the-forever-obsessed

[the-forever-obsessed]

The wolf is so done with the fox’s bs 😂

[the-forever-obsessed]

Okay you guys.

IF YOU PRIMARILY DO NOT SPEAK ENGLISH reply with what you mentally call it, if you have a nickname for it or something

[the-forever-obsessed]

I need y'all to watch this clip

[the-forever-obsessed]

Whenever I see someone refer to "Victorian era-" for places outside the UK I'm tempted to start saying shit like "Han Dynasty era Rome", "Soviet era Australia" etc

[the-forever-obsessed]

i miss them

[the-forever-obsessed]

hey, uh. what the shit

[the-forever-obsessed]

I’m sorry but no modern comedy will ever top this

x

[the-forever-obsessed]

"pasta only fills you up with empty calories" have you considered that it also fills me with love

[the-forever-obsessed]

ok but helen and odysseus have SO much potential as a brotp. his lying/disguise skills + her vocal impression abilities? the chaos would be UNSTOPPABLE

[the-forever-obsessed]

had to break out the wet floor sign bc this gentleman decided to oil up the place

[the-forever-obsessed]

so there’s this story that my grandmother loves telling (well, in recent years. for the first seventy years of her life she did not talk about her childhood at all.)

the story is that a family friend of theirs was Austria’s finance minister*, and Jewish, and after the anschluss he realized he was in trouble, but like many of Austria’s Jews he seriously underestimated how much trouble. by the time he realized it was too late to get out safely. He was also old and in failing health, so dramatics weren’t ideal.

so he asked a family member to drive him to the mountains on the Italian-Austrian border, and he’d cross there. It was easy enough to avoid the Austrian authorities going out, but you didn’t have a chance of avoiding the Italian ones, and they stopped him. 

“Oh,” he said to them, “Benito knows me. Tell him I’m here and he’ll call me a car.” And indeed, they called Mussolini and he called him a car. My reaction the first time I heard this story - and the reaction of everyone I’ve told it to - has been “so Mussolini opposed the Holocaust? He was helping smuggle Jews out of Austria?” And, no, he didn’t and wasn’t. But he knew this guy, they were old friends, the guy was in town, so Benito called him a car. Which is more characteristic of humans than the version where Mussolini was secretly a decent person, really. A million is a statistic, but this guy? I know this guy. He’s a great guy. There’s the phrase ‘the banality of evil’, and I think it applies, but the word that’s always come to my mind is the myopia of evil, the tendency to treat People well but just not look out at the world and see billions of People, not believe that the principles you apply to the ones you know apply to all of them everywhere.

[the-forever-obsessed]

My favorite bit of dialogue from Les Mis 1.1.10 is from the exchange where the Bishop and the revolutionary are discussing the death of one of the Royal children during the revolution:

“I will weep with you over the children of kings, provided that you will weep with me over the children of the people.”

“I weep for all,” said the Bishop.

“Equally!” exclaimed conventionary G——; “and if the balance must incline, let it be on the side of the people. They have been suffering longer.”

I don't know, I think it's a perfect encapsulation of why the bishop's "All lives matter, we should feel sorry for Everyone equally" philosophy was incomplete. The bishop's privileged aristocratic background means he doesn't necessarily understand how to take this systemic inequality into account when choosing who to grieve and who to forget. The death of a king's child is a horrible tragedy beyond words and proof that the rebels are heartless monsters.....but the deaths of thousands of non-royal children under the reign of tyrannical kings, as a direct result of those kings' policies, are quietly forgotten by him. Until the Conventionary pointed it out, the Bishop couldn't see that "weeping for all" isn't enough when some lives are treated as if they're inherently far more expendable. It also makes me think of the fact that there are, for example, so many pieces of media about the suffering of Poor Girlboss Marie Antoinette to the point where its almost its own subgenre. And there's that entire subgenre like A Tale of Two Cities/The Scarlet Pimpernel that's about how Hard it was to be an aristocrat around dirty deranged French Revolution peasants. And period/fantasy media as a whole loves to focus on the struggles of royalty and the upper class. Like yeah, everyone can experience pain/trauma regardless of their social class- and yeah theoretically we should weep for everyone's pain equally. But as the Conventionary points out.... it's interesting how the pain of one small group of privileged people is treated with far much more importance, and is focused on so much more often, while the pain of a much larger group of people is utterly forgotten. "Weeping for all" often only means, weeping for the powerful and important people who were considered worthy of being remembered. And in that vein I think it's relevant that multiple main characters in Les Mis end up being buried in nameless or unmarked graves.

[the-forever-obsessed]

tbh the idea of immortal character's personal growth is interesting and doesn't seem to be explored enough

I mean, how many times have we seen an immortal character drop the whole "actually I'm several hundred years old" bombshell, and they still act like the exact same person they were at age 20 or whatever. how many people do you know who are still the same as they were even just 10 or 20 years ago? yet somehow eight lifetimes came and went and had no impact on this dude?

Give me immortal life stages. Give me

millenia old characters poking gentle fun at someone who's 200yrs old and in their edgy 'brooding' phase.

midlife crisis immortals who just got bit with the 'what am I doing with my life?' bug, who suddenly feel like they're wasting their gift and they need to be making the most if it right now

you know what, I want an immortal who keeps having weird skills/knowledge, and everybody assumes they've got this big elaborate backstory because of it, but no, it's just all from that one fifty-year span where they decided they needed to learn how to everything or else they were wasting their potential

immortals who have changed their stances and opinions on issues but now there's callout posts for things they said in letters to their friends a hundred and fifty years ago, like yes @cumberbatchcockdongle, I am sorry I said transphobic things about the bearded lady at that circus in 1872, please kindly forgive me and/or fuck off

characters going through the eternal cycle of whether loving mortals is worth the inevitable grief. the answer always depends on how recently they've been bereaved. just a merry-go-round of 'better to have loved ans lost' versus 'shitfuck grieving hurts I'm never doing this again'

super laid back immortals who have lived through so much nothing phases them, and sometimes they have to be politely reminded that things do not always 'work themselves out' for mortals

[the-forever-obsessed]

Moon Knight episode 1 + text posts

[the-forever-obsessed]