#marriage abolition

[heartless-aro]

“If you’re worried about the financial difficulties that come with being nonpartnering, you could always just get married platonically for tax benefits!” Respectfully, I would rather Saw (2004) my own foot off than be married, and the fact that the state uses legal and financial incentives to promote monogamous romantic relationships to the public is not enticing to me but is, in fact, an active deterrent to me. I won’t fault anyone for trying to game the system to get by, but I have no interest in feigning alloromanticism or romance favorability to gain the benefits that may come with the government giving its stamp of approval on my personal relationships.

[runedscope]

Marriage bad and reinforces amatonormativity. A portion of the population should not be punished because they don't desire to partner up. Marriage equality is an improvement over what had existed and i dont want to destroy marriage tomorrow and hurt all the people that rely on the benefits, but i dont like it and ultimately it should be abolished and not needed as an institution.

[hyperlexichypatia]

As advice to monogamously partnered people for surviving in the current legal context, this is sound.

As a public policy issue, this is a really good argument for abolishing marriage, or at least unbundling marriage.

And the focus of marriage abolition needs to be on equal rights for unmarried people (whether partnered, single, polyamorous, "it's complicated," or whatever), not on reinventing marriage alternatives for unmarried couples.

There was some really good writing about marriage abolition, legal family abolition, and getting government contracts out of our interpersonal relationships in the early 2000s -- most, but not all, coming from queer people -- and then... I guess Obergefell happened and people just concluded "Well, we have Marriage Equality now, so we never have to critically examine this legal institution again."

this might be because I’m a family law lawyer and also an old crone who remembers when marriage equality wasn’t a thing (as in, marriage equality only became nation-wide two months before I went to law school), but I have Strong Feelings about the right to marry and all the legal benefits that come with it

like I’m all for living in sin until someone says they don’t want to get married because it’s ~too permanent~ and in the same breath start talking about having kids or buying a house with their significant other. then I turn into a 90-year-old passive-aggressive church grandma who keeps pointedly asking when the wedding is. “yes, a divorce is very sad and stressful, but so is BEING HOMELESS BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT ENTITLED TO EQUITABLE DISTRIBUTION OF MARITAL PROPERTY, CAROLINE!”

[cainsign]

been thinking lately about how soulmate aus are kind of fucked up just in the sense of being tied to a person for the rest of your life by societal convention etc. like what if you have their name on your wrist (or whatever) but they're abusive? or what if you just don't like them that much? who decides that two people are "perfect" soulmates? what does a soulmate even entail?

[sophia-epistemia]

you. you get it.

i feel like the truly repulsive thing about marriage isn't the "til death do us part" bit, people lie to themselves and each other all the time, if you really love someone you should want it to last i think. no, the truly repulsive bit is the "oh honey, let's go get the legal system involved so we can make it harder to escape from each other. and maybe a cleric can bless this legal contract to add a religious element to our codependency"

[b-lysia]

what the fuck is "romantic" love anyway?

If love is a feeling then what's the difference between the feeling you get when you see one of your partners after a long day and your childhood dog?

Wouldn't you cry over your best friend's death just as easily as your mom, husband, or surrogate grandmother? Does anticipation not turn into a rippling throng of beating wings in your chest when you wait for a grade on a paper for class, just as much as a call from your crush, or an audition for a play?

Feelings we experience are all physical processes in our bodies though. We are our flesh until we can concretely describe "the soul" as anything more than the emergent result of a living creature's existence. And scientific developments so far tell us that love is our experience of a set of chemicals flooding our brain after an orgasm, or when we see someone we're "genetically compatible" with.

That only describes a handful of situations though, and I don't think it's very adult to call what's very clearly just lust/infatuation, "love."

That sounds more to me like our sex obsessed and yet negative society has just obfuscated lust with flowery excuses to ensure that people are getting married and popping out babies in neat little families that companies can sell shit to.

Sounds to me like "romantic Love" might just be Lust, but layered in our society's pathological embarrassment of the concept of sex and vulnerability. Elevated to ridiculous importance to keep people feeling inadequate and broken unless they're working towards a white picket fence, a husband, and 2.5 kids.

