#i want to say “but i digress” here but thats not actually appropriate

[nephriteknight]

hhhhhh random vent post because i saw someone say the enjoy scrolling through bad takes for fun, went "wow we're very different that always just makes me angry and sad", then went and did it anyways and guess how it made me feel??

anyways my thoughts on the whole tma/tme thing is like. transmisogyny is real. there are very real threats to trans women and bigots often target them especially. but i think that classifying people based on whether that affects them is just inaccurate and unhelpful.

is a cishet boy who like makeup or dresses exempt from homophobia and transphobia? if no one can tell what a non-binary person's agab is, but a transphobe decides to just guess and be transmisogynistic, is it only transmisogyny if they guessed right? my personal goal with transitioning is to go on T and have a body that "looks male" (whatever that means) and then wear earrings and skirts. am i gonna be "transmisogyny exempt" at that point? probably not!

at the end of the day, bigotry and discrimination come from the bigots. they have nothing to do with us! who you are is never going to define what kinds of discrimination you face, because that discrimination comes from outside of you. that doesn't mean that transmisogyny doesn't exist, or that it isn't a problem, or that it isn't primarily directed at trans women. all of that is true! i just think that drawing a line in the sand in the middle of our community isn't doing us any good

[zeppeli-reelstallbun]

-> masterlist

long time lurker, first time diving into actually posting, so figured i’d do an introduction under the cut!!

Hey yall! Unapologetically queer midwestern twenty-year-old with no idea what she’s doing here to tell you more about herself!

Where to start… well, I’m currently in school working towards a degree in infographic marketing and design. That being said, my minor specialization is in the history subgenre, so I hope to work in the political field in some capacity. I write a lot of formal essays, so my time is divided during the year.

I will not be labeling as mdni, but probably won’t reach out to younger users! NSFW works will be tagged appropriately. Consume what you want tho folks.

always looking for mutuals/someone to viciously explain how this website works as if I were a boomer. interests include jjba, succession, star wars, tlou/tlou2, jjk, nge, and many others im sure im forgetting. Im also a big film nerd, so letterboxd users hml

I play a shit ton of instruments, my favorite artists rn are bowie and kendrick (what a pairing i know, but I did get tickets to the gn tour!!)

Lit NERD over here as well, book recs (and any media, really) are an instant path to my heart.

sapphic blog, though the straight x reader fanfic says otherwise

need ritsuko and misato to kiss bad

need them to kiss me bad

constantly thinking about abby anderson and her bench pr (im a gym rat and she could ruin me idc)

and i mean constantly

there’s not a day i lift without thinking about biting her arms oooooh mamma

girl kisser <- that’s me!

I hate to say this without immediately coming off as one of those bi girls in a straight relationship who yaps about wanting to be with women all the time, but yeahimdefoneofthosebigirlsinastraightrelationshipwhoyapsaboutwantingtobewithwomenallthetime

Which sucks because I can’t even complain about the man I’m dating while doing it, which is like, the whole point of the cliche

Whatever though, Ill swallow my pride and lean into it. He’s truly one of the greatest things thats happened to me and I’ve gotten nearly four years of proof that its not changing anytime soon. We also have a cat together, one who cant stay off a keybard and contributes to fics from time to time as well!!

Also uh *cough cough cough* a lot of the details (esp once we get deeper into smut) wouldn’t be as descriptive without him *cough cough* But you didn’t hear that from me

Plus at least the bf likes men romantically and supports the wlw grindset, we love an ally B)

Idk how we have the same taste in women and such vast different tastes in men. Maybe this just means my type is ME and im too self absorbed for my own good, but I digress

Already left my ‘straight, white, abusive, overwatch boy’ era years ago, fear not my fellow m*n loving sappics, there are other, better options!!

ah that’s all i can think of rn!! always open in my dms if you wanna know more or see something you want to talk about!!

[system-of-a-feather]

as a fellow asian system i hope having to deal with racists doesn’t take too much of a toll on you !!

It's just a Saturday honestly.

As bad as Sophie and crew are, they're honestly not that special in terms of just being white. You can't really let their idiocy get to you otherwise you'll just sit there and be chronically angry which - while XIV 1.0 can enjoy it - it's not really my cup of tea. There's a time for being upset about things and its important to air that out, but at this point I've decided I'm kind of just over it.

I'm honestly just playing Inscryption, doing art fight, and going to my basically-mother-in-laws birthday celebration today - probably the gym and playing the guitar. While it is active on the blog right now, I just add my two cents here and there when it comes up cause the topic does actually matter to me as both an Asian and a Buddhist and I'd love to open the door to those trying to genuinely understand it more to discuss how some of these things work, cause again, it's my life and it does mean a lot to me and I like to share it, but it's kinda hard when everyone is (reasonably and validly) upset and focused on two chickens with their heads cut off running in circles making a mess of the place.

So honestly, while it was more "taxing" (<- wouldn't really say that beyond the moment whenever it got me irked) before, at this point I just sigh and go back to my things after adding my two cents.

Cause I would like to see some nice discussion on tulpa stuff and buddhism and white / western appropriation, commercialization, and sensationalism of eastern cultures and the history between the "cultural exchange" claimed - and I'd honestly like to hear other opinions and people with different knowledge than I do comment on it - but that sort of conversation is limited when we don't ignore the two that go "UM ACTUALLY EXCUSE ME WHITE PEOPLE ARE ENTIRELY INNOCENT AND YOU ARE RACIST FOR IMPLYING THAT IT MIGHT NOT BE 100% INNOCENT" and refuse to accept the basic premise that maybe - perhaps - there are a few things off about it.

But again, I digress. I have other things to sit on my mind about it today and its not really something I'm gonna let fester in here beyond when it comes up on my dash directly. I got better things to do than to put time being upset and angry at people who really don't care if I'm upset and angry.

That plus I am also just a bit tired of the sheer negative and angry intent being brought into conversations on this blog, so I am kind of debating what I intend to allow to be on this platform moving forward. I'm not sure where the line between uplifting conversation on AAPI issues begins and when it turns to the sort of syscourse/syscourse-esque things I don't really want to put on people's dash.

Regardless, thats for me to judge as I see it.

Thanks for the ask and concern though. We're doing good and long post short, we look like we are fixated on this topic more than we are cause the internet is only a fraction of our life honestly.

[merlinoutofcontext]

wait so why do you think merlin isn’t queerbaiting? this isn’t meant to be rude im just curious

hey! happy to answer, and i didn’t perceive your question as rude at all btw. here are my thoughts, i’m sorry they’re so long but i also don’t think this is a topic that can be summarized in a few sentences, so...

i don’t really know how else to say that it isn’t queerbaiting by just stating that it isn’t. there is very little evidence in the actual show to even claim that the show was at any point queerbaiting. but to be fair, i also think it’s important to note the term “queerbaiting” doesn’t even have an “official” definition so it can mean very different things to different people. this is the definition that i am working with.

“When an author/director/etc. gives hints, and clever twists to paint a character as possibly being queer, to satisfy queer audiences, but never outright says they are so they can keep their heterosexual audience.”

bbc merlin is a family show. and i don’t mean “family show” in the way that it is usually insinuated - as in it’s supposed to be “clean” and “nice” and “appealing” to a family audience, so therefore any queercoded message is bad and not appropriate. what i mean is that it’s a tv show that was expected to be approachable by families of all ages, at any point throughout the series, so that they can understand what’s happening. whether or not you watched the episode that aired the previous week has absolutely no bearing on the next episode. merlin only started having multi-episode arcs in series 3. and it’s this reason why i think so many ppl are dissatisfied with the show, bc it wasn’t meant to be this deep narrative. they didn't have enough time to write in full fledged storylines. but i digress.

i’m going to be using other tumblr obsessed tv show and ship as examples here. 

i will admit that my original post was sparked by some of the stuff surrounding supernatural that’s happened, but i’m not really going to speak to it much. i do think the internet may have went a bit overboard, and i don’t want to sit here and claim spn was queerbaiting its audience because i actually do think thats kind of a subjective thing. but in my opinion, the fact that they waited until their final season, and what appears to be a characters last episode, to make the ship that has been a large driving force of their remaining audience for the past 12 years, canon, does sit a little weird with me. anyway.

