#I actually have media literacy

[propheticclown]

Crazy realization I had about Kankri Vantas

So most people who play Openbound usually skip his dialogue (which isn't entirely unfair because he loves to 6lah) and this is on top of some optional dialogue so I don't doubt most people skipping this. But something really interesting I noticed is when he's having this conversation with Latula

A LOT of people will most likely chalk this conversation up to Kankri being a misogynist, considering he lists all these traits and then goes "all while 6eing a girl, n9 less."

But if you take this conversation along with the context of Latula's conversation with Porrim.

We find out that Latula's whole "Gamer girl" thing is a facade to try and show that "girls can be cool too". But what does this have to do with Kankri?

Well, considering that Kankri is a Seer of Blood, then it's actually likely that Kankri knows about this facade of Latula and her insecurities involving her gender. Thus his "all while 6eing a girl, n9 less." is actually Kankri attempting to give Latula validation about her own gender struggles and that he does genuinely care about gender on Beforus (if he didn't, he really wouldn't bring up Latula being a girl), and only acts like he doesn't care because of his disdain for Porrim. Not to mention that he does canonically have flushed feelings for Latula and makes more or less weird observations about her, so him knowing her struggles involving image and gender wouldn't be too far of a stretch. I love observing the dynamics between the Dancestors and discovering new things about them. This is why I read EVERY PIECE OF DIALOGUE IN OPENBOUND!!!

[wishchip106]

you know sometimes i do actually forget cherik isn’t canon….

like they’re supposed to be friends here?? 😭😭 what

just two great friends!!! 😁🤩 they’re as close as brothers even!! nothing more!! 😊

[arihi]

Feeling unsafe is not the same as being unsafe and people are unable to distinguish between the two - you always have a right to be safe, but you do not necessarily have the right to always feel safe. This is an underlying theme in a lot of issues, like judging others' kinks, queerness, race, media analysis, and more; what the real heart of the problem is is unfamiliarity, things that people do not know and thus shrink away from in fear or disgust or discomfort. It can be a basic instinct to approach change and unfamiliarity with caution, but it needs to be an intentional act to challenge that fear/world view. It is something that we owe to the people around us, and that we owe to ourselves.

[courtrecord]

honestly i hate how that “maybe the curtains are just blue” post has become shorthand for anti-intellectualism and shit bc as someone who has an utter passion for media analysis now, I WAS THAT PERSON IN HIGH SCHOOL ENGLISH CLASS.

english class never taught me how to analyze stories, it taught me how to remember what things the teacher said were “symbolism” and how to take quizzes where we had to match a quote to the character who said it. i didn’t give a shit about any of it, bc literally why should i. it was bullshit.

there’s this idea online that people are forgetting or rejecting what they learned in english class when they’re bad at media analysis, and maybe that’s a little bit true, but i think the much bigger problem is they never learned it in the first place. cinemasins & “maybe the curtains are just blue” aren’t convincing people to abandon an intellectualism they already had, they’re filling a void.

when all you learn in high school is to write on the test “blue = depression”, why is it surprising that so many people don’t give a shit about the curtains.

[sha-brytols]

its really weird that i keep bringing steven universe up like at this rate i'm gonna make people believe i used to be a steven universe superfan but i swear i'm not i actually mostly only knew of it through osmosis its just. steven universe and dragon age exist on eerily similar planes both on a writer's and consumer's scale so it just tends to come up a lot when i think about the state of fandom and death of the author and whatever you get it .

anyways remember when the fanbase for steven universe (primarily on tumblr) became inundated with discourse and was littered with teenagers overreacting to character flaws and using them to apply malicious intent to the creators and branding it as a form of sociopolitical propaganda against themselves. and then the showrunners seeing this very small pocket of fans demanding complete ideological purity from a cartoon actually for some very odd reason took their demands seriously and tried to rewrite the show's core narrative and characters to fit this impossible standard until the later seasons became so messy and narratively incoherent that it became obvious even to that same small pocket of fans that they were being pandered to

so anyways dragon age veilguard right

[vvividlyy]

I don't know if anyone else saw this but earlier today this was on Marvel's official youtube channel!