Sounds to me like a social standard that got a lot of women and little girls fucking lobotomized for hysteria, stoned, or burned at the stake, and drowned as witches for not cow-towing to.

Sounds to me like a social standard that got a lot of men and little boys slathered across jagged, bullet scarred, and rotting earth as black red paste, and crushed between the gears of industry to prove themselves worthy of.

Sounds like people should be less concerned with trying to make "ace/aro" people fit in to an idea of "normal," and more concerned about why they're so focused on ensuring people fit into a society that we know is built to extract as much life out of you as possible to line some lazy fuck's pockets.

Anyway, Merry PRIDE

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Phoebe Petrovic at Wisconsin Watch:

Wisconsin Pastor Matthew Trewhella has an affable routine when he’s trying to persuade government officials to abolish abortion, ignore gun laws and question election results. The 63-year-old opens his talks with a photo of “Trewhella nation”: his wife of over 40 years, their 11 home-schooled children and dozens of grandchildren. He cracks jokes. He quotes history and scripture. He floats secession as a regretful possibility. With half-rim glasses and collared shirts, Trewhella looks and sounds more like a professor than a provocateur.

But when addressing his congregation at an Embassy Suites in suburban Milwaukee, he sneers and shouts, deriding his enemies as wicked dogs, whores and tyrants.  ���When you see sodomy running rampant, when you see women in government, when you see men behaving like effeminate little squirrels, judgment is in the land,” Trewhella said during a 2020 sermon.  Last year, he said homosexuality should be treated as a crime, noting that the Bible called for the death penalty for “the filth of sodomy.” For much of his public life, Trewhella has made a career of denouncing the law while railing against abortion and gun restrictions. Twenty years ago, that made him a political pariah. His reputation for blockading abortion clinics, calling for churches to form militias and defending the murder of abortion providers was so extreme that two state chapters of Right to Life, the anti-abortion group, condemned him. 

But today, the world has changed. He has been invited to speak by local Republican parties and other groups across the country. He gave a prayer breakfast sermon to one of the nation’s preeminent law enforcement associations. And a prolific booster of election conspiracy theories has used his work as the basis for a campaign to disrupt elections.  Trewhella’s ability to tailor his message for different audiences has helped. He’s gracious to the women who introduce him at political events but tells his congregation that the idea of women in government is “sickening” and “perverse.” In the cast of characters who might influence the upcoming election, he’s not rallying crowds like Steve Bannon, the former Donald Trump strategist, or Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative student group Turning Point USA. Trewhella is more behind the scenes, providing a religious justification for some far-right policies and causes. With the political establishment shifting, he exemplifies how in this splintered landscape, even the most fringe figures can become influencers.

Trewhella gained his newfound acceptance with a self-published 2013 book, “The Doctrine of the Lesser Magistrates,” which relies on a theory developed by 16th-century Calvinists seeking holy justification for fighting political oppression amid the religious wars of the Protestant Reformation. Trewhella has applied it to today’s political battles, writing that government officials have a divine “right and duty” to defy any laws, policies or court opinions that violate “the law of God.” To him, that means outlawing abortion and same-sex marriage, or even violently resisting the government if necessary, noting in his book that there are times when men “must redden their swords.”

In recent years, Trewhella’s teachings have popped up in legislatures and local boards as the Christian right has increasingly influenced Republican politics. A Missouri state representative applied the doctrine when he proposed banning abortion in 2020, when Roe vs. Wade was still in effect. Commissioners in western North Carolina invoked it when they declared their county a “gun sanctuary” to protest state laws.

[...] Trewhella’s acceptance into more mainstream circles has surprised extremism researchers who have tracked him for decades. It’s important to pay attention to a man “creating the ideological rationalizations for these ideas,” said Devin Burghart, president of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, a nonprofit that tracks the far right. “I think that the public needs to know that he’s a dangerous theocrat who would fundamentally alter the United States in irreparable ways that would harm many, including women, people of color and the LGBTQ community,” Burghart said.

