here’s a thought: anastasia was the embodiment of what it means for a story to be told from the female gaze and a lot of its criticisms were about those exact characteristics
actually, u know what, i had a lot of cherry moscato and i talked about this for hours with leah the other night as i typed the above paragraph, and the more i think about it the more there is to say. so i’m gonna write this essay now instead of later when i think i’m more coherent. here’s a quick summary of my rationale and the expansion of my thoughts will be under the cut because i got a little wordy, as usual :)
listed below are characteristics that fall under the female gaze theory:
the main lead is one of the most complicated characters out there and yet her desire is so simple and therefore so universal: she wants love. she wants to belong. she wants to figure out who she is.
the main lead is looking for a matron, whether she’s aware of it or not, and the matron is looking for her.
the other women in the show are also complex and are allowed to have relationships with one another.
it’s implied that anya endured a lot of trauma, not just from the massacre but from her years on the streets, and yet we don’t need to see any of that stuff to understand and feel empathy for her.
the hottest man in the world wears a tank top and his sleeves rolled up and other slutty but not slutty looks. a win for all boytoys out there.
the love interest is also a three-dimensional character that exists for his own journey but he learns and tries to better himself because he knows it’s the right thing to do, not just to ‘impress’ the lead with a temporary fix.
the romance story, arguably the most important relationship of the show, isn’t about physical attraction or being good enough for the other, it’s about mutual respect and learning how to communicate.
her other traveling companion is a lovable father figure who supports her through their whole journey together.
the other man of the show exists to show why this breed of a man, the authoritative figure who uses political ideals and expectations of his patriarchal figure to justify violence and specifically violence against women, is… well, scary.
in the musical at least, anya’s appearance is never mentioned at all, and she’s never expected to change how she looks to “appear” like anastasia. the only time her appearance is sexualized is by the resident villain.
all of that being said, a lot of the critical reviews of the show stem from the above aspects, which says something about the demographic of theater audiences and who controls what gets higher remarks (which,,, does this affect ticket sales?). do with that what you will.
My new favorite hobby is pouring myself a nice glass of wine and browsing popular Amazon reviews for tarot decks.
In all seriousness, as a theologist I find this sort of thing utterly fascinating. There is a complete disconnect of the self in the kind of person that the first reviewer must be, an utterly uncritical cosmology of what external pressures likely brought them into the occult community.
Humanity has repeatedly sought to create religion in times of upheaval, both on a societal and a personal scale. There’s a reason why New Age spirituality and interest in the occult have so rapidly exploded within the past decade or so of the Information Age. People are distancing themselves en masse from organized religion–and ESPECIALLY Christianity, and its politicized trappings within the United States government–but feel the need to keep the religion aspect. In difficult times, belief in something beyond the self and the material is a thing of fundamental comfort. It makes the random suffering and confusion of the world more bearable, grants a sense of satisfaction and control in your life otherwise lacking.
But the occult, specifically, is antithetical to the Information Age in many ways, and utterly anathema to capitalism, and this intersects in a very key way for a person like Jen B. The occult is the infallibly unknowable. It is finding things you can never understand and the joy of trying to grasp the impossible however you can. The world is filled with unexplainable and the strange, and there is a deep and potent joy I feel in studying it, both on a practical level and in an academic level. I love examining why we as a species keep reinventing wizards and powerful spirits who exert influence over our lives in ways we cannot comprehend.
But that is not the occult that Jen B wants. Jen B wants a very, very, very, very, VERY new understanding of the Occult. She wants the occult to be a place of peace and tranquility and sterilized, sanitized self help. She wants clean pale blues and neutral earth tones with lots of natural lighting in a yoga group. She wants to buy crystals that will alleviate her anxiety and realign her chakras, and she does not want to examine why she thinks buying crystals will alleviate her anxiety, and she does not want to research what chakras actually are beyond Pinterest infographics of see-through people in a lotus pose. She, as a Lightworker VERY specifically, wants to feel important, and like it is her duty to heal a broken and toxic world, but she has no idea why she wants to do it or how she could actually do that, and she won’t examine that because the answer isn’t easy and comforting.
The world is a chaotic and cruel place filled with random suffering and deeply ingrained toxic power structures which seek to literally profit off of sucking the life out of billions of people in a slow and miasmic way. But Jen B cannot approach this from a radical mindset, cannot bear the mundane and banal reality of “These problems are caused by political and corporate structures to enforce government control and subservience”. Jen B seeks the occult because she wants to discover that the reason she hates her job and feels no satisfaction from it is actually psychic emotional vampires draining her life force chi, and she can prevent them from feeding off her by thinking really hard about how they can’t actually do that.
