#body revolution

[lookingjoligood]

Updated Review of Body Revolution by Jillian Michaels

My reviews of Body Revolution by Jillian Michaels continue to be my most viewed posts. I feel it is necessary for me to update my review and also add a disclaimer: Update: Initially, I found Jillian Michaels’ approach to exercise and dieting highly motivational. Her intense workouts and strict dietary guidelines pushed me to achieve remarkable physical results, which fueled my motivation and…

[bixels]

The idea that uni protesters are "elitist ivy-league rich kids larping as revolutionaries" on Twitter and Reddit and even here is so fucking funny to me if you actually know anything about the student bodies at these unis. Take it from someone who's going to one of the biggest private unis in the US, 80% of the peers I know are either from the suburbs or an apartment somewhere in America, children of immigrants, or here on a student visa. I've heard about one-percenter students, but I've never met one in person. Like, don't get me wrong, the institution as a whole is still very privileged and white. I've talked with friends and classmates about feeling weird or dissonant being here and coming from such a different background. But in my art program, I see BIPOC, disabled, queer, lower-income students and faculty trying to deconstruct and tear that down and make space every day. So to take a cursory glance at a crowd of student protesters in coalitions that are led by BIPOC & 1st/2nd-gen immigrant students and HQ'd in ethnic housings and student organizations and say, "ah. children of the elite." Get real.

[zephyraes]

STIMBOARD - DANCING ARCADE GAMES

Please link back to this post if used.

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[beaulesbian]

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023)

So we're just supposed to let people die because some algorithm says that that's supposed to happen? You realize how messed up that sounds, right?

[arthur-lesters-right-arm]

Arthur, distraught: You are straight up colonizing my body !

John: No Arthur, if anything I am unionizing your body.

Arthur, visibly more distraught: Dear god my heritage has caught up with me

[euryvices]

sometimes i wish we were intangible just so i could love you like i mean to

[familyagrestefanblog]

God damnit! I knew Monarque’s facial expressions looked familiar!

Even the eyebrows are the same!

It’s actually quite remarkable that the show manages to let Adrien/ Chat Noir and Gabriel/ Hawkmoth (as civilians or whatever miraculous forms) have such individual designs - not even resembling each other too much at all - and yet through the facial expressions, the way they talk and their body language they naturally share one can still consistently recognize them - at least on some subconscious level - as father and son.

Come to think of it. This entire scene of Monarque being fake-kind to Chloé to use her was in general top notch in this regard:

I mean, YEAH. This is absolutely Adrien’s / Chat Noir’s evil and manipulative father.

And the only way to show and convey kindness/ politness this man would acknowledge to be “worthy” of himself to use in a situation like this is either the way his own “perfect” son behaves, or at the very least Gabriel knows exactly what type of kind and polite behavior HE is demanding from Adrien.

I dont have a gif of Adrien moving in the subtle ways like Gabriel copies in the upper one but it’s definitely closer to Adrien’s body language than Gabriel’s own (though by instinct it 300% reminds me of CatWalker

but maybe that's influenced by Monarque being a miraculous identity and so was CatWalker who - as we know - is the perfect [and desperate and completely submissive] prince Adrien was raised to be so my point still stands).

And the second gif is 100% the move we long know from Adrien and also one we know comes from the way Gabriel teached Adrien to express himself for formal politness towards a woman:

[thirdity]

It is useless to dream of revolution through content, useless to dream of a revelation through form, because the medium and the real are now in a single nebula whose truth is indecipherable.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation

[dark-falz]

PSO C.A.R.D. Revolution

Pollux

[stan-rabelais-et-diderot]

Small thoughts on the Netflix Three Body Problem adaptation

1) We are making it international" they said. They replaced all the international collaboration, the counsel of world leaders that we see throughout the books with... two British dudes deciding everything by themselves, not accountable to anyone. They managed to make it less international than the book. But more than that, they perverted the very themes Liu Cixin wove into his books, the very ideas the books revolve on: group mentality & collaboration versus the individual, banal or exceptional. The Netflix show removed the very notion of collective, of group mentality, without which there is nothing to contrast individuality against.

2) They made Ye Wenjie an unrecognizable shell of herself. Her back is not held up straight. An old Ye Wenjie, cursing, sloushing, moving to England. Is it really Ye Wenjie? It bothers me so much that they could get away with saying this is Ye Wenjie. This is not her.

3) They "simplified" the science to a point where nothing is explained, nothing can survive through any kind of analysis of the logic of the things shown & the actions taken. Just one example, because I’ve seen the headset being praised for looking “cool”. It’s not cool if it’s at the expense of a logical plot. The futurist headsets we are shown imply that either 1° the Trisolarians are able to send sizable physical objects [which they physically can't, the limit to what they could send through space is clearly explained, it is the two protons they did send Earth] or 2° the Trisolarians shared schematics of advanced technology with the ETO, letting them to develop the headsets. But that is the one thing the Trisolarians would never do, as their entire plan rely on humans’ technology not being able to develop any further than it already has.

