#womanhood or whatever IDK but there is still a little resentment in there about that shame being passed down to me and it feels sooo

[backseatloversz]

even tho iwas Assigned Female At Birth i cant really relate to alleged Universal AFAB Experiences because i dont feel like i was ever really forced nor even encouraged into things like femininity and typical girlhood/womanhood things and even though i definitely wasnt like. raised as a boy. i often also dont feel like i was raised nor viewed entirely as a girl either. so whenever i do indulge in femininity im like. is this allowed. is this okay. am i allowed to be doing this

[visualsandvoices]

Ok idk if anyone said this re: Greta gerwig’s narnia on here already I only pop in from time to time…

But it seems like Liam Neeson will return to voice Aslan and Tilda Swinton is set to return as the White Witch?

There was also a comment in an interview saying it won’t change people’s conception of narnia, but just make it bigger (I think that was the phrasing, or close to it).

So I’m cautiously optimistic. That makes it sound like they want to get the audience on familiar territory — hopefully it lands! To use the same actors and then depart to dramatically from the 2005 version would be pretty jarring, so maybe they want to recreate that movie relatively closely as a launchpad for the rest of the series? But they still gotta make it their own which makes me nervous lol

Netflix handled the Shadow and Bone adaptation pretty well so maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised 😬

The only thing is that Greta Gerwig seems emphasize messaging and themes in equal measure as plot. Little Women deals prominently with marriage, expectations of womanhood, wealth/class, etc. Barbie is theme over plot, I’d almost say, given the virality of America Ferrera’s speech, I’m Kenough, and the overall impression of Barbie having an awakening to being a human woman or whatever. I haven’t seen it so maybe there’s plot I’m missing but that seems to be the idea.

This kinda thing doesn’t work for narnia, imo. I don’t want to hear Susan give a speech about womanhood in the war era, or some remark on femininity, firstly because it’s so overdone in movies these days but also bc if you’re going to put any theme/motif/messaging on equal footing to Narnia’s plot it should be faith.

I’m not saying Christianity has to slap you in the face. The Disney adaptations handled it well I think. It was there without the movie overdoing it, and there wasn’t any sort of moral or speech or sound bite to sell to the audience otherwise. It was a fantasy movie.

Susan would make an easy target, and I really hope Gerwig doesn’t fall into the “lipstick and nylons” trap everyone argues about. First of all it should hardly be foregrounded bc it doesn’t really become an issue until after she’s left narnia in which case she’s offscreen. The Last Battle maybe, but again it’s brief. My two cents on it though are that I always took it to be her grief for not being able to return to narnia forced her to try to move on, and maybe the resentment over her loss broke her faith. She’s still a character to sympathize with. People say Lewis couldn’t get past her being female and hence the lipstick and nylons but I think that’s a bad read. She was a queen, an adult woman, and cerebrally mature only to return a boarding school student. Of course she didn’t return to her dolls. I also think that it happened because she’s so logical and calculated and careful (neither good nor bad as a trait on its own) that loosing something she loved only augmented her original doubts and made her stubborn. So again it’s not about womanhood nylons and lipstick, it’s grief and sort of an internal self-defence kinda thing. If Gerwig were to explore anything with Susan as she’s older I would say doubt and logic versus faith and responsibility would both be true to the character and far more original/interesting for audiences.

I would love to see how they handle The Horse and his Boy, the Golden Age and how the kings and queens earn their titles (just, gentle, valiant, magnificent). I would love to see a Jill Pole who is allowed to cry, to be a scared school child, and also brave and stoic and thrust into an underground world on a rescue mission. I will be fascinated to see their concept for The Last Battle, because again it’s very much so a Christian story.

So I really do hope Netflix allows the series to live past the first 3, so we get new material. Caspian and Dawn Treader are gonna be a test for Gerwig’s strengths before she’s allowed into fresh territory with the other books.

I just think that if you’re intending to strip it of the intention behind the story — lost faith, found faith, tested faith, resilience, trust, redemption, all through a Christian lens, then maybe don’t adapt it at all. I’m not saying you have to make Christianity so foregrounded it feels like a sermon, but you cannot have narnia without that being the lens through which the world is understood. They aren’t separable things.

AND going back to the casting hopefully it’s not Timothy chalamet / Saoirse Ronan / Florence Pugh. As much as they’re great actors, I think for narnia as a reboot to land, they need a bunch of unknown, fresh faces and actual kids not people in their twenties/thirties. Even as a background narnia cameo it would honestly be distracting.

