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verminfang · 5 years ago

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cocoroaches, butteflies, spiders, beetles, worms (if you feel like doing more: milipedes, isopods, ants, dragonflies, flies and bees)

God this is tough. Not gonna answer the if you feel like part because it makes it even harder and also answering asks on mobile cut that part of the ask off.

In descending order:

5. Butterflies: I enjoy them, they look good, they have fun symbology in various places and you can get some out there dudes but by in large they're mostly quite similar to each other and often a let down from whatever truly wild type of Caterpillar they metamorphosed from.

Cockroaches: something that would be higher on literally any other list but the competition is so so steep. I love cockroaches. Aesthetically they're great even if you don't get into the colorful varieties. They share a common ancestor with mantises which is truly wild but not as wild as Termites actually being an offshoot of the same family as cockroaches (blattodea). Virtually all roaches are social and cooperate and there's even recordings of a kind of depression among them from lonlineness. They're just cute little dudes with a pretty unfair reputation for un-cleanliness.

Beetles: Again every time I have to put one above the other is painful. Beetles are great. There are so many different types of beetle. Compare the 4,000 species of mammal described to there being over 350,000 beetle species described and even more being found. Beetles can get so wild. Bombardier beetles, gravedigger beetles etc but I also have a lot of fondness for the classic. Love a stag beetle, perpetual star's of beetle wrestling. And beetle imagery ala Khepri is also something I always enjoy seeing.

Spiders: Spiders, man what is there to day that hasn't been said. I think spiders are one of the animals that are so cool that they've transcended the arthropod stigma when you talk about liking them. Trapdoor spiders, adorable jumping spiders, Darwin bark spiders with insane web strength, there's spiders that wrap their prey up so much the pressure kills them. They're great and they look cool. Symbology spiders are sick as hell too, again no explanation needed we know all about it.

Worms: (insert worm joke) Annelids rock. There's thousands of amazing extremely weird species you'd be shocked to see. And because hey whose gonna come at me I'm also gonna count this question towards bugs that are referred to as worms but aren't technically like the Velvet Worm, a personal favourite, because no one was gonna send me and ask with Onychophora as something to rank. Also symbology wise I fucking love worms there's so much to do there. One of my favourite dnd characters warlock patron acted similar to a tape worm, consumed corpses like one of the main symbolic role of worms and was named for a line in the conqueror worm. There's more layers and those layers are all worm.

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alecandjosexcellentblog · 3 years ago

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Y: The Last Man - Episode 1 Review

Okay so obviously this is going to contain spoilers but I also feel like I need to mention another thing before starting: The first episode of Y: The Last Man contains graphic, and very bloody, imagery of both visible animal and human deaths. There won't be any pictures in this post but I wanted to mention it anyways as I will mention these scenes.

Spoiler for the entire Review: The best thing about this Episode was that Ben Schnetzer looked Gender af.

[ID: A person dressed in a large black raincoat with a black gas mask, a black backpack and a pet carrier is standing on a street in front of skyscrapers. In the background are partially visible crashed cars.]

Not-So-Quick Summary of the entire episode:

