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taylorgrape · 9 months

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Ryan's Characters as Taylor Swift Songs

I am so sorry. @rumor-weed

AUDREY "RUMOR" WEED AS NEW ROMANTICS "The rumors are terrible and cruel but honey most of them are true." I'm gonna be so real the above lyric was such a big part of me picking this as a song for her lmao. But also it's just sorta a vibey bop and the general energy of it reminds me so much of Audrey which obviously we love. Other notable lyrics that give me Audrey vibes: "We play dumb but we know exactly what we're doing" "It's poker, he can't see it on my face but I'm about to play my ace." "We team up then switch sides like a record changer."

BARTLEBEY THE BUTLER AS TIMELESS "Time breaks down your mind and body, don't you let it touch your soul." Bartlebey is Timeless for two reasons. One, is, of course, the fact that Ryan and I are constantly pushing the narrative of Pincherbey are in love in every single universe and timeline. The other reason is that we don't know if he belongs in this timeline at all or what his like... whole deal is in any regard. And for that reason it is very funny to just say "Bartlebey is Timeless." Other notable lyrics that give me Bartlebey vibes: "And somehow I know that you and I would've found each other." "I thought about it as I started lookin' 'round at these precious things that time forgot." "We'll have a cardboard box of photos of the life we've made, and you'll say, 'Oh my, we really were timeless'."

PHIL WINKLESTEIN AS TEARDROPS ON MY GUITAR "The only thing that keeps me wishing on a wishing star." King of yearning ofc gets the yearning song of all time. Honestly listening to this song and thinking abt the musical situation with Bob and everything just came together. My mans is so in his feelings and if he has a guitar (which he might I'm not caught up on the Phillip lore) I just know that mf would have teardrops on it. Other notable lyrics that give me Phil vibes: "I wonder if he knows he's all I think about at night" "So I drive home alone, as I turn out the light, I'll put his picture down and maybe get some sleep tonight." "The only one who's got enough of me to break my heart"

PETER PEPPARAZZI AS EYES OPEN "So here you are, two steps ahead and staying on guard." Ofc Mr. Pepparazzi is the song abt how everyone is watching you. Because my mans is the one watching!! He is the 'everyone' referenced in lyrics below. King of being nosy fr. I really do not have much to say past that bc I love that this is just how he be. Other notable lyrics that give me Peter vibes: "Everybody's waiting for you to break down" "Everybody's watching to see the fallout" "And nobody comes to save you now."

LOVEY ASPARAGUS AS I DID SOMETHING BAD "I don't regret it one bit 'cause he had it comin'." Miss I killed my husband is obviously this song are you KIDDINGGG literally I could just list every single lyric in this song and it would be correct. She's a baddie and even tho she did in fact kill her husband she's kind of a feminist icon for that. He deserved it and I'm glad she did it. Other notable lyrics that give me Lovey vibes: "Most fun I ever had and I'd do it over and over and over again if I could." "They never see it coming what I do next." "They're burning all the witches even if you aren't one, so light me up."

NEBBY K NEZZER AS YOU NEED TO CALM DOWN "And snakes and stones never broke my bones." hear me out hear mE OUT- my man has dealt with far too much shit he's done his time... and he's surrounded by well... we know them. He's just done and that is DESERVED. Also, of course I am slightly biased but this is such him and his stupid high school glee rival energy. PLUSSS (as listed below) 'shade never made anybody less gay' ARE YOU KIDDDINGGG so nezzer coded (source: bro trust me) Other notable lyrics that give me Nezzer vibes: "And I'm just like 'Damn, it's 7:00 a.m.'" "You need to calm down, you're being too loud." "'cause shade never made anybody less gay."

ART BIGOTTI AS ILLICIT AFFAIRS "Take the words for what they are; a dwindling mercurial high" Okay obviously this is abt Art yearning for a whole ass married man. BUT ALSO the way this song is written just gives me such Art vibes especially with the whole comparing having an affair to drugs thing lmaaao but like when I was picking songs and this came up I KNEW this was downbad king art bigotti. (ps this is currently one of my top taylor songs so this is a great honor" Other notable lyrics that give me Art vibes: "A drug that only worked the first few hundred times." "You showed me colors you know I can't see with anyone else." "Look at this idiotic fool that you've made me."

LAURA CARROT AS ANTI-HERO "I should not be left to my own devices." Obviously this is Laura lmao she a baddie but she also is a criminal. And does nothing to better herself which honestly good for her bc same. She don't give a fuck and I admire that!! She owns being an anti-hero and she is so real for that. Also just like... the energy of this song truly gives me Laura vibes so there is also that. Other notable lyrics that give me Laura vibes: "One day I'll watch as you're leaving 'cause you got tired of my scheming." "It's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me." "The family gathers 'round and reads it and then someone screams out 'She's laughing up at us from hell.'"

GOLITAH GOTTIK AS MEAN "Well, you can take me down with just one single blow," I am going to be so real like 70% of me picking this song was the above lyric bc that's so god damn funny when u think of the bible story. but also. much like nezzer Goliath has been through too much... (see medical malpractice) but despite that he really do be out here just living his life and simply does not have time for the haters which is why i picked this song. Other notable lyrics that give me Goliath vibes: "Someday, I'll be big enough so you can't hit me" "I just wanna feel okay again" "All you are is mean and a liar, and pathetic, and alone in life"

PA GRAPE AS THE BEST DAY "I know you were on my side, even when I was wrong." I'm gonna be so real my main reason for picking this song is bc it's literally written abt Taylor's mom so obviously in my fucked up little delusional mind Taylor Grape wrote it abt Pa Grape. I will not be taking any criticims at this time. That said, these lyrics are more like... how she would feel abt him vs ones that just exude his aura but yolo. Other notable lyrics that give me Taylor/Pa vibes: "I don't know why all the trees change in the fall, but I know you're not scared of anything at all." "Don't know how long it's gonna take to feel okay, but I know I had the best day with you today." "And I love you for giving me your eyes, for staying back and watching me shine."

SHANNON CEDRIC UNO SCALLION AS THE 1: "And it's another day waking up alone" Okay so OBVIOUSLY this started as a shitpost bc scallion number one is the 1. HOWEVER. upon reflecting on some of these lyrics I was like... damn i might b on to something. they're sort of just like depressing and cryptic enough, especially out of context and that just felt so perfect for mr uno. Other notable lyrics that give me Uno vibes: "And if you never bleed, you're never gonna grow" "In my defense, I have none." "If one thing had been different, would everything be different today?" KILT BAGPIPE RHUBARB AS SHAKE IT OFF "I go on too many dates but I can't make them stay, at least that's what people say," Bro I will not fucking lie. As soon as I started this project I KNEW this mf had to be shake it off. A hot fuckin mess, slutting around, everyone finding him slightly offputting, but he is an unkillable yale man so he is fr just gonna shake it off. Also, so far this has easily been the one that I hard the hardest time narrowing it down to just four lyrics bc inside and out this song is Kilt all over lmaaaao (derogatory?) Just know that I decided to not put any lyrics from the chorus bc they all fit too well lmfao. Other notable lyrics that give me Kilt vibes: "But I keep cruising, can't stop, won't stop moving." "I never miss a beat, I'm lightning on my feet." "but I'm just gonna shake to the fella over there with the hella good hair."

TOM GRAPE AS CLOSURE "I'm fine with my spite." okay this song is basically abt someone trying to give closure and this one mf being like nah, i'm good. which to me is so tom. he does NOT need that closure. he's good bein a spiteful little sour grape (which i love for him) but honestly king of not needing the mushy shit. ofc some of this is taken from his relationship with his estranged sister taylor grape but i mean how could i not. Other notable lyrics that give me Tom vibes: "Don't treat me like some situation that needs to be handled." "I know that it's over, I don't need your closure." "Reaching out across the sea that you put between you and me, but it's fake and it's oh so unnecessary."

EGG BOY AS IT'S NICE TO HAVE A FRIEND "'Wanna hang out?' Yeah, sounds like fun." okay so my otp: bathroom eggs ass was ofc fully thinking of that when i chose songs for each of them (see bathroom girls for a similar note) but also this song was specifically Egg Boy to me bc... u know what. he DOES think it's nice to have a friend. he's a silly goofy guy who loves his eggs and this song gives me energy of like childhood nostalgia and that is so him and bathroom girl coded to ME. Other notable lyrics that give me Egg Boy vibes: "School bell rings, walk me home, sidewalk chalk covered in snow." "Light pink sky up on the roof, sun sinks down, no curfew." "You've been stressed out lately? Yeah, me too."

VICKI CUCUMBER AS BETTER THAN REVENGE "I'm just another thing for you to roll your eyes at, honey." I MEEEEEEAN was there even really another option!! Miss steal your man had her man STOLE! a sneaky little bitch (affectionate). I truly feel like there is not much else to say bc the energy of this song is just SO vicki to me. Like this BELONGS to her. Much like Kilt it was SO HARD for me to narrow it down to just four lyrics but i hope u enjoy the ones a pick. Other notable lyrics that give me Vicki vibes: "She took him faster than you could say sabotage." "She looks at me like I'm a trend and she's so over it" "You might have him, but I'll always get the last word." SCOOTER CARROT AS THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS "I'm shaking my head, I'm locking the gates" i have to be so fucking honest rn. I picked Scooter for this song bc this song makes me want to go to a boujee ass hollywood party and get into multiple fist fights with multiple a-listers and honestly i think I would like scooter to be there with me when i do it. He's got just the right amount of spite to help me out. not to mention in soc everyone thought he died so he's got some vengeance in him. me and moyer the destroyer kickin leo dicaprio's ass as god intended. Other notable lyrics that give me Scooter vibes: "This is why we can't have nice things, darling, because you break them, I had to take them away." "And so I took an axe to a mended fence." "Here's a toast to my real friends, they don't care about the he said, she said."

#new romantics #timeless #teardrops on my guitar #eyes open #i did something bad #you need to calm down #illicit affairs #anti-hero #mean #the best day #the 1 #shake it off #closure #it's nice to have a friend #better than revenge #this is why we can't have nice things

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messengerhermes · 2 years

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Hey, since it's trans visibility week here's a reminder: your body belongs to you.

As a trans person that's been out for twelve years, and who has been considering HRT seriously for the last two now, I've noticed a pattern that happens on terms of how people, even supportive people engage with me around my gender.

People get uncomfortable when I assert my right to change my body in ways they don't find appealing.

This happens particularly with family members and partners, but I've also had strangers on the street and coworkers occasionally make comments.

When I first stopped waxing and shaving, it was unease and disapproval of my body hair.

When I wore my hair very short it was complaints over how confusing it was, how pretty it was long. Now that the top part's long again, I get complaints that it's dyed, that I've shaved the sides.

Last year, when I told my partner at the time that I was starting to think about T, I got a lot of objections. They thought I was going to see if vocal training would do enough for me, did I really think I'd be able to grow facial hair, I was dreaming if I thought I'd build muscle, there were other things we could try about my bottom dysphoria.

They were relieved I don't want top surgery, because they would be sad if I got rid of my tits.

When I told a relative recently, she was largely supportive, but couldn't help sliding in "I hate facial hair."

Well I'm not building this body for you, Janet.

The underlying connection between all these comments is:

I don't want you to change your body in ways I find personally unappealing/unsexy/or somehow bad.

My body is not public property.

I'm not a billboard to sell you hamburgers, a projection screen for your porngraphic fantasies, or a vessel for the hopes and dreams you had for the future.

I'm a person. My flesh belongs to me. To shape as I so please.

