#actually i think she knows we very explicitly watched a show with lesbians. and i said i wanted one of them to be bi.

[moonmoonthecrabking]

i wonder how many people have "i know what you are"'d me without me knowing.

[cinnamoncountess]

Fellow Travelers Rewatch Party | episode 2

Content warning: NSFW, strong language (maybe)

Let’s continue the weekly review / reaction session while watching episode 2 tonight!

First time seeing the title sequence and the composition of different LGBTQ+ and historical photographies as well as original sequences from the show - Hawk hanging Tim’s cross chain over the bedpost - merged in is spectacular. The intro has been composed by Paul Leonard-Morgan and he explains the build-up and musical structure as follows: 

„The idea was to have this loop which kept on evolving and descending keys,as Hawk’s life descended into inner turmoil.Tim’s cello sound playing the pizz at the start and the end - I wanted to represent that Tim was the grounding force, keeping the steadiness in the relationship while Hawk’s life descended into chaos.Each character adding a layer to the arpeggios on the top - first the violin, then the piano, then the wind. Sticking to our rule of never resolving. It gets increasingly frenetic until the final reprise played on the cello. Also, it’s written in. Again, so we never settle, just like @MattBomer (Hawk) and Jonathan Bailey’s (Tim) complicated relationship in the show.“ (source: Paul Leonard-Morgan via X / twitter)

It’s incredibly beautiful, well-crafted and the meaning behind feels very palpable in the music, especially with the given explanation! You should check out the Fellow Traveler’s OST: 

We’re in the 80s timeline with Maggie and Hawk meeting in the café!

I still wonder how that came about… Did Tim just tell Maggie to call Hawk? Did they have a discussion about that with Tim pondering whether or not he should go and meet Hawk and Maggie, the protective sister she is, intervening and shushing her brother off in a ‚no way, I’m gonna call and meet this douche who breaks your heart every decade‘ manner?!

Maggie: Although he swears no one else even came close. - Ouch. Tim never found happiness with someone else. That’s truly devastating. However, I’m actually curious to hear a conversation between Maggie and him on that. What did Tim tell her about Hawk and their past relationship? How did he justify his feelings for the man? I crave for more scenes focussing on Tim and his family.

Hawk is part of the Smith family. Leonard is rightfully salty at Hawk, seeing right through his scheme of settling himself a place in his family whilst masterfully playing a false game, while his standing with his own father is standing on wobbly feet.  

Tim: Had I know there’d be pictures I would have worn my best tie. - Dawww. 

I love seeing Tim and Mary socialising with the key political society and shielding each other. The supportive friendship between them is absolutely precious.

Roy Cohn looking Tim up and down suspiciously and then presenting his mom as his date, what a goblin. At first I thought he’d eye Tim up as a potential ‚interest‘ of McCarthy, but maybe he’s just extra cautious recognizing him from the State Department Bureau and the fact that he always seems to linger around when important meetings are held. 

That change of scene from Mary/Tim sweetness to Tim full on blowing Hawk in a doorframe is just  so filthy, sinful and juicy - it nearly threw me off the couch the first time I’ve watched it, such an unexpected switch. Also, damn Tim, clutching the peachy cheeks! (I get it, I get it) Also, it’s Jonathan’s / Tim’s muffled moans while he’s at it, enjoying it just as much as Hawk and edging him on, that makes me feel like a sinner. 

Tim figuring out that Mary is a lesbian and Hawk plans to encourage them to see each other, caring about both of them, their safety, because they aren’t bulletproof like he is. It’s his way of protecting the (vulnerable) people he cares for. 

Hawk talking about his dreams of buying a villa for himself, living a life where no one is judging. He doesn’t explicitly mention Tim but it makes me think of the villa he buys on Fire Island, which comes as close to his dream as it gets, just under more tragic and depressing circumstances. Tim seems satisfied with every little glimpse he is allowed to have into Hawk’s perfectly guarded ‚inner world‘ and emotions. He doesn’t press further and ask what his own place in this dream of Hawk’s would be.   

Them falling asleep together and Hawk waking up to the sight of Tim sleeping peacefully next to him, the sun and lightning in this scene - so beautiful and warming and at peace! That's how every morning for them should be.

Oh no, the neighbour seeing them together. Hawk, you can’t fool him. He’s got his own newspapers in his hand and these were definitely not handed over by a dorky looking man in glasses and a suit.

Marcus introducing us to Langston Hughes and a world where he struggles between racism and homophobia. He’s an outsider in the black community for being gay, which is why he can only handle and focus on one cause… This is far worse than living a fake life in a ‚white people‘ world. 

Momma Fuller: Don’t tell me you’ve gotten some poor girl in trouble. Didn’t think so. - Oh, Momma Fuller knows everything. What a lady, ahead of her time. Like, she’s a Gilded Age woman and is more tolerant and accepting than most of society at the time, very fierce, knows what she wants and willing to marry for a wealthy entourage. She also reminds me of Lucy, because I think she indicated as well that she’d marry a man if he’s wealthy and even if he’s ugly (because then she wouldn’t have to try too hard to hold onto him).

Momma Fuller: And he’s had a change of heart.

Hawk: Doesn’t seem likely in the absence of one. - Hawk can cut super sharp, especially when standing up to homophobes and his father. Love it. 

Mary’s party is honestly my favorite scene of this episode! The pure joy, the music, the playfulness during the charade game, seeing Tim happy / smiling and dancing with Luis. Mary insisting that Tim shouldn’t mention her relationship with Caroline to Hawk… well, she knows very well that Hawk wouldn’t approve at all, that he’d consider it dangerous, not only for them but also a threat for him. AND Mary might be worried for her job as well, she's his employee after all.

Hawk preferring to stand up for his past actions, talking down to his father’s homophobic bullshit and thus refusing to gain the heritage. Wow. Delicious, superb cinema. Wonderful. Perfect. Love to see it!

Hawk (to Tim): I’m home now. - Remember the echo in episode 8 and hold back your tears till then.

Hawk is the big spoon! Awww. Again, such a beautifully staged scene. 

Hawk dictating the love letter, formally addressed to Mary with words actually aimed at Tim - my heart. 

Again, Hawk’s attempt to protect both of them, Mary and Tim, with ethically questionable but effective means. Mary does as Hawk predicts - they know each other very well. Also, can we please recognize that Mary and Marcus as well are just as willing to throw people under the bus as Hawk is?

Back in the 80s timeline!

80’s Hawk refusing to go and have fun with the young guy in the gay bar, instead warns him to be more cautious. 

When Hawk enters Tim’s apartment and Tim notices who it is… then just traces his lips with his fingers, reminiscent. Also, I just love that Hawk still calls him ‚Skippy‘ (affectionately) and Tim doesn’t protest, although he would have every right to claim that he doesn’t call him by this pet name, a name that arose from their first sexual encounter. But he doesn’t. Because he still loves his Hawk.

Sen. Smith: But someone asks me the other day why one of the most eligible bachelors in town hasn’t married yet and I couldn’t think of an answer. - Here’s the pressure for Hawk to start courting Lucy, to protect is mentor and not be his Achille’s heel. 

Hawk (to Lucy): You’ll make a wonderful mother. You’ll teach them to have principles.

Lucy: You always found my principles annoying, silly even.

Hawk: Come on, you know I’m too smart for my own good. 

Their whole conversation, looking ahead. Ouch.  

The whole Marcus and Frankie scene is so effin’ sweet. The way they talk about their poetry and Frankie opening up on his first drag experience and what that entailed… Such natural chemistry between them. The poem Marcus recites is flows so well with the scenes!

Seeing 80s Tim all overjoyed and happy and smiling when they sit down together for Chinese Takeaway food is such a treasure (His ‚thank you thank you thank you!‘ is so sweet)! I’m pretty sure a great part of his delight must derive from the fact that Hawk is there with him, spending this evening with them, eating together. They NEVER had that, not even in the 70s, Tim and Hawk eating with a family member of either of them.

That’s it for episode 2!

[sagevalleymusings]

Ted Lasso is an extremely subtle and nuanced show that we don't deserve and I'm going to defend a character I hate to prove it

So the series finale of Ted Lasso aired last night and I went out of my way to watch it even though I don't have a Hulumaxflix plus account, because I have utterly adored this whole season. I have seen a lot of disappointed fans and negative takes, even outside of the "it's woke now" brigade, and I disagree with pretty much all of the analyses I've seen so far. People are disappointed at the Tedbecca tease that never panned out, they're disappointed Jamie is talking to his dad again, they're disappointed all this stuff they wanted to happen didn't happen, tale as old as time. But I think the issue here is that Ted Lasso is written in the style of a daytime tv comedy while actually being an extremely heartfelt and pained letter to an abusive father that one of our writer was never able to send.

Co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis has gone on record saying the show is about bad dads. And we see examples of this all over the place. Some are more subtle than others.

But the problem with subtle shows is that you have a very wide audience to appeal to. I have seen and dare I say it even enjoyed both Primer and Groundhog Day. But trying to apply the time travel logic of the former to the latter just because they're both time travel movies would be folly. And this is how I feel about Ted Lasso. It has a lot of similarities to a style of show which is usually nowhere near this deep and it makes people expect something of it that it isn't providing. 

How do you know I'm not talking out my ass? Jack Danvers.

