#which i've seen none of

[fourcolour-ace]

I have a very developed post-Fourze AU that I don't share publicly because

1. Everything in it is based around one of the big reveals of the show's endgame

and

2. I fear no one will like it

[ronanlynchbf]

tshirt that says NO LIVE ORGANISM CAN CONTINUE FOR LONG TO EXIST SANELY UNDER CONDITIONS OF ABSOLUTE REALITY

[bixels]

tarpit site.

[foone]

In 2006, the Tamil-language film Paramasivan was released, about a criminal sentenced to death but employed as an assassin instead.

It is, of course, a localized remake of Kartoos, the 1999 Hindi-language film, in which a criminal is trained to assassinate by government agents who have him on tight leash, having already sentenced him to death.

Kartoos (meaning "cartridge", as in firearms) is directly based on Point of No Return, a 1993 American film about an assassin who is trained instead of having her death sentence carried out.

This film was released internationally as Assassin, or (in France), as Nom de Code: Nina (Codename: Nina). Anyway this film is a remake of Nikita.

Nikita is the 1990 French film by Luc Besson, about a criminal, sentenced to death, works as an assasin, yeah. That story. It was released outside of France as La Femme Nikita. This is the original, Nikita.

Which of course should not be confused with the 1997 Canadian TV adaptation: Nikita!

Nikita (also known as La Femme Nikita outside of Canada) is (well, this one is) about a innocent woman sentenced to the death penalty, but forced to become an assassin instead.

The same name, identically, was used for the 2010 American TV Adaptation Nikita.

In this one, it's about a woman who has already been through a whole-ass Nikita situation (which I trust you should understand by now what one of those is) and is now trying to get revenge on the secret organization that put her through a Nikita-Situation.

But the first remake was the 1991 Hong Kong action film 黑猫, or Black Cat.

黑猫 (Black Cat) is about a woman who is sentenced to a Nikita-ass situation. This time she's on the leash of the CIA. And then there's a sequel, 1992's 黑貓II：刺殺葉利欽, or Black Cat 2: The Assassination of President Yeltsin! *

黑貓II：刺殺葉利欽, or Black Cat 2: The Assassination of President Yeltsin is about ... exactly what you'd expect, really. She's still in a Nikita-ass situation and now they want her to kill the then-president of Russia, Boris Yeltsin.

Is that enough? No! No of course not. Because there's also 2017's Korean adaptation, 악녀 (The Villainess)!

악녀 (The Villainess) is a loose adaptation where she's already an assassin before she gets her death faked.

I'm not even going to go into the canceled PS2 game.

But yeah. There's a surprising number of these Nikitas.

* BTW if this was the point where you went "wait is foone just making up movies?", I'd like to say: thank you. Thank you for thinking I'm creative enough to make up BLACK CAT 2: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT YELTSIN.

[factcheckingmclennon]

pyramus & thisbe, the cats: fact or fiction?

starting this blog off on a positive note because when i deep dived & found out this was real i was floored because it does genuinely sound like fanfiction but...

"did paul mccartney really have cats named pyramus & thisbe after the lovers him and john played?"

and let's go to a read more for the source/deep dive!

so this is one that floats around a lot un-sourced. in fact, when doing this deep dive, i found quite a few fan forums INSISTING it was fake because they only ever see mclennon shippers saying it. but lo and behold........

in this interview from Animals' Agenda, 1999:

P: Oh, I’d love to tell you about the animals. I personally never had a pet growing up, because my mom and dad both worked. And even the day we saw free puppies going and my brother and I thought, “Definite, we’ll get one,” we couldn’t have one. So my first pet was when I was living alone as one of the Beatles and I got an Old English sheepdog called Martha, and I loved her dearly, she was beautiful, she was really good for me; we were good for each other. I remember John Lennon coming ’round and saying, “God, I’ve never seen you with an animal before.” I was being so affectionate it took him aback, he’d not seen that side of my character. Because you don’t do that with humans-not as obviously anyway. And then I had two cats called Pyramus and Thisbe, which showed my literate bent, and then I had three-they all had to be cool names, of course-that were called Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. And then as a family, Linda and I, after Martha died, we then got another Old English sheepdog and we eventually had a litter by the one after her. We kept two of the puppies, so that meant we’ve got three now. I have four dogs at home, three English sheepdogs and Stella’s dog, the mutt. She’d hate me to say that!

(source)

now... did he gift john pyramus?

i can't find a source on that one that isn't a mclennon blog/forum. however there's just not enough to prove it one way or the other & it's not out of the realm of possibility that he would've given pyramus to john, especially since there don't seem to be any photos of paul & pyramus even though he mentions the cat as one that he owned. also, i do feel like i've seen some quote from john where he just casually mentions the cat by name floating around? but i can't find it, so if anyone wants to add it, go ahead! for now, that part of this is getting rated....

