#mel says stuff

[karmelarts]

finished playing mouthwashing

started playing mouthwashing last night!!!

[brownfrogs]

Hanzo running his fingers through Cole’s growing silver hair and Cole def gets fussy about it but Hanzo appreciates each new gray strand he finds…

[me1och]

Made some Starkid patches (with a bonus Owen) instead of prepping for exams and wanted to share them here. Very happy with how they turned out!

[giarossin]

mel [to viktor]: you're the professor's assistant jayce: NO, he's my partner

marcus: kiramman girl had a prisoner released on your order jayce: NO, we've got i covered viktor: you promised to destroy the hexcore jayce: NO,

[me1och]

you may not like it but this is what peak performance looks like

my favourite physical gag in any Hatchetfield show ever is in 'What Do You Want, Paul?' when Mr. Davidson mimes the outline of a woman but doesn't stop at two curves and in fact keeps drawing curves all the way to the floor.

I just know he would've kept going if the floor wasnt there. Infinite curves. The ideal woman is actually just a really tall snowman

[melissa-titanium]

REFERENCING THIS POST

[mel-loly]

-“Get ready, your adventure has just begun, Albrecht.”

[whatsfourteenupto]

Fourteen has taken up watercolour painting again. They really like painting little scenes from town

[fazedlight]

Maybe an unpopular opinion, but the idea that Kara would eventually tell the world she's Supergirl is a good ending (if written well). Having the constant looming stress of "if I get outed, everyone I love will get fucking murdered" is... a heavy burden, and I think she's been through enough hardship in her life.

But in order to do that, you need to address two things...

General xenophobia

It's a Super Life

The show sort of does address xenophobia. We go from "aliens aren't real [except Superman]" (which is a weird stance in the pilot but oh well) to "aliens are real" to "aliens are a major threat" (season 4) to "building acceptance" (season 6). Acceptance is never sudden and total, but things can shift over time where it's safer to be out now than decades ago, and that's what happens in the show with being alien. I think they could've done better here (especially in highlighting Kara's stress to give us a better sense of why being able to be out is important), but they tried.

But they never touch It's a Super Life. In Kara's mind, her secret coming out can get everyone killed! Everyone she loves! And the thing is, it's so easy to fix. Mxy can't really rewrite time - if he could, "Mr. & Mrs. Mxyzptlk" would've gone much better for him. He's just a trickster god who took the obvious route (lying) to making his friend feel better. Problem solved.

But they didn't touch on that, which makes the finale decision BIZARRE.

Of course, revisiting It's a Super Life poses a problem in the writing. For a lot of the rift, we saw a really beautiful saga of "two flawed people, driven by their different traumas, caused each other a lot of pain". It's a Super Life was part of the shift away from that complexity. The showrunners just couldn't handle it.

But with better writing... we can end up in a world where Kara feels safe and happy, and finally free of that weighty burden that she might suddenly lose everything again.

[karmelarts]

this isn’t normal. this isn’t how life is supposed to feel. if you don’t think about it it can’t hurt you. I found our hearts and they were still beating. there is still time.

[brownfrogs]

all those years of sexual repression hitting Hanzo like a semi truck and now he can’t hold hands with Cole without gettin a obvious boner

[me1och]

Hear me out. Lah Dee Dah Dah Day is the theme equivalent of a house filled with chintz. That is to say, Becky Barnes deserved to fuck Tom on the floor.

And Mark deserves to be fucked on the floor too.

i believe by Ted, but could be anyone!

[blujayonthewing]

gnome culture emphasizes playfulness and a good sense of humor partly because gnomes are physically small and vulnerable and tend to settle in wild places with a lot of hazards and if they had to take every completely real threat to their safety seriously while also Taking Them Seriously they'd just be paralyzed by fear

[heartnoose]

Sanji being canonically hairy is the best thing about him btw. It’s actually his only saving grace. Every other aspect of him is deplorable but all of his crimes shall be acquitted bc he’s hairy.

[melit0n]

In no particular order, (or in order, if you can rank them) what are your top 5 Ethel Cain songs? 🎤

Oh Tonee, this is like opening up one of five music based Pandora boxes for me 😭 please forgive the rambling.

