#the fact that these villains have found their place in queer culture tells you that queer people have seen themself IN these characters

[bunniehunn]

hughh I wanna talk about the queer theming and iconography in Disney villains/twst characters but I don’t want to look like a freaking nerd

Edit: I put my take in the og tags

[pridepages]

Culture Clash: This Way Out

I just finished This Way Out by Tufayel Ahmed. I have thoughts...

Here there be spoilers!

As the saying goes: coming out is a lifelong journey.

Such is one of the lessons of Tufayel Ahmed’s thought-provoking debut This Way Out. The novel follows narrator Amar Iqbal during a pivotal moment in his life. He’s the son of Bengali Muslim immigrants, born in London but raised in a traditional conservative household. As one of the younger children, he sits in a distinct--inferior--place in the hierarchy. As a man raised in a conservative religiously influenced society, he knows he is in danger. 

Because he also knows that he is gay.

Worse: he’s gay and the love of his life is a white man.

All his life, Amar has struggled with his identity, hiding it from the people he loved the most. But now, he’s getting married. And the news is bursting out of him. Burned out on anxiety, he just sends it to the family group chat: ‘I’m gay and I’m getting married.’

What could possibly go wrong?

There’s a lot to love about this novel for a number of reasons. First, I find it refreshing to read a coming-of-age novel about someone who’s closer to 30 than 20. As someone who falls in the former bracket, I promise that growing, changing, and finding yourself doesn’t stop after you reach age of majority. It’s easy to write about experiences a person has for the first time. But it’s richer, and frankly more interesting, to write about someone who is undergoing a transformation later in life. Someone who has looked around them and said: I’ve been here, I’ve done that, and now I want better.

Second, reading this novel was a humbling experience. White privilege flashes so blindingly bright that it can take reading a story outside it to realize just how much it controls the narrative. I didn’t realize how used to thinking about queer religious narratives as ‘us-vs.-them’ I was until I read this book. What I mean is that the dominant narrative is usually Christian bible thumping, and it usually involves the queer person rejecting the zealots out of hand for backward and bigoted thinking. But here, a pivotal moment is when Amar’s prospective mother-in-law makes a public speech at an engagement party condemning Amar’s religious family for rejecting him. She makes comments to the effect of: ‘their loss is our gain.’ But Amar doesn’t appreciate the gesture. He finds it an insensitive public display of White Savior-ism. “My family aren’t villains in a story,” Amar tells his fiance. “I’m not some anecdote your mother gets to share because she feels like it. This is my life.” White gays are so used to the idea that the mother-in-law’s sentiments are the “right” ones that--absent Amar’s perspective and narration--we might not see anything wrong with what she did.

In that sense, this novel does wonders for showing that culture clash is not just something that happens outside a queer and/or BIPOC individual. It’s not just a struggle to relate to other people--be they family, friends, or other community members. Culture clash is something that can eat you up inside because we are each a mosaic of assembled labels and identities, some of which are difficult to reconcile. For example, Amar struggles constantly with the fact that he is both gay and muslim. “I’ve asked myself a million times why a god that punishes homosexuality would make me gay.” Amar admits. “Was I born bad? What life could I really have if, at the end of it, no good deed would ever be enough to repent the sin of my existence?” It’s a question most queer people of faith have had to grapple with: how can I be both things at the same time? People hate ambiguity, so we need a way to put the question to rest. Some people simply throw out the competing identity that doesn’t serve them. But others find a way to bring together labels that once felt like repelling magnets. Just like Amar, who found his way to a new kind of religious community: “All my life it has felt like there is one absolute. But perhaps there isn’t? People interpret through the prism of their beliefs, in a subjective way.”

Navigating the inner conflict of queerness is hard enough as a member of the dominant culture. So how can we support our rainbow siblings who have the added layer of complexity as minorities in other identities?

We can follow the model of Amar’s fiance Joshua. It’s clear to the reader that Joshua didn’t have a simple time coming out. As his parents wronged Amar, they also wronged their own son. It’s subtle, but the reader can pick it up in the ways that Joshua’s parents try to impose heteronormative traditions and models upon the young couple and their wedding planning. Still, Joshua’s arc is one of intellectual and emotional growth. Over the course of the plot, the couple takes time apart. During that time, Joshua has to come to grips with the facts that he could not understand Amar’s experiences and that he needed to do better as an ally going forward. Better than their actual wedding vows are the promises that Joshua makes to Amar during their private reconciliation: “I’ll do everything I can to make you happy, and feel seen, and never left out.”

Internal culture clash is something pretty much all queer people have felt. We all have to deal with it in our own ways. So instead of casting judgment, let’s learn how to listen better. And learn to step up by first asking the most important question: “What do you need right now?”

We can’t make the world care about us. But we can all learn how to take better care of each other.

[gayfrenchtoast]

Okay fine we're doing this. I havent read the books and I'm probably not going to I've only seen the movies so I'm sorry if anything I say is contradictory or has already been stated.

So! Descendants 3 was kinda shit and I dont like it but especially because of the ending because everybody was like "oh yeah island is open and we're all happy with no worries or implications about free villains or people being spiteful about being imprisoned for years!" In fact if anything they joked about those things.

The island is basically its own culture, I can't say how long it's been around, long enough for some almost adult kids to be about and to develop a kind of community.

The Isle is a place of poverty, people are dirty and on the street, eveyone steals from each other and most people don't put much effort into appearance upkeep (personal or of the sourounding area) not because of laziness or being "evil" but because they clearly don't have time or luxury to do such things or possibly even the clean water. Does the Isle have clean water?? How to they get electricity??? Someone tell me!

Another thing that I've noticed is easy to see but is not much explicitly said is the unique style of those on the Isle. As previously stated they don't have much but those who have the most "power" and such on the Isle are the best example of this As they have the most colourful outfits. However these outfits are often made out of patches and ripped things put together, even salvaged things like nets and chains as we can see on thing like Uma and Harry's outfits in D3 they make the best of what they've got and they do fantastic because their outfits are intricate and detailed and just tell you everything you need to know about them. Which is why it's a damn s h a m e when the original VK's ajust their style to be more like Auradon's. That's not an improvement! Be proud of where you came from!! It's like they forgot what it was like being on the Isle in D3!

Moving on, here's something that was touched on in D2 but not enough. Equality. On the Isle there is basically equal opportunity as in saying everything is shit and nome cares what gender and presumably what sexuality you are as long as you can work. Sexism is shown to be almost casual in aurodon from the looks of it, Chad makes sexist comments and litterally none else says anything or seems to see anything wrong with it except Jay who caves to pressure from peers and expectations. He does redeem himself because he's from the isle and he knows you shouldn't give a shit about anyone's gender or anything. If they can do something and ask to be included you give them that opportunity. The sexism is also implied in the way that the rule book has men written specifically in the first place and that it has taken until then for anyone but boys to be allowed on any kind of sports team. We never see it! It seems to be the hetronormative veiw where the boys do sport and girls do cheerleeding and other genders? What other genders? Never heard of that? BAD AURADON!! I bet there's so many trans folk on the island just living their lives, thinking Aurodon is the better place and not knowing that it's a cis het filled nightmare.

Okay no I'm headcannoning now, if their are now a bunch of Isle kids at auradon prep they find it fucking aweful the way all these preppy royals are treating them and make the first LGBT club in Auradon. There is lots of pushback and they get bullied a fuck ton for making themselves the most prominent queer folk in the school until a fight breaks out and the club demand that they should be treated better, taking all the evidence to fairy godmother who is very hesitant because COME ON she's never been that great she is biased to Auradon kids and if putting away those in the Isle is brought up she is all on it, she is jelly spined about doing anything against the royal kids. So the kids are like "Fine, if you won't help us we'll take this to the King himself!" Well mainly the queer mom's of the group (you know the ones I'm talking about) who lead the others and protect the anxious queers as they storm to Ben at his fucking locker and demand an audience because they are being harassed and bullied and none is doing anything. Ben had no idea there was even a LGBT club (too busy ig) and is gassed there is one for a moment before he's like "wait people are harassing you?" So Bisexual King Ben gets his lovely Bi wife and they start coming to club meetings and investing in the pins and stuff the club makes. Most club members are pleased but the queer mom's are apprehensive that this will help until some assholes come to the club to do their usual bullying only to find King and Queen Beast themselves siting there with rainbow bracelets and bi pins and all trying to have a nice old time eating their fucking cupcakes what the fuck are yall doing? The bullying dies down quick once they realise it ain't gonna fly, the other OG VK's that hear about this become members and very protective over their queer children. Did I mention Dizzy and Ceila are a part of the club? They're girlfriend's. Celia is one of the queer moms. Harry becomes one of the biggest protectors over the group as the pan dad. He's been going around snogging everyone and anyone wholl snog him everyone already knew he was queer they just didn't have the balls to try and bully him over it as much as they bullied the lil club members. But now Harry can often be seen in jackets and shit with pan and general queer patches and pins and running around with his gay children yelling "MOVE WE'RE GAY!!" He totally calls them his queer crew. Anyway as a result lots of queer royals start coming out of the woodwork, obvs Lonnie is one of them, and the club eventually serves to bring members of Auradon and the Isle close together.

Where was I? Yada yada auradon expects girls to be pretty princesses and boys to be brave knights or dashing princes. It's shit and should stop being portrayed as good. Moving on!

Food! One of the things we'll established in all movies is that the food of the Isle is shit compared to food of Auradon. The Isle has no fresh fruit which likely means its almost impossible for things to grow there which is fair because again there doesn't seem to be much fresh water and there are always clouds overhead so no sun. Maybe there is some people trying really hard to grow stuff but the general attitude of the Isle seems to be "there is no time for that" and fruits are forgotten so much that the VK's litterally don't knownwhat they are when they come across them. That and anything containing sugar. Actually it's mention by Dizzy and Celia that they enjoy the fact that the cake dosent have dirt or flies so basically food there is terrible. We don't see much food on the Isle but what we do see seems to be beans, eggs, chips and shellfish. Basically protine and carbs that can be easily stored and produced. To be fair beans are kidna good for you but they're likely a sign that if they get any imports from the mainland it is canned stuff. Prison food. There's probably some chef villain that is trying their best to make good food out of the shit but honestly the Isle dwellers should be angry that they've been deprived of good food for so long not happy they're finally been given decency.

Moving on, music! Auradon dosent have nearly as many musical numbers it seems, the Isle songs have a distinct style, to them, the villains that basically "founded" the place were masters of the dramatic songs (with backup or solo) so banging music is basically ingrained in the music's culture, even for battle as we see with the fight between Mal and Uma in D3. Meanwhile Auradon seems to have mainly romance and "I want" songs. Even Audrey's villain song is basically an I want song.

Okay let's talk about the Villains. We've established that the VK's are not inherently bad. However not all of them can be totally good and there are legit OG Villains just kinda chillin on the Isle. They've obviously lost quite a bit of their power, motivation and sanity (isolation will do that to ya as they lost everything and the VKs know no different) but deadass? They were bad guys. You can try to rehabilitate them sure but you've basically just let them free roam, they could make a runner and you wouldn't get the chance. They were also shitty patents which is brushed over/joked about in the interaction between Carlos and...man I feel bad I forgot her name deadass their relationship seemed to come out of nowhere in the second film she didn't seem interested in them at all and friendzoned them multiple times I'm pretty sure Disney did that becaue queer kids were relating to Carlos and headcanoning them as queer (which they deffinatly are) but deadass their mom is an attempted animal murderer and has hurt her child as we can see from how they're afraid of her and her rhetoric and yet it's "haha I'm afraid to meet your ma!" "Me too cus im a dog! Lol!" Fuuuuck offfffff

I think I'm running out of thoughts so here's a last one for now; with the magical barrier down a bunch of magical Villains kids should be coming out for the woodwork. We know Mal has magic basically stored in her so it's is possible, she technically doesn't need the spellbook to do magic it is just inherent to her. So with the diverse range of people from the isle there are deffinatly magic folk in there. Actually if we're following Disney movie law I saw something mentioning Jay being half Genie and yeah! He should be half Genie! Jafar got turned into a Genie he's probably only human because of the barrier! Oh also Ben should be able to go beast on command as long as he had a better beast form than he did in the movies. And give him back the beard and fangs like fuck you he looked so much better

Okay I'm done for now

[thewatsonbeekeepers]

Chapter 4 – It is always 1895 [TAB 1/1]

TAB is my favourite episode of Sherlock. It is a masterpiece that investigates queerness, the canon and the psyche all within an hour and a half. Huge amounts of work has been done on this episode, however, so I’m not going to do a line by line breakdown – that could fill a small book. A great starting point for understanding the myriad of references in TAB is Rebekah’s three part video series on the episode, of which the first instalment can be found here X. I broadly agree with this analysis; what I’m going to do here, though, is place that analysis within the framework of EMP theory. As a result, as much as it pains me, this chapter won’t give a breakdown of carnation wallpaper or glass houses or any of those quietly woven references – we’re simply going in to how it plays into EMP theory.

Before digging into the episode, I want to take a brief diversion to talk about one of my favourite films, Mulholland Drive (2001).

If you haven’t seen Mulholland Drive, I really recommend it – it’s often cited as the best film of the last 20 years, and watching it really helps to see where TAB came from and the genre it’s operating in. David Lynch is one of the only directors to do the dream-exploration-of-the-psyche well, and I maintain that a lot of the fuckiness in the fourth series draws on Lynch. However, what I actually want to point out about Mulholland Drive is the structure of it, because I think it will help us understand TAB a little better. [If you don’t want spoilers for Mulholland Drive, skip the next paragraph.]

The similarities between these two are pretty straightforward; the most common reading of Mulholland Drive is that an actress commits suicide by overdose after causing the death of her ex-girlfriend, who has left her for a man, and that the first two-thirds of the film are her dream of an alternate scenario in which her girlfriend is saved. The last third of the film zooms in and out of ‘real life’, but at the end we see a surreal version of the actual overdose which suggests that this ‘real life’, too, has just been in her psyche. Sherlock dying and recognising that this may kill John is an integral part of TAB, and the relationships have clear parallels, but what is most interesting here is the structural similarity; two-thirds of the way through TAB, give or take, we have the jolt into reality, zoom in and out of it for a while and then have a fucky scene to finish with that suggests that everything is, in fact, still in our dying protagonist’s brain. Mulholland Drive’s ending is a lot sadder than TAB’s – the fact that, unlike Sherlock, there is no sequel can lead us to assume that Diane dies – and it’s also a lot more confusing; it’s often cited as one of the most complicated films ever made even just in terms of surface level plot, before getting into anything else, and it certainly took me a huge amount of time on Google before I could approach anything like a resolution on it!

Mulholland Drive is the defining film in terms of the navigating-the-surreal-psyche subgenre, and so the structural parallels between the two are significant – and definitely point to the idea that Sherlock hasn’t woken up at the end of TAB, which is important. But we don’t need to take this parallel as evidence; there’s plenty of that in the episode itself. Let’s jump in.

Emelia as Eurus

When we first meet Eurus in TST, she calls herself E; this initialism is a link to Moriarty, but it’s also a convenient link to other ‘E’ names. Lots of people have already commented on the aural echo of ‘Eros’ in ‘Eurus’, which is undeniable; the idea that there is something sexual hidden inside her name chimes beautifully with her representation of a sexual repression. The other important character to begin with E, however, is Emelia Ricoletti. The name ‘Emelia’ doesn’t come from ACD canon, and it’s an unorthodox spelling (Amelia would be far more common), suggesting that starting with an ‘E’ is a considered choice.

When TAB aired, we were preoccupied with Emelia as a Sherlock mirror, and it’s easy to see why; the visual parallels (curly black hair, pale skin) plus the parallel faked death down to the replacement body, which Mofftiss explicitly acknowledge in the episode. However, I don’t think that this reading is complete; rather, she foreshadows the Eurus that we meet in s4. The theme of ghosts links TAB with s4 very cleanly; TAB is about Emelia, but there is also a suggestion of the ghosts of one’s past with Sir Eustace as well as Sherlock’s own claims (‘the shadows that define our every sunny day’). Compare this to s4 – ‘ghosts from the past’ appears on pretty much every promotional blurb, and the word is used several times in relation to Eurus. If Eurus is the ghost from Sherlock’s past, the repressive part of his psyche that keeps popping back, Emelia is a lovely metaphor for this; she is quite literally the ghost version of Sherlock who won’t die.

What does it mean, then, when Jim and Emelia become one and the same in the scene where Jim wears the bride’s dress? We initially read this as Jim being the foil to Sherlock, his dark side, but I think it’s more complicated than this. Sherlock’s brain is using Emelia as a means of understanding Jim, but when we watch the episode it seems that they’ve actually merged. Jim wearing the veil of the bride is a good example of this, but I also invite you to rewatch the moment when John is spooked by the bride the night that Eustace dies; the do not forget me song has an undeniable South Dublin accent.* This is quite possibly Yasmine Akram [Janine] rather than Andrew Scott, of course, but let’s not forget that these characters are resolutely similar, and hearing Jim’s accent in a genderless whisper is a pretty clear way of inflecting him into the image of the bride. In addition to this, Eustace then has ‘Miss Me?’ written on his corpse, cementing the link to Moriarty.