[front-facing-pokemon]

[princessefemmelesbian]

Transandrophobia truthers are so damn racist and white oh my fucking god y'all actually piss me the fuck off every time you tokenize Black and brown men for your stupid as fuck "mra but make it trans-inclusive" ideology created by a creepy guy with a corrective rape fetish(something I'll never let up on for as long as I live, btw). If I ever see another one of y'all say "Black and brown men face discrimination because they're seen as overly masculine and that's why masculinity in men is oppressed in this society" I will literally kill myself. Stop using Black and brown men as brownie points for your bullshit arguments about misandry being real when you don't have the slightest idea how racialized oppression works. White boys are so annoying and dumb istfg.

@punkeropercyjackson @punknicodiangelo @pinkpinkstarlet

[iamthepulta]

The best thing about Italy and Europe is that linen just- exists here. I can go buy a shitty cheap 100% linen dress like I would go to Fry's and buy a shitty cheap 100% polyester dress in America. Absolutely revolutionary for my wardrobe. I can't actually buy wardrobe enhancements because I have a carry-on suitcase, but the fact I still have the option is amazing.

[grassbreads]

I've been rereading more slowly through SGRS since I binged through the whole thing in one day the first time, and god.

In Kikuhiko's first rakugo performance after he and Sukeroku do their play, he does a story about a woman searching for someone to commit double suicide with her. Specifically, the only bits of his longer performance that are transcribed into the manga are snippets of this central character picking out and beginning to seduce the man she wants to target.

Kiku finds himself when he does the play with Sukeroku. He finds something fundamental in both the female role he puts on and the way he's able to command the audience's attention to him. And that's what becomes his connection to rakugo—it's a place where he can find belonging and adoration showing off that aspect of himself. So as the first performance after that, Kiku's performance of Shinagawa Shinjuu is a beginning of sorts. It's the start of his true love affair with rakugo.

And in that moment, we're shown Kiku performing a scene of a woman choosing the man with whom she'll commit lovers' suicide. Kiku—the man who decades later muses constantly about taking rakugo as an art form to death with him—starts his career in earnest performing as a woman who's just decided who she wants to take to death with her.

Then the scene goes on, and we get a little snippet of Kiku as the woman beginning to seduce her lover to death. In the same way as Kiku is seducing his audience into his story, and just as rakugo is truly seducing him. Kiku is the seductress in the story and in his performance, but by nature of the art form, he's also the naive man seduced to death. He's playing all roles. If Kiku wants his love affair with rakugo to end in death, then equally, rakugo leads him to his own demise.

As an old man, Kiku sets fire to the theater and just about makes that double suicide a reality. The building is eventually rebuilt, however, and Kiku's family and friends carry on the torch of rakugo. It's only Kiku himself who dies not too long after. He's saved in the moment by his chosen family and connections, yes. He says that he was ultimately denied his lovers' suicide. And yet, his final performance to the dead seems to mark the beginning of the end for him.

Kiku's first performance after the play is, in every way, a brilliant moment of intertextuality. Kikuhiko is Osome deciding she wants to die, implicitly tying his discovery of what rakugo means to him to suicide. He's Osome choosing who to die with as he truly chooses his art form. He's Osome entrancing the audience like they're the foolish Kinzo. He's Osome seducing rakugo itself to die with him—taking the first true steps down the path that will lead to him becoming the be all end all of the art (emphasis on the potential for him to end all). He's Kinzo being seduced by the offer of suicide with rakugo. He's Kinzo being entranced by the adoration of the audience like Osome's so-called love.

For this moment of Kiku coming into his own and entering his doomed love affair with rakugo, there's no narrative that could have suited him better.

[natjennie]

complaint incoming.

[wild-at-mind]

When you tell people they should be sending every spare penny to their chosen Gaza fundraiser or they are Bad. But then it all gets a bit too stressful so you have to leave tumblr. :(

[repurposedmeatlocker]

Ngl sometimes I feel embarrassed checking my Letterboxd because it feels like everyone is always watching way more movies than me.

[o-uncle-newt]

I read Possession by AS Byatt after people told me "if you liked Gaudy Night you'll like this" and WELL.

Warning- spoilers for both books abound below!

So it sounded great- as a lapsed academic (though not in the field of literature by any means) there's a part of me that loves reading about academia because it's full of such obsessive people, and this book seemed to be exactly that and so I was excited.

Then I read it, and on the one hand, my first thought was "all these people are dull as heck, the only sane modern-day one is Val, and at the end of the day the historical stuff is just two people having an affair, who cares." My second thought was "there's just enough stuff here that makes me think that maybe the author knows that all of this is stupid, like the fact that Val is obviously one of the few sane ones here." But the ending made me doubt even that. Essentially, and I say this even as that lapsed academic, the author could not convince me to care about the important things at stake here, and as a result couldn't get me to care about the people who only seemed to care about those things.