I hate Jack Danvers. We get a fucking lesbian for a change and she's an abusive cowardly closeted slut shaming piece of shit.

I love Jack Danvers. Because I knew she was 1) Keeley's financer and 2) a lesbian in under ten seconds of meeting this person, having seen only her shoes.

Jack is quiet and possibly even a little uncomfortable chatting with Keeley in the bathroom. But Keeley's so charming and open that you can't help but appreciate the quiet bonding moment it turns into.

But I've definitely been there. Women are so comfortable talking to each other in the bathroom and it makes me so uncomfortable. There have been so many times I have been made to feel unwelcome in this space and you want to have a chat...  Please go away.

Once it's revealed this is in fact Jack, it comes as a minor shock that Jack is a woman actually. Why is her name Jack if she's a woman?

It's because "my father wanted a boy."

Jack is one of Jason's "bad dad" characters. Which means her actions are a reflection of her childhood environment in a very pronounced way. Slowly but surely, we learn that Jack believes love is conditional.

Jack introduces us to the concept of love bombing and I think because the relationship progresses past that point, the audience is encouraged to forget this, but… love bombing isn't just new relationship energy. It's an abuse tactic. And we're told pretty explicitly that it's an abuse tactic because the person telling us about it is Rebecca, regarding her shitty and manipulative ex husband.

That Jack's relationship starts on this beat is noteworthy, because it sets up the dynamic that Jack believes she can only retain Keeley's affection if she buys it. Why does she think that?

Moving forward, we start to lapse into a false sense of security as Jack loudly proclaims their love in front of the whole office and is planning on showing Keeley off, only to have the rug ripped out from us the second something even slightly bad happens. 

But it isn't Jack's decision to make Keeley read out that apology and then pull funding when she refuses. Not if we're to believe Jack's word on it at least. It was "the board" whoever that is.

Jack peaces out to Argentina before the final shoe can drop, and it displays lastly an absolute cowardice on her part that she didn't even give Keeley the satisfaction of a break up. 

All of this combined makes me realize though that the sudden scrambling retreat is literally the other side of love bombing - we didn't drop that plot point just because we stopped talking about it. The motivations for both actions come from the same place. Jack believes love is conditional. She feels that she must earn Keeley's affection, and sees nothing wrong with withdrawing her own if Keeley doesn't do the same. And also, the actions of her partner reflecting negatively on her means that love can be withdrawn *from her* if she doesn't bow to pressure from those whose respect she's trying to maintain. 

The coming out moments in parallel with this lens are stark. Coming out to the office wasn't just about being open -it was about speed running earning Keeley's love and trust with grand acts of affection. And there are no consequences to coming out to people that far beneath you socially. Jack owns the HR firm that KJPR… might not have? Meanwhile her old college friend does matter. And when Keeley was a successful business woman to show off, that would have been fine. But now that she's part of a scandal? They're just friends. It serves her to come out to the firm in the interest of gaining Keeley's love, and it serves her to keep it hidden from her college friend, to avoid messy questions later that might make her look bad.

With her very name, Jack has been taught that there's a version of herself other people want her to be that she's incapable of reaching. And absolutely nothing we see from her suggests she's worked to unpack that trauma.

Jack is a minor character - a brief love interest in Keeley's life. But her decisions are deliberate and weighty. The good and bad moments are both informed by the same parental trauma, and the writers stick to it. They're true to character, even if it's "bad representation," even if it's not what fans want.

So let's talk about Tedbecca. I will reiterate that this show is about "bad dads" and more broadly about the ways in which who our parents are and how they raised us results in intergenerational trauma that's difficult to disrupt.

Ted and Rebecca are foils for each other. They both have absent fathers (eventually even they both have dead fathers) and they both have emotionally controlling mothers (more on that in a moment). They both are starting a new chapter in their lives because of a divorce, and family is an important component of that divorce. 

And they are both responding to their trauma, especially in early episodes, the way they've always been taught to respond to that trauma. Rebecca schemes vengefully while pretending everything is fine on the outside because she's been taught that the people in her back will not support her. Her mother put up with shitty behavior from her father for years. Then when her father left, her mother turned into a flighty unreliable hypochondriac. She doesn't want to allow Rupert the same power over her, so she reacts like a cornered tiger.

But at the end of the day, what she wants is a family, and in a lot of ways Ted can't give her that. Is Ted going to have one child in America and another in Britain and split his time between the two? Does that sound like the kind of thing Ted would be willing to do? Nor do I think it's what Rebecca really wants because her desire for family isn't just about having a child, but having a stable family unit to come back to, one she didn't really have growing up. Maybe you could see them hooking up, but by the time their relationship has progressed that either of them could have, they've both grown past the desire to do so. Tedbecca isn't endgame because Rebecca needs someone calm and warm and relaxed to come home to, in contrast to her childhood being a parent to her mother, or the cat and mouse dance with her ex husband.

But Ted isn't much better. We see that his father's suicide soured their relationship, but holy crap do I want to talk about Ted's mom.

In every single scene that Ted and his mom are interacting in right up to the blowout fight, she is guilting him into behaving a particular way. She says he "was born nice" but in reality it's obvious that he's extremely used to having to guess at what someone wants and bend his life around that. Ted's mom wants to visit him so *waits around his apartment* until he notices and offers her a place to stay. Ted's mom wants to sleep in the bed while insisting otherwise (but immediately starts having specific plans about what that means re: suitcases don't go on the bed). Ted's mom wants to go to the game and Ted doesn't insist she go, so she sends a text saying she wishes she were there. It is a relentless barrage of emotional abuse.

No wonder Ted is so sensitive to the lies she's telling people, also the whole time. How many fights have they had where he's done something because she asked him to, only for her to turn around and say "I never asked for that" and have that technically be true? And in fact we are explicitly told in the blow out that she responded to her *husband's suicide* by pretending everything was normal.

And then, finally, we get the truth. She's not there because she wanted to visit London (a thing she said explicitly which turns out was also a lie). She's there to guilt Ted into coming home by using his guilt over leaving his son. Is Ted… also a bad dad?

Ted's entire generous, forgiving personality was shaped by these two parents. One, who was a good man despite making what I would say is the only unforgivable act of selfishness, and the other, who is a manipulative woman who demands generosity from the people around her despite never overtly saying such.

Ted isn't just forgiving of Beard because of the guilt and anger over his father's death. He's also willing to go the extra mile for people because he thinks it's his job. 

Ted leaves for Richmond because his wife wants space, but in a lot of ways it's also an act of selfishness. After all, his ex wife says that she didn't want them to take a break, she wanted to know that Ted would fight for their relationship. And he doesn't - in fact he does the opposite. We now have context to know that asking for something without really asking for it explicitly is a trigger for Ted. So he sees what looks like the emotional manipulation of his mother coming from his wife, panics, and runs as fast and as far away from the situation as he can.

That Ted could never be in a relationship with his boss. Tedbecca isn't endgame because Ted needs a relationship where he can be selfish. 

And I think, genuinely, that all of this is intentional on the part of the writers. A relationship with Ted and Rebecca could never have been healthy, because they are the same character, but one of them is fight and the other is flight.

This show is so, so smart. And I think it's absolutely tragic how much of that smartness is missed because we aren't used to shows with this level of carefully crafted nuance. My god, the scene where Nate comes out of his room and the first shot is an all white hallway with absolutely no distinguishing features? My god. The flex of having the characters singing, and you can hear them walking off, Dani is literally getting louder as he gets closer to the camera! That's studio audio because their breathing doesn't line up with the dancing, but it sure sounds like it was recorded on a soccer pitch. I looked up the name of Keeley's form because I distinctly remember the last scene *not* saying KJPR and turns out in a blink and you'll miss it moment, she changed the name to KBPR to honor the fact that Barbara stood by her when Jack pulled funding.1

I could go on and on and on. There's so many moments where the writers just jam packed meaning and nuance to bursting in this show. 

In the "morning after" scene in the series finale, Ted is wearing a KC shirt, specifically a KC Current shirt, which is a women's professional soccer team. That says a lot all on its own for that being the shirt

In fact, Ted wears a lot of KC shirts on the show. He wears Richmond shirts… when he's at work. 

There's a lot more I could say, and maybe even will. I want to give the jamie/keeley/roy OT3 another look from the top at some point. But I just wanted to get something topical out quickly, because good shows deserve to be showered in praise, and I really think the negative publicity on Ted Lasso specifically is an absolute crime. We can't expect to see writers take a chance on something this detail oriented and nuanced again any time soon if we just skip all the nuance and get mad they didn't doll smash our favorite characters together.

[animebw]

I think episode 8 of Yuri Kuma Arashi is kind of the perfect example of the issues I’m having with this show. Because on the surface, all the symbolism and commentary are spot fucking on.

I’ve danced around it a bit in my posts, but to me, YKA is very clearly commenting on the “pure yuri” genre, as it’s sometimes known. To simplify for time, it’s a certain attitude that goes into writing yuri stories where the girls are shut off from the real world. They don’t read like actual lesbians living full lives, they come off as porcelain dolls kept safe and pristine in their little doll houses. It’s an infantilizing strain of writing that doesn’t really care about portraying queer experiences as much as it cares about selling fluffy fantasies of surface-level cute gayness, separated from the reality of what it actually means to be gay in today’s world.

