#golly. what a world.

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

something I totally didn’t expect from that half hour comedies ensemble poll: lots of people are saying in the tags that they don’t like a lot of characters within ensembles on shows??? um, what????????

you guys are disliking characters on half hour comedies??????

[redrobin-detective]

So I've been listening to my two favorite songs from Hadestown, Wait For Me (Reprise) and Road to Hell (Reprise), on loop for a few days. And on my 400th listen something occurred to me.

Orpheus was writing his song to "make spring come again". He wanted to "fix what's wrong, take what's broken and make it whole." His entire purpose was to write "a song so beautiful it brings the whole world back into tune." (From Come Home with Me).

And he did. Using his love for Eurydice, he was able to finish his song, his masterpiece. But the cost of his dedication to his music meant his love went hungry and went to Hadestown for food and shelter.

He hoped his love and his music would be strong enough to save her, a task we know was ultimately futile but we still sing about it because maybe one day it will be different but also... He did make spring come again. He helped Hades be more secure in his love for Persephone so she could stay on Earth long enough for their to BE a spring. He did take a broken, strained marriage and help them communicate, make them whole. He did bring the whole world back into tune when he sang their song and another pair of distanced lovers began to dance after so long of arguing.

Everyone else got their happy ending but him and Eurydice.

He did not fail, he just not could not imagine that his song didn't have room for his own happiness. It's a reminder that for every triumph there is tragedy, every repaired relationship there is a breakup and that while it may be spring somewhere, somewhere else it is winter. I don't know, that idea of mixed blessing tragedies in the story intrigued me. Because someone's worst day may be someone's best. And that is why we must always sing these songs, to remember on the bright days and to get us through the darkness and to know, someday, spring will come again.

[chiropteracupola]

good development: there are even more abandoned tunnels under the former state hospital than I had assumed

less good development: history professor asked was I 'some kind of masochist' when it came up in conversation that I had watched all of the sharpe that there is

[undefeatablesin]

ALTAR 🩸 : PAGE 9

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[yo-yo-yoshiko]

Your art is amazing and I hope to one day post a lot of art of super sentai like you do

(I'm new to the super sentai fandom lol)

Gira and Lucky are my favs and I headcanon them being brothers because of whacky time and different universe shit

Aahaaawww! Thank you kindly, stranger, thats incredibly nice of you to say! And I always love to see people’s art out there in the wilds of the internet! You should go for it, its a lot of fun! (This is me banging my fists on the table and chanting my encouragement hahaha!)

I am also relatively new to sentai (i hopped on with lupat and kingoh in february) but the series is very my style with the themes and hyper colored heroes and big action and robots, so i settled in quick lol!

Kyuranger was the second series i watched (and completed) so i’ve got a massive soft spot for them, they’re all so cute! Here’s a collection of doodles i made of Lucky a long time ago and never posted for whatever reason just because.

[starfolk7]

I have rewritten the same paragraph like three times now brain pls

[thewandererh]

“What’s your music taste?”

Me:

(It is my tumblr and i get to infodump /lh)

Top: Coco Moon (Owl City), Ocean Eyes Deluxe Edition (Owl City), Stray OST, OMORI OST, Hawaii Part II (Miracle Musical)

Middle: Unravel OST, Thanks to You song (GHOST and Pals), O My Heart (Mother Mother), Robot Face (Caravan Palace), The Gods We Can Touch (AURORA), INSIDE (Bo Burnham), Creatures of Habit (Kiltro), Ellipse (Imogen Heap)

Bottom: Rainworld + Alphas, Gems, and Junk + Rainworld Downpour OSTS, Wake up calls + The Much Much How How and I (Cosmo Shelldrake)

Annnnddd overlaying everything is the wondrous Chonny’s Charming Chaos Compendium by Chonny Jash. Is that the first time I typed chonny jash on this blog,,,, woah..,,,

No images (besides the silly wandrr doodle) belong to me !!!! Literally stole them off of search results lol. Apologies if they aren’t even lol, might fix it later might not. Dont stare at it too long lol

[whimsicmimic]

once again thinking about transistor au and how much i love it and how much i want to go back to it

[allofuswantgwinam]

my mom literally wants to be clueless and im so sick of hearing her say that

[tittysuckersworld]

THE PEOPLES LIKE MINE ARTTTTT AAAAAAA

[ace-with--a-mace]

i can hear again but i can hear wayy better now and everything js super loud

[voidsteeth]

i get it he's everyone's favourite ex-templar and all around good boy

but uh

hes not.

hes not a good boy.

i hate him. :V

[thatweirddolldude]

I can write the saddest story, with genuine tragedy and despair that can still make you feel hope and hold on for what could be a happy end. . . but a joke?

If I try to write a joke I'm being lazy and not thinking how the character could use humor in a natural way to bring ease to both the audience and the other characters. If I write a joke I'm trying to make the audience laugh and not let the characters live in their moment.

