#re: gender at least

[eliotquillon]

just finished the rwrb movie and although i really enjoyed it (and was kicking my feet giggling the whole time) i do have a couple of major criticisms, some of which i think aren’t really the movie’s fault because they had to fit a whole book into 2 hours, but some of which left me kind of disappointed:

-i feel slightly icky that bea and nora got their screentime SIGNIFICANTLY reduced even after june got cut entirely (which i was upset about, but did understand). i loved zahra and adored her on screen but i do think it’s very odd that she is pretty much the only major female character in this movie since bea was nonexistent and nora got permanently spirited away to pez’s bed or something sometime during the second act

-it felt like a lot of the internal conflict in alex and henry’s relationship was very unbalanced and henry heavy - alex’s neurodivergence was erased, his bi epiphany was barely even an epiphany, and him not being explicitly kicked off the campaign after ellen finds out about him and henry essentially killed his whole subplot about realising he doesn’t need to have everything achieved at thirty and deciding he wants to apply to law school instead. which wouldn’t have been terrible but on the flipside it felt weird that we didn’t see very much of henry’s family considering how much they affect and shape his fear of being outed and his feeling of being in a glass cage - e.g bea’s treatment by the media during her active addiction (which was entirely erased), the extent of the tension between him and philip. felt like henry’s pov scenes were a super wasted opportunity for that and we were mostly just being Told about all of these things

-i am not actually that mad about oscar and ellen still being together lol but i felt like in the scene with oscar smoking the cigar on the balcony they were kinda building up to there being significant strain in his and ellen’s relationship that just wasn’t explored. especially since it’s clear oscar would never be able to be president because he’s not a natural born citizen + the sacrifice of his career for ellen’s is so much bigger now that he’s first gentleman in this version

-pacing in general was a bit off but the worst offender was the fact that there was a complete time skip between the alex henry confrontation/reconciliation and the outing. so much of the tension and desperation from that outing scene comes from the fact that the risk of it happening was slowly increasing throughout the book and it felt almost inevitable (the elevator cctv being leaked, henry having to fake date june) and honestly making it so abrupt weirdly reduced a lot of its impact for me

-similarly i actually completely understand why the richards plot / rafael luna plot was cut (i suspect republican election interference hits a bit too close to home after 2020) but my god was miguel a lame fucking villain and him being queer and hispanic erased a lot of the original commentary about racism and homophobia that the richards plot lent itself to. like in general this movie was a lot lighter than the book which is fine! but for a movie where the main subplot is a presidential election So Much of the political themes were heavily neutered or cut to the point that it seemed like the pressure on henry and alex’s relationship was disproportionately coming from henry’s side when in the book it was more balanced

again on the whole i really really loved this movie and i knew going in that certain changed were going to be made. and i hope more movies get made like it! these r just my Thots and i may change my mind when i rewatch it with my friend tomorrow

[knuckleblaster]

moodboard

[frodho-slaggins]

Also it is patentedly incorrect to write a character as a morally cogent and politically literate feminist and have her blame her boyfriend for getting literally unambiguously raped without narratively unpacking it. I think there's room for Annie to feel betrayed or even for her to fuck up in the way she did in the show (by treating this as an infidelity) and for hughie to respond as tho he has something to apologize for (although its clearly not his fault) because ppl are allowed to be hypocritical in their politics, misinformed, blindspots, momentarily blinded by stress etc but only if the framing recognizes the reality that hughie was raped and should be treated with that in mind from a narrative perspective. He's clearly traumatized by it. It's rlly goddamn obviously not even a little bit his fault. It would have been very interesting for Annie to respond this way with the narrative understanding that she is essentially victimblaming but instead it's not intentional just another character writing fuckup. Kripke learn how to write about gender challenge.

[fruitageoforanges]

my conspiracy theory is that part of daemon’s strained relationship with baela in f&b (not sure to what extent they’re going to go down that route in the show, especially as they seem to be somewhat butchering baela + rhaena) is due to gender envy.