To be clear, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with queer escapist fantasy like that. God knows us LGBTQs could use a few perfectly happy stories where we don’t have to think about how much the real world sucks for us. But there’s a certain point where it feels like a lot of yuri stories aren’t written to actually speak to a genuine lesbian experience, but just to present a safe, non-threatening plastic approximation of it to make it more palatable to hetero consumers. Trapping queerness in an unbreakable bubble where it can play out in harmless separation from the real world, a greenhouse full of beautiful flowers that can’t survive outside its walls. No need to think about gay people’s place in “normal” society, either from the perspective of a gay person trying to navigate it or a straight person trying to understand and empathize with their struggles. And I say this as someone who’s loved plenty of fluffy yuri stories: it’s not healthy for so much of the genre to be dominated by that stuff.

So theoretically, I should be really receptive to what YKA is doing. A vicious deconstruction of the harmful expectations that the pure yuri genre places on actual queer people? How it boxes in their experiences and stunts their humanity by reducing it to a harmless, commodified product? With a main villain who was explicitly broken by being locked one such box until she began to see herself as filthy for every minor misstep and grew obsessed with trapping all girls like her in those boxes too, scared the world wold break them as badly as it broke her? I should be so on board for that. That’s exactly the kind of commentary I should be foaming at the mouth over.

The problem is that the show serving that commentary just isn’t very interesting on its own terms.

Like, do I understand the point of Yurika’s role as antagonist? Sure. Do I get the importance of the metaphors that drive Kureha to try and kill Ginko? Absolutely. Do either of those things make me care about them on a deep, personal level? No. Because the sad truth it, these characters are not interesting outside their place in the metanarrative. Strip away the commentary these characters exist to serve and there’s basically nothing left. You can watch Utena without a master’s thesis in feminist theory and still care about Utena trying to save Anthy from her shackles. You can watch Sarazanmai without a PhD in child psychology and still have a blast with the kids’ struggles for connection. You can even watch Penguindrum, confusing mess though it may be at times, and care about Kanba, Shu and Himari even when you don’t understand exactly why things happen the way they do. But you cannot watch and enjoy Yuri Kuma Arashi unless you care more about the overarching metaphors and message of a story than the story itself. If anything, it reminds me less of any other Ikuhara show and more of the similarly meta-narrative heavy Re:Creators: a very good message that I definitely agree with, but man does the story conveying that message not measure up on its own.

[simplyender]

Hi there! I'm the creator and host of Mechanukkah, and I'll be taking the wheel from the ever-beloved @j4gm to review the last two movies of this years event, so, without further ado...

Mechanukkah night 8 (Part 1): The Mitchells VS The Machines

[Pictured: The Mitchells dog, Monchi, a fat pug, sitting on a kitchen floor with a latke edited on to his head. His eyes are facing in opposite directions, and his tongue is hanging out of his mouth.]

Night 8 of my Chanukkah robot movie watch party! Full stops: This is my favorite movie ever. Don't expect a fair review. Fun fact: we pick the movies we watch each year through a vote, and if TMVTM wasn't picked before night 8 i was going to rig the poll to make it the only option available If you haven't seen The Mitchells VS The Machines yet, then WHAT ARE YOU DOING????? GO WATCH IT NOW!! This movie is a total spectacle of animation, endless treats for the eyes with hundreds of background details for you to notice every time you rewatch(I should know, I've seen the movie around 18 times at this point, and I STILL find new things in it!), they even invented a bunch of new animation tools for the movie, resulting in it very rightfully earning several awards for animation that year. That's how good it is. Mitchells Sweep, Babey! It actually lost the Oscars to Encanto but that doesn't count. The only issue I can see with the animation is the abundance of flashing lights, most notably around the beginning of the movie, where the robots begin their uprising. Luckily, Netflix has a warning for it, but just a heads-up, this movie is not epilepsy-friendly.

The Mitchells VS The Machines is a movie which takes place in an alternate version of 2020, with a much more preferable disaster in the form of a machine uprising, juxtaposed with a story about a strained relationship between a father and daughter, those being Katie Mitchell, the quirky, explicitly gay film student(Those are basically the same thing, I say as a canonically gay editor), and her dad, Rick Mitchell(The Daddest Dad to ever Dad), a tech-illiterate outdoorsman. Their main sources of conflict comes from Ricks issues with really...Understanding Katie and her interests, and his fear that she won't be able to make a living off of creating films (He's cool with her being a Lesbian though, so he gets a Good Dad Point for that). He essentially projects the pain of his own failure to make his dream come true in the past on to her, as he doesn't want her to get hurt like he did. Meanwhile, Katie just...Can't understand her dad in general, his failure to communicate resulting in her thinking that he just assumes that no matter what, she's just going to fail, expanding the rift between them. Katie get into a college to learn film making, and she is VERY excited to leave home, potentially forever, but on the night before her departure, she enters an argument with her dad, which ends in her laptop accidentally being broken. Ricks wife, the loving, supportive, and totally badass Linda, actually talk to eachother like a functional couple, and she convinces him to try to fix his relationship with Katie before he pushes her away forever. Unfortunately, this results in Rick making the reckless decision to...Cancel her flight ticket to college so that they can go on a "fun" family road trip from their home in Michigan to California. Katie is reasonably, not happy about this, but her mom manages to convince her to "meet her dad halfway", and she actually does manage to have some fun. Even though...Yeah, what Rick did was kind of shitty.

Something that does help this fact though is that the movie makes sure to show both sides of the argument, clarifying time and time again that Rick loves Katie, even if he doesn't get her. Which makes it all the more rewarding as we see them getting closer throughout the movie, culminating in Rick learning to "speak Katies language" and entirely support her ambitions, while Katie comes to understand her dads perspective, mending their relationship like the daddy-issues-wish-fulfillment this movie truly is.

All in all, this movie does an excellent job with family dynamics, featuring groundbreaking concepts such as siblings in a piece of media actually liking eachother, and a dad learning to understand his daughter and support her through and through, and everybody, and I mean everybody in the family displaying traits of being on the autism spectrum, most notably Katies 8 year old brother, Aaron, and his special interest in dinosaurs, which is not only never mocked in the movie, but outright encouraged by the entire family, which is actually one of the things that kicks off their world-saving crusade towards Silicon Valley by bringing them to a dinosaur themed truck stop where they avoid getting captured by the robots, who plan on shoving every single human being into 7 rockets across the globe so that they can all be sent to space, where they're probably gonna die(but hey, at least they've got free wifi). This, and the familys general dysfunction also results in them meeting two malfunctioning robots, who I'm sure many would argue are the real stars of the film, Eric and Deborahbot5000, and they end up getting adopted into the family. Yay!

One of the greatest merits of this movie, in my opinion, is how it manages to avoid the "HURR DURR TECHNOLOGY BAD" message that a lot of movies with these types of concepts tend to display, instead presenting a nuanced take on how it can be used for good and bad, and that, ultimately, theres nothing wrong with technology, just how it's used. An example of such being how Katie uses it to make friends and create awesome videos(Good), and how Rick learns to use it to connect to his daughter(Good! He also manages to humanize the two bot bros like...Immediately.) Meanwhile, Pal Labs, a megacorporation, uses it to steal peoples information (bad), and create a hyper-intelligent AI that can experience the trauma of being betrayed by what is essentially her father figure, which makes her snap and start that whole "Genocide and world domination" thing(Very bad). I think that something Western movies tend to do is promote this idea that you have to do everything alone, that real success comes from individuality, while TMVTM argues the point that what really matters is working together, and finding people you can be weird with, which is a really charming message.

So I guess overall, the messages of this movie can be summarized as: Technology Good, Corporations Bad. Working Together Good. Being weird, also good. Family good. Pugs are abominations, and adopting robots is excellent and may even save your life from a giant murderous furby! Also the soundtrack was done by Mark Mothersbaugh, lead singer of DEVO. He actually got away with naming one of the tracks for the movie "Linda Kicks Ass", which is obviously a banger. The entire soundtrack is, TBH.

God I love DEVO and The Mitchells VS The Machines. I love them so so much. Mechanukkah word of the day: Cinema!