Erik and Charles were def sitting there enjoying the fireplace before abandoning their beverages to go make out

who said that

Look. It's not ME making everything about Cherik- it's just in the source material!!!

[bossbabyofficial]

[sapphic-agent]

You hate MHA for the fandom, I hate MHA because the author introduced a ton of intricate, important concepts and themes only to brush them aside in the middle of the story for no reason.

We are not the same.

[solivagantingrebel]

The people who say fiction affects reality unilaterally clearly did not grow up trying to make their imaginary friend real by thinking about them really really hard or tried to shapeshift by the sheer force of will or tried to be a witch and make spells by just writing them and trying to will them into existence.

[mysticcrownwolf]

I have not watched arcane but I follow enough people that do to have to general idea of what it's about and I am calling it right now the only reason this fandom demonize Vi is because they like Jinx and by extension Silco so all the bullshit ass enabling he did with Jinx for years will be forgotten because Vi punches her for killing everybody she ever loved and then the people in this fandom who don't have even a quarter of a brain cell to rub together will be like well Jinx suffered so much because of Vi because she had suicidal thoughts and see people meanwhile Vi deadass saw everyone she loved die in front of her, then lose her only remaining family to Silco and then spend her whole childhood in prison. Like the people in this fandom can't comprehend morally grey characters or even think that their faves can be complex people who can do bad things if the narrative shifts that way.

Look me in the eye and tell me these people have a single thought in their head while watching the show because the writers said these two seasons are the Jinx and Vi story. That they will probably make more arcane stuff but these seasons are focused on the sisters and so why do I see post like I wish Vi didn't have so much screen time or I wish Vi and Cait story wasn't the main focus here and the show focused more on "insert any background narrative they wanted to see" like bitch go fuck yourself.

Like I have never seen such a large group of people utterly incapable of media literacy it's like they need to be handfed concepts like:-

"A doomed narrative means no happy endings at most you get a bittersweet one"

"Your fave can be a bad person and still be your fave you don't have to justify them as a good or reasonable person (and demonize their equally traumatized sister looking at you weirdly purist Jinx fans) to continue liking them.

"Metaphors and parallels shouldn't be spoken or spelled out for you. You as a viewer are suppose to understand then yourself using your brain"

"Good people can do some bad things this doesn't make then irredeemable and bad people can do some good things this doesn't suddenly makes them fully redeemable"

"If a shows ending is ambiguous it doesn't mean the writers were too pussy to commit to a proper ending it means they purposefully made it ambiguous so their can be more than one interpretation for it"

"Not all good stories needs have good or even satisfying happily ever after usually in a doomed narrative you just survive to live another day"

"Just because someone's trauma manifest in a more visible way doesn't mean another characters didn't suffer at all (still looking at you Vi haters)"

To summarise do I think the people who can't see a nuanced story like arcane without generalizing everything in black and white and then complaining about how it's bad are all brainless idiots with the mental capacity of a third grader with no capacity for media literacy or reflection. Yes. Is it probably a baseless generalization. Probably. Do I care. No,fuck you'll and all your arcane hate post you all tricked me into reading by disguise them as actually analysis.

If I can pick up on the subtle nuances and non linear narrative of arcane by just reading Tumblr posts and watching some clips on YouTube you people have no reason to have this shitty of an opinion when you actually consumed the full media.

[doublel27]

Sometimes your wildly angry and hateful response to a piece of media has nothing to do with the actual piece of media and has everything to do with your own triggers.

Let me explain: sometimes a piece of media uses a common human failing. Something that happens all the time. To explore humanity within the confines of the story, as stories often do.

Sometimes, for you, that small human failing is the crux of the pain and anger you carry inside. Sometimes even the smallest and least harmful version of it, to quote RWRB, tears all the way down through the floor and into the sub-basements. Beyond where anyone would think that small human failing might go.

Because for you, it’s not what’s happening on screen but the painful things that have happened to you and you haven’t dealt with. You’ve locked them in a box or you’ve festered in them. Made it part of your personality to be against anyone or anything that carries this common human failing. Because the person that hurt you is, in your mind, a monster. You’ve divorced this action from humanity and you’ve made it that it’s only a thing that bad people or monsters do.