I didn't care about Ash and LaMotte- they came across as two people high on their own supply who had a tawdry affair. (And each of them is the less interesting person, as a person, than their official partner!) As a result of not caring about them, I couldn't POSSIBLY care about Roland, Maud, and the rest of their crew, because their only functions were to be possessed by, and weirdly possessive of, these two entirely unworthy individuals, whose in-universe historical and literary significance Byatt couldn't convince me of, and to use that possession as a mirror for their own very lame romance. Beyond that they're utterly uninteresting, and there isn't even meant to BE much beyond that so it's not that surprising.

Anyway, I didn't like this book much, but it still made me think a lot. And there's a way in which a certain kind of person might say "well if it made you think then that's surely a sign of some positive quality" and... maybe? I don't know. I didn't hate all of it, and some parts were interesting, and I do have a whole separate list of things about the book that bug me including a breakdown of some of the book's (perceived by me) themes that I particularly disliked lol. Perhaps I'll post it another time. So I guess you can say it spurred me to thought, but loads of things that I don't like do that, and the only positive thing that that draws from me is that they're not downright dull.

The thing is, after finishing the book I was immediately struck by that "if you like Gaudy Night..." element, because it has a situation that felt weirdly similar (if for totally different reasons)- a young scholar stealing a letter from a library/archive. The circumstances are different- in Gaudy Night, the scholar does it to hide its existence so as not to contradict his thesis, and in Possession, the scholar does it so as to explore the document further, though still secretly- but there are still some interesting parallels vis a vis class. Possession goes into the class thing more than Gaudy Night does, but neither book goes much into it- the scholar is lower-class and someone who has scraped their way to their position, and is encumbered by a female partner of lower social and academic standing, and in the end they are juxtaposed against scholars who come from an elevated class and who have more money and opportunity. In Gaudy Night, Arthur Robinson is judged by the likes of Lord Peter Wimsey and a college full of women who don't have to do anything but think, teach, write, and grade papers; in Possession, Roland has to convince a bunch of academics of standing and resources to take a chance on him (and while this is more about money than class, he's the main one who's like "maybe it's good if Lady Bailey gets her wheelchair"). Byatt elides over this at the end by having him magically become in demand and on his way to achieving his academic goals, but I think in both books, the class element really could have taken on more significance in the text.

(I'd add as well that Byatt pits the upper-class and moneyed Maud, who of course is doing things for "the right reasons," vs the evil American businessman who clearly... doesn't care about Ash enough? Despite how much he clearly and obviously cares about Ash? The book was way more interesting when he seemed like a valid rival to the British team, who only thought that they deserved the letters more because of their obsession, rather than how it turned out at the end where the American dude is an actual cartoon villain. What made him genuinely less worthy besides having money without class, and of course having the bad taste to be American? What makes one scholar's possession more justified? Sayers was never this unsubtle.)

So that made me think more about Possession vs Gaudy Night, and the thing is, there are actual living people in Gaudy Night! Say what you will about the unworldliness of the academics at Shrewsbury, but you get a very keen view of their personalities by the end, even as they are (by necessity given the rules of their world) subsumed by academia, or subsume themselves in it. And the people who do fall in love are REALLY in love, and you understand why...

And somehow a book from 1935 feels far more interrogative of the possession (or lack thereof) found in love and romance, and just about the place of women in academia and relationships overall, than one from the late 80s. In Gaudy Night, Harriet accepts Peter once she has determined that despite their power differential (brought on by class, money, history, and to a degree gender) he will not threaten her personhood, because he has proven himself to her. In Possession, Maud accepts Roland because she has the power (money, class, position, even height) and so Roland actually cannot threaten her- and yet still that final scene is about her being taken by him, basically to prove some kind of a point. In contrast, in Busman's Honeymoon, the euphemistic sex scenes are about Peter trying to please Harriet.

When I say it's to prove a point, I'm paraphrasing Byatt, incidentally- who said: "And in the case of Maud I had made it very inhibiting. She was a woman inhibited both by beauty (which actually isn't very good for very beautiful women because they feel it isn't really them people love) and she was also inhibited by Feminism, because she had all sorts of theories that perhaps she would be a more noble kind of woman if she was a lesbian. And so she was a bit stuck. And Roland was timid because I am naturally good at timid men. It's the kind of men I happen to like. He's a timid thinking man, so of course it took him the whole book." I mean... yikes, but also that explains a lot. Maud can only bring herself to be with a man who is weak/effeminate (?) enough to justify whatever weird psyche Byatt has imagined up for her, but still she needs to get over her inhibitions and under him because... reasons. I don't know.

