#not tagging the movie bc i don't want to start discourse but i very much needed to bitch after seeing it on my dash a bunch this week

[bakedbakermom]

Maybe it's because of the time in my life in which I was forced to watch it but I really fucking hate Devil Wears Prada.

Backstory: me, a 20-year-old with a life-threatening eating disorder, was living in a house with 5-8 other girls in the same condition (residential treatment center). Every weekend we had a house budget to go do various normal teen/young adult stuff. Often we'd spend the money on a trip to the movies, but the movie had to be approved by the staff.

That weekend in particular, we all voted to go see Crank, but the staff decided a movie about a guy seeking thrills so he wouldn't die of no adrenaline was too dangerous to expose a group of eating disordered teens/20-somethings to. They got us tickets for DWP instead.

When I say we tore them all a new one when we got home...

Sure let's send a group of vulnerable girls to see a movie about the fashion industry where one character is on an ice-cube and paper diet (guess how many of us had done that and were triggered beyond words) and another is constantly derided for being a size 4 (how many of us were crying at the thought of becoming that size) and is later praised for dropping to a 2??

Seeing our very real traumas played for laughs soured me forever on this movie. All us girls sat down and wrote a letter not only to the staff who had made us go, but to the producers of the movie themselves for somehow managing to both glorify and trivialize the very behaviors that we were trying to NOT let kill us.

A couple of us left the theater in fucking tears. We bitched about it for weeks. I am apparently still bitching about it after almost 2 decades (much better with regards to the eating disorder though, thankfully). Seriously what the fuck is this movie.

[holyshit]

.

[summers-pratt]

I was tagged by @rosieposiepie for a fun book ask game!! Thank you for tagging me!!! :D

Bought: I buy so many books oh no I didn't think this through OH ok I just bought Nineteenth Century Women's Fashion, and it is all plates and brief descriptions of the displayed outfits from every year in the 1800s and I am very pumped about it bc I have been getting increasingly sucked into the discourse of accurate period clothing in media, so this is scratching a big itch lol

Borrowed: I don't really borrow books that much, I like having my own copies (my overflowing bookshelves are staring at me contemptuously), I think the last book I borrowed from a friend was in high school. She lent me Carrie, but she also included Flowers in the Attic for whatever reason, and, not knowing anything about it, I read it after I finished Carrie, and boy did 10th grade me not see romanticized incest coming.

Was gifted: The same friend gave me Bunny for my birthday and that was a really fun, really weird story about sorority-adjacent Frankensteinian creations for female pleasure and literary exploration and the relationships and imbalances between the women who make them. Super weird, little fucked up, kinda gay, really fun.

Gave/lent: After I read it, I lent my friend Outlawed, it's about women who couldn't conceive in the Old West and also gay people and gender and a dreamed of utopia for them achieved through robbing banks dressed as men. Be gay do crime cowboy edition.

Finished: I just read The Loved Ones and it was really cool at first, a guy worked at a pet cemetery in LA and then he planned a funeral for his friend, and then it got into people who prepare the people for funerals, and I LOVE weird super specific jobs and funeral planning stories (bc you never see that stuff in media, it always cuts from the death directly to the funeral and it's such a waste! So much happens in that period!) But then, because it was written by a straight white cis man in the 1940s, it got misogynistic and racist and was a relief to be over with.

Started: I just started reading Firestarter bc the new movie came out and I want to read it first and I really really like it so far, it just yeets you right into the story and the little girl sets fires with her mind!! It's so fun!!

5 stars: I read Plain Bad Heroines last year and boy howdy is this a fun book. It follows two related timelines, one at an all girl's boarding school in the early 1900s and one in LA and then the same boarding school in the present day, when they are making a movie about the events in the 1900s. There's supernatural occurrences (it starts normal and based in reality and the spooky stuff creeps in and you learn about it with the characters), there's gay people (literally almost every single character is queer, every main character is queer and it is incredible), there's super fun narration devices (snarky footnotes. Need I say more?), there's illustrations and MAPS (I love a good map in a novel, we need more maps in books). I cant even explain all the cool shit in this book, it is just the most fun book I've read maybe ever, I bought copies for three people for Christmas last year, I can't recommend it enough.

2 stars: I tend to really enjoy the books I read but one book I know I hated the ending for was Son of Rosemary, the sequel to Rosemary's Baby (the book the movie is based off of). At first it was great, a little weird but it's a weird story so whatever, then like the last few pages happen and (spoilers for this very old very unpopular book) it's just the biggest fuckin duex ex machina, literally, except instead of a god yanking the doomed character up out of the situation, she's plunged into hell but OH! JUST KIDDING! IT WAS ALL A FUCKING DREAM! EVEN! THE! FIRST! BOOK! IT'S JUST ALL NEGATED! Oh it made me furious I hated it. There is however a fun anagram that the author proposes and doesn't solve, unlike in the first book, and he encourages the reader to solve it, and I did (faster than he did apparently) after I finished the book in a rage, so that was fun.

Didn't finish: My friend and I each got a Pride and Prejudice book (essentially fanfic, but sold in stores), she got a vampire one and I got SUPPOSEDLY the smutiest P&P book out there, a sequel called Mr. Darcy Takes a Wife, but I could not get through it. It was trying to use the same language and only sometimes succeeding, and was setting up to be like a bodice ripper and all Dramatic (ie actually lowkey problematic), while also rehashing the original book as well as giving thorough backstory to characters when it was unnecessary, all the while trying to also be a sequel. It was just so much and none of it very well done OH and the smut wasn't even that descriptive, it glazed right over everything so it was like reading the scene through foggy glasses rather than seeing it clearly. Big bummer.

I'm tagging @momsopposed2theoccult, @silvermars, and @alittlemoretime and anyone else who wants to yell about books! Thank you @rosieposiepie again, this was so fun!!