[notanotherfandombloge]

(via OP's post) #everything about mizu is so deeply upsetting#like ok revenge!!#revenge of what - exactly?!#white men?#and/ or your white self?#born against your will?#and who and what shapes this will of yours except the society you were born in?#this is so deeply fucked in every way#but anyways#I love Mizu and I hope he kills his father dead. if only - if only that would satisfy her.

#i am going to claw my eyes out#when the swordfather turned away and did not want to hear her confession. he was the only one she ever tried to tell. and he didnt want it.#SHE CALLED THE SWORDS IMPURE. BECAUSE SHE SEES HERSELF AS NOTHING BUT A STAIN AND A CURSE.#BUT THAT IS NOT ALL SHE IS. OR IS IT. SHE HAS FEELINGS AND SHE CARES AND LOVES SO DEEPLY.#I A M E A T I N G M Y E Y E S (via eerna)

#Mizu's conflict with her own identity is the very drive of her path and I loved every minute of it#The conflict of her birth her gender her mixed race her certainty that she has nothing but her revenge#She even has a conflict with her desire (via nithili)

#hm i think it's important to note that the agency afforded to mizu while she crossdresses or assumes the male gender#is also why she continues to pass as a man#idk if she rly identifies as a man bc in order for her to exist she has had to pretend she is a man#even when she was young and living with her mother#her mother shaved all her hair off because her father's men were looking for a girl child#and if mizu was a 'boy' then she would be harder to find#i think it's important to understand that so much of her identity is also based on a rejection of womanhood bc it has offered her#nothing but suffering#and on top of that she was excluded from that womanhood bc of her race too#it's true even for women now#a rejection of gender born out of a frustration of what that gender expects from you and the performance of that gender#in many ways i would say her revenge is based on that anger too#and the one time she very openly accepts womanhood - in the way that womanhood should be performed in edo japan - she is punished for it#and she is once again rejected despite doing 'everything right' bc she's mixed race#anyways i love mizu so much and i love her gender whatever it is#bc it encapsulates so much of my own struggle with gender and gender identity (via unmide)

#gender isn’t instrinsic or universal. its based on cultural contexts. but its still really complicated#he lives as a man most of the time and is comfortable occupying a masculine role in society. so he’s a man.#she feels like she has to live that way and resents that women have little choice in this culture. so she’s a woman.#mizu is kind of both! both the ronin and the bride. both a man and a woman#blue eye samurai (via cease-cartography)

I can’t explain what blue eye samurai makes me feel…….its a typical revenge story, a man sets out on his hero’s journey to kill the four men who have wronged him. A lone ronin, wide brimmed hat and sword in hand, roaming Edo Japan on his vendetta. But he’s not a man. He’s a woman. And how has he been wronged? What’s she getting revenge on?

On the fact that she exists. She wants revenge on the four white men that could possibly have conceived her. Who got her Japanese mother pregnant with a blue-eyed child. And not just any blue-eyed child, but a girl child. How is she possibly supposed to live in the world like that? For the wrong of being conceived, for the wrong of being born, for the wrong of being birthed into a world that will never love or accept her, she will kill her father.

I don’t know what level of convoluted self hate that is. Is she a child of rape? Or a child of a whore? Halfway through I realise what she told herself at the start couldn’t possibly be true - it’s not really for her mother. Her mother wasn’t the root of her vendetta, she wasn’t really doing it for her. When she leaves that farm and leaves the chance to live a simple, legitimate life as a woman, she goes right back to hunting down the men. Those men personally wronged her.

And then there’s so much to be discussed surrounding the way she grew up, because as a boy child and a man she can afford so much more than life has dealt her. Her swordfather who took her in out of the love and care in his heart had no shame in teaching a mixed man his art. The face of a ‘demon’ is fine. But not the identity of a woman. Shh. Don’t say it. Don’t confess. He knows and doesn’t want to hear it.

And because she’s lived that way her entire life for safety and security, she’s so completely alienated from being a woman, perhaps she really is he. But not really by choice. Or is it? The thing she does best is the art of killing, the art of men. Gender is a prison and gender is a performance and she has to choose which to perform. The times cannot reconcile hatred and violence with a woman. So she lives as a man.

So she can get revenge on her father, for revenge on herself.