[*the South Dublin accent is my accent, so although we hear a half-whispered song for all of five seconds, I’m pretty certain about this]

Jim’s merging with Emelia calls to mind for me what I think might be the most important visual of all of series 4 – Eurus and Jim’s Christmas meeting, where they dance in circles with the glass between them and seem to merge into each other. I do talk about this in a later chapter, but TLDR – if Jim represents John being in danger and Eurus represents decades of repressed gay trauma, this merging is what draws the trauma to the surface just as Jim’s help is what suddenly makes Eurus a problem. It is John’s being in danger which makes Sherlock’s trauma suddenly spike and rise – he has to confront this for the first time – just like Emelia Ricoletti’s case from 1895 only needs solving for the first time now that Jim is back.

At some point I want to do a drag in Sherlock meta, because I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye, but Jim in a bride’s dress does draw one obvious drag parallel for me.

If you haven’t seen the music video for I Want to Break Free, it’s 3 minutes long and glorious – and also, I think, reaps dividends when seen in terms of Sherlock. You can watch it here: X

Not only is it a great video, but for British people of Mofftiss’s age, it’s culturally iconic and not something that would be forgotten when choosing that song for Jim. Queen were intending to lampoon Coronation Street, a British soap, and already on the wrong side of America for Freddie Mercury’s unapologetic queerness, found themselves under fire from the American censors. Brian May says that no matter how many times he tried to explain Coronation Street to the Americans, they just didn’t get it. This was huge controversy at the time, but the video and the controversy around it also managed to cement I Want to Break Free as Queen’s most iconic queer number ��� despite not even being one of Mercury’s songs. There is no way that Steven Moffat, and even more so Mark Gatiss would not have an awareness of this in choosing this song for Moriarty. Applying any visual to this song is going to invite comparisons to the video – and inflecting a sense of drag here is far from inappropriate. Moriarty has been subsumed into Eurus in Sherlock’s brain – the male and the female are fused into an androgynous and implicitly therefore all-encompassing being. I’m not necessarily comfortable with the gendered aspect of this – genderbending is something we really only see in our villains here – but given this is about queer trauma, deliberately queering its form in this way is making what we’re seeing much more explicit.

Nothing new under the sun

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun” (Ecclesiastes)

"Read it up -- you really should. There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before." (A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes)

“Hasn’t this all happened before? There’s nothing new under the sun.” (The Abominable Bride, Jim Moriarty)

This is arguably the key to spotting that TAB is a dream long before they tell us – when TAB’s case is early revealed to be a mixture between TRF (Emelia’s suicide) and TGG (the five pips), and we see the opening of ASiP repeated, we should be questioning what on earth is going on. This can also help us to recognise s4 as being EMP as well though – old motifs from the previous series keep repeating through the cases, like alarm bells ringing. Moriarty telling Sherlock that there is nothing new under the sun is his key to understanding that the Emelia case is meant to help him understand what happened to Jim, that it’s a mental allegory or mirror to help him parse it. This doesn’t go away when TAB ends! Moving into TST, one of the striking things is that cases are still repeating! The Six Thatchers appeared on John’s blog way back, before the fall – you can read it here: X. It’s about a gay love affair that ends in one participant killing the other. Take from that what you will, when John’s extramarital affection is making him suicidal and Sherlock comatose. Meanwhile, the title of The Final Problem refers to the story that was already covered in TRF and the phone situation with the girl on the plane references both ASiB and TGG, and the ending of TST is close to a rerun of HLV. It’s pretty much impossible to escape echoes of previous series in a way that is almost creepy, but we’ve already had this explained to us in TAB – none of this is real. It’s supposed to be explaining what is happening in the real world – and Mofftiss realised that this was going to be difficult to stomach, and so they included TAB as a kind of key to the rest of the EMP, which becomes much more complex.

However, if we want to go deeper we should look at where that quote comes from. I’ve given a few epigraphs to this section to show where the quote comes from – first the book of Ecclesiastes, then A Study in Scarlet. It’s one of the first things Holmes says and it is during his first deduction in Lauriston Gardens. This is where I’m going to dive pretty deep into the metatextual side of things, so bear with the weirdness.

[we’re going deeper]

Holmes’s first deduction from A Study in Scarlet shows that he’s no great innovator – he simply notices things and spots patterns from things he has seen before. This is highlighted by the fact that he even makes this claim by quoting someone before him. If our Sherlock also makes deductions based on patterns from the past, extensive dream sequences where he works through past cases as mirrors for present ones makes perfect sense and draws very cleverly on canon. However, I think his spotting of patterns goes deeper than that. Sherlock Holmes has been repressed since the publication of A Study in Scarlet, through countless adaptations in literature and film. Plenty of these adaptations as well as the original stories are referenced in the EMP, not least by going back to 1895, the year that symbolises the era in which most of these adaptations are set. (If you don’t already know it, check out the poem 221B by Vincent Starrett, one of the myriad of reasons why the year 1895 is so significant.) My feeling is that these adaptations, which have layered on top of each other in the public consciousness to cement the image of Sherlock Holmes the deductive machine [which he’s not, sorry Conan Doyle estate] come to symbolise the 100+ years of repression that Sherlock himself has to fight through to come out of the EMP as his queer self.

This is one of the reasons that the year 1895 is so important; it was the year of Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment for gross indecency, and this is clearly a preoccupation of Sherlock’s consciousness in TFP with its constant Wilde references, suggesting that his MP’s choice of 1895 wasn’t coincidental. Much was made during TAB setlock of a newspaper that said ‘Heimish The Ideal Husband’, Hamish being John’s middle name and An Ideal Husband being one of Wilde’s plays. But the Vincent Starrett poem, although nostalgic and ostensibly lovely, for tjlcers and it seems for Sherlock himself symbolises something much more troubling. Do search up the full poem, but for now let’s look at the final couplet.

Here, though the world explode, these two survive

And it is always 1895

‘Though the world explode’ is a reference to WW1, which is coming in the final Sherlock Holmes story, and which is symbolised by Eurus – in other chapters, I explain why Eurus and WW1 are united under the concept of ‘winds of change’ in this show. Sherlock and John survive the winds of change – except they don’t move with them. Instead, they stay stuck in 1895, the year of ultimate repression. 2014!Sherlock going back in his head to 1895 and repeating how he met John suggests exactly that, that nothing has changed but the superficial, and that emotionally, he is still stuck in 1895.

Others have pulled out similar references to Holmes adaptations he has to push through in TAB – look at the way he talks in sign language to Wilder, which can only be a reference to Billy Wilder, director of TPLoSH, the only queer Holmes film, and a film which was forced to speak through coding because of the Conan Doyle estate. That film is also referenced by Eurus giving Sherlock a Stradivarius, which is a gift given to him in TPLoSH in exchange for feigning heterosexuality. Eurus is coded as Sherlock’s repression, and citing a repressive moment in a queer film as her first action when she meets Sherlock is another engagement by Sherlock’s psyche with his own cinematic history. My favourite metatextual moment of this nature, however, is the final scene of TFP which sees John and Sherlock running out of a building called Rathbone Place.

Basil Rathbone is one of the most iconic Sherlock Holmes actors on film, and Benedict’s costume in TAB and in particular the big overcoat look are very reminiscent of Rathbone.

Others have discussed (X) how the Victorian costume and the continued use of the deerstalker in the present day are images of Sherlock’s public façade and exclusion of queerness from his identity. It’s true that pretty much every Holmes adaptation has used the deerstalker, but the strong Rathbone vibes that come from Ben’s TAB costume ties the 1895 vibe very strongly into Rathbone. To have the final scene – and hopefully exit from the EMP – tie in with Sherlock and John running out of Rathbone Place tells us that, just as Sherlock cast off the deerstalker at the end of TAB (!), he has also cast off the iconic filmic Holmes persona which has never been true to his actual identity.

Waterfall scene

The symbol of water runs through TAB as well as s4 – others have written fantastic meta on why water represents Sherlock’s subconscious (X), but I want to give a brief outline. It first appears with the word ‘deeper’ which keeps reappearing, which then reaches a climax in the waterfall scene. The idea that Sherlock could drown in the waters of his mind is something that Moriarty explicitly references, suggesting that Sherlock could be ‘buried in his own Mind Palace’. The ‘deep waters’ line keeps repeating through series 4, and I just want to give the notorious promo photo from s4 which confirms the significance of the motif.

This is purely symbolic – it never happens in the show. Water increases in significance throughout – think of Sherlock thinking he’s going mad in his mind as he is suspended over the Thames, or the utterly nonsensical placement of Sherrinford in the middle of the ocean – the deepest waters of Sherlock’s mind. Much like the repetition of cases hinting that EMP continues, the use of water is something that appears in the MP, and it sticks around from TAB onwards, a real sign that we’re going deeper and deeper. I talk about this more in the bit on TFP, but the good news is that Sherrinford is the most remote place they could find in the ocean – that’s the deepest we’re going. After that, we’re coming out (of the mind).

Shortly after TAB aired, I wrote a meta about the waterfall scene, some of which I now disagree with, but the core framework still stands – it did not, of course, bank on EMP theory. You can find it here (X), but I want to reiterate the basic framework, because it still makes a lot of sense. Jim represents the fear of John’s suicide, and Jim can only be defeated by Sherlock and John together, not one alone – and crucially, calling each other by first names, which would have been very intimate in the Victorian era. After Jim is “killed”, we have Sherlock’s fall. The concept of a fall (as in IOU a fall) has long been linked with falling in love in tjlc. Sherlock tells John that it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, something that Jim has been suggesting to him for a while. What is the landing, then? Well, Sherlock Holmes fell in love back in the Victorian era, symbolised by the ultra repressive 1895, and that’s where he jumps from – but he lands in the 21st century. Falling in love won’t kill him in the modern day. What I missed that time around, of course, was that despite breaking through the initial Victorian layers of repression, he still dives into more water, and when the plane lands, it still lands in his MP, just in a mental state where the punishment his psyche deals him for homosexuality is less severe. This also sets up s4 as specifically dealing with the problem of the fall – Sherlock jumps to the 21st century specifically to deal with the consequences of his romantic and sexual feelings. There’s a parallel here with Mofftiss time jumping; back when they made A Study in Twink in 2009, there was a reason they made the time jump. Having Sherlock’s psyche have that touch of self-awareness helps to illustrate why they made a similar jump, also dealing with the weight of previous adaptations.

Women

I preface this by saying how incredibly uncomfortable I find the positioning of women as the KKK in TAB. It’s a parallel which is unforgivable; frankly, invoking the KKK without interrogating the whiteness of the show or even mentioning race is unacceptable. Steven Moffat’s ability to write women has consistently been proven to be nil, but this is a new low. However, the presence of women in TAB is vital, so on we go.

TAB specifically deals with the question of those excluded from a Victorian narrative. This is specifically tied into to those who are excluded from the stories, such as Jane and Mrs. Hudson. Mrs. Hudson’s complaint is in the same scene as John telling her and Sherlock to blame the problems on the illustrator. This ties back to the deerstalker metaphor which is so prevalent in this episode; something that’s not in the stories at all, but a façade by which Holmes is universally recognised and which as previously referenced masks his queerness. Women, then, are not the only people being excluded from the narrative. When Mycroft tells us that the women have to win, he’s also talking about queer people. This is a war that we must lose.

I don’t think the importance of Molly in particular here has been mentioned before, but forgive me if I’m retreading old ground. However, Molly always has importance in Sherlock as a John mirror, and just because she is dressed as a man here doesn’t mean we should disregard this. If anything, her ridiculous moustache is as silly as John’s here! Molly, although really a member of the resistance, is able to pass in the world she moves in in 1895, but only by masking her own identity. This is exactly what happens to John in the Victorian era – as a bisexual man married to a woman, he is able to pass, but it is not his true identity. More than that, Molly is a member of the resistance, suggesting not just that John is queer but that he’s aware of it and actively looking for it to change.

I know I was joking about Molly and John’s moustaches, but putting such a silly moustache on Molly links to the silliness of John’s moustaches, which only appear when he’s engaged to a woman and in the Victorian era. He has also grown the moustache just so the illustrator will recognise him, and Molly has grown her moustache so that she will be recognised as a man. In this case, Molly is here to demonstrate the fact that John is passing, but only ever passing. Furthermore, Molly, who is normally the kindest person in the whole show, is bitter and angry throughout TAB – it’s not difficult to see then how hiding one’s identity can affect one’s mental health. I really do think that John is a lot more abrasive in TAB than he is in the rest of the show, but that’s not the whole story. Showing how repression can completely impair one’s personality also points to the suicidal impulses that are lurking just out of sight throughout TAB – this is what Sherlock is terrified of, and again his brain is warning him just what it is that is causing John this much pain and uncharacteristic distress.

This is just about the loosest sketch of TAB that could exist! But TAB meta has been so extensive that going over it seems futile, or else too grand a project within a short chapter. Certain theories are still formulating, and may appear at a later date! But what this chapter (I hope) has achieved has set up the patterns that we’re going to see play out in s4 – between the metatextuality, the waters of the mind and the role of Moriarty in the psyche, we can use TAB as a key with which to read s4. I like to think of it as a gift from Mofftiss, knowing just how cryptic s4 would be – and these are the basic clues with which to solve it.

That’s it for TAB, at least in this series – next up we’re going ever deeper, to find out exactly who is Eurus. See you then?

[2ndblogg]

Hey! Just read your hot take on novel!wangxian and I absolutely agree. I'm gonna have to say here that I believe it boils down to the fetishization of homosexual men in a lot of the fandom culture that surrounds mlm shipping, as you said it's a space for a lot of women to experiment with their desires and whatnot, but I think therein lies the breaking points between reading novel!wangxian as a good, healthy relationship vs. reading it as a very flawed and toxic one. As an LGBT person, reading the way the author dealt with their relationship made me extremely uncomfortable, it just really feels like something that is written by someone who is more invested in using her queer characters for satisfying her and her reader's own pleasure than a well-built, strong relationship between two characters. Not to take away from the novel in some other aspects, I believe that novel!wwx is a much better, much more nuanced character than what he is in cql, but when it comes to wangxian, I think the intentions are very different for each of them. To each their own, I guess, but I do find it very troubling that some people in the fandom have a really hard time admitting that novel wangxian is not even remotely healthy.

Absolutely.

And can I just say how glad it makes me to see that not everyone is praising this book for it’s lgbt representation...

But I guess that’s also why I just occasionally feel the need to scream my frustrations into the void or try to make sense of the novel.

And why I try to be understanding and accepting of people’s opinion of the novel and not take it ‘personally’ (in the sense of sitting there thinking “holy shit this is how they view ME, this is what they think of ME” etc).

I was in fandoms back when they were really a place dominated by straight (homophobic) women and realism or lgbt representation wasn’t on anyone’s mind (and the occasional dude butting in to say that’s not how sex works or bottoming is experienced was ignored or told to get out). I experienced this change to fandoms being more of a lgbt space, of people becoming aware that media can shape your views of groups of people, of people becoming aware of their fetishizing of fictional gays vs. their prejudice against real life lgbt people etc.

And tbh MXTX just writes like one of those, she writes wangxian like everyone wrote their gay relationships around 2005 and earlier; clear power imbalance, clear roles and attributes that are divided into ‘manly’ and ‘feminine’, certain physical attributes (like the female self insert character aka the bottom being pretty and slight and weaker and shorter), men/the penetrating partner can’t really be raped so anything the woman/bottom tries isn’t really ‘bad’, the male love interest is forceful and self centered but ONLY because he’s so in love and since he’s emotionally stunted he has to express that through sex, men/tops NEED sex and it’s rude/mean to deny them that, the girl/bottom isn’t THAT horny or in charge of their own sexuality but wants to please their partner and what they really get out of it is the emotional aspect, decisions need to be made for them because the dude/top just knows better, the girl/bottom is childish and flirty and the guy/top suffers through it until he finally snaps and shows the girl/bottom who'sboss etc etc. (honestly homophobia and misogyny is so tightly knit in this kind of fiction, if it wasn’t so frustrating it would be very interesting).

Tbh I disagree with novel!wwx being more nuanced (despite a lot of ppl whose opinions I really respect also feeling this way), because I simply cannot seperate him from the wangxian relationship. All I see are tropes and stereotypes applied to make him ‘work’ in the context of the wangxian relationship instead of an actual personality...

To me, in CQL WWX is clearly the main character and you love his interactions with LWJ and want more of them and value them, wheras in the novel most of the time WWX plays second fiddle even when a scene should technically be about him and LWJ’s presence is incredibly suffocating, because he’s always being controlling or at the very least influencing WWX.

I also don’t feel like WWX has much of a character arc/growth. We’re essentially told he had one but the only thing that really actually changes is him hating himself a bit more and letting LWJ smash..., and I guess: he’s less independent than ever, he’s more isolated that ever...

I’ve called novel!wangxian a relationship between an abuser and his victim, because you can find evidence of that in the text. Not because I think the author wanted to portray an unhealthy gay relationship. Like you said, she was fetishizing and wrote for a similar crowd. But to me that ‘realization’ helped...I still don’t see how people can call it a masterpiece but I can at least understand hyping something you like up...