[part 2]

[rollercoasterwords]

thoughts on andrea and michonne?? the most fucking queer coded relationship everrr they WERE dating idc

ok it has been literal years since i've watched the earlier seasons of the walking dead but NO UR SO RIGHT michonne was literally in love with andrea like. ok no u know what u have actually unlocked a rant lmao this is ur own fault for coming into my inbox to talk about twd

(spoiler warning)

ok so i actually HATE what they did to michonne's character over the course of the walking dead, and i think like. looking at what's going on with her character is essentially a case study in what i dislike about the show.

and like, when i say dislike--here's the thing. twd is like. undeniably one of THE most influential pieces of zombie media to ever exist. like it's the quintessential zombie tv show, it helped pioneer the genre, etc etc. and the show has really, really good moments, and there are things i really enjoy about it. so when i say i dislike it, i'm not trying to say that it's like...a bad show, if that makes sense? BUT the thing i hate about the walking dead and i think genuinely one of the biggest flaws underlying so much of it is that like. the setup of the show is the setup of pretty much any zombie apocalypse, right, where you get Normal Society completely turned on its head and destroyed. and for a queer viewer (me, for example) this is so much fun because it's such a site of potential. like--BAM! old world order is meaningless. it's been destroyed. what new shit are you gonna create? what matters to you now?

but the walking dead does the thing that so much zombie media does (unsurprisingly, because most media in generally does this in some way shape or form), which is invest itself in reproductive futurism; essentially, focus on recreating the past in the future (specifically through the figure of the Child--hi Carl! and then bye Carl, and hi Judith, and...well, yeah.) so, we see these groups of survivors coming together and struggling against the way things are so that they can go back to the way things were, with very little change to any of the social structures that caused problems in that old world order in the first place.

and this is super interesting for the way it plays out with queerness, because so much of gender is inherently queered in the apocalypse. like, suddenly the rules have changed, and people cannot perform gender in the ways they used to. but rather than explore that, by and large the walking dead just finds ways to reinforce Old Gender Roles and emphasizes this return to the past as evidence that we haven't Lost Society or Our Humanity (i have written an entire paper about this topic i truly. could go on and on. this is the Sparknotes i promise lol)

OKAY SO. michonne. there's this article i like, Queering and Cripping the End of the World: Disability, Sexuality, and Race in The Walking Dead, by Cathy Hannabach, (you can find it in this book) which talks about the inherent queerness of michonne's character. she writes:

From her introduction to the series all the way through her every scene, Michonne remains the most resistant and “othered” body on the show. Simultaneously marked as African American, queer, butch, and disabled, Michonne represents all that the show seems to be working against. Yet because of this she provides one of the clearest examples of the tenuousness of compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory able-bodiness, and compulsory whiteness in post-apocalyptic Atlanta.

and she later goes on to say about michonne + andrea's relationship:

By employing camera angles, framing, costumes, blocking, and eye line matches that we have been trained to read as signifying sexual coupledom, indeed the same ones used in the show to represent heterosexual couples such as Lori/Rick and Maggie/Glenn, The Walking Dead can plausibly render Andrea and Michonne a lesbian couple and make their relationship central to the narrative without ever having to explicitly declare it....In this way, Michonne can be queered through her removal from normative constructions of gender (femininity) and race (whiteness), thus offering a momentary critique of those ideologies, even while the show as a whole can maintain its overarching ideological investment...

so, in summary: michonne is a queer character. and, in fact, throughout the show she's often used as a sort of counterpoint to the normative/dominant structures at play--for example, hannabach goes on in this article to discuss michonne's distrust of the Governor and how it separates her from the other survivors. (edit - i've received two messages about my labeling of michonne as a queer character here, so i want to be clear. while hannabach labels michonne as butch, that is not an argument that i am invested in, and the perceived masculinity of michonne's character is not what i'm talking about here. to me, michonne's introduction to the show is queer because of her relationship with andrea and the way the two characters act, as well as her structural position outside dominant power structures. as in, her wariness and suspicion regarding the other characters' project of trying to re-create society as it once was.)

BUT. this article was written sometime in...2014? or at least, that's when the book it appears in was published. AFTER this article was written, in season 6 of the show (which didn't air until 2015), michonne and rick become a couple, and remain a couple all the way through season 11. in fact, they're now getting their very own spinoff show! (edit - again, since someone sent me a message abt this: i don't want to downplay the importance of michonne's relationship with rick in that it provides representation of a black woman as a prominent love interest, a role that black woman have historically been excluded from in american media. however, i don't think reading her as a queer character is at odds with this representation, as she could just as easily have been a prominent love interest for andrea. and while michonne's relationship with rick is progressive in terms of representation, it ultimately contributes to a character who was once suspicious of this project to re-create society becoming deeply invested in it. that is what i am saying disappoints me here.)

so what we end up with is this very queer character who is ultimately folded back into the project of heteronormativity + reproductive futurity, who herself becomes a Mother and the protector of the Figural Child (RJ, and also Judith), and ultimately, despite her very queer introduction into the show, ends up being one more proponent for the Return To How Things Were. boooooooo!

[dapperdonuts]

ok this is my last arcane post tonight I'm just gonna ramble about my feelings cause we just binged all of season 2 in one day, spoilers below

season 2 was definitely not as good as season 1, there was too much happening and not enough time to actually make me invested in the characters. but to be fair season 1 was absolutely perfect and I didn't expect them to give me that level of excellence again. There are a lot of things I would change about season 2 but I still really liked it. Lesbians come at me but the jail sex scene was poorly placed and kinda dumb I would have loved a caitvi sex scene at another place and another time, which would have been easier to accomplish if they did more episodes and spaced all the crazy plot points out better. I know y'all are excited for a lesbian sex scene and I'm sure it's rough out there but god y'all deserve better. Jinx shouldn't have died, that felt weird after so many failed attempts at dying and after Ekko worked so hard to save her; her sacrifice there felt unnecessary and would have been a lot more satisfying if she continued to be all ~evil~ this season. (But like many I'm also not convinced she's actually dead)

Anyway, negative opinions aside, the animation was INSANE and I'm in love with every single character but especially Viktor. Ekko shoulda had more screen time because he's perfect and I wish he and Jinx could have been together at the end. Obsessed with Viktor's entire Jesus arc. Goddamn that poor sod, Viktor's first acolyte, who's been through so much shit since like episode one. I like Caitlyn as a character, she's dynamic and realistic and fascinating, do NOT like her as a person, I am not gay enough to forgive a fascist who happens to also be a lesbian.

Also I could have sworn Mylo was using they/them pronouns in the alternate universe but I can't find anyone else mentioning that online?? Did I just mishear?

Ahhhhh

Heimerdinger was really only a plot device in this season and that made me sad :(

Ahhhh

Anyway I think it's all out of my system, 10/10 recommend Arcane, please everyone watch it

(also to whoever said it's copaganda uh I don't think we watched the same show, unless you just really like Caitlyn that much but it was pretty obvious to me the police were portrayed as neutral in their best moments and EXPLICITLY EVIL in their worst)

Edit: also quick rant to the ppl saying "people only say the pacing was bad bc they're mad jinx died lol" you're idiots. jinx dying didn't even make me sad, probably because it felt like a ridiculous time/place/reason, the same as several other things throughout the season. I was aware of pacing and other story issues by the middle of the season and jinx randomly dying was a tiny sprinkle on top. You're being reductive because you're butthurt someone criticized a thing you like

There are so so so many moments in the show that are amazing and that i was yelling cause it was such a good moment. But when you put all the moments together, everything is...clunky. They had so many crazy plot points and were trying to tie everything together and also explain a ton of new concepts in a very short amount of time, and it was just too much. They shoulda had more episodes. I'm especially sad about Mel because she was one of my favorite characters in season 1 and I was so confused by all the Black Rose stuff that I just couldn't care about her plot this time. Cool powers, though.

[runninguplenorahills]

Your tags were clear, no worries. I pointed out how much thought goes into the costumes to specifically highlight that the designers have more in mind than simply popular 80s fashion. And the aspect, as shown in the video, that goes against your point is the fact that costume pieces are not chosen merely because the designers want to reuse an item for the sole purpose of it going with a certain aesthetic. There is more thought going into this, ranging from imagining where and why a character got a piece to replicating themes from earlier seasons.

The shiny hair barrette does work for the purpose of dressing Nancy more adult while still keeping the pastels that were featured in a lot of prior costume designs, but they could’ve chosen literally any other girly, vintage hair clip to achieve the goal of just grounding her personality. Instead, they chose a clip that’s worn by another character in an earlier season, and for lack of a logical explanation as to why they didn’t just use a different clip, using the same clip is a deliberate choice. Especially because Nancy actually does wear a different, girly hair barrette in a later episode.

Equating perceptibility by most to significance of choice is a faulty notion. You’ll be surprised how little most viewers pay attention to detail and how fast they forget most of the show right after watching it. But just because most people don’t pay attention doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to pay attention to.

For example, there are several low quality shots of Mike’s rainbow colored bedroom blinds, it’s a blink and you’ll miss it kinda thing but turns out they’re actually an E.T. reference (and probably more than that); For season 2 they had a custom cover made for the book Karen is reading in the bathtub so the male lead would visually represent Billy; Jonathan has a poster in his room from the movie “the evil dead”, the plot of which includes a girl hearing the clock chime and a voice telling her to “join us”; etc.

And then there’s also the fact that Will’s season 5 jacket has the exact same colors as one of the shirts he wore in season 3, Mike is now repeatedly seen in that bright teal color which Ted is also seen in, Nancy wears a dress in a s5 bts shot that’s incredibly similar to the pink dress El wore in s1 (which was also Nancy’s), and how can we forget the time El wore the same exact clothes Mike wore just one episode ago when he shoved her in his closet?

“Most of the public” didn’t notice any of these details, and I can guarantee you that “most of the public” did not realize that the triangles on Robin’s shirt are of any significance whatsoever, either. Speaking of Robin though, did you know that her red sneakers in season 3 have a drawing of a female body on them to hint at her being a lesbian? And she wore those before her coming out/before it was confirmed she’s a lesbian. Queer coding is a method of communicating that someone is queer without having to say it, sometimes even because you can’t say it. Arguing that a subtle detail that queer codes a character is the only valid queer coding for the reason that said character has already been explicitly discussed to be queer ignores why queer coding is even a thing in the first place.