And the way the characters are treating this common human failing that happens every day is not how you want to handle it. Or is perhaps how you handled it and you wished you didn’t. And it makes you so incandescently angry.

When that happens, my loves, I want you to sit with it and ask yourself why you’re so incandescently angry or sad. Feel your feelings. Examine what it means when a character you love does something you equate with being monstrous. Or even more dangerous, when a character you love forgives something that you deem monstrous. Or if the failings of the characters remind you of yourself in some way. What is hiding underneath the anger and sadness? Is it shame? Is is loneliness? Is it worthlessness? Is it invalidation?

Because this is why the character who is genocidal mass murderer/serial killer is your poor little meow meow and the character with the every day failings is the worst character ever to exist. Because we look for the humanity in monsters, especially when we feel monstrous. But when a character is framed as human and shows a failing, we demonize them, because they remind us of our monsters who were also human. And I want you to think about it. Sometimes.

You have the choice at any time to stop engaging with a piece of media because it’s too painful or too raw or you’re not ready. But that doesn’t make that piece of media bad or evil (mostly there are some exceptions for the writings by the worst of humanity).

Take care of yourself. Please. 💜💜

[lgbtlunaverse]

mdzs twitter is a very funny place to be on cause someone will have "canon dynamics only" in their bio and proceed to have the worst take on canon you've ever seen

[scorpiusmalfoylovesoscarwilde]

I've said it before, I'll say it again, and I'm sure it won't be the last time. I AM SICK AND BLOODY TIRED OF THESE MFS, HALF OF WHO DONT EVEN CARE ABOUT CURSED CHILD, BITCHING AND MOANING ABOUT AN ANGSTY TEEN DARING TO BE AN ANGSTY TEEN, I WILL FIGHT THE LOT OF YOU

(this is gonna be a bit long and probably incoherent so sit down and fucking listen to me 🔫 stick with me because I'm not just complaining about albus haters)

eVERYBODY wants cOoMmpllEeXx relatable HUMAN characters - and then SHIT themselves when the flaws a CHILD has isn't just 🥺 uwu im socially awkward and traumatised 🥺. that's why scorpius doesn't get this fuckass treatment, because his terrible human flaw is that he's a bit shit at conversation and gets sad about his dead mum (generalised understatement, but this post isnt about him. dont come for me i love him 🫶🏻)

god forbid albus, who feels unloved and unwanted (with valid evidence for a teenager), albus who feels completely out of place and outcast from his entire famously-close-knit family, ablus who is well known by the world by default via Harry and hates the attention and high expectations, albus who then gets targeted and bullied by his peers because he's not as perfect and brilliant as his father, albus who is then isolated from his one friend because Harry is making irrational ptsd fueled decisions, albus who tells Harry completely sincerely that he knows he's unlikeable but he'll try and change himself and be more like his siblings because he genuinely believes that's what Harry and everyone else whos had the misfortune of meeting him wants, albus who spends the entire play trying to prove himself and fix things via idiotic childish decisions BECAUSE HES A WHOLE UNSTABLE CHILD

god forbid that CHILD doesn't react like a patient, supported, well adjusted, level headed adult. god forbid he reacts outwardly. god forbid he reacts at all, my bad. clearly he should just sniffle a bit as if he doesn't feel suffocated and helpless by everything in his life, because obviously hes just a spoiled brat who doesn't know what real suffering is. god forbid he complains or feels anything negatively, or doesn't quite grasp that other people are struggling too because he is too busy trying so hard to deal with himself and his declining mental health the best he can with basically no support or understanding. god forbid he isn't completely perfect.

