estarsomnolienta

[estarsomnolienta]

An embroidery of the Wikipedia page for embroidery.

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AHEM. *leans on doorway* I would like to know about that time you led a strike in preschool.

Okay, storytime. Both of my parents worked full time, and the woman who ran the family daycare across the street “went away for her health”- a charming euphemism for her family having her institutionalised because they couldn’t cope with her schizophrenia, but that’s another story for another time- so I went to preschool for two years. The preschool I went to was a good one. Still is, actually. My brother and his wife have their little sprout on the waiting list already, and he’s not two yet. It’s built onto the side of an ex-church, and it has great play areas, a sandpit, ducks, the works. Nice. We did all the usual preschool stuff; craft activities, storytime, naptime, playing with toys. To help us learn to be responsible and cooperative human beings, we were expected to clean up after ourselves, and put things away when we were done with them. Being small children, this had mixed results, so at the end of every day, there’d be a big group cleanup, where we went through and picked all the toys and books up off the floor of the main room and put everything in order.

All very nice, right? Trouble was, about half of the kids got picked up at 5, 5:30ish, and the other half, whose parents worked later hours, would be there till 6 or 6:30. The cleanup usually happened around 6, so the kids whose parents could pick them up early never had to clean up, and I noticed pretty quickly that the kids who never had to clean up at the end of the day didn’t seem to pick up after themselves during the day, either. They knew they wouldn’t have to deal with it, so they didn’t care.

I feel I should mention that my mother was, at the time, the secretary of a large public sector union. She’d been a unionist for some time (we’ve got a great picture somewhere of baby me on her lap at a Women In Leadership conference) and sometimes she had people over for dinner, and they’d talk about union business. I knew what was going on, here. This was a discriminatory practice. It targeted kids whose parents couldn’t afford for one of them to stay home with the kids. It encouraged unfair behaviour in the kids who didn’t have to clean up. This had to stop.

I went to the staff first. Mostly they laughed at me- in their defense, please picture a tiny blonde four-year-old in a princess dress squaring up to you about “dithcriminatory practitheth”- and told me I should set an example for the other kids by being tidy. Well. That wasn’t going to change anything. Having been knocked back by the administration, I took the struggle to the people. While we were cleaning up, I talked to the other kids who had to stay late, and we came to a consensus that things had to change. Look, to be honest, I don’t remember this happening with any kind of clarity. I was very small. Mum has told this story with great pride for some years, though, and most of the details come from her retelling. I don’t know if it was me who first suggested strike action, but I know it was me who led the sit-in protests; I’m told it was me who made an inspiring speech about fairness and division of labour, and it was definitely me whose parents got called.

Upshot was, we went over to a system of shorter clean-up sessions throughout the day- one before lunch, one after naptime, and one at the end of the day- and my mother has never let me forget that four-year-old me was a rabble-rousing monster child.

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—carol ann duffy, from medusa; ‘the world's wife’

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I love to see totally unfit to be parents characters having to take care of kids and doing their best

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Saw The Wild Robot today (came out of the cinema crying) and one of my favorite parts is at the start of the movie, when I don't remember what animal comes from the ground and Roz turns her head and starts running to it like the police from Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs while asking

"DO YOU NEED ASSISTANCE?"

I'm absolutely sure that everyone in the theater heard me laugh.

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AND ANOTHER THING ABOUT THE WILD ROBOT....

I'm not a mother, maybe i will be someday, but motherhood honestly terrifies me, i think is beautiful, but very dangerous, but one pet peeve that i have is the "You just understand love when you hold your baby in your arms for the first time"... Roz didn't feel love, she felt the weight to keep a baby alive, even if she didn't know how, sure it was because she was a robot, but as someone who has a lot of friends that had children and had a mom that was very opened about it. A mother's love, isn't always a love at first side thing, sometimes it's a growing love, you build a love with your child as you watch them grow, as you see them showing their little personalities, as you get to know them, and watch them becoming one.

My mom openly told me that when she saw me and my brother for the first time after the birth, she just felt the weight of the world on her shoulders to keep a baby alive, and she had no idea how to do that, she just kept making stuff up as she go. And she did a lot of mistakes, mainly because of how she was raised, so a lot of things she was imitating, and they weren't what we needed, but she did it what se could, and it eventually killed her, because she never took th time to care for her, she only took care of us... Motherhood is scary and non-rewarding, it's bloody, it's looking at the mirror for the first time and finally seeing who you are at the most raw and pure form, but somehow, still has its beauty.

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and another thing.

if every character that has a unique characterization in their thought process, or fictional perspective, MUST BE “autistic” or “neurodivergent-coded,” that character is no longer relatable to people who don’t self-diagnose, or identify with, or are not diagnosed with, autism or anything on the neurodivergent spectrum.

I mean honestly I see you guys out here telling me that Mulan is neurodivergent, that ROZ from the Wild Robot is neurodivergent and gee, so is Brightbill, that Hiccup is neurodivergent and Ariel is autistic.

Ariel. The “girl next door” princess.

The whole point of characters, especially main characters, especially main characters in children’s media, is to be believable and relatable, on some level. If they’re all ‘special brain-different,’ they’re only relatable to people who accept that label or are given that diagnosis.

AND. It does a huge disservice to the storytelling techniques.

A story is supposed to get under the mental guard of a person. You’re supposed to take your hands off the “thought” wheel and your feet off the “emotion” pedals, and let the story drive your brain and heart to a new place. Or an old place you haven’t been in a while, or were forgetting.