I’m very aware that rainbows weren’t associated with being queer in the 80s like they are today, but while Stranger Things may be set in the 80s, it’s a show from the 21st century, watched by people with the influences and context of today. So if framing the character in close proximity to rainbow colored items is how today’s people understand that said character is queer then it doesn’t matter that 40 years ago it wouldn’t have, because the intended recipient of the message that “this character is queer” is us.

I don’t think anyone’s trying to argue that the hair clip isn’t used for Nancy’s sake at all (at least I don’t) but there’s nothing that speaks against the clip grounding Nancy’s personality as well as being a callback to s2 to convey a deeper message.

Why did they give Nancy the exact same hair clip????

What was the reason

[lokielly]

ofmd fans! you might like amazon prime's "a league of their own"

!!! MASSIVE DISCLAIMER BEFORE I GO ON !!!: our flag means death is often described as a lighthearted show. homophobia isn't really a big theme. this is very different from a league of their own, since it's about the experiences of queer women and queer woc in the 1940s. there's quite a bit of homophobia, transphobia, and racism shown on screen, much more than our flag means death.

i'm making this post because i'm tired of lesbians and other sapphics having to watch show after show get cancelled. currently, a league of their own (which is based on a movie from the 90s) is getting bombed with negative reviews because of homophobes saying that they made it woke. so, please, i ask that you read below the cut because this could be another new favorite show for you, and we need the views and positive reviews to keep it afloat.

the reason i'm targeting this post towards fans of ofmd is because as i was watching the first episode of aloto, i kept thinking of it.

it starts with carson shaw (played by abbi jacobson), a married woman, running from home to become a professional baseball player. when she arrives at tryouts, she meets greta gill (played by d'arcy carden, who i'm sure most of you know as janet from the good place). now, without spoiling much i'll tell you; they are very explicitly gay. VERY.

at tryouts, they cross paths with max chapman (played by chante adams), who isn't even considered for the team despite her amazing pitch just because she's black. despite the setback, she's determined to make her dream of playing ball work no matter what anyone says or does to try to stop her.

the show follows both the women's baseball team and max. max has such a beautiful story of self-discovery alongside trying to achieve her dream. carson also has her own story of self-discovery with greta.

there are also 3 butches in the main cast (which i've seen many people excited about) and latinas (including a cuban girl that only speaks spanish, which made me happy as a cuban-american ex-softball player!!!)

oh, and there's also a trans man!

amazon prime marketed this show as if it was just about the baseball, when it was actually a show about the queer experience in the 1940s. reminds me of how, going into our flag means death, we thought it was a silly pirate comedy because HBO never promoted it as a romcom.

please consider watching it. if you're hesitant, watch the first episode and i promise it'll have you hooked. we need this representation. we need more seasons. for me personally, this show is extremely important to me. it's my first time seeing myself on screen and actually feeling like i'm understood as a lesbian. i'm really picky with how couples are written, and they feel so natural. max's experience also hit me so hard, so i can't even begin to imagine what it would be like for a black lesbian to see.

i know it might seem silly to make this post and ask for people to give this show a chance, but i don't think i can handle seeing it go early. and lesbians have been losing shows left and right ya know. and we all know the ofmd fandom is massive (rightfully so). plus, i think you'll be happy to see a show centered on women.

please do keep in mind what i said in the disclaimer though. this show focuses in on homophobia often. don't watch if you can't handle it. always prioritize your mental health.

[dxringred]

HELLO FELLOW ST/DDIE NOT-QUITE HATER BUT JFC DO THE DOUBLE STANDARDS REALLY NEED TO BE SO OBVIOUS?

i love the fandom, but this issue has been present since. forever. since steve stans were shitting on nancy after the halloween party scene, making fics and long-ass paragraphs bemoaning steve’s puppy-dog eyes when he heard that nancy say that she was pretending to be in love. as if the scene wasn’t about NANCY and her grief??

and then again! when robin came out, the initial “holy shit, we finally have some canon queer rep of quality!! robin’s such a cool character, and this was a beautiful scene!” people immediately latched on to the fact that she didn’t label herself explicitly as a lesbian in order to shove her and steve together. and again, the steve stans raved about what an excellent ally steve was, when the scene was about ROBIN and pushing past her obvious fear to tell steve something like that.

and most recently, with the vickie and robin scenes. i personally don’t ship them, but even that was, apparently, content tailored for the steve stans. the fact that the directors might be leading into an actual romance life for a canonical lesbian character (though nancy has literally been right there. even the actors are in support of the ship)? unimportant because look!! look how proud steve looks in that scene, look how happy he is for robin. wtf.

steve’s a great guy, a fun character and he’s got depth and kindness etc etc. eddie… i mean. he’s also really cool and i get why people like him, i really do. but he barely had a season’s worth of character development, and already he’s a fan favorite. i like the ship, but i hate the fact that once again, the fandom is full-on obsessing over the “cute white boys” and neglecting the wlw pairings

and it’s so much more than a bunch of people upset that their ship isn’t as popular. this is an actual issue, where the lack of wlw content and attention is forever being overshadowed by the mlm pairings.

damn, i didn't even know it was possible to send asks this long-

sadly, i don't know any history of the stranger things fandom since i've never watched the show, let alone engaged in the fandom, but i can attest to the rock/ie one since i've seen several posts mentioning how steve looked like a proud parent or w/e, and then others being all "poor steve" since he's single while robin has vickie and nancy has johnathon. (for now.)

on his own, steve's an okay character to me. his development was good until 4B messed it up with him latching onto nancy again, but even with that, i've never gotten the impression that there's a lot of. depth to him? like it's very much the basic character arc of "popular highschool asshole realizes it is bad to be an asshole and that he actually cares for others". totally fine but hardly groundbreaking lol. and if i see his chest hair one more time-

i haven't watched the show, so i can't attest to eddie outside of gifs, but again. nothing special from what i've seen. his little arc seems to be 'manning up'? instead of fleeing like he did with chrissy (which i thought was a perfectly valid reaction, frankly), he dives into lover's lake, helps save steve and then sacrifices himself which ultimately then lowkey negates the development because he's fucking dead lol.

maybe it's just because he's a far cry from my type of male character, but. yeah, don't get the fan favorite thing. don't get the petition with 75k signatures. don't get the ship (no issue with it yet though) when they barely had any scenes. it's definitely a case of them both being (arguably) attractive white men. cishet girls in particular will eat that shit right up.

the fact that ste/ddie shippers are now going around reporting ronance shippers and calling them names for giving them a taste of their own medicine and/or politely asking them to tag their fucking fics correctly is disgusting imo. it's giving lesbophobia. they seem to think their ship is more important, and therefore nobody else's tags and spaces matter. the way they behave, you'd think the average age of that fandom is 12. (and i wouldn't be surprised if it is, honestly.)

the only canon lgbt+ character is wlw. (i can't speak for will. i don't know if his sexuality has actually been definitely stated yet, and it hasn't in the show as far as i'm aware, so. vickie also isn't confirmed anything as far as i know.) and yet somehow mlm pairings with minimal scenes are heavily overshadowing any wlw content. (first it was billy/steve which. what the fuck, actually. now it's ste/ddie.) i don't know what the huge disparity is rooted in (lesbophobia, misogyny, mlm fetishization, all of the above) but it's fucking annoying and boring. broaden your horizons. get a grip. uggggghhh.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

So we began our Doctor Who journey with the Fires of Pompeii. In it, the Doctor was a lovely kind and flamboyant possible-man, though he explicitly refers to himself as a girl at one point (“Men are not allowed in the Temple!” “That’s alright, just us girls.”) He enjoys travelling, and learning about other cultures, and while at one point he strays a little close to mockery when explaining the ‘age of superstition’ to Donna, he’s very respectful and apologetic when called out.

Hanging plot threads:

“She” (an unknown person) is returning

There is something on Donna’s back

An entire planet, Pyrovilia, just... disappeared, somehow. 

Let’s see how that resolves!

Then we watched the Pandorica Opens. In it, one of the seers from Pompeii is now the companion instead of Donna. Her acting ability is frankly Much Worse. The Doctor is a much more inward-facing character - gone is the man who saw potential in young Quintus and fostered the parent-son relationship of people he just met, and instead we get a terribly self-absorbed man who is apparently incapable of providing any meaningful emotional support to anyone, including a man who apparently was previously dead and then stopped existing but is now a plastic Roman but is the boyfriend of Former Pompeii Seer Amy who doesn’t remember him. 

Meanwhile, there’s a criminal woman called River who knows how to fly the TARDIS and has hallucinogenic lipstick. 

Then a whole fuckton of aliens turn up. One of these is a cyberman, which this episode shows us is a sort of haunted suit of armour that collects human skulls but can be beaten by Celts. The aliens reckon the Doctor is going to blow up the universe, so after one of the most painfully Mary Sue bits of character work I’ve ever seen, they lock him in a cube. Meanwhile the plastic Roman shoots Amy just as she remembers him in a scene that was entirely sterile of chemistry or emotional resonance. River tries to stop the TARDIS blowing up in a genuinely very tense and emotional scene but is trapped inside. It blows up, taking the whole universe with it.

Let’s update the list! Hanging plot threads:

“She” (an unknown person) is returning

There is something on Donna’s back

An entire planet, Pyrovilia, just... disappeared, somehow. (NEW INFO: Maybe because the TARDIS is exploding???)