lets use another ship as an example that is literally, unequivocally queerbaiting. i don’t care about your opinion here, this show queerbaited the hell out of its audience for 7 literal years. johnlock.

multiple times throughout the show the relationship between john and sherlock is hinted at through the language of the show, by characters in the show, etc. more often than not, the concept of a relationship between them is framed as a joke. additionally, bbc’s sherlock kept the sexuality of their main character (coincidentally the titular character) ambiguous, while also managing to make fun of their audience of shippers for even thinking that johnlock could be a possibility. 

never once in bbc’s merlin is the concept of arthur and merlin being close to one another, or connected by fate/destiny/magic (which is often seen as being coded for sexuality) as a bad thing. not in the text of the show, not by the creators of the show, not by the actors in the show. in fact, even in the last episode, merlin’s devotion to arthur is only ever framed as a positive:

“Some men are born to plow fields, some live to be great physicians, others to be great kings. Me, I was born to serve you Arthur and I’m proud of that. And I wouldn’t change a thing.”

similarly, sometime after this arthur tells merlin to never change. in my opinion, a distinct aspect of a queerbaiting show is when the show places hints in the language used by the characters to say that a character might a) be queer in some way or b) have a relationship with someone of the same gender as them. but then when the fandom talks about this towards the actors, or the creators of the show, it’s immediately pushed away by creators and seen as a negative thing. or it’s completely ridiculous that the fandom would even think of such at thing.

people will argue that merlin’s devotion to arthur, and their relationship in general is what makes it queerbaiting. that by the sheer existence of some longwinded eye contact, or statements of friendship and devotion to each other that the show was queerbaiting its audience. but the difference is that merlin’s devotion to arthur and subsequently arthur’s devotion to merlin was never framed as a joke for the audience, or as a negative thing. it was written as something we are supposed to celebrate about merlin.

this show was never written with the intention for merlin and arthur to be together. it’s a retelling of arthurian myth with a bit of a twist in it. merlin and arthur are meant to be the main characters, but a romantic relationship was never on the table. 

characters do remark on merlin’s loyalty to arthur, but it’s always in a questioning way, a why is this man so loyal to the king? what is the big reason? and, yeah, the Big Reason is his magic and their shared destiny. and yes it’s a valid interpretation that magic/destiny = sexuality, and merlin = gay (used as an umbrella term here). but that doesn’t mean it’s queerbaiting. it’s just subtext.

and subtext =/= queerbaiting.

[supercantaloupe]

okay yeah actually, i’ll bite. i’ve got some of my own thoughts about the unsleeping city and cultural representation and i’m gonna make a post about them now, i guess. i’ll put it under a cut though because this post is gonna be long.

i wanna start by saying i love dimension 20 and i really really enjoy the unsleeping city. i look forward to watching new episodes every week, and getting hooked on d20 as a whole last summer really helped pull me out of a pandemic depression, and i’m grateful to have this cool show to be excited about and interested in and to have met so many cool people to talk about it with.

that being said, however, i think there is a risk run in representing any group of people/their culture when you have the kind of setting that tuc has. by which i mean, tuc is set in a real world with real people and real human cultures in it. unlike fantasy high or a crown of candy where everything is made up (even if rooted in real-world cultures), tuc is explicitly rooted in reality, and all of its diversity -- both the ups and downs that go with it. and especially set in new york of all places, one of the most densely, diversely populated cities on earth. the cast is 7 people; it’s great that those 7 people come from a variety of backgrounds and identities and all bring their own unique perspectives to the table, and it’s great that those people and the entire crew are generally conscious of themselves and desire to tell stories/represent perspectives ethically. but you simply cannot authentically represent every culture or every perspective in the world (or even just in a city) when your cast is 7 people. it’s an impossible task. this is inherent to the setting, and acknowledged by the cast, and by brennan especially, who has been on record saying how one of the exciting aspects of doing a campaign set in nyc is its diversity, the fact that no two new yorkers have the same perspective of new york. i think that’s a good thing -- but it does have its challenges too, clearly.

i’m not going to go into detail on the question of whether or not tuc’s presentation of asian and asian american culture is appropriative/offensive or not. first of all, i don’t feel like it’s 100% fair to judge the show completely yet, since it’s a prerecorded season and currently airing midseason, so i don’t yet know how things wrap up. secondly, i’m not asian or asian american. i can have my own opinions on that content in the show, but i think it’s worth more to hear actual asian and asian american voices on this specific aspect of the show. having an asian american cast member doesn’t automatically absolve the show of any criticisms with regard to asian american cultural representation/appropriation, whether those criticisms are made by dozens of viewers or only a handful of them. regardless, i don’t think it’s my place as someone who is not asian to speak with any authority on that issue, and i know for a fact that there are asian american viewers sharing their own opinions. their thoughts in this instance hold more water than mine, i think.

what i will comment on in more depth, though, is a personal frustration with tuc. i’m jewish; i’ve never really been shy about that fact on my page here. i’m not from new york, but i visit a few times a year (or i did before covid anyway, lol), and i have some family from nyc. nyc, to me, is a jewish city. and for good reason, since it’s home to one of the largest jewish populations of the country, and even the world, and aspects of jewish culture (including culinary, like bagels and pastrami, and linguistic, like the common use of yiddish words and phrases in english colloquial speech) are prevalent and celebrated among jews and goyim alike. when i think of nyc, i think of a jewish city; that’s not everybody’s new york, but that’s my new york, and thats plenty of other people’s new york too. so i do find myself slightly disappointed or frustrated in tuc for its, in my opinion, rather stark lack of jewish representation.

now, i’m not saying that one of the PCs should have been jewish, full stop. i love to headcanon iga as jewish even though canon does not support that interpretation, and i’m fine with that. she’s not my character. it’s possible that simply no one thought of playing a jewish character, i dunno. but also, and i can’t be sure about this, i’m willing to bet that none of the players really wanted to play a jewish character because they didn’t want to play a character of a marginalized culture they dont belong to in the interest of avoiding stereotyping or offensive representation/cultural appropriation. (i don’t know if any of the cast members are jewish, but i’m assuming not.) and the concern there is certainly appreciated; there’s not a ton of mainstream jewish rep out there, and often what we get is either “unlikeable overly conservative hassidic jew” or “jokes about their bar mitzvah/one-off joke about hanukkah and then their jewishness is never mentioned ever again,” which sucks. it would be really cool to see some more good casual jewish rep in a well-rounded, three-dimensional character in the main cast of a show! even if there are a couple of stumbles along the way -- nobody is perfect and no two jews have the same level of knowledge, dedication, and adherence to their culture.

but at the same time, i look at characters like iga and i really do long for a jewish character to be there. siobhan isn’t polish, yet she’s playing a characters whose identity as a polish immigrant to new york is very central to her story and arc. and part of me wonders why we can’t have the same for a jewish character. if not a PC, then why not an NPC? again, i’m jewish, and i am not native, but in my opinion i think the inclusion of jj is wonderful -- i think there are even fewer native main characters in mainstream media than there are jewish ones, and it’s great to see a native character who is both in touch with their culture as well as not being defined solely by their native-ness. to what extent does it count as ‘appropriative’ because brennan is a white dude? i dunno, but i’m like 99% sure they talked to sensitivity consultants to make sure the representation was as ethical as they could get it, and anyway, i can’t personally see and glaring missteps so far. but again, i’m not native, and if there are native viewers with their own opinions on jj, i’d be really interested in hearing them.

but getting back to the relative lack of jewish representation. it just...disappoints me that jewishness in new york is hardly ever even really mentioned? again, i know we’re only just over halfway through season 2, but also, we had a whole first season too. and it’s definitely not all bad. for example: willy! gd, i love willy so much. him being a golem of williamsburg makes me really really happy -- a jewish mythological creature animated from clay/mud (in this case bricks) to protect a jewish community (like that of williamsburg, a center for many of nyc’s jews) from threat. golem have so often been taken out of their original context and turned into evil monsters in fantasy settings, especially including dnd. (even within other seasons of d20! crush in fh being referred to as a “pavement golem” always rubbed me the wrong way, and i had hoped they’d learned better after tuc but in acoc they refer to another monster as a “corn golem” which just disappointed me all over again.) so the fact that tuc gets golems right makes my jewish heart very happy.

