#also the amount of people who pretend to be a movie critics and don't even know what an actual plot hole is or what pacing means

[scarefox]

Scroll through MDL page of a currently popular series, find at least 2 people in the first few comments who straight up insult actors appearances as ugly or body shame them in some way the moment they are not generic looking (or feminine men or even worse women...).

And then there are people on that page since ages who told me they never saw a bad comment ever... you are either part of the problem or blind if you don't see the toxicity of the userbase on there.

[schismusic]

Metroid Dread, Michael Mann's Ferrari and the flimsy-ass excuses I tried to find to connect them

Sometimes it just takes some honesty to get lack of creativity out of the way.

This waiting thing I'm not new at, not at all. I've done it very often. The earliest I can remember I was eleven and Tron: Legacy was about to drop in theaters. You bet your ass I got the soundtrack the very second it entered record stores. It was an aesthetic-defining moment. The kind of stuff that alters your brain chemistry permanently. When some friends who were in Venice told me Ferrari was a bad movie I felt all kinds of stomach-churning. I don't mean to be François Truffaut-like and pretend like all movies made by Michael Mann are automatically good, but I do have insane amounts of respect for the man as a filmmaker, and after what happened with Blackhat - in short: a really good movie sorely mistreated by audiences, critics and box office revenue - I was kind of hoping in some sort of smash hit. I really needed a W, so to speak.

In case you guys were wondering, I kinda dig Patrick Dempsey as Piero Taruffi.

Once again it just kind of floored me for a second. It wasn't too clear-cut right away. I don't think it's one of his best - too many things just don't align: the acting feels distracted and half-hearted and the inexplicably botched adaptation/voice acting job they distributed in Italy is even worse than that laughable fake Italian accent everyone has on all the time in the original; some of the dialogue is insanely out of focus and thematically off-center in a way no other Mann movie ever allowed for; sometimes it feels like the movie itself has to take the script back onto its central theme without losing itself to agiographic intents; the photography often felt a bit too painterly for the movie to have that same electrifying visual feel as (most recently) Blackhat or (most impactfully) Miami Vice. Crucially, something still felt off in a good way. What to make, for instance, of the sunglasses symbolism that instantly connects a movie set in the late '50s with the original cyberpunk aesthetic wherein “by hiding the eyes, mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous,” like Bruce Sterling himself said? Or again the cuts to the clutch pedal and then the gear stick systematically being interpolated when someone is driving? Or yet again the sheer sense of speed, the same speed of sand slipping through one's fingers, every shot conveys? When I came out of the theater (a local monoplex, almost deserted, mostly dedicated to films d'essai - incidentally also the only theater that showed the movie without me having to go to the Big City) some people I knew asked me what I thought of it and my very honest reply was "ask me in about ten years". There's absolutely no telling what future filmmakers and film historians will make of this: everything rests on the shoulder of future Mann movies. These intuitions here, not just the communication discourse (which, once again, is pretty typical of all Michael Mann movies, starting at the very least from The Insider) but this unique omissive/breathless style of storytelling and information conveyance, might make for another cutting-edge, literally breathtaking Michael Mann thriller soon: very soon, if the voices about Heat 2 being adapted to a movie turn into a reality.

Yet ultimately at the heart of every horrifying car accident, the screaming contests, the bankruptcy threats, there sits an inconsolably pulsing heart that the movie resolves to show us exactly twice.

We were at my grandparents' for Christmas and as we drove through the town my father looked out of the car's window and saw an obituary with his last name on it. I didn't quite catch who exactly it was and how they were related to us - and rest assured they most likely were, it's an Abruzzo thing. As most of my family's deaths, as discussed on my Godflesh post, were on my mother's side, to see my father's last name on a mortuary announcement was a bit of a surprise, in that as you probably can imagine it's also my last name. It's a new experience which, in total frankness, I don't exactly hope to replicate soon.

Topically enough, right on Christmas morning my precious and beloved friends J. and A. gifted me a digital copy of Metroid Dread, a game I had basically lost any hope of ever playing. The Metroid series has always fascinated me in that, for a franchise as old and weathered and revered as Mario and Zelda, there's relatively few people - at least when I was a kid with no readily available internet access - who kept a memory of it. I first met Metroid as a middle schooler, via the Prime Trilogy collection a friend of mine had saved on his jailbroken Wii; never finished it but it stayed within me like a particularly revealing nightmare did. When I played Super Metroid at age eighteen that intro sequence burned itself on my prefrontal cortex and changed everything. It's a masterpiece that drives its main strength from the freedom to explore and delve deeper and deeper into it - and quite revolutionarily, the possibility of not doing so. To realize when enough is enough takes a special ability and knowledge of the self. To accept less than what would be enough takes either idiocy or excellently precise calculations and execution.

While preparing for this post, I annotated on my phone's notes app that "Michael Mann would make a fantastic Metroid movie that everybody would hate". I know this because something similar already happened with Miami Vice: he systematically removed almost all signifiers of the original TV series to reprocess the core concept of it into a lean, aesthetically experimental, profoundly emotional film about means of communication reshaping the way crime and crime-fighters relate to each other, and the way the individual relates to sovereign organizations. It certainly helped that Michael Mann himself, as screenwriter-turned-director-turned-producer, was the man who defined the original Miami Vice's aesthetic, and therefore was in all likelihood the most qualified to strip it down to absolutely nothing, remake it from scratch to fit a new, apocalyptic vision of a post-9/11 society of control based on telecommunication.

In discussing Ferrari with @power-chords, she immediately pointed my attention onto just how critical the figures of mass communication turn to be throughout the movie. Journalists, priests, even the movie stars the pilots are dating. Michael Mann is moving into a territory of movies not about movies, but movies about media in general, sitting at the edge of communication breakthroughs, studying the intersection between an "old world" and a modern, contemporary, fucked up world. Unsurprisingly, Metroid Fusion (and to a lesser extent Metroid Dread itself) delve into omission, falsification, breaking down of information: there's fertile grounds for Mann to work with, I think.

Most importantly, however, Metroid Dread is peak-form Metroid, combining the strength of the more exploration-based titles in the series with the thrilling combat-oriented difficulty spikes of Fusion. The new thing compared to, for instance, Samus Returns is how the game does not trivialize the enemy encounters in regular gameplay up until the very end, which by the way is nowhere close to a careless power trip. And even if it were, it'd still be more than warranted: the final boss is granted to give you unrequested cosmetic surgery to make you look like a dumbass. All the while Samus has never felt any better, movement is slick and deliberate, the 360-degree aiming is incredibly precise even taking the Joycon drift into account: and this precision eliminates almost all instances of rage-game bullshit when it comes to the EMMIs, the fighting, the jumping, the exploration, without by default trivializing any of the elements. It is, simply, a game feel miracle.

It feels about as glorious as it looks.

The deep knowledge of the gameplay mechanics of a great Metroid game is key to Mercury Steam's success with the central executives at Nintendo of Japan. Samus Returns didn't sell too bad, like most Metroid games (at least when you don't compare them to Pokémon, Mario or Zelda), but this here is just a quantum leap. All elements of the game, including the mechanical frameworks established in the 3DS game, are honed to a lethal degree: every enemy encounter, every instrument at the player's disposal turn out to be multifaceted, limited only by the player's own creativity and abilities. But the game knows how to help you, the player, hone those abilities too - it wants to be discovered. It entices you in further and further.

The game is majestic, in short. It knows itself, its players, its predecessors, even its stakeholders spectacularly well. And it is so thanks to employees who were forced to borderline inhumane working conditions, under threat to get their name scrubbed off the end credits if they didn't physically show up for work in the middle of a global pandemic.