Amy is maybe dead

The Doctor has been cubed

River is possibly blown up

The TARDIS has blown up

The universe appears to have ended

NEXT! The Eaters of Light, set in 150AD.

Whoever wrote this episode needed to do even basic research into the Picts, starting with “Are they Celts” (they were not.)

ANYWAY, the Doctor is now played by Caecilius, from Pompeii, so I presume the entire cast of this show is going to be repurposed Romans. He is also an appalling abusive fascist who thinks anyone who fights off rapists and murders that want to steal your homes, chickens and misc other possessions are “children” who need to “grow up”. On meeting a Pictish warrior he mocks and belittles her repeatedly until she cries, and then accuses her of “sulking”. He makes fun of the important cultural artefacts she carries, even calling one a ‘lollipop’, before declaring that it’s really important and they need more, actually. 

We get a second reference to him being, or having once been, a woman - he says he was once a Vestal Virgin, second class.

He is now travelling with two new companions - Bill, who is a very charming lesbian, and Nardole, who seems to call the Doctor “sir”. At several points, Nardole tells the Doctor he should be guarding a “Vault”, describing it as his duty. What could this be??? Exciting.

Then at the end it turns out what is in the Vault is, in fact, a living woman. She is called Missy and she is roaming loose in the TARDIS, which is no longer blown up, and seems to know how to work/fix it. Perhaps she is River? Another woman who was supposed to be a prisoner and knows how to work the TARDIS. What are the odds there would be two, after all?

But Missy is very definitely a prisoner, and used to be the Doctor’s friend.

Let’s update the list! Hanging plot threads:

“She” (an unknown person) is returning (NEW INFO: perhaps River returned as Missy)

There is something on Donna’s back

An entire planet, Pyrovilia, just... disappeared, somehow. (Maybe because the TARDIS is exploding???)

Amy is maybe dead

The Doctor has been cubed (NEW INFO: he’s out, maybe)

River is possibly blown up  (NEW INFO: unless she’s Missy)

The TARDIS has blown up  (NEW INFO: It’s fine now)

The universe appears to have ended  (NEW INFO: the universe is back)

The Doctor has employed(?) Nardole

There’s a vault in the TARDIS and it contains Missy but we don’t know why 

Hope these get resolved soon!

[thedreadvampy]

Ok so I watched It's A Sin, Russell T Davies drama about the AIDS crisis, and first of all genuinely so good. it's funny it's warm it's angry it's touching I cried a lot. and Jill's monologue at the end was. fucking beautiful.

but it has awakened an old question in me about the excellent moving AIDS stories I've seen in TV and film. I'm thinking Pride, Angels In America, Pose, this...

where are the lesbians?

because like. ok. lesbians and bisexual women made up so much of the political and social queer scene at the time. and were very often the people running the hotlines and visiting the hospitals and organising the funerals and doing the things that those with the illness couldn't. brought food. washed clothes. organised protests. pulled together mutual aid.

and I get that the important thing is to centre those most affected, who were by and large people who fuck men. I do understand that. but the thing is all of these stories feature lesbians and bisexual women. in the background. as pillars of strength and as side characters.

you know there's clearly queer nurses and doctors in It's A Sin, and Pose has Nurse Judy and Angels has Nurse Emily.

and they have lesbian friends. usually in the background at parties without names or much in the way of lines. Pride has the two lesbians in LGSM, who I'm not sure if they're named on screen? they get some lines but not a lot of plot other than showing the Welsh ladies dildoes. Hannah in Angels discovers her queerness at the end of the play, which is beautiful but happens late enough that we really only see one scene of her post-revelation and that's her hanging out with the boys.

and there are women in the core cast of all these stories - not so much Pride, where it's mostly just the combined force of the Older Welsh Ladies, but obviously most of Pose's cast are women, Jill I would say is the main character of It's A Sin, and Harper is one of the 5 mains in Angels.

but the women in core cast in all 5 (except Hannah in Angels) are all either explicitly straight or have no romantic interests and their plots are built around the men in their lives and they might be implied to be uninterested in men, or implied to be in love with a gay man.

the closest I can come to thinking of wlw characters who actually get screen time for their same gender attraction in their own right in any of these shows are like. in Pose Candy and Lulu are secondary mains, and so is Judy. but none of them in any of these stories get the screentime or the space to really talk about their sexuality and attraction. I think that we meet Judy's girlfriend once or twice, although she doesn't get much screentime, and iirc we only really talk about Candy and Lulu's relationship in any meaningful way after Candy dies.

and I just. do not get me wrong. I literally adore every one of these stories, they live right by my bones. I'm not trying to downplay the importance of telling these kinds of queer stories (especially stories like Pose and It's A Sin which touch on non cis white experiences of a pleasure which has largely affected trans people and people of colour).

but in these stories there's so much room for love and sex and attraction. and we see sex and romance between men and sex and romance between men and women. and we see solidarity and love between queer men and between queer men and straight women and between queer men and trans women (in Pose specifically - otherwise less than I'd like). but I cannot think of a time I've seen something that touched on the pain and love in queer community in the 80s and 90s that featured wlw as anything other than backdrop or support or fully attached to men's stories.

Judy I think comes the closest, followed by Hannah. but Judy features primarily as Pray's best friend, and Hannah comes into the story as Joe's mum then Prior's friend and has very little space to herself other than the moment of revelation, which is still kind of secondary to Prior's whole prophet thing. and neither have relationship storylines. the closest thing to a wlw romantic storyline I can think of in these stories is Candy and Lulu and that's never foregrounded, and even in the funeral episode it's kind of ambiguous. all of these shows spend a lot of time emphasising queer culture, queer love, queer sex, and yet I think the sum total of kisses between women in all five is a single figure number (esp if you don't count nameless background extras in party scenes)

and it gives this impression that like. straight women were more part of the queer community in the 80s and 90s than gay women. like that gay communities were fully segregated. and that's just not true because like I said queer women and queer men and nonbinary people were moving in the same spaces and hanging out together. and during that time, you know, women were also fucking and falling in love. and I really think it's a shame and I do think it's symptomatic of the fact that most of these stories are written or cowritten by gay men. there's very often in queer media a total lack of interest in sexuality that doesn't involve men In My Considered Opinion.

[jessikast]

Leverage: Redemption thoughts

Now that I have - joyfully and with complete delight - watched the eight episodes we’ve been graced with:

I adore it. The first episode, in particular, felt almost like fanfiction in the best way. Our characters were BACK. (Except one, and I don't think anyone really misses him.) The banter, the references to the original show (I teared up at the first over-head group shot), the vibes and character dyamics - perfection.

I'm really surprised that - in a show that is otherwise quite progressive and very aware of the world it's operating in - that unless I've missed something we still don't really have any canon queer characters. (I mean yes, obviously, there's our OT3 which is only word-of-god canon, and in my heart everyone in the crew except Nate was totally bi, but the only character I can think of was that lady detective in two episodes of season 4 who was lesbian and who *may* have had an excellent lunch date offscreen with Sophie.) Breanna said something about wanting to fit in in terms of 'who we love' in The Card Game Job episode, but I don't think that was anything explicit.

Sophie's grief at the start of the first episode was amazing. Gina Bellman's acting was so lovely.

I really miss having more Hardison, but I like Breanna more than I thought I would. I was prepared to bristle at her cockiness and defend our precious baby Alec, but I think the show did a really good job introducing her - allowing her the technical skills she needs to be genuinely useful to the team, and also showing that she is explicitly being mentored and taught. If she went the route of many other 'annoying kid genius' characters she'd always be haring off, getting herself into trouble and in over her head, but I love that she LISTENS to the others - and they're respecting and listening to her too. (And do we know how old she's meant to be? She's sort of introduced as 'Hardison's kid sister', but she also talks about having day gigs so she must be old enough to be out of school and working. Late teens/early 20s?) I thought it also worked really well how explicitly they drew the parallels between Breanna and Hardison (and Parker) at the start of Leverage, both for endearing us to her character and for showing us how much our original team have matured and grown.

And how lovely is Hardison's new career direction?! He's hacking, like, the GLOBAL POLITICAL SYSTEM.

I was a bit confused by the way Sophie's leadership of the group wasn't really addressed a lot. We knew - from the end of the original series and from the 'what we've been up to' summary in the first ep - that Parker has been masterminding the trio, and yet very quickly after Sophie's return she just takes control. It's addressed really briefly but not resolved, and then in the eighth episode it seems like Parker has purposefully stepped back to allow Sophie's leadership as part of them supporting her through her grief, but I feel like we missed a step there. Not that I WANT conflict between our faves!

How amazingly, completely gorgeous is their new building? The outdoor courtyard area? The bar and the high, stained glass ceiling?! That cool stables (?) entryway??! (Do they actually live there? What happened to Sophie's inital reluctance to leave her home and Nate's things?)

I do wish that we'd seen some of our old favorite side characters, or at least heard how they're doing. Obviously the focus in the first set of episodes needs to be establishing the new characters and team, so I'll cross my fingers that we get Maggie, Sterling (possibly as a couple), and Taggert and McSweeten AT LEAST. I also have a big soft spot for Hurley and Peggy. Even just a throw-away reference to how they're doing would make me happy! Also the other 'shadow team' - i.e. Archie and Chaos etc. would be fun.

