#which would be hysterical

[bestworstcase]

I feel like (different anon) half of the fandom doesn’t even care about Salem in the sense that regardless of what Her goal is? To be fair in my corner I’ve seen more individual character hatred rather than “this plot doesn’t make sense” hatred. Or ppl just saying the plot sucks without offering why they think so which is the majority of rwby “criticism”. But Salem being the key to the end of the show has been very well telegraphed since the end of volume 3. She started as this faceless monster, a creature to hate, the one who killed their headmaster and plunged the world into war. Then we learned that Oz was also keeping secrets and outright lying, so that knocked him off of the Trusted Adult pedestal (tho he has always been kinda shady but in terms of story formula that’s what I mean). Volume 6??? The Lost Fable?? Still so amazing. Salem very literally gets humanized in the eyes of our characters. She still did all of those awful things but she’s a Person now rather than an Entity. Those moments of confrontation (Ironwood’s office with Ruby, Yang while in the whale, Oscar.” We get to see her talking to her Evil Guy Crew. We see her have emotions.

AND THEN THE BROTHER GODS once thought of as entities much like how Salem was seen by the cast in the beginning. Yes they are still gods but not in the sense that at least I was thinking. They came From somewhere. And yes Salem was the first to discover they were fallible but knowing what V9 told us helped me put it into perspective

So the last arch being about fully learning what Salem wants and then, probably possibly, deciding how to help alongside with it. I think ppl get upset bc they view that as “oh yeah all the ppl she killed and lives she ruined don’t matter she’s our bestie mow” kind of Joining with Salem. When im seeing it as a more Neo agreeing to work with Cinder type deal. If Salem wants to stop the gods, get revenge, make them humble, and the gods return and want to wipe out remnant For Good, I’d say that’s a common goal our kids can get behind.

rwby is a cool show with cool villains and I enjoy it a lot and also your thoughts about it sorry this is so long

the thing with salem and the, like, common fandom interpretation of her and where her arc is headed is that. at least since v9 it’s less about resistance to the idea that the final confrontation being team rwby vs the gods as it is the way folks assume salem fits into that, namely that most of the fandom still takes completely at face value the idea that she’s selfish, arrogant, and needs to learn her lesson about the value of life and death. so you get these wild takes that the gods were assholes who punished her out of proportion for what she did, paired with this implicit idea that salem does actually deserve this punishment because she Still RefusesTo Learn Her Lesson, and thus she needs to be redeemed by team rwby proving her wrong somehow.

but like

salem did nothing wrong. praying to the gods was not wrong, reacting emotionally when they were cruel to her was not wrong, recognizing their fallibility and unworthiness was not wrong, rallying people against them was not wrong, vowing to keep fighting after they massacred everybody was not wrong, cursing them after they left and blaming them for ending the world was not wrong, jumping into the pool of grimm was not wrong, BEING grimm is not wrong, rejecting the divine mandate after ozma hid it from her for years was not wrong. frankly continuing to be a thorn in his side since then is, i would argue, also not wrong, because she’s made herself the immovable obstacle preventing him from summoning his genocidal god back to remnant to kill everyone again; it is laughably obvious that the ultimatum is not a game humanity can win. and then factoring in the part where ozma is obsessed with finding a way to destroy her, what else is she supposed to do besides live in exile. and of course if you close off every other door except violent rebellion you are eventually going to invite violent rebellion. 

so like. Salem Is Right, and seems to be taking what she considers the path of minimal destruction (the grimm held beacon but pull out of vale within a few days; her plan for haven was nearly bloodless and left mistral untouched; she made no move to attack mantle and began her siege with a grace period for her to leave in peace if the relics were surrendered), which means that she’s likely willing to negotiate methods if other less destructive paths are opened to her. her villain -> hero arc can’t turn on team rwby persuading her that she’s wrong, because fundamentally her position is “the genocidal divine tyrants do not deserve our obedience and we can and must defy them” which is, um, correct. but if they adopt that position themselves and then negotiate How i think they’ll find she’s a lot more reasonable than they’ve been led to believe, and i do not think the wider fandom is prepared for that whatsoever

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

All cards on the table.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

[awkwardrocker]

The funniest part about George's meltdown today is that it was wholly unnecessary.

All he had to do was come out today and go, "I said my side of the story in the stewards and obviously Max didn't take kindly to that but what's done is done and we'll move on."

But instead he tried to go scorched earth and it made him look so much worse.

[lemonisntreal]

BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLINKY BLI

[theres-whump-in-that-nebula]

Hypervigilant Characters

A character goes to the dentist or other place which requires they lie down on their back; they keep their arms firmly crossed over their belly/chest at all times because they don’t like leaving that area exposed and believe it to be a weakness to not protect it.

Always having to sit facing the door in an unfamiliar place, in case someone dangerous comes through it.

