I've enjoyed how a lot of the FF7 Rebirth reactions have been.
Aerith does anything - *sobbing*
Barret and Dyne - *sobbing*
Tifa and/or Yuffie in the house - *sobbing*
Vincent exists - *horny sobbing*
Cid exists - "He looks great, BUT I SWEAR TO GOD IF HE'S STILL ABUSING HIS WIFE LIKE IN THE ORIGINAL GAME, I'LL KILL EM!"
9 notes
·
View notes
i just finished reading giovanni’s room and i am curious about the immense amount of ‘room’ imagery in the novel. i mean duh, a novel called ‘giovanni’s room’ is going to use that analogy. but ive seen people interpret giovanni’s room as soooo many things but none of them felt satisfying enough for me.
ive seen ppl call it a physical cage for davids idea of masculinity, or a place of freedom and love where david can love who he loves away from society’s expectations, or a toxic and claustrophobic place that forced him to stay in the closet. but i feel like the room can be all of these at once. in my eyes, the room analogy is amorphous and its meaning changes throughout the story because my take on it is that giovanni’s room is giovanni.
when david first sees the room, he remarks that it is organised by ‘punishment and grief’ (p. 78). and he thinks that his role is to ‘destroy this room and give Giovanni a new and better life. This life could only be my own, which, in order to transform Giovanni’s, must first become a part of Giovanni’s room.’ (p. 78). the implication is clear - he must become a part of giovanni’s life and to destroy the grief that wracks giovanni and give him a better life.
but its important to highlight that giovanni never saw his room like david did. because when david asks him why he has buried himself in ‘that hideous room’ (p. 104), giovanni doesn’t agree with him. he rebutes:
‘The world is full of rooms - big rooms, little rooms, round rooms, square ones, rooms high up, rooms low down - all kinds of rooms! What kind of room do you think Giovanni should be living in? How long do you think it took me to find the room I have? And since when, since when’ - he stopped and beat with his forefinger on my chest - ‘have you so hated the room? Since when? Since yesterday, since always? Dis-mois.’ (p. 104)
if you consider that the idea that giovanni’s room is giovanni, this conversation is essentially david calling giovanni hideous and giovanni having to justify his existence, his humanity to him. giovanni simply lives in that room, he never thought of it as stinking or dirty like david did. because unlike david, giovanni ‘is not afraid of the stink of love’ (p. 125), to him this is simply the reality of love and being human. and when he asks david when he has started to hate the room, it prompts the reader to question of when he has started to hate giovanni himself.
this discovery is all the more heartbreaking when giovanni says this monologue when reuniting with david after hella’s return:
‘Sometimes you were here all day long and you read or you opened the window or you cooked something - and I watched you - and you never said anything - and you looked at me with such eyes, as though you did not see me. All day, while I worked to make this room for you.’ (p. 121-2).
and yes i did cry at the bolded section. it just reminded me of the man called ove and how in that novel love was shown so much through building. how ove builds a ramp for wife so she can go to work, builds all the tables in their houses lower for her, builds bookcases after bookcases. and thats what giovanni was doing for david. he was working to make that room for him. to make himself for david. and when he lost his job, he found other ways to show his love for david through the room and david knows this:
He had some weird idea that it would be nice to have a bookcase sunk in the wall and he chipped though the wall until he came to the brick and began pounding away at the brick. It was hard work, it was insane work, but I did not have the energy or the heart to stop him. In a way he was doing it for me, to prove his love for me. He wanted me to stay in the room with him. Perhaps he was trying, with his own strength, to push back the encroaching walls, without, however, having the walls fall down. (p. 102)
the room where these two have spent so many hours in had begun to feel smaller when they were struggling with money. giovanni recognises the desperation of the whole situation - that he has nothing to offer david anymore. he has no job, he is no longer entertaining enough to pique davids interest, and davids fiancee is coming back. the room has become smaller and boring - he has become small and boring. so when he begins pounding at the brick wall, it was as if he was trying desperately to change himself so that david would stay with him.
but david doesnt. when david first kisses hella upon their reunion he describes her as a ‘familiar, darkened room’ (p. 108), almost as if he is imagining kissing giovanni instead. but when she makes up her mind and they agree to marry, when they make love, he describes her as a ‘strong, walled city’ (p. 110) - david has already learnt to forget giovanni. because no matter how hard he tried, giovanni’s life was so much smaller than hella’s, he could never hope to compete. hella is a city, giovanni is just a room.
and when giovanni was caught, he was caught ‘no farther than the Seine’ (p. 135). giovanni never even left paris even though he knew he would be arrested. he remained there where david had left him - like a house; like a room.
the room was never just a room - the room is him; he is the room. and he could not make himself into a city for david as much as he wanted to try.
60 notes
·
View notes
the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.
capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.
now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.
and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.
and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.
and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".
it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"
15K notes
·
View notes
please can we stop describing bigots as delusional. please. im so fucking tired. someone being sucked into a hate group surrounded by others who believe minorities should be oppressed and encouraging them to believe in conspiracy theories that the rest of the group believes, is fundamentally different from someone having a mental illness that causes delusions.
delusions, by definition, cannot be explained by things like cultural background - such as having a belief constantly reinforced by intentional attempts to rationalize it for the sake of maintaining power over minorities. yes, someone can be both delusional and a bigot, and yes conspiracy theories can feed into delusions, but the two are not fucking synonymous.
i did not spend my teen years convinced that i was being stalked by demons just to hear so many of you people equate my disability with incel behavior and genocidal propaganda. stop reinforcing harmful connotations about mental health struggles.
5K notes
·
View notes