#Lindsay-Ellis

[thewalrusespublicist]

What do you think about the Lindsay Ellis essay on Yoko?

Hi anon,

Ah, this is a toughie as Lindsay Ellis' video was actually the video that got me interested in the Beatles! So on that front .. I must have really enjoyed it at the time and I am grateful/embittered to it for leading me down this chaotic rabbit hole!

That being said, ughhh the video. On the one hand, to actually deal with the topic at hand she needed much longer than the run time of the video to actually get into it with enough detail, so it was always going to be simplistic. I did like some of her points about the other competing factors in the break-up and how Yoko really shouldn't be blamed for the overall break-up. I also liked her comparisons with Courtney Love and how women get blamed in these scenarios unjustly. However, my problem is she was presenting herself as an informed authority on the subject when to be honest, she doesen't actually show that great depth of knowledge. The not knowing about the nitty gritty about Northern Songs is one thing but clumping May Pang with those desperate for fame or clout ... I found either ignorant or disingenuous. That wasn't the first time I've noticed that with Lindsay's work. Not going to lie, I stopped watching her for ages after I watched a video where she was talking about British media and somehow managed to call John Hurt a low-rate tv actor and said that Blackadder was pro-the class system which I'm sorry, was ignorant to the point of stupidity. So yeah, I think Lindsay is great at conveying information but maybe also perhaps conveying incomplete information as if she was an expert in the subject.

This next bit might be a tiny tiny bit controversial but I don't really care. Knowing what I know now, I found the entire video to be partaking in an outdated and reductive type of feminism which doesn't actually allow women to have any flaws or be real people. Yoko was massively over-hated for all the wrong reasons, but it seems that in reaction some fans including Lindsay refuse to look at her with any critical view and dismiss any dissent as rooted in sexism. As a born and raised from the cradle feminist, I find this approach not only exhausting but sexist in and of itself as it strips women of agency and complexity. In the case of Yoko, the two extremes has meant that we've only recently been able to have honest conversation about her. No Yoko didn't break-up the Beatles, but she was a contributing factor and was a massive factor in why they didn't reunify in the 70s. Not because she sat on the bloody amp but because of nearly everything else she did. To say that she had no impact is terrible source-work and practice as it requires dismissing most of our sources from the period and from multiple primary perspectives in order to fulfil an ideological agenda. This in May's case is also silencing the voice of a female employee in a vulnerable position power-wise to sanitise her much wealthier boss' public image. I don't like that. I also want to make it clear that I don't think a lot of Yoko's actions were borne out of malicious intent but due to her extremely complicated personality and trauma, a personality that gets completely flattened if she's just a bit of cardboard jutting out in the corner. There are no winners if you refuse to engage with women as real people and through a modernised Madonna complex lens.

So ... a well-presented video with some great ideas but at the same time quite a basic overview that showed a lack of understanding of some key elements and a refusal to actually engage with the material to push a particular agenda.

[blindhoping]

my favorite part of the video essay cinematic universe is when video essayists voice act each others screenshots. an unfortunate side effect of this though is the first two minutes of lindsay ellis’s omegaverse lawsuit video where folding ideas and hbomberguy read explicit wolf porn to you.

[no-mr-powers]

[razmerry]

x-nyan: first clan

Wolverine and Nightcrawler

Angel

Mystique and Juggernaut

Darwin

Sabretooth

Forge, Jubilee, and Dazzler

Cable and Deadpool

Kitty Pryde

Storm, Psylocke, and Havok

Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch

Beak, Callisto, and Caliban

[antinativefaves]

Dear Lindsay Ellis, this is not how you begin an "apology' to Indigenous people who call you out on your racism.

[madlori]

The downward spiral of YouTube video essays is so seductive.

One minute you're watching Lindsay Ellis's 90 minute video about Yoko Ono and the HBomberGuy's 4 hour plagiarism takedown, and the next thing you know you're watching not one but TWO different videos about Ned Fulmer.

Anyway recommend me your favorite YT video essayist. Not Jenny Nicholson, Sarah Z, Strange Aeons or Hannah Alonzo, I already watch them.