The episode opens with a bunch of ✨aesthetic✨ shots of dead bodies lying around like trash all across the world. Animals, People, crashed cars and helicopters. We quickly get told this is 3 weeks after the big mass death of every mammal with a y-chromosome. This is also the first time we meet Yorik and his pet monkey who I don't think has a name, or maybe it did and I just did not pay attention. Yorik is on the search for Beth, a person we yet not know who they are. After he saves his monkey from impending death through helicopter falling from a roof, we time travel back to a day before Mass Death™ to Yorik trying to teach a boy magic. The scene has no particular use apart from telling us Yorik wants to be a big magician. After that we cut to a scene in a, what I assume to be, narcotics anonymous meeting, where we meet Hero, Yorik's sister, and Sam, who has a total of two lines to symbolise us he is friends with Hero, and also only at the NA meeting as emotional support for her. This is also the last time we see him throughout this entire episode. We also now know who Beth is, Yorik's girlfriend who he is intending on proposing to. After these scenes we cut to Oklahoma, where we meet a black woman only called Agent 355 building a bomb for some smimey dude chewing off much more than he could swallow. He forces A355 to leave the room so he can sell her bomb, and we watch her climb out through a window and blow the house up. She jogs away in a weird shot on a street surrounded by corn fields, but then again maybe that's just how Oklahoma looks, I'm not american. After encountering a dead stag, who visibly bled out through eyes and mouth (I'd say we love a good foreshadowing but do we really?) she climbs into a black car and finds out she now is undercover in the secret service. Then we cut to Jennifer Brown, a congresswoman and the mother of Yorik and Hero, doing girlboss politician things and calling the President, rightfully, out on his misogyny. Then we cut to a, presumably, news interview of the president, or rather his Press Advisor Nora being stressed about her kids' birthday party, and also because Jennifer called her boss a misogynist. She then gets forced by him to shoot a weapon in a scene that's clearly supposed to be uncomfortable, and it worked. After that we jump to the introduction of the president's daughter Kimberly, presenting her book(s?) and talking about how unfair it is that her son gets taught bodily autonomy and consent in school, and how terrible it is that shitty men now get held accountable for sexual assault. I already don't like her and that just intensifies after we meet her sons and her husband after her interview. However we also get foreshadowing number 2, a dead mouse found by her two twin sons. At this moment I start to feel like I deserve emotional compensation for the amount of dead animals I had to see. We then go back to Yorik and his girlfriend Beth having a fun little domestic dinner, that ends with Yorik proposing, and Beth telling him she doesn't want to marry him because she doesn't want him to hold her back from meeting new people during her upcoming year in Australia. The scene ends with Beth leaving the apartment and Yorik punching the wall in a show of masculine anger™ (get a punching bag dude). Until the end of this episode this is the last we see of our Protagonist. After a scene of A355 preparing for her new mission we skip to Jennifer's new PA on a Date. The scene is clearly made to show us she has a cisgender man she cares about, F to her he seemed nice, and to show general chaos through animal visuals. Foreshadowing number three. The first clear visual we see is a panicking police horse without it's rider (the horse said ACAB, iconic) but then we see a hoard of rats cascading down the streets with people screaming in the background. Ignoring a scene of Jennifer at Kimberly's birthday party we go to our next important scene, where we see Hero, who is a paramedic, and her coworker/lover/man-who-cheats-on-his-wife-with-her having sex in the back of their ambulance truck.

He tells her that he told his wife about them, but then leaves the truck and Hero finds a message of said wife saying nothing about him cheating, but instead about him picking up baby wipes and diapers when he comes back from work. Outside of the truck we see a dog coming up to the man, we also get our fourth moment of foreshadowing with our first entirely visible animal death. The dogs, clearly painful, death (what a good boy playing death so convincingly) scares the man back into the truck where he gets immediately into a fight with Hero, which has it's point of escalation when she accidentally kills him in self defense. Now it's morning and the ambulance get's approached by a police man, who then tries to open it, but while we see Hero sit next to her coworkers dead body we hear a thump. She gets out of the back and finds the police man in a puddle of blood, however we have yet to see how he died (spoiler, the same way as the animals). The episode then cuts to a political meeting with Jennifer, her two PA's, the president and multiple other people, mainly military and other politicians. We also can see A355 standing in the background with other secret service agents. The first important thing we hear is that the entire contact to Irak broke off. Jennifer being concerned about the situation approaches the President, in this moment Mass Death™ starts with the bleeding out of eyes and vomiting of blood. While everyone is in a mass panic, A355 trying to revive the President and Jennifer trying to keep her own cool, we cut to Nora who is anxiously awaiting her husband and son coming down to breakfast. She then finds them together in her bed, as we established already dead, the last we see of her is her trying to keep her daughter out of the room. The episode ends with Yorik waking up from his monkey throwing... something - at his face. Waking up he immediately looks for Beth, but gets distracted by outside noises - namely screaming.

[ID: A grey background with the letter Y large in the middle, underneath the Y are the words The Last Man in capital letters. The image is grey scale]

Now comes my very sexy review and opinions.