I have to admit - and it's just my personal bias - that I expected more from The Card Game Job episode. The whole ren faire was fun (and 100% worth it just for seeing Elliot as a knight) but I thought that we were going to get more of the cut-throat world of competitive collectible TCG tournaments etc. And I know that this show requires a bit of suspension of disbelief, BUT: an amazing, special, one-of-a-kind card and it's not even in a sleeve?!?!

I liked the idea of the The Mastermind Job, but I did think it was a bit thin explaining how this guy had SO MANY details about their cons - was IYS actually tracking Nate so closely, or did Nate spill a LOT of stuff at the bar? And I wish that the revelation that Nate had elided Sophie's role as a way to protect her privacy had come from HER rather than the random fake-Nate somehow figuring it out mid-showdown.

I liked the way that having some new team members meant the 'are we the bad guys? is this a tad morally dubious?' questions got asked.

Finally: Sophie misspoke when she said Nate's heart gave out, right? Was there any way we don't think it was his liver? His poor, poor abused liver?

Anyway, I'll probably have more collected, coherent reponses later, but overall I am SO happy to have this show back.

[raviposting]

Okay so I’ve seen a lot of conflicting responses to Buddie this episode, from it being clear to people that they’re getting together, to thinking the writers have unintentionally messed things up to thinking it’s purely queerbait.

And I get the different responses, I do - tbh I’m somehow in two camps, where I simultaneously believe it’s a slowburn but I also think it’s bait. And those are two very different opinions to have and it got me thinking about why we have these different responses as fans to the possibility of a queer ship (namely two men who would presumably be bi/pan) being canon. 

While people talk about how it’s just people wanting two characters to kiss or entitled fans - sure, that’s existent in every fandom, but I think there’s also a very real fear from queer fans who don’t want to get their hopes up and I d on’t love how the conversation has shifted to calling queer fans stupid for having hope, so I kind of wanted to break it down into 3 aspects that I’ve noticed: 

How writers portray bi characters and why that makes fans hesitant to have hope

What queerbait actually means as a concept

How much “slowburn” has changed in procedurals

1. How writers portray bi characters

Something I’ve thought about a lot are the bi characters I’ve seen on TV - Darryl (CEG), Sara Lance (Arrow), Lucifer (Lucifer), just to name a few. These are great characters imo and I think you’d have a fun time watching but a thing to note is that all these characters were established as bi within the first season of their respective shows and they all fairly quickly fell into a clear romantic ship as well (with the exception of Sara as she spanned multiple shows). It may have taken time for them to say the word bisexual, but it was still clear these characters were queer fairly quickly on. You could maybe argue that Lucifer was a slowburn, but then (while it does not take away from him being bi/pan so do not use this as an excuse to be shitty about him) it’s a m/f ship which is still not the point of my post, to find a m/m or f/f ship that has that same treatment.

Some writers have done it - like for Valencia in CEG, or Petra in JTV - when they saw that fans read them this way, but trying to find those characters were few and far between, and when I looked at popular queerbait ships (whether or not they actually are queerbait) it’s usually ships where the characters are largely viewed as bisexual. A lot of times this also comes with pushback from both straight and to be frank, other queer fans as well. Straight fans don’t always see the signs that queer fans do, so to them a queer character who hasn’t been explicitly clear from the start comes out of nowhere. And what I’ve seen from certain queer fans are concerns that people aren’t appreciating the canon queer characters in a show - and I think there is a conversation to be had about that, but I don’t think the response should also be about then demanding less representation for people either. 

If we go back to 911, people talk a lot about how it has canon queer characters, which it definitely does - Michael, Hen, Josh, Karen, and David are all canonically gay/lesbian and that’s awesome, and we absolutely should talk about fans (white fans in particular) ignoring these characters. It also does not change the fact that none of these characters are bisexual and that is the representation people are looking for. Both of these things are true - these characters are often under appreciated in canon AND people deserve bisexual representation. They don’t contradict each other and to act like one negates the other does a huge disservice.

And even if a character was made bisexual in the canon text we don’t get that slowburn. This may be true for things like Leverage, or LOK, but there’s also a real fact of censorship that affected these shows and the fact that general audiences may not understand the queer text tjat the writers intended. It doesn’t make the writing any less wonderful or the ships any less poignant or beautiful or important, and there’s ofc shows like She Ra that made this more obvious (or the.....mess that was Supernatural that made it. Half true?) but these are still real things that should be acknowledged on why people are so hesitant to call it slowburn - because it’s something most queer fans haven’t SEEN DONE, because m/f ships will get that care for slowburn when it’s done but it’s not done for m/m or f/f ships in that same capacity.

2. What queerbait is

This one’s fun because I don’t think many people understand what it is, but queerbait is very dependent on the intentions of the writers/creators/etc. - which tbh can be hard to gauge, because a genuine intention that ended up not happening or someone baiting fans or someone trying to support all ships and not be rude all have very different intentions but to a fan who only sees bits and pieces of this person on social media, it can be hard to gauge.

Honestly with how much the 4th wall gets broken because of social media now I’d personally say we’ve probably moved into a different definition of queerbait - unintentional vs intentional - because we’re at a point where a show knows what ships are popular and at what level of excitement fans are for it - but that being said, there’s still a clear spectrum of intent. And imo? I don’t think 911 has that intent of queerbait - whether it’s a slowburn or they have a different vision for buddie that I (probably) won’t agree with remains to be seen, but this show usually treats its storylines with care. Are they perfect at it? No, definitely not, I definitely think that they’ve dropped the ball a few times (especially with just how many characters they have lmao), but they also clearly do their storylines with earnest and with genuine care for these characters.

Is 911 getting them together? I want to say yes. I don’t think this was always the plan, just something that they decided along the way, but I also don’t think that changes anything about the ship. A lot of people point to Tim Minear being vague about the ship, or the actors and their interpretations, but 1. We have no idea what they’ve been told about Buddie moving forward and 2. No show runner is going to spoil their show that much. 911 may be keeping quiet because they have a different plan for buddie, sure, but also maybe because they’re still figuring out how exactly they want to do this and/or they want to make this slowburn and don’t want to give it away.

3. Slowburn in procedurals

I feel like this is something that procedurals have started shying away from, but slowburns used to be very common - Bones, Castle, their ships didn’t get together for literal years, but that’s just not something that many shows do nowadays, even for m/f ships. Even things like Deckerstar will have the characters get together after ~3 seasons and explore the relationship onwards, whereas a few years ago, y ou’d pr obably be watching a sh ow and it’d take them 7 seasons to get together. My assumption for this is that shows are afraid  of getting canceled, but there’s been a pretty big shift in getting a couple together after say, 6 seasons to now getting them together about halfway through the show. I don’t think either one is bad or good - in good writers’ hands, either can be amazing - but that shift has made it so that a lot of younger fans in particular, I think, don’t fully recognize slowburn when they see it.

911 as a show tends to run pretty fast - it kind of has to with its depth of characters they have - but when they do have slower running storylines they really do make use of that as well. Bobby’s addiction is something that’s always going to be present in his character, May’s suicide attempt was brought up again front and center after 3 seasons, even Chim’s dynamic with the Lees was brought up again and it was reinforced again that they’re his family. There are certain storylines that have to be continuous and aren’t a one and done type of thing, and that includes Buck and Eddie, especially if you want to establish them as queer to a general audience who doesn’t think about these things.

And honestly, despite my fears, I think they are laying groundwork there. We have Buck learning to be more confident in his relationships, we have Eddie ready to date and learning to follow his own heart, we have Buck and Eddie both establishing that Buck is family and will always be there for Christopher. These are pretty big steps to do for a ship and we’ll obviously have to see how the show goes forward but they’ve already insinuated Eddie and Ana are breaking up, I’m sure Taylor and Buck may last a season and be over, but we do have to see what this next season brings. Do I think they’d say this? No, definitely not.

tl;dr: 

911 is a show with good viewership, but there’s always a possibility they can’t continue with their season and then their promises would feel like a lie. Or they may still be hammering out the details as this season hasn’t been written. Or they may just simply not want to spoil their show,  or they don’t want people criticizing a story before it’s finished, all of these could be reasons. The showrunners, writers, actors, ultimately they owe nothing to us as a fandom to potentially spoil their series, or do something, change it or their schedule for it, and get accused of bait. 

But it also doesn’t change why fans are wary of this storyline either, and I wish people would have more nuance and compassion for fans who are worried about queerbait (whether they think it’s not queerbait and dislike people worrying about it or if they do and are calling people idiots for believing it). There’s a lot of reasons why fans are wary and don’t want to have hope, and it’s not necessarily about 911 specifically as it is a pattern of writing seen in other pieces that have fans worried. These things can all coexist and I wish we as fandom in general could acknowledge that, because pretending that they don’t and criticizing each other/people’s intentions or knowledge when they have certain expectations also doesn’t do much to help.