[thevampiricnihal]

I know that the discourse is done and over with now, but the thing about the “white Heathcliff” is:

We can’t know for sure how Emily Bronte imagined Heathcliff to look like (though I think there is enough data to think that he was not supposed to be white) but I think trying to make Heathcliff white and “palatable” is antithetical to what this character represents. In any other Victorian novel the protagonist’s mysterious origins would be explained at the end and he would be revealed to be an heir to a large fortune or at least to be “white all along” (thank you, Lindsay Ellis) but this is not so with Heathcliff. With Heathcliff you are supposed to sit with the discomfort of not knowing. He is supposed to be a profoundly marginal figure. The right-wingers on Twitter who try to make him “palatable” for themselves are I think thinking of Heathcliff as “Mr. Darcy but self-made”. He is not that. He is supposed to make you uncomfortable. Think of what ethnicity for Heathcliff would make you most uncomfortable, he is that ethnicity.

If I were making a Turkish retelling of Wuthering Heights I would suggest Heathcliff being Kurdish, Armenian, Romani, a nomadic Alevi Türkmen or a Syrian refugee, all in the same sentence, and then sit with everyone trying to make sense of it.

It is not supposed to make much sense. Heathcliff is not supposed to be a palatable character to the leftist side of things either, he is not supposed to be politically correct, elaborate, detailed, concrete “representation” either. He is meant to produce a sense of discomfort. How to adapt such a character? Well, maybe you shouldn’t.

[notaplaceofhonour]

something I realized looking at the stats for “breadtube” creators like Hbomberguy, PhilosophyTube, ContraPoints, etc. is, as much as we may tend to think of them as all having comparable platforms, it really isn’t even close.

yes, many of the core group have a similar number of subscribers (1-2M) and many of them are friends or have collaborated in the past, but in terms of actual viewership, none of the others even come close to having the same reach as Hbomberguy.

at time of writing, his last video got 24M views. 6 of his last 8 videos got ~10M or more. The average viewership for his essays is ~5.6 million, a number that ContraPoints has cracked a total of four times, Lindsay Ellis and Shaun once each, and PhilosophyTube never.

there isn’t a huge point to this other than that it kinda reframes the scale of their platforms, for me at least. none of them have a platform even remotely comparable in size to hbomberguy.

[haveyouseenthismovie-poll]

[theforswornelite]

Yoko and The Beatles

(She never went away and i dont have a nebula but still)

[ooglywooglies]

it's kinda crazy how readily left leaning people write off people who criticize them for being racially insensitive just because it happens on tumblr or twitter or bsky like I know we're on the stupid idiot website but that doesn't mean you're immune to racial blunders

[nellasbookplanet]

The three tiers of queer sff:

Broke: what is worldbuilding? Made in a lab to be as blandly inoffensive as possible. Time to randomly namedrope terms like 'nonbinary' and 'ace' while doing zero work actually incorporating them into the world or characters and have someone give a speech about how valid they are. Lines like 'I'm too ace for this' while never exploring the concept of asexuality or aromanticism and still having very central romance plotlines is common. I hate it here learn how to write realistic dialogue and fully realized characters I'm begging.

Woke: more ore less typical sci-fi and fantasy but It’s Queer Now. Might include in-universe queerphobia to be struggled against or may have queer identities be fully normalized. Can be done bad or well depending on the skill of the writer. A good way to explore our contemporary ideas of gender and sexuality or to have a bit of a power fantasy with lesbian princesses and trans knights. There will probably be a bisexual love triangle.

Bespoke: what is a gender. What is monogamy. What is polyamory. What is romance. What is platonic. Time to show you the most fucked up uncategorizable relationship you’ve ever seen. There may be weird ass metaphorical sex

[euniexenoblade]

[pitchsidestories]

UWCL Final in Bilbao 2024 moodboard

Who else is excited for the CL final on Saturday?

pictures are from pinterest.

[sajirah]

Ampersand, Cora, Kaveh, and Nikola from Truth of the Divine.

I started this forever ago and have finally accepted that I’ll likely never finish it. So if you see any unfinished parts, no you didn’t.