"MercurySteam employees talk about the working conditions in the studio" - Spanish article from AnaitGames

During one of the earliest scenes in Ferrari, Enzo (Adam Driver) goes to Mass in the factory's own chapel, and together with all the racing department's higher-ups he proceeds to not give a damn about the function, keeping his eye on a stopwatch instead, monitoring the times Maserati's drivers are doing on the Modena racetrack. As the execs do this, the priest starts waxing poetic: "If Jesus was born today he would not be a carpenter. He would be a mechanic, like you are," says the uncaring bastard in a long dress to alienated, broken working men, facing - unbeknownst to them - the serious threat of bankruptcy, immediate liquidation, job loss. It took this movie about thirty years to get made, being passed from one producer to the next one, from one director to the next one, with this script that sort of tries to be a biopic with all of its strengths but is fundamentally tethered to a protagonist who's, ostensibly, Just Some Guy who happened to own half of one of the most famous car manufacturing companies on Earth. But the reason he was able to do that is, like one of my teachers points out in his Letterboxd review of the movie, his entirely-too-natural knack for timing. The precision Enzo Ferrari requires of his drivers, that quite literally lethal element of exertion, precision and composure, is what is required of him too, but this doesn't make him any better than anyone else: he's not the one dying, he's not the one crashing cars. Some of his friends did. He just got extremely lucky.

Informing the very concept of the labor of love is the idea, almost the aesthetic even, of the love of labor. Gaming culture is profoundly imbued with this. Crunch, stricter and stricter timelines: these are no news to anyone who's into gaming in an even remotely active manner, and are the byproduct of a culture based around hype - a profound affection that degenerates into pretense. Enzo Ferrari fashions himself a dictator, taking charge of the communication around his brand and purposely, painstakingly reshaping flows of information to operate according to a logistical nightmare of an inner timetable. Adalgisa Bisbini (Daniela Piperno) plainly states, with the brutal honesty that can only come with old age and immeasurable pain, that "the wrong child died", right behind her son's wife's back as they're visiting the family grave. Two graves marked Alfredo Dino Ferrari sit mirroring each other in an imposing structure in the San Cataldo cemetery, in Modena. Enzo Ferrari mourns them both, unknowingly echoing his mother's feelings. It is a circle of mutually inflicted pain where everyone already feels what they're being told, and yet it never stops: labor must ensue, so that the vestiges of love can ensue. No wonder Enzo and Laura Ferrari (Penélope Cruz) can only ever fuck on top of spreadsheets.

The importance of an ashtray cannot be overstated.

[thelesbianpoirot]

Hello, I am not getting any younger and I want to jump back into the bleak lesbian dating world. Should I act like a normie to get a wife? Or should I looksmaxx and stay true to my lesbian separatist beliefs?

On one end I betray myself but on the other I’d have to do an uncomfortable amount of work to become more good looking. I don’t think women will care about my beliefs if I’m jacked.

What do you think?

Babe this is so real, people like to pretend gay women don't care about appearance and that every lesbi woman wants a low effort fat butch, but that is a BIG lie. Even gay women have preferences informed by society, few vary. So looksmaxxing will probably get you more women. I did get more attention my dating app pages when I dressed femme, but I didn't want to do that anymore, so I just get a good haircut, nice looking clothes, put stuff on my face so I don't have awful acne and take pictures in great lighting. If you can do a bit more, like working out, and buying a cool outfit or two, do it, but don't do shit you can't maintain because she'll leave you if you can't keep it up. I met a girl when I was 125 pounds, shaved and with long hair to my ass, and she did not want me when I gained 50 pounds due to health issues and buzz it all off. I have lost some of that weight, but I am definitely not 130 anymore. And I left her because I realized she didn't want me anymore, and I was not staying with someone who didn't want me after I recovered from an eating disorder. But I also don't blame her because you can't force yourself to get turned on by someone you are not. BEING JACKED HELPS A LOT but if you hate exercise, just focus on getting fit, basic walking more, stretching, eating greens, drinking water. But date while you're working on your body, so you know what the dating landscape looks like, so when you post those updated pictures, and the interactions flood in, you aren't too out of your element. SUMMARY: LOOK GOOD IN AN EASILY MAINTAINED WAY - hygienic, well-dressed, good haircut etc. It does help with dating a lot. But being an impossible to maintain transformation will never last and whatever relationship you gained because of your transformation also won't last. I don't start off relationships with strong feminist conversations, I like to slowly introduce my beliefs. You don't want to be preachy and annoying, but don't go too much against your beliefs. You'll hate being stuck with a woman who is your ideological opposite, so if you're looking for more than sex, I'll so be true to yourself, but don't bulldoze her down in conversations if she says something un-feminist, everyone has space to learn. I personally cannot date a someone heavily into trans identity, I have tried that, and I just grew to hate that person, because they would constantly try defend TIMS against any criticism, kept implying I was a trans man, and they just talked about nothing but childish things and gender. It was so cringe, I had to get out of there. Don't do that to yourself. But there is nothing wrong with not bringing up the scum manifesto to your date. Just talking about other things you might have in common before you delve too deep into specifics - books, movies, hobbies, sports. I put feminist in my bio, because I think if that dissuades any woman, she isn't my type at all. I also put "interested in sexual relationships with adult women" for the same reason. But I don't put "radical feminist aligned" because radical feminism has been given such bad press, that despite a woman agreeing with everyone of my beliefs, she might have preconceived notions implanted by anti-feminists and trans activists. Separatism is niche, not well known, so a potential woman might google it, and find some dumb article by an anti-feminist and think you're some weirdo extremist or something. Even if every time I have explained separatism to a woman, she has agreed sounds incredible. Slowly share more and more of yourself with people, don't excitedly dump all at once. It's just rude otherwise. SUMMARY: Don't try to ideologically trample normal women, but don't date your ideological opposite, people are more accepting of your beliefs after they have known you for a while.

[frumfrumfroo]

(Sorry if I am belabouring the point, so feel free to ignore this ask) no yeah I'm definitely the same way and you're never wrong for having personal reasons not getting into something immediately - I think some of the fandom anxiety comes from the fact that things get cancelled so quickly without sufficient viewership (or even with sufficient viewership, which is a whole other nut). It puts a weird amount of onus of a show's success on the fandom, which is even stranger in the time of broken trust and active resentment of audiences/audience engagement with a text/trying to 'outsmart' us. But ultimately there is something severely rotting at the root that I don't think we have any control over.

And yeah the popular perception of TD season 1 is that it's grimdark because its protagonist is deeply wounded and many a fanboy is butthurt about its celebration of redemption. It's an incredibly, incredibly dark show, and so that tragic beginning is hard for a lot of people to get past, I think, when it's not the final conclusive thematic remark*. I would say that Dark is similar to this if you want an idea of the tone. Somehow we have ended up where the children's modern day fairytale is grimdark and nihilistic and shows inured in tragedy are idealistic and redemptive.

Anyway, very thankful for your blog in keeping me sane in the time of psychedelic narrative rules, and being Principled, because sometimes I feel like a stick in the mud lol.

And the asterisk is there up above because I have heard this exact description of a popular book series (A Song of Ice and Fire) and I disagree with this conclusion, partly because the series is unfinished, partly because I think the fanbase on Tumblr is overly optimistic, and also because TD has an absolute conclusion which is idealistic. So I just want to note this so it doesn't seem like I'm misrepresenting or overstating the show lololol.