[aeondeug]

So while I was reading GtN and HtN I occasionally stopped to be like “Wow, it’s great how these can be just so gay!” And like. That is really great. Super great. I love that about them. But I also remember at least once stopping and going “Wow, it’s great that there’s no homophobia here!” And like at the time I just kind of nodded along to myself. Around when I just finished GtN, I remember being very fond of the bit after the book with like the guy explaining like. The deal with necro/cav relationships in The Media and throughout history and how actually none of these things have ever been romance. This is just a pure relationship, unaffected by naughty things like ROMANCE. WHY DOES EVERYTHING NEED TO BE ROMANCE?! shouts the author of this paper. And I laughed at this. Because it reminded me a lot of people who do this shit with queer love. They do it with history and just go “Why does Sappho have to be gay, why can’t she just have passionate feelings for her BFFs”. Which is mindbogglingly stupid to me and anyone who has so much as LOOKED at some of the poem fragments. But like people do say that shit. And they do this a lot over like queer anything in fiction unless it like punches you in the face with rainbows immediately. “Why do Bubblegum and Marceline have to be gay? They’re just friends!” is a take that I legitimately saw on the day of the finale. And not just once. I saw it a few times. And I’ve seen that happen over so many ships in so many things, whether or not the ships end up canon. “Why does it have to be gay?” and the specific sort of outrage over it I’ve seen in essay length posts is just common, and that sort of outrage reads very similar to the argument that dude made about necro/cav relationships. It reads like that and close enough so that I made a joke about it even. I didn’t think too, too much on this at first though because I mean. We have Abigail and Magnus. They’re right there. A man and a woman, a husband and a wife. So like I was able to simultaneously go “omg it’s just like those why can’t they just be friends WHY DOES IT NEED TO BE GAY people” and also “wow it’s nice that there are spooky negative queer experiences of SADNESS here”. Which has got me thinking. Ok. So we have that essay. Now what else do we have in the books? I suppose could point at the entirety of Gideon and Harrow’s just furious refusal to admit that they might actually be in love with one another. Even though it appears to be obvious to literally everyone else in the galaxy. And is obvious to the readers. Hell, Gideon even has a moment of feeling like she needs to tell Harrow something the day before she dies. Something which is heavily romance coded, I don’t know the word for it. But like a “Wow I feel a need to tell them something and it’ll be my last shot” before a death just kind of always reads “It was an ‘I love you’. They needed to say it and didn’t get a chance”. So we’ve got that and, specifically, we’ve got their outrage at the suggestions. Gideon stresses that she’s JUST Harrow’s cav. And she’s very fucking insistent on that. Part of the why is that she knows Harrow is in love with a fucking dead girl in a casket but like. It just hits a certain way. There’s also Harrow’s just repeated disgust she expresses towards the concept of necro/cav relationships. She needs to explain away to herself that like, well, Abigail and Magnus were ALREADY married before he was named her cavalier primary so maybe that makes it fine. And even then she’s not like super duper comfy with the idea. A taboo has been broken, Harrow feels, and she needs to get really rules lawery to find any comfort with that. Other small things that feel of note to me here are the nature of the ways we know that these two are gay outside of like. Their weird thing for one another. With Gideon we’re introduced to it basically immediately with her joke about titty mags. Harrow specifically makes a comment at some point that some of the magazines Gideon gets are very gross, yes. Her interest in women is explicitly made sexual from the get go, and the idea that The Gays are just weird sex fiends and there is no love there is a frequent one. With Harrow meanwhile we know because she says she’s in love with the girl in the Locked Tomb. Who is very much dead. A thing that is fucky enough that like there is an entire song and dance about “GIDEON THE FIRST IS MAKING OUT WITH A CORPSE??????” and how Harrow is a hypocrite for being so offended by that all. Also the girl is behind the door. She is something that isn’t supposed to be seen or known about or, heaven forbid, woken up. That is all the ultimate taboo and Harrow not only fucking broke that but she looked at the girl and went “Wow I’m in love” on the spot. So we have this collection of things that could be read as some sort of metaphor for like...The taboo nature of queer love. “Why can’t they just be friends?” and issues of purity and the lack thereof. And we have characters who are very clearly in love but who can’t just admit that because they think there’s something fucking wrong with that. Gideon’s JUST her cav and Harrow is also in love with a dead chick. We also have Magnus and Abigail around who are just like. Happily married and fine with things regarding their whole necro/cav aesthetic. Ianthe doesn’t seem to give a shit that Gideon’s into Harrow at all. There’s a fondness for necro/cav relationships enough that there’s an entire romance genre centered on them and like characters in the cast are fond of those, some of them. Things appear to be Fine, at least as far as their friends are concerned. Maybe the asshole writing the essay that kicked this pondering off would have an issue and a stuffy old grandma would pitch a fit. But like their friends don’t have a problem with necro/cav shit. But we still very much have Gideon and Harrow being “Well no. We’re just a necromancer and their cavalier. GOD.” Now part of what got me thinking about this is that I recently decided to start watching Bly Manor. Because fuck it we haven’t yet. And specifically part of why is I remember seeing an analysis of it done by Rowan Ellis which had this bit where like the argument that “Bly Manor proves you can do queer stories without homophobia being a part of it!” is brought up and like...Ellis is like “Ok but we very much do just lock a queer woman in a literal closet while she screams to be let out”. And lo and behold in the first episode we very much do just lock a queer woman in a literal closet while she screams to be let out. In an episode showing that she’s like just unable to go back home for...some reason. And that she has some sort of difficulty with her relationship with her mother. No, the show is not having the character literally go “Wow I sure am in the closet and I kind of fucking hate that woe is me I am so gay”. But figuratively? It’s all over the place in that first episode. I’m not sure about the others because I haven’t watched them, but it is there in the very first one. And that’s something horror does very well. It takes things that are scary and uncomfortable and bundles them up in shades of metaphor. It hides them from  you by showing you the thing cleverly disguised. Maybe you do not notice it the first time through perhaps. Maybe you felt that a certain thing like the closet scene resonated very hard with you and you’re not sure why. But you perhaps don’t consciously go “Aha! It is the horror of being closeted!” Upon looking back on it or back through it though you might notice it. And be like “Oh that was there. Holy fuck.” Now maybe you’re also someone who isn’t like. Comfortable. With straightforward depictions of specifically queer suffering. Maybe it’s just too scary. But with this show hiding it in a metaphor you got to sit through that. You got to be brave enough to sit through a very, very scary thing. And afterwords you go to think about it. This is the power of metaphor and it’s something horror has been very, very good at doing for ages. Maybe racism or homophobia or whatever else is too nerve wracking for you to look at face on in media, but maybe you can watch a movie or a show where the horror of those things are very much there but cloaked in metaphor. And so maybe we are getting that with Gideon and Harrow’s weird issues around how “taboo” their feelings are. Two people who are just unwilling to believe that it might be that thing, in part because that thing is “taboo”. Except instead of the taboo being literally “They’re lesbians, Harold,” it’s instead cloaked in a comforting metaphor of necro/cav relationships and some dude who is really fucking offended at people’s space ao3 fanfictions about his historical favs. Which is important because every fucking scrap of anything one gets is an argument. It can’t just be that they’re in love. It’s that you must PROVE it and some asshole with a degree or just a bone to pick is going to come by and be like “WHY CAN’T THEY JUST BE A NECRO AND A CAV” about it all. And like I’m someone who’s known they’re into other women for a long while now. At least half my life. We have conquered that hurdle. But we haven’t entirely unpacked all the weird little societal bullshit that is still in there. Hiding. Lurking. And that societal bullshit specifically frames that sort of love as something gross and taboo and “Why Can’t They Just Be Friends?”. With that last thing hurting a lot. I’ve constantly run across people going “Why can’t they just be friends?” or going “They just have a sisterly relationship!” about things I shipped. Even when those things involved shit like the characters kissing on screen or mentioning that they’ve been dating in a sequel series. I can’t simply like my ships. I can’t simply see myself in romance. Because my sort of love is so taboo that it is, in itself, a debate. Maybe being shown the thing cleverly disguised as another thing might help me unpack that. At the very least it helps me look at it. When it’s something that hurts a lot to this day.

[une-fille-ou-deux]

Let’s talk about Bette’s comment about Tom and Alice (ep206)

Bette says that she doesn’t want to imagine them having sex. Because Tom is *ominous music* a man. I know (very well, believe me) that this is a commonly held sentiment, but I don’t understand why a tv show, which is written and rewritten and edited so many times, makes this choice.

It’s not that I’m in favour of characters with perfect politics. I’m honestly quite annoyed by the leap between the OG L word and Gen Q, because suddenly these characters are magically no longer transphobic and racist. I think it’s much more interesting to actually write such a change into the storyline. 

Bisexuality seems to be an exception - apart from the general lack of bi rep on this show, which I still think is *a choice* - since such a comment would never be considered acceptable if Bette had made it about a situation involving a trans character.

The problem is that TLW is unable to represent bisexuality in any other way than to frame it through a lesbian lens. The common (non-)argument, is “well it’s called the L word”. But it’s not like there aren’t a ton of bi women who watch this show. And we get one (fucking *one*) bisexual women as representation (since the others - insofar there were even meaningfully bisexual on screen - were left in season 1) and *still* we have to listen to an unchallenged biphobic comment by one of the most popular characters.

The visual representation of bisexuality (i.e. sex with a man) needs to be countered with a disgusted comment by a lesbian, otherwise it will no longer be relatable to lesbians? If in your representation of bisexuality bisexuals are less important than how lesbians feel about who they fuck - and therefore need to be framed by these feelings - just don’t bother. 

(And it’s not as if the fandom of this show isn’t already wildly biphobic, either explicitly, or by “just preferring Alice with a woman” as if it’s about them. They’ll be fine without the help from the show itself.)