Hearing people (especially children) screaming or yelling outside scares the shit out of them every time; because they think someone’s been injured or is being abused by someone else. They have to peek outside to make sure everything’s okay; it always is.

Having to check every closet, nook, crevice, behind every door whenever they get home in case someone is in their house who shouldn’t be.

Noticing instantly when the tiniest of the tiniest things are out of place on anyone and anything.

If they can’t find something, their mind always goes “someone stole it” even when it’s highly improbable, or even impossible to be true.

Having unnaturally fast reflexes that can catch practically anything no matter how sudden.

Becoming skittish and flighty in situations in which they do not have complete control over their environment.

Purposefully carrying oneself with an intimidating affect and behaving more confidently and dangerously as their level of fear increases.

Preferring booths to tables in restaurants because booths are more enclosed and therefore safer, or so they believe.

Staring down and acting menacingly towards any potential hiding spaces when they walk past them in the dark.

Scanning hotel rooms and public bathrooms for cameras and audio bugs; and/or always assuming they are being spied upon.

Refusing to cough within earshot of other people because they either believe people will judge them for being unsanitary, or that it’s a sign of weakness.

Stone cold facial expressions and purposefully being ambiguous to everyone.

Refusing to show any skin at all during the summer months because heavy clothes are their armor.

Keeping an eye on everyone in general, wherever they go.

[moongothic]

Seen a few people too many discuss the concept of Dragodile Baby 2 and my hot take is that there's no way in hell Crocodile would ever detransition just to go through nine months of horrible dysphoria again, let alone go through pregnancy ever again (or allow Ivankov to even touch him, what if they died and weren't able to trans Croc's gender again afterwards? Hell naw, ain't worth the risk)

But this leaves an opportunity for a Funnier Option:

Dragon wants another baby? Sure, but it's his turn to carry it >:)

[azriona]

Not a Fairy Tale Kiss, Chapter 42

Pairing: Bucky Barnes/Avenger!OFC (2nd person POV)

This Chapter word count: 3.1k ~ Total Story count: 149k ~ This chapter is rated Mature. Chapters are posted on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and some Sundays.

Summary: When you and Bucky are both accidentally hit with sex pollen while on a mission, you're determined to keep your relationship status at friendship, even if you’d like it to be more. Even if you think he feels the same. Even if you accidentally end up pregnant. Even if it kills you.

(Spoiler Alert: it might actually kill you. Good luck with that.)

Trigger warnings include discussion of abortion, failed pregnancies, deaths of both mom & baby--not the MC! Full warnings on AO3. Happy ending is guaranteed, despite warnings. Please see AO3 for full A/N and tags.

Chapter Summary: In which there are decisions and plans (and kissing, oh my).

Bucky’s voice is a growl. “What are you doin’, darlin’?” “Not wasting any more time, tell you that!” you gasp, almost getting the jacket off his shoulders. There’s a soft chime, and a clearing of a digital throat. “Apologies for the interruption,” says Jarvis, “but Team Dinner will begin in ten minutes.” Bucky sighs and rests his forehead on yours. “Maybe it was a waste of time, but I can’t regret it, because every minute was with you.” “Dammit,” you mumble into his breath. “Every stupid story about you being romantic as all hell is a hundred percent true. Do you get how annoying that is?” He laughs softly. “I’ve heard.” You punch him again, lightly. “I better win that bet.” “Then we better go to dinner,” says Bucky, dropping one last kiss on your lips before he pulls away to open the door to the hall. “Hello,” says Steve Rogers, on the other side of the doorway. Bucky immediately slams the door closed again.

GDI, Steve! Go see what the hell he wants now on AO3.

[jaybirdsandbabybats]

linke saying viktor is ace as an excuse to deter the jayvik shippers man shut the hell up. you can be gay and ace. you can be gay and ace and still be sex positive.

dude can just straight up say "i dont like jayvik but if you see it that way i don't know what to say" instead of starting fires with all his non-answers in interviews

[proudfreakmetarusonikku]

why didn’t you guys tell me zuko was so funny like he’s framed as this terrifying villain but he’s a blatantly autistic sixteen year old who’s just really fucking angry all the time like. he’s not even evil autism (which would be great) he’s just like sixteen and lives in a world that most likely doesn’t know what autism is like. dudes just still stuck in the very rigidly following one thing and being horrifically stubborn about this like tbh he doesn’t even seem like he’s trying to be a dick he's just absurdly hyperfocused and also was raised with a ridiculously warped sense of morals. like he is incredibly flawed and does a lot of awful things to clarify but it’s intensely funny that he is just like. going through the agonies.

