#media

[prokopetz]

Okay, but, like, is it good good, or is it "the main character has the same mental illness as me" good?

[shadowandbone]

“Four Crows & a Saint started a band.“ Cast for THE LATERALS MAGAZINE via Kit Young | SHADOW AND BONE, SEASON 2

[darqx]

I am trying to sleep.

[eosofspades]

i just watched Knives Out for the first time tonight and i have a million and one thoughts about it but i think the most succinctly i can explain why it's such a good movie, is that i correctly guessed the (insanely good) plot twist/reveal less than halfway though, and never once as it went on did i feel like it was "too easy" or "out of nowhere." this movie is SO well-crafted and has such a love and respect for the audience and doesn't belittle the audience's intelligence or withhold information just for cheap suspense and still manages to be so interesting and genuinely funny??? fucking top notch movie

[profoundsoulsong]

DP prompt

Danny makes a phantom twitter account and it all goes to hot hell so quickly its honestly surprising.

[thirdity]

Most present-day images — be they video images, paintings, products of the plastic arts, or audiovisual or synthesized images — are literally images in which there is nothing to see. They leave no trace, cast no shadow, and have no consequences. The only feeling one gets from such images is that behind each one there is something that has disappeared.

Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena

[garbagechocolate]

Guys hold on I just woke up

God the AU isn't THAT good

[astraltrickster]

I have...such complicated mixed feelings on the way we're kind of "rehabbing" older queer(coded) characters lately.

On the one hand, it's really, really unsettling to see people unironically holding up these characters who were, more often than not, the butt of jokes in their time as somehow ~great representation~ and ~ahead of their time~ - when, for the most part, no! No they weren't! They were VERY much products of their time, they could barely be MORE products of their time! Even most of the few who WERE portrayed sympathetically for the most part still had MOMENTS where their queerness was played as something to be laughed at, not with! And the fact that we're hearing these claims that they're super positive and progressive actually all over the place at the same time as we're all but bringing back "metrosexual" with how much stricter we're getting about gender presentation before we begin to Suspect Things, at the same time as "egg" has all but become the ~progressive~ way to say "I'm revoking your man card" (but we internally think that's a GOOD thing so it's FINE to hold people to that standard, right?), at the same time as we have an explosion of people treating stereotypes as absolute facts that can predict everything about a person from their REAL gender (because the problem with gender essentialism is ONLY that people apply it to genitals instead of presentation, right?) to their sexuality to their sexual position preference and it's TOTALLY not questionable at ALL that all of this lines up almost perfectly with the model from ancient Greece that acted like being a gay male bottom was only slightly less pathetic and useless than being a (cis) woman which was just the WORST thing you could be, and all that fun crap...that's really not a fun call to have coming from inside the house!

But, on the other hand, in the context of an even partially changed culture...sometimes, uh...in a sense, maybe not the same sense some of the people saying it think, but a very meaningful sense nonetheless...they're right, actually. Some older queercoded characters, especially comedic ones, really have aged into being a lot more positive than they were intended to be, just by virtue of surviving to see the culture stop seeing "being gay or trans or gnc or anything else is inherently bad and shameful and embarrassing" as being as much of a self-evident "fact" as when they were written. Like, the writers were often never MEAN about them beyond "oooooh the man is wearing a dress!" or "oooooh that woman is crude and unladylike!" or whatever else that large swaths of the modern population...no longer see as inherently shameful or even close to it. There may still be humor to be found in the fact that they're flying in the face of expectations, but who a good number of us read as the butt of the joke has changed.

And another important thing is, this approach as a reparative reading isn't actually new at all. Queer communities have reclaimed and celebrated these characters this way for pretty much as long as they've been produced, reveling in the fact that really, when you peel away the completely arbitrary social demands, the superficial stereotypes used in this coding literally aren't even bad - oh nooooo, the character is ECCENTRIC, call in the national guard~! Like, c'mon writers, did you just forget to actually be mean in your bullying attempt, or what? Of course, these characters ARE still funny as hell though - by virtue of being the one fucking interesting person surrounded by boring-ass normies who react HILARIOUSLY to anything even slightly off from their expectations, that is. Nothing new about that reading at all! We've always been doing it!

What is pretty new - and for the most part constitutes a wonderful sign about how times are changing, but also has aspects that are very, very worrying - is people not realizing that this is a reparative reading and instead assuming this is how most of these characters were meant to be read all along, nor realizing that most people did not read them that way. It is still very, very important to remember - lest we, well, put the exact same bullshit in a rainbow hat without a trace of irony or deconstruction like we have been lately - that for the most part, they were not in fact intended to be read this way. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part, these characters were meant to be the punchline themselves, and they performed that role very well to the mainstream audience, because they came about in a time where, if you had a gnc man (or "man"), or a woman who's not interested in men, or whoever else, you really didn't have to go out of your way to frame them as something shameful; that was just automatically culturally "understood" to an even worse extent than it is today. The framing may seem sympathetic by today's standards, especially by the culture set by LGBT+ circles, but at the time it really wasn't meant to be.

But, you know what? As long as you keep that in mind, as long as you're not forgetting the very loaded history here...go nuts! Fuck it, those characters ARE ours now and I am not sorry and you shouldn't be either!

[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

[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.

[prokopetz]

I've gotta hand it to the Friendsim 2 folks. As far as long-form fan media goes, a sequel to the visual novel spinoff of a webcomic is already playing in hard mode, on top of the unbelievable hassle of keeping a large remote-work team where nobody is getting paid on task, at this point they're a year and a half and eleven volumes deep in spite of getting basically zero exposure, and they're showing no signs of stopping any time soon. There's a non-zero possibility that whoever is PMing this thing literally made a deal with the Devil.

[tsscat]

GET GONCHED

[thechekhov]

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

[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]

[garbagechocolate]

Have a flower :)

Thank you bloo ❤