#sorry for the rant it's just that from a media and culture pov (my field of study) coie is a fascinating event in the pop culture landscape

[rapha-reads]

No, seriously. Crisis On Infinite Earths is way too complex. Or at least part 1 is. I'm totally lost on everything Arrow and The Flash, given that I've stopped watching respectively mid season 5 and mid season 3. But there are so many characters to follow, so many different plotlines...

I mean, yes, I'm going to watch all the parts, but I'm still going to nitpick.

Also, that's a whole planet that just got erased. Sorry, I feel more gutted about that than about Ollie, who the whole fandom knew was going to die for some years now. But jesus h roosevelt, a whole planet, whole universes?? That's the thing from my darkest nightmares.

[jemmo]

it's not an ask but some idea or observation that i want to see if you noticed too. it's about the wife/husband scene in the hospital with pran and pat talking about the terms. when i was first watching i really felt like it was long coming and when pat said he was confused and it was not serious for him i believed that too no question. it was that scene at episode 3,,my beloved,, at the bus stop that really shows you both of their sides but on a more lighter level. at the time it was airing lots of viewers were questioning why would p'aof use these terms and others were pointing to the way pat switched the terms over and even said we're two boyfriends. at the time and with the two few other times it'd come up i felt like this all was building up towards something and that the series still didn't deliver its point. it was so beautiful to see not only the discussion but that it already had foot in the story and you did see both of their povs from the very beginning. how pran didn't like this really and how also you totally believe pat didn't see past the fun or playing around of it. just appreciating the craft behind writing pat and pran.

thank you so much dear anon for pointing this out to me bc thinking about it now, i too also really appreciate how this specific point was built up to through the whole series. also sorry it took me a while to respond but i have some tuff i do wanna say about this bc it brought to light some things i hadn't thought about before. bc the thing is, while yes this was poking a bit of fun at the kinda tired out husband and wife trope in bl and also raising it as a topic for discussion, it didn't at all feel preachy to me.

(editing jess (yes im editing this) just to say this became something else, i discuss some stuff about society and media and go on many tangents hence the read more bc i feel like some ppl dont care about this stuff. and this is all just me ranting, my thoughts, im no professional, and dont know shit so take from it what you want)

i dont want to get too deep with this bc i am in no way the kind of person to have the final say on these things, but i watch way too many video essayist on youtube while knitting for hours talking about the kinda 'state of play' of this whole internet culture we're in, and i find it interesting to look at. bc i think there's this thing with what i'll lovingly term 'wokeism' that it provides a sense of superiority. ppl online or even when talking person to person in these kinds of spaces can often make themselves feel better than others, wiser, more aware and understanding bc they were able to pint out 'well actually that thing is problematic' or 'actually you cant say something like that' or 'that isnt socially acceptable anymore'. and that can be fine, bc at the end of the day you are making other people more aware, but you can't lie that it sometimes makes you feel good to know i'm better than all these other people who haven't fixed their problematic views. and this is one of the things that contribute to leftist spaces being demonised bc they jump on everything every word every term, they all have to be politically correct. you know the classic 'you cant say anything these days bc some randomer on twitter might come from nowhere and attack you for saying the wrong thing'. and thats the thing i wanna focus on. it comes from nowhere. and applying that to media, thats why some of these shows that claim progressive ideals can feel performative bc a statement that basically boils down to 'feminism is cool' or 'trans ppl are ok' just seems to come from left field. bc then ppl that are more closed minded watching that media are less likely to be receptive to those ideas, bc they're just being chucked at them.

what bad buddy does with this whole husband and wife thing, and on a larger scale with the whole feud being a perfect metaphor for queer experience, is they integrate their messages so so so well into the story so that its much more invisible when they're being made, and yet they're so much easier to take in, so much more digestible for the audience bc they aren't outright, one time only messages. they're part of the story, they're woven throughout, they're in the theming. and when the show makes you care about its characters and plot then weaves in these ideas, you kinda take to them without a second thought. like when i watched that hospital scene of pran saying he doesn't care for the label, i was just like 'lol yeah that is kinda dumb why should they have to use those words'. what i did not think was 'wtf where has this come from why is there suddenly this psa on the husband and wide labels in my fluffy hospital scene???'. you see??? and thats bc little nuggets of this message had been placed throughout the story. think ep 3 our beloved. the scene is playful and yet we still get a clear message pran doesn't want he's not comfortable with feminine labels. and its not some big song and dance, the word 'PROGRESSIVE' isnt written in lights behind them. its just a dude making his preference known, and thats totally cool. also in this scene we get one of countless displays of green flag pat being comfortable 'playing a woman'. and again, we dont need the words 'fuck toxic masculinity' to be tattooed across pat's forehead. bc its not purely about pat being that way to combat that issue. yes there's an element of pat being that way to go against toxic masculinity, but again its not performative. its just pat. its the way he is, its part of his character, its developed naturally from his personality. it fits. it isn't a psa being stuffed where it doesn't fit. this isnt trying to fit the triangle into the round hole. its a triangle already being in the triangle hole.