and yet...he doesn’t show up that much? sure, in s1, he’s very helpful when he does, but in s2 so far he shows up once and really does not say or do much of anything. he speaks with a lot more yiddish-influenced language than other characters, but if you didn’t know those words were specifically yiddish/jewish, you might not be able to otherwise clock the fact that willy is jewish. and while willy is a jewish mythological creature who is jewish in canon, he isn’t human. there are no other direct references to judaism, jewish characters, or jewish culture in the unsleeping city beyond him.

there are, in fact, two other canon jewish characters in tuc. but...here’s where i feel the most frustration, i think. the two canon jewish humans in tuc are stephen sondheim and robert moses. both of whom are real actual people, so it’s not like we can just pick and choose what their cultural backgrounds are. as much as i love stephen sondheim, i think there are inherent issues with including real world people as characters in a fictional setting, especially if they are from living/recent memory (sondheim is literally still alive), but anyway, sondheim and moses are both actual jewish people. from watching tuc alone you probably would not be able to guess that sondheim is jewish -- nothing from his character except name suggests it, and i wouldn’t even fault you for not thinking ‘sondheim’ is a jewish-sounding surname (and i dislike the idea/attitude/belief that you can tell who is or isn’t jewish by the sound of their name). and yeah, i’m not going to sit here and be like “brennan should have made sondheim more visibly jewish in canon!” because, like, he’s a real human being and it’s fucking weird to portray him in a way that isn’t as close to how he publicly presents himself, which is not in fact very identifiably jewish? i don’t know, this is what i mean by it’s inherently weird and arguably problematic to portray real living people as characters in a fictional setting, but i digress. sondheim’s jewish, even if you wouldn’t know it; not exactly a representation win.

and then there’s bob moses. you might be able to guess that he’s jewish from canon, actually. there’s the name, of course. but more insidious to me are the specifics of his villainy. greedy and powerhungry, a moneyman, a lich whose power is stored in a phylactery...it does kind of all add up to a Yikes from me. (in the stock market fight there’s a one-off line asking if he has green skin; it’s never really directly acknowledged or answered, but it made me really uncomfortable to hear at first and it’s stuck with me since viewing for the first time.) the issue for me here is that the most obviously jewish human character is the season’s bbeg, and his villainy is rooted in very antisemitic tropes and stereotypes.

i know this isn’t all brennan’s fault -- robert moses was a real ass person and he was in fact jewish, a powerhungry and greedy moneyman, a big giant racist asshole, etc. i’m not saying that jewish characters can’t be evil, and i’m not saying brennan should have tried to be like “this is my NPC robert christian he’s just like bob moses but instead he’s a goy so it’s okay” because...that would be fuckin weird bro. and bob moses was a real person who was jewish and really did do some heinous shit with his municipal power. i’m not necessarily saying brennan should have picked/created a different character to be the villain. i’m not even saying that he shouldn’t have made bob moses a lich (although, again, it doesn’t 100% sit right with me). but my point here is that bob moses is one of a grand total of three canon jewish characters in tuc, of which only two humans, of whom he is the one you’d most easily guess would be jewish and is the most influenced by antisemitic stereotypes/tropes. had there been more jewish representation in the show at all, even just some neutral jewish NPCs, this would not be as much of a problem as it is to me. but halfway through season 2, so far, this is literally all we get. and that bums me out.

listen, i really like tuc. i love d20. but the fact that it is set in a real world place with real world people does inherently raise challenges when it comes to ethical cultural representation. especially when the medium of the show is a game whose creatures, lore, and mechanics have been historically rooted in some questionable racial/cultural views. and dnd is making progress to correct some of those misguided views of older sourcebooks by updating them to more equitably reflect real world racial/cultural sensitivities; that’s a good thing! but these seasons, of course, were recorded before that. the game itself has some questionable cultural stuff baked into it, and that is (almost necessarily) going to be brought to the table in a campaign set in a real-world place filled with real-world people of diverse real-world cultures. the cast can have sensitivity consultants and empathy and the best intentions in the world, and they’ll still fuck up from time to time, that’s okay. your mileage may vary on whether or not it’s still worth sticking around with the show (or the fandom) through that. for me, it does not yet outweigh all the things i like about the show, and i’m gonna continue watching it. but it’s still very worth acknowledging that the cast is 7 people who cannot possibly hope to authentically or gracefully represent every culture in nyc. it’s an unfortunate limitation of the medium. yet it’s also still worthwhile to acknowledge and discuss the cultural representation as it is in the show -- both the goods and the bads, the ethically solid and the questionably appropriative -- and even to hold the creators accountable. (decently, though. i’m definitely not advocating anybody cyberbully brennan on twitter or whatever.) the show and its representation is far from perfect, but i also don’t think it ever could be. still, though, it could always be better, and there’s a worthwhile discussion to be had in the wheres, hows, and whys of that.

[msawesomegeek]

Cinderella (2021) Movie Review

A/N: Look at me, reviewing something that actually came out this year! Look, long story short, I accidentally got free 7 days prime and wanted to make the most of it, and I love Romesh Ranganathan and James Acaster. So yeah, I watched. Also I found out right in the end that the guy who plays the prince is in one of my favourite movies (Handsome devil.) Anyways, on to this, and I feel kind of weird calling it a review, because I feel like it is just gonna be an appropriately deranged rant. Enjoy <3 And tell me if you agree, disagree or just wanna talk really.

Spoilers ahead.

To the person living under a rock its cinderella but with a small twist, the prince has a personality, so does actually, everyone else, which is cool, but I digress, everyone has personalities, and Ella wants to be a designer and the prince doesn't wanna be king, not really. Thats it. I hope I dont have to summarise the rest of Cinderella for you, it's pretty basic and have been done a million times.

Now, I watched the old and it was like my least favourite growing up, because I guess a little internalised misogyny, and well I liked Mulan and Jasmine, because they did stuff in their movies. And well, Cinderella just could look pretty, and that was never my strong suit soo. I then when Disney Plus came to my country watched the live action remake. And yeah, it was okay, I remember feeling things but also having no need to watch it again. This, this one I dont know how to feel about.

I didn't know where to start, but the good I guess, because that is gonna be the shortest. Okay, so Idina Menzel is amazing, and I love her. The only thing is, and that is probably just a me thing, but her high note in Material Girls reminded me of Wicked and I was like teared up for a moment, because god that is so much better a musical and I hope no one ever puts it onto any film unless its live. I did also really like what they did to the step mothers character, it gave her depth but not in a way that took up space too much in the story, maybe the piano thing was literally a bit too much, but it was actually really cool to see this mother first be this evil entity who teaches her daughters to be material, and then reveals why. It was cool. Also I had to take a break after the first 10 minutes of this movie, and one of my thoughts was: I don't know anything about most of these characters but those step sisters are fantastic! And they were! Not too overly dumb or naive for the dumb one and not too mean or anything for the other. Just perfect. Great singing. No notes. You three can stay!

James Cordon, Romesh Ranganathan and James Acaster, they were really good. They were funny, a little distracting at times, but you know what that is more the editors fault than theirs. I loved them. No notes.

I would also like to add, I liked the changes at least most of them to the story and characters. No it is not at all perfectly executed, we will get to that TRUST ME!, but it isn't too woke, a little on the nose maybe, but come on! We have seen cinderella in so many ways (Sidenote, great for ONCE not to see Minnie Driver as an evil stepsister, because she's played the stepsister in like half of all cinderella adaptations.) We have seen this story so many times before, the reason that a cinderella story or Ella Enchanted, which in my book are the only ones worth a rewatch, are good is because they tried to do something different! And it worked! So I really don't mind it.

The last strength this movie has: It's really fucking funny sometimes, her rat lines, hilarious, I'm sorry, I laughed, its fucking dumb, but I laughed. I will say though, little side note here, I'm not sure it was all intentional though. And like, sure the commentary was funny, but it was a little inconsistent and sometimes it really took the tension out of a scene where it needed tension.