you all sound like some fucking boomer telling teenagers they don't know what real struggling is, they aren't mentally ill, they dont have any problems because they have a roof over their head, they should all go to war kids are too soft these days 😫😖😱 fUCKING‼️SHUT UP‼️

he does things wrong but he knows he does and he does everything he can to fix it! and he is fourteen!!! do none of you remember what being fourteen is like 😭😭 I swear half of you have got to be basically fourteen yourselves cmon man

cause I'm seeing this fucking pattern a lot recently. not just for albus, not just in this fandom, everywhere. ‼️ no one can fucking handle flawed characters anymore ‼️ the only thing any character is allowed to have wrong with them is trauma apparently, otherwise they have to be perfect, and I'm getting sick of it. characters and stories are meant to reflect real life, they're meant to help shape our world view, why are you expecting everyone to be fucking perfect??? what happened to nuance? what happened to understanding character development? you are all acting like characters and people are so black and white. either they're perfect or they're insufferable and evil. I won't lie, the most common victims i've noticed of this are women. but the flawed women are typically demonised, whereas the men are typically turned into uwu baby boys who actually aren't capable of doing anything wrong and then fanon goes nuts making them into ittle wittle victims. and I'm so fucking sick of all of it, I hate this. (obviously this is not a strict rule. Albus Potter, and also Albus Dumbledore now I mention it, are demonised beyond belief)

BRING BACK FLAWS AND BRING BACK NOT COMPLETELY WRITING OFF A CHARACTER BECAUSE THEY DARE TO BE HUMAN

I AM FED UP, ALBUS POTTER GET BEHIND ME

[mynameisnotthepoint]

So yesterday, I binged Love in the big city. I had read the book, and as I am wont to do, i skimmed through to get back to the episodes and really sit down and watch them later (hopefully in small increments over the next two weeks).

I have been scrolling around on twitter since then (as one does, I am sick in bed with nothing to do but an assignment I don't have the brain power for right now) and really made me think.

First, I looked at international fans' reactions in English e.g. a gay guy I follow who parties a lot and talks openly about his sex life said it felt real, another guy kept complaining about Go Young's taste in men but also the people who watched it for the romance and only focused on that (and the sex scenes, which have racked up 100.000s of views). Some excitedly writing about how handsome the actors were, how they wanted to see a second season, a shame about this or that plot point (the "endgame" not being there). And as @lurkingshan said, it is NOT a romance drama or even a BL drama. This is a chronicle of one's man's life and his trauma, his relationships and his triumphs.

A lot of English-writing commentors praise the actors for their bravery. And that is always the debate, isn't it? Without them taking the role, this thing might not have been made. But the people behind it, who wrote, filmed, assisted, the writer who is a gay man himself, they all had such high stakes too, even higher (the author kept urging people on twitter to give the drama high views, one of the actors offered free hugs and an eating live stream if they managed to trend at no. 1). The drama is a depiction of a queer person's life as it could happen. Taking on this role, playing the part and then leaving it behind, is that as brave as people who live this life every day? Not to say that none of the actors in this production could be queer, bc some probably are.

One of the people i follow on twitter pointed out this feels like the drama shows queer sex, not sensationalised sex, just, that sex is a part of life so it is depicted in a series that is about life. With reading that, I began to wonder what queer koreans were saying about the series. Thanking the fact that google translate has not yet dropped their support of X, formerly twitter, I began by searching up Nam Yoon Su's name in Korean. A lot of people were calling him handsome, saying they cried about his performance. And then I stumbled upon several things:

1. The club scenes/music they used seems outdated to some Korean queers. They wrote that this feels more like a man in his 30s reminiscing his 20s than someone actually in their 20s, which, fair, the drama is told over the span of like 10 years I believe. Also the commentors thought the dancing was bad. But they said, even if some of it felt not true to gay life/the actors couldn't completely sell it as believable, that the drama was important and shouldn't be criticised too harshly.

2. They were having a linguistic debate about the usage of Korean gay slang (i think it was the word 기갈, but I could be wrong bc my Korean vocabulary is like 30 words) and that it has come into vogue with straight girls who go to gay bars, as Mi Ae does in the drama. In a way, it is a risk bringing a subculture that is/was quite closed to the mainstream (I think similar critiques have been made about drag race).

3. That the drama was not reaching its intended audience (queers) and was instead something for straight BL fans to screech over. It does feel kind of weird that something that veers more into raw territory (if you disregard the casting of Nam Yoon Su, who is super pretty and not at all like Young was described in the book), is treated the same as the stylised/trope-ified human experiences we see in some BLs (nothing wrong with those! Media is in its essence always a distillation of an experience),

I think that there is always a risk of depicting something that is close to the way actual individuals experience it and running into voyeuristic territory, on display for millions of people. Is it weird to want people to take this more seriously? To look at it in depth, treat the characters like humans that could actually be living out there and not Ken dolls you can mash together? Or is that too reductive of me, dictating what other people's experience with media should look like?