4) I thought it was gonna be lesser than the Tencent show. I didn't expect it to be so utterly lacking on all front. If there was one point of worthy comparison, one point where I expected Netflix to do a good job, if only to show they had a bigger budget, it was “the” boat scene. Tencent spent 25% of their budget on that scene, so I expected Netflix would try to make their boat scene more spectacular, better on a technical level, to show that the US special effects are undefeated or something. I would have never expected that they wouldn’t even try to compete. That scene happened in the episode 5 of the Netflix show & it’s underwhelming. It has no gravitas, but of course it can’t have any gravitas, it’s not the culmination of the collaboration of humans across the globe, demonstrating that they can fight back & achieve greatness when they are united, of course it can’t be the same when it’s just 10 British people working in isolation. They didn’t just do something underwhelming on a technical level, they did something underwhelming on a narrative level. Just like the scene with the insects, the culmination of the Tencent show had no weigh & no impact when done by Netflix.

5) The misguided belief that somehow an American show could show Chinese history (the cultural revolution) to an international audience better & with more accuracy than a Chinese show to a Chinese audience because of the censorship in China is laughable. An international audience would need more context to understand a historical time that they or their parents didn’t live through, but that’s not what Netflix did. What they showed was mildly violent & shocking to be sure, but not very accurate to the content of the book. They cut out a lot of plot, but they could have done that, simplified it without stripping it of context or changing the story so much it resonates wrong. I'll just give small examples:

on the stage when they condemn Ye Wenjie's father (with microphones in front of a huge audience???) they keep saying "lies", which makes no sense, that's not the logic, the charge is propagating western propaganda, upholding western values & a capitalist way of thinking, not lying (see the end of page note on that point).

they call Ye Wenjie comrade during her time at the Red Coast (in the book [& in the Tencent show] her status as a political dissident & therefore NOT a comrade is emphasized, stated explicitly. If you don't understand the social implication, let's simplify & say that being a comrade is like being a citizen, not a comrade, not part of the group, not trusted).

Netflix Ye Wenjie unironically says: "how awesome would it be if China was the first [country to make contact with aliens]". She says it, mind you, not in front of the political commissioner because she is asking for something & need to butter him up, no, she is just enthusiastically patriotic? She is shown to be enthousiastically patriotic toward China & LATER she sells out the planets to the Trisolarians.

The inconsistencies are not only baffling deviations from the source materials that display a complete lack of comprehension of Ye Wenjie as a character, as well as an astonishing disregard for the accuracy of the ideology of (Mao-area) communism & the history of Maoist China. They didn't show a lot of content, so they could have easily avoided making such basis mistakes.

What really pisses me off is that I keep seeing press pieces saying that the Netflix version “doesn’t shy away from showing”, “won't censor” the part of the story taking place during the Cultural Revolution, sometimes outright saying it as a reason to watch the Netflix version over the Tencent one, implying to the readers the Tencent version is heavily censored, when in reality the Tencent version spend a lot more time than on it than the Netflix one, showing how bad it was, in an accurate way, very close to the content of the book. The political rhetoric fallacies, the bureaucracy, the hypocrisy, how miserable everything is, is shown very well.

[Disclaimer, I'm not Chinese, it's not my culture, it’s not the country I live in. But in France there are Maoists, so I’ve learned just enough about the history of Mao & the Cultural Revolution to hold very negative views about it. In reverse, in a very racist, sinophobic way, many Westerners think Chinese people can’t think for themselves if they don’t hate every single thing about China & they lump in the country, the people & the Xi Jinping administration. It’s absurd to ask other people to hate their country, to have no pride in anything from their country. What hypocrisy, in every country, nationalism is taught to us from the time we first attend school. Patriotism is a requirement, it’s ingrained, internalized in all of us. We can be critical of our country’s history, of our government, or many things & still find pride & love for some things. I know that’s the way I feel about France.]

Censorship does exist in China, it’s exist materially in a way that differs from the Hays Code in the US in both the scope of its autority & its function. It is enacted by a governement agency called the NRTA & everything that airs on tv has to be clear by the NRTA first. A clear guideline is not provided, we know what passed it, creators know what didn’t, so to a lesser extent we know what doesn’t passes NRTA censorship: graphic violence, nudity, sex, ghosts (or BL since 2021...) et caetera. It would be dishonest to pretend that the topic of Cultural Revolution is a taboo that cannot be spoken about, as if the current administration has a positive view on it & would therefore not allow it to be criticized. What is censored (as far as we know, what is different from the book) in the Tencent show is the opening scene, a very graphic violent scene. That’s it. It’s censored, probably more for the violence than anything else. Some people find it disappointing, but the symbolic meaning of that violence in not hidden in the narrative & the event are instead visually & auditory implied in a short flashback at the end of one episode.

NB) In the opening scene of the Netflix show (the same one that was cut on Tencent), the political tribunal has someone accusing: "Lies, all lies!". But lying is not a political charge. It sounds ridiculous. They just had to follow the book, they didn’t have to understand communism, but no, they had to come up with things themselves... My best guess it that the creators didn’t realized that "lying is bad" is a cultural value that is not universal.