[little-smartass]

given that the story of Robin Hood is like... very very famously set in Nottingham(shire) it would be cool to see one single solitary adaptation that gives literally any of the characters in the story a Notts or at least midlands-sounding accent. I know there's a longstanding gag about Robin Hoods with american accents so this is like, very much nitpicking, but Prince of Thieves appears to have a Little John with a fucking COCKNEY accent for gods sake. wtf is going on.

[tatiejosie]

................................. donald????????????

🏳️‍🌈?????

[ratatatastic]

genuinely criminal that the nhl compiled a scf final recap featuring caster calls in 19 different languages and did not provide cc because the call on reinharts scf gwg is spanish is best translated as "The Panthers have stopped falling apart! The Panthers bathed in holy water!"

EDIT:

it actually gets funnier because what he ACTUALLY says is "The Panthers have just been saved! The Panthers bathed their goal in holy water!"

[communistkenobi]

i was gonna read lotr but it’s dense enough that it’s basically a fictional version of all the course readings I have to do so I’m rereading golden compass instead. and man there is a lot of orientalism in this book that I did not pick up on as a child

[flowgninthgil]

Game devs are a bunch of cowars

where's my minishort boy? where's my minishort Men?

Where's my CatMan? with skinny men legginging?

Where's my Petboy? Where's your shoulders? Your arms? Your tail? Your kandi chocker?

Where are theminishorts? the crop tops? I can "butch" my girl but can't "femme" my man? What's this? Your average TERF gathering?

shoutout to the character creator offering the Type 1/Type 2™ choice but once out of it reverts to the male/female naming

[neil-neil-orange-peel]

I love reading your asks, so I wanted to ask you if you had any favorite female characters from Rik and Ade projects?

Helloooo! Thank you, that's so sweet. ❤️ Let's see... I'm going to single out some TYO characters specifically and then talk more generally. This post is absolutely going to become a big, incoherent mess. 😂

Sue from Sociology is my favourite minor TYO character. Don't get me wrong, I love Helen the Murderess too, but there's something that draws me to Sue. To be fair, I'm just seriously weak for Jennifer Saunders in general, and she's basically done up as a female Rick here, if Rick was actually cool. I like inserting her into fanfic sometimes (okay, once... but I have plans). She's very much a background character for the majority of Interesting, but Interesting itself is one of the first (and only, possibly the only?) time there are lots of women in a TYO scene at once, even if they're not getting to do much. Shout out to Dawn's Christian who gets crushed by the gigantic sandwich too, of course! (As an aside, I find it funny that both Jennifer and Dawn got to strangle/smother Mike on the sofa on different occasions.)

Vyvyan's mum. Pauline Melville pops up a couple of other times in TYO as well, and she's just very good whenever she does. I believe she gave French & Saunders a bit of guidance when they were all on the standup circuit. Vyv's mum is a great character because she's just SO awful. Let female characters be awful! She's so spiky and sharp in every way, and she's probably the only semi-developed female character who appears on the show. I think letting the audience meet her gives Vyvyan a bit of texture and depth - sure, we could imagine any family background for any of them, but we're being told THIS HERE is Vyvyan's. Poor Vyv. Pauline Melville herself, of course, is a prize-winning writer now! The dream.

The devil and her condemned soul is one of my favourite TYO cutaway segments. The condemned soul is Helen Atkinson-Wood, who is most well-known for playing Mrs Miggins in Blackadder the Third. She also has a small role in the Comic Strip episode Consuela (and possibly others, but I looked up the cast list to that one yonks ago because it's my favourite). I wonder if Lise wrote this sketch, considering the subject matter. Either way, Dawn and Helen's delivery is great, especially the faux discrete way Dawn says "period pains". I hope it put stuffy men's heckles up.

Aside from TYO, Jen and Dawn were often the only female presence in the Comic Strip episodes, particularly the earlier ones. Of the first two series, Dawn wrote Summer School and Jen wrote Slags - neither were standout episodes of their series, the kind often recalled today, but with Slags especially, the female characters within them were given more agency and stake in the plot than usual. Jen played five different characters in Happy Families in 1985 - a little gem written by Ben and also starring Ade.

I'd like to give a little shout out to Helen Lederer, who popped up a lot in Rik and Ade's - and French & Saunders' - comic output, while never really being given her own opportunity to shine on TV. Oh, and I'd also like to give a shout out to Marsha Fitzalan, who played Sarah B'Stard in The New Statesman - she did such a good job of playing an intensely flawed, funny female character. There are countless male characters who are basically terrible people - I mean, Alan B'Stard for one - and it's vital women are also allowed to be that awful in comedy.

Comedy has always been a pretty male sphere. Even these days, there are definitely still men Ricky Gervais who believe women can't be funny. Misogyny is still massively prevalent in society. Male comics attract female attention; female comics attract male abuse. That's a simplification and generalisation, of course, but it's broadly true. And I don't see younger generations of men getting better with this, to be honest. Actually, I see them getting worse (thanks, Andrew Tate). Sorry to be all doom and gloom!

