the most liberating thing to me about everything everywhere all at once is the idea that even if you have settled, you can still find joy and inherent worth in the life you have chosen and the people you have chosen to live it with. that’s counter-hegemonic in so many ways and deeply affirming
when evelyn told joy “it’s okay to be a mess.”
how many people don’t get to live the life they want to live. how many people don’t ever become their best or “ideal” selves, or achieve so-called success and high regard. how many people’s dreams don’t come true, how many people are seen as a failure bc they couldn’t “make something of themself.” are their stories not worth telling? do they not matter? this is already a profound message in a general sense, but in the context of the lives of immigrant families in the us, it’s especially radical, i think. when evelyn told her father she knows he’s not proud of her, but it’s okay bc she’s finally proud of herself. that even in the universe where she becomes rich, well-loved and famous, she still wonders about the “what if” she could’ve had with waymond, and wants to give their relationship another try.
it just reminds me of that ursula k. le guin quote from the dispossessed, “free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think.”
mermaidsheenaz:basically, spoilers are clear - there is going to be some kind of Team Family meeting at the Hilltop in MSF/MSP. and yes, Daryl is going to be there, as well as Jesus. and YES, they were filming together OUTSIDE Hilltop. I am 100% certain we’re going to get Desus scenes in the next ep. ALSO, Daryl might know the way from ASZ to Hilltop, and from ASZ to Sanctuary… but he never went from Sanctuary to Hilltop before! and as we know, JESUS WAS MARKING THE WAY WITH SYRUP!
I want Loki and Bucky to be best friends. I need them to be a chaotic duo. I need them to bond over being mind controlled, being confused by modern day midgardians, to play random pranks.
I love them both so much, I just love the idea of them being really good friends.
I know we like to make fun of Bucky having the weakest serium. Like he’s constantly being beat up by super soldiers. But I think he has one of the strongest. Like Steve. He just holds back a lot of his strength because he doesn’t want to hurt anyone to badly; even in a fight.
In the fight against the winter soldier and Captain America (in CATWS) Bucky is dominating the fight against Steve, Sam, and Nat. The only reason he leaves is because he had the perfect escape route when Sam kicked him and Nat shot a rocket launcher at him. There are plenty other fights like this when Bucky is being controlled.
I think he holds back his strength because even in a fight, he knows he can kill someone with one punch and he hates the idea of it.
(Also this scene when he could have easily killed that flag smasher and just impaired the knife into the floor as a warning so he didn’t actually hurt them. )
Well, it’s official. Fictional men have ruined real men for me.
You’re not going to read me poetry that puts into words all that we can’t say because we’re too busy protecting our found family, but at least there’s pining? Darling, no thank you.
We don’t have a Latin phrase that immediately evokes our relationship? Romance is dead.
We don’t have a theme song? What are we supposed to dance to right before Armageddon then? Riddle me that one, Batman.
You’re not going to make up a story to express your undying love for me, without actually expressing your undying love for me? Honey, just no.
We’re not going to have a “rivals-who-learn-to-respect-each-other-over-time-to-friends-to-lovers” arc? Why are you even here then.
If I tell you that I love you at an important moment in the plot are you going to say you love me too or are you going to respond with a sarcastic one liner? These are the important questions, dear one.
I just had a thought. We all love morally grey guys with dark hair, but who was the guy like that we all grew up with? Percy Jackson.
He’s a skater boy, intimidating. He is a mama’s boy which makes it better but he literally decided to go on his first quest to find his mom, in the process becoming a national fugitive at 12. Just to try and punch Hades and actually fighting Ares. He became the prophecy boy and did all the good stuff partially out of spite.
There is a reason he was taken instead of Annabeth. He is the lover that would tear the world apart if you got hurt or taken. He would have torn apart Olympus until Hera gave her back, memory intact. He would give you the world if you asked for it. He would give Annabeth anything she asked for.
He’s the hero of the story we grew up with, so it makes sense that he is what we are attracted to. He is basically our blueprint. You don’t have to agree, but I realized this earlier today.
The moment you realize that Nico Di Angelo could have seen Disney’s Snow White in theaters, when it first came out in 1938. Little baby Nico sitting with his sister and watching Snow run from her evil stepmother. Oh wow.
So…I was just thinking about how I watched Good Omens with my mom, who read the book when it came out. I instantly got hooked on these characters and love them dearly. But my first instinct was to grab two of my most religious friends and make them watch it with me.
Lucky for me; they both love it and one even cosplayed a Fem!Aziraphale to my Crowley. I love them so much.
So this is an appreciation post for them (I doubt they will ever see this) and Good omens. I love it.
Everyone on the Squint team on Bones, obviously Bones, but Zach, Hodgins, all the other interns, Cam, I see them as autistic-coded. May just be me but the way they interact. The way Hodgins needs Angela to help him focus while Booth dose the same to bones…I love it.
