#highlight for me this year

[hadesoftheladies]

women's sports is one of the loudest and most successful anti-patriarchy campaigns in human history. what women's sports did and does is prove, over and over again, the excellence, the raw power and strength of the human woman. it completely disrupts ideas on gender.

you have big, powerful women in rugby. fast, endurable women runners. impeccably strong gymnasts. women with strong, large bodies that take up space. that are HEALTHY. they are not RESTRICTED or ladylike. they are free of the stillness/deadness that femininity demands. no corsets. no (aesthetic) thinness. no hourglass bodies for gawking. women's sports screams to society "we are fully human, not objects, not small men. we are not domestic dolls. we are hunters and foragers. fighters."

why do you think men are so vitriolic about it? why don't they want women in football? why don't they want it televized? why do they keep harassing female basketball players? why do they insist on dressing women in sexualized uniforms? why do they now make it taboo to exculde men from women's sports?

i firmly believe it's because women's sports tears patriarchal gender ideology apart so effortlessly. it completely spits in the face of patriarchal political propaganda and shows how null it is. it forces all of us to view women as full, as the beginning of human excellence, as central to human history. not as decorative sexual objects, no matter how men want us to be.

that's why there's so much aggression and derision when it comes to women's sports from men. because women's sports destroys the idea of femininity and depicts women as non-derivative. women must be monsters and cannot afford to play into the childlikeness that femininity demands. the arena of sports forces us to focus on women's physical performance rather than appearance. their strength rather than how attractive they are. their skill and strategy. their humanity. it is a form of entertainment where all female roles are agentive and active rather than passive.

women's sports events are also hotbeds for female and lgb solidarity like you have no idea!

y'all need to start watching women's sports. not only because it is exciting, but it deprograms the patriarchal bullshit out of you so fast. you realize how much is possible. how much we can all achieve right now.

[taluns]

Walking Wake (aka the Suicunesaurus!!!)

[julijbee]

girlbossing too close to the sun.

[stil-lindigo]

art vs artist 2023

[cjay321-0]

DamiAnya my beloved~

[homielander]

objectively very funny that homelander spent three seasons antagonizing or killing anyone who dared defy him and squashing anything that even remotely resembled dissent... only to be like how come no one stands up to me😔 why can't you speak your minds😠 ugh i am singlehandedly carrying this company!!

[poisonousquinzel]

"harley quinn's never had a good design in the last deca-!" WRONG dropkicks you through a brick wall

[cozylittleartblog]

i can finally say real and sincere words i dedicate my song to you

print on my etsy

[lilidawnonthemoon]

[willowcrowned]

it's so funny to me that brennan has wanted pvp so bad for so long that he introduced a non-dnd mechanic just to get it. A+ work. we should all be so lucky as to be delightfully strong armed by our dm into trying to kill our friends

[housecow]

do i get partial highlights again…

[timethehobo]

Suicide Squad KTJL but it’s that cutscene where Joker (seemingly) kept coming on to Boomerang. 😂

[thatneoncrisis]

Curious about your issues with the show!! I have my own ofc but always interested In more opinions

spoilers for like. all of the show el oh el

its hard for me to like. properly articulate on the fly but i think its primarily 1. a show that is genuinely trying to build a complicated structure out of the rusted metal and twigs that makes up LoL lore that gets overhauled every like, four years, so often times it feels like a character in arcane will get hard shafted out of a natural arc so they end up where they "should be" in accordance to their league counterpart.

strongest example i have off the dome is violet, where i think in act 1 of arcane shes a really intriguing and well crafted character whos sympathetic and has goals and values you can follow. and then they shunt her off to prison during the time skip and when she comes out shes like. everything she does from that point on just feels Tilted it feels like they gutted out all the parts that would have gotten me from A to Z wrt her going from scrappy kid in the lanes whos like. direct causes of terror and unhappiness in life were from enforcer. to a bitch who joins the enforcers. and its not that i dont think that turnaround is possible, i just dont think they articulated it well with such a truncated amount of episodes split between so many subplots

and then my main Thing 2. uuuh. this is more of like my own issues with this kind of story telling in general rather than an arcane specific issue that i will codify as "liberal progressives attempt to Both Sides the issue of apartheid in their magic story." the creators of the show emphasized that they wanted each character to be morally grey, differnt shades to them and the motivations contextualizing their actions. which is like, fair enough thats just good character writing but i dont think theyre particularly. great at that. especially when trying to marry it to my earlier point about how certain characters essentially have to invert to become their league analogs in some sense. also someone like ekko? not grey. hes just right? he doesnt fuck with enforcers and he doesnt fuck with the kingpin flooding the lanes with shimmer, he just wants to help the people suffering the most. stand up dude.

theres a lot of different levels to which this clashing between intent and execution falls flat for me in arcane but the one ill get into now is silco and vander. from an objective view its a classic story of two close brothers in arms driven apart by ideology/circumstance, weve seen it with professor xavier and magneto, it also reminded me of tchalla and killmonger although they dont have the childhood friends aspect going for them. but the point is its not like a unique idea. two people want to change the world for the better, one of them starts killing civilians about it, the first guy is like hey! maybe dont do that! epic fall out ensues.

