#it was painful to watch

[hoperays-song]

Dating? Never.

Meena: Are you dating Ryan?

Johnny: What? Fuck no, there's nothing going on between Ryan and me. Why would you think that?

Ryan: *walks by*

Johnny: Hey, love! *kisses his cheek* You're looking amazing as always!

Ryan: *kisses Johnny on the cheek, smiles, and walks away*

Meena:

Ash:

Johnny: Anyway, you guys are exaggerating. Stop seeing romance where there is none.

[scuderiahockeyfc]

what even was that game?? how did we go from being down 2-0 and pulling ahead 3-2 just to lose in the last few minutes???

[the-box-of-mine]

Huh what a bad day

[chessb0r3d]

Analysis so bad you don't even know what it's talking about anymore.

[unraveling-fast-its-true]

The creators of that and also the 2nd half of season 1 were sick, sick

Society if Black Butler Season 2 wasn't so Fucking Weird

[stuckinapril]

Incredibly alarming that talks of “peace” in Gaza seem to extend no further than a ceasefire. How do you think they’re gonna start off where they left off themselves? Their houses are destroyed, so many have lost mothers and fathers and brothers and children, they still have no clean water and no food. Any area Israel withdraws out of is an area it already knows has been rendered inhospitable. There was even a direct quote by some IOF soldier gleefully stating how he “wasn’t sure Palestinians could go back to their homes.” So what happens when the US “succeeds at negotiating a ceasefire”? Who will be responsible for helping the Palestinians rebuild all that they’ve lost?

[novelconcepts]

I Saw the TV Glow is such a uniquely, devastatingly queer story. Two queer kids trapped in suburbia. Both of them sensing something isn’t quite right with their lives. Both of them knowing that wrongness could kill them. One of them getting out, trying on new names, new places, new ways of being. Trying to claw her way to fully understanding herself, trying to grasp the true reality of her existence. Succeeding. Going back to help the other, to try so desperately to rescue an old friend, to show the path forward. Being called crazy. Because, to someone who hasn’t gotten out, even trying seems crazy. Feels crazy. Looks, on the surface, like dying.

And to have that other queer kid be so terrified of the internal revolution that is accepting himself that he inadvertently stays buried. Stays in a situation that will suffocate him. Choke the life out of him. Choke the joy out of him. Have him so terrified of possibly being crazy that he, instead, lives with a repression so extreme, it quite literally is killing him. And still, still, he apologizes for it. Apologizes over and over and over, to people who don’t see him. Who never have. Who never will. Because it’s better than being crazy. Because it’s safer than digging his way out. Killing the image everyone sees to rise again as something free and true and authentic. My god. My god, this movie. It shattered me.

[rapidhighway]

But if your favorite character isn't on the floor panting and dying and in horrible pain in a terrible situation then what's even the point

[nor5tar]

Oh, wait, is that why so many adult humour shows literally have the characters get ice or ice cream when they’re feeling sexually frustrated? That makes more sense than what I thought the joke was.

Must be🤔 I never thought of that

Reminds me of when I started watching Eileen, and I gave up after like 15 minutes because I thought it was going to be a psychological thriller and was just cataclysmically horny🥲

The main girl literally shoves snow down her skirt in the first scene and I was like??? Girl??? You're going to be so cold and wet why would you do that

[whetstonefires]

i mean i was mad because they set up her using her speed-mastery of the rulebook, in the bit that led up to her getting conned into nearly marrying a villain, but then during the story climax she did not get to actually use that for any real advantage.

even though the other bad guy was breaking rules and she had a bunch of rule-enforcers right there, whom she could have used for something to try to avoid sacrificing anybody. she could have made an attempt!

instead she finally asserted her agency and Being The Boss status by deciding to sacrifice Earth and her own life for her loved ones, and telling her subordinates to stay out of it.

and then afterward, having already surrendered, she changed her mind about that, so late that the only reason it didn't get her and her family and the planet earth all killed

(because if she died, and they hadn't personally murdered her, the title to the planet reverted to the other two assholes)

was that her flying dog boyfriend and the cops, her theoretical subordinates, ultimately didn't listen to her, did their own thing the one time she gave a direct order, and saved her ass.

and like, it's all very well to be worth saving to someone, that's a good angle, and in a different plot in the same fucked-up setting their ignoring her orders to save her could have been a high point in itself, with more setup.

but a story that repeatedly reinforces that the female lead is wrong to attempt to do anything, especially make decisions about her own life, was very frustrating to watch.

i got no catharsis on the repeated hammering of the theme of jupiter being helpless and feeling trapped, because her smacking Eddie Redmayne in the face in a context where it accomplished nothing useful didn't address the patterns that actually distressed me.

so i walked out of the theater all knotted up, feeling narratively blueballed.