For the marketing directors of Target’s next New Age self help book, for the contracted freelancers who are hired to write a cutesy pastel purple “101 Spells For The Working Witch” to be sold for $10.99 at Barnes and Noble, for the white reiki masters and yoga instructors who like houseplants, the occult is not a place of wonder and mystery and the unknown and the unknowable. The occult is not the occult for them, because they want to learn that spiritual enlightenment can be found on Amazon.com for 24.99 plus shipping and handling, because the world is scary and complicated and doesn’t make sense, and crystals are pretty little rocks you can arrange into shapes, and this makes them feel like they can survive another day of being forced into doing absolutely nothing of worth, meaning, or time, so that they can use an imaginary high score in their bank account to buy water and a studio apartment.
If you’ve been personally victimised by “The Wild Unknown” Tarot Deck by Kim Krans, you MAY be entitled to compensation
Have you ever wondered about like cave paintings? Like, “What were they doing? These don’t… look very good,” -chuckles- In fact, almost every cave painting has Spaghetti Lines, which are webs of lines drawn over-top images, which you can see here.
-picture changes to a grayscale image of a deer standing in tall grass-
And here’s an example of natural Spaghetti Lines in nature, but we’ll get to that in a second.
-picture changes to a photo paleolithic drawing of a mammoth. Alongside the photo is a tracing of the drawing, to clarify the lines-
The second weird thing is like sometimes animals are given extra body parts, like here the mammoth has two trunks. And here, there’s a drawing of an antelope or a deer, it looks like, that seems to have two heads.
For a long time, people would assume like maybe the Spaghetti Lines were just some kind of paleolithic graffiti, and maybe the animals were these kind of religious creatures that they had mythologized. But then, in 1993, a German scholar went into thiscave in southern France, and it changed everything.
Unlike the other caves he had been to, this one was very poorly funded, so it had no artificial lights, and he had to be guided in by a local farmer, with nothing but a flickering lantern to guide his way. Here is how he described the experience.
He said, “M. Lapeyre finished his story and wanted to move on. I encouraged him to remain and to slowly swing his lantern back and forth a few feet from the cave wall. As he moved the light, I saw the colors of the tectiform begin to shift. When the lamp arced to the left, the blacks faded, the browns became red and the red intensified. When the light moved to the right, the pattern reversed, creating a shifting color scheme. Moreover, the engraved lines under and around the tectiform became animated. Suddenly, the head of one creature stood out clearly. It lived for a second, then faded as another appeared. The spaghetti lines were no longer a confused two-dimensional pattern. Rather, they became a forest or a bramble patch that concealed and then revealed the animals within. By firelight, a secret of the cave painters was exposed. In the space of a few moments, I saw cuts and dissolves, change and movement. Form appeared and disappeared. Colors shifted and changed. In short, I was watching a movie.”
Understood this way, the antelope with two heads, under the dance of the firelight, is an antelope going from grazing to checking for predators. And the mammoth with two or three trunks becomes a mammoth in motion, swinging his trunk.
There’s something beautiful to me about knowing that hundreds of thousands of years ago, ancient humans descended into the depths to watch movies.
/end transcription]
I heard about this recently and about lost my fucking mind. I am begging someone to actually film the effect so we can see it for ourselves!
The BLGʼs [Belfast Libertarian Group] first venture was a series of silk-screened posters – five altogether, commonly headed ʻKnow Your Enemyʼ. The five targeted ʻenemiesʼ were: (1) the Army, (2) the Courts, (3) Big Business, (4) Sectarianism, and (5) the Churches. When posters 1, 2 and 3 were ready for distribution the BLG was approached by members of the Official Republican movement who expressed approval and offered to put up hundreds in Catholic/Nationalist areas.
Here was the groupʼs first dilemma. Should they accept assistance from a group which was listed among those they were meant to be criticising? However, whatever they thought of cooperation with Republicans, one fact was clear – they couldnʼt possibly put up that amount of posters, especially in IRA-dominated areas. So they warily accepted the offer. Then a problem soon arose. Seemingly, some Provisional IRA supporters were going around Andersonstown ripping down the posters, possibly because they didnʼt want the Stickies (Officials) to gain any local advantage in the propaganda field. The BLGʼs contact in the Officials commented:
Give us more of the posters! The Provies are ripping them down so weʼre going to put them up again – and stand guard beside them if we have to!
It was bad enough to be cooperating with Republicans, but to be caught up in part of their incessant feuding!