Okay, now for the complaining. If you loved this movie, you're probably not going to like this.

Now first off, and this is JUST for me, but when that Cellist broke her Cello after The Seven Nation Army mash up, I literally yelled: "NO! That is so expensive!"

Moving on! Like I said, I liked the story, I did like the changes they made to it. But there were some things that just pissed me tf off. Mostly it is on the prince's side of the story, and its not just there that there are flaws I just noticed them more.

The FIRST FUCKING SCENE WITH THE PRINCE! First time we meet him, first time we are introduced to him. He tells a girl, he doesn't wanna marry her, (And I went back to check it because I wanted to make sure I didnt miss something the first time.), he rejects a girl, because, "I don't plan on settling down any time soon.". I'm sorry. Just, just to be clear here. You wrote a script. Several people wrote a script. People agreed to act, direct and film it. AND NO ONE, NO ONE, thought to stop and ask about how fucking stupid that line is! This fucking movie, tries its damnedest, the rest of its almost two hour run time, to convince you, that, the reason Robert is opposed to marrying anyone other than Ella, is because HE WANTS LOVE. His mother says that is his reason! They cut away to more exposition, and THEN they have the fucking audacity, that his next scene has him being scolded by his father, and THEN making his I want song be, Somebody to love by Queen. (I literally paused and breathed to calm down my anger). I'm sorry. I just have to ask. WHAT THE HELLL???!!!!

WHAT?!!

WHAT!!!!

hn,gbsdig

WHAT?!

WHAT, is this?! What (and I mean this from the bottom of my heart) THE FUCK!

Why! Just Why, did no one! Nada, niet, no one, stop and say: Hold on, its almost like the princes ENTIRE establishing scene is him acting like a brat who doesn't wanna marry, and literally telling a princess he doesn't wanna marry, not just her, but implying in general. Isn't that kind of weird when he the rest of this movie claim he only wanna marry for love. Why not just make him say that? And apparently if someone DID say that, they were promptly fired, because this movie was clearly written and directed a M. Night Shamalan ripoff, because at least his twists makes fucking sense!

I know its just a fucking movie, but it pisses me off SO fucking much. Like it is one line, in one scene, and this movie would be 10 times better.

Next. And yes, this will involve less what's in all caps with exclamation points after, but know, that there will be equal amounts of what the hells felt in this next thing.

Later, Robert has permission from his parents to go off and marry Ella, and he searches which is kind of a cool sequences, then him and the boys are riding through the woods and all hope is lost, you know? Anyways, we get this scene, with the boys, and we know so far that Robert has a best friend named Haymish (I think), and then two other nameless bros who are mostly just clones of Grigor from the Great. Anywho, they are riding through the woods, all hope is lost, and then one of them gives this beautiful speech about how love is important and we all should long for what Robert has. It inspires them to carry on and Robert remembers that the marketplace exists. Cool? No. First off the dialogue in this scene is more contrived than a Kardashian ass. It is clunky and I am sorry, but no amount of cute irish accent is going to make me forget that you are literally spewing bullshit about love in a way that is laughably unsubtle and honestly just terribly written. Now maybe, just maybe, I could have forgiven that, if, it was said by Haymish (Still not sure thats his name but we'll go with it), because we have spent time with Haymish, we have liked Haymish because he is sort of sassy and we know that he is cautious and the person discouraging the prince, so to have him when all hope is lost go: No, if this is true love, you got this and you will find here. Now think, where could she be?

Still clunky, but its two in the morning and I didnt get paid to write a movie. But it would make sense, its a character established to go against the prince and be sensible, for him to be inspired and have a change a heart would be sweet, still contrived but sweet. Instead, we get this god damned NOBODY who might as well be an extra, saying these things and I was internally screaming: WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU! Why are you here? Who are you?!

Last thing on Robert and I promise to trash like two more things and then go. Anyways, Robert, I kind of loved and hated him at the same time. Good actor, singing wasn't awful. Here is the deal, if they had sticked with it a little more (and I get why they didnt but then why do it in the first place), I would have loved his character. He was witty and fucking funny. And half of the time when he wasn't busy being sweet or in love, he was a perfect ripoff of Peter from the Great. Now the reason I both loved and hated Robert is because of exactly that. The Great is a fantastic series that you should absolutely watch. And it's like they knew what they were doing, like his first line is like straight up something Peter would say, delivery and everything, and making him say Huzzah. Like, is this intertextuality or what? Like at the first half of this movie, I could literally see Peter from the great being friends with Robert. And if they had actually dared to follow through and allow him to continue to be sort of an awful person that could work, and could have been a great story about him wanting to be better than his father bla blah bla. I also get why they couldn't do that, but then like, just make him stupid my bros. Like make him more stupid. It would make sense that he is an idiot who just falls in love with a random girl. It would make even more sense for Gwen to be just rolling her eyes at him. Also, why dont we know more about Gwen, besides that she would actually be a great leader, here is a thing I have a problem with, why does she at like no point in the story talk to her brother. Why doesn't she give the pep talk! You cant convince me that she loves her brother with heart eyes in the end when you two have literally never had a conversation! Sorry, tangent. Anyway, the reason I hate Robert being like Peter from The Great, is, it reminded me I could just be rewatching The Great instead of this weird ripoff.

Moving on! Now, I still dont know where I stand on the godfairy, like I was like, its the fucking butterfly, of course it is. And I did like it, then I hated it, then I liked it again. That's it.

Now, what pissed me off to no end in this movie is, the music. First off I really did not like the opening number, it felt weird and clunky somehow, I would have been fine with a little voiceover or for it to somehow to be incorporated into Ella's I want song. Because I get it establishes the world, but like, idk, it just wasn't a very good song. And the opening number is also a big pet peeve of mind. First off, I dont hate Camilla Cabello, I think she's a good musician, I like some of her songs, I liked fifth Harmony. And hell, I did not even mind her acting in most of this. It was fine. The problem I have with her, that in that opening number, which is opening, HER movie, she is autotuned to death. I also had that problem with the second number, and then it was fine in perfect. But you CANNOT have the audacity to have an opening number to a movie, where the lead actress is a musician, and then autotune her to death. Like I spent a good amount of time wondering what went wrong. Like one of the notes sounded like it was tuned to the wrong note! And I know you can autotune today, without having the sound of it noticeable, and it was so fucking noticeable. So WHY. Why would you do this! This is an amazon movie, you have endless resources. Hire a better mixer! And even it was a great sound producer who did their job completely correctly, it also kind of in those first two songs, sounded like it was like in a bad place for her range. I literally in the beginning after hearing a note by Camilla, paused and went: Really!? Not going to get another take of that? Cool. Fine. Whatever. Its only a MUSICAL! And then they have the audacity to have her singing come in after and in duet with Idina Menzel, who fucking Slays. Even the step sisters slay their part. Just do a different take. Do something to the music! Dont let your lead singer sing a bad note and be badly autotuned! How did you let this happen? Also, while we're at the music, I dont hate some of it, like fuck somebody to loved did, but that was mostly because they had the audacity to sing queen and then not follow through in his character! Like, they might as well have made him sing Under Pressure. Actually, I just went to spotify under Queen to find a song, and Under Pressure would fit his character perfectly, his motivation and everything. Also, is there a reason they didnt make his song just duet Ella's in the beginning, but instead shoehorned it in when they got the rights to Queen instead? Because it would have shown connect and stuff. Maybe like, make their reunion scene, idk, meaningful? No. Not what you're going for. Cool. I also hate that they sang Perfect. We get it. Its a good song. Okay? Just let it be. Let it be just music, just instrumental, let them dance, let them sing it later. Just, not now. You could also have like, not picked something that in under a year became the worlds most annoying song because its played at every wedding ever. That is also an option, you know?

Also, I thought Ella was in a hurry, to like sail off. Dont try to convince me they gathered the whole kingdom in under an hour to announce Gwen as the new queen. Like, I get you want a big finishing dance number, but come on, they have somewhere to be!

