#kill pop culture

[gothhabiba]

Another bewildering assertion I've seen floating around is that the United States of America deliberately destabilises West Asia and North Africa, murders millions of civilians, destroys towns and cities, arms militias &c. because of Islamophobia. I assure you that this is not true and that no one who is serious about understanding geopolitics or Islamophobia has this analysis. Islamophobia may have early modern or pre-modern instantiations, but in its current context it is very much a result of and a rhetorical and social justification for the geopolitical, economic, resource-driven exigencies of imperial capitalism. You're looking at a cart and insisting that it is pulling a horse around

[aardvaark]

i don’t think we talk enough about how sophie copied her life philosophy from a kenny rogers song lmao. how many times do the leverage team pick her up on trying to pass off song lyrics as advice? or plots of films and books as Definitely Real Anecdotes. like they’re all at the bar telling some scary stories that happened to them and suddenly someone interrupts her like "ohhh fuck you that’s The Cask of Amontillado" and everyone groans. hardison sees parker’s notes from being mentored by sophie and about half of it is (admittedly applicable) paraphrased song lyrics.

[eyepatchoflove]

lestat being both french and italian explains everything, because there is actually nothing wrong with him, he's just like that.

[lackadaisycal-art]

Just one more thing...

[hussyknee]

I'm really not a villain enjoyer. I love anti-heroes and anti-villains. But I can't see fictional evil separate from real evil. As in not that enjoying dark fiction means you condone it, but that all fiction holds up some kind of mirror to the world as it is. Killing innocent people doesn't make you an iconic lesbian girlboss it just makes you part of the mundane and stultifying black rot of the universe.

"But characters struggling with honour and goodness and the egoism of being good are so boring." Cool well some of us actually struggle with that stuff on the daily because being a good person is complicated and harder than being an edgelord.

Sure you can use fiction to explore the darkness of human nature and learn empathy, but the world doesn't actually suffer from a deficit of empathy for powerful and privileged people who do heinous stuff. You could literally kill a thousand babies in broad daylight and they'll find a way to blame your childhood trauma for it as long as you're white, cisgender, abled and attractive, and you'll be their poor little meow meow by the end of the week. Don't act like you're advocating for Quasimodo when you're just making Elon Musk hot, smart and gay.

[popculturebaby]

Matthew McConaughey in “A Time To Kill”, 1996

[be-the-glenn-to-my-maggie]

Some may say Speak No Evil was a movie made just for James McAvoy to show off his acting skills. They were wrong. It was made for the kid who played Ant.

[holdoncallfailed]

i genuinely think teenagers are so maladjusted these days because they don't have rookie mag. we need to organize an international campaign to get teen girls off of tiktok and into the rookie archives

[autisticcassandracain]

I dunno man I feel like most statements along the lines of ‘Batman isn’t REALLY x, he’s y’ don’t hold much water because usually, there’s a pretty good chance a number of writers over the years have written him as x, you just didn’t like it or think it doesn’t count for some reason.

For example ‘Batman isn’t REALLY a good parent, he’s actually a bad parent’, when Batman has been written as a good parent by a number of writers, and has, in addition, been written as realizing that he’s screwed up with his children and resolved to fix it by even more. At the same time, stating ‘Batman isn’t REALLY a bad parent, he’s actually a good parent’ is also incorrect, because Batman has been written as a bad parent by a number of writers, either intentionally or not; in addition, the pattern presented by the tug-of-war between writers who believe he should be a good parent and writers who don’t has, over the years, created an unintentional pattern that strongly resembles that of an abusive relationship. So, stating he is a good parent is inaccurate and dismisses a bunch of his canon writing, but stating he is a bad parent also dismisses a bunch of his canon writing and the intentions of the authors that wrote him.

The secret here is realizing that Batman has had so many writers over the years that it’s practically impossible to find a universal truth about him beyond the basic premise and maybe very, very basic characterization keystones. Writers with different beliefs about both the character and the world at large have written him in accordance to their worldview, and sometimes that worldview will align with yours, and sometimes it won’t.

Like, at this point, Batman is more an idea than he is a character. He is the bare-knuckled fight against injustice, but what ‘injustice’ is depends heavily on your worldview, as does what ‘bare-knuckled’ and ‘fight’ mean. Batman has been interpreted in dozens of different ways over the years, and singling out a few of those as the True Batman is largely arbitrary and dependent on your personal taste and belief in what the character should be. The only ‘objective’ measurement you could apply here are the old Golden Age comics, and I think most fans can agree that measuring modern Batman comics by how faithful they are to the Golden Age comics is, more often than not, a little ridiculous.

For the record, I do think that arguing about what Batman should be matters; if right-wing assholes use the character as a mouthpiece for their worldview we can and should critique that, but not because it’s ‘OOC’, but because the worldview espoused by those right-wing assholes is harmful and shitty. Batman should be a good parent, not because it’s ‘OOC’ for him to be a bad parent, but because having your paragon of justice be a child abuser is pretty shitty. Etc.

I don’t really have anywhere specific to go with this, I just think it’s a little strange when people try to view Batman as a character with a clear-cut characterization, rather than a concept that many people have approached in different ways over the years. Can that concept be mishandled? Sure. But it’s usually mishandled for reasons a bit more substantial than ‘a previous writer wrote it differently’.

[starinkedmotel]

Lucy Liu's red carpet look book, late 90s/early 2000s.

[ghostcrows]

nothing can ever ever beat this.

[rinadoesdesign]

Cover art I designed for Kill Bill by SZA

Studiorina on IG

[fleshdyk3]

just saw the new beetlejuice and it was SO GOOD i loved it sm

[sciderman]

Yk not looking at usernames sure is wild. I thought the Bob and Wade you were talking about were those guys from distractible

don’t know what that is but 👍 ok

[aeolianblues]

You come onto Tumblr sometimes and think 'wow everyone here has such a depth of musical interests, they keep talking about all these bands I've never heard of' and you google them and it's my chemical romance, my chemical side project, my chemical solo project, my chemical gay lover, my chemical best friend, my chemical counterpart from the midwest, my chemical girl (only one), my che

[stabbingandorbeingstabbed]

idk how music reviews work like if pitchfork just assigns a writer to an album or if they volunteer or what but i have to imagine music writers would either outright refuse to review lestats albums no matter how much buzz they're generating OR they'd have to put their lives on the line and hope they can make their adulation sound sincere enough regardless of the merit of the music itself bc you knowwwwwwww if they gave him less than an 8.9 that writer would be in some kind of elaborate writing-related vampire saw trap designed to bleed them dry over the course of 8 hours within like minutes of the piece being published. like you're taking your life into your own hands 100% if you take that on