Family Tree from Preacher's Daughter

This song drives me MAD. I could talk about her vocals in every song, but her voice in this makes me buzz. The bass throughout is ominous and incredible: same can be said for the SFX. I'm a sucker for when artists add in extra things like that. The flies put me on edge (which links it to Ptolemaea and eventually Sun Bleached Flies) and the bell ringing out during the first chorus makes me feel like I'm attending a funeral. Literally 'for whom the bell tolls', which kind of foreshadows her death later on in the album.

I genuinely think the lyrics are the closets I've come to a religious experience. "They say 'Heaven hath no fury like a woman's scorn', and baby Hell don't scare me, I've been times before." Insane. Ate and left not a single crumb. Her dead tone on "I've killed before and I'll kill again", being a callback to Two-Headed Mother's "I've loved before, I'll kill again" is just. Ugh. I can't even describe it.

+ Special mention to Family Tree (intro). I haven't, and will probably never, get over "Jesus can always reject his father, but he cannot escape his mother's blood."

Televangelism from Preacher's Daughter

There's very few songs, to me, that encapsulate a painful yet quiet death well, and this is certainly one of them. It's a solemnly comforting tune. Considering lore wise, it's meant to represent Ethel's soul coming out of the basement after she's been killed, it makes sense.

The first half genuinely sounds like something the pianist in my Catholic School used to play before prayer started. The fact that it was entirely improvised is absolutely insane, too.

Plus, the incredibly smooth switch from August Underground to this is brilliant.

Ptolemaea from Preacher's Daughter

Literally every part of this song is amazing (pretty much all of Preacher's Daughter is a work of art to be honest). It's definitely one of the few songs that genuinely unnerves me; still has the same creeping, fearful effect after the hundreds of time that I've listened to it.

First, off: The title is a reference to the ninth and final layer of Dante's Inferno: betrayal. Ptolemy commits treachery (a betrayal of trust), which lands him in the ninth circle, hence its name. This is what Isaiah does to Ethel. It's a somewhat niche reference that I love.

Secondly, Death's monologue (some people also interpret this voice as Isaiah, the man who kills and cannablises Ethel by the end of PD, but I'm just generalising it as The Grim Reaper) is so, so eerie. The repetition switching between "Heard you, saw you, felt you, gave you" to "Need you, love you, love you, love you" with Ethel screaming and asking for him to stop in the background always gives me chills.

Thirdly, all the lyrics go hard in this one. "Calling me the one, I'm the white light: beautiful, finite", "Even the iron still fears the rot" and "I am the face of love's rage" are some of my favourites.

Honestly? The entire song puts me on edge. Listening to it, I feel like I'm millimetres away from the sharp point of a knife. The build up to her screaming "stop" is full of panic, but cathartic.

Two-Headed Mother from Inbred

The distorted guitar at the start mixed with her vocals itches my brain so well. Her tone and dictation in this is really 'soft' too, and more spoken than sang, which I adore. It sounds less like a song and more like being hummed an eerie tune as you drift in and out of sleep.

Overall, despite the topic (of both the song and album in general: it's called Inbred for a reason) the beat is an absolute groove. Never in my life would I have expected a song about trauma passed on from a mother so a daughter to have such a blend to it.

On the note of the topic, just, hello?? It mixes a mother's hatred and love and passes it down to a child who sees it in every man she sees. Let alone paints her lover in a horrible image in order to remove guilt from how badly she's treating him. Just how her dead mother still has dictation over her, she exerts the same amount of control on her lover. She knows very well that her two headed mother brought her here and can send her right back.

Head in the Wall from Golden Age

This one just encapsulates so, so much religious based anger and debilitating depression. Every single lyric oozes with pain and I always have to like, sit down when this comes on.

Growing up a Catholic kid, in a not so nice religious environment, yeah. Just yeah. Misogyny was rife and "It's always my fault: girls will be bitches, and boys will be boys" resonates with me a lot. I could say a prayer wrong and be told to sit outside in Winter to do my work for the rest of the day, and a boy could chase me around the playground, pull my hair and try to punch me and it's still be my fault because boys will be boys.

The whole song just illustrates a very depressive mindset, being more angry towards yourself, and then moving on to environmental factors to try and shift blame in an attempt to stop feeling shitty. For those reasons, I don't listen to Golden Age or Carpet Bed all too much because they sucker punch me right in the chest a little bit too painfully, but HITW is still a favourite.

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

no offense to mel shes great its not that i want her gone or anything, its just that her narrative role would make so much more sense for yaz to have