And like, badly written gay relationship or not; gay/straight,man/women, I see how people can find it hot. Exploring your sexuality through fictional characters isn’t necessarily a strictly straight girl phenomena. I probably have read fic that was exactly like this, I can’t judge anyone for it. But no one prints out the last PWP they read and goes, “this is ideal lgbt representation and nothing will ever be this good, the fact that it includes rape makes it so realistic” like????

(Is that part or an effect of the woke and purety culture? you can’t say ‘i like this book but it has flaws’ or ‘i’ve enjoyed this but it’s not up the feminism or lgbt acceptance that i preach/live’ so you have to pretend it’s flawless?)

And like, I do think novel!wangxian is a nightmare when it comes to lgbt representation and I do believe this is largely due to a cishet woman writing about gay men and fetishizing them (the fact that a lot of peoples arguments why novel!wangxian ‘is better’ boils down to ‘there’s kissing and sex’ is also pretty telling). And I am frightend and worried by some peoples response to it.

But is it really fair to see it as just that? It’s a problem sure, but that same thing happens in straight media (which I am admittedly not well versed in). Stephanie Meyer didn’t set out to write Edward Cullen to be a creep and non of the teenage girls that went crazy over him viewed it as such...Reylo fans (aside from some of them proclaiming Finn to be the real villain and saying it’s racist and misogynistic to not find Kylo Ren hot) found a way to view him threatening her as romantic and sexy, Loki fans that didn’t ship him with Thor usually fell into the camp of “he would be a perfect boyfriend” or “what if this OFC was his slave and he raped her everyday <3″... like ignoring/glorifying/romanticizing behaviours or exploring what kinks you might have through the safety of fictional characters and fictional settings isn’t JUST happening when it comes to ‘the gays’...

And not just specifically in fandom spaces either, a lot of ‘romantic’ movies include inappropriate touching, the boy/guy knowing better than the girl what she wants etc. And I absolutely do believe that that’s something that normalized these things for a lot of young girls and guys (I don’t want to get into this too much, I’ve really seen a change in the past few years, but before that it was pretty common for young boys to believe they need to keep pursuing and pressuring a girl that has said no, girls truly thought boys could die of blue balls, girls thought it was their duty as good girlfriends to let their boyfriends fuck them even when they weren’t in the mood, that they couldn’t talk about what they want in bed or what they don’t find enjoyable because ‘sex is for boys and girls get a relationship in exchange’ etc.).

And in much the same way movies have only relatively recently begun being called out for that, it’s also still pretty recently that they’re being called out for having their one queer coded character be a pedophile and a murder or whatever...Like, society as a whole becoming aware of these issues.

But do authors that publish their work with a specific target audience in mind have a responsibility to think about the effect it might have on them? (And I can already hear loud screams of ‘no way, it’s not your fault if your audience isn’t smart enough to understand that this bad thing is bad’, but I actually do believe in a way they do. That doesn’t mean you can’t or shouldn’t write whatever you want, just maybe take a look at HOW you bring your point across. (We do KNOW people are influenced by what propaganda they’re consistantly fed. I mean, you wouldn’t write a pro-drugs childrens book...) )

What if the author isn’t aware of their bias and prejudices? Or their target audience isn’t their actual audience?

And do we, society and media, judge female and male authors differently when it comes to romance and sex in fiction? (The answer is yes btw) But also, where do we draw the line at calling something ‘badly written’ and calling it toxic? Can it be both? As I’ve said before, a lot of people claim that only the physical intimacy scenes of novel!wangxian are bad, because they’re badly written and OOC, some say the book as amazingly written and only the wangxian relationship is bad because the author doesn’t know how to write gay men. In my ‘hot take’ I essentially said that’s not necessarily bad writing so much as it’s simply an (okay, unintentional) toxic relationship. And would this relationship still come across as toxic (or badly written, whichever you want) if we didn’t know the author to be a cishet woman? Or if a gay man had written it? (my personal, eloquent answer for this is: yes, but differently.)

Which was really all just a rambly way to get to my point of: it’s not just fetishizing of gay men, it’s also the homophobia and self-inserting in a safe situation.

You can literally replace WWX in the novel with a female character and it wouldn’t change a thing. The author takes such an effort into building up this power imbalance in every aspect of their life that if WWX were a heroine nothing would change in this (sexist/ancient society) setting.

(And clearly this is something that appeals to people if you look at the amount of female!WWX fics...)

Not even the sex scenes. There are maybe two allusions in all of them combined that WWX might also have a dick but like, you can’t be sure and it sure as hell doesn’t need stimulation.

(and again, that could be written as a kink...but it’s just not.)

CQL is a gay love story. MDZS at it’s core is none of that.

But I also very much agree with your ‘to each their own’, like here I am criticizing and trying to find explanations and whatever, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter why someone might like (or write) a book like this, I vastly prefer CQL!wangxian but people have their own reasons for not doing so.

The ‘problem’ really only lies in, as you said, people not being able to accept that it’s not a healthy relationship. Or claiming it to be perfect lgbt rep.

And because my brain can’t shut up today:

I also can’t stop thinking that the way some people ‘glorify’ the book as due to their age and ‘inexperience’.

When I was a pretty young kid and got into fanfiction, there was nothing but completely OOC!whump to be found in the first two fandoms I was in. And I loved it. It was YEARS later that I thought I might like to read something with the characters being...in character. What I’m trying to say, in different stages and phases of your life you might enjoy different things, for different reasons...and obviously, in that moment, you won’t think about ‘what appeals to me here/should this appeal to me/etc’.

I don’t mean inexperience as ‘sexual inexperience’ here, though of course that could be part of it, but also like, inexperience with this genre (is this the first book like this you read, or did you just read 50 in a row that all had the same unhealthy vibes?), with lgbt people and issues (do you know any lgbt people or is your only image of them either the cute boy you can’t have and don’t want to see with another girl or grown men in full kink gear in front of children during CSD? and also: do you think ‘i like this’ and that’s the end of it or do you notice how many people idolize this objectively unhealthy relationship and won’t allow critique on it...)  

I...just wanted to say thanks really.

I just can’t stop rambling apparently and I know I mostly just repeated what you said or what I already said but in longer... I just really do feel very strongly about novel!wangxian and the perception of them and have actually at times felt very personally...worried/affected, by people’s acceptance and love of them and I just... have to try and make sense of it...

[neversidefaerie]

Some light on the situation with Joye...

Who is Joye? She's a girl who has Lyme's Disease and Bipolar Disorder, the latter of which caused her to act abusively towards others in the past, but she has since reformed. She feels a strong connection with the character of Shadow Weaver in She Ra and is a big supporter of the idea of SW getting a redemption arc. She has strongly rejected the widely held notion that Shadow Weaver abused Micah and has found much evidence to suggest that instead they had a healthy friendship. She has also criticised many people who made the assumption that Shadow Weaver had no trauma to cause her to become abusive, drawing attention to how Shadow Weaver's most dangerous spell going wrong affected her mentally and physically. She is also an Entrapdak shipper, much like myself, and very active in the She Ra villain fandom.

She is a strong Christian, but is heavily critical of many beliefs and attitudes found in conservative Christian culture. I personally found her to be a very tolerant, non-judgemental and open-minded person, who never resorted to bullying when arguing her points about either faith or fandoms.

With these things in mind, I will now go into the controversy that caused her account to be deactivated (I am uncertain if this was an action of her own doing or if the staff suspended her).

Being a great advocate for a Shadow Weaver redemption arc, at some point she made a friend who also supported the idea. This friend had created a lesbian love interest OC for Shadow Weaver. I'm not exactly certain what happened, but at some point I believe that this friend asked Joye to draw her OCs in a romantic context. Joye didn't want to draw this and somehow this led to the friend concluding, due to her Christian beliefs, that she was "homophobic".

Another problem arose from one of Joye's ships: Shadow Weaver and King Micah. Joye believed it was only appropriate to see their relationship as romantic if Micah remained widowed and was well over the age of consent. I still personally never liked this ship, but I appreciated her efforts to provide circumstances for it that she thought were justifiable. Eventually, however, she stopped shipping them altogether.

As someone who previously supported a problematic ship (Lydia and Beetlejuice) but had decided after a while it was better just to see them as friends, I have undergone this journey myself. I remember how repulsed I was when I saw artwork depicting Lydia as a minor kissing BJ - I thought the relationship was only appropriate if Lydia was well over eighteen. Likewise, Joye had disapproved of people shipping underage Micah with Light Spinner.

The ex friend began accusing Joye at some point of supporting a paedophilic ship, even though Joye had only supported the ship in a more appropriate context and later disavowed it altogether.

The third controversy stems from a conversation on a post somewhere, which is regarding a scene in which Shadow Weaver is sick and suffering and Catra acts apathetic towards her condition. From what I can gather, the ex friend thought Catra's behaviour was justified because of SW's abuse, but it upset Joye, because she has a chronic illness and didn't like seeing Catra (or anyone) mistreat a sick person for any reason. The ex friend thought that Joye was saying that Catra was being abusive towards Shadow Weaver and took offence to this.

I befriended Joye after she placed a supportive comment on an Entrapdak post of mine, in which I detailed a discussion I'd had with a delusional anti-Entrapdak who was convinced that Entrapta had been made to look underage as a form of fetishism. I soon went onto Joye's blog, where I struck up more conversations with her and we quickly became friends.

After her ex-friend started spreading information about the three preceding controversies, it caused Joye a lot of stress, especially since the ex-friend is very angry and spiteful towards her. Joye once said to me that the irony was not lost on her of the fact that this ex-friend was willing to advocate for war criminals to receive redemption arcs, yet believed someone guilty of alleged homophobia was unforgivable and deserved no respect.

I firmly believe it's never acceptable to harass or mistreat others, no matter how wrong their viewpoints are. It just causes the said person to think that the fact they're being attacked means that they must be doing something right. Also, I firmly believe it can make you a worse person than the person being attacked.

I also testify that Joye is not a homophobe. She did not express any hostility towards LGBT people and even openly condemned violence and persecution towards queer individuals. Perhaps your mileage may vary on what constitutes a homophobe these days, but I honestly do not think she qualifies.

Ultimately though, you can believe whoever you want to believe. I am just saying what I think is true, deduced from my interactions with Joye and my perusal of the ex-friend's blog. I can take pictures of my conversations with her if anyone needs proof of what I'm saying.

If the ex-friend or any of her supporters see this post, I want them to know this: I don't want a fight. And neither does Joye. Virtually everyone's mentally ill or mentally disabled here on Tumblr, and I can safely say that most bloggers don't want the added stress of getting involved in a big argument, which may be why Joye is currently offline.

There's enough problems with harassment in the Entrapdak community without there being in-fighting amongst the fans of She Ra villains. Joye is a good friend and I want her back on this site. I would also like her ex-friend to reconcile with her, but I don't know how possible that is.

Anyone who is a friend of Joye or thinks I'm telling the truth, please use the hashtag "#we support joye"

Thank you for reading!

[erinptah]

Super Drags review (tl;dr Show Good)

The post where I do my best to spread the Good News, that there exists a saucy gay drag-queen magical-girl animated comedy and everyone should watch it.

Okay, not everyone -- I'll give some caveats at the end -- but definitely a heck of a lot more people than Netflix has bothered to advertise it to.

Look at this! Why did nobody tell me about this??

What is Super Drags?

Fast facts:

It's a 1-season, 5-episode adult animated comedy series, released in November 2018

Here's the official page, with a free-to-view trailer

It packs more explicit, unashamed queerness into those 5 episodes than any other cartoon I can think of

The only possible competitor would be if you took the whole 5000-episode run of Steven Universe and pared it down to a supercut of Just The Gay Parts

This in spite of being produced in Brazil, which (in my broad understanding, as a total non-authority on the subject) is more oppressively, dangerously homophobic than the US

The original is in Portuguese

There is an English dub, fabulously voiced by contestants from RuPaul's Drag Race

It's wrapped in "for adults only!" warnings, not because the content is any less child-friendly than (say) your Bojacks Horsemen or your Ricks and Mortys, but because Brazilian authorities tried to get it shut down on the grounds of this much gay being Harmful For Children

It was (heartbreakingly) not renewed for a second season

Here's a promo video, in which the main characters (Portuguese, with subtitles) play Drag Race judges for Shangela, who ends up voicing Scarlet in English.

And here's a beautiful flashy music video of the big musical number! (Also Portuguese, no subtitles, but the melody and the visuals stand on their own.)

Plot and worldbuilding stuff!

The elevator pitch is "What if Charlie's Angels, but also drag queens, with superpowers, because magical-girl transformations?"

In this universe, all LGBTQ people have magical energy. The Big Bad is an evil magical-drag-queen nemesis who tries to drain our energy for her own purposes. It's like if Ursula from The Little Mermaid was a first-season Sailor Moon villain.

...sidenote, in case you were worried, the representation isn't "cis gay men and nobody else." There's a butch lesbian in the recurring cast, a genderfluid person (in that specific word!) as a one-off love interest, and all the ensemble scenes are wonderful collages of different races, body types, and gender presentations.

Our heroes also fight non-magical everyday homophobes, who get written with scathing realism.

The moment I knew the show wasn't pulling any punches was in the first episode, where a newscaster complains about being Silenced by the Law of Political Correctness, then chirps "however, we have a special guest who is thankfully above the law!"

According to the reviews I've found from Brazilian viewers, it's also pitch-perfect when it comes to local queer culture, community dynamics, slang and speech patterns, even memes. All of which flies right over my head, so here's a post (with no-context spoilers) about one viewer's favorite details.

The handful of reaction posts on Tumblr have a dramatic split between "Brazilian viewers fiercely defending the show as culturally-accurate, uplifting, and brave in a terrifying political moment" and "American viewers complaining that the show is problematic because it's a comedy about drag queens with no perfect role models and lots of sex jokes."

As the Super Drags tell their nemesis (and this is also in the first episode): "How dare you try to turn the LGBTQXYZ community against each other? We do enough of that on our own!"

In between missions, our girls work sitcom retail jobs and deal with other everyday problems. All of which are written in amazingly nuanced and thoughtful ways for a show that also features "defeating an orgy monster with a lip-sync battle."

Detailed character stuff!

Our heroes are Color Coded For Your Convenience!

The Super Drags themselves go by "she" in-uniform, and a lot of the time when out of it. Like the Sailor Starlights, only more so. I'll roll with that.

In blue: Safira Cyan, or Ralph by day, an excitable college-age kid who's built like a football player and squees like a fangirl. (She's an anime fan in the original, and for some reason all the otaku references were replaced in the dub, but you can see them in the subtitles.)

Ralph lives with her younger sister (they play video games together!) and their dad, comes out to them mid-series, and is very shippable with another young guy who starts out reciting the homophobic beliefs he was raised with but whose heart clearly isn't in it.

Safira's weapon is a classic magical-girl wand that casts protective force-fields. Which are shaped like condoms. Because of course.

In yellow: Lemon Chiffon, aka Patrick, the oldest of the group and generally the smartest/most strategic. In most cases, the other two treat her as the de facto team leader -- unless she pushes it too far.

By day she's a single guy with thick thighs and thinning hair, who has some body-image insecurities on the dating scene. And this show has Things To Say about unrealistic beauty standards within the community...not to mention, about masc guys who look down on anyone too flaming or femme because straight people disapprove.

Lemon's weapon is a fluffy boa that can be used as a whip or a lasso, especially when there's a bondage joke to be made.

In red: Scarlet Carmesim, also Donizete, the loudest and most aggressive teammate with the most cutting insults, who refuses to suppress that attitude in an attempt to appease racists. (But will give it a shot when trying not to get fired.)

Donny still lives in her religious/homophobic mom's apartment, and I'm pretty sure it's because neither of them can afford to move out. Her rock-solid sense of fierce self-confidence is the reason it doesn't bring her down.

Scarlet's weapon is a fan that she uses to throw shade. Yeah, you knew that was coming.

The Charlie to these angels is Champagne, who runs operations from a cool magitech compound and breaks the fourth wall at the end to petition for viewers' support in getting a second season.

...we let her down, folks :(

So here's a thing. The show never draws a sharp line between "people who become drag queens because it's a way they're driven to express themselves as gay men" and "people who become drag queens because they were trans women all along." That's consistent with how South American LGBT+ culture works. (Again: best of my knowledge, not personally an authority on this, etc etc.)

Many of the characters, including Champagne, never describe themselves in ways that translate to one of our sharply-defined Anglo-USian identity categories. And I'm not going to try to impose any English labels on them here.

But I can say (in contrast to Safira, Lemon, and Scarlet), Champagne never switches out of her "drag" name/voice/presentation, not even in the most candid off-duty scenes, and still has the same bustline when naked in the tub. Make of that what you will.

You Should Watch This Show

If you have a Netflix subscription, watch Super Drags!

If you ever do a Netflix free trial month in the future, make a note to yourself to watch Super Drags!

It's one of their original productions, so there's no risk of missing your chance because the license expired. But it's absolutely not getting the promotion it deserves. Which means potentially interested viewers won't find it, which means Netflix will think there's no interest, which means they'll keep not promoting it...etc etc etc.

No idea if there's any chance of getting it un-canceled, but maybe we can at least convince them to release it on DVD.

And the sheer gutsiness it took for a group of Brazilian creators to produce this show in the first place -- that deserves to be rewarded with your attention.