When Rik and Ade started out in comedy, women getting to play characters other than wives or the like - that is, straight characters and caricatures there largely for the male characters to bounce off of for their laughs - was still uncommon. Despite the existence of successful female comics across the pond like Lucille Ball, and beloved 1970s sitcom The Good Life having a main cast split evenly gender-wise (I know Richard Briers technically had first credit, but Penelope Keith as Margo Leadbetter was absolutely the funniest of the four of them), there was a genuine belief that women couldn't (and maybe shouldn't) be doing comedy.

Women like Victoria Wood were pushing boundaries in important ways around the time of the alternative comedy boom by writing specifically about women (and, quite often, northern women - which I personally think is important, since Last of the Summer Wine had such a chokehold on portraying almost all of its female characters as ostensibly the same). Her sitcom dinnerladies was both melancholic and hilarious. Her sketch shows and other comic output, quite often featuring Julie Walters (her friend and muse), Celia Imrie, and many others, were all written entirely by her. She was also a gifted pianist and wrote several comic songs.

All of this is to say, Victoria Wood definitely helped pave the way for French & Saunders. She even referred to herself as an alternative comedian in her material. But honestly, I don't think it was until much later that women stopped being regularly restricted to straight roles in comedies created by men (which, of course, most comedies were). This was part of why Absolutely Fabulous, written by Jen, was such a breath of fresh air in the 1990s. For once, every single major character was a woman - men were the scarcity! And Jen has mentioned before that producers would constantly pressure her to write more roles for men. Meanwhile, we can observe that Girls on Top (dubbed the female TYO, which is... sort of true and sort of not), which Dawn and Jen starred in with Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman in the 1980s, isn't very well-known today. I'm not 100% sure how well it was received at the time, but clearly it wasn't as popular as TYO had been before it. Ruby Wax and Tracey Ullman have both also had successful careers in comedy, but I'd argue that's mainly thanks (particularly in Tracy's case) to opportunities in America.

So I'm not saying women never got to be the funny (also I'm just talking about the UK), but the fact is: if your comedy has a completely/majority male cast, with women only popping up in supporting roles or in guest appearances, it's obvious which characters are going to be better developed, more beloved, and just funnier. I mean, even the Vicar of Dibley, which was obviously written for Dawn and showcases her comic prowess, features a supporting cast of funny men (there was also Emma Chambers as Alice and Liz Smith as Leticia - before she was killed off - but the women were outnumbered by the men). I get that this perhaps fits with the idea of a tiny, slightly backwards village in Oxfordshire - and the fact Geraldine was a female vicar shocking these men was very important to the premise - but still.

We know certain men just REALLY struggle at writing women, too, so they've either done a really bad job or just avoided trying altogether. I do have an example for this, but I don't want to name them since I do love the show they created - it's just, y'know, writing women is definitely not their strong suit! And I'm really not trying to poo poo any shows here by pointing this out. I'm just making observations. All of these comedies I'm referencing here are very old now.

So! To get back to where I started with this!

I love that Lise Mayer was one of the writers of The Young Ones. In some ways, the fact one of the writers was a woman feels pretty incredible for 1982. At the same time, though, it's not surprising that she's often the forgotten one when people talk about who wrote TYO.

Rik and Ade were/are feminists, and it obviously wasn't their fault as individuals that comedy was so male - comedy was also restrictive in other ways before them. In terms of social class and political attitudes, they were definitely something refreshing and new. That said, it wouldn't be until later, with people like Caroline Aherne (who really changed the fundamentals of the sitcom genre with The Royle Family), that working class voices who weren't fucking Bernard Manning actually got some notice in comedy. And I've not even mentioned race in this ramble. If comedy was male, it was even more pale. There were comedies starring black and Asian comics in the 1980s and 1990s that started to break through - The Lenny Henry Show, Chef!, Desmond's, The Real McCoy, Goodness Gracious Me - but there's no denying BAME people, BAME women especially, have had to struggle a lot for a voice in comedy. Comedy is more diverse today than it was 40 years ago. There has been progress. But it's absolutely still male dominated, and still very white, at the top.

Rik was pegged as the golden boy of the alternative comedy movement, and he was and is undoubtedly remembered for so many different comedies. But in terms of pure success and fame? Actually, I think Dawn and Jen have been the standouts of their cohort. I don't think anyone would've predicted this 40 odd years ago - I mean, Christ, Rik had to speak up just to ensure they got equal pay at The Comic Strip. The boys were given their chance to shine first, there's no doubt about that. But it was Dawn and Jen who were the subjects of a BBC documentary last Christmas.

...Maybe there is hope for funny women, after all.

[mariemariemaria]

Does anybody else feel like mental health awareness has done very little to help them in material reality