These are just my initial thoughts, I need to ruminate on them more, and I could be completely wrong about all of this.

I myself rarely go outside and have not had many queer IRL friends, which is why I am drawn to these series. To be honest, I don't even know the local queer slang bc I have been to the queer bar here once before it closed down due to internal disputes. Reading Love in the big city made me feel like i was hit with a sledgehammer, the series makes me want to go out and live again (once I am feeling up to it).

[agenderduck]

It deeply upsets me that there aren’t a lot of analysis posts off of Lesley, at least ones that don’t completely mischaracterize her. Often times Lesley is watered down to just being “Yellow’s Mom” by the fandom and nothing else. Lesley is tragic. She is not motherly, she’s a prisoner. A prisoner in a prison partially of her own design, but a prisoner nonetheless. matpat, and the david theory in general has rotted people’s brains. It’s fine to have an interpretation of a character, I could care less, but it’s an entirely different thing all together to completely miss the point of a character. Watching the line “you’re one of my favorites….” be brushed aside for what is otherwise a completely unserious line is infuriating. There’s no actual proof that Lesley is Yellow’s mother outside of theories. When she says “you’re not my real son” In my eyes, it’s more so in the way that she is the creator, and he is her creation, not that Lesley is actually an author, she just thinks she is. The trio represent parts of her, almost everything they do is by her hands. They’re miserable because Lesley is miserable. She believes herself to be an author, a creator, but she doesn’t hold any real power, just a small amount. Yellow didn’t scale the staircase on his own, everything was meticulously laid out by Lesley. Because, the truth is, he represents a part of Lesley that she has long since forgotten, the part of her that genuinely wants to change, to progress instead of regress. By giving yellow his batteries and bringing him up stairs, she is checking that she is still alive. That there is still that small part of her that can change.

But, as previously stated, she doesn’t have any real power, and she has no interest in truly changing. She has strings of her own, she can’t change even if she wanted to. Lesley has a tendency of setting up scenarios where the puppets are given a false sense of control. She does it with red in transport, and she does it again in electricity with yellow. In her mind she’s teaching them, teaching them that things cannot stray outside of what she has laid out for them. It’s her own twisted way of helping. Yellow, unlike red, possesses a genuine ability to question things and a natural curiosity. Lesley knows this. That’s precisely why his batteries are denied from him, unless Lesley hands them to him on a silver platter when convenient. Yellow has to pay the price of being constantly disoriented, to be in a constant state of confusion because if he isn’t then that would entail Lesley addressing what is pulling on her strings. The batteries are a threat to this cycle, hence why Lesley gifts him a book of false knowledge. A book of nothing. A red herring. She knows where that book is going, straight into the shredder as it always does. Where it should be. Because ever so slightly out of shot at the end of her room sits a door that creaks open every once in a while and she dare not question it. A door that she ignores as she continues on playing her piano as she always does. As it should be. No questions to be had. Just the keys of a piano echoing emptily in a dilapidated dollhouse, and the ghost of an artist who lost herself eons ago.

[fullmetal-scar-simping]

Truly wish mangahood fans would just tell first time Brotherhood watchers to read the manga first to get all the context they need to make Brotherhood suck 1% less, instead of suggesting the broke-ass, tired "watch 03 until it diverges" nonsense.

These continuities do not line up. They do not click into each other. The characters in 03 are fundamentally different from mangahood, the events of fma 03 from episode 1 are fundamentally different to !the manga! let alone to Brotherhood. The way alchemy itself works is fundamentally different and that's pretty obvious when you compare mangahood and 03! So how are you going to funnel newbies into mangahood by feeding them half of 03?

I know we're all hoping new fans are as incapable of engaging with what they're actually watching as most existing fma fans, but it would make far more sense to prepare them by having them actually read the source material that Brotherhood is actually adapting, not an anime that Brotherhood has nothing to do with.