In spite of various anti-discrimination laws that sound good on paper, the country has serious problems with homophobia, transphobia, and anti-LGBT violence (warning, article has a violent image which is only partly blurred).

Maybe the creators could've gotten a second season if they made this one softer, less sexually-explicit, more restrained...but honestly? I bet that wouldn't have helped.

Consider Danger & Eggs, an Amazon original cartoon. It was made in the US, thoroughly child-friendly, and restricts its LGBT+ representation to things like "characters go to a Pride celebration...where nobody ever names or describes the quality they're proud of."

And it didn't get renewed past the first season either.

(Note: it had a trans woman showrunner and a queer-heavy creative staff, so I blame all that restraint on executive meddling, not the creators themselves. The showrunner even liked the tweet of my review that complains about it.)

So there's something very satisfying about how Super Drags went all-out, balls-to-the-wall (sometimes literally), all the rep explicit and unapologetic, packing every 25-minute episode with all kinds of queer content that would be censored or muted elsewhere -- but here it's exaggerated and celebrated and just keeps coming.

(...as do jokes like that, and I'm not sorry.)

Okay, there are a few legitimate reasons to not watch this show

Some caveats.

None of these things are Objectively Bad Problems that the show itself should be shamed for...but maybe they're genuinely not your cup of tea.

It does have actual Adult Content beyond "the existence of gay people." This show loves to swing barely-clothed cartoon genitalia in your face. There is, as mentioned, an orgy monster. If that kind of humor is going to bother you too much to appreciate the rest of the show, give it a pass.

I wasn't kidding about how realistic the homophobes are. Opening of the first episode has a guy trying to murder a busload of people while shouting slurs at them. If that level of hatred on-screen is gonna crush your soul, even in a show about sparkly queens flying to the rescue with dick-shaped magical weapons, don't push yourself.

Any fiction with this much crossdressing and gender-transgressing is going to hit some trans viewers in a bad way. Because trans people are such a broad group, with so many different experiences, that Every Possible Trope Involved pushes somebody's buttons. (See also: "some trans readers complain about a storyline that turns out to be drawn from a trans writer's actual life experience".) If this show goes does gender things that turn out to be personally distressing for you...or even just distressing for this specific time in your life...don't feel obligated to keep watching.

It has aggressively-sassy queer characters making jokes and calling each other things that are affectionate in-context, but would not be okay coming from straight/cis people. If you can't wrap your head around that, go watch something else.

Other Than That, Go Watch This Show

For all its big heart, big ambitions, and big gay energy, Super Drags is tiny enough that I've binged the whole show 2 times in the past 2 weeks. Thankfully, it's highly re-watchable -- lots of fun background gags and subtle foreshadowing that you don't catch on the first round.

(Pausing one last time to appreciate that a show with elements like "the high-tech robot assistant is called D.I.L.D.O." can be subtle at all, let alone be this good at it.)

I've also paged through all the fanart on Tumblr and Deviantart, looked up the single fanfic on the AO3, and started brainstorming plans to request it in Yuletide next year. Someone, please, come join me in (the English-language side of) the itty-bitty fandom for this ridiculous, glittery, over-the-top, fabulous series.

[ettadunham]

A Buffy rewatch 7x13 The Killer in Me

aka i just want willow to be happy

We did it, guys! We made it to the last season! Also, hello if you’re new, and stumbled upon this without context. As usual, these impromptu text posts are the product of my fevered mind as I rant about the episode I just watched for an hour (okay, sometimes perhaps two). Anything goes!

And I have a lot of complicated feelings about today’s episode.

Killer in Me follows in the footsteps of Potential, taking a break from the Big Bad to focus more on some of our characters. It just does it with a somewhat more questionable execution.

And by questionable, I mean that I’m not actually sure how I feel about all of it. There’s a lot that I like here, and with the ending scene especially, I found that, overall, it worked.

You got me, show. I want Willow to be happy.

I earlier criticized Kennedy for being an under-developed love interest for Willow in the show’s last season (as opposed to Willow/Anya that was… right there, you guys, it was right there!!), but I can’t even pretend to be mad anymore. Ultimately, that’s not the point. Kennedy’s not the point. Willow not feeling constantly miserable for the rest of her life is.

And while the doomed relationships thing is basically a theme here, I think at this point the writers also became somewhat aware of the implications of having their one (canon) queer main character end the show on that note? I mean, it was 2003, we were still getting used to not connecting to the internet through dial-up, so there wasn’t as much uproar as you’d might expect today upon Tara’s death. But it still had an impact. This sort of meta acknowledgement would also coincide with having Rona earlier in the season comment upon how black women die first in movies – a trope that the show’s been obviously guilty of as well.

Not to mention that Kennedy was written with an effort to have her be more steeped in queer culture – something that the writers never really explored with Willow, and use Kennedy here to comment upon. But we’re also just talking about Willow’s experience and relationship to her sexuality in general, which is so nice???

Maybe if we’ve done this more and earlier, we wouldn’t have The Discourse in the first place…

I like the simplicity of it all too of what Willow says. She fell in love with Tara. That was it.

What makes the show strong, even when it might not be familiar with certain experiences, is that it knows its characters. That’s what they build upon with their themes too, and it’s what makes these stories work, regardless of anything else. So I like to think of this scene as a follow up on that, that also briefly ties into a greater context.

The part where Willow talks about her mom’s reaction to her coming out is also interesting, and something we’ve never discussed on the show before.

WILLOW:  “My mom was all proud like I was making some political statement. Then the statement mojo wore off and I was just gay. She hardly ever even met Tara.”

This isn’t all that surprising if one remembers Gingerbread though – Willow’s mom couldn’t even recall Buffy’s name. In season 3. So, of course she wouldn’t bother to get to know her daughter’s girlfriend of three years either.

Willow says that she didn’t mind though, saying that her and Tara were “private”. Which in a way is a callback to season 4, when Willow kept Tara and her relationship with her hidden from the Scoobies for months, saying that she wanted something that was only hers.

(“I am, you know.” “What?” “Yours.”)

But Willow eventually introduced Tara to her friends, and the latter became an integral part of their group. And yet when it came to her mom, she felt more comfortable with keeping these things separate.

…Or maybe it’s just that she felt distant from her mom in general, who never even tried to understand or connect with her.

In any case, Willow and Kennedy’s date ends up being surprisingly sweet. Especially when you consider that Kennedy essentially tricked Willow into the whole thing…

Anyway.

Let’s talk about Willow turning into Warren.

I think I already mentioned that there’s this possible interpretation of the Trio as a darker reflection of Willow in season 6, without getting too much into it.

I guess we’ll have to get into it now.

Let’s go back to the early seasons and Restless. What does Willow feel like her defining characteristic is at that time? What’s her greatest fear in college? How does she see herself even as late as season 6?

WILLOW:  “Let me tell you something about Willow. She's a loser. And she always has been. People picked on Willow in junior high school, high school, up until college. With her stupid mousy ways. And now? Willow's a junkie.”

Willow started out the show as a lonely nerd, who was motivated by wanting to be special and loved. Her and Warren were never the same, because Warren never had the self-awareness to temper his entitlement, but you can track some of the same patterns through both of them, coming from a similar place of insecurity. Like their need for control and power, and the lengths they’d go to maintain that.

And I think Willow had the self-awareness to recognize that. After all, that kind of ability of self-examination is one of the things that distances her from Warren in the first place. No wonder then that her subconscious chose this form of punishment for her upon Amy’s hex then.

The part that initially felt more clunky to me about this, was the misogynistic language. That was what signaled to us the fact that Willow wasn’t just simply appearing in Warren’s form, but was becoming him. And it felt decidedly extreme and non-Willow-y, and messed with the nuance of it all.

…Until I remembered the kind of language Willow would use in the earlier seasons to describe characters like Cordelia or Faith. It stuck out to me then as well, and in a sense, this detail now can be interpreted as a commentary on that, and Willow’s internalized misogyny.

But the crux of it all, the emotional gut-punch, ends up being about a whole different kind of connection that Willow feels to Warren.

Killing Tara.

WILLOW:  “No, she was never gone. She was with me. We should have been forever, and I let her be dead. She's really dead. And I killed her.”

Let 👏 Willow 👏 be 👏 happy 👏

See? There’s a lot of juicy stuff here to talk about and I love that. Not to mention that we finally embrace Amy as an Ethan Rayne-type of chaotic neutral villain foil to Willow, and it’s so good! So very good!

AMY:  “This is not about hate. It's about power. Willow always had all the power, long before she even knew what to do with it. Just came so easy for her. The rest of us, we had to work twice as hard to be half as good. But no one cares about how hard you work. They just care about cute, sweet Willow. They don't know how weak she is. She gave in to evil, stuff worse than I can even imagine. She almost destroyed the world! And yet everyone keeps on loving her? So what's wrong with having a little fun, huh? Taking her down a peg or two?”

It’s delicious. Even more delicious than the brownies Amy and Willow would bond over during Junior High.

On a less fun note, a lot of characters’ reaction to the idea that Willow would now be a boy is a bit… troubling. I’m not talking about the Scoobies here, who are mostly freaked out by the fact that it’s Warren, but things like the Wicca group’s reaction for instance. Like, they aren’t even reacting to the story of how Willow was hexed yet, they’re just being weird about the idea itself that someone they knew as a girl is now a boy. As if that was out of the realm of possibilities.

Meanwhile in one of our other side-stories, Spike’s chip is malfunctioning, so he and Buffy are trying to contact the Initiative to ask for their help (Sarah Michelle Gellar also lost her voice at some point it seems), and the rest of the gang think that Giles might be dead and the First, so they go on a road trip to investigate.

Overall, there’s plenty of flaws to be found with this episode. The themes of Willow turning into Warren don’t actually get fully explored, and scenes like Willow buying the gun are just super weird for it. Ideas like the fairytale kiss are just clunky. And yet, The Killer in Me also got to me, and provided me with tons of stuff to dissect.

So, much like with the Willow/Kennedy relationship, I can’t be too mad about it.

[latetotherant]

“Are you rich?” Is Shrill too Economically Idealistic for Its Own Good? ••• By Meredith Salisbury

“Oh My God. What’s happening? I’m afraid that I am feeling myself.” These are the words we here Annie (Aidy Bryant) say to her best friend and roommate Fran (Lolly Adefope) while she’s dancing in a new dress and enjoying some new found self-love towards the end of the first episode of Hulu’s comedy Shrill. The show, which is based off of Lindy West’s memoir Shrill: Notes from a Loud Women, follows Annie as she navigates life as a fat millennial woman living in Portland, Oregon. Shrill has been rightfully praised for its blunt and realistic depictions of everyday life as a fat woman and for its nonchalant handling of abortion. For all the care Shrill puts into authentic depictions of Annie’s everyday life, Shrill does so at the expense of showing the larger and more systemic issues fat women face. The omission of these larger cultural forces makes Annie’s transformation seem idealistic, unrealistic, and impossible for the women watching replicate.

Shrill is set in Portland, Oregon. It makes sense that one of the most accepting and liberal cities in the popular imagination is the setting for televisions first radically positive representation of fat women. Like Portlandia, another socially conscious television show set in Portland, Shrill uses comedy to point out where its liberal audience fails in their liberalness. In Shrill, radical self love, queerness, and anti-capitalist ideals are all casually accepted from the get go. Annie’s parents praise Fran’s, who is a lesbian’s, love life with her rotating door of queer partners and Annie’s ex-punk gen-x boss Gabe (John Cameron Mitchell) vilifies “the establishment” regularly. In a way Shrill feels like it teeters on the line between comedy and parody. It is unclear that the Portland represented in Shrill is different than the one created by the sketch comedy show Portlandia. Carrie Brownstein, the creator and star of Portlandia, even directed the Shrill episode “Date.” The similarities between the shows’ representation of Portland is not necessarily a bad thing—Portlandia did a great job at pointing out to liberal people where their liberal ideologies fell short—and Shrill picks up where Portlandia left off and continues this crusade. The issue is that Portlandia was satirical whereas Shrill is meant to be realistic. Shrill, like Portlandia, does not take into account Oregon’s white supremacist past or the fact that Portland is the whitest large city in America nor does it acknowledge how Oregon is one of the most expensive states to live in and that Portland is experiencing an affordable housing crisis.

The fact that Annie and Fran are never plagued with systemic issues leaves room for the show to explore interpersonal ones like Annie’s relationship with her boss Gabe. Gabe is Shrill’s villain. He is the editor-in-chief of The Weekly Throne, the alt-weekly newspaper Annie works for. At first he frustrates her by passively blowing off her pitches and asking her to keep working her way up, but by the fourth episode, the one titled “Pool” he begins a crusade against fatness. After learning The Weekly Thorn can save “a buttload of money” if the staff can “pry [their] cheese-thighs off the couch more than once a week” he gets rid of the vending machines and requires the staff to do “one heart healthy grouptivity once a month.” At the first “grouptivity” Gabe mutters “lazy bodies lazy minds” under is breath. He goes on to question whether Annie takes work seriously and tell her that “success is about an effort” and that “[she] didn’t [try] today.”

Through Gabe, the show pushes people who believe they are fighting against dominant culture to see that they still have biases they need to work on. Gabe is portrayed as a gen-x, ex-punk, and “feminist” through jokes about being the “original bassist in Bikini Kill,” by wearing band t-shirts for bands like Quasi (Janet Weiss of Sleater-Kinney fame’s band), and the fact that Gabe is played by John Cameron Mitchell who is an queer gen-x icon in his own right. We are led to believe that Gabe’s work was once gritty and boundary pushing. He claims when he was Annie’s age he was already “burnin’ shit down and fuckin shit up.” But, what we see now is someone who was on the right side of history, but lost his way as he became older and more financially stable. He is a former radical who is hindering Annie’s growth professionally and personally.

The way Gabe treats Annie at The Weekly Thorne is terrible. Shrill uses Annie and Gabe’s work relationship to drive Annie to find self confidence. The thing is for women work is not just another place for interpersonal relationships. It is a place that provides people with an income and (hopefully) benefits. Individuals need these to survive. In Shrill Annie never once thinks about the financial ramifications of her actions. At work she is not very professional. She is seen sitting on tables, hugging her boss when he gives her an assignment, pestering him about pitches, and posts an article to the paper’s site without permission. While some workplaces are significantly more informal than others, Annie’s behavior at work does not make it appear as though she values her job. Gabe is by no accounts a good boss and she has every right to be upset with the way he is treating her, but it is still fascinating to me that Annie never once seems concerned about the possibility of losing her job. She even quits in a fit of rage in the last episode. It is known that fat women face discrimination when they are applying for jobs and full time jobs in any media industry are nearly impossible to find these days. There is never a moment where Annie stops and worries about what the implications of leaving her job would be. Sure she stood up for herself, but at what cost? She walked away from an income and health insurance without batting an eyelash. What other millennial women who works in media could do that?  

Annie and Fran’s financial situation remains a mystery throughout the six episodes. How is it that two marginalized women in creative careers can have very little financial anxiety? The only inkling of concern comes from Fran when she asks Annie “Are you rich? That’s like $50 every time you have sex with Ryan” when she finds out Annie has been taking the morning after pill every time she has sex with Ryan. Annie never addresses this, she is rightfully preoccupied with the abortion she needs to have, but it still leaves the viewer wondering how she is finacially staying afloat.

Annie’s spending on the morning after pill is not the only unexplained expense in the show. A quick google search revealed that Annie and Fran live in a home that last sold in 2016 for $500,158 and rents for similar houses in the same neighborhood are around $2400 a month. It is unclear how they can afford to live there with Annie working for a small alt-weekly newspaper and Fran cutting people’s hair out of her house. It’s even more baffling when you add in the fact that Fran does not even require payment for her work. The only time we see her compinstated for her work she is paid in stolen clothes. How do these two afford a multi-bedroom house in Portland, Oregon, a place that is notorious for unaffordable housing, while working in independent publishing and freelance hair styling?

The walls of Annie and Fran’s home are adorned with art prints like this one that used to be sold at Otherwild and Fran is often spotted in Wildfang overalls and coveralls. Both brands have become trendy in recent years and are recognizable in queer urban circles as marker for a type of queer financial stability. Wildfang coveralls are the velour Juicy Couture track suit of lesbian culture. Rachel Syme explains that the “Juicy’s suit was just pricey enough to radiate status, but attainable enough to become a part of the everyday wardrobes of thousands of high-school girls.” Wildfang’s clothes do the same thing for queer women. Fran’s $188 coveralls signal to queer women watching that she is financially stable, yet still relatable, but it is never addressed how she got this way.

Annie quits her job in a fit of rage after Gabe writes a rebuttal to her article claiming her fatness. In this moment we see Annie stand up for herself. She calls Gabe a “bully” and tells him he is “stomp[ing] over an entire group of people.” We are supposed to cheer Annie on in this moment—she has finally began to believe in herself—but she just walks out of her job without any real concern about her future. This moment is the climax of the season. But what is she going to do now? Study after study has found that fat women face major discrimination when applying for jobs; especially in the media industry. I am proud of her for standing up for herself, but I do not see how any real person could do that without some type of financial safety net.