[...]

Trewhella’s transformation

Trewhella tells his own life story in biblical terms: A fallen man finds redemption. Trewhella said he wrote it all down in a 23-page conversion testimony after his 5-year-old son asked him, “Dad, when are you going to write a book where you can tell us how you went from being a bad guy to a good guy?”  [...] Growing up in a Catholic family, Trewhella wrote, he was forced to attend “nearly unbearable” Sunday Masses. He described his mother as a “classic merciful mom” and his father as “short on words and quick on corporal punishment.” When Trewhella was 11, his parents divorced, which he called an “ugly thing” that “removes all innocence.”

As a bad guy, Trewhella wrote, he joined a Detroit gang and “dealt drugs, stole cars, firebombed houses, robbed businesses, burglarized homes, fought other gangs, and fenced stolen items to the Mafia.” Then, he said, he landed in an evangelical rehab program at 17 and had an epiphany during church. “Understand, I had told the shrink at the psyche ward just three days earlier that I would burn down more houses when I got out of jail,” Trewhella wrote. “But sitting there — I saw my sin for how truly reprehensible it was. I was in the presence of a holy God.” As a good guy, Trewhella got married, graduated from a Pentecostal college and, in 1989, founded Mercy Seat Christian Church in the Milwaukee area.  He also became one of the nation’s most militant anti-abortion activists. He joined the so-called rescue movement, in which activists blockaded clinics. In 1990, he founded his own organization, Missionaries to the Preborn, whose members chained themselves to cars parked in front of clinic entrances.

[...] Trewhella’s ideas also gained favor among gun rights activists as a wave of counties declared themselves “Second Amendment sanctuaries,” some of which state that local law enforcement will not act on any gun laws they deem unconstitutional. The hard-line Gun Owners of America has consistently cited Trewhella and his book in its support of such resolutions. At least 10 resolutions across the country specifically refer to lesser magistrates. One of the earliest, issued in 2019, was authored by a county commissioner who has described reading Trewhella’s book as a “turning point” in his leadership. [...]

Like many leaders on the right, Trewhella suddenly found a much larger audience when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. As some people questioned public health measures like masks and vaccines, they began looking for ways to resist government officials they saw as trampling their rights. They found answers in Trewhella, who pumped out short-form videos and spoke on conservative podcasts and other platforms. “In light of the tyrannical acts by the state regarding COVID-19, we are rebooting our efforts,” he posted on social media in April 2020.  The doctrine appeared in local meetings in Indiana and Tennessee as officials challenged public health measures. Andy Ogles, then-mayor of Maury County, Tennessee, south of Nashville, invoked the doctrine when he took steps to allow unvaccinated health care workers to keep their jobs. Ogles is now a Republican member of Congress. His office did not respond to requests for comment. 

Frustrated by pandemic measures like restaurant closures and masking in schools, Republican activists in Ottawa County, Michigan, west of Grand Rapids, invited Trewhella to speak several times. In 2022, one group that invited him, Ottawa Impact, helped flip the county board of commissioners to Christian control. Since then, the board has tried to fire its health administrator and declared Ottawa a “constitutional county.” The largely symbolic resolution states the board will not enforce any measure that it believes infringes on constitutional rights. Trewhella called Ottawa “a blueprint for counties across America.”  Two Ottawa Impact founders denied that Trewhella influenced their work. But that sort of denial is common: When asked about their relationship with Trewhella or his ideas, people often distance themselves or are reluctant to give him credit.

Wisconsin Watch has a major exposé on radical anti-abortion activist Matthew Trewhella’s extremism influencing the GOP. Trewhella was once fringe, but over the past decade, his positions became mainstream in the party.

Read the full story at Wisconsin Watch.

