#it feels superficial

[thundergrace]

Yeah, about now, it does feel worth mentioning that this film exists. It is a literal continuation of Romeo & Juliet. Juliet doesn't die because she's turned by a vampire but Romeo does die and because of that, Juliet is just bitter af forever until she meets this woman. Then she's still mostly a jerk but then she falls in love with her and is less of a jerk.

[bastardlybonkers]

i feel like not enough ppl are factoring in the cultural clash between laios and shuro and the many micro agressions shuro faced while being in their group. literally the name 'shuro' in itself is one

his name is toshiro 😭 lets also not forget that he has his own communication issues, in the opposite way that laios does- thats literally a factor in their argument, that his envy for laios's ability to express himself sincerely manifested as part of his distaste for him.

ig all this to say like, was their fight heart wrenching, especially when reading laios as autistic? absolutely. anybody whos ever been in laios's position knows how much it hurts to realize someone you thought was your friend doesnt actually like having you around, especially when they didnt tell you and you had no way of knowing due to not understanding their cues. but im begging yall to step back and see the nuance of this situation cause im gonna be real a lot of you are kinda just brushing over it acting like everything is toshiros fault and that hes a terrible person when in reality hes an average guy who really, really clashed with laios and it led to a very long misunderstanding due to their supremely opposite methods of communication. even laios and toshiro, after letting everything out in their fight, were able to come to an understanding and start a foundation for an actual friendship built on better communication

ok yknow what Edit: i shouldve made it even more explicit at the end of this post, i hadnt thought i would need to since i started the post with this, but i think a few too many people are missing my point so i just wanna clarify. i shouldnt have said 'really clashed' and left it at that because yeah they did, but it wasnt just their opposite methods of communication, it is also very much that toshiro was experiencing microaggressions via laios. it may have been unintentional on laios's part, but it still happened and wore him down, made it harder for him to communicate on top of both the more subtle social cues that he was raised with and his own communication difficulties. i also want to say that the fandom reaction to toshiro and the complete ignorance of this point is also racist tbh or at the very least ignorant. i understand that the anime did not cover this panel, and neither did the manga, as this was an omake, but im gonna be real with you guys. there are enough context clues within the story to clue you into this. if you didnt pick up on it thats ok, but i think this is a good lesson in picking up subtext in the stories that youre watching and/or reading. kui shouldnt have to explicitly say 'by the way laios was racist to toshiro' for this point to be understood, and at the very least, when the author portrays a character in a sympathetic light (as kui clearly does) it should make you question Why they are doing so and what makes them sympathetic, rather than youre immediate and only reaction to be 'well i hated what this guy did/said so i hate them and they suck'. idk exactly how to finish this, just. idk. question your biases and gut reactions to things you see in media and stories, and think about whether or not theres subtext that youre missing.

[obsob]

happy and proud!!

✷(print shop)✷

[svedupelle]

i have a hard time for manga with like super detailed drawings. it feels like too much idk

[major-victory]

Bnha seasons 1 and 2 are just "Love wins! Your childhood bully acknowledges you by wanting to kick your ass even more!!"

[flowersinmidgar]

happy birthday to the game ever <333

og image teehee

[ahaura]

im sure its been said already but as the election draws near more and more liberals will come out of the woodwork to shame people with a conscience to give away their vote to the democrats for free. i'm already seeing posts saying "why aren't people more concerned about a trump presidency?" you want to know why? it's because people already know he's bad. everyone already knows what he is and what he's done and what he'll do. there's nothing to discuss. he's a racist despotic worm of a man. there's nothing else to say.

biden is currently president. the genocide is happening under his watch. he's the one funding isra*l and arming them; he's sidestepped congress more than once to give them weapons. by oct. 27, the biden administration already knew that "Israel was regularly bombing buildings without solid intelligence that they were legitimate military targets." the state department/biden have engaged in atrocity propaganda, cast doubt on the legitimacy of the death toll recorded by the gaza health ministry, and so on. the united states is currently in the process of trying to pin the "war in gaza" on netanyahu (see sen. schumer's speech) after months of backing blatant genocide as a means to act as if they're "doing something" about the genocide (Instead of, say, threatening to cut off all aid to israel with the condition that all hostilities in gaza, the west bank, and occupied jerusalem are halted immediately and permanently, allowing palestinians freedom to travel, allowing aid into gaza, etc etc etc.)

the long and short of it is that liberals view their own lives as being worth more than palestinians'. that's it. they'll vote for another 4 years of the guy ushering in genocide and supporting apartheid + settler colonialism because he isn't outright attacking them (despite various laws and rulings happening both at the supreme court level and at the local level all over the country that will endanger people). they'll settle for the illusion of safety and security and shame anyone with a conscience and accuse them of "supporting the republicans" when in an actual democracy you would be able to use your vote as leverage to extract concessions from those who want to be elected. that's how it's supposed to fucking work.

democrats are not owed people's vote. if biden loses, it will be biden's fault; it will be his campaign's fault; it will be the democrats' fault. trump is bad; the republicans are bad. we already know this. this is not an endorsement of either. but if democrats are too cowardly and feckless and servile to the motivations of the american empire and never do anything for their constituents then why the fuck should anyone vote for them. you want to get mad at someone, why don't you do something useful and stop worrying about team-sports with a purely selfish basis and start hounding the people in power who are supposed to serve you, the voter.