and i could go on and on, about this thing and that thing that is handled in a similar way. i could be like yeah the mention the wife thing at the start of ep5 and in ep9 in pran's room. but we all know that. what i do wanna still say is that i love that its such a non issue. its a non issue as in pran has dismissed this before but not felt the need to raise it any further bc its not like he despises it and more so he knows pat doesn't have any real ill intention behind it. as we hear later, he's saying it just bc he thought it was the thing to say. he thinks i wanna be closer to pran and i already call him my boyfriend, so what else can i say to show we're closer than that. but when pat's said it a couple of times, pran takes the opportunity to just be like btw im not really cool with that its not my vibe so yeah. and he doesn't bring it up with any heat, he's not attacking pat. he's not even outright saying the words 'i dont like this label. pls stop'. and still you can read all that even when he starts the conversation with a jokey vibe and uses their established dynamic of teasing each other to make pat understand why he doesn't like it. and then they both laugh, bc at the end of the day it was just dumb. they were trying to do this thing that society told them was the thing to do in relationships but it wasn't working so they don't need it. they don't need dumb, kinda outdated and gendered words just to prove to the world they're close. they know how close they are, and thats enough for them. and at the end of the day, isn't that what queer people have always been doing?? saying fuck what society wants me to do, i'm gonna live my life according to my own terms. i don't need your meaningless milestones routed in heterosexual relationships to validate my relationships. as long as me and my partner are on the same page and happy with that, i dont need anything else.

and let me end with saying that if ppl like these terms or ppl like seeing couples in bl use these terms, that doesn't make them dumb, or behind the times or problematic. some ppl just like stuff. and let me also state that the husband and wife labels do not have to be any comment on tops or bottoms. first of all, those terms are similarly tired out but also fine to use if you vibe with them. but a wife does not equal a bottom. and a wife does not equal the feminine one, or the one that does traditionally feminine things. and i would so love to see bl tackle this. bc a top can be a big strong man but also want to be called a wife, just as a bottom can do the cooking but also want to be called a husband. and switching does exist. and i so get switch vibes from like everyone in bad buddy bc thats what ppl are like. they can change what they like to do, dont put them in a box. and i love this kinda meeting place between these two kinds of labels. bc a rejection of husband and wife demands you to acknowledge that this is two men in this relationship (and it also kinda goes against this whole self-insertion thing that bl started out with as a female written and focused thing where you had a defined wife/bottom character that you could replace yourself with), and a lack of any outright top and bottom coding takes you away from this fascination ppl have with sexual positions. bc at the end of the day, why does it fucking matter?? if you like it one way or the other thats cool, but thats not something we should have to broadcast to the world. and nor should it be what you fixate on for characters. if theyre gonna be intimate, care more about the emotions and connection, nots what being put where. intimacy isn't a matter of someone giving and someone recieving, its coming together. and thats not to say it has to always be so emo, sometimes you just wanna do stuff. but even then, what goes where, it aint all that important.

basically tl;dr labels can be cool or not, its all up to personal preference and thats every individuals right. bad buddy knows how to share its messages without slapping you across your face with their 'wokeness' and then patting themselves on the back for ticking off something on their representation list. awesome writing. awesome messages. they're actually fostering nuanced discussion of these things. p'aof i love you.

[tedfashionski]

Finking, Finking.