It's also extremely unsavoury the way big name fans and the former twitter cabal, wherever that hangs out now, will take advantage of this anxiety and use it as a bludgeon to make a captive audience feel like they have some 'duty' to support the financial success of giant evil corporations. Giving Disney more money and bullying people for not giving Disney more money is not a moral victory, I think we should all be able to agree. Abusing calls to support artists by co-opting them into the service of mindless consumption of branded refuse is fairly repugnant. Saying 'vote with your dollars' between a choice of Disney Extruded Movie Product A, B, or C is both hilarious and sad.

eg: that tie-in comic, I think it was the TLJ one? The one with the terrible art. It's a commissioned product, the artist was paid once and as little as possible to create it for solely marketing purposes. Applying fandom etiquette to it or saying it should not be criticised because of high turnover times is frankly fucking ridiculous. It's a professional commissioned product they were selling for profit. They had all the time and all the money in the world, there's no excuse for it to be awful and absolutely no one should have felt obligated to buy it or keep quiet about how bad it was. Maybe the artist could have done better under better working conditions, but that doesn't make the actual product we're being asked to purchase acceptable. Giving Disney your money is not going to improve those conditions and it's not going to help that artist.

The same with the tros defenders saying they tried therefore you can't criticise them. A) they did not try B) this was not a sincere piece of art and pretending otherwise is just insulting and C) it's a corporate product made by a near-monopoly who employed alleged professionals. Nothing could possibly be more fair game for harsh criticism.

Ultimately putting this onus on fandom of you must throw your money away on this thing or be a free shill for this brand or maybe they'll stop throwing us any crumbs... like it's debasement. Given all the many recent examples of how public support doesn't matter unless it's that first weekend a show drops on a streaming platform or the opening box office, how being the 'wrong' audience makes you irrelevant no matter how many of you there are, how even very successful shows are dropped after two seasons because producers don't want to pay actors, etc. etc. it's even more silly. We should be demanding better, not propping up this nonsense. Creative people are being profoundly fucked over by this system and are often still fucked even if they make something successful.

If people want to support artists, buy independent and small label media. Go see original, mid-budget movies at the cinema (if you live in a city where you have any chance of one playing, that is).

And see, I have no problem with darkness, angst, and tragedy if I know it's going somewhere positive. Having to really go through it can make the journey and the ultimate conclusion feel even more rewarding. As long as it's not angst for angst's sake, but is doing something meaningful and necessary, it only enriches the hope at the foundation of redemption or recovery stories.

Idealism is brave, challenging, and requires sincerity. When the modern fairy tales are being produced in cynicism and by committee to meet a quota for the shareholders...

Thank-you ❤️

[biblioflyer]

Picard s3e10 "The Last Generation"

I laughed, I cried, I cheered, but I'm not free of conflicts.

The artificial constraints of a 10 episode season are something I really feel acutely. So I'll start off with an acknowledgment: if OG Picard fans are furious, I get it. I don't share your anger, but I do understand it.

Spoilers ahead.

I broadly agree with the creaky older fan sentiment that in many ways Season Three is what Season One should have been. Primarily in that the absence of the rest of the main characters and centering Picard and Picard only and, to some extent, Data, was a disservice to the rest of the TNG ensemble.

A flaw that was rectified in Season Three. However, by rectifying it in Season Three and then committing to the story they were going to tell in the amount of minutes they were going to tell it in, a grim sort of triage inevitably was going to take place. The victims overwhelmingly were the characters and storylines of Seasons One and Two.

That was neither kind nor fair.

I won't pretend I didn't love this season. But I also was aware of and frustrated by what was missing because I am committed to the ideals I started this blog on: these are my self conscious reactions, reflections, and introspections rather than objective truths I live and die by and demand others validate, lest they be deemed "not real fans."

Now I myself will not be buying a ticket for the Matalas hate train. I think there was an awareness that a lot was being left on the cutting room floor to cater to fans like...well, me, and an attempt was made to offer an overture to a possible sequel series not unlike a "sorry for your loss" bouquet.

Should you view that as a fair consolation prize for only addressing Seven and Raffi's relationship with a couple of quips and an action movie one liner? Or literally forgetting Elnor?

Were I in your place, I probably wouldn't. But I sincerely hope we get that sequel show so that proper amends can be made.

Hopefully it will also include Worf so that the DS9ers can get justice for Jadzia.

Although, I am a bit pessimistic that its going to happen even with the overwhelmingly positive reception. Two overlapping ship focused shows seems unlikely unless Enterprise-G is a metaplot driven narrative show while Strange New Worlds is episodic with light sprinkles of meta. A prospect that I am kind of meh on. Season Three proves that you can do a season long narrative and it not get too bloated or convoluted and deliver a satisfying finish, but I don't know that its enough for me to trust the concept of the 10 episode version of a classic Trek two parter going forward. Five times burned, twice shy.

For those keeping score, that's seven seasons of serialized Trek with five that I think were not well executed overall, not unforgivably so, but they definitely had a clumsy adolescence as their shows matured. I liked Discovery season 4 quite a bit. I'm not on the "Discovery sucks" anti-hype train either, but I think the show has rather clearly been showing its work as it has struggled season after season to figure out its own unique identity and to balance that identity with the expectations of the broader Star Trek franchise, navigating the hellscape of the fandom and trying to figure out which parts have valid criticisms and which are misanthropes who are allergic to other people experiencing joy: and its been a messy process.

What also steals some of my euphoria from the ending of Picard is the announcement of the Section 31 movie.

I love Michelle Yeoh, I even like the character of Georgiou, but I don't trust anyone who has been involved in Trek to date, not even Ron Moore or Robert Hewitt Wolfe, to not resuscitate vile late 90s to mid-oughts nihilism and uncritical worship of "hard men making hard choices because the good are too effete and squeamish to do what must be done."

I know, I know, its negative for a Star Trek apologia blog but I hate Section 31. That's the only thing I'll ever gatekeep. Its a violent refutation of the core premises of Star Trek: that reason and decency win in the end and the endless fascination with constructing scenarios where characters have no other choice but to do near genocides, assassination, and other grimderp shenanigans really infuriates me. There are multiple franchises where I would accept that with zero qualms: Babylon 5, Star Wars, Farscape, Stargate, Battlestar Galactica*, the Expanse etc. but they don't have that same core premise that good wins because good is actually how you win.

*Although it got REAL tedious REAL quick because of how excessively Moore's Galactica leaned into this. Which is incidentally kind of why even though I admire the man, I kind of want to see him and Star Trek keep 500 feet from each other at all times. The guy is way too into torturing series leads. Save that for O'Brien, he lives on pain.

So, to recap.

Dear S1/S2 fans. I adored this ending: it was everything I love about TNG right down to Picard saving the day through warmth and decency. But I'm sorry you got screwed. This is not a zero sum game to me. I think there was a way we could have all been happy and it sucks that wasn't a priority.

[thirdmagic]

honestly if barbie had been a 100% uncritical and unironic celebration of barbie as an empowering feminist figure i would have really checked out of it quickly. because yes, the takes that barbie is literally ruining the world and is a literal agent of the patriarchy is wrong and unfair and the idea that she's single handedly responsible for causing body image issues is really reductive, there's a reason it's in the movie and it's from the mouth of a tween girl in its most cartoonish exaggerated form lmao. but we've all been that pink-hating tween girl at some point who has only just discovered these words and terms for things we've always felt all our lives and our understanding of it is still kinda immature and reactionary. i do broadly think and feel very positively of barbie as a cultural icon, and I mean yeah a lot of it is nostalgia some of it is just me wanting to reclaim this symbol of everything girly that is derided for being girly and we feel we're forced to give up because its considered lesser. but genuinely i do think she's been the target of lots and lots of very unfair and bad faith criticism over the years. At the same time, if the film had unironically taken the "Barbie is Only a force for good and Has Solved Feminism" stance, like- that would have just really stretched my ability to engage with the film, because well, that's not really true or fair either, and I just wouldn't be able to buy it even from a very good film.