Jupiter Ascending: *is literally entirely about how Jupiter reacts and the choices she makes in the scenario she finds herself in*

Critics:  Waah waah Jupiter lacks agency.

She has to choose whether or not to save the Earth at great personal cost and she lacks AGENCY?  Did Harry Potter “lack agency” because Hagrid told him he was a wizard?  Put a girl in a showpiece dress once and that’s it, it’s over, no more decisions for her?

I think prokopetz is totally right when he says people are failing to read this movie as a “lost princess” story.  If you want to put this story in a literary and cultural context you have to read it as a princess story.  

Listen up, people, here’s what makes princesses so special and princess stories important: Princesses are simultaneously perfect objects and powerful agents.  “Princess” is a culture hack for women.  If we have to live in a world that’s unequal, then at least we will carve out this one niche sheltered from most of the misogynistic shit women get pelted with.  How and why “princess” and fairy tales about princesses turned into this dual space of desirability and power is long and mostly lost to the mists of time, and has a lot to do with women writing novels in 17th century France and Charles Perrault being a fuckhead, but let’s not get into that.  Let’s just take it as read:  Princesses are special.

Women get objectified a lot, which literally means, “turned into objects”.  We’re defined entirely by the judgments of other people: Are we attractive, do we behave pleasingly, do we have the right attributes and do the right things.  We collude with this to some degree because we want people to like us, because we’re a social species that still instinctively fears abandonment as a precursor to death.  But most of the time the patriarchy makes us compromise: to be good objects, it makes us give up our agency, our ability to make decisions and be actors in our own lives.  To be attractive often means being malnourished, weak, and physically incapacitated.  To be liked means to be meek, mild, and powerless.  The right things we’re supposed to do are let other people make all our decisions for us and not inconvenience people.

Princesses, by some miracle, exploit a loophole in the patriarchy where we can be both.  A princess can both be seen as good, beautiful, wise, deserving of loyalty and devotion, and loved by everyone who sees her, and make her own decisions.  She can act out, run wild, escape the palace, make mistakes, choose the wrong guy, do anything she likes, and still be a princess.  The only thing she did to become a princess was be born, and since the title isn’t “earned”, she can’t lose it by bad behaviour or inadequacy.  It is an inherent state of worthiness.  That is some powerful shit, my friends.

Yes, Jupiter is surrounded by people who suddenly love her and want to defend her and dedicate their lives to her–but that doesn’t take away her right to make her own decisions.  She’s the boss.  She doesn’t have to go it alone and fight all her own battles, although she can if she has to, because women aren’t buried in the toxic masculinity bullshit about being a “lone hero”; her life gets to be rich in meaningful relationships without compromising her.

[taiturner]

What about you? Do you like girls? Boys? I... I think that I like TV shows.

I SAW THE TV GLOW (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

[orcboxer]

No amount of pain made anybody stronger. Strength is built, not fuckin carved.

[lorastyrels]

We’ve got forever to figure out the rest

[idliketobeatree]

we need to talk about the Blue Light.

how it represents a safe passage forward from Death, and more broadly it symbolises the idea of a personal, individual to each person Heaven;

how the person usually isn't as directly lit as Edwin here, but from a side?

and how, when Charles looks at Edwin with the slightest smile and utter conviction in his eyes, Edwin is completely bathed in blue?

and. how Edwin, dead on a technical error, never got to see where his soul really belonged when it comes to his afterlife— and yet it's doubtless, from this shot alone, what his original destination would be.

[shepscapades]

[PART 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]

A young Xolotl and the strange build he’s spotted across the water from his starter builds! I wonder what it could be… how mysterious!