All in all, (Wow, you made it this far? I deliver on the deranged rant part right?) there are some cool things about this movie, but I will be honest a lot of it bothered me, but hey, if you have two hours to spear, you might as well, you know, watch Handsome Devil. It has the guy who plays the prince, but its great and beautiful, and have characters that make sense and a great closing song that doesn't feel shoehorned, but is actually just beautiful in a fantastic way. And if you after that still haven't had enough, go watch the great. I promise its better. Like if you have no other options, sure, watch it, be like me, enjoy the comedians, the Idina's, the Peter like lines, and try to get past the rest. It is, passible. Like, technically it is a movie.

2/10 stars.

[septiembrre]

GG Headcannons

Tagged by @sothischickshe. Thanks, boo ;-) 

Ship: Beth x Rio -- in honor of our lovebirds day for GGWEEK2020

38. What is/are their love language(s)?

Haha, this has already made its way into one of my ficlets. I am also writing love languages into my next chapter of Better Be Mine. I can’t let it go!! I don’t actually care about them as tool for my irl relationship but it’s so easily identifiable for Brio. So my headcanons here... 

Rio’s love languages: 

Rio prefers to receive love through Quality Time. 

Rio shows love through Physical Touch. 

Beth’s love languages:

Beth prefers to receive love through Words of Affirmation.

Beth shows love through Acts of Service

49. Do they have differing political opinions?

Lol, @sothischickshe I can’t believe you tagged me in this!!!! Stop reading into the underlying vibes of Beth/Rio conversations in my fics! 

So the short version of my response is: yes. 

Now the absurdly long response:

I think about Rio & Beth a lot. I think about them talking about politicized issues quite a bit and imagine them in conversation with each other, teasing their beliefs apart. I like picturing these conversations instigated by hard parenting moments, things in the news, and things that come up as they finally start saying more words to each other. I think Rio could also just directly ask Beth about her political beliefs (I can’t necessarily picture the reverse yet).  

I think Beth is definitely more conservative than Rio -- and that’s an assumption I make because Rio’s a Latinx guy who probably came up with lack of access to wealth, and Beth as a white woman in the suburbs who formerly perceived herself/her family as wealthy. 

Beth’s characterization is complicated -- sometimes it really leans into Karen stereotypes/white woman privilege (lol, I cannot believe they literally had her show up at Gil’s workplace. I CRINGE!) and other times her beliefs and actions positively surprise me. Personally, in my fic writing, I love leaning into an idea that Beth grew up more working class/experienced neglect from her parents. I don’t want to romanticize these experiences but trauma around financial insecurity & complicated family relationships personally resonates with me. Ugh, I love writing about it, and it’s something that I read in her childhood that I like to lean into. That flashback in Season 2 really humanized Beth for me and it really made me love her. 

Okay, that was a major digression about class, but her life experience must lend itself to her political beliefs. She married into a wealthier family -- a family that owned it’s own business, was financially stable and just... a family perpetuating all the harmful effects of white heterosexuality and problematic gendered labor. And she conformed to it! Beth diminished herself to make herself fit there, to find safety and stability, to feel worth. So, I think her politics as an adult are also “safe” and probably echo the popular moderate trends in normative, toxic parent groups. Honestly, irl as a queer WOC who is anti-capitalist and been forced to be political for my own self-preservation and preservation of folks I love, I would not seek out PTA Beth’s friendship for multiple reasons, but I still have such a soft spot for Beth as a character?

That being said, Beth in the context of Annie & Ruby is obviously a different Beth. She loosens up in these spaces, she speaks her mind much more freely and in these scenes she comes as a normal, relatable human and she’s funny and prim and awkward. I think she comes across as somewhat liberal but not particularly educated on the issues/progressive (as is the way most characters are characterized on network TV). In this vein, she throws around a lot of white privilege and because some of it has gone un-interrogated in the context of the show... I’m not sure how intentional these vibes are or if it’s just par the course of it being white-owned network TV. Obviously characters are allowed to make mistakes and do shitty things, but I wish there was more on-screen acknowledgement of race in the show, and more intentional naming of things. In regards to Ruby + Beth in particular, I feel like an American white woman can’t have a life-long/multi-decade friendship with a Black woman and not be intentional about acknowledging racism/the specific misogynoir that Black women face. But the show hasn’t really acknowledged this aspect of Ruby + Beth’s friendship... 

*stares at the camera like I’m on The Office* 

It would be such a rich opportunity to discuss the challenges of interracial friendship if done well. Also, what an opportunity to delve into what it’s like to maintain friendships across the years (um, it’s hard!!! Even with people you love so much! Tell us more about Beth & Ruby’s ups and downs!). Beth and Ruby care about each other so much. When they and Annie get friendship beats -- I cry! Just make it make more sense! If the show filled in these blanks, it would be so great. Beth is obviously awakening~ definitely so in regards to her gender and her power and it could shift her political opinions? The show definitely poked a little fun at her crime “wokeness” by having her push back on cultural appropriation with those other PTA parents. Just by the exposure of her own relationships, Beth has experience with the lack of American safety net, our terrible, impoverishing health-care system, and inaccessibility of higher education. 

So, on one hand the show tries to do a thing where they equalize and don’t name race in the context of the three leads, “they’re three women��, but then they play on racial tropes with Beth and Rio’s relationship... I would like for their interracial relationship to be more overtly discussed/acknowledged outside of Rio’s somewhat performative call outs of Beth’s white lady fragility. 

So anyway -- Rio’s politics. We don’t know a ton about Rio so we don’t have too much textual evidence to go off of. But, we do know that Rio picks at Beth’s facade of white women fragility all the time -- sometimes with more hostility and other times simply teasing. When I write him, I give him my own experiences of having to become well-versed discussing politicized issues by the default of growing up experiencing racism and xenophobia. Rio, like any Mexican-reading man, has probably been told to “go back to his country” throughout his life -- and I can’t imagine it not politicizing him... Though, conservative Latinx exist and constantly shock me with their assimilationist audacity. *stares at the camera like I’m on the office again* But, idk, it’s something about their characterization of him of being so worldly~~ I imagine him being informed and up-to-date on the American news. I want him throwing around his power and $$$ by donating to local, progressive candidates of color. But, this is all projection~ :-) 

Ha, I feel like this was too critical of my forever otp (and on ship day to boot)!! And of Beth. The show has a habit of putting Beth through the physical and psychological wringer, and what I want instead is for our baby to be out of harm’s way, financially stable, divorced and independent, and also forced to interrogate the more harmful ways she deploys her whiteness. Lol, no one would watch my show. I know. 

I love Beth & Rio. They thrill me. And like many others in the fandom,  I often want to remove them from the GG canon and make them have harder/real/necessary conversations -- and generally converse about anything/everything because they barely do that on screen. I love the drama of their scenes, but my happy place is skipping a year ahead and building headcanons about what they could look like in actual relationship with each other... and one of these daydreams is Rio pushing Beth on her politics. I’m in an interracial relationship with a white woman myself -- and one of the things I love is endlessly discussing political issues and processing and growing together, and I like transplanting that to Brio in my fic perhaps too much, and it makes them OOC in my writing at times. 

Okay!!! This got long again. Thanks for tangling with this if you’ve gotten this far. There were a lot of assertions up there and I’m happy to unpack something further (but, thats at your own risk y’know. Clearly I don’t know when to stop when it comes to writing these ridiculously long posts).

[jessiewre]

Day 22

Sun 26th Jan 💜

It’s been a year to the day since we lost Nanny. That’s mad isn’t it. Miss that legend.

Woke up at about 5am because we’d gone to bed too early, but managed to power through and stay in bed till 7am. Phil got up and continued researching his new obsession - a half marathon near Kilimanjaro - and I joined him at 8:30am for Spanish omelette breakfast included in our 25$ a night room. Good deal that init. People say that in London you’re never further than like 5 meters away from a rat. Well thats like me and good deals, there’s always one close by for me to sniff out. Maybe I’m more like one of those pigs and the deals are truffles.

I digress...

The hostel manager was now wearing a chefs coat and I realised he was now the chef. What a multi-talented chap he was. I threw him into a frenzy by asking for salt, pepper, ketchup and chilli sauce, and eventually went into the kitchen myself to assist.