For fat women and queer women Annie and Fran appear to be wonderful role models. Annie is smart, and stylish, and finding her voice in a way many of us hope to and Fran is strong, and unwavering in her sexuality and standards. Shrill does a wonderful job creating inspiring role models, but Annie and Fran’s lives are impossible to replicate in everyday life. Throughout the season we see Annie strutting around Portland in a collection of adorable and perfectly tailored dresses. It turns out that almost all of Annie’s clothes were custom made for the show by costume designer Amanda Needham. Fran’s strength is a linchpin of the show and she is portrayed as the foil to Annie. In her review of Shrill Emily Nussbaum explains that Fran “specialize in brassy self-assertion, a bravado that doubles as a shield and as a weapon.”  and later explains that it’s Annie’s “niceness ... that fuels the show.” Fran’s self-assertion comes from her ability to opt-out of interacting with straight men, other than her brother or the occasional boy Annie brings home. Shrill leads us to believe that Fran’s lesbianism is what makes her that brash woman who refuses take shit and this is why she is able to empower Annie. Although all women are taught throughout their lives to seek the validation of men; coming out as a lesbian frees you from some of those expectations. Although male bosses, relatives, and friends still exist; there is no longer the expectation that one of the men in your life could be your future partner and this alleviates some of the compulsory need to please them. Annie on the other hand still believes she needs to placate a boy and win over a boss and those needs hinder her ability to stand up for herself. The thing is that queerness does not suddenly alleviate all of those pressures. As much as I would love to exist in a world without problematic straight men and the patriarchal nonsense they bring with them it is not possible. Fran has created a life where she only cuts cute girls’ hair and somehow still has a roof over her head a wardrobe full of $200 Wildfang overalls. Her queerness and lack of traditional employment may allow her to accept herself without pause, but the lack of hardship or pushback she receives is implausible and unlike the experiences of any queer women I have ever known or heard about.

Shrill represents a radical hope for fat women’s futures. It presents a nuanced depiction of the everyday struggles of fat women, but refuses to complicate its narrative with the broader and more systemic sexist and homophobic struggles fat women face. By diving deep into specificities it allows Annie to overcome her personal problems but misses the mark on addressing larger structural ones. In Shrill’s universe, Annie can quit her job without ever acknowledging how hard it is for fat women to get hired in the first place and Fran can live a blissful queer life in Portland without ever facing a racist or homophobic person. And both of them never have a financial care in the world while living in one of the most expensive cities and working in underpaying careers. I wish the lessons taught in Shrill were applicable to everyday life. I wish I could call out a fat-phobic boss on the internet without the fear of losing my employment and possibly my health insurance. I wish I could only cut cute girls’ hair and still have a roof over my head and some of the most stylish clothes in queer culture today. But alas I do not live in the world Shrill has created and I do not think I ever will.

[theheavymetalmama]

And now, some Unpopular Opinions!

Because at this point, why the hell not?

Iron Man was better than The Dark Knight

I am in no way, shape, or form suggesting that The Dark Knight is a bad movie. Far from it, in fact. It’s a damn good movie with some fantastic performances, a gripping story, and some of the best written characters and dialogue in the history of movie making. So is Iron Man the better movie? For one, it’s not so stuck up its’ own ass about its’ message. The Dark Knight is a lot of things and one of them is pretentious as fuck, come off as less of a love letter to Batman and more of a method of the director Chris Nolan showing how much he has nothing but contempt for superheroes and comic books in general. Iron Man, in contrast, embraces it and has fun with the idea of a guy who builds a mech suit and fights bad guys. There’s also the question of influence, and that right there is no contest. The Dark Knight influenced Batman; Iron Man influenced the entire movie industry.

Final Fantasy XV was a massive disappointment

I kind of feel bad for dunking on this game considering they just cancelled the last of the DLC. Then again the last of the DLC was going to expand on Lady “Show Up and Blow Up” Lunafreya and Aranea “I’m here and now I’m not” Highwind’s stories and now we’re not getting them and I’m still bitter as fuck for the director’s pathetic excuse for why a girl couldn’t attend the coming of age road trip, so all bet’s are off! Okay, the ladies getting shafted aside, there is a lot to like about Final Fantasy XV, but was it worth the tedious development time? No way in hell. The game looks good but like many open world games feels mostly lifeless and empty, and of the four main characters only one of them is likable and isn’t even playable in the game’s vanilla form. The story is a broken mess that requires other forms of media to fully grasp (dick fucking move there, Squeenix) and the summons coming at random times serves as more of an annoyance than anything, especially since they always seem to show up except during times when and where they’d be useful. It also doesn’t say good things about a company’s management when a game can sell millions of copies in record time as well as do gangbusters on downloadable content and then still manage to lose over 30 million dollars.

And for the record, let it be known that Noctis is far and away the whiniest and most emo protagonist in Final Fantasy history, which is saying something considering this is a series where one such protagonist’s entire character is being so jaded and world weary to the point that his name is the sound a crying baby makes, and he doesn’t whine and complain as much as Noctis does.

Just because you’re a cop or a soldier, that doesn’t automatically make you a good person

I’m in favor of police and law enforcement and even though I believe our military budget makes Caligula himself look frugal in comparison I do support our troops. Having said that, being a cop or a trooper doesn’t mean jack shit if the person under the uniform is a complete and utter scumbag, which happens more often than many care to admit. In fact some people, many people, become cops and soldiers not to protect and serve or out of a sense of honor and duty, but simply because they like making others miserable and want to do it for a living. There’s a reason songs about fighting the law and unflattering depictions of authority figures date back as far as authority figures have been a thing. Respect is earned, not given.

‘White Nationalist’ and ‘Nazi’ are the same things

Calling a Nazi a white nationalist is like calling somebody who abuses their spouse a rough lover. Stop beating around the bush and tell it like it is. Also, don’t debate Nazis, punch them. Punch them as hard as you fucking can. If they punch you back, punch them again, and again, and again until they either run away (which most of them do) or stop moving. Trust me, nobody is going to miss them. That goes double for the alt right. Oh, and speaking of which...

Far Cry 5 chickened out

As somebody who grew up in a dead gold mining community that was mostly Catholic, when the first trailer for Far Cry 5 came out I was stoked as hell for the chance to gun down religious fanatics and skinheads in a place in rural America that didn’t look all that different. Then the game came out and it was abundantly clear to anybody that something somewhere in the game was changed at the last minute. Some have argued that it was their intention from the get go, others claimed they didn’t want to alienate their core demographic. It doesn’t say nice things about your core demographic if you’re worried about depictions of white supremacist cultists scaring them away, but okay, fine. Then make a game that takes place during the decline of the Ku Klux Klan, or in a post World War II Europe where you hunt Nazi war criminals, or failing that make something akin to Black Dynamite or a wacky 70′s Kung Fu movie where everything is purposefully over the top and exaggerated, I don’t care! All your other games have you gunning down hordes of brown people, let people like me and my husband kill some skinheads god damn it!

If you still support Donald Trump after all the vile and abhorrent things he’s done, you’re a bad person

There’s no beating around the bush on this one. I don’t blame people who were swooned by this conman thinking he’d genuinely make a good president and have since regretted their decision. I have nothing but sympathy for them. No, I’m talking about the people who STILL trip over themselves to defend this vile, homophobic, delusions, misogynist, narcissistic bigot. Like when he called Nazis “very fine people,” or is still pushing for a stupid wall along our border that will be bested by two extension ladders and a pair of tin snips. The travel ban, the rollback on regulations that kept food insecure people fed, kids dying in his fucking concentration camps, yeah, no. He’s a treasonous scumbag who deserves to be locked in an 8x8 cell until he rots, and if you still support him then you can claim the top bunk.

Climate change is real and coal can fuck off

Coal is dead. Let it lay down and rot. What, coal is your only source of income in the area you live in? Then move somewhere else! You think I would have left my hometown if there were any opportunities other than timber, fishing, and tourist traps? Sorry, but the longer we stay in the past with coal the lesser we can look forward to a future where a planet can sustain human life. If we want our planet to live then coal needs to die.

No, the left isn’t “just as bad” as the right

This is a fucking gas lighting farce that immediately falls apart when put under scrutiny. Are there extremists and crazies on the left? Of course there are, but they’re entirely different beasts as those found on the right. The left is more of a “eat enough kale and you can talk to dolphins” or “sleep with crystals under your bed and you can see the future” kinds of crazy, whereas the right is more of the “kill all the queers and let the brown babies starve” kind of crazy. Oh, and to each and every single person who said “Clinton is just as bad as Trump,” y’all can cover your reproductive organs in honey and stick them in a mason jar filled with live bullet ants and tarantula hawks, you ignorant scare mongering shitheels!

“Captain Marvel doesn’t smile!”

So what? She’s a space Navy Seal, not a boy scout like Captain America or Superman; she’s not supposed to smile.

No, the ‘alt left’ doesn’t exist and Antifa aren’t the same as Nazis

Are Antifa breaking the law? Yes. Should they be held accountable for their actions? Yes. Are people who want to kill Nazis exactly the same as people who want to exterminate the Jews and subjugate anybody who isn’t white while wiping other people’s culture off the face of the Earth under an authoritarian rule? Hell to the no and “Antifa is just as bad as the Nazis” is right up there with “Vaccinations cause autism” and “the Earth is flat” on the scale of “If you believe this, you are STUPID.” If Nazis and white supremacists went unopposed they’d go around raping and murdering Jews and non whites until there were absolutely none of them left. You know Antifa would be doing if there weren’t any Nazis around? Sitting in their crappy apartments smoking weed, sipping craft beer, eating pizza, and laughing their asses off at 20 year old Saturday Night Live skits. Ooooooh, scary! Yes, Antifa are assaulting people and destroying public property and yes they should be held accountable for their actions. But I’m not going to pretend, even hypothetically, that Nazi apologist scumbags like Tucker Carlson having his door banged on or actual Nazis like Richard Spencer getting punched in the face is on the same playing field as babies being put in cages, innocent black people being murdered by cops, or Jews being put into ovens, you fucks!

New She Ra is better than Old She Ra and 80′s cartoons in general

If you don’t like the new She Ra and prefer the old one, fine, you do you, but don’t act like the original is “So much better” because it isn’t at all. The villains were jokes, the animation was beyond cheap, the characters all looked the same, there were stupid talking animal sidekicks, and the story went nowhere really fucking fast outside of “Bad guys are doing bad guy stuff, our heroes must stop them” because they were commercials to sell toys. Nothing more, nothing less. If the new She Ra isn’t your bag then that’s all well and good, but don’t be a stupid asshole about it, talking about how it wasn’t featured at PowerCon like it’s a big fucking deal when only sad dorks like us give a shit about conventions, or whine about how you’re being oppressed and censored because a 16 year old isn’t rocking 44DD’s, or talk about “CalArts style” like that’s a real goddamn thing. Oh yeah, and speaking of which...

“CalArts style” is not a thing

Shut the fuck up, no it isn’t. It’s a stupid, meaningless buzzword hurled at people who never fucking went to CalArts in the first place. If you’re perplexed as to why modern cartoons all look like Steven Universe, the simple fact is that cartoons are made predominantly for children and shows are made to be aesthetically pleasing to them. With shows like Adventure Time, Regular Show, Steven Universe, Star vs the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls being soaring success stories while shows like Young Justice, new GI Joe, and 2011 Thundercats ambitious failures, it’s obvious that formal abstractionist non angularity is in while aspirational human physical fitness is out, and a big reason the latter was even a thing in the first place is because they were toy commercials first and there were only so many variations on plastic molds to form the fucking action figures and because it was the 80′s and Arnold was the biggest star at the time.

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi” is a good movie and fanboys can eat bantha poodoo

I’ve heard all the reasons for why The Last Jedi is a bad movie and they’re all either stupid nitpicky bullshit or meaningless fanboy gripes. I could write an entire essay debunking those reasons point for point, like how the reason Holdo didn’t tell Poe a damn thing because no admiral would ever a tell a lowly grunt anything about their plan, especially after being demoted for being a hotheaded little fuckup. Or that Rey being related to Obi Wan or any previous Star Wars character didn’t happen because that would have been stupid and the definition of predictable. Or that the reason Akbar didn’t do the suicide run is because he’s a meme that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about and that there’s no way in Hell that the Mouse would allow a character named “Akbar” to do a suicide run. Or that Kylo Ren not being an intimidating villain is the whole point and that you’re supposed to hate him because he’s a petulant Darth Vader wannabe and a snake to boot. Or that the effectiveness of said suicide run, where Snoke came from, or the state of the Resistance by the end of the movie, or that any other so called ‘plot hole’ doesn’t matter because this is a movie about space wizards for children and paying obsessive attention to meaningless and pedantic details is exactly how we end up with stupid subplots in the Beauty and the Beast remake and Metropolis and Gotham City being across the river from each other! But the biggest one is Luke wasn’t portrayed as some Jedi Clint Eastwood (why fanboys want that eludes me; the EU did that a few times and they were all terrible) and that him exiling himself doesn’t make any sense.

Sorry, but no, Luke running off to a far and unreachable island makes perfect sense. For one, it’s kind of a thing that disgraced Jedi do, and for two, Star Wars is a fairy tale in space. All of the characters draw inspiration from characters and archetypes from fairy tales and fables of old, and the one Luke Skywalker resembles most (largely by design) is King Arthur. Think about it. Common boy who doesn’t know who his real parents are, meets an old wizard, gets a legendary sword, discovers he’s of noble lineage, tags along with a few colorful characters, goes on a quest that’s bigger than him and the life he knew, hits a few bumps down the road, and then eventually he saves the kingdom by overthrowing his father who once was a great man and a hero but gave in to power and corruption and became a dark reflection of his former self.

You will never unsee that. 

Oh yeah, and remember how things turned out for King Arthur in the end? He started a whole new kingdom, he had a few good years, he grew arrogant, things started to fall apart, and suddenly he and everything he worked to build up were undone overnight by a younger, more vindictive relative. Disgraced, Arthur was whisked away to an unreachable island deep rooted in his own legend and mythology where he remained until Britain had fallen to darkness and needed him again. Now of course Britain as we know it has yet to see such a thing (we’ll see how Brexit turns out) but Luke did exactly that. And no, sorry fanboys, but The Last Jedi wasn’t a failure in any sense of the word. It grossed over a billion dollars, received critical praise, the DVDs and BluRays sold like hotcakes, and was adored by kids, teenagers, and young adults, the primary audience that Star Wars is for in the first place. And I don’t give a shit what the audience score on RT says, because for one aggregate sites are a blight on film criticism and we went from this;

“Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad are AMAZING, Rotten Tomatoes is biased and paid off by Disney!”

To this...

“Star Wars: the Last Jedi is TERRIBLE, Rotten Tomatoes says so!”

In just over a year. To say nothing of the fact that what you’re currently saying about The Last Jedi was also said about The Empire Strikes, and like ‘Empire’ twenty years from now people will look back on the fanboy outrage and say “Wow, what a bunch of babies.” And before the inevitable response...

“But Solo bombed because of The Last Jedi!” 

Nooooo, Solo bombed because it came out right between Infinity War and Deadpool 2, was rife with development issues since day one of production, it was aimed overwhelmingly at fanboys obsessed with Star Wars deep lore answering questions that the general audience doesn’t give a shit about, nobody was even interested in the thing until the Lego Movie guys were signed on for a hot second, moviegoers aren’t currently hurting for cocky space cowboys...

...and because of the simple fact that it’s a solo movie about Han Solo...and it’s not 1995 and Harrison Ford isn’t in it. See, fanboys don’t realize that just because nerd and geek bullshit is mainstream now doesn’t mean that everyone is now a fanboy deep rooted in everything from where the characters are from to where they’re going, because when people say “I love Star Wars and Han Solo is my favorite character” what the vast majority of them mean is “Those movies with the space wizards and the laser swords are a lot of fun and Harrison Ford is a great movie star.” That’s it. That’s extent of why people like Han Solo. Sad dorks like us may care about stuff like where and when he got the Falcon, how he met Chewie, where the dice came from and all of that and more, but the general audience just wants to see Harrison Ford do cool shit in space. That’s it. To say nothing of the fact that nobody was even interested in the spinoffs in the first place. When Disney announced that they were making episodes 7,8, and 9 everyone went “Oh Hell yes, sign me up!” Then when they followed up with that they were also making spinoff movies about stuff that happened off screen or between movies the same audience was like “Oh...well that’s neat, I guess.”

And no, that stupid fanboy boycott had nothing to do with. Even the dude who started that petition to strike TLJ from canon admitted that he was in a bad place and that he was being stupid and angry, and I can promise you that all the shrieking dorks on Youtube are the buzzing of flies to Disney. If that crowd had any box office and movie making decision influence whatsoever, the next spinoff we’d see a trailer for would be “My Twi’lek Waifu: a Star Wars Story.”

PewDiePie is the worst thing to happen to video games this side of the gaming crash of 83 and he needs to fuck off

Yes, you read that right, and I don’t say that lightly. All sorts of terrible things have happened in the gaming industry since the gaming crash of 83. The console wars, the Atari Jaguar, the Philips CDi, Jack Thompson, the death of the Dreamcast, WoW, an entire console generation packed to the gills with homogenous gray and brown shooters with protagonists who all looked the fucking same, GamerGate, microtransactions, DLC abuse, the death of Maxis, an increasingly toxic fandom, “women are too hard to animate,” the degradation of E3 from a showcase of the biggest and bestest in gaming to a corporately sponsored circlejerk of self congratulatory backslapping and so much, much more.

