#<- this can and absolutely should be a homoerotic swordfight

[nethnad]

doctor who christmas special where the doctor and the master swordfight in a church aisle WHEN

[haveagooddalyn]

Do you have a moment to talk about our lord and savior, The Untamed

hello all!!! i don’t usually Make Posts here bc.... well i just never started and now it’s a Habit. BUT!! it’s a brand new (terrible) world and i’m locked in my house looking for things to do and i NEED to talk about the untamed and #QuarantineLyfe has deprived me of coworkers to shout at and i’ve already yelled at my three (3) friends, so here we are

the untamed?? you’re thinking, is that that show with all the gifs you reblog of the two beautiful swordsmen pining at each other and you’re just screaming in the tags? yep!!! that’s the bitch!!! i started it 2 months ago and it still has a death grip on my soul. i have gone fully fucking feral about it. will i ever be capable of caring about anything else again? who knows. do i care? absolutely not, i have never been happier

the thing is that everyone who watches this show promptly (a) loses their full-ass mind about it and (b) feels compelled to get everyone else in the world to watch it, so that’s what’s happening here. PREPARE TO BE CONVINCED

(below the cut, bc i am not a monster lol)

okay so the untamed!!!!!!!!!! (that’s the appropriate amount of exclamation marks, i assure you). it’s a chinese drama on netflix (can confirm us and canada, unsure about anywhere else), it’s also all on youtube, and it’s *unhinges jaw and starts screaming*

you know that gif from the pride & prejudice movie where they touch hands for 1.2 seconds and we all clutch at our hearts? the untamed is THAT but for 50 episodes and also gay. you know the north & south bbc miniseries when richard armitage is watching the love of his life leave him and says “look back, look back at me” in That Voice and you’re somehow on the floor? it’s THAT but also gay. this show is just Yearning and Devotion dialed up to 10000000000 and it is UNBEARABLE and also THE best thing i’ve EVER seen. i love myself a period drama and the untamed is like: Period Drama, But What If The Most And Also Gay And Also There’s Magic, and that is Very Good For Me

i’m not doing a very good job telling you what this show is about and that is bc this show is batshit. if you start to describe the plot at all you sound unhinged, so i’m not gonna do that, i’m just gonna make a list of The Best Things About The Untamed, and then i’m gonna link to a couple people who’ve said things way more coherently than me. okay? okay.

reasons to watch the untamed: an incomplete list

the sweetest and sunniest Chaotic Bisexual dark lord you’ll ever meet, a stone-cold badass with a heart of gold who’s also a gigantic little shit

his boyfriend, the Lawful Gay who is a huge bitch and also The Most Integrity Of All Time, literally the definition of “cool and calm on the outside, emotional disaster on the inside”

#Peak Fucking Romance. just Peak Romance after Peak Romance until you’re just like okay, so everybody else pack it up and go home, this is the most EPIC ROMANCE of ALL TIME, and also every single scene between them is somehow the greatest scene of all time??? what the fuck

so much sibling drama. SO MUCH. just so many siblings having so many feelings about each other all over the place

everyone is beautiful??? literally everyone. it’s wildly unfair

brilliant costuming. the robes are so fucking gorgeous. i have a huge incurable case of beautiful robe envy

“gay chaos angst” which is what my friend called it and she’s right and she should say it

“doing the right thing for your loved ones vs. doing the right thing” and “doing the right thing when it isn’t popular” and “doing the right thing by your heart” and other top hits that make me weep

necromancy and also zombies

magic and also martial arts

STUNNING sets

the Tortoise of Slaughter, which is the greatest name for anything ever and so it gets to be a reason all on its own

do you love to suffer? do you love hurt/comfort where the hurt is a LOT but the comfort is also A PLUS? do you love emotionally devastating story arcs about love and loyalty and betrayal and sacrifice and loss and found family? do you also love murder? OH BOY do i have the show for you

are you like, who cares about plot when i have a boatload of characters i’d die for and stunningly compelling relationship dynamics of all sorts and powerful themes about propaganda and justice and corruption and morality and family? bc SAME and the untamed is HERE for us

always a slut for sick-ass swordfighting, ESPECIALLY when it’s homoerotic

Tearful Reunions Up the Wazoo

cute bunnies!!!!