[unproduciblesmackdown]

among the boundless billions zaniness like laugh track as it definitely has that moment of expressing "rolling my eyes as The Left makes a kerfuffle of Acting like they have a stance as a veneer over the true belief that [xyz] is cool & chill actually" like what, approximate 0.000% chance wendy isn't, as usual, given the Objective Stance of "yeah yeah ohh we are cancelling involved parties talking about how we Don't watch this But. we all love this damn epic movie & already have it memorized so shut the fuck up, kids today" like. don't wanna really delve into how much billions thinks taylor or anyone is "really" trans / nonbinary like not too much benefit of the doubt in this material including what does provide info abt that specifically

& the general like [head in hands. what do you think any of this could possibly be about (you're the one that made your show at all about Power)] of "yes, it's bad/wrong to be someone that someone has done something to / victim of something" like that to be anti misogyny All Women Must Be Epic Winners b/c there's something to be proved: that they don't Deserve to be victims (of misogyny), not taken as a Given. while when we see some epic winner men stepping on other men (who need not all be guaranteed Winners so as to say misogyny is wrong), that's often Good, well beyond any assumption that various forms of basic disrespect / violation / patterns of emergent/entrenched power difference as Bad (for being things done to people, not for there being people they're being done to), & generally billions has to take an extra step when ppl get shitted on & tell us the Specific Cases when it was undeserved actually & someone was being mean to a specific person who didn't deserve that. & the specific cases when hey guess it wasn't that bad(tm) or when hey It's Okay that you're someone something was done to, in this case. & tell us what we were supposed to know all along like when someone who something was being done to (wrong Of Them, whether b/c they inherently deserve it no matter what, &/or b/c they failed to be someone who could make it Impossible to do anything to them, which, how do you do that besides being The Authority / Superior yourself, exactly? nonrhetorically? what if the in group vs out group / fascism / authoritarianism protected Me?) was actually being treated Too Well b/c ah well the abuse meant you were getting any attention, maybe it meant you were claimed as any superior's property, maybe it meant you weren't Already disposed of, as all Losers were in the end, You're Welcome.

obviously referring to winston where it's spelled out all the abuse towards him was deserved, & More than he deserved in the case of rian having more access & taking advantage of that, all for billions' enjoying its own sendoff there of, again, maximizing violation & violence short of [real violence is physical & leaves bruises / draws blood / Literally kills] which would be distasteful in general But doesn't it make wags look like the winner & winston the loser is that the former's completely unrelated completely impersonal ego blow gets way amplified taken out on winston, the most vulnerable recurring character when spyros as [first & ultimate Everyone Hates Him role] is more entrenched in there & billions still magnanimously pities tuk, as it does winston too, just not quite as much. again that like completely surface level realized power fantasy of forcing the mirror up to the Inferior so they're like nooo my inferiorityyyy & in doing so like, the projection in that lmao, we get it re: the valuing of & need(tm) for such Power Tripping & Reaffirming My Superiority & My Ego Restored; Everyone Claps like good god. & then for all ben & tuk are the slightly softer Two Too Nice Boys duo to the rian & winston quant duo, also like too nice i guess but not as much, ben is in charge of tuk but Any instance of rian being in charge of winston outstrips them in that "yay interpersonal abuse" dynamic, like then in the end billions may be like "yeah it's possible to be mean to them unlike how being mean to winston is actually Nice b/c he deserves everything he gets, we only vicariously enjoy it vs Feeling Bad for tuk & ben sometimes (still magnanimously & it's Not That Bad / just goofin)" like ben & tuk still Fail by not being people it's impossible to do anything to. & not Exceptions who anyone is really being Too Mean to. like if they were women, in which case, no problem surely with a "positive" kind of victim blaming where there is something Inherent that Will be victimized so hey how about to cancel that out there's this special Paternal Protection you Need always, Or Else? :) but instead they are men who are asian & is ben gay & w/tuk & winston nobody mentions glasses or fatness but billions doesn't really do much or very in depth textual mentioning of Anything, even w/nonzero mention that there may be gender & race in this world. a gay man, once. no disability. we just Know who are the inferiors who deserve it when they're treated inferiorly, or if they don't, they start deserving it when they fail to stop/avoid it, but if you start mentioning the factors behind who we all totally agree is inferior like whoa nobody was Saying any of that? being the real agent of oppression on the basis of the factors only You spelled out, much? nonbinary? i never say anything about the Gender Binary when i'm subscribing to it, sounds like You've created & enforced it. obfuscation & deflection onto [so Just Normal nobody has to label, explain, or argue it] couldn't serve a purpose & protect the existing power differences as they are. maybe You're the problem? perhaps you brought it upon yourself & now you're causing too much trouble standing up for yourself while everyone else's criticism is laser focused on you as the prior & continuing negative actions done to you are taken as a given / unquestioned / covertly protected to overtly encouraged?