[gatekeeper-of-witchcraft]

sometimes the whole “stop having q***r discourse and focus on fighting for your rights instead/we’re all oppressed” thing reads to me like another way to tell gay people to shut up and stop defining and defending ourselves

[buttercuparry]

I don't think romance or desire or whatever, negates abuse; in my understanding this is where the nuance is. Also I don't think saying that a movie might be making a case for abuse as its underlying theme, takes away the agency of one of its protagonists and perpetually victimizes her, especially when we can interpret the protagonist as saying that she has been abused, and grows angry, and frustrated and resentful when other characters don't understand why she is being anxious or fearful and dismiss her.

[ribombeee]

“social justice warriors” is actually just a statistical error. Social Justice Diana, who does over 10,000 social justice a day, is an outlier and should not have been counted

[lazynoodlepuff]

It's been years but I still remebertat one youruber. I was watching round 2015 when gay marriage was made legal in USA. There was such a shitstorm on polsih Internet (mostly Facebook I think) where people were fighting over it and either recharging their profile pictures to rainbow flag in support of lgbtq and gay marriage or fucking flag of Poland to say they are against it

And that guy (pretty kegt wing guy) made a video about patriotism and queernest and he said something like "Don't take the flag away from me"

And it stuck with me. As someone who didint even know they were queer, as someone who grew up with a lot of patritic feelings about my own country. That plea to not turn our national flag into a hate symbol. That you can love your country snd be patriotic and not br homophobic. It stuck with me every time the right wing/conservatives use Polish symbols and imagery. How dare they take it away for their purposes of hate. It belongs to all of us how date they turn the symbols of national solidarity into a tool of hate

I love my country and its history. Don't take it away from me

[communistkenobi]

By worrying endlessly about what makes men fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation, Western Marxism rigs the deck against ever becoming hegemonic. […] The celebration of transgression, so characteristic of queer theory, is incompatible with the struggle for legal sovereignty waged by movements of national liberation and people’s democratic dictatorships. […] Trans studies, infused with an ambivalence between gender-deviance and the desire to pass, cannot take up queer theory’s exaltation of transgression uncritically. Eastern Marxism simply does not valorize transgression as such, since its goal is hegemony, to function as a legitimate ruling party representative of the general interest, and the collective transgression of one norm in particular: imperialism.

— Nia Frome (2024), The Problem of Recognition in Transitional States, or Sympathy for the Monster

The author makes the case why 1) various strains of Eastern Marxism (MLism particularly) seem so compelling to transgender people specifically 2) how this is reflected within the tension between queer theory (what Frome describes as having a general preoccupation with the ‘exaltation of transgression’) and trans studies (what Frome describes as being more preoccupied with political goals of hegemony, eg gender-affirming healthcare, control of administrative gender data about ourselves, etc) is directly comparable to the West/East Marxist split, with the author firmly placing queer theory within Western Marxism’s anticommunist preoccupations and theories of state.

I think this is most compellingly argued when she points to the homonationalist (homo-imperialist?) commitments of western LGBT organisations, NGOs, thinktanks, etc. to ‘spreading democracy gay tolerance’ to the backwards Global South. One only need to refer to the photo of an IOF soldier standing in a bombed street in Gaza holding up a gay pride flag to recognise the academy’s role in ‘queering’ imperial pursuits. Now obviously this doesn’t mean trans studies is exempt from this (far from it), but what I think this essay does well is demonstrate why trans studies has been famously called “queer theory’s evil twin” and why more broadly the political goals of transgender people are on some level incommensurable with queer theory’s (and downstream of this, the western queer community’s) commitment to transgression as the primary mode of resistance and action.

And, ironically, why despite this desire for eternal transgression, the headline political goal of western gays for the past few decades has been marriage equality, a desire to be folded into pre-existing hegemony (perhaps another example of its Western Marxist tendencies?), in contrast to the transsexual goal of gender liberation and eventual abolition via the pursuit of using medicine and administrative state power to make ourselves our own frankenstein monsters, both scientist and creation (a goal that also necessarily requires a transitionary state, a “monster” state that is neither full capitalism (cissexualism) nor full communism (transsexualism), but an apparatus that gets us from A -> B. This description is blatantly one of both socialism and gender transition itself, and in this comparison it is revealed why the transsexual may desire Marxism-Leninism). This also reveals why transmedicalism - the desire to uphold cissexual, psychiatric, pathological conceptions of transgenderism as a mental illness and/or sexual perversion - is a dead-end, a forfeiting of even more power to those who already have it, and fundamentally different from the goal of free HRT, surgery, name changes and gender marker changes for everyone forever amen

[botgal]

A heads up to anyone living in Oklahoma.