The ketchup was in a huge bucket bottle in the fridge and he gracefully glugged it out into a plastic squeezey bottle that he couldn’t find the lid for. Yum.

Shout out to Stella and Helen who will surely boke at that description of keptchup.

We got bodas to the Woman’s Centre for the recommended walking tour starting at 10am - but there was a big bike race on believe it or not, and so road blocks meant we had to walk the last kilometre. Phil was loving the bike race, I could see his legs twitching like he was imagining himself on a bike that moment, but I soon snapped him back to reality by power-walking ahead to avoid us being super late to the walk.

The sky was rapidly turning a dark shade of grey but Phil assured me that the weather report he’d checked stated that there would be no rain until midday or later.

You may be able to sense where this is going.

We arrived at the Centre and sat in the sofa area for the introduction, and the exact moment the woman began to talk and tell us about the community, the rain began to thunder on the metal roof and no one could hear a word she said. After 10 minutes, the intro finished and the rain actually calmed down a little, but then it went totally crazy again and me and Phil looked at each other like...hmm should we just not do this walking tour.

Another English girl there was thinking the same thing and the 3 of us decided to ditch the tour and head back the next day, while the 3 older people and a young American woman went off in the torrential rain with umbrellas. Umbrella’s are all good and well but I couldn’t see another soul on the streets so I seriously doubted how good a community walking tour would be in this weather. We chatted to the English girl, Esther, and she was ending a weeks work doing research for the Princes Trust who she works for. In a nutshell, she creates programmes for local groups in different countries to integrate technology into their lives to improve their prospects and quality of life. Really interesting! Phil mentioned that she should hang at our hostel later if she wanted as we were planning on trying out the bowling alley on site, and she was really up for that, especially considering she was in Kigali on her own and it was her last night.

The rain eventually calmed down enough for us to jump on a boda and we decided that considering the rain, it would be appropriate to visit the Genocide Museum at this point. We knew we were going to visit it at some point so made sense to be inside during the rain.

We were really hungry though and didn’t want to rush through the museum, so thankfully there was a cafe on site where we had a vege burger and vege panini, both with chips. We decided we’d try and lay off the chips for a while after that meal, it was the chip that broke the camels back.

The Rwandan Genocide museum was a harrowing and necessary visit.

The below information is upsetting, I’ll warn you now.

genocide

noun

noun: genocide; plural noun: genocides

1. the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular nation or ethnic group.

To briefly summarise, the problems began when the country was ��colonised’ - or should we say if we’re being honest, when the country was invaded against its will. The Germans were first in 1899 then the Belgians in 1916 and then the Belgian’s decided to split the country into three different groups. Ultimately this created a sort of competition between the groups of people that had never existed before and this was what they say sparked the issues in the country. Fast forward to 1994, and the genocide officially began, over a period of 100 days - neighbours were murdering neighbours, friends were murdering friends. Relatives even betrayed each other. By turning people against each other, the ringleaders were able to sit back and watch the killings happen for them.

Being in the country now, its very difficult to imagine it happening, as it feels vibrant, friendly and safe. But the images in the museum leave you under no illusions. People were mindlessly slaughtered, no one was spared - children, pregnant women and men. It was absolutely mind-blowingly horrendous.

The museum talks a lot about how the international community sat back and let it happen, like Rwanda was on another planet that no one cared about. There is obviously a lot of pain from that which was difficult to read about.

But there were also a number of people who put themselves on the line by hiding people in their houses and gardens, saving many lives. Unfortunately, there were not enough of those people and over a million people were killed. They are still uncovering mass graves today.

There were videos playing with interviews from survivors talking about the guilt they feel from being the only member of their family who survived. But incredibly, they spoke about forgiveness and said they would like to forgive the perpetrators if they were willing to ask for forgiveness. They spoke about moving forward with only peace in mind, as this was what would move Rwanda forward in a peaceful way. By seeking revenge, the violence and pain would continue, they said. It’s unbelievable to hear that from someone who watched their innocent young siblings and mother murdered by machete in front of their very eyes. You can’t even imagine what this person has gone through.

One of the most difficult parts of the museum was The Children’s Room. This section had beautiful photos of child victims printed in large portraits displayed around the room, with a small plaque underneath each one with bullet points of information about the child, like:

Name

Age

Favourite Snack

Best Friend


Then the final point for every child was

Cause of death

The descriptions here were detailed and distressing.

Obviously there is a huge amount of detail missing from this account of the genocide and I urge you to have a read about it if you have time and are interested.

We left there after a few hours taking it all in and went to find the Inema Art gallery, as we’d read about it being a really cool artists space that has had a lot of international interest.

It was different to what I expected, as there wasn’t actually a lot of pieces in there - more like a few extremely large pieces, each priced around $5000. So obviously, we bought two and headed off.

Well anyway, some of the artists were there stood near their art in smart clothes and were hoping for a super rich muzungu coming in and buying everything. That was not going to be us, so we thanked them and headed to the cafe for a little coffee.

Not before I asked them if there were any female artists there.

One guy said No, the women in Rwanda seem to stick to the craft-making and THEN he said that even though many are good at art, he thinks they are lacking in passion.

I said Hmm perhaps you means Confidence, not passion.

He was like Oh yeah, maybe that.

Yeah MAYBE THAT mate.

We boda’d back to the hostel and Phil donned up in his gear for a run. Just before heading off, he finally booked himself a spot onto the Kilimanjaro half marathon in Moshi, Tanzania on 1st March. FFS. Better get practicing on my excited supportive girlfriend look then.

Meanwhile I sat in the hostel garden watching videos on how to use Procreate on the iPad. Suddenly realised Phil had been gone AGES and then he rocked up having run like 10 MILES and then said Oh also, I may have tripped over and potentially broken my toe.

He’d taken out his phone to check the map and ended up kicking a bit of metal sticking out of the group, and then he’d fallen over and made a few new cracks on his phone screen (to join the 5 that were already there).

Wicked.

Phil had a quick shower and change while hobbling around on his bad foot (I hear broken toes are brilliant for half marathons), and Esther arrived at the hostel, so we went searching for a restaurant open on a Sunday. After a few fails, we eventually stumbled across a place called Afrika Bite and negotiated the 10k per person meaty Rwandan platter down to 5k each for a vegetarian version for all of us. It was so good! Garlic potatoes, peanut sauce, rice, vegetables, fried banana, salad, plus some ‘fish fingers’ ordered as an extra. Such a welcome relief to eat something local and delicious. Shout out to those who are reading this blog mainly for the food descriptions.

We went back to the hostel to play in East Africa’s 2nd bowling alley (the only other one is in Nairobi!) and Esther made sure she mentioned she had a ‘bad neck’. That would explain her unbelievably bad scoring thats for sure. Ok now to be fair, Phil the physio also advised that she use the heaviest ball available which turned out to be truly awful advise and after a stagnant run of about 2 points in 6 goes, she tried a really light ball - and actually hit some pins! Go Esther.

Can I also mention that this bowling alley had a system where a bloke hidden at the end would organise the pins and reset them for us manually using a kind of lever system. He always managed to move his hands out of the way before the ball struck the pins of course.

Esther headed back to her hotel and we ended up playing basketball on the two hoops game with Desire the manager. Our quick game of ‘How many can you score in 1 minute’ managed to take over our lives for over an hour. My record was 23, Phil’s 24 (he’s taller init) and Desire managed 33 (well, he works there so ya know). Was addictive and super fun and I got the impression Desire will spend the next year working on his pb.

[jimdsmith34]

What Your Wedding Dress Style Says About How Much Of A Bridezilla You Are

Mazel Tov! Youre getting married. Or you’re balls deep in a breakup and fantasizing hard about a day when a man comes into your life who doesn’t turn out to be a total fuckboy as soon as you hook up. Either way, you’re obsessed with weddings right now. Despite being a completely outdated societal norm that reinforces the idea that women are nada unless they have a man who loves them, its something we all dream about our entire lives. Hey, no one ever accused me of being a romantic, but even Im all fired up about putting on a big cotton ball of a dress just to have some poor dude proclaim that hes officially whipped in the name of the Lord and the government. I blame tbh. Like, fuck you Randy for making me all basic and shit. How dare you? I’m supposed to be a card carrying feminist out here in my pussy hat and yet the minute somebody mentions floral arrangements, I’m suddenly full of opinions. It’s the eternal paradox. Anyway, to help you judge the shit out of almost-married besties this wedding season or make sure you dont commit bridal fashion suicide if youre youre the one saying I do, heres what your wedding dress style says about you.