if this has you interested, here are links for (a) an extremely helpful primer that i highly recommend reading before watching bc it tells you things like a list of each character’s 8 names and also that the first 2 episodes are like being launched into a fantasy series on book 3 and you will understand about 30% of what’s going on, and (b) a very good spoiler-free review

http://readingtheend.com/2020/02/01/the-untamed-a-primer/

https://www.vox.com/2020/3/27/21192718/the-untamed-netflix-review-rec-mdzs-cql

and so i will leave you with the soulmates’ faces, bc they are beautiful and every time they look at each other my heart grows not three sizes but thirty thousand

(p.s. pls feel free to talk to me about this show ANY time, either here or on twitter, where i spend 127 hours every day)

[georgeodowd]

I wrote a bunch of stuff, because idk why

I have SO MANY THOUGHTS about GAY PIRATES which are now in full whirlpool mode with the season 2 announcement, but here goes. I've spent an obsessive amount of time trying to figure out what needs to happen in season 2, to the point that I've spent the past month writing a bit of fan fiction about it (okay, 100K+ words, but who's counting). But I realised with today's announcement, there's like... MASSIVE JOY but also anxiety? I wanted to kind of unpack that a bit here. I perhaps too obsessively collect David Jenkins tweets and interview quotes to try to piece together what he's planning, and I think one thing in particular has been nagging me. He's expressed various flavours of: 'Ed will have to become the Blackbeard he was always rumoured to be' and 'season 1 was about falling in love for the first time; season 2 is about getting your heart broken' and the freaking logline is about whether or not our pirates will survive their love.

Now I pretty quickly decided that Ed was going be derailed from going 'full Blackbeard' in my fic by Izzy fucking off for more violent waters and the rest of the crew stepping up to show him how to put himself back together in funny and heart-warming ways. When I heard that that's not likely to be the plot of season 2 (and after discussing this with a friend who has wildly different ideas and wants a full on 'dark af' season 2), I felt a lot of discomfort. I thought it was just because I had gotten it wrong, failed to predict what would happen, was not in some kind of mindmeld with our Saviour Jenkins.

Today I realised it's something else, and maybe my fears are misplaced. Look, as a queer kid who is just stepping fully into their genderqueerness as well, I am SO USED to getting hurt by the stories I love. I've talked at length on here about queerbaiting. I literally was blown away when Jim was a canonically enby character, and I actually looked up the actor on IMDB partway through an episode because I was SURE they had cast a cis actor and I was prepared to get kicked again. To put it mildly, I am gun shy. I am so prepared to be hurt that I'm already anticipating season 2 of this ground-breaking, healing show hurting me, too. And maybe here's why.

Taking poor, misguided, chaotic, survival-mode Ed down the 'dark Blackbeard' path - letting his only outlet for the extraordinary pain of his first real heartbreak be violence - is such a reinforcement of toxic masculinity, that I just don't see it being a huge part of the show. Will it happen? Yes. Will he stay in that place for long? I really don't think so. As much as this show is a queer fantasyland, it's also an unabashed love letter to positive masculinity, to deconstructing what it means to be a man in so many delightful ways. And I trust Jenkins to know that in his bones, because that's the personal part of the show for him. He's tweeted about it before. I think something, or someone, is going to come along pretty early on in Ed's descent and give him a more positive, healthier outlet for his feelings. It may be three or four episodes in, but I think he really has some fun ahead of him to heal - BEFORE he reunites with Stede. Unpopular opinion, but I don't think Stede should be the thing that saves him. It rips all of his autonomy away to be at the mercy of Stede's whims in that way. I want them both to step into their own power separately, before they find each other again. And yeah, I absolutely want a homoerotic reunion swordfight that comedically transitions into some pretty epic fuckery (of a more literal sort). But they gotta save themselves before they can save each other.

And I guess that is why, despite how scared I am that it's going to be a very angsty season, I think I've talked myself down from my real fear that it's going to be the story of a scared, hurt man lashing out through violence unchecked. I think the real power will be in giving Ed another outlet to express his feelings in constructive, cathartic ways. And I'm going to trust these amazing writers to give us that.