#“toxic yuri” -me in the movie theater

[siilytwiztstr4w]

glinda x elphaba fills my heart with whimsy

[animentality]

Do you like horror movies? I've recently become obsessed with the Saw franchise (less so the actual torture porn of the movies - more so the fun queer fandom headcanons and toxic yuri + yaoi)

I love horror!

Horror was my bailiwick before I got very into sci fi and fantasy.

I'm a bitch who loves intense emotions, and the soul rending shrieks of a person, at their wit's end, abandoning all pretenses and human airs, and becoming their most base, instinctual self.

Horror is great for that sort of thing.

As for SAW - I actually LOVE Saw.

I think 1 and 2 were honestly brilliant and didn't deserve the ratings they got! They're way more clever than anyone ever thinks!

The first Saw twist was actually brilliant, and not enough normies know that it really wasn't just torture porn from the beginning. The escape room thriller, murder mystery element was present too.

Now later Saws kind of became torture porn, but.

I adore 1, I think 2 is awesome and Amanda's haircut is transcendent.

I have seen 3 and 4, but didn't like them that much. I think I saw 7, but I'm not sure, and I definitely saw Spiral and 10 in theaters...

Spiral was bad, but 10 was the only Saw movie to have an actually respectable RT score, which is honestly kinda hilarious, when you think about it.

Ooh, and I loved it, btw. Can't recommend it enough. Really wonderful human story...about sadistic murder traps being inflicted on healthcare scammers.

So in short, YES.

I love horror.

Torture porn doesn't do much for me, but the villains are reallllly cunty and that makes them soooo much fun to talk about. I have a soft spot for the Saw fandom. They're pretty chill, in terms of fandoms.

Also, that iconic post

saw fans are the best.

[asagimeta]

Thank you for writing what you did about Atomic Blonde. Literally all I've seen about it on twitter/tumblr is 'DON'T SEE IT, KILLS A LESBIAN IS DISGUSTING AND MISOGYNISTIC OFC' and I haven't been able to articulate why that's such a damagingly simplistic view of what happened but you captured it perfectly. I loved the film and I'm glad another bi lady did too :)

Anon, you honestly don’t know what this message means to me, I posted that post with the idea in my mind that I was probably going to get flames, saw the +1 and thought “There’s my first hate mail of the night”, and this is such a beautifull and cleansing surprise

I’ve seen enormously mixed reveiws going through the first minute of posts in the Atomic Blonde tag, it’s kind of half and half from what I saw, but I felt the need to post myself because some of the pro!AB posts I saw (note: SOME not ALL) seemed very dismissive of the Kill The Your Gays/Burry Your Lesbians trope wich is just… not good

See there’s a difference between Kill Your Gays and “We have to kill this person off who happens to be gay” but people don’t often see or atleast acknowledge that difference

The Vampire Diaries killed their lesbians

The 100 HAD to kill off a lesbian woman because the actress was leaving the show and there was no way, plot wise, for them to have her… what? Run off on a toxic planet to never return because the actress was on a different show?

Supernatural killed their lesbian

The Walking Dead HAD to kill off a lesbian woman in order to leave Alexandria without a doctor so that Maggie would have a reason to be in desperate need of going to Hilltop surrounded by 90% of the main cast, wich had to happen to get them confronted by Negan (ha… oh how I wish this hadn’t happened but you know how plots are)

There’s a very big problem of offensive and problematic tropes developing and then fandom being so- RIGHTFULLY- hurt by those tropes that they assume anything that CAN play to it, DOES play to it (IE: Yuri On Ice!!! being “queerbaiting” despite the show being about a literal, canonically queer couple who are in a romantic relationship, just because Japanese censorship laws LITERALLY do not allow an on-screen show of lip-on-lip male/male kissing that isn’t, in some way, hidden)

Things like what happened to Charlie on Supernatural are the reason why people are RIGHTFULLY upset at the Bury Your Gays trope, especially for lesbians, but there’s a line between avoiding an offensive trope and avoiding certain narratives all together, and as I said in the first post, the “Lover of the protagonist dies and fuels their mission” trope is a tale as old as time, look at American Assassin! Dylan O'Brien’s fiance’ gets killed off in the very beginning but I haven’t seen anyone call THAT misogynistic yet and that one fuels the pain of a straight man, but that’s the way the genre works (not that’s an excuse not to deviate from it though)

One of the biggest problems about queer media that’s even MARGINALLY mainstream is that it’s all the same *~~tragic and depressing oh woe it is to be queer~~* nonsense that wins Oscars and usually has some tragic ending where they don’t end up together or one of them dies or whatever, becase *~oh woe to be gay~*, queer media needs to branch into other genres…. like horror, and spies, and thrillers, and those movies don’t typically have Everyone Is Happy And Alive endings