in the end the place barbie holds in legacy and place and culture is just... complicated. good or bad isnt really the question, she is a cultural icon, she responds to certain trends, she represents certain trends, she defies certain trends, she is shaped by the culture she is part of. and people will respond to that differently. that's why the trailer tagline was 'if you love her barbie or if you hate barbie, this movie is for you', and i think why the film really really works for me is that it delivers on that promise. it does what i most wanted and hoped it would do when i saw it would go for that more meta angle, by wrestling with the many different complicated layers of her legacy and what she means to many different people, good and bad, without damning her or elevating her on a pedestal.

because yeah i don't think we can deny that in many ways she is an embodiment of a sort of ideal and stereotypical femininity that yes is a largely patriarchal standard. but it's also the fact that she does do a lot to empower girls to have dreams and ambitions and to seek out self fulfillment and creativity in their play, and that is important and significant and beautiful about what she does do. but the other side of that is the insane amount of pressure you might feel as a girl to Be Something and how your only worth is if you're exceptional in some way, and she does interact with that, the messaging behind her does feed into that, if only because its an idea that already exists and is ingrained in us from society on the whole. and the film responds to that by making 'it's ok to just be you' its core message, by emphasizing with that struggle, by having barbie herself decide to just be regular and human and find worth in humanity and human flaws of flesh and aging and body. and a fully grown adult woman, a mom with a desk job who understands full well that nothing about barbie is realistic and didn't fulfill any of the ambitions barbie represents, can find joy and relief and value and beauty in playing with her.

it doesn't offer an easy answer of 'is barbie good or bad' because there is no easy answer to that, and it gives us the veneer of a hollywood happy ending but ultimately it doesn't pretend that everything's been solved forever and now everything will be good. there is a fair bit of cynicism in the line 'one day the kens will hold as much power in barbieland as women do in the real world' with how the film understands that inequality cant be magically fixed and it doesn't try to sell you on that either- again, if it had been the kind of Inequality Has Been Solved And Everyone Is Happy ending you kind of expect from most fantasy-ish movies to this effect I would have just not bought it. Ending on the note of and "our Barbie, the main character, found her path in life and is happy even if the world isn't fixed" just feels more honest for this kind of personal story really.

beyond saying only one specific thing about it, the film is in conversation with the legacy and the discussion around barbie, which is the most important thing that a film about barbie, as a brand or as a character, can be. it brings it into the film and makes that entire conversation the central conceit and uses it as a vehicle to explore ideas about womanhood on the whole, which i think is ultimately a good choice because it's that very legacy and discussion that makes barbie as a character and a cultural icon perfect for this kind of metaphor.

[jaelijn]

I had this rant in my drafts for a few days thinking about not ever posting it, but I just saw *yet another* post of this kind, so f* this.

I hate how much fandom and tumblr has informed me that it's cool to hate on the Avatar-the-blue-people film series because the first film is "ssoooo cringe and hahaha there is noooo fanfic haha because it's soooo bad even though it is one of the highest crossing films hahah" and "AtLAB is soooo much better". Like: WHY is it necessary to shit on people's enjoyment when it does nothing to hurt you? It's not the funny "gotcha" you think it is. It's just mean-spirited. Like sure hate on companies and big name creators, but have you thought about what this does to people *just like you* who just happen to enjoy a thing?

It's grown to a point that I don't even want to mention I enjoyed it even a little bit, never mind admitting how much I loved it back when the first one came out. And yes, it has issues - which big film doesn't? But it was such an eye-opener in terms of scifi - not only in terms of how FUCKING GOOD scifi could look on screen without being all "spaceship tech and battles hehehe ooohehehe" but also in terms of what a full alien ecosystem could be. I still have the movie poster hung up. I own the artbook. And the soundtrack. There are literally no other films I can say that about.

It was massively influential for my taste in scifi as well as my way of writing alien landscapes and I felt seen for the way in which my love for nature transcends any care I have for humanity as a species.

Anyway I have been to see part II and love it no less and if not for this stupid nonsense you'd think tumblr'd be all over it - like they have made such strides from the issues of the first one.

It's a story of a family that isn't defined by blood. Of belonging even when you're different. Of loving and protecting nature. There's a heavily neurodivergently coded character who explicitly has epilepsy (and a FEMALE one at that). There's no shortage of strong women without the need to make them... act especially male. There's significantly less white-savourism than in the first one. There's a culture that has a heavily sign-language based conversation style that is completely normalised. It looks *amazing*. The soundtrack is fantastic. It's become an ensemble cast. It's opened up the world even more.

Is it trope-y as all hell, very unsubtle in its message and is its plot flat (and/or repetitive from the first one)? Sure. But the same is true for literally every action/super hero movie, and everyone seems to love those. (And at least in terms of repetitiveness some is definitely intentional - as in relevant to the story! - parallels).

Is it fairly amato- and heteronormative? Yeah. But again, that's pretty much every media.

Is there a significant amount of violence and death - also yes. But to me it's the brutality of a war film - it's supposed to be brutal, it's supposed to be unpleasant and raw in places, whereas a lot of violence in movies otherwise feels to me like I'm supposed to enjoy it.

There are probably other ~~problematic~~ things, and if not in the film then with the people or businesses involved, sure. And I'm not dismissing them. I'm not saying it's perfect. But unlike other media I could mention, as far as I'm aware, it's not an active instrument in a hate campaign, and yet all I see is criticism and I have no one to talk to about it IRL and, following this tumblr attitude, no one I really want to admit to that I like it on here, either.

Anyway. I'm ranting. But if a movie has the power to make me cry from beauty as well as pain, make me lose myself in awe and shake with incandescent rage, have a sheer RANGE of emotional responses, I can't honestly pretend I didn't enjoy it. Just let people enjoy it.

[zendyval]

Having watched the film 3 times my unpopular opinion that this film should have been marketed as a romcom and had a rating of pg-13. That scene with Z and the boys in the bed is so funny as oppose to deeply erotic and that would've have allowed most of her fanbase to go see the film because most cabt see r rated films. Like, if they had took out the Patrick lockeroom scene, it would have been pg-13.

I went with friends, and since I've read forums, and concluded that their opinions were unenthusiastic about the movie due to the leads being unknown and for most unattractive, which is crazy to me, and the lack of sexy scenes. Most ppl thought the movie was going to be deeply erotic and were not amused it wasn't.

Not to compare her to Sydney, but Sydney's fanbase is mainly men and young women. She has done nude scenes and sex scenes, and most ppl want to see her films because of it. I love Z, but I don't think she understands she has a large fanbase who isn't of age to watch her stuff or mainly know her from Disney and Spiderman. I even asked ppl who have watched Dune if they rate her performance higher than those role. I think that because that level of scifi is niche, but they still compare her performance as MJ as something they like or prefer. Euphoria is very popular online, but where I'm from, it's not something ppl watch. Like most ppl would watch Emily in Paris or Bridgerton because it's lighthearted and the characters are likeable. I know she wants to do darker roles and can cause her emmy-winning portrayal of Rue, but most of the gp loves her due to her down to earth appearance because she's nice and jovial. Perhaps a role where she plays a character than leans into her skills as a singer and fashionable person would be ideal. I hope it doesn't come across like she can't do darker and unlikeable roles. It's just niche in this current climate. It's why Succesion, although a critical acclaim show, had a low rating throughout Istanbul runtime because ppl don't like unlikeable characters.

It's hard to sell a film where given the thin premise and largely only 3 characters, this film indeed would have been better at 90 minutes rather than 2 hours. Again, I love long, although films, but I'm aware I'm the minority. Most ppl are not film geeks. They prefer blue-collar stories to relate to.

