#media

[prokopetz]

Level 1: character gets a redemption arc for something that's not really that bad because the writers are cowards and don't want to risk making them truly unsympathetic.

Level 2: character gets a redemption arc and the text just straight up refuses to specify what they actually did, but trust us, it was really bad. (AKA Schrödinger's war crime)

Level 3: character gets a redemption arc for something the writers clearly think is really bad, but it's... kind of not? (Bonus points if it's a weird gender role thing.)

Level 4: character gets a redemption arc for something that genuinely warrants it, but the writers seem to have very strange ideas about why it was bad.

[grand-magnificent]

Warren Kepler is in my opinion truly one of the people who had the most unfulfilled potential re: character analysis within the fandom, and the reason that never got realised is that during the height of the active fandom, The most obnoxious people really got their panties in a bunch hurriedly talking about how terrible he was as a human being every time he did Anything to make sure nobody thought they might like An Awful Person as if he was real instead of like. a character inside a narrative. one that was like. Very doomed by said narrative entirely beside his actions

[worth-beyond-a-number-scale]

I wish society would allow characters to be fat before they're old. The only times fat people get to exist in media (other than as villains, fat jokes, etc.) are when the character is viewed by society as sexually unavailable (ie old people, parents, caretakers, etc.) It's why a movie will have two fat parents and then those fat parents produce children who somehow got the skinny, conventionally attractive twig genes. The first example of this trope off the top of my head is How to Train Your Dragon with Hiccup's love interest being incredibly tiny and conventionally attractive while BOTH of her parents are fat and muscular.

One of the only fat characters in Sleeping Beauty is the fat king (who is both the fat parent trope as well as the fatphobic tropes of fat = symbolism for privilege and fat = bumbling fool). The other fat characters in the movie? The fairies who were the guardians of Aurora. But the main characters who we're supposed to relate to and view as appealing? Who are supposed to be sexually available in this society because they're young, royal lovers? They're thin. Of course!

Look at any fucking movie, TV show, cartoon, advertisement, background characters, comics, what have you, and all of the fat characters will have to be a fatphobic trope. Villain, comedic relief, fat friend who supports the main character getting the love interest, nerd, "ugly" character, caretaker, parent, or just nonexistent entirely because despite fat people making up billions of the world population, THERE IS COUNTLESS MEDIA WITH NOT A SINGLE FAT PERSON IN IT!

I looked at a website for a fucking inpatient mental illness program and ALL of the dozens of pictures of the happy, smiling, diverse people who are supposed to make all the potential clients of the inpatient treatment feel represented and safe were thin. ALL OF THEM! Even the pictures used to represent the eating disorder inpatient program were nothing but thin women, which is INCREDIBLY FUCKING HARMFUL!!!! Like not even just bigoted and insensitive and the harm that comes with that, literally deadly because it continues the expectation that only thin people can have eating disorders while fat people who have them are weight loss success stories who shouldn't stop starving themselves. A lot of people with eating disorders also feel like they can't ask for help until they're "thin enough" to "have really suffered." So imagine having an eating disorder and all of the recovery resources have nothing but photos of thin women the width of a green bean. And that's before even mentioning the harm of only ever showing women as capable of having eating disorders.

And I can tell you right now that 99.999999% of society thinks these pictures not showing any fat people is okay, they wouldn't even notice the lack of fat people because fat people are already excluded from society as it is!

All of the fat parental figures with thin children I can think of in just ten minutes alone:

(Funny how the fat = wealthy and privileged trope stops as soon as it comes to the prince, princess, or whatever child character we're supposed to relate to, which is literally the last four examples. How come it's "All rich people in the past were fatties because they had the WEALTH and PRIVILEGE to overeat uwu" but no one ever complains about "historical inaccuracy" when Jasmine is as thin as a tennis racket?)

(The two fat characters in this show are the motherly authority figure over Tinkerbell and the bumbling buffoon fat joke character. There are TEN skinny characters in these two pictures and a measly TWO fat characters who are nothing but stereotypes.)

I'm fucking done being given crumbs and told not to stuff my face with them. Start making some actual goddamn fat representation. This is only the tip of the iceberg about how horrendous the state of fat representation is.

[heartfilia-source]

woman of all time LUCY HEARTFILIA day . ˚◞♡ ⃗ *ೃ༄

Unit art is from FTGKMH ✨⭐️💫🔆🌼🍯🌟💛🫶

[titleknown]

Leaving it anonymous to avoid putting a rando on blast, but I saw the stupidest fucking anti-AI-art take and I had to respond:

Yeah, this is ahistorical bullshit, because even within my fucking lifetime there's been multiple technologies that've been used by capitalist greed to displace working artists, and yet we all can still acknowlege the art produced by those same technologies is still valid and good in its own right. These are ideas that can co-exist.