and the story is cognizant of the fact that silco IS an antagonist: not just in the sense that he is opposing our protagonists goals, he sold out the children to the enforcers in the first act, he released shimmer onto zaun and keeps a stranglehold on the city with his circle of chem barons like he fucking sucks. and the whole time im watching im noting how his methods to "free zaun" are like, THE thing destroying it. the streets are rampant with nameless mutated homeless people hooked on shimmer he is directly responsible for. and i was kind of waiting for like. a shift within his circle. if that makes sense. obviously people like violet and ekko and caitlyn dont like him but they never did they dont have to be convinced, but to have someone who initially put all their trust into him as the guy to bring zaun into glory and then slowly have to reckon with the fact theyve propped up a mad man who has prioritized power in himself over the initial goal of liberating the city would have whipped ass.

and then it just didnt happen. theres this fascinating thing going on with silco where hes talking mad shit about the likes of vander, oh hes too softhearted, he will never do what it takes to truly ensure the safety and freedom of the lanes bc he cares too much about his damn babies. and then silco finds himself as caretaker of one of those babies. the show meticulously shows me how he cares for her, he softens for her, he lets her tinker in her silly cave all day and blow up cops with harley quinn bombs. so we have three main things to keep in mind with silco:

his primary stated goal is to free zaun from piltovers repressive rule.

his shimmer production is one of if not The thing actively destroying the lanes

he now has Baby, whos safety has become a growing priority for him.

this culminating in the finale where he is presented with the opportunity to hand her over to the authorities in exchange for zauns independence. now THIS could have been a really interesting internal dilemma for him. he is now faced with the exact choice that led vander to becoming "weak" in his eyes. whats one girls life in exchange for his dream finally becoming a reality. but its also an impossible thing to ask because thats his Daughter. so now hes risking scrutiny from his underlings for being wishy washy. ooh intrigue mystery. youd really need some time to steep on his agonies and what hes really willing to prioritizeat this point in his life

and then none of that happens bc hes immediately kidnapped and shot and never has to seriously consider it. he never has to SACRIFICE he always just. has everything he wants. forever. until he dies. powerful chem baron running the show with his army of teen supersoldiers.

another route i considered them being able to do is something more focused on him and sevika. she left vander to join his cause specifically bc she thought vander was weak. as his right hand, she would do anything for silco, including literally giving up her fucking arm when she saved him from the blast in act one. timeskip, now we see she has a fun new mech arm powered by silcos own shimmer, which we are shown the side effects of time and time again. i thought this was leaning into a metaphor about how her emotional dependence on him and his cause was being represented by a chemical dependence on shimmer. like its destroying her physically and mentally but she NEEDS it to work out to know it wasnt all for nothing so shell put up with whatever sketchy bullshit hes got going on, the ends justify the means. and we get like six detailed shots of shimmer being pumped directly into her body i thought for sure they were gonna be like oh this is fucking killing her, like a compound v situation

but shes like. fine. theres no side effects besides a cool scar. shes chilling.

i also thought her antagonistic dynamic with jinx was going somewhere. like if sevika noticed that silco was putting her above what needed to be done for the sake of liberating zaun, and noticing how it mirrored how vander became "weak" and getting that much more pissed about playing second fiddle to a 17 year old. like imagine you get that whole scene where sevika makes it look like shes gonna execute silco, then murders the chem baron who asked her to do it because she trusts him THAT much, then later she hears about jayce's offer to silco and sees him GENUINELY considering leaving the offer on the table JUST for jinx. sorry if i was her id snap. id go crazy id start a coup.

so basically what im saying is. lotta different options to make the characters richer and more grey as they struggle with what they really care about. but the story just kind of shuffles past them and then insists that the bonds were there the whole time you guys jinx and sevika are totally besties now shes a symbol of zaun <3

[hello-eeveev]

saskia just handing over weepe’s medical case, despite weepe having just betrayed her—unrepentant, except for her finding out—destroying the entire life she built for herself (alongside weepe and with his help), and the moon falling out of the sky

- vs. -

imelda withholding weepe’s medical case until he said what she wanted to hear in a convincing enough manner, to the point that he nearly died and his body is further irreversibly changed and now in need of constant monitoring

———

weepe’s love for saskia not being enough to break him out of his self-destruction and self-loathing

- vs. -

jonas’s love for phineas being the reason he could no longer ignore the way the trust harms people, leading to him abandoning it and growing out of his own complicity

[notbecauseofvictories]

the most affective thing I've ever watched on climate change was comedian Jordan Klepper's episode on the L'eau Est La Vie water protectors in Louisiana. Not because it was well put together or terribly comprehensive (there's a documentary that does it better) but because it was the first time I'd seen a public figure follow in activists' footsteps---and be scared so absolutely shitless, he can't quite hide it from the cameras.

these days, Klepper goes to the big political rallies and smirks and jokes, and though that can be fun to watch---it just isn't the same.

[gummi-ships]