One of the best ways to do that is to create a character that, on the surface, seems special and unrelatable. Like a girl living in the Imperial Dynasty of China, or a literal non-human robot. You can’t, on the surface, relate to them as easily, so you naturally start to think, “what would it be like to be seeing the world through these new eyes?” And then you’ve given up the wheel and pedals of your mind to the movie. You find yourself relating to concepts like motherhood and protectiveness, which the robot character is experiencing, but you’re looking at those concepts through new eyes.

That is why the character is a robot. Not so that she can be an allegory for your “special-undefined-perspective-on-life which is sometimes called neurodivergence.” She’s not a robot for that reason. She’s a robot because a robot character flips the “what would it be like to learn everything over again?” switch in your brain, and then the story can show you it’s focus, (like motherhood and kindness in The Wild Robot) after the switch is flipped.

and it’s flipped for everybody, (“neurodivergent” and “neurotypical”) not just people who identify as the vague term “neurodivergent,” or have been diagnosed as autistic. Stop fitting everything into vague-enough-to-be-claimed, but named-enough-to-be-a-special-identity boxes. You’re ruining the universal, unifying value of it all.

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I think what I love about Vontra is that you immediately pick up that she's an antagonist.

Spoilery bits below, mostly I'm rambling.

We spent this whole movie with characters being introduced as threats, they attack Roz, break her, steal peices of her, insult her. Roz is subjected to the brutality of the food chain every scene of the movie, but for the animals this is natural, this is normal. You eat others, others eat you, you fight to stay alive every day.

Roz's compassion in encoded into her, it's the human pack bonding that makes everyone in the film think she's weird, and she never loses this most human part of herself. Proof that she was made by human hands, it saves her and everyone else.

Except that it's a part of human kind that humans in power don't like.

The place that made Roz wants everything to be perfect, it's a city of the future, an oasis for select humans to escape what is slowly revealed to be a world in ruins from climate change, but we never see more of that except the passing scenery of destroyed cities.

Life is still growing, still thriving, and corporations are still building walled cities and promising the ultra wealthy a completely subservient servant class.

When the ship arrives to collect Roz, the ship she's been trying to signal half the movie, we don't know what to expect. Are they friendly? Are they here to fix her? She's been slowly breaking down the final half of the movie, leaking fluid, losing peices, shutting down as her battery depletes faster and faster. She gets fatigued, she uses a prosthetic, she goes days without moving.

She is disabled.

And down from this ship that is supposed to rescue her drops a peppy sounding companion who promises to 'fix' her.

Even though she is programmed to sound happy to put others at ease, as she states, you know immediately that she is Bad News.

The way she talks down to Roz, her manner of speech, her constant invasion of personal space, her pointed questions that are obviously accusations.

Yeah we all went "ooh toxic yuri >3" because we love queer coded villains getting flirty.

But it was also very obviously meant to feel violating, specifically similar to medical violation.

Roz was on display as a disabled robot, something in need of repair, in need of help, but Vontra saw her as something needing to be Corrected, not simply fixed but full factory reset, all the bits of her that are unique sent away to be studied.

Roz wanted help, she wanted to belong, she wanted to be repaired, but she also still wanted to be HER. However it's her disability that influenced her changes in coding, she needed to create her own updates to get around issues she faced, and it created a personality she enjoyed being.

She wanted a choice, but Vontra was programmed to see all deviation from the norm as something in need of repair. Roz wasn't a person in need of help, she was a defect to be collected, studied, adjusted, and put back out into production.

Respecting Roz, her boundaries, her thought process, even her willingness to be touched, it didn't even occur to Vontra. Because Vontra is a robot programmed to collect broken robots, and Roz is a broken robot.

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nothing fucks me up like found family trope

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No no no but like- from a human pov the world building has almost all the characteristics to be called a eco dystopia; the sea levels got crazy high, we have to live in very weather controlled spaces, there are centers specialized on growing food because it's not longer possible to do it on earth. Even the clothes of the few humans showed respond to the common futuristic vibe. But it doesn't feel dystopic in the way a world completely "destroyed" and over run by climatic changes should be. It's almost optimistic.

Yes, half the cities got destroyed. And the goose still migrated through continents.

Human life has to be 100% monitored because of how unsustainable it has become. And the life we create it just as capable of loving as we are.

The thought that even the best "ai" (although I do have a strong posture on the fact that Rozz was not ai, but that's for another post), created with the best technology and "all the information humankind has" (or something like that was said about Rozz's core) will still choose love and kindness and compassion.

And will have preferences. 'cause god how good it feels to see a pessimistic eco future in where people survive BECAUSE of, not despite of others. We are alive and we will live through the harshes winters and the solitary autumns and the scarce soil by being with other. Being in a community.

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the wild robot is the best movie i have ever seen in my entire life and i am not joking. i have never seen or felt a movie more beautiful, fluid, or emotionally impactful. i highly recommend it, this movie has restored my faith in the animation industry and has given me hope for the future. 1000000000000/10

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It is a beautiful day to have a sketchbook right now

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ok ok hear me out: when Roz is all covered in The Moss, she grows flowers in the springtime <3 (yes, this was just an excuse to draw her in a flower crown, but you KNOW im onto something here!)

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Just a simple robot vibing in the wild. Nothing to see here.

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Swim!

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Amazing.

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The Wild Robot

My Response After Watching it

Y’all. I believe in humanity again if THAT is what people can create. What a story. WHAT. A. Story.

Please. Please. PLEASE. Take the time to watch it. It is BEYOND worth it.