I don't know if "lying" is a big deal in China, but I know it's not a big deal in my culture & in a Marxist/communist political context, lying is just not "a thing". They are a lot of charges you can get in a political tribunal:

-individualist behavior,

-liberalism/imperialistic thinking,

- lack of self-criticism (Maoism famously has the three principles, one of which being the practice of self-criticism so you/we can do better).

-deceiving the masses with xx propaganda [so they don't revolt when they would if they knew the truth], that’s as close to lying is a political charge can get,

-aspiring to bourgeois comfort [that can mean profiting of other people's labor, not doing enough or not wanting to sacrifice your life for the cause],

- treason & of course

- being counterrevolutionary / working against the revolution, are the two big ones !

Can you see what is not on that list ? Lying is not on that list.

[my-pjo-stuff]

Say about Luke what you want, but would he have been Roman he'd have punted Octavian into the sun by the time TLT rolled around.

[ioletia]

Yesterday I came across a tankie transfem. Which, when you think about it, doesn't really make a lot of sense. Of the states that tankies usually idealize, none of them would allow a transgender person to exist in them. Do you think Maoist China would have been accepting of anyone even the slightest bit outside the perceived normal? No. Stalin criminalized homosexuality; do you think trans people would have been that much more accepted? No. You could argue that under Lenin, the USSR was a bit more accepting of the LGBTQIA+ peoples, but he died pretty quick and was replaced by Stalin- who, again, criminalized and gulaged that shit.

The issue is that authoritarians always go after the weakest groups- such as minorities. They demonize them, ostracize them, and/or end up murdering them. And, unless our gay bombs and dysphoria lasers are in production, the LGBTQIA+ peoples will remain a minority.

Marxist-Leninists or, as they are more easily branded, Tankies, forget that the authoritarian vanguard party are still authoritarian in nature. Before the "one party socialist utopia" pipe dream is realized, there will be blood- and, as history has shown, that blood is often ours (the LGBTQIA+ and minority populations). This is of course assuming that said pipe dream would even allow us to continue existing.

In other words, if you're LGBTQIA+, a minority, a disabled person, whatever, and consider yourself a Marxist-Leninist... Maybe look at the history of that shit. Because theory and practice are two different things.

[xieyaohuan]

I know the Tencent San Ti/ 3 Body show could not include any grand Cultural Revolution scenes because it had to walk a pretty tight line to avoid accusations of engaging in historical nihilism, but to me, episode 11 of the Tencent show is in a way more devastating than the visuals we get in the opening scene of episode 1 of the Netflix show (where we see a full-blown struggle session).

One of the most terrifying abilities that authoritarian states have is to completely isolate a person from all relationships that were ever meaningful to them by forcing people to betray each other. When you've been singled out for criticism and attack, you don't just have to deal with denunciations launched against you by strangers or an anonymous state (which is terrifying enough), you have to listen as your colleagues, your friends, your parents, your children, your spouse, etc. all come forward and denounce you.

What the Tencent show manages to do is quietly build a relationship that provides two characters comfort in an otherwise extremely cold, hostile environment, and then take a hammer and shatter it to pieces. And that is some powerful stuff.

[xinyuehui]

Okay, one last post about Netflix's 3 Body Problem. I literally moved on (as in, I didn't bother finishing it), but today I saw a post on *** and some Chinese American saying the Ye Zhetai scene is the representation we need blah blah blah China could never. What triggered me the most about this is that the closest thing this person is to being Chinese is probably being born with the bloodline, probably never interacted with Chinese media. We are supposed to be in this together, and what are you talking about right now? There's a handful of Chinese diaspora out here who literally never bothered interacting with our culture (which is fine, nobody's business to tell them what to do), and then whenever America does any "representation," they are suddenly online! Sure, it would be nice if Western media started to be more diverse for us out here, but you literally can't rely on some white man to do it. You have to curate this experience for yourself if it's something you truly care about. There's no good excuse to not seek out things for yourself. The majority of the cdrama/cnovel fandom here on Tumblr (or Twitter) do not speak Chinese, but there are English subtitles on many official and fan-based platforms. Some non-Chinese danmei reader could probably tell you about censorship in China back to front better. Anyways, that's another can of worms.

Back to Ye Zhetai, I've already talked about it briefly here. It's not that deep, the scene exists to get people talking. It's all perfunctory, the banners are written in a Microsoft YaHei font (Microsoft invented this font in 2004), they do not care about the history behind it, it's to evoke a reaction in the West. Let's show this traumatic thing that happened in China, then segway all the world saving plot-line to England, is that clear now if that hasn't occurred to you yet??

There's a list of the media that stemmed from the Cultural Revolution on Wikipedia with one easy Google search. Did you really look? Did you watch and read everything on that list?? Is there really no Chinese representation apart from Netflix??? If it's not allowed in China, how could he ever write the book and publish it in China?? Did you even know about the speculation that Ye Zhetai is based on the real physicist Ye Qisun??

[blackwoolncrown]

You are not immune to propaganda.

This includes sexuality.

*transphobes DNI*

[majaurukalo]

Disabled people: please, don’t make assumptions about us and let us say what we need.

Able-bodied people: make assumptions about disabled people and talk in their place.

Disabled people: get mad.

Able-bodied people: