#I'm not actually a hate blog

[necroticghost]

why the fuck am I the way I am

[dailydenne]

[icewindandboringhorror]

A little costume with eyebrow whiskers again.. making their return lol..

[anghraine]

me, to myself: I've been ranting for over 20 years about my gripes with the Peter Jackson LOTR movies and especially their tremendously influential (mis)handling of Gondor, Aragorn, the legacy of Númenor, Elrond, etc, and been consistently annoyed by how much their fans insist on uncritical glorification while also trying to present themselves as fandom underdogs who must defend these inescapable behemoths from the smallest slight. Maybe I should try to focus on other things and put them behind me.

[news: Jackson is making a new LOTR project involving Aragorn and Gollum]

me: alternately, maybe I will never be free

[pynkhues]

When black people tell you that some of your talking points are racist, you should probably sit up and listen rather than slinging accusations of terfism back at them. Just a suggestion.

I mean, I have been listening, anon, and I've actually been reading pretty widely, and as I said yesterday in this post, which I assume is the one you're replying to, my talking points aren't being addressed at all. What's happening is that strawman arguments are being created for people to demonstrate my apparent racism which are built on things that I never said and would never argue, because it's easier to do that than actually engage with the nuances of what masculinity is and has been.

One of the ways that I've been listening was in regards actually to that post I was linked to yesterday which talked about the fact that Louis doesn't embody Black masculinity in 1910, which was genuinely an argument I was really curious to know more about, but because it was a stated point and no argument was actually mounted, I did / am doing my own research - I read Michele Mitchell's The Black Man's Burden: African Americans, Imperialism, and Notions of Racial Manhood 1890-1910 last night and I've read parts of Alexa Dagan's These Hard Times Gon' Kill You: Black masculinity, racial and intimate violence, and the blues in the Mississippi Delta, 1918-1945 with the intention of reading it in full over the next few weeks - and those have provided really useful context, so I'm very glad to have read the former and be reading the latter, but they don't support the argument that Louis doesn't mark traditional Black masculinity for the era. In fact they argue the opposite - particularly the first one that specifically goes into Black men being emasculated by white supremacy and the impact that had on Black masculinity, and the effect of class mobility being Black men would distance themselves from lower class Black men when they attained wealth, both things which I think are really present in Jacob's astonishing performance.

I've also previously read Jesmyn Ward's The Men We Reaped, Maxine Beneba Clarke's The Hate Race, and Clint Smith's excellent poetry collection, Counting Descent, among many others, which all explore topics of contemporary Black masculinity (although are broader explorations of Black history, life and identity), and yeah, obviously I don't have lived experience - I'm open about being white and Australian - but y'know. I'm not completely ignorant, and I am listening to voices. A lot of them actually. I just don't agree with you, and I'm not sure why that offends you so much that you've come into my inbox a couple of times now to say words to this effect (calling me a racist before saying 'just saying' / 'just a suggestion' is kind of a tell, anon), but I would say that when you send me asks like this that you're being disingenuous. I don't think you're asking me to listen, I think you're telling me to shut up, which really goes back to that point about this whole thing being an exercise in control, not conversation, which I made in that last post.

I'd also just pose a question to you too, if that's alright. Why is this request for self-reflection never one that goes both ways? I am interrogating my internal biases, are you? Do you ask yourself the question of why TERF rhetoric is really, really pervasive in these talking points? Do you think about why it is you try to apply heteronormative gender essentialism to a queer character / couple? Do you ask yourself why it's so important to you that this character be 'female-coded'? I can appreciate the challenge of that - trust me, working internally in this sort of way is a lot, I know how hard it can be to unpack this sort of thing, and I really do mean that genuinely, so I hope that you take it that way - and look, it can be really hard to know where to start, so here are a few resources, just in case you do want to explore this and maybe start tackling your own biases, because it's not enough to put TERFs DNI in your bio, and it's not enough to only be listening to the terminally online on tumblr.com (I say as someone who's often on here, haha):

Archer Magazine is a great magazine that explores gender and sexuality, with a really big focus on trans and non-binary identity and queer sexuality. There's a physical magazine, but they post a lot online for free. Here's the gender tag, if you want to have a look. I'd really recommend signing up for their e-news though.

TeenVogue's On Queer Fandom and the Radicalization of the Underdog

Who's Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson is a really interesting read on her romantic relationship with the trans artist, Harry Dodge, and merges memoir and philosophy. It talks also about gender and parenthood in ways that might be interesting in regards to these particular conversations.

Of course, the documentary Paris is Burning, which is available to watch free on YouTube here.

I also haven't read this one yet, but a few friends have recently recommended Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender by Oyeronke Oyewumi that sounds genuinely pretty fascinating.

So, yes! Anyway. Not really sure how to close this one out, but again, just to reiterate, I've got no issue with you enjoying femme!Louis. Good for you, have fun, we interpret the character and the show differently. That's okay, anon, there are lots of people who like your interpretation more than mine, and I hope you guys have a great time with that in the hiatus and over the next season, but I'm gonna keep doing my thing over here.

[jaxonkreide]

who gave this man blue eyes, take them back

[danthropologie]

@ DANIEL!!!!!!!!

[every-sanji]

[sideblog-9000]

Wilson bought house a piano!!????

[camellcat]

I'm in the middle of a btvs s5 rewatch and idk what the fuck is going on but xander is NOT riley's number one fan. in fact he is dogging on riley quite consistently. he is holding a grudge, even. what happened to make him switch so hard that he's calling riley her "one in a life-time" ????