anyway so wild if the Completely Normal(tm) Victim Blaming is uncritically recreated & oft embraced for "if you're watching this & don't wish you were axe / find him appealing" [billions as a sequence of vicarious power trips] purposes in this series....but a bit wild considering like this is your multiseason show that wasn't just purporting to be those power trips for [enough demographic & apparently specific personal tastes overlap w/creators] & was at all purporting to question the matters of power at play in the material, or yknow, at least to not be completely superficial material while said material is textually & thematically all about power difference being leveraged, how, the consequences, & so on. thus i will have to intermittently talk about it forever like this like lord unbelievable. & the funny little & sometimes less funny less little characters it has trapped in there so that those of us who were never meant to be in the audience can be cursed with this knowledge. like i have some feedback. "imagine not victim blaming" & "imagine adjusting your perspective can go beyond superficial layers added to politely defer to some other ppl while they're present but really like cmon do they deserve that. am i not just saying what we're allll thinking"

[bottomvalerius]

Kinda starting to hate the “boy cat” “girl cat” duality on the clock app

[sweetalnazar]

a potential hot take, but ngl og Asra 'uses all pronoun, gender isn't real' energy is so sooooo much better than wet meow meow 'he/they Asra'

[rawliverandgoronspice]

One thing I really like is that the whole Unhallowed Vespers trilogy (so Litany, Descant and Antiphon) is that is really served as my brainstorming test grounds for Thralls.

There are ideas in there I realize I don't like as much as I thought in hindsight, or conflict with other stuff I decided I'd rather pursue instead, and I get to have explored them before committing to those in a more long-form kind of project --or some that are too subtle or complicated to be carried out outside of writing (mostly thinking of a ton of Ganondorf character details, some things about gerudo culture that I want to tweak, characters that are getting axed because We Don't Have Time, etc).

On the contrary, there are things I set up in there I never actually got to explore, and I get to pull out that thread in here instead (basically every single of the hylians' character arc roughly, Nabooru, even Impa in a way). It's pretty weird and interesting to revisit the same core ideas twice, but in a different medium and with different character arcs in mind starting off the same thing.

[clonerightsagenda]

Need the Murderbot artists to come listen to Wolf 359. For every Hera in a miniskirt I want some eldritch AI geometry.

[peternincompoop]

i NEED to know how many people found out they were trans from watching iasip!!!

also feel free to add in the tags WHO made u realise it!!

[grapecaseschoices]

hola if mutes and followers:

im looking for an if [with a demo, at least!] to plug kendis in.

so far im going to try project haeda for - and i qoute - “ Kendis would have a great time taking years off of Nash's life. nb/nb hostility sksjfhg “ - @quaxorascal

i am open to all genres [and most time periods], my only conditions are:

MC can have a stable dynamic with at least one family member, or there is room to headcanon distant relatives in

If the gender selectable ROs don’t have ‘nb’, than I PREFER there be AT LEAST one nonbindary/genderqueer RO.

[and ofc mc must be able to choose gender and pronouns. I am still suffering in playing Kendis as a ciswoman just to get Nate, smdh. Never doing that crime in another game.]

Do not waste our times giving me a game where the amt of white characters to characters of color is significantly larger. Nothing 4/3:1, or even 4:2. 

Thank you! I appreciate yall even looking at this and triply appreciate any recs! :-DD

[autistic-shaiapouf]

I should start rb'ing the pride art I've done, those wings, happy pride moth, and that post I made colorpicking the nonbinary flag from Pouf's main color palette

[unproduciblesmackdown]

wouldn't give them the benefit of the doubt at this point anyways but truly don't think we can believe billions considers that bullying winston + most people being better than him and thus entitled to their authority over him and ability to treat him however with no ill consequence for them (which we were supposedly aghast at prince laying out as his own perspective) (and is wendy's own perspective that she never really drops) Is Bad, or even potentially not good, when rian is definitely meant to have earned a Good Reward for "evolving" out here which has nothing to do with all the treatment towards winston or even just a fairly callous and self serving perspective in general, but just like. oh but i don't wanna swipe someone else's homework and put my name on the top, i'll leave. and then everybody who writes any of this stood up and clapped

[isitovernow-ootw]

beginning to wish i was exposed to queer internet spaces a bit later so i could have just existed for a while, its really hard to think about my gender when I haven't spent a single period of time not analyzing it since i was 13

[seilon]

sudden vivid memory of being 14-15 years old and daring to wear knee-length boy’s shorts to a local summer festival in one of my first public acts of transgenderism and despite that being the most mundane thing on earth (especially considering I was still not allowed to cut my hair at that point so i by no means looked mistakably like a guy or anything) being verbally torn to shreds to the point of sobbing by my mother upon getting home because I was apparently making myself (and her by association) look bad and being a flagrant humiliation in front of my friends’ parents. i guess sometimes i forget how scarring and often terrifying simply Existing as a trans kid was lol