Oklahoma Senator Dusty Deevers is set to introduce a law to the Oklahoma State Senate, SB 593, which will not only increase punishment for possession of CSAM (Child Sexual Exploitation Material), but outlaw and criminalize ALL forms of pornography and it's creation, distribution, and possession. Whether it be written, auditory, or visual.

This bill is not only a massive breach of First Amendment rights of adults to access things, but also a danger to any adults who wish to access these problems. As Senator Deevers has especially cited that any educators or librarians who look at such should be classified as sex offenders.

This comes with a slew of other bills which Senator Deevers claims are to help "restore moral sanity in Oklahoma".

SB 456: The Abolition of Abortion Act - Outlaws the use of self administered abortion medication and effectively “declares that life begins at conception and ensures that no person may lawfully terminate the life of a child in the womb."

SB 550: Classifies Drag Queen Story Hour as a cabaret performance to effectively ban the nonsexual presentation of drag queens near children.

SB 228: The Covenant Marriage Act - Offers a $2,500 tax credit to Oklahoma couples who consent to a "covenant marriage" in which they waive any right to divorce except under "cases of abuse, adultery, or abandonment".

SB 829: Ends Oklahoma no fault divorce by removing "incompatability" as a reason for divorce. If signed into law it would only allow divorces in the event of "abandonment, gross neglect, extreme cruelty, habitual drunkenness, insanity for a period of five years, adultery, unknown pregnancy and fraudulent contract."

SB 329: The Promote Child Thriving Act - Creates a $500 child tax credit contingent upon it being filed for by a mother and father filing jointly (exclusion of single parents and gay couples). And increases that to $1000 for children born after the marriage of the parents, which can exclude those in non traditional familial groups and children born from wedlock.

All of these bills echo heavily the Project 2025 playbook and should be fought against swiftly and firmly. As if they show they can be passed here, these ideas could spread to other states as well.

Call your reps, spread the word. And do not let the ideals of a christo-authoritarian take control over the state of Oklahoma without a fight.

You can find your Oklahoma State Reps using this site here

[djuvlipen]

controversial radblr opinion: the left isn't just as bad as the right and leftist men aren't just as bad as right-wing men. It is absolutely true that there is a liberal left and an antifeminist left that wants to decriminalise prostitution, that embraces porn, that deplatforms and boycotts women and lesbians for defending sex-based rights, that supports abusers and tolerates sexual violence, but there is also a left that wants to abolish porn and prostitution and supports women's rights (and yes, there are men advocating for this. I am not pulling a 'not all men', just stating the fact that there are leftist men who oppose TRA politics and the sex industry). Right-wing parties have absolutely never offered women that kind of support. Pretending that left doesn't exist anymore is plain wrong and frankly disrespectful to leftist activists who advocate daily for the abolition of prostitution and for holding abusers accountable (I am in such a party).

Claiming the left is just as bad as the right when it comes to women's rights is so disingenuous and irresponsible given the current political climate in Europe, where fascist parties have been steadily growing and becoming the #1 political force on the continent. It's not leftists who want to deprive women of their reproductive rights, who want to establish religious authoritarian regimes, arrest prostituted women. It's the right.

Feminism is a left-wing political movement and overemphasizing the differences between the feminist movement and leftist politics is irresponsible. Claiming you are 'politically homeless' is irresponsible and a pretty privileged thing to call yourself when poor women, disabled women, woc and lesbians don't have the luxury of not voting for the left. Divesting from left-wing parties because you disagree on their support of transactivism is irresponsible.

Politics won't wait for you, we shouldn't leave the entire leftist political platform to men and TRAs. Feminists have to invest leftist parties (and be active in those parties) if we want to have a political platform.