Like, as an example, Photoshop and other photomanipulation technologies. Like, folks would not dismiss photomanips as "not real art," hell it's my artistic specialty, and @drchucktingle's book covers come to mind as an excellent example of the form.

But it is also true that Photoshop displaced a lot of illustrators. There is a reason that, as most folks into AI art with a traditional art background would tell you, they freaked out about Photoshop back in the day in the same way.

There is a reason that lavishly illustrated romance novel covers and movie posters are gone and ended up replaced with cheap photomanips by penny-pinching corpos in what I would say has been a net cultural ill. Both of these paragraphs' truths can co-exist.

Similarly, CGI! Nobody argues that CGI can't make some amazing visuals, creators ranging from Genndy Tartakofsky to Worthikids' are proof of that! There's a lot of exciting, artistically interesting CG work out there!

But at the same time, it was used to fuck over practical effects by being turned into a sweatshop in a way practical effects couldn't! There's a reason they always use CGI when practical would be cheaper and better looking and there's a reason Rick Baker retired, and they are not happy reasons!

And with AI art, even though the displacement fear is real and there's reams of shitty hacks out there, there are people doing good and interesting things with the tech, @reachartwork and @deepdreamnights are my go-to's for that!

Like, the one thing that's different about this technology is that people are using copyright to play on the poisonous notion of making you hate "secondary creators" to ignore that it's the bosses' fault you might get screwed, and use it to advance copyright bloat to line their pockets despite the fact that it didn't help artists with the DMCA, it didn't help artists with license-ifying sampling, and it ain't going to help here.

Don't fall for it, keep your eyes on the real enemies. Because those historical factors have in common that it was corporate greed that used those technologies for ill, and it is only through labor power not copyright expansion that we stop them.

[fzxy40]

Nico in a promotional video for the 2010 Monaco Grand Prix (x)

[thoughtportal]

The silicon age is built on sand.

The things we love can disappear just like that.

Streaming changed everything. We pull from the cloud, not realising most of the content we buy is rented to us, not truly ours. Whether a Kindle book, or a film bought on iTunes; they can snatch it back in a heartbeat. Spotify's incompletion fucks with the canon, omitting beloved songs and albums based on licensing. Maybe a generation will grow up never having heard early Jay-Z, or Lana del Rey, deep cuts of Radiohead or the delights of Sapokanikan. Maybe their friends will never get into K-Pop. When George Lucas reworked Star Wars there was outrage; Disney makes stealth edits whenever it likes. People joke that future films and TV shows might just iterate - rush towards a deadline, patching ropey plot points and effects after the fact.

And cancelled artists don't have a chance. You had to burn a book, but a file's just gone. Maybe, like Amon Tobin, one errant sample gets your iconic track erased from the internet.

Because few people realise how delicate the cloud is. An outage freezes traffic, and one day might wipe out all those illicit remixes, all those emails, love notes. A million unprinted photos.

On a fragile internet, so much of our cultural wealth hangs in the balance.

All our beloved things. Tomorrow's dust.

[thechekhov]

I have this conversation with myself at least once a month. 

[darkwood-reblogs]

hot take but i actively miss when tv shows were like 20 episodes a season. slow down. let me get to know the characters. let them do something dumb and not consequential to the plot for one fucking second i'm begging you.

[foxtomes]

yes critical analysis of media is super valuable but I think suspension of disbelief isn't practiced enough

"the beginning relied so much on fate/chance meetings/a bizarre set of circumstances that could have solved the conflict if avoided" babe that's an inciting incident

[tsscat]

GET GONCHED

[prokopetz]

One of the central dilemmas of my media consumption is that on the one hand, I have serious objections to how bisexual men in popular media are almost invariably depicted as emotionally dysfunctional sleazeballs, but on the other hand, whenever I see an absolute fucking disaster of a human being who isn't bisexual all I can see is all the perfect opportunities for him to fuck things up that the narrative is obliged let pass because he doesn't swing the right way.

[writeouswriter]

Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.

Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.

Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.

Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer

[ceevee5]

[ground-zoro]

Large Studios: We're removing all these popular movies and tv shows from our streaming services because it's costing us too much money paying their writers. They will never be seen again.

Also Large Studios: STOP PIRATING OUR PROPERTIES!! YOU'RE COSTING US A FORTUNE!!

[fangirlneverlie]

I love you people who over-analysis one scene, I love you people who look at small detail that people haven't noticed, I love you people who take characters and characteristics seriously, I love you people who noticed subtext, I love people who over analysis media or TV shows in general I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU I LOVE YOU