[all-that-jazz-93]

"B.J. Hunnicut. Same size, same shape."

The look on B.J.'s face...oh he did not like that

[can-of-slorgs]

caw 🦅

[dxppercxdxver]

i can hardly stand it i wonder where your head is but i don't think i wanna know so i leave it alone

[surprise surprise it's more sharpelesbians. might need to make a tag for this au because i don't think it'll be releasing its stranglehold on me any time soon.]

[call-me-copycat]

I just need to be told "You Can Do It" right now.

[athenaskiddo]

Probably she hates me. And I just want her back. She's my best friend. Why I'm like this? Why I treated her like I hate her? I don't want time. Fuck. Fuck. I'm an idiot

[2hoothoots]

i was having a chuckle to myself last night about Gristol, and how his plans are basically:

Restore Ford Cruller's memory

Find Maligula

???

Profit

but then... of course they are, right? this is Gristol we're talking about. Fatherland Follies drives home again and again that he's still operating on a child's logic, a warped and reductive version of the world that he never bothered to grow out of. both of his memory vaults center on the images of his childhood, this idealized version of the past that he clings to no matter what. and that's still how he remembers Maligula, too - as this saviour figure, who rushes in to help him when he's in trouble.

[ID: Two slides from Gristol's memory vault, Glory to Grulovia! Left: Gristol clings to Maligula's back as she summons waves to sweep away his assailants. Right: Gristol and Maligula waving from a balcony as the people cheer. Gzar Theodore brandishes a dagger in the background.]

like so much else, Maligula represents a return to this idyllic childhood - to the peace and simplicity of his youth, when he was free from worries and responsibilities. in his mind, he doesn't need to make any further plans - once Maligula's back, everything will go back to normal. Maligula will make everything better.

...is what i thought, but then i remembered this line:

[Screenshot source. ID: Gristol, in Truman's body, bows on his hands and knees in front of the newly-awaked Maligula. The caption reads: "Yes, High Priestess! I am here to correct the mistakes made by my father!"]

and that's kind of interesting, right?

to be clear: this happens directly after Maligula sees Helmut-in-Gristol's-body, and recognises him. her line before this is:

"Little Gzesaravich! Have you come to pay for your father's sins?"

my first thought was that Gristol hadn't expected to still be in Truman's body by the time he managed to find Maligula, and this was him trying to placate her and buy some time until he could explain the situation. but watching the cutscene back, that's clearly not what's happening here. Gristol is answering as himself, and his response of throwing himself to his knees before her is, as far as i can tell, genuine.

so what is going on here?

in Fatherland Follies, there's this line in the ride narration that stuck out to me:

"Why didn't the Gzar help Maligula in her time of need? No one knows, but historians agree - it is Gzar Theodore's biggest failure."

other lines mention Gzar Theodore's "mistake", and it's wording Gristol himself echoes in the screencap above. evidently, he believes that his father abandoned Maligula, leaving her to her fate at the hands of the Psychonauts, and it was that mistake that lead to them being driven out of the country - that mistake which he seeks to correct. maybe he even feels like he has a debt to repay to her for his family turning their backs on her all those years ago.

the 'High Priestess' thing, though - that's kinda weird, and threw me for a loop the first time i played the game. it took me until my second playthrough to connect the dots, and remember how the room in the Lady Luctopus - Gristol's room - was full of Delugionist scribblings and symbols.

[Screenshot source. ID: left, the walls of the hidden backroom in Gristol's hotel suite, covered in scrawlings of eyeballs and Maligula's name. Right, the pinboard from the hidden backroom. On its surface are photographs and newspaper clippings connected by pieces of string.]

i mean, look at this stuff! he had a whole conspiracy board and everything!

we learn very little about the Delugionists and their beliefs as a whole during the game, but i think drawing the connection here suggests two important things. one: that Gristol was in deep with this stuff. i don't know how he linked up with them - maybe via old family connections, or just good old-fashioned digging (we know he's skilled at worming his way into peoples' good graces, after all) - but it seems likely that he's begun to internalise their ideas, maybe even warping his own memories of events. and two: the Delugionists themselves are, if you'll pardon the pun, pretty far off the deep end.

like... i understand why PN2 didn't go heavy on the "mass-murderer cult worship" aspect of things, in the end, but man this is such a tantalising glimpse into the wider mythos around Maligula. Gristol is proud and haughty and thinks himself above everyone else; the fact that his first reaction seeing Maligula is to throw himself to the ground at her feet says so much about the way he's come to see her. he's not just trying to bring back Maligula, his childhood bodyguard. he's trying to bring back Maligula, the High Priestess of the deluge, the semi-mythical figure whose supporters believe even death couldn't stop. he doesn't even flinch at the way she confronts him, and maybe it's because he's bought in so completely to this deified figurehead, this idea of Maligula; more a living force of nature than a person. and it all comes back to the same place: an abdication of responsibility, not just to the person who protected him when he was little but to this avatar of floods and destruction. Maligula will make everything better.

i'd write more about my thoughts on the Delugionists but that'd be taking a hard turn into speculation, and this is already kind of long and rambling so i'd better end it here. but what an unexpected and evocative line, right? it's some of the only stuff we have to go off of regarding the Delugionists as a whole, but i think it does such a good job of hinting at the wider story - at teasing another layer to the mythos surrounding Maligula, one whose ripples we see throughout the game but which never quite breaches the surface.