I'm still waffling on a knife edge about testosterone, but I realize the fear that holds me back is this:

What if they're right and I get none of the changes I want but also become undesirable in ways that get me discarded?

It's a real fear. I cannot guarantee T will change my voice, grow me a gay little mustache, help me beef up, or solve my dysphoria when it comes to intimacy.

But what's my alternative?

I stay unchanged in a body that some days I don't recognize in the mirror, with a voice that sounds like I stole it from the lost and found until time inevitably changes this meatsuit in ways that also render me undesirable?

Some choice.

There's a lot to be discussed about gender essentialism and the ways white supremacist beauty standards can influence what we as trans people deem as "necessary" for our gender expression when it comes to medical transitions.

But if the discussion boils down to "if you seek medical transitions in any way you're giving into the binary and cissexism," then we're stripping bodily autonomy completely from the conversation.

And honestly, I resent the idea that I'm playing into the gender binary by wanting bodily changes that make me *more* ambiguous by our currently defined standards of gender, not less.

And I resent the ways those arguments only seem to come into play to push me *not* to pursue changes that could make me comfortable in my body, but "hey babe, gender is all a performance, go for it" never pops up when I express the desire to wear plunging chiffon gowns to expose a thick thatch of chest hair that's sprouted between my tits.

I have the right to shape this body of mine however I see fit, my body is not a rental, I don't need to preserve its resale value, I'm here for life.

Your body isn't a rental either, and you can't resell it. Make it up to be your dream home.

#Trans #Nonbinary #Trans day of visibility #trans visibility #Gender stuff #Hrt #Gender affirmation #Look I just want to be an ambiguous bog witch that stirs unexpected feelings in people and not be blamed for it

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starsnhiseyes · 9 months

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You know honestly Ive been thinking about gender a lot and how my experiences and opinions really are worth a lot more than Ive been kind of taught by others in the community to think they are; i had learned from years of being treated a certain way that masculine queer people's opinions are inherently less worthwhile than feminine queer people's opinions, binary trans opinions are less important than nonbinary opinions, masculine trans men's (gender conforming? Somehow? Even though being trans is inherently gender nonconforming??) opinions are less important than feminine trans men's (gnc) opinions, and trans men's opinions are WAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY less important than trans women's, and that all of this together essentially means that my opinions are worth little to nothing, my experiences do not matter, and my existence contrinutes absolutely no worth to the community as a queer person - I exist, but no one really wants me here, and they're only allowing me to on a technicality, as I am *technically* included in it, but they would really rather I not be here and if I have to be, that they don't have to see it, and if they have to see me, that god forbid I at least just keep my mouth shut and never try to communicate about my experiences

But I've been thinking about how fucked up that is, how fucked up it is that I get treated like I'm cishet male-lite because I'm a masc trans man, when the reality is that I am so genuinely androgynous that people do not consistently gender me one way or the other. I get gendered as male and female equally, no matter if Im in a progressive or conservative area, an urban or rural area, people will refer to me with different pronouns that they're each sticking to within the same conversation when addressing me. And it's fucked up to act like I'm essentially a cishet man when not only am I gay but without ever trying to seem particularly masc, fem, or androgynous, on a day to day basis I am consistently ambiguously gendered - implying that I experience both "male" and "female" social experiences regardless of the fact that I identify as male. And I recognize that this in turn somewhat gives me both male and female social role, and I wish it could be acknowledged that this can happen and it's possible for a man to have, at times, female social roles, without actually being nonbinary or identifying as a woman. A cis man can dress femme full time and essentially look like a woman and assert that he is still male, that he's not a woman, that he's not trans, but I can't acknowledge the fact that my appearance bestows me with both male and female social roles despite my identity as a man?? And to be clear I do not want female social roles necessarily, but it's not like I can control how people see me and how they interact with me, so this is a neutral observation of how I am treated and the roles I fill socially, willingly or not, not a declaration of my gender or an insinuation that your gender depends on how other people treat you - cis women fill male social roles all the time, so this is not a roundabout way of declaring trans women not real women, since that's the accusation that gendered discussion always comes down to. It's just really frustrating to me that Im literally trans, gay, visibly gender nonconforming, visibly queer, visibly trans, and I don't feel like the social roles I fill are strictly male - as much as I'd like them to be - yet around other queer people I get brushed off and treated like I don't really belong in the community because I'm not queer enough, I'm a masc trans man so my identity isn't radical enough, I'm either basically a cis man or a tomboy, so my thoughts, opinions, and experiences don't matter because they're innately less complex less nuanced and less meaningful than queer people with feminine genders and presentations

#To be clear this is not a 'not all men' post its a #It really sucks to be left behind by the queer community when you're already left behind by cishet society #Because your gender isn't radical or confusing enough

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theotherseapancakes · 1 year

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Very entertaining to me how one of the most popular tumblr posts I have is me yelling (sleep-deprived) about Chrom's insecurities.

(I rambled this got long im sorry.)

Slightly, SLIGHTLY less funny that it constantly reminds me that was the day a bird broke into our house and refused to leave, though, which is funny, in a horrible way. Because Chrom attracted a Robin, I guess, IDK. It was a small one. (It was not funny at the time. Literally nobody would help us we called EVERYWHERE just had to make our poor roommate come home.) I get notes on that one so often. I feel like Chrom's insecurities SHOULD be obvious, but maybe they're not AS obvious as I thought? Hrmmm. Food for thought. ... I'm putting this on main because I'm scared it'll also blow up somehow--but while I'm here, I'm also thinking about how FEA has some really good leitmotif useage. Like, I think anyone if they just listened to the OST will notice the obvious Id ones (which I tend to feel belong to Robin, as the protag, which makes sense to a degree, but Chrom too) but I feel like rambling specifically about something dumb. Say how "Such Bonds Are The True Strength of This Army" has such a simple melody that gets reused in so so many pieces. It's really good stuff; Nintendo music is always leitmotif heavy in the best ways but it's not absent here. It makes the game feel cohesive to me. Also I can't think of many times I've heard the notes to Id Purpose also in other songs. It's present in Sorrow for obvious reasons but I still just. Gosh, I fucking love this game. I know it's a mess, I know it has issues. I know, I know. But fuck if it doesn't compel me. I don't ask much of my fiction. Just engross and compel me. Sell me on your characters. And I can't deny awakening does that. Sitting here rotating Robin in my head and Chrom and thinking about how their relationships really do mean the difference between so much. Grima is so lonely (the latest FB event makes this doubly obvious I would say) and Robin is so surrounded by friends and allies. That shit hurts. Like, imagine if you made all these friends only to be told by the universe, hey, no, fuck you, giant dragon time. Anyway everyone should go play the gay awakening mod and also my game about anime chess people, it was the one that introduced easy mode gdi. GO PLAY IT PLEASEI M ON MY KNEES CRYING AND BEATING THE FLOOR.

#grimleal trash heap;#fire emblem rambling #i just have so many feelings #like not even the lascivious kind i just #Chrom and Robin hit me in the SPECIAL BUCK DESTINY tropes so hard and NNNGHHH #also as seen with my OCs #i love a good drastic difference pairing where they compliment each other #or a friendship even

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fizzingwizard · 17 days

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warning homophobia/transphobia

my dad: "i dont know why your [queer] brother thinks i don't love and support him. he's just decided these things about me because he's gone too far left to see around the corner."

also my dad: "pride flags dont belong in classrooms" "queer books dont belong in schools" "transwomen are men pretending to be women" "michelle obama is a man"

yeeeeeeah... can't imagine why your son thinks you might be rather less than supportive of him. total mystery.

...

(btw i've literally asked him how he works this out in his head and sometimes he says that he doesn't believe all the stuff he says on facebook, even though he posts it, and other times he says it's different when it's family... and then he continues saying/posting the same stuff. he's very pro people being able to say what they think without it causing their families to fall apart and hey i think we all want that. but he can't imagine at all my brother's whiplash when he says "gay people are ruining this country no don't hold me responsible for posting that of course I support you also transwomen aren't valid" lol seriously how can you expect someone to stick by you when you constantly do that to them? my dad self-edits a ton with me partly because my mom and I carefully drew a "no politics" line when we talk. but we still see all his facebook stuff and now and then things slip out during a phone call. idk man. i'd like if we could all "just get along" too woot woot free speech yadda yadda. i don't care when he insults democrats or compares trump to jesus and i've even stopped caring that he spouts things that are just straight up lies. fortunately my dad can't really harm anyone by believing what he does. he doesn't have money or power and the only ones seeing his posts are his family at this point. but it's so obnoxious how he's convinced he's right to the point that when he can't explain something it's somehow us who are wrong for questioning. once he told me that even though he often says all liberals are stupid, he doesn't think i'm stupid because he knows one day I will become a conservative lol lol lol. gosh I can't wait till I'm an old conservative like him and can make super fresh and funny jokes like "kamala harris slept her way to the top" with impunity. that's how you know you're smart, btw, if you make sexist jokes bc it shows how tough and untouchable you are (9_9)

#personal

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bronte-deserves-better · 3 months

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Your ocs sound so cool, do you mind sharing stuff about them?

Anon, it is to my great shame that I have left this so long that I no longer remember what ocs this ask was in reference to.

However, I do still absolutely want to talk about my ocs, so have a ramble about two of my current favorite! (Rest under the cut- this got long).

#1 OC of all time: Alera Pyren!

So everyone is aware that I'm not normal about Fintan and Bronte, especially in the context of the Pyren brothers AU, right? Well anyways, I have in fact made an entire family tree for the two of them. Alera Pyren is their great-aunt (sibling to their grandfather). She's a pyrokinetic, and in one of my headcanons she is one of the original three Councillors.

Reasons to love Alera:

Trauma. So much trauma. She watched her mom die in childbirth and then her stepdad die from an ogre attack.

Ultimate eldest daughter syndrome. Not only is she the eldest of six, she also had to raise all five of her siblings after the death of their parents.

Heir To A Legacy She Didn't Ask For. Her father was a famous warrior among her group of elves in the pre-Council days, and since Alera was his eldest child and had his ability, she was expected to follow in his footsteps. He died when she was five, by the way.

Badass warrior lady. She has a flaming sword and served as the general of the original Council. Though elves generally don't do well with violence, in my headcanon history, there was in fact an era where violence was significantly more common, and Alera essentially got the elves through it on the power of sheer rage and being a very powerful pyrokinetic.

Queer icon. She is beautiful, she is powerful, she is gay as hell. Lesbians love her. Although homosexuality is highly discouraged among the elves, Alera had such powerful gay energy and refused so ardently to be in the closet that even in the modern Lost Cities, 'much like Alera' is a polite way to call someone a lesbian. Pyrokinesis is heavily associated with queerness in the Lost Cities in my headcanon, largely because of Alera.

Warrior in a peaceful world. Alera fought for centuries to win the peace treaties between species- some of which hold up to this day. After she was done building a less war-torn world, what did she do? Sulk because she wasn't needed anymore? Nope! She went and decided to become a genetics researcher.

Anyways, I love Alera. Is she incredibly morally questionable? Did she kill many people in the name of peace? Yes. However, she's still absolutely fascinating. People think Alera is cold-hearted because she would chose the safety of the world over any individual person. What they don't get is that Alera loves all her friends and family ardently. She just has so much care for the world that she could not give it up no matter the cost.

#2 OC of all time: Mellona Errie!

He's an orphan! He's Alera's best friend! He's desperately loyal even though he knows Alera would choose the world over him if it came down to it! He's... Mellona Errie!

Mellona is quite literally the water to Alera's fire- he's a hydrokinetic, and he is the chill, calm best friend to fiery Alera. He was an orphan bastard who had no household to belong to back in the day, and Alera took him under her wing even though she was also trying to care for five siblings.