(Height is also interesting here as a point of contrast- Byatt makes Maud taller than Roland to make a point about how on the one hand she retains the power but on the other hand there is now even more of her that has to surrender. Peter and Harriet are the same medium height and wear the same size gown.)

I think the thing that most stuns me is how regressive Possession feels when it comes to gender politics on relationships than Gaudy Night does. I'd need a whole other post to talk about this, but the theme of Possession seems to me to be "relationships that produce things (whether art or children) are worth more than ones that don't." Roland is better with Maud than with Val because Val is a second rate scholar who drags him down (while supporting him financially) and Ash is better with LaMotte than with Ellen because LaMotte didn't only inspire his writing (Ellen's contributions are described only in the negative "didn't impede"), she gave him the child that Ellen refused to. Incidentally, in both cases it's the man pursuing a relationship that will give HIM something... But, to paraphrase Peter in Busman's Honeymoon, one wouldn't want to regard relationships in that agricultural light. Gaudy Night is about how two people can produce great things without each other but choose to be with each other for their own, and each other's, happiness. They aren't each less apart, and as I noted in a prior post, they don't need to solve cases together or conjoin their work in order for their relationship to be worth something. It is worth it for them to be together because it encourages some kind of inner balance within them and between them, as people. They enjoy collaborating but that is by no means the basis of their love (and, incidentally, I think that a lot of, if not most, detective series romances fail this basic test of "would they have fallen in love if they were accountants who met on a dating app." Peter and Harriet definitely would have- would, say, Albert Campion and Amanda Fitton have? I do NOT think so).

And here's the thing- another reason why Byatt's quote above is so off-putting is that it makes it clear that not only in the text but on a meta level, the purpose of the relationships is to prove a Point. I found Roland and Maud to have zero chemistry, and honestly I was expecting them to get together 3/4 of the way through and split up at the end when it turned out they had nothing in common- it seemed like that kind of book. I was kind of stunned when they only got together at the end in an "it's meant to be" way because nothing about it seemed meant to be. They were stuck together by that one thing and they each apparently needed the relationship for some kind of self-actualization or historical rhyming or other. (Whatever I say about Ash and LaMotte... at least they seemed to like each other!)

Peter and Harriet... they get together because they love each other. Do they change over the course of Gaudy Night, and over the course of the other books they share together? Of course they do. But if it makes sense, I'll put it this way- Harriet doesn't accept Peter's proposal as proof that she got over her hangups, Harriet gets over her hangups so that she can accept Peter's proposal. Her hangups only matter because they were keeping her from this particular kind of happiness- she was a fully actualized person even with them. She is a person who does things for human reasons so that she can build a mutually happy life with the person she loves, not a little plot mannequin being moved around in order to tell the author's desired Message. People can say what they want about Gaudy Night and its flaws, but despite the intricacies of its construction, nobody can call the characters' actions and motivations anything but brutally human.

Whether within their universes or on a meta level, the books have SUCH different things to say about the value and nature of love, the place of and purpose of sex, the place of art and intellectual accomplishment in relationships, all of the above in the context of femininity… and I can't help but feel that each time, Gaudy Night wins the contest. It's possible I'm missing something major about Possession, and maybe sometime I'll post the rest of my notes about the things I disliked and people can tell me what I'm wrong about- but if nothing else it made me appreciate Gaudy Night even more, so for that I'm grateful.

[2prince2sparkle]

Losing my mind hearing that people think being punitively misgendered as they/ them only happens to she/her trans women and not also he/ him trans men

Edit: glad I dug through the shitty comments enough to find op saying she didn't mean the phrasing of a particular sentence to imply this didn't happen to trans men, she wasn't expecting the post to blow up and was just writing about the things she's experiencing in a casual rant way. Internet ok sometimes. (Still other people in the comments thinking the above though.)

[majoris]

tagged by @kakinou (🖤) to post nine of my favourite first watches of 2023

which was a mission impossible (yes this is a pun, a MI pun 🫡) since it looks like I've only seen 39 new (not necessarily new new) films this year ??!! And I really don't like the word favourite and I don't do those (if you've been here long enough you're well aware) AND the films I've seen were 🌚 meh, mostly but here we are, an eclectic selection maybe but even if not my favourite, all of those movies did leave some kind of imprint on me in one way or another.

tagging 9, for fun and movie recs: @iceinherheart-kissonherlips, @colorfulmetaphors, @emotionalsupportwarcriminal, @sothischickshe, @fatalgift, @nynazenik, @lonely-night, @ressariot, @sdktrs12 (as always, tagging 'cause I think it's nice, but there's no pressure ever to do anything, feel free to ignore me)

[uselessgaywhovian]

so how's everyone else's saturday night going