THIS ISN'T ABOUT ANYONE ELSE BTW! If you use a lot of jokes in your writing, I love that for you! I love reading it! My favorite book is a comedy. I'm just not funny and you know if I'm trying to be funny and I don't just let the characters exist. . . then *I'm* being lazy.

[administer-distractions]

.

[sailforvalinor]

Thoughts on my first Tarzan rewatch since I was a kid:

• Golly gee, I did not remember that both Kerchak and Kala’s very young son AND Tarzan’s parents get mauled by a leopard, it happens within the first ten minutes, and you actually SEE his parents’ bodies. Modern Disney would NEVER

• Also remember when Disney actually animated really good fight scenes, they had nail-biting tangible stakes, and they actually showed blood??? Remember when they weren’t cowards????

• REMEMBER WHEN TARZAN KILLED THE LEOPARD TRYING TO PROVE HIMSELF TO HIS ADOPTIVE FATHER HAVING NO IDEA THAT HE WAS AVENGING HIS BIOLOGICAL FATHER (AND MOTHER). REMEMBER THAT

• It’s been said before, but the effort put into the physicality of Tarzan is just top-tier—especially later into the film where he starts to mix his gorilla and learned human mannerisms. There is so much detail here and it’s fascinating

• Also, the times where they chose to make the gorilla conversations understandable to the audience or make them sound like gorillas (aka switch to Jane’s pov) is SO fascinating and does wonders for building up the “two worlds” dichotomy.

• Jane’s crush on Tarzan is SO obvious and honestly comes on so suddenly, she is delulu for days, but honestly I cannae blame her, if *I* was saved by a strong handsome wild man who couldn’t understand me but stared deeply into my eyes as if he could see my soul through them as he pressed the palms of our hands together, I’d probably fold too

• My favorite character was Tantor the elephant. WHAT a character arc, I was so proud of him

• Hey uhhhhhhhh remember how the villain of this movie died by inadvertently hanging himself and the movie indicated this by showing his dangling silhouette in a flash of lightning??? HELLO???

• Y’all like to give Ariel a hard time for giving up her voice for a man when Jane Porter permanently and irrevocably left civilized society to run away to the wilds of Africa to live with gorillas for a man she met a week or two ago who she’s still getting over language barrier issues with. I’m not saying she shouldn’t have done so, I completely support her decision, but I feel like if this movie weren’t so slept on some of y’all would have a lot more to say about it.

• In general Jane is a bit more unhinged than we give her credit for, and more power to her. She’s rapidly climbing the ranks of my favorite Disney princesses.

• And then her father joins her??? “People go missing all the time”???? LOL

• Finally, it’s been said before, but: Phil Collins, you legend. You did not have to go that hard on this film, but you did and we appreciate it so much

[illycanary]

Katara's Story Is A Tragedy and It's Not An Accident

I was a teenaged girl when Avatar: The Last Airbender aired on Nickelodeon—the group that the show’s creators unintentionally hit while they were aiming for the younger, maler demographic. Nevermind that we’re the reason the show’s popularity caught fire and has endured for two decades; we weren’t the audience Mike and Bryan wanted. And by golly, were they going to make sure we knew it. They’ve been making sure we know it with every snide comment and addendum they’ve made to the story for the last twenty years.

For many of us girls who were raised in the nineties and aughts, Katara was a breath of fresh air—a rare opportunity in a media market saturated with boys having grand adventures to see a young woman having her own adventure and expressing the same fears and frustrations we were often made to feel. 

We were told that we could be anything we wanted to be. That we were strong and smart and brimming with potential. That we were just as capable as the boys. That we were our brothers’ equals. But we were also told to wash dishes and fold laundry and tidy around the house while our brothers played outside. We were ignored when our male classmates picked teams for kickball and told to go play with the girls on the swings—the same girls we were taught to deride if we wanted to be taken seriously. We were lectured for the same immaturity that was expected of boys our age and older, and we were told to do better while also being told, “Boys will be boys.” Despite all the platitudes about equality and power, we saw our mothers straining under the weight of carrying both full-time careers and unequally divided family responsibilities. We sensed that we were being groomed for the same future. 

And we saw ourselves in Katara. 

Katara begins as a parentified teenaged girl: forced to take on responsibility for the daily care of people around her—including male figures who are capable of looking after themselves but are allowed to be immature enough to foist such labor onto her. She does thankless work for people who take her contributions for granted. She’s belittled by people who love her, but don’t understand her. She’s isolated from the world and denied opportunities to improve her talents. She's told what emotions she's allowed to feel and when to feel them. In essence, she was living our real-world fear: being trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood. 