But I think this lends to a question...are people supposed to making movies based on what gets the greatest box office return and what makes the most money or based on the kind of movie they want to make? Because taking Z out of the equation, making Challengers a rom com is not Luca's speed. I don't think you're going to get Luca Guadagnino to make a PG-13 rom com, and I've got nothing against rom coms but it seems like you're saying the movie should have been a thing that's different from what it was meant to be, which then makes it an entirely different movie

Also the film is generally well received...so I'm not sure I totally get all of it. If they made the changes you or your friends want then likely a lot of the people that loved it would no longer love it. I get film is subjective so it's cool if certain things didn't vibe for you or your friends, but I don't think we can pretend that the movie also did work for a lot of people on many levels.

I also think as someone mentioned yesterday, I'm not sure cutting out one or two scenes would get them a PG-13 though just because cursing more than an at minimum amount still gets you an R rating, but I'm not sure on that one.

Also whether one likes Challengers or not, or thinks it's a good movie or not, or even if they like Z as an actress or not, I don't necessarily think it's her responsibility to only stick with making movies that her fans can see. First I'd argue most of the generations that grew up with her on Disney are now over 18. Maybe not the ones from Spidey or ones catching her in reruns.

But I also think it comes back to, are studios making movies by number to get the highest possible box office or are we letting directors and filmmakers tell the stories they want to tell--for me the answer is somewhere in the middle because I get the bottom line matters, but I also suspect had Z never gotten involved with Challengers, this movie would have been made mostly for art house crowds. It only got a wide release because of Z's fame.

I definitely think this is a niche film, as is Euphoria despite it's popularity, but I'm not sure I think any actor or actress should feel confined to only take a small variety of roles so as to maximize box office.

[cipheramnesia]

Jennifer's Body is profoundly overrated and I will never recommend it as queer horror. I can name a half dozen other movies without even working hard that are better horror and have better queer text or subtext. All Cheerleaders Die, Seance, The Ranger, She Never Died, Book of Monsters, Assassination Nation, Spiral, Jamie Marks Is Dead, Tragedy Girls, and even the lackluster Cannibal Troll.

Jason X (the one in space) is a better, smarter, more interesting and more genre savvy horror movie with more profound love of horror than any movie in the Scream franchise or Cabin In The Woods (for which I have a special dislike). For that matter so is Troll 2. Also the original Slumber Party Massacre and even Slumber Party Massacre 2. Scream and Cabin In The Woods have a slick coat of paint and clever dialog hiding a middling to offensively hateful understanding of horror. Slumber Party Massacre, the OG purposefully genre aware feminist slasher film is the bar to clear and they failed.

American Horror Story and every Walking Dead Series are joyless effects reels that respectively try and fail to capture the gonzo spirit of the 70s and 80s, and George Romeros entire body of work. They're machines built to manufacture scenes that will make people talk on social media about how bloody and/or shocking they get, strung up on an empty frame with nothing but cold wind blowing through it. Chucky the series and Z Nation are superior in literally every aspect except budget. They are series full of heart and deeply care about characters, trauma, and growth, and the bonkers amount of surrounding violence sustains and propels the narrative rather than existing for the sake of some grim notion of social darwinism.

Event Horizon is widely regarded by most critics as terrible in every way you can imagine. Despite this, it is overrated. It is not a secretly good underdog classic, and Paul W.S. Anderson is a hack who has never made a single good movie in his life. It's hard to come up with specific and superior alternatives because I'm not sure there's a worse outer space horror that exists. Pick literally anything else.

I think the last three Romero zombie movies were pretty good. I think Return of the Living Dead 2 is also pretty fun if a bit dumb. I think a lot of people pretend like The Blair Witch was never scary or good because they're embarrassed they got caught up in the hype and don't want to admit they liked it. Tobe Hooper is a legit genius director. Jordan Peel somehow is underrated and it's definitely because of racism. Hellraiser parts 5, 6, and 7 are okay - not great but better than their reputation, certainly better than part 4.

I don't think there's any hard fast rules about what makes something horror or what makes something disturbing or scary. A lot of Tumblr likes to declare specific things as rules of horror as if set in stone but it's not true. Horror can be as much about contrast or the unknown or the deeply and grotesquely detailed as it needs to be. It's a fools game to pretend to know what any single thing defines horror because it's as much a silent empty hall as it is literally gallons of blood gushing everywhere. It's the knock at the door for the last man on earth or a giant army of ants stomping a city. Defining how some elements of horror function is interesting. Declaring them as rules is stupid.

Ultimately none of those matter anyway because the best horror is just about people. Not as in people being the horror, but as in the subject of humanity. Love of the artists. Joy in the form of everything awful or alarming. Sharing and loving the audience who spends their time with the art. A lot of horror knows how to exploit its audience and flatter its audience and pamper its audiences' egos about how they're not like those OTHER horror fans those WEIRDOS because this one is meta or expensive or artistic. The lack of love is tangible, the emptiness between words and bodies and moments in time. Horror is joy, filling that space with love and humanity.

In general, my opinions about horror are objectively wrong, however they're wrong in ways interesting enough to be worth considering.

[cassatine]

☕️ + zero dark 30. Been pissed off since I saw that film and rarely found anyone who cares to critique it so really just want to hear you drag it tbh

*cracks hands*

Zero Dark Thirty is a CIA-backed pro-torture propaganda film, and while it pretends at being a near-journalistic piece, it is in fact constructed to make the CIA look good and torture like a reasonable if maybe sort of regrettable option that not only works (a lie) but was also instrumental to the irl extrajudicial killing of bin Laden (also a lie). It did draw a fair amount of criticism for the way it dealt with its subject matter, mostly wrt its take on torture and historical accuracy, and if you hit libgen or scihub you’ll find more in-depth criticism than I can offer. I watched it once maybe five years ago, and I mostly know about it from reading up on the military-entertainment complex, so that’s the aspect I’m going to be focusing on.

Because when I say the film is CIA-backed propaganda, I don't mean the Agency saw it and liked it. I mean the CIA was involved in shaping it, starting before there even was a script: Mark Boal (the screenwriter) and Kathryn Bigelow (the director) were already working on a movie script about the hunt for bin Laden and were in talks with the CIA for that project at the time he was killed; when the news broke they decided to scrap their losing hunt movie and do a winning hunt one. The CIA loved the idea and gave them so much access to information and personnel there was a bit of a scandal about it.

I also mean that beyond the specifics, it’s not something unique to Zero Dark Thirty: it's the norm for American movies using DoD assets or internal knowledge or locations for free (free for the filmmakers/studios/moneyfolks, at the end of the day it’s people's taxes that pay for it), that the script and film go through the concerned branch(es), in this case the CIA, for approval, which is of course conditional and mostly rests on creatives’ and studios’ willingness to comply with requests for changes. Depending on directors, studios, screenwriters, the sort of stories being told, which arms of the DoD are concerned, and a bunch of other factors, that process can be more or less invasive but overall, it concerns a long list of films, although the most complete one I found stops at 2013.

Creatives do get to argue back, to a degree; some of them do, more or less successfully, some of them, well, don't (Boal and Bigelow belong to that category). I say to a degree, first because as I mentioned, the DoD is under no obligation to give its approval in the end, so if you plan to make an epic war film (or shoot a scene in, said, the CIA headquarters at Langley) it can be sort of hard to justify to the money people why they need to pay for planes and fake locations and things when the DoD can offer those planes, let you in real locations, and give you access to all the things for the measly cost of a few script changes.

Secondly, to a degree because there is an unavoidable requirement, that of positive representation, with a view to public opinion and recruitment:

According to the army’s own handbook, A Producer’s Guide to U.S. Army Cooperation with the Entertainment Industry, this collaboration must “aid in the recruiting and retention of personnel.” (quoted in Operation Hollywood)

Of course, if you look at military-entertainment films, you’ll find plenty that are more nuanced than actual recruitment spots; the positive rep requirement means the DoD can say no to helping any film project deemed too negative, but it’s not going to say no over an asshole drill sergeant or bureaucracy criticism or a good helping of “war is hell” etc if, on the whole, the project is deemed positive enough in its portrayal of the military, its role, or its importance.