I don’t care how much PewDiePie gives to charity, or how many fans he has, or how many people think he’s just the greatest, because he’s not. He’s an embarrassing, stupid asshole who constantly gets busted for making stupid racist jokes and by extension making his fans and everyone who has even the vaguest ties to the word ‘gamer’ look like stupid, racist assholes. He’s a corporate ass sucking apologist who gives exposure to anti Semites and racist wastes of space to his audience of mostly 10 to 15 year old boys, and he’s more terminally obnoxious than an Adderall addicted Pomeranian. 

The day he posted his first video of him overreacting to a jump scare while making loud screeching noises on top of edgy rape jokes was the day the progress of “gaming as an art form” was shot between the eyes, placed in a box that was then filled with concrete, and thrown into the ocean. He’s a dumbass man child that’s making all of us look bad and he needs to take his millions worth of corporate sponsorships and fuck off forever into some dark, lonely corner of the Internet where he’ll never be seen or heard from again until an inevitable meltdown that lands him on an episode of Down the Rabbit Hole.

And that concludes this post. I’ll give my final thoughts tomorrow, and on Saturday I’m closing this account forever.

[canallynwrite]

I bring asks: 2, 4, 7, 12, 13, 17, 26, 29, 30

thank you!

2 - HOW DID YOU DISCOVER YOUR SEXUALITY? TELL YOUR STORY.

for context: i’m biromantic asexual!

i was one of those kids who didn’t even know that it was actually possible to like girls as well as guys, so i only really discovered the lgbt+ community after i entered middle school and got access to the internet. the first time i actually thought about being anything other than straight was when my friend came out to me as bisexual. now, my first (or second, whatever) thought was: “does she like me?”

and nobody wants to be the person who thinks their not-straight friend of the same gender is into them just bc said not-straight friend came out to them, so after doing some research i did some self-reflection and realized my actual feelings were more akin to something like: “i hope she likes me.”

for the rest of the year i tried to convince myself that she was the exception to my straightness and was definitely not crushing hard on her. then at the end of the year i started dating someone who, after we dated for a week or so, came out as a trans dude, and i sort of just accepted my bisexuality. the last bit probably doesn’t make sense, but he was in the middle of figuring out his gender, so for a while he identified as a gal and that was when i first really acknowledged that yes, i am indeed very not straight. him coming out as trans just hammered my bi-ness. looking back on it, there were many signs that i was not straight at all. i just had zero language for my feelings!

my asexuality was just always there, tbh. i found out about asexuality after i accepted my bi-ness so as soon as i learned what it meant i just went ‘yah, that’s me. i’m ace.’

4 - WHO WAS THE FIRST PERSON YOU TOLD? HOW DID THEY REACT?

uhhh, apart from the dude i was dating, probably the aforementioned friend who’d come out to me as bi. she was really happy for me and we celebrated my first coming out experience together!

7 - WHAT IS ONE QUESTION YOU HATE BEING ASKED ABOUT YOUR SEXUALITY?

i try not to get mad at ppl asking questions, bc i know that it is Quite Possible to not know much about sexuality (for the longest time i didn’t know ANYTHING) but biphobic and acephobic questions in general really get my goat. yes, asexuality is a thing that exists; no, i’m not going to cheat on my partner just bc i’m bi.

12 - WHAT’S THE STUPIDEST THING YOU’VE HEARD SAID ABOUT THE LGBT+ COMMUNITY?

tbh, any time a straight person starts talking about the lgbt+ community like they know everything about it and are Great Allies i have to roll my eyes. jordan, you’re straight as uncooked spaghetti and cisgender, please stop pretending your opinions have any authority here just bc you read a few articles on gender/sexual fluidity and have a gay friend or two. 

but, on a more well-known note, the stupidest thing i’ve heard would definitely have to be anything that those assholes who claim that the lgbt+ community includes pedophiles have ever said. that idea is both stupid and enraging.

13 - WHAT’S YOUR FAVOURITE THING ABOUT THE LGBT+ COMMUNITY AS A WHOLE?

i’ve seen lgbt+ people say a lot of stupid shit, even against other sexualities (especially against asexuality), but as a whole the lgbt+ community is extremely accepting and seems to have so many little niche corners for every possible interest or hobby. like, u want lgbt+ writers??? u got it, pal. a group lgbt+ athletes??? u may have to look a little harder than for the lgbt+ writers but damn, they’re there! blogs about lgbt+ animals in nature??? yes, that does exist!

it’s such a large community, filled with so many different types of people, which is what i love about it!

17 - HAVE YOU BEEN IN A RELATIONSHIP? IF SO, HOW DID YOU MEET?

i’ve been in two! and am currently in,,,, something? it’s a little complicated. we both know we like each other (and i wish we were dating!) but we haven’t “””officially””” decided to go out. 

the other two were a) some dude i broke up with after two days lmao; we won’t talk about him, and b) the dude i talked about earlier! we met on a roleplaying forum for ppl in our area when we were younger and really hit it off. i asked him out two or three months after we met, and we were together for about six months before going off ‘n on. we “””officially””” broke up after a year or so bc he needed some time to himself for his mental health.

26 - WHAT IDENTITY ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE YOUR YOUNGER SELF?

well, for pre-middle-school me i’d sit her down and give her an hour long lecture on the lgbt+ community and recommend her some books w/ lgbt+ characters. she doesn’t know that being bi is possible so i’d also pull up an irl bi person as an example. for questioning!me, i think i’d just advise her not too push to hard against the idea of being bi. if you continue to like girls (and you will) then that’s okay and not something to tear yourself up about.

29 - WHAT IS SOMETHING YOU WISH PEOPLE KNEW ABOUT BEING LGBT+?

a) we are, in fact, a very wide spectrum of individuals, and stereotyping irl people does not help anything. being interested in women does not make me super butch; it makes me, me.

b) being lgbt+ is most certainly not all peaches and if you act like it is then you are Very Wrong Indeed, my friend. tbh, i don’t have much for this point besides complaining about that one straight person who called themselves an ally but still tried to police who i came out to and implied that if i wasn’t okay with having my sexuality shouted out to the world in the middle of a crowded cafeteria then i must be repressing myself. so, yeah, don’t be like that person, kids.

30 - WHY ARE YOU PROUD TO BE LGBT+?

how persistent lgbt+ people - of the past and present - are. throughout every age and every culture, no matter if lgbt+ ppl are oppressed or accepted, you will find lgbt+ people. some are harder to find, because of hate towards people like them, but look hard enough and you will find them. even when lgbt+ people were persecuted, they were there. even in places where they could still be put to death today, they’re there, and they’re fighting.

the pink triangle was what nazis marked gay men with in concentration camps, but lgbt+ people, most notably the AIDS movement, have reclaimed it, taken it back and turned it into a positive symbol for lgbt+ people.

and that is why i’m proud to be lgbt+. to stand with these people is an absolute honor.

[gapimnydiaries]

Diary Entry #21: White Gays are better Filmmakers: What I learned about inclusivity from being a Gaysian filmmaker

Dear Diary,

“The Less I know the Better” by Tame Impala was playing on Apple Music as a good friend consoled me. I was in a space no larger than a handicapped single-stalled restroom. There was just one tiny single bed, a small TV and what you’d call a closet (but wasn’t really). There weren’t any windows and the only source of light I had was a mood lamp I bought at Ace Hardware™ in a mall called Grand Indonesia in Jakarta. I remembered I was trying to play it cool when, in truth, I was crumbling on the inside.

Earlier in the day, I had a Skype call with television development executives from Los Angeles who initially hired us to write a “diverse and progressive” series. But after a series of drafts, we found out that, like most people in a place of privilege, they weren’t as woke as they thought they were. After whitewashing and slashing the storylines that explored the complexities of being a person of color in America, they wanted us to reduce the women characters to serve the interests of the straight, male protagonist. “It’s a post-racial Millennial world” they explained. To make matters worse, the entire call was filled with attempts to other-ize me, from asking what it’s like to live in a rural village in Singapore to pointing out that my iPhone text-tone -- “ding!” -- was some kind of Asian praying bell.

Afterwards, I really wanted to email them and write: this type of behavior is ignorant and unacceptable. But, considering that I really needed the job and I had a writing partner who told me to let it go because we didn’t want to be rude, I remained silent. The silence of course, was really painful because obviously, this wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. In fact, it happens all the time. When people like me speak up about micro-aggressions or feeling left out, the people in power get angry and then I have to take care of their fragile feelings instead of validating my own. I’m always left feeling silenced, powerless and usually attacked for being “oversensitive.” The only thing I could do at the time was to call my friend and be temporarily consoled while listening to Tame Impala (Yes, I should’ve picked a better band for the occasion).

By this time, I had been alone in Indonesia (not Singapore) for 5 months. I was deep in pre-production on a short film called, Pria. During this time, I’d traveled across Java for months and interviewed countless gay Indonesians who either lived or had lived in rural areas. The film ended up being an amalgamation of their experiences told from their perspective, the perspective of the minority. So, within this context, the experience of that not-so-woke-ignorant phone call felt like such a step backwards, especially after being in Indonesia and realizing how ignorance of minority experiences can have such negative consequences. With these LA Execs, I met privileged people who wanted to promote and capitalize on the “global and diverse” world that “we live in right now,” but were so out of touch with the reality of what diversity really means that they ended up, perhaps unknowingly, becoming part of the problem.

◆◆◆

The author directs a scene on the set of Pria

Curious villagers watching the playback monitor during filming

The author and crew filming a scene in the morning

The author and producers stroll through the village “set”

◆◆◆

Out of all my intersectional identities, my “Asian-American-ness” has always been the hardest to fully embrace. I was born in Indonesia and moved to the US in elementary school. In Indonesia, I’m a minority because I don’t look Indonesian and I’m not Muslim. I’m mostly ethnically Chinese but none of my family members know any Chinese or anything about China. When I returned to Indonesia to do Pria, the locals there thought that I was from anywhere BUT Indonesia. When I came to the US for the first time, people were confused AF. They’d mock my accent and would always yell out “Ni Hau!” I’d try to correct them and tell them that I’m not Chinese, but that only confused the shit out of them. They would counter with the only two other Asian countries they’d heard of: Japan and Thailand (I mean really, if you wanna mock someone, get educated, people). There were definitely other FOB children at school, but most, if not all of them, were actually Chinese or Korean so they’d form their own communities out of their shared culture and language. Plus, the word FOB never felt like it applied to me; I came here on a plane, not a boat.

◆◆◆

(Far Right) The author with his siblings at a mall in 1996

◆◆◆

While I had such a confusing time trying to fit within the definition of Asian American, Gay was something that was always clear. That’s not to say that I didn’t have a hard time; like most queers, it was a process. But I always knew that I was gay and there was no question where I fit within that definition. So, when I started making “professional” short, queer films in 2011, I felt like I finally found a community that embraced me for me, for my work, and not the way I looked, or sounded, or how I presented myself. The LGBTQ film community has always supported me. Since I started, my shorts have been accepted to most LGBTQ film festivals domestically and internationally. But a troubling pattern began to emerge as I attended these festivals year after year. The majority of the films I saw were not diverse and mostly affirmed and celebrated the str8 white male ideal. There was always a lack of diversity, not only in the films, but also the filmmakers and organizers. I would always be one of the few (if not the only) minority filmmakers on the Q & A stage.

◆◆◆

The author attends a photocall at Frameline39: San Francisco LGBT Film Festival in 2015

The author at the Q&A for his short film, “Pipe Dream” at the Castro Theater, San Francisco (June 2015)

◆◆◆

This didn’t bother me at first, but after continually facing micro-aggressions at these LGBTQ festivals, in clubs, apps, and other Queer spaces, it started to really impact the way I saw myself and how I fit within the community. It already sucked enough having to deal with ignorant str8 people, but it’s much more hurtful when it comes from the community that you thought you were a part of. A community that promotes itself as being inclusive, a community that knows what invalidation feels like, and a community of film festivals run by, well, mostly people who identify as LGBTQ.

When I arrived at the centerpiece party for the 2017 Frameline: San Francisco LGBT Film Festival, the majority of the attendees were Gay White Men. I felt like I had just stumbled into an exclusive Mean Girls clique. It honestly felt like I was in a Gay club trying to scan for anyone with an interest in talking to an Asian. The way that everyone looked at me, just looking right through me, made me feel like I didn’t exist. When I told them about my short film from Indonesia, I was met with all sorts of assumptions. One sleazy, white producer from New York (who was trying to fuck an Australian actor all night) told me, “I’ve always wanted to go to Indonesia, it’s so exotic!” He then patted me on the back, “It must be so tough for the ladyboys there.” I guess even in a creative, inclusive, “safe” space like a Queer festival party, it’s as hierarchical as it would be in any other social Gay space, with whites taking the top spot. I wanted to think that this was an isolated incident because I’d been to this same exact party twice before and had a fantastic time. But, I slowly remembered, those other two times, I went with my white friends. There were, in fact, other incidents that occurred throughout the week including (but not limited to): being mistaken for another Asian on 3 different occasions and being grabbed in the ass by someone as I was leaving my Q & A (the latter could just be straight up sexual harassment and has nothing to do with race… but, in my experience, just looking like an “Asian Twink” in a Gay space usually gives other men the permission to violate our bodies...plus the Australians and Norwegian there didn’t get their asses grabbed).

◆◆◆

The author attends a photocall for the shorts program, “Worldly Affairs” at Frameline41: San Francisco LGBT Film Festival

The author during the Q&A session for “Pria” at the Castro Theater, San Francisco (June 2017)

◆◆◆

Of course, how can these white people understand wtf is going on with us “ethnic folk” if most of the films in these programs just affirm their str8-white privileged personhood ideal? There’s already a lack of Gaysians in the mainstream media and when we are ~lucky~ enough to make it on screen, we are only reduced to exotic stereotypical objects of desire or sexless, unattractive background players. If these are the only images shoved down everyone’s throat, it’s no wonder we’re always considered an Other…

Because these LGBTQ film festivals promote themselves as an inclusive safe space, this time, I decided to speak up. Surely, they would somehow understand. These organizers would know what it's like to grow up and not see (LGBTQ) characters like themselves on screen, or at least ones who weren’t child molesters, rapists, villains, creepy psychopathic old men or “sissies” serving as the butt of the joke that reduces their personhood to a minstrel show. They would understand what it would feel like to be erased, othered and/or misrepresented.

I sent out a mass email, Bcc-ing every LGBTQ festival that I’d been accepted to this year (and ones I was rejected from). In the email, I detailed how, when attending these Western festivals, I was always seen and treated as “other” because of my race. I told them how much their programming affects how LGBTQ POC are seen and treated within the general community. I tried to explain that by not including films like Pria, films from the other half of the world, in their LGBTQ Film Festivals, they are effectively erasing our stories and shutting us out. If there are minority films, we’re almost always grouped by race or by issue (why do white people only like us when we’re a cause to fight for? Even then, they want us to be a cause with hope). Are we not good enough to be part of the regular gay white programming? In times like these, programmers, the gatekeepers and privileged people in power have the responsibility to really examine what diversity means to them. Honest and complex representations of minorities are important (as well as minorities behind the scenes). This also means being strategic in programming these types of films. Not only do they determine how other people in the majority see and treat us, but they also shape the way we think and feel about ourselves.

The responses to the email were varied. “Seriously. Well-put,” said one LGBTQ festival. The rest refused to consider my point of view and instead resorted to belittling me and accusing me of being bitter for not having gained a spot in their program (like, honey, please. I sent the email to festivals that I DID get into too). But, to be honest, I am fucking bitter. These invalidating responses automatically reminded me of what happened in Indonesia a year before: that Skype call with the executives, and the many other times where I was either whitesplained and/or mansplained.

So yes. I’m absolutely bitter and I’m fucking angry.

How can I not be when I see these LGBTQ programmers complain about Donald Trump or say that they’re promoting diversity when their actions (or inaction) speak otherwise? Diversity isn’t just literally black and white, it’s something more complex; it occupies the gray area in the middle. Many people seem to think that just because you put a handful of Black people on screen (there are OTHER races too, you know?) and showcase minority “issue” films (on Gay refugees, Gays in the Middle-East, etc.), they can solve racism and inequality.

In truth, however, the work is far from being done. It doesn’t matter how many POCs are on screen if we are only reduced to stereotypes or, in the opposite case, neutered to the point where our complex experiences are distilled to white-people-cause-of-the-moment or worse, erased altogether. I just want to see my goddamn experiences represented accurately and truthfully.

I know that the work is hard. We have to dismantle a system of oppression that has been in place for hundreds of years that’s still an ongoing problem not just within the LGBTQ community but society at large. But, still, I expected better from our own community. How can a community that is fighting for equality perpetuate a system that promotes the invalidation of members within their own community?

It’s a system that allows for my bosses in LA to ignorantly make insensitive comments about my race via Skype.

It’s a system that enables a white, friend-of-a-friend at a Thanksgiving party to confidently assume, because of where I met the host, my appearance, and my non-English name, that it was my first Thanksgiving.