Reasons to love Mellona:

Also trauma. He had an incredibly fucked up childhood.

Somehow the nicest guy ever despite that. Despite everything that happened to him, Mellona is still chill and lovely and tries hard to be a kind person.

Deep loyalty. Mellona never forgot what Alera did for him as a child, and so he follows her through literally anything. Alera could kill someone right in front of him and he wouldn't blink.

Hot as fuck. People who like men love him. he is an icon.

Anyways, these two live in my head rent free. I hope you enjoyed, anon!

#swearing #mellona errie #alera pyren #my ocs #kotlc ocs

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pottergerms · 3 years

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Hi, I saw your post about "mourning" the HP series. I feel like lots of fans feel the same way, and I'm very sorry. But I see also a bright side over all the JK Rowling controversy. I'm a trans woman, I'm a writer (somewhat) and HP was one of the books I'd read when young that inspired me to be a writer. Yes, I am angry and hurt by JK and her transphobic ideas, but I don't mourn HP because I don't think HP belongs to Rowling ever since the moment she decided to publish it. Yes, I'm aware of the huge forture she earns and will continue to earn from it, yet I believe that "publishing" means "take to the public/to the people". We are the public.

Karl Marx said something (I won't remember where) that "once an idea is spoken out loud it doesn't belong to the one who said it anymore". Of course he was talking about the political movements that his ideas inspired in Russia, But I think he was right. About any and every idea.

People saying to "leave the fandom", or "read other books", are very simplistic. I went to Malaga and visited the Pablo Picasso Institution fully knowing Pablo Picasso was a sexist pig and a women abuser - and okay, maybe I wouldn't have done if he was alive and profiting from it - but what I mean is: I did not feel conflicted about enjoying his paintings, because for me it was more important to me how ~I~ felt about them, than what they were supposed to mean by the painter. I do the same about HP now.

I ask everyone: don't leave. No, The Harry Potter fandom always been an expert on not giving two shits about JK. Fanfiction has always been an act of freedom and rebellion. Why are people feeling less inclined to write / read fanfics now that JK is openly a bitch? It should be the other way around, no?

Write as many HP characters as possible as trans! Make it be the answer to the bigotry coming from the author mentioned in the disclamer!

When I was young, I always related to Draco Malfoy and I was ashamed to say he was my favourite character. But I couldn't help it. I also did go to a private school, I also felt like I need to be the best to impress my parents, I was a meanie, I was closeted (I always read Draco as a closeted gay kid) and I also came from a somewhat rich background. And my mother also spoke french.

I used to read lots of mpreg Drarry fanfics, mostly the ones with pregnant Draco. I didn't know yet why that concept of a man getting pregnant, the gender-swap and the (sometimes awful) feminization of my favourite character, fascinated me. Years later... Ta-da! I'm trans.

I am still very much in love with this fandom. And now, I have the pleasure to watch it's creator die of hatred for what she has created, because somehow, in a way, it created me.

I am speechless by this. Thank you SO MUCH for sharing all of that 🥺

I don’t have much to add because your experiences are yours 💛 but I want to share that I’ve also related to Draco for this reason… and being out as bisexual really did change my life. I would not have done it without this fandom, and without fanfiction especially.

JKR is the fucking worst, but I agree that we took Harry Potter from her a long time ago, even before her Twitter account. We always knew she wasn’t good enough to own its canon.

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traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors · 2 years

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No tws; seeking advice and reassurance if possible

Okay so here's the thing. I kind of feel like a bad bisexual because I just tend to sort of... dismiss bisexuality? Like oh, I'm not bi, I'm gay. And when I see pretty people of the opposite gender I'm never like "oh yeah they're hot and goddamn" but not because I don't think they're hot bc I absolutely do but because like... sometimes I just feel like bisexuality just can't be a thing?

I was just watching this show and it had this whole process of this guy trying to figure out his sexuality and it showed him watching a video on what it means to be bisexual and my first thought was "No he can't be bisexual bc then he's not gay and it's not as good" which is like obviously BULLSHIT bc he's adorable and so is his relationship and mlm romance btwn a bi guy and a gay guy/two bi guys is just as amazing as a mum relationship btwn two gay guys but like... that was my first reaction? And I hated it? And I was just sitting here and the character went "Oh I'm definitely bisexual" and I was like "but you like guys more obviously" and like... that's just not what anyone's reaction should be??? Just dismissing someone's bisexuality to try and box them into the gay or straight boxes that can be more defined and contained and decisive? Especially as a bisexual person myself???

Even at work with my coworkers I tend to hide that I'm bi in favour of being gay as if it would somehow make me less lgbtq or just lesser in general if I said I also was attracted to girls which is dumb. Like people tell me that some girl is hot and I'll be like "lol I wouldn't know I'm gay" and I just feel... scared almost to say anything that could make them realize that I'm actually also into women? Idk it's stupid. I just wondered if any other bi people have the same experience or if this is like... something that makes sense to anyone or if its normal or if anyone has tips on working to just... idk be less like this???

Anywho, thanks

~Ellis

Hi Ellis,

You are definitely not alone in this experience. I actually call myself “gay” as an umbrella term because I struggle to admit to being bisexual (especially because I am currently in a straight appearing relationship). A lot of me feels like I’m not valid, and like I shouldn’t even go to pride because I don’t belong. (I know rationally I do, but it’s hard.)

It’s a normal and valid way to feel, given how often bisexuals have been dismissed even within the LGBTQ+ community. I’ve heard this referred to as the “double closet”.

I don’t think there’s an easy fix for this. I’m still working on it but I am slowly learning that I am valid and I don’t belong in the LGBTQ+ community any less because I’m bisexual.

I know it’s hard and it’s so valid to not be “out” as bisexual. But try and remind yourself that being bisexual is completely valid and is not “less than” any other sexuality.

If any followers have anything helpful/supportive to add, please feel free!

#mod april #trauma talks #ellis

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innuendostudios · 3 years

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Thoughts on: Criterion's Neo-Noir Collection

I have written up all 26 films* in the Criterion Channel's Neo-Noir Collection.

Legend: rw - rewatch; a movie I had seen before going through the collection dnrw - did not rewatch; if a movie met two criteria (a. I had seen it within the last 18 months, b. I actively dislike it) I wrote it up from memory.

* in September, Brick leaves the Criterion Channel and is replaced in the collection with Michael Mann's Thief. May add it to the list when that happens.

Note: These are very "what was on my mind after watching." No effort has been made to avoid spoilers, nor to make the plot clear for anyone who hasn't seen the movies in question. Decide for yourself if that's interesting to you.

Cotton Comes to Harlem I feel utterly unequipped to asses this movie. This and Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song the following year are regularly cited as the progenitors of the blaxploitation genre. (This is arguably unfair, since both were made by Black men and dealt much more substantively with race than the white-directed films that followed them.) Its heroes are a couple of Black cops who are treated with suspicion both by their white colleagues and by the Black community they're meant to police. I'm not 100% clear on whether they're the good guys? I mean, I think they are. But the community's suspicion of them seems, I dunno... well-founded? They are working for The Man. And there's interesting discussion to the had there - is the the problem that the law is carried out by racists, or is the law itself racist? Can Black cops make anything better? But it feels like the film stacks the deck in Gravedigger and Coffin Ed's favor; the local Black church is run by a conman, the Back-to-Africa movement is, itself, a con, and the local Black Power movement is treated as an obstacle. Black cops really are the only force for justice here. Movie portrays Harlem itself as a warm, thriving, cultured community, but the people that make up that community are disloyal and easily fooled. Felt, to me, like the message was "just because they're cops doesn't mean they don't have Black soul," which, nowadays, we would call copaganda. But, then, do I know what I'm talking about? Do I know how much this played into or off of or against stereotypes from 1970? Was this a radical departure I don't have the context to appreciate? Is there substance I'm too white and too many decades removed to pick up on? Am I wildly overthinking this? I dunno. Seems like everyone involved was having a lot of fun, at least. That bit is contagious.

Across 110th Street And here's the other side of the "race film" equation. Another movie set in Harlem with a Black cop pulled between the police, the criminals, and the public, but this time the film is made by white people. I like it both more and less. Pro: this time the difficult position of Black cop who's treated with suspicion by both white cops and Black Harlemites is interrogated. Con: the Black cop has basically no personality other than "honest cop." Pro: the racism of the police force is explicit and systemic, as opposed to comically ineffectual. Con: the movie is shaped around a racist white cop who beats the shit out of Black people but slowly forms a bond with his Black partner. Pro: the Black criminal at the heart of the movie talks openly about how the white world has stacked the deck against him, and he's soulful and relateable. Con: so of course he dies in the end, because the only way privileged people know to sympathetize with minorities is to make them tragic (see also: The Boys in the Band, Philadelphia, and Brokeback Mountain for gay men). Additional con: this time Harlem is portrayed as a hellhole. Barely any of the community is even seen. At least the shot at the end, where the criminal realizes he's going to die and throws the bag of money off a roof and into a playground so the Black kids can pick it up before the cops reclaim it was powerful. But overall... yech. Cotton Comes to Harlem felt like it wasn't for me; this feels like it was 100% for me and I respect it less for that.

The Long Goodbye (rw) The shaggiest dog. Like much Altman, more compelling than good, but very compelling. Raymond Chandler's story is now set in the 1970's, but Philip Marlowe is the same Philip Marlowe of the 1930's. I get the sense there was always something inherently sad about Marlowe. Classic noir always portrayed its detectives as strong-willed men living on the border between the straightlaced world and its seedy underbelly, crossing back and forth freely but belonging to neither. But Chandler stresses the loneliness of it - or, at least, the people who've adapted Chandler do. Marlowe is a decent man in an indecent world, sorting things out, refusing to profit from misery, but unable to set anything truly right. Being a man out of step is here literalized by putting him forty years from the era where he belongs. His hardboiled internal monologue is now the incessant mutterings of the weird guy across the street who never stops smoking. Like I said: compelling! Kael's observation was spot on: everyone in the movie knows more about the mystery than he does, but he's the only one who cares. The mystery is pretty threadbare - Marlowe doesn't detect so much as end up in places and have people explain things to him. But I've seen it two or three times now, and it does linger.

Chinatown (rw) I confess I've always been impressed by Chinatown more than I've liked it. Its story structure is impeccable, its atmosphere is gorgeous, its noirish fatalism is raw and real, its deconstruction of the noir hero is well-observed, and it's full of clever detective tricks (the pocket watches, the tail light, the ruler). I've just never connected with it. Maybe it's a little too perfectly crafted. (I feel similar about Miller's Crossing.) And I've always been ambivalent about the ending. In Towne's original ending, Evelyn shoots Noah Cross dead and get arrested, and neither she nor Jake can tell the truth of why she did it, so she goes to jail for murder and her daughter is in the wind. Polansky proposed the ending that exists now, where Evelyn just dies, Cross wins, and Jake walks away devastated. It communicates the same thing: Jake's attempt to get smart and play all the sides off each other instead of just helping Evelyn escape blows up in his face at the expense of the woman he cares about and any sense of real justice. And it does this more dramatically and efficiently than Towne's original ending. But it also treats Evelyn as narratively disposable, and hands the daughter over to the man who raped Evelyn and murdered her husband. It makes the women suffer more to punch up the ending. But can I honestly say that Towne's ending is the better one? It is thematically equal, dramatically inferior, but would distract me less. Not sure what the calculus comes out to there. Maybe there should be a third option. Anyway! A perfect little contraption. Belongs under a glass dome.