Hi, welcome to my ted talk. (That is the only time I will ever make that joke. This is Fashionski Finks. Expect radically low standards of self-involved rantiness with zero research or accountability from here on out). For a while there I seriously thought that the covid-19 quarantine was going to result in people being increasingly placid and accepting of creeping extensions of the police state. But here I am, getting depressed again, not about the protests, which I love, but more about my relationship to in-group pressure dynamics. One of the problems with being a relentless contrarian is the discomfort of my impulse to rebel against groups even when they’re championing the right thing. I have to find my own way to fight against the system as an outsider. No gods, no masters, no fucking peer pressure.  I’ll never be happy joining a chorus line. I don’t sign fucking petitions (they’re just lists for the NSA). I do donate, but like fuck will I do it performatively. I can’t go to protests cus I get panic attacky in crowds. I empathise pretty strongly with outsiders of all stripes but believe ridiculously excessively in the public good of criticism, and have a nostalgic love of trolling (I like to think I’m gentle with it though). Bring back the troll! We need that fucker, he’s a sign of a healthy internet. I’m writing this blog thing as an extension of my need to vent my extreme negativity. TBH I never expected to get any followers with ted twitter and the bizarre welcomingness of the hf twitter community totally wrongfooted me. I’m not nice. Ted isn’t meant to likable. He’s my dark side. I was meant to be using this alt as a way to terrorise the nice nice (secretly cruel) fashion people. I’m gunna try and up that aspect more. Just bear in mind, my complaints are largely about the system, but if I see you perpetuating fashion’s entrenched anti-intellectualism or its insidery bullshit, I’ll come for you with a little meta-bomb with your name on it. Maintaining my misanthropic tone does take work tho, like, deep down in some twisted part of my psyche, I guess I do actually want to be liked. It’s fucked up.

I suppose it’s only fair to explain this Ted fursona. Like, new concept, who dis? Why all the furry porn? …..because I just think it’s hilarious. Every time I think about the furries I cackle (not at them, mind). I just love the mad corruption of pure Disney aesthetics into hardcore pornography. That’s anti-authoritarian as fuck. I love the sincerity of their culture. The way the crazy fetish aspect means they’ll never be fully blandified by mainstream acceptance. The way it’s so cringe but so delightful. And more seriously, I’m interested in how a culture of mostly gay male nerds developed to the point where they’ll invest 10k in custom fursuits and support eachother’s independent businesses in ways that the fashion community completely fails to do. The fashion world sucks. There’s so many correlations there that I want to investigate: the newness (furries date from around the 70s, fashion culture in its self-aware state dates from the late 19th C – both very young fields); the centralisation/decentralisation; the hierarchy (furries can be pretty catty, I have discovered in my research, and we all know what fashion people are like); the adoption of new identities; the cis-boy gayness aspect (I’m increasingly tired of the extreme nasty hierarchy of certain CSM queens. It’s all very UGH. Just, fuck those particular bitches.) There’s more to the furry love, but I’ll explore it in future posts.