Then we watched Katara go through an incredible journey of self-determination and empowerment. Katara goes from being a powerless, fearful victim to being a protector, healer, advocate, and liberator to others who can’t do those things for themselves (a much truer and more fulfilling definition of nurturing and motherhood). It’s necessary in Katara’s growth cycle that she does this for others first because that is the realm she knows. She is given increasingly significant opportunities to speak up and fight on behalf of others, and that allows her to build those advocacy muscles gradually. But she still holds back her own emotional pain because everyone that she attempts to express such things to proves they either don't want to deal with it or they only want to manipulate her feelings for their own purposes. 

Katara continues to do much of the work we think of as traditionally maternal on behalf of her friends and family over the course of the story, but we do see that scale gradually shift. Sokka takes on more responsibility for managing the group’s supplies, and everyone helps around camp, but Katara continues to be the manager of everyone else’s emotions while simultaneously punching down her own. The scales finally seem to tip when Zuko joins the group. With Zuko, we see someone working alongside Katara doing the same tasks she is doing around camp for the first time. Zuko is also the only person who never expects anything of her and whose emotions she never has to manage because he’s actually more emotionally stable and mature than she is by that point. And then, Katara’s arc culminates in her finally getting the chance to fully seize her power, rewrite the story of the traumatic event that cast her into the role of parentified child, be her own protector, and freely express everything she’s kept locked away for the sake of letting everyone else feel comfortable around her. Then she fights alongside an equal partner she knows she can trust and depend on through the story's climax. And for the first time since her mother’s death, the girl who gives and gives and gives while getting nothing back watches someone sacrifice everything for her. But this time, she’s able to change the ending because her power is fully realized. The cycle was officially broken.

Katara’s character arc was catharsis at every step. If Katara could break the mold and recreate the ideas of womanhood and motherhood in her own image, so could we. We could be powerful. We could care for ourselves AND others when they need us—instead of caring for everyone all the time at our own expense. We could have balanced partnerships with give and take going both ways (“Tui and La, push and pull”), rather than the, “I give, they take,” model we were conditioned to expect. We could fight for and determine our own destiny—after all, wasn’t destiny a core theme of the story?

Yes. Destiny was the theme. But the lesson was that Katara didn’t get to determine hers. 

After Katara achieves her victory and completes her arc, the narrative steps in and smacks her back down to where she started. For reasons that are never explained or justified, Katara rewards the hero by giving into his romantic advances even though he has invalidated her emotions, violated her boundaries, lashed out at her for slights against him she never committed, idealized a false idol of her then browbeat her when she deviated from his narrative, and forced her to carry his emotions and put herself in danger when he willingly fails to control himself—even though he never apologizes, never learns his lesson, and never shows any inclination to do better. 

And do better he does not.

The more we dared to voice our own opinions on a character that was clearly meant to represent us, the more Mike and Bryan punished Katara for it.

Throughout the comics, Katara makes herself smaller and smaller and forfeits all rights to personal actualization and satisfaction in her relationship. She punches her feelings down when her partner neglects her and cries alone as he shows more affection and concern for literally every other girl’s feelings than hers. She becomes cowed by his outbursts and threats of violence. Instead of rising with the moon or resting in the warmth of the sun, she learns to stay in his shadow. She gives up her silly childish dreams of rebuilding her own dying culture’s traditions and advocating for other oppressed groups so that she can fulfill his wishes to rebuild his culture instead—by being his babymaker. Katara gave up everything she cared about and everything she fought to become for the whims of a man-child who never saw her as a person, only a possession.

Then, in her old age, we get to watch the fallout of his neglect—both toward her and her children who did not meet his expectations. By that point, the girl who would never turn her back on anyone who needed her was too far gone to even advocate for her own children in her own home. And even after he’s gone, Katara never dares to define herself again. She remains, for the next twenty-plus years of her life, nothing more than her husband's grieving widow. She was never recognized for her accomplishments, the battles she won, or the people she liberated. Even her own children and grandchildren have all but forgotten her. She ends her story exactly where it began: trapped in someone else’s narrow, stultifying definition of femininity and motherhood.

The story’s theme was destiny, remember? But this story’s target audience was little boys. Zuko gets to determine his own destiny as long as he works hard and earns it. Aang gets his destiny no matter what he does or doesn’t do to earn it. And Katara cannot change the destiny she was assigned by gender at birth, no matter how hard she fights for it or how many times over she earns it. 

Katara is Winston Smith, and the year is 1984. It doesn’t matter how hard you fight or what you accomplish, little girl. Big Brother is too big, too strong, and too powerful. You will never escape. You will never be free. Your victories are meaningless. So stay in your place, do what you’re told, and cry quietly so your tears don’t bother people who matter.

I will never get over it. Because I am Katara. And so are my friends, sisters, daughters, and nieces. But I am not content to live in Bryke's world.

I will never turn my back on people who need me. Including me.