Night Moves (rw) Ah yeah, the good shit. This is my quintessential 70's noir. This is three movies in a row about detectives. Thing is, the classic era wasn't as chockablock with hardboiled detectives as we think; most of those movies starred criminals, cops, and boring dudes seduced to the darkness by a pair of legs. Gumshoes just left the strongest impressions. (The genre is said to begin with Maltese Falcon and end with Touch of Evil, after all.) So when the post-Code 70's decided to pick the genre back up while picking it apart, it makes sense that they went for the 'tecs first. The Long Goodbye dragged the 30's detective into the 70's, and Chinatown went back to the 30's with a 70's sensibility. But Night Moves was about detecting in the Watergate era, and how that changed the archetype. Harry Moseby is the detective so obsessed with finding the truth that he might just ruin his life looking for it, like the straight story will somehow fix everything that's broken, like it'll bring back a murdered teenager and repair his marriage and give him a reason to forgive the woman who fucked him just to distract him from some smuggling. When he's got time to kill, he takes out a little, magnetic chess set and recreates a famous old game, where three knight moves (get it?) would have led to a beautiful checkmate had the player just seen it. He keeps going, self-destructing, because he can't stand the idea that the perfect move is there if he can just find it. And, no matter how much we see it destroy him, we, the audience, want him to keep going; we expect a satisfying resolution to the mystery. That's what we need from a detective picture; one character flat-out compares Harry to Sam Spade. But what if the truth is just... Watergate? Just some prick ruining things for selfish reasons? Nothing grand, nothing satisfying. Nothing could be more noir, or more neo-, than that.

Farewell, My Lovely Sometimes the only thing that makes a noir neo- is that it's in color and all the blood, tits, and racism from the books they're based on get put back in. This second stab at Chandler is competant but not much more than that. Mitchum works as Philip Marlowe, but Chandler's dialogue feels off here, like lines that worked on the page don't work aloud, even though they did when Bogie said them. I'll chalk it up to workmanlike but uninspired direction. (Dang this looks bland so soon after Chinatown.) Moose Malloy is a great character, and perfectly cast. (Wasn't sure at first, but it's true.) Some other interesting cats show up and vanish - the tough brothel madam based on Brenda Allen comes to mind, though she's treated with oddly more disdain than most of the other hoods and is dispatched quicker. In general, the more overt racism and misogyny doesn't seem to do anything except make the movie "edgier" than earlier attempts at the same material, and it reads kinda try-hard. But it mostly holds together. *shrug*

The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (dnrw) Didn't care for this at all. Can't tell if the script was treated as a jumping-off point or if the dialogue is 100% improvised, but it just drags on forever and is never that interesting. Keeps treating us to scenes from the strip club like they're the opera scenes in Amadeus, and, whatever, I don't expect burlesque to be Mozart, but Cosmo keeps saying they're an artful, classy joint, and I keep waiting for the show to be more than cheap, lazy camp. How do you make gratuitious nudity boring? Mind you, none of this is bad as a rule - I love digressions and can enjoy good sleaze, and it's clear the filmmakers care about what they're making. They just did not sell it in a way I wanted to buy. Can't remember what edit I watched; I hope it was the 135 minute one, because I cannot imagine there being a longer edit out there.

The American Friend (dnrw) It's weird that this is Patricia Highsmith, right? That Dennis Hopper is playing Tom Ripley? In a cowboy hat? I gather that Minghella's version wasn't true to the source, but I do love that movie, and this is a long, long way from that. This Mr. Ripley isn't even particularly talented! Anyway, this has one really great sequence, where a regular guy has been coerced by crooks into murdering someone on a train platform, and, when the moment comes to shoot, he doesn't. And what follows is a prolonged sequence of an amateur trying to surreptitiously tail a guy across a train station and onto another train, and all the while you're not sure... is he going to do it? is he going to chicken out? is he going to do it so badly he gets caught? It's hard not to put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, wondering how you would handle the situation, whether you could do it, whether you could act on impulse before your conscience could catch up with you. It drags on a long while and this time it's a good thing. Didn't much like the rest of the movie, it's shapeless and often kind of corny, and the central plot hook is contrived. (It's also very weird that this is the only Wim Wenders I've seen.) But, hey, I got one excellent sequence, not gonna complain.

The Big Sleep Unlike the 1946 film, I can follow the plot of this Big Sleep. But, also unlike the 1946 version, this one isn't any damn fun. Mitchum is back as Marlowe (this is three Marlowes in five years, btw), and this time it's set in the 70's and in England, for some reason. I don't find this offensive, but neither do I see what it accomplishes? Most of the cast is still American. (Hi Jimmy!) Still holds together, but even less well than Farewell, My Lovely. But I do find it interesting that the neo-noir era keeps returning to Chandler while it's pretty much left Hammet behind (inasmuch as someone whose genes are spread wide through the whole genre can be left behind). Spade and the Continental Op, straightshooting tough guys who come out on top in the end, seem antiquated in the (post-)modern era. But Marlowe's goodness being out of sync with the world around him only seems more poignant the further you take him from his own time. Nowadays you can really only do Hammett as pastiche, but I sense that you could still play Chandler straight.

Eyes of Laura Mars The most De Palma movie I've seen not made by De Palma, complete with POV shots, paranormal hoodoo, and fixation with sex, death, and whether images of such are art or exploitation (or both). Laura Mars takes photographs of naked women in violent tableux, and has gotten quite famous doing so, but is it damaging to women? The movie has more than a superficial engagement with this topic, but only slightly more than superficial. Kept imagining a movie that is about 30% less serial killer story and 30% more art conversations. (But, then, I have an art degree and have never murdered anyone, so.) Like, museums are full of Biblical paintings full of nude women and slaughter, sometimes both at once, and they're called masterpieces. Most all of them were painted by men on commission from other men. Now Laura Mars makes similar images in modern trappings, and has models made of flesh and blood rather than paint, and it's scandalous? Why is it only controversial once women are getting paid for it? On the other hand, is this just the master's tools? Is she subverting or challenging the male gaze, or just profiting off of it? Or is a woman profiting off of it, itself, a subversion? Is it subversive enough to account for how it commodifies female bodies? These questions are pretty clearly relevant to the movie itself, and the movies in general, especially after the fall of the Hays Code when people were really unrestrained with the blood and boobies. And, heck, the lead is played by the star of Bonnie and Clyde! All this is to say: I wish the movie were as interested in these questions as I am. What's there is a mildly diverting B-picture. There's one great bit where Laura's seeing through the killer's eyes (that's the hook, she gets visions from the murderer's POV; no, this is never explained) and he's RIGHT BEHIND HER, so there's a chase where she charges across an empty room only able to see her own fleeing self from ten feet behind. That was pretty great! And her first kiss with the detective (because you could see a mile away that the detective and the woman he's supposed to protect are gonna fall in love) is immediately followed by the two freaking out about how nonsensical it is for them to fall in love with each other, because she's literally mourning multiple deaths and he's being wildly unprofessional, and then they go back to making out. That bit was great, too. The rest... enh.

The Onion Field What starts off as a seemingly not-that-noirish cops-vs-crooks procedural turns into an agonizingly protracted look at the legal system, with the ultimate argument that the very idea of the law ever resulting in justice is a lie. Hoo! I have to say, I'm impressed. There's a scene where a lawyer - whom I'm not sure is even named, he's like the seventh of thirteen we've met - literally quits the law over how long this court case about two guys shooting a cop has taken. He says the cop who was murdered has been forgotten, his partner has never gotten to move on because the case has lasted eight years, nothing has been accomplished, and they should let the two criminals walk and jail all the judges and lawyers instead. It's awesome! The script is loaded with digressions and unnecessary details, just the way I like it. Can't say I'm impressed with the execution. Nothing is wrong, exactly, but the performances all seem a tad melodramatic or a tad uninspired. Camerawork is, again, purely functional. It's no masterpiece. But that second half worked for me. (And it's Ted Danson's first movie! He did great.)

Body Heat (rw) Let's say up front that this is a handsomely-made movie. Probably the best looking thing on the list since Night Moves. Nothing I've seen better captures the swelter of an East Coast heatwave, or the lusty feeling of being too hot to bang and going at it regardless. Kathleen Turner sells the hell out of a femme fatale. There are a lot of good lines and good performances (Ted Danson is back and having the time of his life). I want to get all that out of the way, because this is a movie heavily modeled after Double Indemnity, and I wanted to discuss its merits before I get into why inviting that comparison doesn't help the movie out. In a lot of ways, it's the same rules as the Robert Mitchum Marlowe movies - do Double Indemnity but amp up the sex and violence. And, to a degree it works. (At least, the sex does, dunno that Double Indemnity was crying out for explosions.) But the plot is amped as well, and gets downright silly. Yeah, Mrs. Dietrichson seduces Walter Neff so he'll off her husband, but Neff clocks that pretty early and goes along with it anyway. Everything beyond that is two people keeping too big a secret and slowly turning on each other. But here? For the twists to work Matty has to be, from frame one, playing four-dimensional chess on the order of Senator Palpatine, and its about as plausible. (Exactly how did she know, after she rebuffed Ned, he would figure out her local bar and go looking for her at the exact hour she was there?) It's already kind of weird to be using the spider woman trope in 1981, but to make her MORE sexually conniving and mercenary than she was in the 40's is... not great. As lurid trash, it's pretty fun for a while, but some noir stuff can't just be updated, it needs to be subverted or it doesn't justify its existence.

Blow Out Brian De Palma has two categories of movie: he's got his mainstream, director-for-hire fare, where his voice is either reigned in or indulged in isolated sequences that don't always jive with the rest fo the film, and then there's his Brian De Palma movies. My mistake, it seems, is having seen several for-hires from throughout his career - The Untouchables (fine enough), Carlito's Way (ditto, but less), Mission: Impossible (enh) - but had only seen De Palma-ass movies from his late period (Femme Fatale and The Black Dahlia, both of which I think are garbage). All this to say: Blow Out was my first classic-era De Palma, and holy fucking shit dudes. This was (with caveats) my absolute and entire jam. I said I could enjoy good sleaze, and this is good friggin' sleaze. (Though far short of De Palma at his sleaziest, mercifully.) The splitscreens, the diopter shots, the canted angles, how does he make so many shlocky things work?! John Travolta's sound tech goes out to get fresh wind fx for the movie he's working on, and we get this wonderful sequence of visuals following sounds as he turns his attention and his microphone to various noises - a couple on a walk, a frog, an owl, a buzzing street lamp. Later, as he listens back to the footage, the same sequence plays again, but this time from his POV; we're seeing his memory as guided by the same sequence of sounds, now recreated with different shots, as he moves his pencil in the air mimicking the microphone. When he mixes and edits sounds, we hear the literal soundtrack of the movie we are watching get mixed and edited by the person on screen. And as he tries to unravel a murder mystery, he uses what's at hand: magnetic tape, flatbed editors, an animation camera to turn still photos from the crime scene into a film and sync it with the audio he recorded; it's forensics using only the tools of the editing room. As someone who's spent some time in college editing rooms, this is a hoot and a half. Loses a bit of steam as it goes on and the film nerd stuff gives way to a more traditional thriller, but rallies for a sound-tech-centered final setpiece, which steadily builds to such madcap heights you can feel the air thinning, before oddly cutting its own tension and then trying to build it back up again. It doesn't work as well the second time. But then, that shot right after the climax? Damn. Conflicted on how the movie treats the female lead. I get why feminist film theorists are so divided on De Palma. His stuff is full of things feminists (rightly) criticize, full of women getting naked when they're not getting stabbed, but he also clearly finds women fascinating and has them do empowered and unexpected things, and there are many feminist reads of his movies. Call it a mixed bag. But even when he's doing tropey shit, he explores the tropes in unexpected ways. Definitely the best movie so far that I hadn't already seen.