And on a very personal note, as a bisexual woman, Atomic Blonde is so important to me because Lorraine’s sexuality is not erased or fetishized or closeted or portrayed in ANY way other than purely bisexual, and she’s never put down for it, she’s never called a slur, she’s never accused of “just being straight/gay and unable to decide”, it never COMES UP at all, and oh my GOD that’s so rare that, as a person who legitimately goes to the movie theater EVERY Friday, I cannot, off the top of my head, think of another movie where that’s the case

Bisexual representation- ESPECIALLY positive bi representation- is a freaking UNICORN in the vast sea of media and you’d better bet I’m going to hang onto this beautifull blonde unicorn with everything I have because I KNOW I’m not going to see it again until Gotham City Sirens, probably, and that’s… what? Four years from now?

I am so so so happy you sent me this message Anon, I am honestly, honestly so happy, thank you

[alightinthelantern]

Because the decade is ending I’ve been revisiting old interests and past fandoms from when I was a teen, and boy is it a trip down Memory Lane.

Listening to old Vocaloid songs from when I was in high school back in 2010, when I was 15 and new to internet culture, and it was one of the first Japanese culture I ever discovered. Apparently Vocaloids are still a thing? I knew Miku was still popular bc I’d seen stuff in the past year featuring her, but apparently the other Vocaloid characters are too, and there’ve been a whole bunch of new ones introduced in the past decade? I remember when the whole Daughter of Evil saga was being created. I remember all the alt characters people created by taking the main vocaloids and pitch-altering their voice banks. The Vocaloid community was fresh and thriving back then. That was back when Gender-Bending was a staple of fandom culture, and making male “versions” of female characters and vice versa was hugely popular. This was when “Caramelldansen” and “Ievan Polkka” weren’t Classic Memes, this was when they were new, and all the rage.

I remember the Gamecube days, back in the 2000s, and watching my stepbrothers battle my sisters interchangeably on it or the old Nintento 64 they had, in Mario Kart, or Mortal Kombat, or the original Smash Brothers (I, who had terrible hand-eye coordination, wasn’t fit for playing, but was more content to passively enjoy anyway). I remember when the Wii was first introduced (my mother didn’t believe in video games for a long time, and only bought a console for the family about four years later). I remember the GameBoy, I remember the release of the first XBox. I remember the online dress-up doll games. I remember when the Lego Star Wars video game was first released, and being an avid fanatic of those famous bricks as a kid enjoyed watching my siblings play that probably more than than anything else.

I remember how huge the cosplay scene was in the early 2010s, for all kinds of shows. I remember reading Emma: A Victorian Romance by Kaoru Mori with glee as a teen, siting in a bean bag chair in the Teen Area of my local library, because they had a dedicated manga section and had the entire print run. That was back before Borders was bought out by Barnes & Noble and ceased to be, and I’d often sit in the second-floor manga section of my local Borders and read the volumes that caught my eye for a half-hour or more, and the store clerks didn’t care because it was a different world then, a different culture, and I was always a polite, well-behaved kid anyway who always physically respected the books. Apparently the anime adaptation of Mori’s Emma from years ago finally got an English dub in the past year? I’m going to have to track it down and give it a watch.

I remember loving the Romeo x Juliet anime as a teen, that crazy and brilliantly original high-fantasy reimagining of the classic play. I loved that the English dub script was mostly in Elizabethan-era English. I remember Ouran Host Club and Baccano! too, and the first of those being one of the funniest things I’d ever seen in my life at the time. Same with The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya. I remember liking Fruits Basket back in 1010, and only realizing years later how fucked up it actually was. I remember Baccano! and Nabari No Ou. I also remember some other shows whose names don’t bear repeating. I remember downloading their OSTs off dedicated websites that no longer exist. I still have these soundtracks in my iTunes library. I remember when burning playlists onto CDs was popular; they finally became obsolete and passé sometime in my high school years, after the rise of mp3 players and programs like iTunes crystallized the superiority of the .mp3, and then people would laugh when I mentioned my own burned CD collection.

