#idk Daphne's had some ~issues the past few days

[xoxoemynn]

gonna call out of work tomorrow due to a severe case of feeling tender as hell

[idolomantises]

talking abt that one thing in velma thats on my mind a lot for the past few days (that turned into a big incoherent rambling about gay rep in media)

i'm seeing jokes about how the queer representation in mystery inc being so much better than the queer representation in velma and honestly it makes me want to go on a whole tangent about my thoughts on queer representation nowadays vs the more subtle examples decades prior.

There's this weird debate that goes on online about what is "good" queer representation, and one of the most notable and honestly annoying examples is that queer representation has to be so subtle that you could easily miss it/ignore it. i've always hated that take because its a claim mostly said by straight people who are uncomfortable with seeing characters who are openly queer and/or state their identity, but they present it as some sort of push for subtle and nuanced writing. personally i do prefer it when a character just, identifies as how they are without explaining their identity, but that doesn't mean flat out explaining your orientation is inherently bad representation. its why i will always defend the very clunky and awkward high guardian spice scene. it is absolutely poorly directed and written, but that doesn't make it "bad representation". however, I do consider the character who explains that he's trans bad representation because he is flat, uninteresting and very clearly a creator self insert. he doesn't feel like a well rounded character who's also a trans man, but just an incredibly sanitized example of trans representation.

i have many, many issues with helluva boss/hazbin hotel and i do genuinely find some depictions of queer characters just flat out offensive (you can argue with me about how angel dust being written like your average 90s gay stereotype is woke actually because he has trauma, i dont care), but i do admire and appreciate that the series doesn't want to sanitize its queer characters, even if its done poorly. though i could go into a whole rant about how i find it very telling that female characters that are queer are far less sexualized or allowed to be problematic compared to their queer male counterparts.

anyways back to velma. that show does something that i've always found pretty irritating in queer representation which is just this weird lack of faith in its audience. characters can't have a slow burn anymore. internalized thoughts, anger, frustration, longing. you have to immediately know that two characters are gay for each other, even if they're lifelong enemies. its like when modern horror movies open with the gore because they're scared people are going to be bored or leave early. there's no subtlety or chemistry between daphne and velma, they're just lovers because idk, its two girls who hate each other and who doesn't love that.

then i think about how mystery inc handled velma and her sexuality, how she was allowed to be well rounded and nuanced before you slowly realize that "oh, she doesn't like boys". i know her whole thing with shaggy is controversial among fans but i always loved how she does do something pretty unlikable but not immoral. yeah, it is shitty to force shaggy to choose between her and his dog, but i can understand her line of thinking and empathize with her. and i do like how they become friends in the end despite their awkward break up. It's always fun rewatching it and realizing that their incredibly awkward and cringe relationship was meant to be awkward and cringe. it was supposed to be weird and difficult to watch, because those two weren't meant to date each other. you could see how hard velma was trying to make the relationship work despite the fact that you never get the vibe that either character was full invested in it, unlike daphne and fred's relationship.

then you had velma and her relationship with marcie, which started off as sort of a catty rivalry (not full on attempted murder, i mean holy shit hbo velma) that slowly grows to where you're completely convinced that these two did gradually like each other. and i do really enjoy stuff like that, more subtle writing like that. which doesn't just apply to queer rep btw, my favorite ships are relationships that feel understated, something you have to really dig for and pay attention to. its why i consider bubbline the best f/f representation in cartoon. because its subtle, but not too subtle where it feels out of no where when they kiss, and nuanced in ways that enhances the relationship AND characters.

there's a good amount of relationships i see in cartoons where the creator, who is usually queer themselves, often wants to depict queer relationships, but is weirdly adverse to depicting the uglier aspects of that character, and refuses to add subtlety to it. steven universe is a show i've always felt conflicted on its handling of queer representation because on the one hand i appreciate writing lesbians that are messy, traumatized and make constant mistakes. but on the other hand, the show goes out of its way to ignore these issues and/or make excuses for it, making the decision to make these characters messy and complicated genuinely baffling (this is also one of the big issues i have with catradora and stolitz).

it makes me think back to my own work too. i really enjoy making fluffy, easily digestible gay content for my followers and myself because it puts me in a good headspace. But even now and then i like exploring those little nuances too, because i don't really enjoy stories with little conflict. Because of that acknowledgement of how satisfying it is to write fluffy, queer rep, you end up putting yourself in other creator's shoes. you're so used to media that either dehumanizes gay people or tells people that they don't exist that you push yourself to make the most in your face queer rep you can but its at the cost of an interesting and subtle characters. characters that don't really have arcs or places to learn and grow.