Before starting to watch the show, I made a few assumptions:

Trans People won't be featured or mentioned at all

Intersex People who? Never heard of 'em

Queer people in general will either be scarce or completely non-existent

It's going to be Girlboss Fake Feminism Sci-Fi Bullshit

The Radfems will either eat this show up OR all the women will thirst over this One (1) Man still alive and it becomes a cishet man's dream

While I still don't have confirmation for the last two statements, the first 3 so far have been proven to be true - to an extent. After making my assumptions I went on to check the cast list, and, apart from Ben Schnetzer, who I only know from his great performance in PRIDE, and, to my surprise, Elliot Fletcher, I don't know a single cast member. To be fair, too surprising is that not, considering I can barely keep the actors from my favourite shows straight. However back to my surprise, I found transgender actor Elliot Fletcher to be part of the cast for this show. And I immediately had a new assumption, or more so fear: His entire character will be stripped down to dysphoria over not dying alongside all the cis men OR "see some men are alive, transphobia is no more" However, this has been neither disproven or confirmed yet, as I only watched episode one. However the fact that he only had two lines and then disappeared for the entire rest of the episode gives me pretty bad vibes, as he is supposedly a main character and I still know more about Hero's dead lover than him.

While the Episode wasn't bad, just boring, I don't know if it convinced me to keep watching. The CGI monkey was weird considering trained show animals exist, visible in their use of a very real dog and horse. I don't know who I am supposed to root for and I don't really see a concept further than "Y Chromosome Dead, repopulation impossible, #girlboss" We were introduced to problems that solved themselves through this mass extinction, like Jennifer's husband filing for a divorce because of a marital problem that was never mentioned, bringing up the question why these plot points have been scripted in in the first place. Many of the characters were either not likable or had no distinct personality. Taken Kimberly for example whose entire personality seems to be internalized misogyny and boys will be boys uwu and Nora, who's entire characterization seems to be stressed. The entire representation of queer people in this episode wasn't Sam, as we don't know that he's trans yet, but a man talking about wanting to suck dick while high for a good two to three minutes. I mean he's valid, but we will never see this man again. At one point we just saw Hero stumbling through city streets while seemingly intoxicated, all the while people around her are dying like crazy. Mothers are screaming about their sons, cars are piling up like hell, a fucking plane crashed into the pacific ocean and we only hear that the vize president was in it. The first episode was packed with content that had no relevancy to the plot, the only thing keeping me watching were the fact that I started this with the intention of writing this post. I should've watched the new Cinderella movie that apparently sucked ass, probably would be more enjoyable. At least Billy Porter was in that one.

While skimming the Wikipedia article for this show, or more so the Contents of the shows Premise, I did read a line that confused me a bit "Clark went on to say, that while all people with Y chromosomes are suddenly killed off, essentially removing the gender binary divide among the survivors...." The gender binary would not be removed just by every person with a Y chromosome dying. Chromosomes don't rule the gender binary, societal standards do. Just because every person with a Y chromosome was Thanos snapped, but make it bloody, it does not remove those societal standards we grew up with. Another things was this "...there is still a large gender disparity in many aspects of essential infrastructure..." and while I 100% agree, it did end up about not enough women being truck drivers...? And that manifested my assumption about this show not being an exploration of how society views gender and sex in correlation to each other, but it being about the empowerment of women in ignorance of trans women, as they are, you know, dead. The first episode of this show feels like the introduction to the "What if men didn't exist?" ideal you can easily find in a lot of TERF spaces, spaces that ignore the existence of nonbinary people and condemn trans women for being predatory men and trans men as confused girls who need to be saved from becoming evil men. I wanna end it on this quote from the article "We are making a show that affirms that trans women are women, trans men are men, non-binary people are non-binary..." So the show affirms these things by killing off every existing trans woman, a part of the nonbinary community, a community which already struggles to be not just seen as women/men lite, and by adding a trans man character that wasn't even originally in the source material and also doesn't seem to exist further than being Hero's best friend. I say that last part, because, again, throughout this episode, an episode for us to meet the main characters and their families and to find out what happened, we find out more about the life of Hero's dead lover than about Sam. And honestly, a society without trans women and half the nonbinary community sounds fucking terrible.

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