While accuracy is also technically a requirement, as can be read in the DoD’s own guidelines ("the production must be authentic in its portrayal of actual persons, places, military operations and historical events. Fictional portrayals must depict a feasible interpretation of military life, operations and policies.", as quoted in Operation Hollywood), in a move no one saw coming, that's…. extremely relative, as this amazing quote also from Operation Hollywood illustrates:

Phil Strub, the head of the Pentagon’s liaison office recently revealed the following criterion for getting approval for a film as “accurate”: “Any film that portrays the military as negative is not realistic to us.”

In practice it means that, well, historical and factual accuracy frequently take a backseat to the positive representation requirement, but also that DoD requests couched as demands for greater accuracy range from technical nitpickings, to erasure of atrocities in the name of being accurate to the ethos of american fighting forces, to technical nitpickings that are really major changes. Etc.

In Zero Dark Thirty's case, one of the script changes demanded by the CIA was not to have the lead character be an active participant in the opening torture scene:

"For this scene we emphasized that substantive debriefers [i.e. Maya] did not administer [Enhanced Interrogation Techniques] because in this scene he had a non-interrogator, substantive debriefer assisting in a dosing technique." (from a Gawker article covering the changes)

Under the procedural jargon and the rulebook technicality framing it's not a small change that's being required here, especially since it concerns the opening scene, which sets the tone, and is the audience's introduction to the lead character. Even in 2012, introducing your heroic ladyboss character doing torture was somewhat risky; making her an observer was more likely to help with audience identification, and it gave the film more time to bring the audience to the point of accepting that maybe torture is kinda yikes and it's not great we had to do it (which is not at all the same than it's not great we did it) but. it worked, didn't it? and who's gonna argue it wasn't for the greater good?

Leaving some room to the notion that torture is kinda yikes lets the film pretend it isn't portraying torture as a good thing, no sir, all the while constructing a narrative that frames acts of torture as instrumental to the success of the bin Laden hunt, something a bunch of reliable people, including one acting head of the CIA itself, have called a big fat lie and/or generally criticized as a choice for the film.

The CIA script memo only says that according to The Rulebook Maya wouldn't have been an active participant in the opening scene; what was made from that change comes from Boal and Bigelow, in an example of the worst sort of synergy the military-entertainment complex facilitates -- they were clearly into working *with* the CIA and never planning to do anything but a film about heroic, hard-working Agency people who had to do some ugly things for the greater good, and in turn the CIA was more than happy to help. But if Zero Dark Thirty’s overall thesis and message wouldn’t have been that different without the CIA’s active involvement, it would nonetheless have been a different film. It would have shown a lead character arguably closer to the people that inspired her, people who include a CIA employee literally nicknamed the Queen of Torture (identified as Alfreda Frances Bikowsky). It would have shown an officer firing an AK-47 from a roof for funsies during a party, and it would have shown a dog used to scare a detainee. Those two scenes were removed for “accuracy.” I don’t know if the CIA used dogs for the bin Laden hunt, or if it’s in their catalogue of atrocities at all, but I’ve seen Abu Ghraib pics and it’s definitely accurate that dogs were used for intimidation during the War on Terror.

Now, while I find the accuracy tricks especially pernicious personally, you’ll find plenty of cases where the DoD liaisons don’t ever bother – Operation Hollywood, which I quoted previously, covers times when they straight up asked for more positive rep or, you know, lied, or demanded stuff like plain atrocities erasure, as with John Woo’s 2002 Windtalkers, the script of which initially had a Marine nicknamed ‘the Dentist’ removing gold teeth from Japanese war dead and a scene in which another Japanese soldier attempting to surrender gets blasted with a flamethrower, also I think by a Marine -- two things documented to have happened at least many times more than once, details in this book I’m reading, but all that went away easily enough because the Marines have an ethos or something, and that’s what must be shown.

The whole system is rotten, really. It’s meant to facilitate positive portrayals of the US military and if not completely forbid criticism, make it not only much harder in comparison to put it on screen for cheap, but also to flood it under those more positive portrayals. Zero Dark Thirty is an especially awful, unsubtle product of that system, but it is not a surprising one. The almost-underdog against a unhelpful bureaucracy, the ugly but necessary acts, the horror of war and even the moral injuries – nothing in Zero Dark Thirty is new or revolutionary. We’ve seen it a hundred times, and if it was American, more often than not the DoD had a hand in it.

[tangledbea]

Hello I can't remember the last time I watched Tangled the movie as well as the tv series but was shocked to find out about the controversies surrounding Chris Sonnenburg and the accusations from the former staff of a toxic work environment. I also read a post that you confronted him about racism within the series and movie. Would you mind telling me what the racist moments were in the series and movie that you pointed out? I want to understand the situation better, thanks.

I'd first like to clarify that I didn't confront him. I wasn't even talking to him. I was having a conversation with someone else, and he commented on it something like, "And here's where I bow out." And then we never saw him on Tumblr again.

As for racist moments, the movie has an all-white cast. Even background characters. There is not a single POC in Tangled, even though there are crowd scenes with hundreds of people in them.

And while there are POC in the series, the Black people are all pretty trope-ish. While I adore Lance, Xavier and Quaid (and Ruthless Ruth), there is still a sense of tokenism to them which I wish the creators hadn’t let happen. Lance is the token black guy in the main cast, who is mostly comic relief and doesn’t get much of a character arc of his own, on top of which, he begins the series as a criminal. Xavier is the magical negro trope. Quaid and Ruth drift away from the tokenism a bit, but they’re still each only there for an insignificant amount of time. (It’s kinda badass that Ruth was a proprietress and Quaid is basically Tangled’s answer to Bass Reeves, though.)

Then there's Madame Canardist. She was created for the movie, but not used (you can spot Vigor in the credits, though), so I can't even blame this entirely on the show (though they could have done something to make her less of a racist caricature). Madame Canardist is a harmful stereotype of a Romani person, frequently and negatively called a g*psy. (That word is as taboo as Esqu*mo and neither should be used.) They are not all fortune-tellers. They are not all mystics. They are not all swindlers. They do not all live in painted wagons. And they are a people who are alive today who are still being persecuted.

Vigor, himself, is a racist stereotype. Psychic monkey in a turban was an oft-used racist caricature for Indian people, back when the mysticism and glamor of the East was all the rage in the US and the UK. The fact that such imagery has persevered to this day shows how little people know or think about the stereotypes.

And then there's the Separatists of Saporia. I have seen people criticize them for being Middle Eastern-based (if nothing else, they are all POC, regardless of what race they are), and having a group of POC take over a predominantly white kingdom in a terrorist move... well, I hope you can see why that's a problem. Even Petunia (the Daylight Thief pretending to be Kiera's mother) is a villain.

The series definitely did better than the movie, in that it included POC at all, but as the saying goes, "They did better, but there's still room for improvement." I acknowledge that there has been progress in the Tangled franchise. But a lot of the issues are a complete tonedeafness to societal issues. I don't think the decisions were necessarily made in malice, but that doesn't mean we can't criticize them.

Before I close this out, I would like to bring up Gothel, and by extension Cassandra. Many people think Gothel is an antisemitic caricature, but I disagree, primarily because her design is based on the looks of Donna Murphy (her voice actor) and Cher, neither of whom are Jewish. Not to mention, the movie was written by a Jewish man, and I find it hard to believe that he would have deliberately written antisemitic tropes into his movie. I think Gothel is an unfortunate coincidence. However, I am also not Jewish, and I am not at all attempting to say that Jewish people who feel slighted are wrong. I have seen convincing arguments both for and against the idea, all from Jewish people, so it's not as if there's a unified front.