Ball Gown

If you dream of having a dress so big you can hardly walk down the aisle, you def want a ball gown, meaning youre a basic AF bride. You probably say shit about wanting to feel like a princess on your big day and all your bridesmaids def commence talking shit about you as soon as you leave the room. Just trust me. They are. Youre the type thats dreamed/talked/pinned about this day for-fucking-ever and youre super optimistic about getting married, even though deep down you know a lack of interesting sex with a man who is developing a beer belly is in your future. Youll start a mommy blog once you have kids and make everything look like its perfect, but youll have a secret stash of vodka and maybe a little weed in your nightstand for the one day a year when you’re actually allowed to enjoy life. 

Mermaid/Trumpet/Fit And Flare

First things first, whats the fucking difference? And even if there is a slight difference, is three different names for something thats virtually the same really necessary? Im gonna say no. But I digress. If this is the kind of dress you go for, youre confident and hot but you understand that your 90-year-old Meemaw doesnt want to see you looking like a hoe on your wedding day. Ever since you got engaged, you havent eaten carbs (except for that one drunken pizza binge at your bachelorette) and youve been hitting up SoulCycle every morning. Youre super successful at work thanks in large part to your type A personality. Because of this, youre obsessing over every detail of your wedding and have had at least four nervous breakdowns planning this shit. Youre excited for it to be over with so you can finally relax, but lets be honest, youll find something else to obsess over in a matter of days. Probably like, a baby or some shit. 

Something See-Through

If this style is for you, youre the trashy bride. I mean, at least youre bold, right? Youre marrying someone whos rich AF because theres no way youd settle for one dick the rest of your life if there wasnt some benefit in it for you. You were the lush of your sorority in college and while you were excited to get married at first, the whole till death do us part thing has you wigging the fuck out the closer you get to your wedding. In a few years, youll get a role on because you need to do something for you and after two seasons you and your husband will call it quits. Youll say its because the pressure of living your life on reality TV magnified your problems, but its really because you were bored out of your fucking mind. In a year or so, you’ll try releasing a pop single and it’ll be embarrassing for literally everyone.

Tea Length

Hold on. I need to wait for this massive eye roll to end before I can put together my thoughts. Okay cool. Im finished. A tea-length wedding dress is reserved specifically for hipster brides and people who are roughly a thousand times less cute than they think they are. At your wedding, everything will be DIY because you couldnt find anything that truly embodied your essence and you will literally tell everyone in earshot about it. For favors, you and your fianc brewed your own beer thats fucking disgusting if I had to guess and made custom labels that say Let Love Brew. Vomit. IRL, you pride yourself on not having the type of job the status quoor as you like to call it, “The Man”expects you to have. So like, you harvest bees and sell honey on the side of the road or some shit. Idk. Long story short: Youre the worst. Welcome to your tape.

Multiple Dresses

Isnt one $10,000 dress for one evening of your life enough? If your answer to this question is no, youre extra af. You care way too much about what everyone thinks and youre going to be so tied up in everyones opinion of you and your wedding, youre going to be fucking miserable the day of. In general, you try way harder than you need to at pretty much everything you do. Out of your 12 bridesmaids, only 4 or 5 would consider you a close enough friend to have them in their wedding, and all of them are pissed about how much money they had to spend making your destination bachelorette happen. Ouch. In a few years, youll pop out a kid or two and quit your job to be a full-time mom so you can take up tennis at your local country club and become the president of PTA.

Your Moms Dress

If you insist on wearing your moms old haggard wedding dress from the 80s, youre a typical nicegirl. Everything you do in life revolves around whats best for others rather than looking out for #1 and because of this youve been walked on by everyone you know. Tragic. You think wearing your moms dress will be a sweet gesture and will make her v happy, but did you even think about yourself? I mean, its your fucking day and youre gonna wear some tacky shit from the 80s? Id feel bad for you except youre also the type that would only have beer and wine at your reception, fuck maybe even no alcohol at all, and I dont feel bad for people who pull that kind of shit on their friends.

A-Line

Brides who choose A-line dresses are sophisticated, classic betches, not just on their wedding day but in general. Unlike most brides, youve been chill throughout the entire wedding process and not a total nightmare so youll still have friends other than your spouse once this whole thing is over. Youre like really really pretty and dont need a super tight dress to be the hottest girl in the room. Youre the type that wont change after you get married. Youll still hang out with all your friends and not be lame AF and for sure wont keep your wedding portraits as your prof pic for too long. When you have a kid, you’ll name it something normal and have the appropriate amount of involvement in its day to day life. Congratulations. You win. 

source http://allofbeer.com/what-your-wedding-dress-style-says-about-how-much-of-a-bridezilla-you-are/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2018/01/what-your-wedding-dress-style-says.html

[trendingnewsb]

MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me

Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?

The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?

Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.

They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.

For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?

Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.

When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.

A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.

The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:

As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?

Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.

In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.

With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.

People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide

The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?

Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.

MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?

People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.

When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?

She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.

Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?

Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.

Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.

The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.

This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.

Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.

MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June

Read more: http://ift.tt/2rBtxTD

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MIA: This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me

Maya Arulpragasam is bringing dancehall, hip-hop and grime to this years Meltdown. Is the outspoken British Sri Lankan the best argument for positive cultural appropriation?

The Guardian said that you couldnt shag to my record. As conversational openers go, MIAs beats the banal niceties of, say, Hello, how are you doing?. Its no surprise that she charges straight into a chat about why her last album was considered too confrontational for the bedroom by this paper. Its an icebreaker moulded to MIAs very own design: abrasive, compelling, underpinned by sex. Yeah, she finally concedes with a grin when I suggest we move past it, you cant have it all, can you?

Its a theme she warms up to when we talk about her edition of Meltdown at the Southbank Centre, which were ostensibly here to discuss. Usually, I wouldnt do something like this, she says, slouched under an oversized khaki coat dress. [But the organisers] were like: Hey, you can do whatever you want. Still, putting on the South Banks annual festival, curated in previous years by the likes of David Bowie, David Byrne and Patti Smith, has turned out to be a fairly arduous affair for MIA who says she doesnt do computers at the moment.

They didnt tell me it was nine days long. I thought it was a weekend. And then all my lists were, like, Well, this person wont be in London and that person is doing Glastonbury. Organising festivals is actually really complicated, she stresses. It wasnt just about dreaming something and then it appeared. Programming literally means, like, programming.

For all that Maya Arulpragasam didnt quite know what she was letting herself in for, one suspects the Southbank Centre didnt either; logistics aside, the mornings photoshoot has already been met with some flapping from the press officer made nervous by MIA climbing on the roof without safety clearance. Still, her lineup dancehall, Brooklyn hip-hop, depressive Swedish rap and Nigerian grime is perhaps the most underground the festival has seen in its 24 years. How much is she expecting to shake up its comfortable concert halls, cafe bars and conference-room spaces?

Click here to watch the video for last years Go Off.

When I was a teenager in London, I would just get a Travelcard and go somewhere, explore the city and go to weird places, she says. I would never judge the place, like, This is middle class and white. This is a white country, you dont have to spell it out to me, but there wasnt ever a limit on where I could go or what I could do.

A long, elliptical digression on London then and now follows, which takes in the optimistic multiculturalism of the 90s, Tamil house parties, empire and British identity. Its the bento box of an MIA interview: individually contained ideas that dont obviously bleed into one another and yet, overall, make a collective sense if youre prepared to go with it. Thats the key thing about MIA: you have to be willing to go with her to properly get her. Given that she still looks and sounds like a beautiful, bratty, art-school upstart and is prone to labyrinthine tangents, its easy to portray her as inarticulate or unhinged. But MIAs intelligence is instinctive rather than intellectual, and fuelled by the political.