More importantly, why Ted fucking Kaczynski? I’m not like, actually a terrorist. (….yet. tehehe. NO, seriously I like non-maiming violence. Fuck yeah to property damage. Fuck yeah to disabling the system in extreme way. But no to wooden IEDs. Think of my shitty jokes that fail to land as my hand-crafted bombs). I think I like the shitness of Ted. He was just an epic fail of a terrorist. I’m a little white girl living in London. I’m not actually a primitivist, as much as I crave a hut in the woods. I did go to an elite school though. I had some really shitty experiences in the fashion industry in my early 20s, and I watch my friends who are relatively successful in that system and I get so angry on their behalf at their poor treatment. They think I’m too angry. Fuck that. They should be more angry, and the fact that they can’t be angry at their extreme precarity and the fact they’re still insecure and terrified of being ejected by the system after all their investment and skills they’ve built up is BULLSHIT. I’ll be double angry for them, I’m not invested in that system. I don’t need it to pay my rent. I’m free, motherfuckers, and I’m coming for the abusers and exploiters. If you’re a complacent industry figure not fighting hard from within, uggghhhhh fuck you. Yes, YOU. Soooo, I relate pretty hard to the MK ultra stuff. (go look him up, he was basically tortured and experimented upon by the elite). But there’s a pretty big chasm between my views and his, and I’ll try to be clear about the extent of my interest in his extreme beliefs. I haven’t even finished reading the manifesto. Basically, I watched that shitty show on Netflix with sam worthington around the same time I watched Joker (that movie fucked me up) and thought it’d be a good outlet to larp online as a terrorist. There’s the angry white alt-right school shooter aspect, which I’m still figuring out, cus I’m non-binary and I was raised by nutso trumpy right-wingers, who I barely speak to anymore, and I struggle to get along with people generally. There’s sad, self-pitying rage here. I empathise with the angry white dudes too much. I feel guilty about it. That’s good ground for artmaking (yes, shamefully, this…is…art. Sorry). I modelled this fursona a little after my brother, who I spent years living with and arguing with and trying to lift out of his scary racist youtube rabbit holes. This is actually quite an emotional thing for me, cus I did the ‘talk to your fascist family’ thing. And I completely failed. I realised his right-winginess wasn’t lessening, I wasn’t gaining ground, and in fact my excessive empathy and desire to reach out to the relative most similar to me in character meant his extremism was rubbing off on me. Making me more resentful and depressed. Feeling powerless. I was being too kind-hearted and forgiving of his masculine impotence. So I’m exploring some personal shit here. But Ted is also a cute lil fuzzball teddy bear. He means well, but me being super autistic and faily at social skills means he’s kind of a dick, cus I am. I’m going to try and further develop this character, this POV, and this post is the only time I’ll explain the divide between him and his creator (moi). The ‘I’ on the twitter and here is Ted Fashionski, I need that space between me and him. Masks give us this freedom to be more ourselves. Internet culture has lost a lot of its wild brutal anonymity in the last decade or so, now everyone’s afraid of making mistakes. How the hell do you grow if you’re not allowed to fuck up? This is a vital outlet. He’s become an important part of my life and I have to say, I love being Ted Fashionski. He’s like Paddington Bear who just escaped form Guantanamo or something.

I get pretty fatigued as a matter of course. I’m a long-term depressive since childhood. I have a difficult time keeping my hard-on for living. I don’t get suicidal really but I do struggle with extreme fatigue. I sleep a lot. I often fall into spirals of self-hate. And as someone who utterly believes in revolutionary leftist politics, I beat myself up about not doing enough. I’m so middle class and english and white. I was raised in such a chauvinistic and complacent culture; I don’t even know where to start. I’m wading my way through post-colonial literature and beating myself up for finding it boring and uncomfortable. It’s hard to force yourself to acknowledge your culture is The Bad Guys. It’s easier to fall into fanstasies of supremacy and butthurt misunderstoodness. And it’s not like my depressive brain needs any encouragement to hate me. My trajectory is ever leftwards, but I remember the righteous fury of being right-wing. I get it, that was me. We need more paths back from fascism, more comprehension of why people are that kind of shitty. I talk less, and less well, the more depressed I am. If I’m talking, it means im feeling a lot better. Just, fyi.

Give me a minute to be critical here. With the George Floyd protests, a lot of the cool guys on fashion twitter has gone blazingly hardcore on the political side. But there’s this troubling rhetoric about ‘no return to normal content’ or ‘this isn’t the time for fashion’. Like fuck it isn’t. This is a key problem with fashion culture right here, we have this received perception of fashion as empty escapism. Escapism matters in fashion, yes. But seriously, talking about the surfaces of things does not equal not caring about deeper meaning. What the fuck. Clothes are a connective tissue, a membrane between us. They’re emotional and powerful. We can talk about things that matter THROUGH clothes. I speak fashion, pretty fucking well. Most people who work at fashion magazines are morons with no understanding or respect for their subject. They’re incapable of doing it justice, and that’s deliberate. On this tumblr you’ll see rants and reviews of fashion and other artforms, always interpreting through a fashion lens. cus it matters, cus it’s a vital part of the culture, cus just because something has a glittery, seductive surface doesn’t mean it doesn’t communicate or contain depth. There’s no going back to ‘normal fashion content’, yes. Normal fashion content is a fucking psyop to divert legitimate interest in aesthetics amongst largely non-academic dyslexic visual types away from careful thought/feeling and towards empty consumerist commericiality. The traditional fashion media wants you to express yourself and your interest in the zeitgeist through buying more shit. Another fashion world is possible. Let’s destroy the old and build a new one, one where surface and spirit are connected and true and fashion can’t be abused in service of evil industrial monopolists.

/end rant. TLDR: angry fictional teddy bear with tin-foil hat and an eco-anarchist fetish says no to stupid fashion and yes to the renewal of conceptual fashion. Also, Fuck White People.