It’s a system that excuses gays when they put “No Asians” on their Grindr profiles and justify it as just “preference.”

It’s a system that allows an African American drag queen in New York to call me up on stage and mock my race and question my Americanness, while excusing such behavior as jest.

It’s a system where, when I was 17, a white, visiting professor took me to his home and raped me, assuming that I wanted it because I’m a “submissive Asian Bottom” who should’ve “relaxed more so that it would’ve felt better.”

It’s a system where, if I do speak up against the people in power who are supposedly on my side, I’d be dismissed and made to feel that I was the problem, that I was the one who was being overly sensitive and needed to check my feelings.

But, the thing is, I’ve been checking my feelings. I’ve been checking my damn feelings every day of my life. And you know what? I’m tired. I’m tired of them saying, “I can’t be racist or ignorant, I have black friends...” or “You obviously haven’t seen our program, we have an eye for colored people!” or whatever dumb-fuck excuse they use to deflect from the actual problem and validate their inaction/behavior/ignorance. It’s time for them to check their own damn feelings and realize that for real change to happen, they need to shut the hell up and listen. I’m sure they’re all well-meaning, but in the end, good intentions won’t matter much when the results are tone-deaf and continue to facilitate segregation and inequality.

I think that as we gain more acceptance within the mainstream, those who are now in a place of privilege tend to forget what it felt like to be in the minority. They forget those in the past who helped fight for our rights, they forget other members of their own communities who are still suffering, they forget what it felt like to be degraded for who they truly are, they forget what the real MO of the LGBTQ community is: Equality. There isn’t just one answer that will fix this Racism problem. The work needs to be highly personal and it starts with examining our own selves. It starts with listening to other members of the community without preconceived judgments and really examining the whys and hows of this system (of privilege) operating within our own lives. And look, I really get it. It’s hard to ask yourself why you’re not attracted to Asians, or why you’re still repulsed by femininity, or why this minority still feels left out when you went out of your way to create a safe space for them. We all want to believe that we’re fighting and living for the right things. And I think it’s now time to stop believing and start doing the real work.

As the Tame Impala song came to a close, I stared intently at my Ace Hardware™ Lamp. It was my only source of (literal and somewhat figurative) light, so after being in this dark room holding in my feelings, the warm glow of the light was oddly comforting. I started sobbing and my friend said, “Don’t worry they’re just hypocritical wannabe-liberal white execs… What else can you do?”

“But..,” I responded. “One of them is black.”

With much love, forever and always, Yudho Vanderhof Aditya

--

Yudho is a recipient of the 2016 Director’s Guild of America Best Asian American Student Director Award. He’s working on a feature film about gaysian Americans, if you’d like to share your experiences with him (which he will repay via coffee or tea at most NYC cafés), contact him: 📧: Yudho.aditya@columbia.edu IG: youdough

[meanderingandrambling]

Thank you so much for such a thoughtful (and thorough reply). First off, I get it, surprisingly most of my Jewish buddies don’t have many questions about Judeo-Paganism, but then again I hang around with a very liberal cohort (liberal in the religious sense-though we range from modern-Orthodox to Reconstructionalist, politically we’re all Leftists). But goyishe Pagans have a lot of issues. Not surprising what with the rampant antisemitism within Pagan and occult communities, but still.

I honestly wasn’t really expecting a solid answer. These spiritual practices, even dedicated reconstructionalism, are all still being developed and I think it’s important to compare and talk about what we’re experiencing and doing, no matter how headache-inducing that can be.

Honestly I think the fact that I am undeniably connected to our culture and history really gives me a lot of leeway. I go to plenty of Jewish cultural and religious events with my local leftist organization to say nothing of the small community of leftie Jews I know socially. With regards to my family’s more traditional Reform and Conservative temples it’s pretty much a case of don’t-ask-don’t-tell. My family doesn’t care at all and if my more conservative relatives do they’ve never said anything. Seems as I show a cursory degree of discretion with regards to the polytheistic idolatry they’ll tolerate my presence. Of course it also helps that I have a very humanistic understanding of deity on the first place.

Anyway. Yeah, there’s no evidence that she was or is a deity, but honestly that never really bothered me. I’m fundamentally an animist and while I do worship Hekate my primary focus has always been on figure from medieval European folklore. Think Aradia, Herodias, Nicnevin, ect (I know there’s question about the latter but I’ve never seen a solid primary source that gives evidence for historical worship). Or even Diana, not as Roman deity, but as medieval Witch-Queen, a decidedly later development despite the Murrayite witch cult hypothesis a figure for which there is no evidence of worship. I often think think contemporary understanding of deity vs. spirit is too strict, the categories are fluid and nebulous.

I suppose my largest hesitation is in how negative she is within our traditional folklore. That said, while I’m both Sephardi and Ashkenazi my family tends to follow Sephardi practices and Lilith was never as prominent in that strain of the family. But then again most of her transformation as a feminist figure has come from American Ashkenazi feminism. I’m especially fond of those feminist Jews who write of her as a figure of queer womanhood as well. And to be honest, as a queer lady who is very, very much uninterested in motherhood and very, very much a supporter of reproductive healthcare-including abortion-there’s something I find very compelling about her, villain or not.

What I tell myself now is that while our people regarded her as a demon for millennia we are also not immune to homophobia and sexism, and so much of story is rooted in both. Fear of Lilith as sexuality, especially sexuality beyond the approved bounds of marriage and family. Fear of sterility, fear of death, fear for our young. And as someone who herself embodies some of those social fears, I don’t know, it sometimes feels a bit like being seen, you know?

I’m sorry, Lilith manages to hit all my interests regarding feminism, sexuality, Judaism, and Paganism. I do tend to ramble. I don’t really link to anything with my real name on it here (had a bit of a nazi problem about a eighteen months ago, it’s calmed down a lot since then but still) but I have some very self indulgent writing about her floating around the internet. And here too I guess.

Anyway if anyone’s somehow made it to the bottom of this rambling I also found some less dear copies of Which Lilith? I’m a bookseller in my day-to-day life and highly recommend getting your books from either bookshop.org or biblio.com as opposed to Amazon. Aside from being less, you know, evil you can often find more options. Which Lilith? can be found here starting at 33.04, or at least it can be until I go ahead and snag that copy.

Hey there, I'm sure you're very tired of people asking you Judeo-Pagan shit each and every fucking day so, sorry for that. I'm writing as a cultural/ethnic Jew religious Pagan. I do practice idolatry and by all standards of Judaism I are definitely a heretic. By many more liberal standards I wouldn't even count as a Jew anymore. But that's just a little background. I've really enjoyed how you talk about Lilith both as a specifically Jewish figure and tracking the evolution of her story (1/3)

I really appreciate how you call out goyishe pagans and occultists who want to treat her as if she's separate from Jewish culture. But I was wondering if you could give me any advice or thoughts about engaging with her story as a Jewish Pagan (or just a Pagan, my parents are Jewish and I was raised in a the community culture but just in case you consider idolatry a deal-breaker). I've always been attracted to her due to her connection with sexuality especially as separate from motherhood (2/3) To say nothing of her story in the Alphabet of Ben Sira. I'm just wondering if it's appropriate to worship her in the same way I would, say Hekate or Nicnevin? I find her story fascinating and engaging and I know I want to experience it in a visceral, mystical way, but I suppose I'm uncertain about how I think that can best be done. If you have any ideas I'd by most appreciative. 3/3 --

Hey there! I appreciate the kind words ^^ I definitely understand why people are so curious and want to ask, but it can definitely feel a little stressful when people are constantly like “How do you DO THAT???” when I’m still finding my own way with it. Also, get ready, this is long lol.For what it’s worth, I would still consider you Jewish. :) Judaism is so much more than just the religion and the culture and Peoplehood of it is absolutely just as relevant. ^^ Of course I can’t dictate your practice to you since it’s ultimately your own and I feel like as a Jew anything you make an educated decision on is going to be valid, you know? But I can share nuggets that helped me.

For starters, the more I started looking into her story the less I’ve actually viewed her as a goddess. I sort of came into my research thinking I would end up adding her to my “personal pantheon” like that, but then the more I learned the more she felt like a dark hero-figure. Not quite as deified as Heracles, a little more mystical than Sappho, if that makes sense. Like not a deity in the same way as Hekate but definitely still a powerful individual figure. Most of the playing-up of her as a goddess seems to be a direct result of ceremonial magick fetishizing her, and the Wiccan need to turn everything into a goddess.

As for how to experience her... there’s kind of no good answer to that. The traditional answer would be “don’t,” and the jewish feminist movement of reviewing and reconceptualizing her story is still a fairly modern one. (Also entity work in the context of Judaism at ALL is a dubious one... check the conversation I’ve been having on this blog just recently!) I don’t necessarily agree with the hard “don’t” because nothing about me is traditional, but I feel like it’s still important to approach her with caution since the modern feminist midrashim are still being weighed against centuries of her being nothing more than a baby-killing sheyd, yk? I feel like I’d be a hypocrite if I approached her expecting things to be totally safe and gentle but then side-eyed people who think faeries are only there to help you personally. So, as cheap of an answer as it is, you might just have to really dig in and research her and research her until you feel out what works best for you! One book that I’m really enjoying is this one:

It’s a collection of Jewish women writing about Lilith from all different stances and angles and that is so valuable to me. (I haven’t finished it yet...) It was published in 1998 and is now currently out of print so it’s >$100 on Amazon, but I kept it in my wishlist and waited several months until it dropped down to around $40 and I snatched it up. So if you can find a copy, that might help get a more thoroughly-Jewish perspective of her that isn’t totally “Lilith Bad the End” :)

[antoine-roquentin]

For about five years, Mic.com was a place where readers could go to get moral clarity. In the Mic universe, heroes fought for equality against villains who tried to take it away. Every day, there was someone, like plus-size model Ashley Graham, to cheer for, and someone else, like manspreaders, to excoriate. Kim Kardashian annihilated slut shamers, George Takei clapped back at transphobes. “In a Single Tweet, One Man Beautifully Destroys the Hypocrisy of Anti-Muslim Bigotry.” “This Brave Woman's Horrifying Photo Has Become a Viral Rallying Cry Against Sexual Harassment.” “Young Conservative Tries to Mansplain Hijab in Viral Olympic Photo, Gets It All Wrong.” “The Problematic Disney Body Image Trend We're Not Talking About.” “The Very Problematic Reason This Woman Is Taking a Stand Against Leggings.”The site had an unfiltered voice that spoke on behalf of marginalized individuals. Breitbart called it “SJW Central.” “I think a lot of people in today’s day and age want to know, ‘What are we supposed to be outraged about?’” a former Mic staffer who left the site earlier this year told The Outline. “It seemed as if we were trying to position ourselves as, ‘We are the definition of woke, and this is how you break down this narrative or fight the mainstream.’”But after laying off 25 staffers last week, Mic has a new mandate: pivoting to video. According to a memo that was sent to staff, the site’s new mission is “to make Mic the leader in visual journalism.”

In retrospect, it looks like Mic’s commitment to social justice was never that deep — which surprised and disappointed many of the young ideologues who went to work there. (The Outline spoke to 17 current and former staffers who requested anonymity due to nondisclosure agreements.) Mic chanced upon the social justice narrative, discovered it was Facebook gold, and mined away. Now the quarry is nearly dry....

The site started in 2010 as PolicyMic, an evenhanded, forgettable politics website where unpaid contributors posted commentary that could be upvoted by other site members. The PolicyMic origin story was that Chris Altchek, a Goldman Sachs banker who leaned conservative, was always debating his friend Jake Horowitz, a foreign policy columnist for Change.org who leaned liberal. The two had fierce debates about the issues of the day, and they wanted to convert that spirit into a website “to help our generation talk about the issues that really matter,” Horowitz told The New York Observer. The two met in jazz band at the New York prep school Horace Mann; they started the site when they were 23, each having raised $75,000. Altchek contributed his Goldman bonus....

This Facebook-driven success was no accident. Every time Mic had a hit, it would distill that success into a formula and then replicate it until it was dead. Successful “frameworks,” or headlines, that went through this process included “Science Proves TK,” “In One Perfect Tweet TK,” “TK Reveals the One Brutal Truth About TK,” and “TK Celebrity Just Said TK Thing About TK Issue. Here’s why that’s important.” At one point, according to an early staffer who has since left, news writers had to follow a formula with bolded sections, which ensured their stories didn’t leave readers with any questions: The intro. The problem. The context. The takeaway....

In some communications, Horowitz and Altchek emerged as tone-deaf to the diverse staff they had cultivated. In 2015, when a TV news reporter and a cameraman were fatally shot in Virginia during a live broadcast, Horowitz and Altchek ordered pizza for the office and sent an email to staff letting them know that they could take time off if they felt traumatized by the news. In response, a group of employees of color wrote an email pointing out the fact that the site frequently covered shootings of black people by police and those writers had never been offered pizza or a personal day.

The leadership was excited about elevating underrepresented communities, but employees said that Mic had become a content factory. The site had “no plan” for a Trump win on election night, multiple former employees told me, and improvised by pulling queer people and people of color out of the newsroom, putting them in front of a camera, and having them talk about how they felt. In another instance, a former staffer told me about how Horowitz, who served as editor in chief of the site until mid-2015 and is now editor at large, once interrupted a reporter pitching a video about a woman building rooftop gardens in New Orleans: “‘But, is she black? Is she black?’" the former staffer recalled Horowitz asking, “as if the story would be less impactful had the woman doing the work been white or Hispanic or Martian.” When the site was pushing into original comedy, Altchek told multiple staffers that he wanted to make “the next Chappelle Show, except it’s hosted by a trans woman of color.” Multiple former employees brought up the time Altchek introduced a video about the feminist #FreeTheNipple movement at a large staff gathering with a joke implying that the video still would have been excellent even if it hadn’t included boobs: “Titties aside,” he said, it was a great piece.

Altchek’s biggest misstep, however, was a get-out-the-vote effort called #69TheVote, which launched in late 2016. The conceit was that, while 69 million baby boomers and 69 million millennials are eligible to vote, only the former actually do so. “Boomers have always been on top,” the voiceover in the announcement video says. “Sometimes it seems like they're afraid to try new positions. But we're ready to go down on history” — a voice interrupts — “ahem, in history” — “oh right….” The video was widely disavowed by staff members and lambasted by The Washington Post, Gawker, Vice, and others....

Cahill’s suggestions belied his ignorance of reporting and lack of sensitivity to social issues, according to former staffers. Cahill wanted to replicate the success of New York magazine’s cover story with photos of women who had accused Bill Cosby of rape, said the staffer who covered social justice issues, and suggested they “do a similar roundup” with survivors of sexual assault. “‘Maybe campus rape, maybe not...whatever! Just find rape victims and get them to share their stories!’” the staffer recalled in an email, mocking the tone. “I know it wasn't intended to be so… gross. But to me it demonstrated such a complete lack of understanding of how sensitive those stories are, how difficult it is to find dozens of victims willing to go on the record about the trauma they've experienced, the trust a writer has to earn, not to mention the horror of how many Cosby accusers there were… all of it. It showed me he didn't get how any of the work the reporters were doing was done, or that the reason NYMag's story did well had nothing to do with that ‘story template’ playing well.”

While Cahill was remaking the site in Google’s image, Mic hired NPR NewsExecutive Editor Madhulika Sikka to shore up its journalism cred. Sikka was brought in with the hope that serious journalism could help free Mic from its dependence on Facebook — and that her resume could offset the fact that former news director Jared Keller and former managing editor of news Chris Miles were both found to have plagiarized parts of stories. Seven months later, Sikka was out, telling Ad Age that the job “wasn't quite the right fit for me.” Meanwhile, Cahill was promoted to managing editor of editorial operations in January 2016 and then VP of content in June 2016, according to his LinkedIn profile.

During these experiments, Mic continued to bait Facebook readers into getting worked up over everything: Mark Zuckerberg’s hoodie, a high school teacher in Oregon who doesn’t believe in rape culture, people with bad opinions onThought Catalog, people using bad hashtags, and Zazzle.com. “Mic trafficked in outrage culture,” a former staffer who left in 2017 said. “A lot of the videos that we would publish would be like, ‘Here is this racist person doing a racist thing in this nondescript southern city somewhere.’ There wouldn’t be any reporting or story around it, just, ‘Look at this person being racist, wow what a terrible racist.’” Mic had already exhausted its outrage vocabulary by the time Trump’s election supercharged civil rights violations.

“It ratchets everything up to 11, to a point where if everything is an outrage, nothing is an outrage,” the staffer who left in 2017 said. “Everything is the biggest deal in the world because you’re trying to create traffic, and it desensitizes us to what are actually huge breaks in social and political norms.”

[rachelannc]

ORANGE IS THE NEW BLACK: The Final Season. Netflix. (Credit: Screenrant)

My oh my. What a journey these past seven years have been with Orange Is The New Black. And if you’re anything like me, you’ve been watching this show for the past seven years, and looking back at everything you’ve seen this show do, it just overwhelms you with all kinds of feelings.

I don’t tend to watch a lot of TV as committing to shows and the time and getting hooked onto something isn’t really in me, but Orange was the first show I ever watched on Netflix before Netflix really became what it was (as one of the first-ever Netflix original series made during a time people didn’t really know what Netflix was, giving roles to women, showcasing women’s stories and providing an intriguing setting at a women’s prison released during my slow college summer days, yeah, OITNB really stuck).