[in-defense-of-loki]

I think the worst thing about Ragnarok is being that movie that was almost okay. And what I mean is, after being a fan of Loki since Thor 1 (which opened me up to the wonderful comic world, and Norse mythos), I was excited for the next movie that featured Loki. I felt a little off about him not dying in TDW only to show up on the throne he didn't actually want, but I could move past it. And now realizing that Loki was supposed to die, and the next film was going to take place in Helhiem, I'm so disappointed about what we could have had. It also makes it glaringly obvious Loki on the throne was such an afterthought.

But I went to the theaters with my band of movie-goers, and sat through Ragnarok feeling....off. It was enjoyable for what it delivered, I wasn't bored or disinterested, and it kept me distracted enough I didn't immediately realize it's fatal flaws. And I imagine nor did most people, and most those people continue to ignore it (at this point I think maybe on purpose). After it was over, and my band of peeps discussed what we watched, I was left feeling...empty. Something was bereft. And then going on to talk to my other friends who watched it, but not with me, expressing their like of the movie, I felt even more awkward. Because I didn't really enjoy it. I didn't understand why, at first, but I didn't want to be left out, so I pretended it was great.

And maybe a lot of others did this, too.

Then I went online with my feelings, only to find a massive amount of posts about how much it actually wasn't good, how much of the original movies were erased, replaced with soulless replicas, continuity gone, problematic themes afoot, trauma erasure, and how out of place it actually is by taking a 180° on style, atmosphere, and characterization.

I felt seen, heard, and then I started reading metas being critical of the movie and all it's elements....and then the truth behind what Waititi did to us fans on top of admitting his skewed perception. And my feelings were realised, I found what was bereft, a name to all that which I experienced with the film. And what was wrong with Ragnarok wasn't as blatant or immediately obvious as with the Loki show, least not to me, and that's part of the problem with the movie. And before anyone goes, well at least the story wasn't bad, I read a side by side comparison of Thor 1 and Ragnarok and they are identical, with some elements differing. But that's just saying it was Sakaar instead of Earth type shit. I am gonna guess that Love and Thunder is gonna be a redo/copy of what happened to Thor in IF and EG, because Waititi hasn't shown he can be creative by himself, but maybe that was the writers, Pearson, Kyle, and Yost, fault? Dunno.

But Ragnarok has a great fake-out, and I'm sure it's vivid colors and new characters helped fool us at first. I think most people get hung up on that, and that's why they don't find issue with it, willing to pretend it doesn't have any flaws. I'm sad and angry we were handed such a film and expected to sit pretty and take it, like a loyal dog, and that many people fell for it. To continue the analogy, perhaps the rest of us are more like cats snuffing the new food because we liked what we were served before. It's why I will not be watching Thor 4, I'm sure I'll get to know what happens anyway via posts on here.

But I'm done, I'm done with the MCU, I'm done with Waititi, I'm done with the direction they're taking things. I've stopped consuming their media, and I won't support them in other endeavors, OFMD is not the only thing I'll be skipping. I don't care how many times people will tell me this new Marvel show is actually really great, it's like they're listening! It's bait, and I'm done being fooled.

I'll still engage with meta on here, though, it soothes a bit.

[futuregws]

Okay and I ask you the same question what project of her did good outside of euphoria bc more than half of the people watching are not watching it for her let's be real// we can be real. Zendaya is the one who got people watching Euphoria and no one knew the other cast as much as her so you saying they don’t watch for her is so funny. Everything she has been on has been successfully unlike the guy you go crazy over. His fans are under tweets everyday asking people if they have seen Chaos walking, Cherry, Devil all of the time and countless of his other movies. If he really was popular outside of spiderman everyone would’ve known those movies not just his fans. You ask people about what zendaya has been on and they will name half of her projects while Tom is only known for Spider-Man. Everytime people call him out on his acting/ project all they can bring up is the impossible which he made when he was 11 and has no other critical Acclaim movies what’s so ever. The hate for that girl gets sadder everyday because you and your anon has nothing on her and think this pr is doing al lot for her when he is the one who needed her 2 days before uncharted came out.

One is the youngest Emmy winner and the other one has been trying hard to get one award that isn’t kids awards. And before you said “he got Bafta” yea he did and it was voted award. Next

First of all please don't even call me a Tom fan I'm far from it, so get it right, and second, there's absolutely no way you wrote all that with a straight face the amount of fantasy there it's insane, zendaya might have introduced people to euphoria, but they most definitely did not stay for her, she's literally the character that people care about the least, or are we gonna ignore that it was Maddy's make up looks that got people OBSESSED, or the whole vibe and cinematography, and now in season two the WHOLE Cassie and Nate thing are we just gonna pretend that it wasn't that, that people were excited about and don't even get me started on you saying that people actually know all her projects, babes they don't and there's a difference between knowing and actually enjoying come on, and you know what's absolutely crazy is that yall are still so obsessed with her Emmy I swear yall talk about it more than she does were yall the ones that won am I missing that part?? And also do I need to bring up again the HUGE list of actors who have a long list of well known, liked and successful projects and yet no award, you're gonna tell me they are less important or talented, and finally please hun search the definition of hate for the love of god, just bc you don't like what others say doesn't mean it's hate

[akookminsupporter]

People who like pop culture stan rich people, even if we like to pretend we don't, or that they aren't that rich. We are all stanning rich people all the time. But when problems of social and financial divide in our society are heightened or more felt (currently partly due to the pandemic), cognitive dissonance gets interrupted and people tend to misplace a lot of anger and helplessness on the necks of random celebrities. The In the SOOP houses are big but doesn't every kpop idol get styled in ridiculously expensive clothing by stylists and isn't this whole thing part of a larger glamourous industry?

It isn't BTS's fault we live in the kind of hell where some people can't afford to be treated for cancer while Jeff Bezos goes on a dick rocket to space.

Some of the comments people have made about the SOOP houses have more to do with the politics of certain visuals because they look like a certain kind of rich people house that a lot of people find tacky. Sociologically, people see these kinds of houses as worse than more expensive but more minimalist houses or somehow more indicative of 'bad wealth'. This could be true I don't know. I agree with you that the SOOP houses are a set. People will be able to watch the soop for years to come whatever happens to them.

I have heard some of my friends say that what they love about watching K reality is that everyone lives in a "classy" normal looking apartment and does normal stuff like cooking and cleaning. There are fantasies and anthropological divisions happening there. It isn't an attitude that is all that different from one of my WASP friends rich parents who see outward displays of wealth as gaudy and "classless".

At the end of the day BTS are more charitable than we probably even know about. It makes as much sense to criticize a hollywood movie that costs two hundred million dollars to make than whatever got built for the soop. But when BTS are seen in big houses people take it personally. There must be better ways of reckoning with financial inequality than worrying about where BTS sleep.

So the problem is that the fact that they remodelled a property to record content that would be sold and consumed by fans like 98% of everything to do with BTS was too obvious? But them using private planes or wearing expensive clothes or buying art isn't? Doesn't that also make it obvious?

And I don't know but, I'm pretty sure if the guys had to record in the soop with the budget and accommodations of BV 1 for example, fans would also complain because they are millionaires! The company has money because of them! The least they could do is give them better accommodations and budgets according to the status they have today.

I'll say it again, I do think criticism of the rich getting richer every day while others are getting poorer is valid but criticising BTS or its agency for using the money for something work-related is a bit... I don't know. Especially when we have no idea what they did with the house afterwards.

Something that is important to point out and that someone already did in one of the reblogs of my post (sorry for not remembering your name) is that in the soop has a considerable amount of brands as sponsors, so a lot of the elements in the houses are most likely product placement.