Cutter's Way (rw) Alex Cutter is pitched to us as an obnoxious-but-sympathetic son of a bitch, and, you know, two out of three ain't bad. Watched this during my 2020 neo-noir kick and considered skipping it this time because I really didn't enjoy it. Found it a little more compelling this go around, while being reminded of why my feelings were room temp before. Thematically, I'm onboard: it's about a guy, Cutter, getting it in his head that he's found a murderer and needs to bring him to justice, and his friend, Bone, who intermittently helps him because he feels bad that Cutter lost his arm, leg, and eye in Nam and he also feels guilty for being in love with Cutter's wife. The question of whether the guy they're trying to bring down actually did it is intentionally undefined, and arguably unimportant; they've got personal reasons to see this through. Postmodern and noirish, fixated with the inability to ever fully know the truth of anything, but starring people so broken by society that they're desperate for certainty. (Pretty obvious parallels to Vietnam.) Cutter's a drunk and kind of an asshole, but understandably so. Bone's shiftlessness is the other response to a lack of meaning in the world, to the point where making a decision, any decision, feels like character growth, even if it's maybe killing a guy whose guilt is entirely theoretical. So, yeah, I'm down with all of this! A- in outline form. It's just that Cutter is so uninterestingly unpleasant and no one else on screen is compelling enough to make up for it. His drunken windups are tedious and his sanctimonious speeches about what the war was like are, well, true and accurate but also obviously manipulative. It's two hours with two miserable people, and I think Cutter's constant chatter is supposed to be the comic relief but it's a little too accurate to drunken rambling, which isn't funny if you're not also drunk. He's just tedious, irritating, and periodically racist. Pass.

Blood Simple (rw) I'm pretty cool on the Coens - there are things I've liked, even loved, in every Coen film I've seen, but I always come away dissatisfied. For a while, I kept going to their movies because I was sure eventually I'd love one without qualification. No Country for Old Men came close, the first two acts being master classes in sustained tension. But then the third act is all about denying closure: the protagonist is murdered offscreen, the villain's motives are never explained, and it ends with an existentialist speech about the unfathomable cruelty of the world. And it just doesn't land for me. The archness of the Coen's dialogue, the fussiness of their set design, the kinda-intimate, kinda-awkward, kinda-funny closeness of the camera's singles, it cannot sell me on a devastating meditation about meaninglessness. It's only ever sold me on the Coens' own cleverness. And that archness, that distancing, has typified every one of their movies I've come close to loving. Which is a long-ass preamble to saying, holy heck, I was not prepared for their very first movie to be the one I'd been looking for! I watched it last year and it remains true on rewatch: Blood Simple works like gangbusters. It's kind of Double Indemnity (again) but played as a comedy of errors, minus the comedy: two people romantically involved feeling their trust unravel after a murder. And I think the first thing that works for me is that utter lack of comedy. It's loaded with the Coens' trademark ironies - mostly dramatic in this case - but it's all played straight. Unlike the usual lead/femme fatale relationship, where distrust brews as the movie goes on, the audience knows the two main characters can trust each other. There are no secret duplicitous motives waiting to be revealed. The audience also know why they don't trust each other. (And it's all communicated wordlessly, btw: a character enters a scene and we know, based on the information that character has, how it looks to them and what suspicions it would arouse, even as we know the truth of it). The second thing that works is, weirdly, that the characters aren't very interesting?! Ray and Abby have almost no characterization. Outside of a general likability, they are blank slates. This is a weakness in most films, but, given the agonizingly long, wordless sequences where they dispose of bodies or hide from gunfire, you're left thinking not "what will Ray/Abby do in this scenario," because Ray and Abby are relatively elemental and undefined, but "what would I do in this scenario?" Which creates an exquisite tension but also, weirdly, creates more empathy than I feel for the Coens' usual cast of personalities. It's supposed to work the other way around! Truly enjoyable throughout but absolutely wonderful in the suspenseful-as-hell climax. Good shit right here.

Body Double The thing about erotic thrillers is everything that matters is in the name. Is it thrilling? Is it erotic? Good; all else is secondary. De Palma set out to make the most lurid, voyeuristic, horny, violent, shocking, steamy movie he could come up with, and its success was not strictly dependent on the lead's acting ability or the verisimilitude of the plot. But what are we, the modern audience, to make of it once 37 years have passed and, by today's standards, the eroticism is quite tame and the twists are no longer shocking? Then we're left with a nonsensical riff on Vertigo, a specularization of women that is very hard to justify, and lead actor made of pulped wood. De Palma's obsessions don't cohere into anything more this time; the bits stolen from Hitchcock aren't repurposed to new ends, it really is just Hitch with more tits and less brains. (I mean, I still haven't seen Vertigo, but I feel 100% confident in that statement.) The diopter shots and rear-projections this time look cheap (literally so, apparently; this had 1/3 the budget of Blow Out). There are some mildly interesting setpieces, but nothing compared to Travolta's auditory reconstructions or car chase where he tries to tail a subway train from street level even if it means driving through a frickin parade like an inverted French Connection, goddamn Blow Out was a good movie! Anyway. Melanie Griffith seems to be having fun, at least. I guess I had a little as well, but it was, at best, diverting, and a real letdown.

The Hit Surprised by how much I enjoyed this one. Terrance Stamp flips on the mob and spends ten years living a life of ease in Spain, waiting for the day they find and kill him. Movie kicks off when they do find him, and what follows is a ramshackle road movie as John Hurt and a young Tim Roth attempt to drive him to Paris so they can shoot him in front of his old boss. Stamp is magnetic. He's spent a decade reading philosophy and seems utterly prepared for death, so he spends the trip humming, philosophizing, and being friendly with his captors when he's not winding them up. It remains unclear to the end whether the discord he sews between Roth and Hurt is part of some larger plan of escape or just for shits and giggles. There's also a decent amount of plot for a movie that's not terribly plot-driven - just about every part of the kidnapping has tiny hitches the kidnappers aren't prepared for, and each has film-long repercussions, drawing the cops closer and somehow sticking Laura del Sol in their backseat. The ongoing questions are when Stamp will die, whether del Sol will die, and whether Roth will be able to pull the trigger. In the end, it's actually a meditation on ethics and mortality, but in a quiet and often funny way. It's not going to go down as one of my new favs, but it was a nice way to spend a couple hours.

Trouble in Mind (dnrw) I fucking hated this movie. It's been many months since I watched it, do I remember what I hated most? Was it the bit where a couple of country bumpkins who've come to the city walk into a diner and Mr. Bumpkin clocks that the one Black guy in the back as obviously a criminal despite never having seen him before? Was it the part where Kris Kristofferson won't stop hounding Mrs. Bumpkin no matter how many times she demands to be left alone, and it's played as romantic because obviously he knows what she needs better than she does? Or is it the part where Mr. Bumpkin reluctantly takes a job from the Obvious Criminal (who is, in fact, a criminal, and the only named Black character in the movie if I remember correctly, draw your own conclusions) and, within a week, has become a full-blown hood, which is exemplified by a lot, like, a lot of queer-coding? The answer to all three questions is yes. It's also fucking boring. Even out-of-drag Divine's performance as the villain can't save it.

Manhunter 'sfine? I've still never seen Silence of the Lambs, nor any of the Hopkins Lecter movies, nor, indeed, any full episode of the show. So the unheimlich others get seeing Brian Cox play Hannibal didn't come into play. Cox does a good job with him, but he's barely there. Shame, cuz he's the most interesting part of the movie. Honestly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that's barely there. Will Graham being a guy who gets into the heads of serial killers is explored well enough, and Mann knows how to direct a police procedural such that it's both contemplative and propulsive. But all the other themes it points at? Will's fear that he understands murderers a little too well? Hannibal trying to nudge him towards becoming one? Whatever dance Hannibal and Tooth Fairy are doing? What Tooth Fairy's deal is, anyway? (Why does he wear fake teeth and bite things? Why is he fixated on the red dragon? Does the bit where he says "Francis is gone forever" mean he has DID?) None of it goes anywhere or amounts to anything. I mean, it's certainly more interesting with this stuff than without, but it has that feel of a book that's been pared of its interesting bits to fit the runtime (or, alternately, pulp that's been sloppily elevated). I still haven't made my mind up on Mann's cold, precise camera work, but at least it gives me something to look at. It's fine! This is fine.

Mona Lisa (rw) Gave this one another shot. Bob Hoskins is wonderful as a hood out of his depth in classy places, quick to anger but just as quick to let anger go (the opening sequence where he's screaming on his ex-wife's doorstep, hurling trash cans at her house, and one minute later thrilled to see his old car, is pretty nice). And Cathy Tyson's working girl is a subtler kind of fascinating, exuding a mixture of coldness and kindness. It's just... this is ultimately a story about how heartbreaking it is when the girl you like is gay, right? It's Weezer's Pink Triangle: The Movie. It's not homophobic, exactly - Simone isn't demonized for being a lesbian - but it's still, like, "man, this straight white guy's pain is so much more interesting than the Black queer sex worker's." And when he's yelling "you woulda done it!" at the end, I can't tell if we're supposed to agree with him. Seems pretty clear that she wouldn'ta done it, at least not without there being some reveal about her character that doesn't happen, but I don't think the ending works if we don't agree with him, so... I'm like 70% sure the movie does Simone dirty there. For the first half, their growing relationship feels genuine and natural, and, honestly, the story being about a real bond that unfortunately means different things to each party could work if it didn't end with a gun and a sock in the jaw. Shape feels jagged as well; what feels like the end of the second act or so turns out to be the climax. And some of the symbolism is... well, ok, Simone gives George money to buy more appropriate clothes for hanging out in high end hotels, and he gets a tan leather jacket and a Hawaiian shirt, and their first proper bonding moment is when she takes him out for actual clothes. For the rest of the movie he is rocking double-breasted suits (not sure I agree with the striped tie, but it was the eighties, whaddya gonna do?). Then, in the second half, she sends him off looking for her old streetwalker friend, and now he looks completely out of place in the strip clubs and bordellos. So far so good. But then they have this run-in where her old pimp pulls a knife and cuts George's arm, so, with his nice shirt torn and it not safe going home (I guess?) he starts wearing the Hawaiian shirt again. So around the time he's starting to realize he doesn't really belong in Simone's world or the lowlife world he came from anymore, he's running around with the classy double-breasted suit jacket over the garish Hawaiian shirt, and, yeah, bit on the nose guys. Anyway, it has good bits, I just feel like a movie that asks me to feel for the guy punching a gay, Black woman in the face needs to work harder to earn it. Bit of wasted talent.