[hazycorvus]

Back in the grasp of fate Lend me a hand Forever out of reach

[astrobei]

tiktok is not allowed to talk about the hunger games anymore actually because why did i just see a comment saying that young snow would’ve been in love with katniss. and why were people agreeing with their WHOLE CHESTS

[darth-sonny]

Coraline's relationship with the Other Mother is exactly how I imagine Kirby's relationship with Prime is

this is also Kirby propaganda for the @tmnt-oc-comp

[soundbulb]

I'm not saying this because I actually have beef with anyone who wrote posts like this, but I just saw a true detective post that was talking about how poetic it was that rust cohle covers for marty when he kills ledoux because cohle was thrust into deep undercover narcotics for killing someone, and how he jumps to protect marty because he was left alone with self loathing and the severity of undercover gang work during this period, and he won't let that happen to marty. and this to me is a pretty good example of how fandoms woobify their favorite man at the expense of the actual themes of the story.

both rust and marty murder people and get away with it. we can obviously say that their victims deserved it for committing crimes against children, but that's pretty irrelevant given you're not allowed to legally kill someone out of retribution. if a regular person finds the kids and shoots ledoux, they go to prison. but rust and marty are police, not regular people. if you wanna know the line that's actually connected to rust's story of emptying a clip into a man, and marty killing ledoux, it's "of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things with impunity." and more on that later.

but the undercover position wasn't penance, it was law enforcement trying to both cover for rust and exploit his act of violence. rust is, quite literally, still doing his job only now doing it with even less constraint. when he displays a capacity for unrestrained violence, they promote him to a position where this violence is a boon. when he's ready to cover for marty regardless of reason, this is not to me an emotional catharsis, but the reality that cops view themselves and each other as above the laws the selectively enforce, even to the detriment and death of others, and have the institution that purports justice cover for them because they're homoousian as that institution. even rust, who everyone hates. in the same way the mayor and the superchurch pastor can get away with killing marie fontenot and hurting all the other people rust interviews; they are the institution that protects them.

this is why it's important in the end that they don't get to catch anyone powerful or notable within that institution, with a literal fringe inbred strain of the childress family as the only one that ever sees any consequence. it's also why it's thematically important that rust and marty aren't cops when they do it and they specifically have to work against the police.

theriot leaves his religious position, and reveals in his 2002 interview that while in the seminary he found pictures of child abuse, and this is what cumulates in his departure from the tent revival. an implied whistle blower who came forward, or would come forward, about the abuse in the christian schools dies in a car "accident" in his 2002 interview with tuttle. the institutions weed out or hunt down those who won't cover for their exploitation of authority. on multiple levels, the story is showing you who is allowed to be protected by these institutions and who isn't. who is "chum in the water" and who isn't. in 1995 rust and marty are protected, but when rust realizes he's part of the system that's killing dora lang and marie fontenot and countless other women -- what he calls the sprawl -- his refusal to cover for it revokes his protections.

I really don't think it's supposed to be character catharsis when we watch them contrive this heroic epic tale of facing down certain death, and then we cut to them, off duty, cornering a naked man out of the shower and shooting him on a whim when he's already cuffed and kneeling. obviously no ones hurting for ledoux, or the offscreen man rust shot, but this isn't the tale of fate helping them thwart evil they told. they bolster the mythos of police as the barrier between darkness and the rest of the world, while the anticlimax of their very banal abuse of power plays out. if you want the actual parallel to marty and rust's ledoux story, it isn't one where rust is the person he needed or anything like that, it's when marty breaks into lisa's home and assaults her and her date. it's when rust is alone in a motel room with the blonde woman buying his quaaluudes, and the scene has him loom heavily on his half of the frame as we cut between him bathed in shadow and green light, and her covered with bruises. alone in this room he could hurt or kill her, she even says she thinks he's dangerous. then as we watch him get closer, standing over her and looking down on her dispassionately, we know the only reason nothing will happen to her is his lack of interest. he's still imposing as the camera shifts under him, and the scene ends with him looking down at us and her, saying "of course I'm dangerous. I'm police. I can do terrible things with impunity." it's marty huffing his own paint, thinking he's a big strong hero, a "real man", and beating the shit out of the men he caught his daughter with, then going out to his car and vomiting from fear.