Feminism has its roots in Marxist thought. Read de Beauvoir, MacKinnon, Firestone, Federici - they all extensively rely on Marxist theory to analyse men/women power relationships. You can't be a serious feminist if you refuse to engage with Marx's work because he was a man. You can't be a serious feminist if you don't know some basic Marxist concepts (dialectical materialism is the one that comes to my mind) and if you disregard absolutely everything Marx ever did or said and even reject the label 'marxist'. Anti-leftist sentiment is very prevalent on here, and I absolutely get where it's coming from, but it's a misrepresentation of reality to say all of the left is just as misogynistic as the right. And I'm so sick of hearing they are one and the same when my country's far-right party (who opposes gay marriage, wants to restrict abortion access, and such) has been winning all our recent elections

[pharawee]

If you are in Thailand or following Thai politics you probably already know that today Thailand's Constitutional Court has ruled to dissolve the Move Forward Party for "attempting to overthrow the Thai political system", barring current leader Chaithawat Tulathon and former leader Pita Limjaroenrat from participating in politics for the next ten years. [source]

This is, of course, some major bullshit (but what else is new). Move Forward is responsible for pushing for many if not most progressive policies in Thailand, including marriage equality. This is the party that won the 2023 general elections and, although not part of the current government (which is also bullshit), it's currently the biggest parliamentary party.

Move Forward's remaining MPs have already announced that they will join a new party and continue in their efforts for democracy and reform in Thailand. This is what Move Forward MP Rangsiman Rome has to say (you can find his original tweet here - I'm only providing a somewhat clunky English translation because I think it's such a powerful and important message):

[No matter what the name of our new party will be, in 2027, the whole country will be orange.] Throughout the time from Future Forward Party to Move Forward Party, we have pushed for progressive agendas for the public, including advocating for the abolition of military conscription, marriage equality, a new constitution, as well as policies to promote freedom and protect human rights through various party policies. However, we have faced severe accusations such as overthrowing the government and subversion, culminating in today's Constitutional Court decision to "dissolve the Move Forward Party." In a democracy, each political party has a set of values, ideologies, and the hopes and dreams of the people who choose that party, conveyed through policy creation and implementation as the people desire. We affirm that the only acceptable way to dismantle a political party is through the verdict of the people in the election booth, according to democratic principles. The legal warfare process of dissolving a party erodes public confidence in democracy and does not strengthen democracy in Thailand. If we persist in pretending that the process of party dissolution, which is disconnected from the people, is normal, it will continually destroy the dreams of the people. This implies that if a group of people with similar dreams and ideas come together to form a political party and propose policies to the public but differ from the state or the elite, they will be destroyed mercilessly, right? We must affirm that the policies of the Move Forward Party are what society needs. We must affirm that what the Move Forward Party has done to solve problems is what Thai people need, whether it is exposing the patronage system, human rights violations, corruption, or various progressive policies. These are what Thailand needs, and we affirm that we, as citizens, will be the ones to fan the winds of change. We will ensure that the Move Forward Party is not just a political party but represents the people and the journey of all of us. No matter what the name of our new party will be, in 2027, the whole country will be orange.

[cheriecelestial]

Batboys as Desi Films

𝐃𝐢𝐜𝐤 𝐆𝐫𝐚𝐲𝐬𝐨𝐧

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)

Raj and Simran meet during a trip across Europe and end up getting stranded in the middle of nowhere after they miss their train. Despite their initial clashing, they fall in love. However, Simran’s traditional father has arranged her marriage elsewhere. Raj must win over Simran’s family to marry her, leading to a series of heartfelt moments, comedic misunderstandings, and ultimately, a dramatic climax where love conquers all as the couple fights for their happiness against societal norms.

Dick is so raj coded with his quips and charisma. Their chaotic banter and chemistry is off the charts. Any Indian who hasn’t watched this gets their desi card revoked immediately, I don’t make the rules. This movies fits Dick’s dramatic flair perfectly.