The Bedroom Window Starts well. Man starts an affair with his boss' wife, their first night together she witnesses an attempted murder from his window, she worries going to the police will reveal the affair to her husband, so the man reports her testimony to the cops claiming he's the one who saw it. Young Isabelle Huppert is the perfect woman for a guy to risk his career on a crush over, and Young Steve Guttenberg is the perfect balance of affability and amorality. And it flows great - picks just the right media to res. So then he's talking to the cops, telling them what she told him, and they ask questions he forgot to ask her - was the perp's jacket a blazer or a windbreaker? - and he has to guess. Then he gets called into the police lineup, and one guy matches her description really well, but is it just because he's wearing his red hair the way she described it? He can't be sure, doesn't finger any of them. He finds out the cops were pretty certain about one of the guys, so he follows the one he thinks it was around, looking for more evidence, and another girl is attacked right outside a bar he knows the redhead was at. Now he's certain! But he shows the boss' wife the guy and she's not certain, and she reminds him they don't even know if the guy he followed is the same guy the police suspected! And as he feeds more evidence to the cops, he has to lie more, because he can't exactly say he was tailing the guy around the city. So, I'm all in now. Maybe it's because I'd so recently rewatched Night Moves and Cutter's Way, but this seems like another story about uncertainty. He's really certain about the guy because it fits narratively, and we, the audience, feel the same. But he's not actually a witness, he doesn't have actual evidence, he's fitting bits and pieces together like a conspiracy theorist. He's fixating on what he wants to be true. Sign me up! But then it turns out he's 100% correct about who the killer is but his lies are found out and now the cops think he's the killer and I realize, oh, no, this movie isn't nearly as smart as I thought it was. Egg on my face! What transpires for the remaining half of the runtime is goofy as hell, and someone with shlockier sensibilities could have made a meal of it, but Hanson, despite being a Corman protege, takes this silliness seriously in the all wrong ways. Next!

Homicide (rw? I think I saw most of this on TV one time) Homicide centers around the conflicted loyalties of a Jewish cop. It opens with the Jewish cop and his white gentile partner taking over a case with a Black perp from some Black FBI agents. The media is making a big thing about the racial implications of the mostly white cops chasing down a Black man in a Black neighborhood. And inside of 15 minutes the FBI agent is calling the lead a k*ke and the gentile cop is calling the FBI agent a f****t and there's all kinds of invective for Black people. The film is announcing its intentions out the gate: this movie is about race. But the issue here is David Mamet doesn't care about race as anything other than a dramatic device. He's the Ubisoft of filmmakers, having no coherent perspective on social issues but expecting accolades for even bringing them up. Mamet is Jewish (though lead actor Joe Mantegna definitely is not) but what is his position on the Jewish diaspora? The whole deal is Mantegna gets stuck with a petty homicide case instead of the big one they just pinched from the Feds, where a Jewish candy shop owner gets shot in what looks like a stickup. Her family tries to appeal to his Jewishness to get him to take the case seriously, and, after giving them the brush-off for a long time, finally starts following through out of guilt, finding bits and pieces of what may or may not be a conspiracy, with Zionist gun runners and underground neo-Nazis. But, again: all of these are just dramatic devices. Mantegna's Jewishness (those words will never not sound ridiculous together) has always been a liability for him as a cop (we are told, not shown), and taking the case seriously is a reclamation of identity. The Jews he finds community with sold tommyguns to revolutionaries during the founding of Israel. These Jews end up blackmailing him to get a document from the evidence room. So: what is the film's position on placing stock in one's Jewish identity? What is its position on Israel? What is its opinion on Palestine? Because all three come up! And the answer is: Mamet doesn't care. You can read it a lot of different ways. Someone with more context and more patience than me could probably deduce what the de facto message is, the way Chris Franklin deduced the de facto message of Far Cry V despite the game's efforts not to have one, but I'm not going to. Mantegna's attempt to reconnect with his Jewishness gets his partner killed, gets the guy he was supposed to bring in alive shot dead, gets him possibly permanent injuries, gets him on camera blowing up a store that's a front for white nationalists, and all for nothing because the "clues" he found (pretty much exclusively by coincidence) were unconnected nothings. The problem is either his Jewishness, or his lifelong failure to connect with his Jewishness until late in life. Mamet doesn't give a shit. (Like, Mamet canonically doesn't give a shit: he is on record saying social context is meaningless, characters only exist to serve the plot, and there are no deeper meanings in fiction.) Mamet's ping-pong dialogue is fun, as always, and there are some neat ideas and characters, but it's all in service of a big nothing that needed to be a something to work.

Swoon So much I could talk about, let's keep it to the most interesting bits. Hommes Fatales: a thing about classic noir that it was fascinated by the marginal but had to keep it in the margins. Liberated women, queer-coded killers, Black jazz players, broke thieves; they were the main event, they were what audiences wanted to see, they were what made the movies fun. But the ending always had to reassert straightlaced straight, white, middle-class male society as unshakeable. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy demanded, both ideologically and via the Hays Code, that anyone outside these norms be punished, reformed, or dead by the movie's end. The only way to make them the heroes was to play their deaths for tragedy. It is unsurprising that neo-noir would take the queer-coded villains and make them the protagonists. Implicature: This is the story of Leopold and Loeb, murderers famous for being queer, and what's interesting is how the queerness in the first half exists entirely outside of language. Like, it's kind of amazing for a movie from 1992 to be this gay - we watch Nathan and Dickie kiss, undress, masturbate, fuck; hell, they wear wedding rings when they're alone together. But it's never verbalized. Sex is referred to as "your reward" or "what you wanted" or "best time." Dickie says he's going to have "the girls over," and it turns out "the girls" are a bunch of drag queens, but this is never acknowledged. Nathan at one point lists off a bunch of famous men - Oscar Wild, E.M. Forster, Frederick the Great - but, though the commonality between them is obvious (they were all gay), it's left the the audience to recognize it. When their queerness is finally verbalized in the second half, it's first in the language of pathology - a psychiatrist describing their "perversions" and "misuse" of their "organs" before the court, which has to be cleared of women because it's so inappropriate - and then with slurs from the man who murders Dickie in jail (a murder which is written off with no investigation because the victim is a gay prisoner instead of a L&L's victim, a child of a wealthy family). I don't know if I'd have noticed this if I hadn't read Chip Delany describing his experience as a gay man in the 50's existing almost entirely outside of language, the only language at the time being that of heteronormativity. Murder as Love Story: L&L exchange sex as payment for the other commiting crimes; it's foreplay. Their statements to the police where they disagree over who's to blame is a lover's quarrel. Their sentencing is a marriage. Nathan performs his own funeral rites over Dickie's body after he dies on the operating table. They are, in their way, together til death did they part. This is the relationship they can have. That it does all this without romanticizing the murder itself or valorizing L&L as humans is frankly incredible.

Suture (rw) The pitch: at the funeral for his father, wealthy Vincent Towers meets his long lost half brother Clay Arlington. It is implied Clay is a child from out of wedlock, possibly an affair; no one knows Vincent has a half-brother but him and Clay. Vincent invites Clay out to his fancy-ass home in Arizona. Thing is, Vincent is suspected (correctly) by the police of having murdered his father, and, due to a striking family resemblence, he's brought Clay to his home to fake his own death. He finagles Clay into wearing his clothes and driving his car, and then blows the car up and flees the state, leaving the cops to think him dead. Thing is, Clay survives, but with amnesia. The doctors tell him he's Vincent, and he has no reason to disagree. Any discrepancy in the way he looks is dismissed as the result of reconstructive surgery after the explosion. So Clay Arlington resumes Vincent Towers' life, without knowing Clay Arlington even exists. The twist: Clay and Vincent are both white, but Vincent is played by Michael Harris, a white actor, and Clay is played by Dennis Haysbert, a Black actor. "Ian, if there's just the two of them, how do you know it's not Harris playing a Black character?" Glad you asked! It is most explicitly obvious during a scene where Vincent/Clay's surgeon-cum-girlfriend essentially bringing up phrenology to explain how Vincent/Clay couldn't possibly have murdered his father, describing straight hair, thin lips, and a Greco-Roman nose Haysbert very clearly doesn't have. But, let's be honest: we knew well beforehand that the rich-as-fuck asshole living in a huge, modern house and living it up in Arizona high society was white. Though Clay is, canonically, white, he lives an poor and underprivileged life common to Black men in America. Though the film's title officially refers to the many stitches holding Vincent/Clay's face together after the accident, "suture" is a film theory term, referring to the way a film audience gets wrapped up - sutured - in the world of the movie, choosing to forget the outside world and pretend the story is real. The usage is ironic, because the audience cannot be sutured in; we cannot, and are not expected to, suspend our disbelief that Clay is white. We are deliberately distanced. Consequently this is a movie to be thought about, not to to be felt. It has the shape of a Hitchcockian thriller but it can't evoke the emotions of one. You can see the scaffolding - "ah, yes, this is the part of a thriller where one man hides while another stalks him with a gun, clever." I feel ill-suited to comment on what the filmmakers are saying about race. I could venture a guess about the ending, where the psychiatrist, the only one who knows the truth about Clay, says he can never truly be happy living the lie of being Vincent Towers, while we see photographs of Clay/Vincent seemingly living an extremely happy life: society says white men simply belong at the top more than Black men do, but, if the roles could be reversed, the latter would slot in seamlessly. Maybe??? Of all the movies in this collection, this is the one I'd most want to read an essay on (followed by Swoon).

The Last Seduction (dnrw) No, no, no, I am not rewataching this piece of shit movie.

Brick (rw) Here's my weird contention: Brick is in color and in widescreen, but, besides that? There's nothing neo- about this noir. There's no swearing except "hell." (I always thought Tug said "goddamn" at one point but, no, he's calling The Pin "gothed-up.") There's a lot of discussion of sex, but always through implication, and the only deleted scene is the one that removed ambiguity about what Brendan and Laura get up to after kissing. There's nothing postmodern or subversive - yes, the hook is it's set in high school, but the big twist is that it takes this very seriously. It mines it for jokes, yes, but the drama is authentic. In fact, making the gumshoe a high school student, his jadedness an obvious front, still too young to be as hard as he tries to be, just makes the drama hit harder. Sam Spade if Sam Spade were allowed to cry. I've always found it an interesting counterpoint to The Good German, a movie that fastidiously mimics the aesthetics of classic noir - down to even using period-appropriate sound recording - but is wholly neo- in construction. Brick could get approved by the Hays Code. Its vibe, its plot about a detective playing a bunch of criminals against each other, even its slang ("bulls," "yegg," "flopped") are all taken directly from Hammett. It's not even stealing from noir, it's stealing from what noir stole from! It's a perfect curtain call for the collection: the final film is both the most contemporary and the most classic. It's also - but for the strong case you could make for Night Moves - the best movie on the list. It's even more appropriate for me, personally: this was where it all started for me and noir. I saw this in theaters when it came out and loved it. It was probably my favorite movie for some time. It gave me a taste for pulpy crime movies which I only, years later, realized were neo-noir. This is why I looked into Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang and In Bruges. I've seen it more times than any film on this list, by a factor of at least 3. It's why I will always adore Rian Johnson and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It's the best-looking half-million-dollar movie I've ever seen. (Indie filmmakers, take fucking notes.) I even did a script analysis of this, and, yes, it follows the formula, but so tightly and with so much style. Did you notice that he says several of the sequence tensions out loud? ("I just want to find her." "Show of hands.") I notice new things each time I see it - this time it was how "brushing Brendan's hair out of his face" is Em's move, making him look more like he does in the flashback, and how Laura does the same to him as she's seducing him, in the moment when he misses Em the hardest. It isn't perfect. It's recreated noir so faithfully that the Innocent Girl dies, the Femme Fatale uses intimacy as a weapon, and none of the women ever appear in a scene together. 1940's gender politics maybe don't need to be revisited. They say be critical of the media you love, and it applies here most of all: it is a real criticism of something I love immensely.

#film noir #neo-noir #criterion channel

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sigynpenniman · 3 years

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Julian Bashir Playlist Time!!