With bugtopia i made a joke about how i want some of my queer rep to feel like you're being queerbaited. It's not literal, obviously, but mixed in with characters who are already married and in same gender relationships, i really want to write dynamics that feel subtle enough for a bit of a slow burn. even if you know they're going to end up together, to at least value the characters on their own before centering them on their relationships. queerbaiting is something that deserves all the criticism it can get, but it is embarrassing when queerbaiting feels genuinely more interesting than actual queer rep because queerbaiting has that factor of "maybe they won't get together" that adds that bit of intrigue, vs so many shows that repeatedly hammer in your head "don't worry guys, they're gonna be lesbian lovers".

mystery inc (and many other shows) being forced to keep a relationship obvious while subtle to get through censorship really forced creators to be creative with their storytelling and not center characters around their relationship and identity. but nowadays i think shows like to take the easy way out. for me, i always thought the most impactful example of queer representation in steven universe is "Rose's Scabbard". I genuinely don't enjoy that episode because it's a good example of the show thinking that trauma is an excuse for shitty behavior, but i cant deny that an entire episode of pearl breaking down and finally accepting that she wasn't the center of rose's world. it's the crew being forced to be creative and push through censors to telling a compelling story about a traumatized lesbian slowly realizing that she basically deluded herself into thinking she was someone's savior.

I think it's silly to try to place good queer representation in one box. like subtle queer rep is good, but also queer rep where a character flat out states that their gay. where I think it falls apart is when it either reinforces stereotypes without properly deconstructing or expanding on them, makes the characters so overly kind and non-controversial that the relationship is just boring, or try to make your messy and complicated characters but the narrative refuses to hold them accountable or at least acknowledge that they're doing something wrong. and to clarify on that last part, i'm not asking for some hays code nonsense where every bad person goes to prison and/or promises to stop being a bad person again. i mean the narrative doesnt just fucking sugarcoat their behavior. i don't want to see helluva boss ignore the fact that stolas made blitzo call him out for only using him for sex and then pathetically rush to justify their relationship by giving them a bizarrely sanitized and sweet backstory. and i don't want to see catra literally end the fucking universe and only do something good because she's straight up out of options and the show just decides that that was her redemption and she doesn't need to do anything to atone for what she did (including repeatedly abusing and verbally berating adora).

anyways velma has none of those interesting qualities and i'm pretty sure daphne and velma kissed because the creator is a weird pervert who thinks two girls kissing is hot.

[ramle17-18]

10/30

lmao so i've been really really awful about keeping up with journaling. i wrote an entry about a week or so after the last one and then more than halfway through tumblr decided to delete it without saving it as a draft :) and i just simply didn't have the energy to rewrite it. so i will try to summarize everything that's been going on, because i hadn't even started school yet in the last entry. i think it'll be easier to go by subject than by day in this one just because so many different things have happened, and it's over 2 weeks' worth lol. so!

school:

we started school! we've successfully completed two weeks :) some days are definitely rougher than others, some kids are definitely rougher than others, but overall they seem to love marleigh and me a lot! the first week we just did nametag-making activities so we could start learning their names and get a rough idea of their hebrew levels (they're really all over the place). all last week we did halloween activities with them, which they LOVED. we did trick-or-treating games and then i drew these enormous word searches on the board for them to all take turns solving as a class, and that seemed to work really well with their vocab words so i think that's something we'll use again for sure.

iris, the school counselor, is apparently going to be giving us food every wednesday, which is honestly amazing. she's so incredibly sweet, but also very shy because her english isn't good so she barely talks to us. but she's adorable and so so nice.

i'm frustrated with hana, the other english teacher besides avital, because she just never seems to know what the fuck is going on with anything ever. but thankfully we really don't have to work or even talk to her very often.

marleigh and i have been working super well together, and i really do stand by what i said about not feeling like i would want to have been paired with anyone else in the house.

ulpan:

we also started ulpan. unforunately not as much of a success, which has been incredibly fucking frustrating. so basically what happened was, we went in for our first day about two weeks ago (wednesday the 18th i think) and she passed out these long-ish passages with questions to answer. everyone except me was like "nope lol" but i tried to do it, and immediately yael, the teacher, came over and was like "no you're doing this wrong" (because i was translating sentence by sentence so i could remember what i had read when it came time to answer the questions...she didn't explain to me why it was wrong to do it that way nor did she offer any alternatives but uh ok). she also doesn't speak very much english which would be fine except it just doesn't lend itself well to our situation which is so unnecessarily complicated.

anyway, so after that she wanted me to just start at the beginning with everyone else, yknow like the very very beginning with the letters and "ani jami, at yael" over and over and over and i was going to lose my shit. so i was asking if there was like an in-between level i could be put in because the second level (which is what the passage was from) seemed a little too hard for me, and she responded by...giving me another passage worksheet. and everyone was getting annoyed with me, and i felt bad, but also i had been looking forward to this since before even getting here, we had to wait a month and a half to start, and i really refuse to not learn anything at this point.