𝐉𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐓𝐨𝐝𝐝

Goliyon ki Raasleela Ram-Leela (2013)

The modern adaptation of William Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” set in rural Gujarat, India. It follows the love story of Ram, from the Rajadi clan and Leela, from the Sanera clan, who belong to rival gangster clans engaged in a long-standing feud. Despite the enmity between their families, Ram and Leela fall deeply in love, leading to a tragic and tumultuous journey filled with passion, violence, and sacrifice.

It fits Jason’s love for guns and classics. An absolute visual treat with cinematography and all the songs are absolute bangers.

𝐓𝐢𝐦 𝐃𝐫𝐚𝐤𝐞

Jab We Met (2007)

Aditya, a heartbroken business tycoon, someone who was dwelling in the lowest ebb of his life and was almost on the brink of giving it all up, aimlessly boards a train to escape his depressing life. On his journey he meets Geet, a talkative and vivacious young woman. Geet is on her way to meet her boyfriend, but her plans go awry, and she ends up stranded. Aditya, feeling sorry for her, decides to help her get to her destination safely. Along the way, they encounter various adventures and challenges that bring them closer together. Despite their contrasting personalities, they develop a deep connection. However, when they part ways, Aditya realizes his love for Geet and sets out to find her. In the end, they reunite, realizing they are meant to be together.

Grumpy x sunshine. The OG green flag. Epitome of ‘if he wanted to,he would’. Makes my chatterbox heart happy because of how much I relate to the FL. Favourite comfort movie of all time. ML kinda looks like Cillian Murphy’s scarecrow. “I like you a lot but that is my problem, you don’t need to worry about it.” Their fights and his little sassy comebacks and rants were so cute and fun to watch.

𝐃𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐚𝐧 𝐖𝐚𝐲𝐧𝐞

Jodhaa Akbar (2003)

The Mughal emperor Akbar, seeking to forge political alliances, marries Jodhaa, a Rajput princess. Initially a marriage of convenience, their relationship evolves as they learn to respect and love each other. Jodhaa struggles to adapt to Mughal customs, especially with their cultural and religious differences but her courage and integrity win Akbar's admiration. Despite conspiracies and opposition, including from Akbar's own court, their love prevails. The film explores the transformation of a young ruler, initially groomed for ruthlessness by his mentor Bairam Khan, into a wise and compassionate emperor who values mercy, diplomacy, religious harmony and cultural acceptance. Akbar's realization of the importance of religious tolerance, showcased through his abolition of discriminatory policies and his respect for all faiths.

The arranged marriage tag and the ‘raised as a weapon but softens and shows more compassion out of respect and love for his empress’ tag fits demonhead!Damian so much. The way he said mashallah after he pulled off her veil in the middle of a sword fight >>>>. I love how it captures the essence of India’s rich heritage and diversity. “Why seek paradise ? It is before me now.”

𝐁𝐫𝐮𝐜𝐞 𝐖𝐚𝐲𝐧𝐞

Khoobsurat (2014)

Milli, a free-spirited and eccentric young woman becomes the physiotherapist for a royal family. She brings her lively yet clumsy personality into the conservative royal household, shaking up their structured lives. It clashes with the formal atmosphere of the palace, especially with the stern matriarch, Nirmala Devi. Despite initial resistance, Milli's unconventional methods bring joy and laughter into the lives of the family members, including the brooding prince, Vikram. As Milli navigates the challenges of fitting into the royal household, she also finds herself falling in love with Vikram, leading to a series of comedic and heartwarming moments.

Very cliched (well it is a Disney film) and the second hand embarrassment is unreal but sometimes after a long day all you need is a feel-good cheesy rom-com. Oh to sit next to Fawad Khan in a red convertible while gazing lovingly at him. I like how she emphasises on improving the patient’s mental health to help him heal. Incase you haven’t noticed already, cold brooding™️ x silly goose is my favourite character dynamic.

𝐀/𝐍 - I’ll be honest with y’all, this was to satiate my desire of writing x desi! reader cuz I don’t have enough motivation or time to do it T^T