Apple Music playlist (if you're a heathen and subscribe to apple music like me) here

I know that there's plenty of people making playlists, but I really feel like this is an under-utilized brand of fan content. Instead of attempting to create a list of songs that Julian would listen to, or a playlist of songs which were all lyrically directly applicable (though there certainly some of those in here) regardless of genre, I tried to create something which captured, above all, his vibes instead, by choosing songs that balance at least somewhat relevant lyrical content with the energy or feel that I associate with the character. What it means matters, but not as much as how it makes you feel. That said, I signed up for apple music and read a TON of those overwrought iTunes store album review descriptions while I was making this, so I have a whole lot to say about all my choices here. In depth explanation of my symbolism and methodology behind each song under the keep reading. (I love tumblr. I want to write 1,000 words of analysis about why I picked songs to represent Julian Bashir and some of you are gonna read it. This is where I get to pretend to be one of those iTunes music writers. I feel joy.)

Good Morning - Two Door Cinema Club TDCC's Gameshow is high on my favorite albums of all time list for nebulous reasons I myself don't really understand. It was this album, though not this song (but one that will pop up later) that actually inspired me to make this playlist to begin with, as for some reason, from the color scheme of the album cover, to the overall vibe, to the ever-present references to illness, injury, surgery and healers in the lyrics, the whole thing feels inescapably Julian to me. And with an opening like I'm a sinner/I'm the victim/I'm an alien when I'm myself/I'm a healer/I'm a fixer/I'm a present danger to my health/I'm so strong/Doing what I'm supposed to do/ There's something wrong/With somebody like me, it's hard NOT to think about Julian when you hear this song, and I can't think of a better way to start this off.

Sweater Weather - The Neighbourhood I think there's a joke somewhere about bisexual people all liking Sweater Weather, and yeah, I resemble that remark. Sweater Weather is just good. You'll notice there's a sort of chill-indie-alt-electronic thing going here, and that is very much the vibe I'm sticking with. Sweater Weather slots in beautifully, both sonically and thematically. As the singer looks to warm and protect the person he's with from the cold, you can't help but feel a loving coziness coming off of this one. It always makes me feel cozy, at least, so it's here.

Gooey - Glass Animals I have nothing to analyze here because the artists themselves have said that the lyrics of this song have no meaning, they're just meant to capture a vibe, and capture it they do. Close your eyes and ride the vibes of this one. The energy is right, I love it, it belongs here.

Blue - Mika I could probably write a couple hundred words on Blue alone, in any context. This might be my beloved Mika's magnum Opus. Opening the song with the inherently counterintuitive lyric Blue is a feminine color, Mika manages to pack it ALL into this 3 minute song: questions about gender; concepts of sadness, joy, and their intersections; of the perception of melancholy as a flaw and loving people despite, or maybe because of, those "flaws" and anything else about them; a powerful first person reassurance that made me start weeping in my car the first time I heard it; just the phrase "why are humans cruel to you." And oh boy, ARE there questions of gender. Why is blue NOT considered a feminine color? Is that a good thing, a bad thing? In 3 minutes of artful poetry, Mika manages to wrap up sadness, love, joy, pain, the feminine that exists within the masculine and the masculine that exists within the feminine, in the simple color of blue and then, in one lyric, validates it all. And on a much simpler and more obvious note, this is in fact all a philosophic musing on the symbolic meaning of the color we see Julian wearing almost all the time (when he's not in uniform, almost all his civvies are also shades of blue.) I feel like this is one of those songs that's hard to analyze because it does what music and poetry does best - communicate something that cannot be communicated any other way. With these broad themes of loving others around the things they can't love about themselves, you can decide for yourself if this one is coming FROM Julian or directed AT him, either works. I find myself struggling for exactly the words to explain this one, but listen to it; you'll understand.

Little Dark Age - MGMT Another choice with no obvious lyrical relevance, but the tonal fit was just too good to pass up. The vibes pass.

The City - The 1975 This song is one of several present because it leans on medical symbolism to get its point across, though I would be lying if I said I fully understood what that point was. But the entire second verse, apparently about the song's subject suffering from some kind of illness and reassuring him that the next one's the M.D./You'll be feeling just fine, seems somehow to transmit the discomfort of illness directly to the listener. I don't know how or why, but the effectiveness of the empathy the second half of this song elicits, in me at least, puts it squarely in the "odd medical vibes" category.

Surgery - Two Door Cinema Club THIS is the song that inspired this whole playlist, mostly because of its title and general vibe. Another example (of many) of medical/anatomical references in this album (another of the songs is called Fever, etc), this song just feels like Julian to me.

The Other Side Of Paradise - Glass Animals I really like Glass Animals. That is probably becoming obvious. Aside from its delightfully cohesive vibes, this song opens with what's simultaneously the slyest and most brazen gay lyric I have heard on the radio recently, as the male singer says When I was young and stupid my love left to be a rock and roll star/HE told me... The song seems to be about a man whose male lover left him in pursuit of fame and fortune, and eventually ends up with a woman, leaving the singer behind. It's got simultaneously subtle and obvious gay themes, it's got confused love affairs, it's got so much bisexual energy. I cannot think of anything that could be more Julian.

Sit Next To Me - Foster The People Kind of like Sweater Weather, this whole song is built around a rather cute and sweet "sit next to me," and you can't help but feel a bit warm and cozy when you listen to it. I think it pairs with sweater weather well, and slides in with the rest of the picks very nicely.

Nothing Better - The Postal Service (the original band of the lead singer of Death Cab For Cutie) Another example of heavy surgical symbolism, the very first lyric of this song is Will someone please call a surgeon. This is actually a duet, and the singers speak of their real hearts to represent their emotional ones. Something about Your heart won't heal right if you keep tearing out the sutures always gets me and always will. And it vibes good. It vibes so, so good.

&Run - Sir Sly Sir Sly's &Run is my favorite song for driving too fast. It does an amazing job of musical onomatopoeia, talking about running while making you want to run. It's a song about running out of plans and running as far as you can instead, which is all very "I'm illegal by definition so I went to the farthest possible reaches of space." And like everything else here, it just feels good. It's also one of the only highlights here that I can actually see Julian listening to.

Cosmic Love - Florence and the Machine It's no coincidence that it seems like most of us who are invested in Julian Bashir are some flavor of genderqueer, be it trans, nonbinary, questioning, or something else entirely - the man's got a Gender with a capital G, and there's a whole lot going on in there. Between the words that were written for him on the page, and the words that were actually spoken, and the way he carries himself, Julian always seems caught between the white, western, and frequently toxic masculinity that the writers often seemed to want to imbue him with, and the very different, racially and culturally distinct masculinity Sid actually brought. But there's an undeniable element of the feminine in Julian too, at least by a traditional definition. The presence of this part of him at all, much less the fact that, in-universe, it's the more traditionally "feminine" parts of himself - the caregiving and nurturing aspects - that Julian seems proudest of or to like most about himself, is a large part of what makes his character so interesting, at least to me. So there was no way I was getting out of this without acknowledging that somehow, and I can't think of a better way to acknowledge a complicated relationship with the feminine side of one's own gender than with this world's own Celtic divine feminine, Florence Welch. I can't think of any better artist, at least that I know of, to represent femininity as a nonspecific ethereal goddess-concept. I basically spun the wheel of Florence here, as anything would have worked, but Cosmic Love felt very appropriate for a character who does in fact live in space. There could even be some Garashir in here, I think.

Dream Sweet In Sea Major - ミラクルミュージカル, or Miracle Musical, a sister act made up of members of Tally Hall I also couldn't leave off without acknowledging Julian's affection for classic lounge music, especially since it's the only thing about his taste in music that we actually know. But instead of tacking on some rat pack, instead I'm polishing this off with the incredibly chaotic and somehow also perfectly cohesive and calm Dream Sweet in Sea Major. It's got all of the vibes of a lounge singer but gone completely off the rails, which just seems perfect somehow. And it's also a very nice feeling to be left with, so it seems only right to put it at the end.

and if you've read all of this, I love you. Y'all didn't know I was this into music did you. but I am. oh boy. I AM.

#julian bashir #playlists #Spotify

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bi-sapphics · 2 years

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Damn you really are just an ugly homophobic white girl. Grow up and stop harassing others. You literally don't even know what lesbian separatism is, or that the ideology refers to bi women choosing to be lesbians by swearing off men for feminist reasons. Educate yourself and spread less hate online. You wouldn't have any rights if it wasn't for a black lesbian throwing rocks at cops at Stonewall, so shut the fuck up and stop being fascist. Stop punching down. Gay people exist, get over it.

i was honestly just gonna delete this ask since i'm tired of all these nasty baseless accusations from anons being angry that my blog doesn't go their way but you're so unbelievably wrong and have me so taken aback that i'm gonna try my best to teach you otherwise - not that it would change your ugly mindset, but i'm tired of misinformation being spread and i want my response to be open on my profile for future necessary reference, which i'm sure will be needed sooner or later.

anyways, let me start by sarcastically saying congrats on telling me you failed to read literally anything i said and admitting that you think bi women advocating for our own culture and recognition is both hate and homophobia. i carefully word my posts so that i don't accidentally sound like i hate lesbians (well... i do hate biphobic lesbians, but not lesbians in general) but unfortunately i can't control how my audience perceives it, i guess. you're also accusing me of something entirely unrelated with "gay people exist." my issue isn't with "real" gay people or gay culture, it's with gay people taking something away that did in fact also belong to bisexuals in order to claim it as gay culture.

and i know damn well how lesbian separatism happened, stop gaslighting me actually. you want us to believe bi women did this to ourselves in wanting to be completely separate from lesbians and i did used to believe that myself because it's what i was taught!! but that's not what happened, radical feminist lesbians saw us as traitors both to lesbians and ourselves as women under the patriarchy and they kicked us out and labelled us as essentially straight, or "bihet." they claimed "lesbian" terms were now lesbian-exclusive because the fact that bi women were considered lesbians up until the 70s or 80s made it easy for them to do so. all they had to do was pretend nothing had changed and since bi women weren't lesbians anymore, they didn't have to be consistent in redefining their terms since the other party had no power to take it back. in other words, bi women were forced out of lesbian spaces without our consent despite our similarities for reasons that had nothing to do with our natural differences, but rather a notion of purity. we were not given a say and it's incredibly disrespectful to lie and gaslight us into accepting that we somehow did. and in addition to that, we got no form of reparations or right to even pack up our things (butch/femme, dyke reclamation, double venus symbol, a recognized place in history, inclusion in sapphic activism, etc.) we were thrown out empty-handed and had the gate slammed behind us. unfairly. we did nothing to deserve that.

i'd "educate myself" if i hadn't already. you see, i very much educated myself and from what i've found, i'm right and you're a liar. you want me to stop talking out of my ass? fine, read any goddamn post on tumblr that argues it. and i guarantee you they'll all be well-written and cite credible sources from both the relevant time periods and the present. click the links on my profile. go through my tags: "#lgbt sources" "#lgbt resources" "#bi sources" #"bi resources" tags and any similar "x discourse" (butch/femme, slur, bi, lesbian, lgbt, trans, etc.) and "x history" (bi, bisexual, lesbian, lgbt), "biphobia", "bimisogyny", "biphobic lesbians" & "lesbian separatism" & "lesbian exclusive" especially and others like them that i have. read an article. pick up a damn book. read a historical source. read literally anything that doesn't argue "this is the way it is because i said so and this is how i want it to be due to my personal and/or taught prejudices", but instead something like "this is how it's always been, and yes things have changed, but these events have not flowed smoothly in agreement or even through a fair trade-off. nothing has really changed in the sense of material reality though, despite all the collective hatred built up over time." see how that works out for you and then come back, i'd love to know.