[j0eyj0rdis0n]

DATING MIW

CHRIS MOTIONLESS -

Loves showing you off, like it's insane the amount he talks about you

Also love love loves giving you his jackets when it's cold out because they're so big on you

Y'all go all out on Halloween and I don't even think I need to go into much detail cause y'all got the most decorated house on the block and all the little kids love you guys

You both run on coffee, half of your grocery runs are just for coffee, every morning you both sit together and enjoy your coffee even if it's hectic you both make time for that silence together

You both sing together in the car and you know despite all of Chris's efforts to assure you he's not distracted driving, he totally is

You do his makeup before concerts and he lets you have free reign which makes you so so happy, he loves the glimmer in your eye when he tells you to 'go wild'

Always throws you a rose at the end of the show with a wink and it never fails to make you blush

His kiss of choice is on the tip of your nose, he finds it so cute for an unknown reason, or at least one he refuses to tell you...

If you can't come on tour with him then he makes sure to video call you nightly unless you're busy then he just relentlessly texts you through the day

Always makes sure to let you know how much he loves you and how much you mean to him

RICKY HORROR -

I'm telling you photoshoots every day

He finds every part of you so attractive, from your head to your toes you're perfect to him

Long walks together (of course he secretly takes photos of you during)

The amount of scrapbooks y'all will have when you're old and grey is crazy

When you watch movies he always criticizes the cinemaphotography, movie night is always Thursday. You have no choice in this.

Forces you to have virtual movie night with him over video call when he's on tour if you're not with him even with the protests you put up, he knows you love it

He will not get interrupted during these calls, he makes absolutely sure of it. If any of the guys walk in, one glare from him and they're out

Tries so so hard to teach you how to play guitar

He always gives you the prettiest shots in the tour vlogs, often moments you never realized he was recording

You call him your stalker since he can never quit watching you like he's amazed by everything you do

He devotes so many songs to you on tour, some of which don't make sense but you take it anyway

Can't ever seem to take his eyes off of you when he preforms, like he can seem to pick you out anywhere in the venue

He's a hand kiss kind of guy, very romantic of course

Lots and lots of roses as gifts

Loves it when you help him with his makeup

RYAN SITKOWSKI -

Teasingly throws picks at you during shows

You always have to do his makeup and slick back his hair because he pretends he's too busy to do so even though he just loves the way you spend extra time with him before shows

He cooks for you always and loves every second

You both coordinate outfits together, making sure they match and everyone knows you're together

Lots of late night skates through the cities you tour through together (if you can't skateboard then bike or roller skate)

Always exploring together and he always has to take your picture

Loves posting about you two and what you guys do together

If you weren't a stoner before then this man has converted you somehow

Always cracking some stupid dad joke that you always laugh at even when no one else does because you just can't help yourself

Light pecks on the lips are his most common way of showing affection besides hand squeezes that always seem to comfort you perfectly

If you can't come on tour with him then he always video calls three times a week at 10:00 PM whatever time zone you're in.

Loves telling you crazy tour stories

Always brings you a beautiful outfit home that he thinks you'll like

VINNY MAURO -

Literally like a lost puppy without you so stay close at all times

You have to cook for him since he literally seems to burn water

Lots and lots of teasing from him, sometimes he doesn't realize you take it to heart but feels terrible when you finally tell him

He loves it when you play with his hair or put it in different styles

Also when you help him put on his body paint? The man loves it

Every car ride you have together you compete and see who can name the most songs that come on shuffle, you usually win unless you feel nice enough

He loves it when you sit in on his drum streams, he gets so distracted by you that the chat gets jealous (of course you get unlimited and free song requests even if he makes fun of you for some of them)

Sometimes he tries to embarrass you by making you play drums on stream (something in which you're quite bad at)

Constant competitions to see who's better at what

Lots of video games together, like a crazy amount

On tour you both team up on the guys, playing all sorts of pranks

He lets you co-star in his segments of the tour vlogs and you both eat it up

If you can't come on tour with him, he always makes sure to call you

Always manages to find you the cd's or records you want on tour and bring them back as not-so-surprises

Definitely a neck kisser

JUSTIN MORROW -

Absolutely adores you like the way this man looks at you makes you want to tear up from joy

He always lets you pick the new color for what he should dye his hair, he never cares how crazy it may be

Loves it when you match your outfits with his hair color

You both jam out together, making sure to annoy the neighbors in the process

You both cook together often, usually dinner, unless you unanimously feel lazy and decide to order takeout

Lots and lots of sports marathons, if you don't like it then honey are you screwed because this man is obsessed

If you don't like the Dolphins then you're kicked out during the games with any opposing teams, sorry I don't make the rules here

Always making faces at you while preforming which you don't hesitate to make back

Helps you take plenty of pictures for your socials and loves doing so

More of a phone call kind of guy so when you can't come on tour he'll make sure to call you relentlessly, checking up on you all the time, he acts like he didn't just call you two hours ago and expects something grand to have happened

A forehead kisser, he loves the fact that he's taller than you and makes it very apparent

Loves being that one obvious goth couple in public and having people stare

[its-ashley-95baybe]

Ashley read what this one blog just posted

“First of all please don't even call me a Tom fan I'm far from it, so get it right, and second, there's absolutely no way you wrote all that with a straight face the amount of fantasy there it's insane, zendaya might have introduced people to euphoria, but they most definitely did not stay for her, she's literally the character that people care about the least, or are we gonna ignore that it was Maddy's make up looks that got people OBSESSED, or the whole vibe and cinematography, and now in season two the WHOLE Cassie and Nate thing are we just gonna pretend that it wasn't that, that people were excited about and don't even get me started on you saying that people actually know all her projects, babes they don't and there's a difference between knowing and actually enjoying come on, and you know what's absolutely crazy is that yall are still so obsessed with her Emmy I swear yall talk about it more than she does were yall the ones that won am I missing that part?? And also do I need to bring up again the HUGE list of actors who have a long list of well known, liked and successful projects and yet no award, you're gonna tell me they are less important or talented, and finally please hun search the definition of hate for the love of god, just bc you don't like what others say doesn't mean it's hate”

Euphoria didn’t break records in season 1 because people watched it for the other cast members when no one even knew them. Euphoria got so popular on twitter because the amount of love Zendaya gets on that app which made people subscribe to HBO just for Zendaya. Zendaya is the most popular actor right now and this person above hates on her to the point they think she’s not the one bringing in the people. Every article that came out mentioned how Zendaya made this show what it is today and even HBO max came out and thanked her and said it’s all thanks to Zendaya that people are watching this show. This person above and their anon always makes tom to be this guy that brings people to watch his movies when that’s no the case and they always say that he is so popular so if he is how come people don’t care for what he does outside of spiderman? She also mentioned that people got obsessed because of Maddy’s makeup completely forgetting that Men who don’t do makeup watch this show? There’s so many movies and show that have an amazing cinematography but that isn’t bringing in watchers is it? No. These haters can’t fathom that Zendaya brings in people to watch her no matter what shit she’s on. As if there isn’t multiple virals tweets saying that they wouldn’t have watch this show if Zendaya wasn’t in it. Funny thing is she said people care about Rue the least but wasn’t she the number one most mentioned character on Euphoria on twitter? We keep mentioning her Emmy because she is the youngest lead actress in a show to win an Emmy and that’s an accomplishment. Zendaya is critically acclaimed actress no matter how much they try to dismiss that. Also what’s with this obsession of them saying Zendaya is the one who needs this pr more than him? She’s a household name no matter where she is she’s trending number and people will do anything to watch what she’s on but can’t say the same for someone else who needed this pr far more then her. People completely ignored him on his own movie while Tobey and Andrew trended for 3 month straight on twitter. Too bad he will forever be known as Spiderman and Zendaya’s boyfriend.

That Friday the thirteenth is hitting hard this go around. Still going strong lol.

Im glad people are speaking up still.