i’m gonna be honest, whenever i’m feeling kinda meh, one thing that will always cheer me up is imagining ancient romans speaking with ridiculous southern united states accents
please imagine cicero addressing the senate with “well howwwwwwdy, y’all”
instead of catullus 16 beginning with “pedicabo ego vos et irrumabo” it starts off with “bless your hearts, furius and aurelius”
augustus reads ovid’s poetry and exiles him on the grounds that “it ain’t right”
and honestly i would love to hear “y’all’d’ve” come out of any of the ancients’ mouths
More recent data has shown an even more favorable box office landscape for female-led films. In 2013, the year of Frozen,Catching FireandGravity,female-led films outgrossed male-led films handily, both in the US and internationally. Frozen was the top-grossing film in the world that year and is the highest-grossing animated film of all time. When you divide the total gross by the number of movies in a franchise, the Hunger Games franchise is more successful than Harry Potter, Star Wars, Jurassic Park, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Lord of the Rings, Transformers, Fast and Furious…in fact, it has a higher average box office gross than every recent US movie franchise except the two Avengers films.
And yet, even though the economic data is there IN ABUNDANCE that films starring women can make a crapton of money, only 15% of lead characters in movies in the US were female in 2014. The reason why is both complicated and simple–I could talk a lot about the complicated feedback loop between what studios think is going to be profitable (based on sexist assumptions and not actual data); what projects agents think they can sell and how that filters down to what writers write; how fewer roles for women means fewer chances for talented actresses to get noticed and become designated as the kind of A-list stars that will make a studio feel confident to greenlight a movie when they’re attached; how lower pay, lack of interesting work and rampant sexism means women both in front of and behind the camera are more likely to drop out of the film industry instead of staying in long enough to become successful. But the short answer is that it’s just sexism.
And then what happens is an example of the scarcity problem. There are so many more movies with male leads that when one bombs, no one considers it a statement on the capacity of male characters to draw an audience. It’s just an unsuccessful movie. But every female-led movie is carrying the impossible weight of proving that any female-led movie can be successful. So when you have a movie that’s maybe okay but marketed poorly, or a movie that’s just bad–and hey, lots of Hollywood studio movies are!–that becomes proof that women can’t draw an audience instead of just proof of it being an unprofitable movie.
I am so glad that the word blorbos exists now. It’s so much more evocative and accurate than “comfort character”. Like, they’re different things. He doesn’t bring me comfort, he makes my hands itchy and I want to polish him with pledge. I want to put him in a Pringle’s tube and shake him. I want to brush his hair and put little shoes on him like a Bratz doll. That’s a blorbo.
just read in interview with Vince Gilligan in which he said the original ending for El Camino was Jesse in prison but then he showed it to his girlfriend and she was like ‘you absolutely cannot do this everyone will hate you what is wrong with you’ and frankly bless this woman because if, after everything, I had got anything other than Jesse Pinkman driving off to Alaska i would have hunted VG down and killed him for sport
You will never hear dwarven folk metal. You will never hear elf prog rock. You will never see an orc do a drum solo. You will never see a gnome shredding on the keyboard. You will never see a goblin punk band. Despair eternally