so i went into the hall to work and madeleine came out a bit later and nurit came to talk to us, and i guess yael told nurit that she thought i was very disrespectful and that i clearly don't know as much hebrew as i think i do, and that she knows what she's doing etc etc. (i also don't like that nurit told me that but i'll get to that in a minute lol). by the end of the day yael said she would try to find something in between for us, which is literally all we'd been asking for from the beginning.

so we left pissed but relatively mollified. we went back the next monday and yael's supervisor, gila, was there. she told us that basically instead of us all having a 2.5 hour class, madeleine and i would come in at 5:30 and work until 6:30 or 6:45 and the others would have from 4-5:30. everyone was pissed, fairly so, and so madeleine and i brought it up to gila and we were like "we just thought we'd be doing stuff to the side so we could ask her questions but that she would spend most of the time with the beginners, we don't want to take any of their time away from them" and she gave us this whole speech about how it's not allowed to work that way etc. which is bullshit. but anyway so we went back at 5:30 and then at 6:15 out of NOWHERE yael shoves all her shit into her bag and is like "ok see you next week!" and fucking bolts. and madeleine and i were like uh????

so we went back the next wednesday (which was last week) and tried to tell yael how we were feeling, but as usual she kept speaking over us and trying to guess what we were going to say before we said it, and she kept being like "so you want to come back into the other class?" and we were like "NO, we just want the others to have the full time that was promised to them." and so she takes us into the hall and she looks at me and goes like "i know you complained about me. i really think you need to trust what i'm doing and you need to have a more positive attitude about ulpan." and i was gonna fucking punch her. so then i was like "to be clear, are we done at 6:15 or 6:30? because gila said 6:30 a bunch of times the other day." and she said some bullshit about how the hour includes a 15 minute break and since she doesn't need the break we can just do the 45 minutes. but as matt pointed out later, it's supposed to be 75 minutes including a 15 minute break, so she's skimping off literally 25% of our lesson and we're now getting 45 minutes twice a week. she told us we can sit in on the other class and do work off to the side if we want, but they can't stay after. so like i think we're just gonna sit down and shut up and keep working on our own lol.

this woman's teaching methods are also fucking ridiculous. madeleine tried to use an infinitive and said it wrong and yael literally was like "ok, if you don't know how to do something correctly, don't do it at all." and also doesn't give us time to write anything down "we don't have time we don't have time!" and i just can't stand her. the stuff we're doing is also below my level but like i said i'm just gonna deal with it and keep working on duolingo. talia also sent me the online version of her hebrew textbook so i'm gonna use that as well and just do work on my own.

nurit & house drama:

well! first off, nurit finally got involved with all of the matt and rachel drama because he was being awful awful awful to her. so in typical nurit fashion she decided that the best way to handle the issue was to first speak to sultana and marleigh, then matt and rachel separately, and THEN matt and rachel together, which is literally the opposite way from how i would've done it, but whatever.

we've also noticed that in addition to her lovely habit of being "blunt" she likes to gossip. a lot. about us. to one another. and it makes us super fucking uncomfortable. yesterday i was in the car with her on the way to the rabin museum and she just started talking shit about matt to me, i was so uncomfortable and then of course immediately went to him and told him about it lmao

we're also butting heads with her because she keeps planning all this shit without any regard for what we want to do. her sunday activities have mostly been flops, and she ignores all of our input or suggestions. we went to the ilana goor art museum in jaffa which was actually really cool, but the tour was an hour long and she was like "what should we do after, i think we should do team-building, we can go to a park and i can bring a ball" and i was like "can we just stay in the museum? it looks really big on the website and i'm sure there are going to be things the tour doesn't cover" and matt and madeleine agreed, and nurit basically went into this whole thing (prompted by matt being kind of a dick ofc) about how she's in charge and we're being insulting and blahblahblah.

basically she has no problem with bluntness when it's coming from her but the second it's directed at her she gets super defensive. all i know is i'm never telling her anything about myself again because she can't be trusted to keep it to herself.

weight:

lowest so far is 136.2. i've been hovering around 137 on and off the past few days though, i think it's because i'm constipated tbh. idk if it's because i'm not eating enough or what. but i went down a notch on my fitbit strap :) we have the eilat trip this weekend and i think i'll wear the purple suit instead of the black one.

misc:

i ended up not going to hannah's halloween party :( they were super nice about it obviously but i felt bad. i just haven't been sleeping well and i was so exhausted, plus madeleine was sick and didn't really want to go either, so i just stayed home.

in other news i've been pretty good about reading! i just finished 'rebecca' by daphne du maurier yesterday and really enjoyed it. i want to try and read more classics by female authors.

we also watched pulp fiction and i didn't like it. we saw mother! and it was alright, super crazy symbolic but the movie itself was...a lot.

i think that's really it?