#targeted tv

[spockvarietyhour]

The Experience ™️

[bluecrocss]

Adult PJO fans: "I can't relate to her if she doesn't look like me" "this is disrespectful to book!Annabeth" "I can't see her as the same character if she's black" "blonde, white women are soooo underrepresented in media. No one else can understand 😫"

Meanwhile, the actual demographic the show and books are for:

(@/walkersriptide_ on TikTok)

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Caveats in the tags.

[men-in-4k]

FRA FEE as Adam Prime Target S1:E01 · 2025

If you like the content, follow me on TWITTER as well <3

[anghraine]

It's interesting (if often frustrating) to see the renewed Orc Discourse after the last few episodes of ROP. I've seen arguments that orcs have to be personifications of evil rather than people as such or else the ethics of our heroes' approach to them becomes much more fraught. Tolkien's work, as written, seems an odd choice to me for not wrangling with difficult questions, and of course, more diehard fans are going to immediately bring up Shagrat and Gorbag.

If you haven't read LOTR recently, Shagrat and Gorbag are two orcs who briefly have a conversation about how they're being screwed over by Sauron but have no other real options, about their opinions of mistakes that have been made, that they think Sauron himself has made one, but it's not safe to discuss because Sauron has spies in their own ranks. They reminisce about better times when they had more freedom and fantasize about a future when they can go elsewhere and set up a small-scale banditry operation rather than being involved in this huge-scale war. Eventually, however, they end up turning on each other.

Basically any time that someone brings up the "humanity" of this conversation, someone else will point out that they're still bad people. They're not at all guilty about what they're part of. They just resent the dangers to themselves, the pressure from above, failures of competence, the surveillance they're under, and their lack of realistic alternative options. The dream of another life mentioned in the conversation is still one of preying on innocent people, just on a much smaller and more immediate scale, etc.

I think this misses the reason it keeps getting brought up, though. The point is not that Shagrat and Gorbag are good people. The point is that they are people.

There's something very normal and recognizable about their resentment of their superiors, their fears of reprisal and betrayal that ultimately are realized, their dislike of this kind of industrial war machine that erases their individual work and contributions, the tinge of wistfulness in their hope of escape into a different kind of life. Their dialect is deliberately "common"—and there's a lot more to say about that and the fact that it's another commoner, Sam, who outwits them—but one of the main effects is to make them sound familiar and ordinary. And it's interesting that one of the points they specifically raise is that they're not going to get better treatment from "the good guys" so they can't defect, either.

This is self-interested, yes, but it's not the self-interest of some mystical being or spirit or whatnot, but of people.

Tolkien's later remarks tend to back this up. He said that female orcs do exist, but are rarely seen in the story because the characters only interact with the all-male warrior class of orcs. Whatever female orcs "do," it isn't going to war. Maybe they do a lot of the agricultural work that is apparently happening in distant parts of Mordor, maybe they are chiefly responsible for young orcs, maybe both and/or something else, we don't know. But we know they're out there and we know that they reproduce sexually and we know that they're not part of the orcish warrior class.

Regardless of all the problems with this, the idea that orcs have a gender-restricted warrior class at all and we're just not seeing any of their other classes because of where the story is set doesn't sound like automatons of evil. It sounds like an actual culture of people that we only see along the fringes.

And this whole matter of "but if they're people, we have to think about ethics, so they can't be people" is a weird circular argument that cannot account for what's in LOTR or for much of what Tolkien said afterwards. Yes, he struggled with The Problem of Orcs and how to reconcile it with his world building and his ethical system, but "maybe they're not people" is ultimately not a workable solution as far as LOTR goes and can't even account for much of the later evolution of his ideas, including explicit statements in his letters.

And in the end, the real response that comes to mind to that circular argument is "maybe you should think about ethics more."

[angelfishcake]

I need everyone to see this

[tinglingpeter]

LEO WOODALL in Prime Target (2025)

[k-wame]

LEO WOODALL as EDWARD BROOKS Prime Target | Apple TV+

[padmestrilogy]

i saw the tv glow (2024) dir. jane schoenbrun / revenge of the sith (2005) / rots novelization, matthew stover / "i saw the tv glow's ending is full of hope", emily st. james / rots first draft / justice smith unpacks the mysteries of i saw the tv glow / return of the jedi (1983)

[dirtbagdefender]

[begging-4-footnotes-in-the-story]

Taylor buying 1989 at Target in 2014.

[sergle]

I'm listening to a lot of Maintenance Phase (bc I love it) and this comes up sometimes, so I'll just be sat here thinking about how common it is for little kids to grow up watching their moms and other women in their life jump from diet to diet. Just as ambient background noise in your childhood, the adults around you obsess over calories aloud, express guilt over eating enjoyable food, frame exercise as a form of punishment for eating, and so on.

[spockvarietyhour]

Fallout "The Target"

[deimcs]

You were born amidst the Dalish elves: noble wanderers who refuse to join the society of humans that subjugated their homeland so long ago. The Dalish travel the land in tightly knit clans, struggling to maintain their half-forgotten lore in a human world that fears and despises them. You spend your time hunting with your clan-mate Tamlen in the forests, and as is sometimes the case, your quarry is not always the local wildlife…

[men-in-4k]

LEO WOODALL as Edward Prime Target S1:E01 · 2025

If you like the content, follow me on TWITTER as well <3

[wilgrhm]

[waltybrainrot]

part 2 of me trying to sell a niche (queer) norwegian show with no official translations to y'all :D

here are some screenshots from season 2 warning: this ventures into spoiler territory

mathias (w/sara) saving his mans too late

he likes to grab erik + this looks like a love triangle LMAO

i screamed.

mathias meeting his mom to erik's horror LMAO + bonus mathias holding the door for him

find someone who looks at you the way mathias looks at erik

THIS LOOKS LIKE A DATE.

just two bros fishin' and arguin'

but they made out up so it's fine

mathias in his bunad + erik in a suit ahhh

tumblr is being mean and saying i added too many photos so i gotta make a part 3 i'm so sorry ;-;