I get that rust cohle is memed on, like very babygirl-ified. but this to me begins to favor him as a personal figure of comfort rather than a character in a story that's interested in the way institutional power interacts with and exploits the unknowable and unpredictable powers of our world. I do like thinking about the emotional lives of these characters, even relating to them -- I don't shit on that instinct at all because it's the natural response to characters, especially such intense and tragic characters. but I do notice a lot of posts in these tags have a "poor rust" sentiment to them. talking about how he's used and never treated with tenderness; how he's ready to show up for marty in a way "no one showed up for him" when the reality is we are very intentionally not shown rust's past before the dora lang case, the case that is the infrastructure of our narrative, and the only detail we are given -- that he was allowed to keep his job after committing a shockingly violent murder -- says that he was sufficiently looked out for by the institutional power he would later try and fail to indict, and he in fact repeated this cover up for someone else, perpetuating over and over the cycle of violent men doing anything and never paying for it, while everyone else pays for everything just by existing.

[sleepsucks]

[warlenys]

you are responsible // pearl diver, mitski

[koriand3r]

Willow | Spike - Clothing

“Why are you still in costume?” “Okay, still having to explain wherein this is just my outfit.”

[gilmores-glorious-blog]

me on a regular basis

[kanansdume]

I've recently been watching these very interesting Star Wars video essays on YouTube (yeah I know, a rare breed) and it brings up these comments Lucas has made about how he views Star Wars as almost like a silent film in terms of how important the visuals are to him in comparison to the dialogue. But this essay also points out how important Lucas finds all of the "rhyming" moments in his trilogies and the way he utilizes them to remind you of something else for emotional or thematic reasons. And there's so many of them, both in visuals and in dialogue, and it's interesting to consider how important this is to him, the repetition for a purpose as well as the storytelling through visuals above everything else and then to look at Star Wars since the Prequels came out and realize how little has really been able to match up to those ideals since then.

The ONLY thing that's come out since the Prequels that I think really hits these two things the same way is, in fact, Andor. One of the things I noticed about the way people discussed Andor as it was airing in a way I haven't really seen for any of the other shows or films was the visual SYMBOLOGY. So many times I saw people noticing the Imperial cog everywhere, from the aerial shot of Narkina 5 as the prisoners escape to the architecture of Mon Mothma's house. There were people picking up on the use of items in Luthen's shop that are familiar from other things to give this idea that Luthen is from another time, he's attempting to preserve this world he lost, that if you're not looking closely enough you won't notice what he's really saying or doing with this shop. The color choices for the different locations and people got analyzed because the people involved spoke about how they intentionally utilized color to SEND A MESSAGE about the characters and the world. We know that the people who made the costumes and sets really worked hard to treat Star Wars almost like a period drama and study the history of the franchise as if it were a real place so that the things they came up with felt like they belonged in this world everyone knows so well even if it's completely new. And of course there were all of the myriad references to things from Rogue One, the constant repetition of "climb", the sunset on the beach, etc.

Nearly EVERY SHOT in this show was created with so much intention behind it in order to say something meaningful about the characters, the world, this specific story they're in, and the overall saga of Star Wars itself. It's insane how much greater impact this show was able to achieve through the incredibly careful usage of visual symbols and thematic repetitions, much like Lucas did before them. It feels like they didn't just study the history of the galaxy far far away, but they studied the history of STAR WARS and what Lucas was trying to do and say with this story. They peeled back his onion a bit more and were able to create something that really has that same visual feel even when it's not created for a child audience. It also is experimenting with its narrative style through its structure and through Cassian's character being allowed to be somewhat more reactive than proactive, and while that didn't work for everyone, it does feel like it's following in Lucas's footsteps of experimentation through Star Wars. Push the boundaries of what Star Wars is and can be and what you can say with it.

But this only works because they peeled the onion back enough to TRULY understand all of the messages Lucas was sending with it. They got the heart of Star Wars and despite its lack of space wizards, despite the lack of most major characters in the Saga, this was a show that honestly got the message more than just about anything else Star Wars has put out since the Prequels. The choices between selflessness and selfishness, the themes about how you always HAVE to make a choice even when it feels like you don't have any (sometimes ESPECIALLY when it feels like you don't have any), and how important it is to make sure to choose the path of compassion above everything else. The themes of connection to others, the symbiotic circle and the impact even the smallest person can have on world around them, it's RIGHT THERE and it's CENTRAL to Andor's storyline.

So yes, it experiments a little with narrative structure, but it's possibly the most Star Wars thing to exist Revenge of the Sith because it honestly truly GETS what Star Wars was about, both in its themes and in its filmmaking. A lot of people said that Andor didn't feel like Star Wars to them, usually because of the lack of space wizards and the fact that it's not a story aimed at children. But to me, Andor is EXACTLY what Star Wars is and has always been. They're stretching the boundaries of what Star Wars can be, but it's saying the exact same things Star Wars has always said, it's just saying it slightly differently. This doesn't feel like fanfiction to me, not really. Unlike things like the Mandoverse or the books, Andor isn't just taking some of the toys out of the sandbox and going to play with them somewhere else. Andor is IN that sandbox. It's building a slightly different sandcastle, but it's still within the sandbox, using the same sand that Lucas did.