The Mehrabian maxim that reckons that only 7% of communication is verbal is one that might best be proven by the transcript of a chat with MIA removed of all tone, attitude, context and body language. Take, for instance, her explanation of why only the future remains relevant:

As humans, we dont use our past and our history to work out the importance of what our role is in the present, she says. And if you cant use the past to define your present, then it should not be an element that holds back the future. Greece is a perfect example. More than Britain, they were brought to their knees, and not a single white country thought about saving them. And it was part of their heritage. Its where their mythology comes from or their concept of capitalism and democracy comes from. Nobody cared, everybody cared about the modern. Right?

Kim Kardashian is actually more powerful than Greece. She has more money than the whole of Greece, she continues. Therefore, thats where the power lies. If you then define it that way, then you kind of just have to live with that. And maybe whats happening in modern society: that if youre going to judge it by that, then other countries are gonna come in and define the future.

In print, its a statement that seems lacking in logic and coherence. In the moment, Im fairly sure Im able to follow her and we go on to consider how and where this future is being defined (for the record: You cant ignore the fact that China is going to be doing their thing in the next 50 years) and how Arulpragasam believes the immigration issue has become a red herring covering up a truth that can explain the American and British swing to conservative populism.

With Brexit, the idea was to get away from Europe and reinvent our identity, she says. And really, that identity was going to be American, but then they gave us Trump! So, everyone now is like, Oh shit, what is Britain? Are we going to rewind back to the 1800s? We cant. Its too late for that. So, going forward, we need a charismatic leader who then va va vooms the British identity. And we dont have that either.

People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted … MIA. Photograph: Stephanie Sian Smith/The Guide

The prime minister has called a snap election on the day we meet. Does MIA have any faith in our political system? Or in the left?

Everyone keeps going, Corbyn cant do this, but its, like, well, who else is there? she says. If people just left him alone to actually do the job and actually gave him some support, maybe hed be different. Treating him with so much contempt fighting that takes all his energy. How the fuck do you expect him to do interesting things? In any case insists the estranged daughter of a Tamil revolutionary, politicians are people who couldnt get jobs somewhere else.

MIAs politics, unwieldy and unslick though they may be, have often made her an easy target for tedious sneering in the press; the most insistent narrative is that, like Banksy, shes big on arch, subversive statement but lacks substance. Or that she is a hypocrite for making herself the poster girl for the worlds most marginalised people. And yet, shes one of the best pop stars Britain has ever produced. For all the ear-clanging experimentation of her five albums, MIA has always kept a sleeve full of pop bangers Bucky Done Gun, Paper Planes, Bad Girls, Finally that have sounded like little that came before or since her. Even if she didnt have the tunes, here is an art-school refugee Sri Lankan single mother with a visual aesthetic co-opted by everyone from Vetements to Versace who was born into political rebellion and revels in controversy. Gleefully gauche and carefree, MIA is the best argument for when cultural appropriation works. Bland singer-songstress beloved of Radio 2 playlists she isnt. So how much has the criticism bothered her?

People thinking that Im a bitch is totally unwarranted because Im not, she ays. I just had to fight for shit, and I still do. I just dont care any more. I dont know. She stops and starts. What I deal with as an artist, the media, the public persona, its a walk in the fucking park, compared to how confusing the universe really fucking is. Theres so much beauty in it and theres so much mystery, theres so much confusing shit in it. That is way more interesting to think about than why, like, Patricia hates me. You know what I mean? I laugh. Its like, Who the fuck is Patricia? and How can Patricia say this shit about me?. It just does not matter to me at all.As it is, she says shes most preoccupied with how to be a functioning grown up, an adult and a mother to an eight-year-old son (whose father Benjamin Bronfman is son to the billionaire heir of the Seagram fortune) born into immense privilege.

When the war came to an end in Sri Lanka in 2009, it actually did affect me, she explains. Everyone was, like, What the fuck does she know? Shes, like, a pop star, but that was my life. It was 50% of who I was, it was my identity. I didnt know what to do with myself. So I had a kid. Its the year the cause died, but the year my personal cause my son was born. And then, OK, I have to figure out what to do in very small parameters: I have a son, how is he going to see his grandma, am I going to make it there on Saturday? Can I make sure that I dont mess up his head by being depressed about certain things?

She struggles to reconcile her upbringing poor and living in Sri Lanka for her childhood to poor and living on a council estate in Mitcham, south London, in her adolescence with her sons. Im not very straightforward as an immigrant. That whole My kids would never see the pain that I saw; Im not like that. Im totally up for reintroducing him to the pain. I dont have any qualms about that. Her problems havent changed, she says, because of money or better circumstances. Whether Im in a mansion or a council flat, I would feel the same anxiety waking up going: I need to write this thing in a scrapbook, wheres my notepad? I would still have all those problems. I might still overcook the fish fingers. Those things are not going to magically transform because your house has changed. At the beginning I thought that money couldve saved my family. Very quickly I realised that money is not the thing.

Her conflict in wanting to being huge and commercial versus credible and ahead of the curve has been a persistent tension threaded through MIAs career. When I got into the music game, it was never an option to shut up and make lots of money. she says. To be a huge pop star, I would have to be, like, Yes, I think bombing Afghanistan was a great idea, I love our democracy and what it has achieved. I love the American flag and Im going to make a jumpsuit out of it. I just think it was important to have all of those Arab Springs, and its great and lets drink Coca-Cola. I had to do that, and do it all in a thong. Could I have done that if it meant that my mum had the nicest house in Chiswick by the river?

Click here to se the video for MIAs Bad Girls.

Does she worry about money now? If youre preaching living within your means, you have to, to some extent. But I also know that if youre someone in society that speaks out about injustice or political issues, one of the things that happens is that you get economically punished, 100%. I take that hit all the time.

The most recent, obvious example was MIA being forced to quit her headline slot at Afropunk last year, following a contentious quote in which she asked in an interview why Beyonc and Kendrick Lamar might not discuss why Muslim lives matter or Syrian lives matter. I dont regret [raising the issue], she says, with triumphant chutzpah. You saw how bad it was. And the Muslim ban didnt happen just with Trump, it was already happening under Obama. But you couldnt say that about him, you couldnt say that he introduced the Muslim ban, or banned seven different countries, or was already monitoring people, or dropped more bombs than Trump has. In truth, Obamas administration did identify the seven countries on Trumps list for additional screening measures, but it didnt bar their nationals. Shes already skipped ahead. The quantity of damage cant be quantified right now, she insists. Well have to wait the four years. After eight years of Obama, we kind of knew [his failings], but we just werent allowed to say them because he was so great. He was better than any person in Hollywood that I wouldve watched. He was really likable and just had loads of swag. That doesnt mean that you have to deny the truth, though.

This (and much more) comes moments after she tells me she has no time for opinions these days. She claims she doesnt read the news any more and that her primary sources for information are customers at the local kebab shop, taxi drivers and then sort of figuring it out. What about the state of the world? MIAs moment as an agitprop pop activist has never seemed more potent. Politics? I have no time for these things because Im so stuck in the zone. Ive become a hermit. [Meltdown] is actually giving me the chance to actually go out and meet people again. Ive gone for weeks without talking to a person, I do that happily. I tell her I dont believe her, as I suspect it would be a recipe for her to go fully barmy.

Im actually quite an extreme person, so I dont see that as madness. I see that as, like, solitude, doing a phase of solitude is not that bad. After declaring her fifth album AIM to be her final one, shes also trying to find new ways to channel her creativity. Im trying to write a film. I havent stepped into it yet because I want it to be good. Once you hit the start button you cant really stop it. She has, she tells me, the added complication of ADD to contend with. When was that diagnosed? I just have it. Dont even need diagnosis, its a waste of time, its a waste of the NHS. In truly blithe MIA style, she adds: Its just when you have too many ideas and not enough ways to get them out.

MIAs Meltdown is at the Southbank Centre, SE1, 9-18 June

Read more: http://ift.tt/2rBtxTD

from Viral News HQ http://ift.tt/2rbYbGf via Viral News HQ