if anything, the person who doesn't understand what they're talking about, anon, is you. let's back the fuck up for a second here....... FASCIST ?!?!?! YOU USED THAT WORD UNIRONICALLY TO DESCRIBE BISEXUAL WOMEN FIGHTING FOR RESPECT AND A HUMANE PLACE AMONG WLW COMMUNITIES....... and you think i'm going to listen to your takes with an open mind? so let me get this crystal clear: it paints someone as immature and lesbo/homophobic to know factual history and that's unacceptable, but it's completely right and justified and okay to call said person fascist for sticking with it? even if i was wrong, which i'm not btw, you have caused much more offense and damage by falsely using that word purposed for fucking governmental control and literal dictatoral terrorism than i ever have through participating in discourse (and if you say that's not how that works, then... maybe that's also true for most of your argument here). you really need to consider what you just said, in fact i'd probably also take a moment to refuse the irony of calling me white in a derogatory way (which is fine on its own in different contexts idc) and then immediately turning around and referring to the bi community as fascist (which includes plenty people of color oppressed by fascism, btw!!). if you have no issue with that, or if you don't think it's necessary to address your baffling language, then why should i even begin to consider what you have to say? because it's a one-way street and people like myself should listen to you without question? call me crazy but imo that bears a very minor resemblance to the whole total authoritarian ideology of fascism, anon. just throwing that out there as some food for thought, since that word doesn't actually carry any weighted meaning anymore y'know, according to you yourself.

rereading the part where you said "you wouldn't have any rights if it wasn't for a black lesbian throwing rocks at cops at stonewall, so shut the fuck up and stop being fascist. stop punching down. gay people exist, get over it." and i find an interesting resemblance to what i heard TERFs saying all the goddamn time back when i used to hang out in radfem spaces (very telling how you conveniently never mentioned said lesbian was a transfem): "gay people exist", specifically said to exclusively bisexual women as a group in a way that paints them as homophobic by nature of being too man-tainted to value their same-gender attraction and pay more attention to the lesbian side of their community, focus more on choosing a side and just being a lesbian so that we could be "pure" and "morally correct" again and avoid the abuse of men at our own hands. oh... wait. wait hang on. what's that? OH YEAH, riiight, we don't actually even get to do that if we want to despite our expectations because we were forced out of the lesbian community and declared to be nothing like you!! gee, if only we hadn't been told to stay the fuck away from lesbian culture with a 10-foot-pole, we might actually have an option to be wanted by gay women instead of being """inherently""" open to men all the time now (jsyk bi women fucking despise that phrase because it's so damn misogynistic). sounds like a setup but, oh silly me, it couldn't possibly be something that would make lesbians look bad or else i'd get called a homophobe!! weird how that shit works, huh!!

but sure, i'm just an ugly homophobic white girl for not taking the shit and keeping silent over a "disagreement" that harms my community. bi women with direct relation to lesbians exist anon, get over it. SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!

i'm assuming it's this post or others like it that prompted you to open your filthy mouth. well i'm not sorry for being right. and i wasn't harassing anyone, especially not directly.

also why do y'all only invade my inbox when i'm sleeping like knock it off goddamn if you do that you gotta wait for a response

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breadboylovin · 3 years

Text

NEW POST FOR MY 95060 PLAYLIST!!! complete with explanations of every song choice under the cut because i love explaining my own creative decisions for some reason (PLEASE DO NOT FEEL COMPELLED TO READ ALL OF IT IF YOU DONT WANT TO ITS VERY LONG LOL). i may add a few songs here and there later on, or more likely rearrange what i've already put in slightly, but for now i consider it done.

alright now heres a look into my twisted mind

PART 1: TEMPTATION

Franz Ferdinand - Michael: It's a song about seducing someone named Michael. What more can I ask for (serious explanation is that it’s also very homosexually charged like you just have to listen to it… also feels taunting in a way where it’s like ‘oooooh you want me so bad’ and he’s RIGHT Michael DOES want him so bad). Also credit to this post for letting me know this song existed and inspiring me to make this playlist in the first place :-3

Mystery Skulls - Paralyzed: Just another song about how Michael is awestruck by David and feels compelled to follow him for whatever reason (the reason is that he wants him so bad)

TAEMIN - WANT: This is one of three Taemin songs on here because I think if David survived until present day he would fucking LOVE Taemin. Anyways this is a song about knowing you’re hot shit and everyone wants you and I think after seducing Michael through fucking?? Fatal motorcycle races and evil noodle mind tricks??? David deserves to feel that

Glass Animals - Gooey: OHGHGHGHFH THIS SONG… the vibes are impeccable on this one, Dave Bayley’s alluring voice feels like a slight remix of what David is going for and the way it feels like the singer is trying to convince the listener of something (even though it’s purposely vague) just FEELS like David with Michael. The line “I can’t take this place, I can’t take this place/I just need to go where I can get some space” especially fits when imagining how Michael is new to Santa Carla and may want a place to belong that David and the boys are happy to provide

TAEMIN - Impressionable: I see this as the moment that Michael downs the bottle of “wine”, where this song is David’s internal monologue reveling in how easy it was to charm Michael and get him to join. I always thought this sounded like a taunting villain song so it just fits. Also it’s like ridiculously horny which is a plus

PART 2: THE RELATIONSHIP ITSELF

MGMT - Me and Michael: In my head this is directly after Michael drinks the “wine”, and if it were an actual song in the movie, it’d play instead of Cry Little Sister in that scene. I already made art related to this but I really just love the juxtaposition between something that Michael will later see as horrible (becoming a half-vampire) and David seeing it as a perfect slow-dance moment. Also “Me and Michael, it’s not a question now” because the blood drinking has now linked them together… mmmmm. Credit to this post again for making me find this song!!

ALI - DESPERADO: This one is less about David and Michael specifically and more about how the night in the cave went down for everyone there, starting with a soft slowness as they ate and then descending into chaos as Michael downs the wine and they celebrate a new addition to the pack. The bacchanal energy is off the charts

Dorian Electra - Man to Man: This song is just one that I attribute to all of the boys because I think they do a lot of homoerotic sparring. Also the part of the movie where Michael punches David in the face and David just goes >:-3 back at him

Chase Atlantic - Friends: I don't know what it is about this one but it just Hits… The chorus kinda sounds like David and the boys trying to convince Michael to stay with them instead of coming back to human society after drinking the blood, in the same sort of taunting manner that they had when David (presumably?) made Michael hallucinate the bike lights and sounds outside of his house

Taking Back Sunday - You're So Last Summer: THIS SONG IS JUST REALLY GOOD. I don't know what it is about this one either… I guess the “Maybe I should hate you for this/Never really did ever quite get that far” part could represent the first glimpse of Michael’s more conflicted feelings about David. Also the second half of verse 2 not only fucks so hard but could also be indicative of Michael’s repressed gay feelings, lying to himself about how he wanted to be around David because he’s cool or whatever but he actually just has the hots for him and would let him do anything if he asked to

MGMT - Little Dark Age: Mostly here just for vibes. Have y’all seen that one edit set to this song? Yeah

The Neighborhood - Prey: I feel like this song captures the general unease that Michael feels right before he sees the boys kill for the first time, knowing that he’s probably turning into a vampire and something horrible is happening… especially with “Something is wrong, I feel like prey” just generally describing what it must feel like to be a human among vampires (though he’s not fully human anymore at this point)

PART 3: REALIZATION + FIGHTING BACK

TAEMIN - Criminal: YET ANOTHER TAEMIN SONG!!!! It’s all about realizing you're with someone who’s like, an evil manipulative villain and genuinely bad for you but you can’t escape just yet because you’re kinda into it. I don't think David is THAT bad of a guy, but Michael could be like “I need to get out of this situation because this man is a vampire but I feel attracted to him and it’s hard to really get away”. Also the line “My hands holding yours that stabbed me are not clean either” just HITS cus Michael hates David’s vampirism but HE’S a half-vampire now so it’s not like he’s innocent either. This is just a really good 95060 song AND a good song in general, listen to it even if you don't normally like K-pop cus it slaps

Glass Animals - Wyrd: This would be the moment where Michael snaps out of it and just starts running away, but to no avail, because he’s still a half-vampire (“You can’t run so you must hide” meaning that he can’t outrun his new monstrous nature, the best he can do is hide it until it eats him alive). Meanwhile David laments over how this is a stupid decision from his perspective (“So, my friend, our time is done/You and I could’ve had so much”)

Moonface - Minotaur Forgiving Theseus: This is a very veeeeery bitter song from Michael’s perspective about David being a vampire… with the “You’re just a hitman” repetition referencing how David. Y’know. Eats people. And the “I heard you're coming for me now” references both how David first approached him and the impending confrontation

The Neighborhood - The Beach: This song goes from the bitterness of the previous one to a pseudo-acceptance of the end of their brief friendship and what’s inevitably going to happen next. However, I think the bridge of the song illustrates the little bit of Michael that doesn’t want this to happen, that wants this relationship to somehow work out because he cares about David even if he is a vampire (unfortunately he ends up repressing this because he feels a duty to kill David now)

Gorillaz - Rhinestone Eyes: This is mostly in here because of the music video, the buildup to a battle just echoes in my head whenever I hear this song now. In the context of this playlist it makes me imagine David looking up at the Emerson’s house from the hotel (and Michael doing the opposite) knowing that something’s about to happen and it’s going to be horrible

Glass Animals - JDNT: This entire song feels like the climax of the movie. Verse 1 feels like the Emersons and Frogs getting ready to attack the cave (“I’m all armored up”) with “I feel that final poke” being when Marko gets staked, and the chorus right after is a tinge of regret that Michael feels once the plan starts to take shape. Verse 2 is the other boys waking up to see that Marko is dead + them dying themselves (“Where my funny friends gone?”) and the bridge is Michael and David’s fight before Michael finally gores David on the antlers. The outro of “You can’t breathe without me” VERY much feels like David taunting Michael from beyond the grave, knowing how much Michael loved him and how horrible what he’s just done is

PART 4: GRIEF

The Brazen Youth - Burn Slowly/I Love You: Ooooooghghgh the conflicted feelings about their relationship is STRONG in this one… The “Burn Slowly” part being him trying to convince himself that he did the right thing by killing David while the “I Love You” part is him realizing that he really did love David and it fucking hurts

Sufjan Stevens - The Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us: MAN. MAN… Everything past “I can’t explain the state that I'm in” is just so… it’s Michael realizing what he had even more and just how much it hurts that he’s lost it. He knows he was in love now and it fucking hurts SO MUCH!!!!!

Sufjan Stevens - The Only Thing: [head in my fucking hands] Michael moping around Santa Carla because it feels empty without David. All the “should I tear my eyes out now?/Should I tear my heart out now?” parts oh my GOOOOOOOOD sufjan stevens i'm going to slap you on the head.

Paramore - Tell Me How: THIS SONG HURTS SO MUCH ITS SO. It’s another one about conflicting feelings so theoretically it should be earlier in the story but I always envision something very morbid when listening to this (and have now written a fic about it so check that out)… Michael going back to the hotel where he put David’s body and musing to no one, asking how he’s supposed to feel now, the “And always coming to your defenses” where Michael keeps defending David and their relationship to his family who all think David was a horrible monster… this song fucking hurts. Also I unintentionally drew a parallel between JDNT’s “You can’t breathe without me” and this song’s “Do I suffocate or let go?” and now that I’ve realized that it hurts even more. Fuck this song

#the lost boys #michael emerson #the lost boys david #95060 #michael x david #david x michael #text #Spotify #i have thought sooooo hard about this playlist fr and theres so many individual lyrics and bits that i want to make art for #if i had all the time in the world i would #but. for now. enjoy :-3

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