I know there is no justifying the terribleness if JKR naming the one of the only POC characters two last names of different cultures. Just because they are historically “Asian”. Nice, lumping everyone on a continent together.
But I had a thought that could redeem this.
What if her name was Cho-Chang. As in one complete last name, from both parents of varying cultures. And what if (this is a guess, I don’t know if this is an actual thing but I think it’s cool), outside her family, no one actually knew her first name. Like everyone calls her Cho because that’s the first part of her last name and while it may not be her first name, it’s considered a sort of nickname.
I also like to think that her being a Ravenclaw (while it may be a stereotype, rude) is because she is extremely intelligent, creative. She is the character we like to bash for crying a lot. But it makes sense, her boyfriend was murdered. And yes, she and Harry kisses but people rebound. Especially when they are mourning, plus Harry and Cedric both being triwizard champions created a connection between them. And Cho just wants her boyfriend back, so she projecting him onto the only person like him.
Cho gets a lot of flack, and she doesn’t deserve it. She’s grieving and a textbook way. She had to be smart, in any kind of way. Doesn’t have to be academically, to get into Ravenclaw. To be honest, I just want her happy.
*I am in no way defending JKR, I just thought of this and thought it was a cool idea.*
Izzy Hands is Kylo Ren: Or, An Informal Exploration of Fandom’s Proclivity Towards Minimizing and Sympathizing with White Male Violence
i brought this undertaking upon myself by putting this thought out there (and getting cursed with the knowledge that this take makes izzy/ed reylo) without my full intent to write the post. my being cursed is my own fault, my own cross to bear, my own self made misery. however, i’m going to make this analysis EVERYONE’S problem now because jokes on all of us, i wrote the post.
notes for readers: this meta is just under 6500 words. i have tried to divide it into thematic sections determined by bolded lines. sometimes i will reiterate previous points with expanded discussion because i always have more to say. big thanks to @dragonzair@plotdesignerand@twelvemonkeyswere
so to get the ground work settled: obviously izzy hands is not identical to kylo ren, given that he is not the fallen son of heroes, nor directly a key figure of a fascist empire. however, in the context of our flag means death and its fandom, particularly the portion that favors izzy and takes him at his word without examining the underlying context of his scenes and dynamics with other characters, there is a LOT of similarity between the ways that the two characters enact violence, and in the way the fandom response is geared towards sympathizing with these two characters for said violence while also and minimizing their responsibility for it.
So here’s the thing about Our Flag Means Death, which like 87% of Tumblr I have binged in the past couple of days. Despite all the quotes from David Jenkins and Taika Waititi talking about how it’s a rom-com and how they developed and pitched the whole show around the romance from the start…I still sort of expected it to be like, an action-comedy workplace sitcom about pirating with a prominent queer romantic subplot. Which sounds fun! But that’s not what the show is.
I didn’t really get until I was about halfway through the show that like. The romance is the main plot. The “A” plot if we’re getting TV-writerly about it. The story is a capital-R Romance and they committed to that. The main storyline is about these two dudes realizing they’re in love with each other and trying to find a way to be together, and all the other plot elements, from the other romantic subplots to running afoul of British imperialism, are there to support that emotional story. And that’s so much more surprising and interesting than what I was expecting!
(It’s also, I think, why the show feels particularly, for lack of a better word, fic-like. Because fanfic is often about elevating a romantic storyline to the level of the main plot in a genre and/or universe where it would either be a subplot or nonexistent.)
The rom-com formula is such a common movie storytelling format that most of us can recognize it quite easily by now. But it’s not a common TV format–partially because it has an expected beginning, middle and end, unlike a sitcom structure where the situation is the story engine for generating potentially infinite, relatively self-contained little plots involving the same set of characters. This doesn’t mean sitcom characters can’t have character growth or relationships with each other that change and develop over time, but we’re talking about two fundamentally different story structures here.
And once we understand what kind of story we’re in…
(and here we’re going under the cut because spoilers)
the last few days i’ve been trying, like many, to really put my finger on exactly why ofmd feels so different from any other queer show that’s come out in the last 10 years, and I think this is a big part of it.
because it’s not as if there’s been no queers in media, y'know? we’ve had gay romantic storylines in tv shows before now. maybe they weren’t always great, and there’s been a lot of truly shitty ones, but there ARE good examples to be found. but even the shows we have that are explicitly about the queer experience have never felt like this to me, and I think that’s in part because none of those stories are romances by definition. even in stories like she-ra or steven universe where we have explicitly queer romances that end happily, they weren’t the point of the show. ofmd is maybe the first show (at least I can’t think of any others) in which the queer romance IS the plot, is the point. there would literally not be a show without it, which I don’t think I could say for any other piece of media with queer rep in it. and I don’t think any of us realized how starving we were for that kind of explicit representation until it was in front of us.