If you’ve managed to finish watching the final season, read on ahead if you don’t care for any potential spoilers.

OITNB was truly revolutionary. When it introduced us to Piper Chapman in its first season — an upper-middle-class white blonde entering prison — little did we know that she was just a “Trojan horse” to tell the stories of women who rarely get told: women of color, immigrant women, queer women, poverty-stricken women, women with addictions, mental illnesses, disabilities, etc. OITNB was a true pioneer in the way it told these very important, very under shadowed stories, and left us with some of its best episodes to date in its final season.

The main thing that has been OITNB‘s driving force is its ability to humanize characters

… characters we may have grown to hate or dislike simply because of their behaviors and actions with the characters we loved in the prison world. The flashbacks helped give us context as to why people are the way they are (it made early characters like Pornstache seem even lovable), which is something that is important and something we all should realize.

These women are women just like us. They have become a product of the system we are all placed into, and perhaps they lost their way. They found themselves at the wrong place at the wrong time, or got caught up in something seedy just for the sake of trying to survive.

In season seven, Tamika (Susan Hayward), an old friend of Taystee’s (Danielle Brooks) who became a prison guard at the same prison Taystee was incarcerated at, loses her job as warden at Litchfield — a job she got to become a “scapegoat” for black women and diversity for the uppers in the system, but a job she ended up proving to be terrific at, as she implemented programs to try and help make the prison a better place for the women. Taystee even started tutoring other inmates to pass their GED test.

When Tamika gets fired, she says she’s relieved, because no matter what good she or others may continue to do, “The system will always be what it is, and there’s not a damn thing I can do.” (That is one hell of a line.)

OITNB did a great job of highlighting and revealing the problems in our system — and how undeniably unfair they can be.

No matter what you do or how good you can try to be, the system always feels against you, and you feel helpless. In the case of Taystee, the systems of oppression became too much and almost impossible to fight or dismantle (even Mr. Caputo and the villainous Fig have tried their best to bring justice to the prison). A life sentence in prison for Taystee can make you question why you should even continue to try or fight, as you reason that ending your life is the only way out.

One of the most heartbreaking moments came in the form of Pennsatucky. She’s been there since season one and become one of the most lovable rednecks the shows ever had. She’s got a good heart, is widely misunderstood, and only wants the best for others and for herself. Her learning disability may hit home to so many people, and the fact that she did pass her GED, all thanks to Taystee, only to find that out after Pennsatucky lost her life… That was an immediate tearjerker. And a real loss that doesn’t sugarcoat anything. (Ugh.)

One of the storylines I really loved this season was the relationship Nicky (Natasha Lyonne) found with Shani Abboud (Marie Lou Nahhas) in the immigration detention center. For such a brief character in the whole of the series, Shani’s story was so telling, riveting and important. Her story of deportation, but also of female genital mutilation within the Muslim culture, was so revealing. I’m glad shows like OITNB exist to shine a light on these issues and cultural differences that do in fact exist, but never see the light of day. Her presence was refreshing, and we got to see so many layers come to light of Nicky as well, for how broken she is but how much of a heart she has for everyone around her. (And I have to add, I’ve got such a girl crush on Shani, as straight as I am, ha!)

There are so many layers to this series, but as Piper has always been the one that tied the whole series together, we can’t help but feel and relate to her. (After all, most of this shows viewers might relate to the white liberal that is Piper?) As she gets released from Litchfield and transitions into everyday life, the struggles of that life out of prison become so real. Paying rent, finding a job, keeping up with your probation, and trying to stay out of trouble? Taystee made that very clear (and so did many of the other inmates) as they found their way back into prison, after being released, and it all just becomes one huge circle and cycle that repeats itself (for Aleida, “I’ve got people in there, and I’ve got nobody out here,” is so telling).

Piper’s moment with Larry when he laid it all out on her — for who he thinks she is, and read her and her actions like a book (as someone who has had her whole life laid out in front of her, this perfect, beautiful life, but one day maybe meant nothing to her, as she craved something different, which she found through Alex, and that drama continues to fuel her, even when she’s got this perfect woman in the form of Zelda in front of her) — was just so incredibly telling. (I fearfully might be able to relate to Piper in this case, quite frankly…)

We begin to know ourselves and our relationships better through these characters, and as these characters get tested, we see what drives characters to do what they do, which makes this series so damn compelling. It’s a series that has always been about everyone else but Piper, and we can all relate to it.

This series has opened up so many conversations over the years, and when it started in 2013, it began to highlight pressing topics during its run. The Black Lives Matter movement was at an all-time high when we saw the death of Poussey (Samira Wiley), due to an untrained guard trying to stop a fight he thought she was engaging in, only to accidentally suffocate her to her death. Then came the prison riots and the unjust f**ked up system that goes into saving the upperhands’ lives and and reputations at the sake of the inmates.

Although season seven as a whole seemed to be its most focused yet, with each episode and every scene serving up some hell of moments, powerful scenes, damn funny moments and the humor you find in these women who find happiness while even in the sh*ttiest of circumstances… I think that’s what this show’s all about.

Life will always throw you curveballs and tough moments, and it’ll never get any easier, as the system will always work against you and out of your favor, but, you can find happiness. You can find joy in the little everyday moments and find your life’s purpose and make someone’s day that much better.

All of the exits in this show were so beautifully raw, painful, unfair and real. The deportation of poor Maritza (Diane Guerrero), who had grown up in the U.S. her entire life, just felt so unfair! And while I had wished to see more of the other inmates’ stories whom we had fallen in love with over the years, such as Soso, Big Boo, Yoga Jones, and all the others in the Columbus, OH prison, this show seemed to do its part (I’d hope someday they’ll continue these stories of the other women). The last 20 minutes of the last episode felt a little rushed to get all the cameos of the other women in, but, understandably so, it was still a lovely send-off.

There’s not much else I can say at the moment, but I think for anyone who’s watched this show knows the great impact its had. Thank you, Orange, for what you’ve done and given us, and all the conversations you’ve sparked and platforms given for so many viewers and women over the years.

Orange, forever. 🧡

Have you watched the final season? Do you watch OITNB? If so, I’d love to know your thoughts on the season or series as a whole!

My Thoughts After 7 Years of ‘Orange is the New Black’ My oh my. What a journey these past seven years have been with Orange Is The New Black…

[thesffcorner]

Reign of the Fallen

Reign of the Fallen is the first book in a YA fantasy duology written by Sarah Glenn Marsh. It follows Odessa, a master necromancer who lives in the Kingdom of Karthia. The King of Karthia has ruled for centuries, resurrected by his royal necromancers, and the Kingdom has entirely forbidden change. When she and her partner Evander see the corpse of their former master during one of the King’s resurrections, they stumble onto a plot to overthrow the King; and possibly destroy necromancy forever. I went into this book with pretty high expectations, because I had heard people say it was their favorite book of last year and that it’s a really unique fantasy, that happens to center queer characters. I have to say that while that last bit is true, I was more than a little disappointed by the book.

Let’s start with the writing. This is not Marsh’s first book, but in many ways it feels like it is; from what I know she’s primarily a children's author, and despite the copious amounts of sex/making out in the book, this felt very young. Had it not been for the sexual content and rather violent deaths, I would firmly say that this could be a middle-grade book, since it’s so simple in its writing and world-building. Karthia doesn’t feel like a real place; none of the descriptions stood out or made me feel like I had a grasp on the culture, customs or even geography of the place, and for the most part I felt like this could have been set in any generic fantasy Kingdom. I’m not saying I need a Game of Thrones style detailed map and history, but having a bit more creativity in how the land is described, what the people wear, what they eat or drink would have been helpful. It’s not just the physical descriptions of the place that are a problem, it’s also the history and logic of the country. This is a Kingdom that’s stuck in time, since the Elder King is afraid of change and has banned it. And yet, the consequences of this seem to be nonexistent. First, how come there are no people, especially ones who live in the Ash, where the Black Plague is apparently abundant, who have ever rebelled against the King? How come no one is concerned or angry that because he has made no improvements over the centuries he has ruled, his subjects are dying off, and how has the plague not spread further? Moreover what doesn't change exactly? Are people still farming the same way? What about new generations? How are there very few mages if there's more people? If the dead can't reproduce, how are there any living royals left if the King has ruled for centuries? There is some mention of the palace being added more towers and rooms to host the ever expanding royal population, but wouldn't that be change? Or is it only change if it benefits the poor? Even the little things that should build on the world are neglected, like fashion trends and clothes staying the same for centuries. Even villagers in far away provinces have made no secret efforts to make improvements in their lives, or rebel; the most we get is some contraband coffee . There is an interesting set up here for a potentially serious situation if there are new types of mages that exist, or people from the Ash being fed up with being forced to live in squalid conditions with no work, but we never get any pay off. The atmosphere in the book isn't oppressive either; we never get the sense that things are bad or people are unhappy, which would make no sense considering how things are presented to run in this place. For a better example of what being frozen in time would actually look like, and is an inspired take on this same concept, I suggest An Enchantment of Ravens. The biggest issue I had with the book is that everything is very surface level, and even the characters can't escape it. All of the characters suffer from inconsistent characterization and informed traits, but also a specific thing that FPS books do that I hate, which is where characters flat out tell you exactly what they are feeling and thinking. For example: we have Odessa, our lead. She is afraid that if without being a master necromancer, she would be nobody. She has no family and no name, outside of her work. First, this is not true; we are shown from the start that Odessa has a loving relationship and lots of close friends; second do you know how I know this is her central conflict? She flat out spells it out for us, in chapter 1. We don't get any scenes or moments of her being devoted to the job, no points where her being a workaholic meddles with her personal life or threatens something else she cares about, there are no characters who react poorly to her being an orphan (in fact everyone seems to love and care about her). Her being the king's favorite necromancer is mentioned several times, but the King has barely any presence in the store, so we don't really get to see what kind of relationship they have. The most we get are a few moments of her being defensive or bitter that Evander wants to leave Karthia, (which is forbidden), but it doesn't make much sense to me why she wouldn't want to leave if they are so devoted to each-other. He too is a necromancer and if he can find work and travel in the outside world, why couldn't she? He's offering to leave his title behind, so if they were to leave Karthia, they would both be nobodies so I genuinely didn't understand why this was a fight they were having at all. Odessa isn't the only one who suffers from this, though she is hit hardest because we get the story from her PoV. The other characters have this same issue; they spell out their character traits, opinions, feelings and even entire relationships, and there is never any ambiguity about what they are thinking or feeling. The most egregious example was the relationship between Master Cymbre and Odessa. They are supposed to have this really tender mother-daughter bond, and we never see any of it. We are told by Odessa how she was raised and mentored by Cymbre, we are told she considers her a mother and how she always counted on her for guidance and help, but on page, they have 2 conversations, both including other characters, and the few scenes they do have alone, they aren't even communicating. I don't understand how you can fuck up a mentor figure this badly; Master Cymbre was a completely superfluous character and she might as well not have been in the book. Even the conceit of this book was not taken to its full potential. First, the Deadlands were woefully underdeveloped; I liked the idea of the stillness, treachery of the spirits and changing landscape, but the writing didn't convey any atmosphere. The Deadlands weren't creepy, they weren't eerie or sad, they were just there. This is especially sad, because the Shades that lurk there are supposed to be what nightmares are made off. The Shades too were just there. They are supposed to be incredibly powerful and repulsive, but the writing just didn't convince me of either. There was so much potential to describe them as this amalgamation of bile and rotting corpses strung together by dark magic, but they are never written as particularly threatening; most of the time when they kill someone we are just told they screamed and fell dead, which has no bite as something terrifying. The only creativity I could see in the book were the mechanics of the dead. I liked the idea of them being these slowly rotting corpses, being constantly cold and hungry, of having to cover all their skin in case someone lays eyes on them and they become Shades. There is a real sense of dread about these creatures, and if Marsh took the concept to the extreme, we could have had this genuinely deep, interesting exploration of what the price for bringing someone to life would be, and if being alive was worth the misery of such an existence, and the constant peril of turning into a monster. For a book about necromancers, necromancy is a subplot. We go to the Deadlands and we find a spirit, but we never get to see what a raising actually looks like. This happens a lot in the book, where what could be an interesting scene or concept is just skipped over. The plot was very simple, and I immediately guessed who the main culprit would be. Even if I had any doubt, there is a scene in the book that outright tells us who it is, but Odessa is too stupid and naive to notice, which is not a good sign from the supposed best necromancer in the land. The character too is a complete waste of potential; they are not developed beyond a very surface level, we never get any hints that they are secretly planning a coup, they never act like they could be against the way the Kingdom is ruled, and yet it was still so predictable they would be the villain. There could have been a really interesting moral and philosophical debate about the price of what they have done being worth the change that it will inevitably bring about to the Kingdom, and how such sacrifice is necessary for things to change for the better. If it had tied in with the poor and plague victims it would have had some actual bite, but no; they are just a one dimensional villain and the good guys are good, even if they are objectively wrong. One big focus of the book, is interestingly enough, addiction. I was not a fan of this plot point, even though it was one of the few things in the book that were done well, mostly because I find no joy or investment in reading about a self-destructive character spiraling deeper and deeper into lethargy and misery while all their friends watch and do nothing. I would have been more interested if the things Odessa does while being addicted to the potion actually had any consequences, like destroying her friendship with certain characters, leaving someone to die because of her incompetence, or hurting someone in her daze, but no. I also found the rehabilitation part too short and inconsequential; again, we skip over most of the harrowing stuff, and 7 days pass in the span of a few pages so that Odessa can be back in business like usual. It felt like a massive inconsequential detour, and it served more to pad out the page count than actually developing and informing her character. Let’s talk about the characters. I already mentioned how the main villain was a wasted opportunity, but so were their allies. They all had a compelling reason to do what they were doing, and if they had been better developed and we actually got to spend more time with them, we could have seen how the state of the Kingdom had brought them to their point. Instead, what we get is one character standing in the way of Evander and Odessa's romance... right. Ok. Danail, Simon and Jax were fine. Simon was Odessa's brother, in that they were both raised at the same convent as kids. The fact he calls her 'sister' all the time, made me cringe, because it's not a title, it's supposed to be sibling talk (do you call your siblings brother and sister as anything but a joke? Yeah, didn't think so). There is a bit about Simon being from a noble family and having night terrors about being separated from them, but we never follow up on it, so it just seems... irrelevant. Danail is Simon's boyfriend, and he has no personality. He is feminine, which I appreciated, in that he wears eyeliner and cares about clothes and fashion, but he neither does much nor contributes much to the plot, other than when Simon tells us they have been fighting. Jax was probably the best developed of the bunch and I actually liked him best. There are some interesting implications about his relationship to Evander, which if intentional are never followed up on. He and Odessa have a thing which was actually written surprisingly well, and he's the only character that exhibits any nuance, in that he doesn't flat out state what he wants and shows care or anger through his actions. However, what he Odessa do in the guise of comfort and moving on is never really explored fully, and I'm having a hard time believing that their 'friendship' could survive beyond the point that Odessa gets sober. We are presented this volatile angry character, and yet he's completely fine that Odessa uses him as an emotional clutch, and negates any bond they might have developed while grieving? Nah. For the girls, we have Valoria, Mereday and Odessa. Valoria was the least interesting character; she is a princess and an inventor. She wears glasses. She is shy. That’s about it for her character. She loses her entire family in one day and has nothing to say for it. Great. Mereday was more interesting, but again, it's all surface level stuff. There could have been something truly interesting about her nursing this crush on Odessa since childhood, but staying away because she has family problems, and because she doesn't want to get in the way of Odessa and Evander. However, we get very little, if any of this, and instead we focus on a really ill-timed romance. Mereday loses her girlfriend and brother in the span of a month, and yet she's fussing about Odessa and kissing her? People process grief in different ways, but this was just... woefully underdeveloped for it not to be squeaky as a plot point. I already talked about Odessa, but I'd like to point out that she could have been a more interesting character if she had been written consistently. She's mean and selfish, which is fine as a starting point for her character, if the book actually addressed these traits. She uses people left and right, is completely immersed in herself and her own pain and loss, that she is incredibly rude to Evander's mother and sister, and dismisses their feelings. She shrugs off her mentor and her friends, and yet at no point does she experience consequences for her actions, not to mention that she feels jealous and entitled if they are friends with each-other or care about anyone more than they do about her. I'm not saying I want Odessa to be alone, I'm saying I want to see her work to regain the people in her life, and make amends for what she does. There was the opportunity here for a genuinely interesting character arc, and instead we get... kissing. The other problem with the characters was that they all sounded exactly the same. With the exception of Jax who swings between kind of sexist and jokey, to violent and jockey, everyone else is indistinguishable. Simon is supposed to be sarcastic, but his jabs and jokes are indistinguishable from the ones Odessa or Evander make. It’s a fantasy book where the characters sound like they stepped out of high school, and I didn't much care for that. Overall, I did not like this book. It was too short, too superficial and too underdeveloped to be engaging. It read like a first draft of a story that’s in desperate need of some personality and editing, and even the cool concept and possibly interesting world couldn’t save it.

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