I remember when Over the Garden Wall first came out, in 2014, and how groundbreaking it was at the time in terms of what an animated show could be, visually and plot-wise. That show still has a small bud dedicated fandom it seems. I remember the character ask-blogs that were so popular from 2014--16 on tumblr, both ones with drawn replies and ones with live cosplay photos or gifs. God, the ask-blog community was so huge at the time. That might have been the height of tumblr’s popularity, the mid-2010s. I remember DeviantART and the thriving fanart community it had before tumblr took over in the early 2010s. I remember all OCs people were making, and the ask-accounts before ask-blogs were a thing. I remember the roleplay groups. I remember all the fucked-up things people were into back then because the Scene Phase had come but not yet entirely gone, and because teens were emo little shits in general. I remember when anime pairings were written as “[name] x [name]” in full before people started mashing names together around 2014, I remember when words like y*oi and y*ri were the norm. Oh how times have changed. (And thank god they’ve changed)

I remember when the Twilight movies were being made and my high school health teacher put the first movie on in class one day and had the class point out different ways in with the romance was toxic and unhealthy. It’s mind-boggling that in 2019, after The Discourse had come, burned, raged, and gone, that people are still stupid enough to like those films. Even back then I was smart enough to see them for the creepy, badly-written dreck that they were. I remember when The Hunger Games was published (I never read it). I remember the first Hunger Games Movie coming out and the controversy surrounding Jennifer Lawrence being cast as the lead. I remember coming into school one day to find two of my teachers casually debating it (I never saw the movies, and didn’t particularly care about that conversation).

I remember watching an independent showing of Studio Ghibli’s From Up on Poppy Hill in 2015 at a local indie theater, and the audience roaring with laughter when one of the boys at the old club house asked “How can we make archaeology cool again?!” and another replying “We can’t!”, and then a woman in the audience said out loud “Archaeology is cool!”

I remember the birth, life and death of Vine, and despite The Discourse raging on tumblr at the time, the humor on that app was still largely Mainstream and often racist.

I remember Teen Wolf, and Glee, Sherlock and Supernatural and Doctor Who. I remember the emergence of “Superwholock” and the sheer insufferableness of the fandom before they eventually, blessedly died out. I remember the disappearance of shows like J*njou R*omantica and the rise of shows like Free! and Yuri on Ice!!!, Modern “woke” animes that still featured vapid, cliché-driven writing, with Modern “woke” audiences that were puerile-minded and cliché-hungry as ever, the same y*oi fangirls as those that had existed in the early 2010s, only now the shows had done away with the nasty R*pe-As-Romance and replaced it with cringey, ham-fisted pretenses of Realistic Psychology or Social Conscience. And I realized that anime fans my age weren’t worth their salt, and by that time I was too old for anime anyway so I finally dropped it. New animes have come and gone, new live action shows have come and gone, and all the same terrible fandom drama that has burned year after year regardless of show still burns. Same shit, different sewer.

I remember how different online culture was for teens a decade ago. I remember how different real life was for teens a decade ago. Everything has changed so much in the past decade. Teens were children when I was teen. Now, ten years later, teens are like miniature adults, thinking and speaking maturely, socially and politically conscious, wise beyond their years. Racism is acknowledged for the evil it is, and bigoted trolls are no longer socially accepted. When I was a teen, been an edgelord was in, and kids like me who were unusually conscientious were labeled Babies and Oversensitive whenever something didn’t sit right and we voiced objections. Anons telling people to kill themselves was routine. People were violent and ruthless online, and the culture was truly reminiscent of The Lord of The Flies, a cutthroat free-for-all among girls and boys of all ages.

But not anymore: as people keep saying these days, being an Asshole is Out, being Kind is In. Shit like H*zbin H*tel, that would’ve been immensely popular ten years ago, is acknowledged for the violent, vile crap it is. And the language around sexuality and gender has changed so drastically, and has opened up so much. There was no trans content a decade ago in fandom, and Gender-bending, when done to explore the social ramifications of a character as the “opposite gender” (because nothing outside the gender binary existed as far as fandom was then concerned), and not just for titillation, was always cisgendered and done by way of Alternate Universes.

I had a miserable experience as a teen, and I wish that I could have experienced this kind of environment in my formative years rather than the one I did. But although I never did, I am so happy for the teens of today, that they are able to experience this kind of social openness, that they can experience this kind of unity and conscientiousness that exists in a way it never did before. That, even with as bleak and awful as the world is, they are fighting to make it better for themselves. Because it really was them that changed it.

Because, as much as Millennials like to pretend otherwise, we didn’t make the internet culture what it is today, We were edgy shitlord brats who loved laughably bad media, whether it was edgy and featured protagonists who murdered for fun, or maudlin and featured Mary Sue protagonists. We had flame wars over who was “uke or seme” for characters that weren’t even gay. We were nasty piss-stains, and even the teens like me who were better than the rest still had our awful moments. I’ve done and said things as a teen that I’m ashamed of, and no amount of nostalgia can change the fact that fandom and the media it consumed was objectively awful a decade ago. And though “Fandom Moms” and other nasty, disgusting, overgrown-children may be a proud bastion and defenders of the Old Ways, reminiscing about their LiveJournal Days and telling themselves their age is somehow indicative of wisdom rather than how creepy and pathetic they really are, their days are numbered, and I can’t wait to see their +30yo asses slowly die out in the face of progress.