#you want to reimagine a fairytale? make it gay

[vintage-bentley]

Before you draw or write Aziraphale and Crowley as a straight couple, ask yourself this: why can’t they be a gay couple? What does them being straight bring to the scene that them being gay can’t? Why do you feel that erasing a gay couple improves this scene? Do you, on some level, feel that there is something superior about straight couples? If not, why are you even considering changing a gay couple into a straight couple in the first place?

[girlfriendsofthegalaxy]

tuesday again 4/25/22

where the fuck were we

listening

Tongue by Rêve. i do not care for this latex aurra sing album art, but this instantly went on the "somebody come fuck this (GAY)" playlist. a fun danceable party bop about oral. other than a concerning line regarding "gamey like venison", what more can you ask for. spotify

Yeah Yeah Yeah by Blood Orchid. starts out with some very straightforward drums and then gets SLUDGY. this makes me want to sing along with the chorus with as much vocal fry as i can manage. i think the band is american, but the pronunciation of "yeah" is something i have only heard from posh brits? i think it works here. spotify

Praising You (feat. Fatboy Slim) by Rita Ora. this is somewhere between a cover and a reimagining? fun if you already know and like the original, fun if you don't. short, peppy, got me through a lot of mopping on saturday. spotify

reading

very long title by susan pinsky. checked this out mostly for any advice on moving, which was limited to two paragraphs that said "get rid of everything possible, the most efficient packing is not always the thing that will get you through a move in one piece, hire people to do everything for you if possible". this was unhelpful to me.

the author is not adhd, but is writing it out of the experience of having an adhd daughter and a ton of clients who probably had adhd. it feels like it is largely geared toward people who have a wife or child with adhd. while the version i read had been updated, it did feel very out of date at several points, especially with regards to calendaring/planning systems and (if possible) forcing everyone to call you at your home phone so you can check your wall calendar that you keep on your wall and not double book yourself. like what.

while i had independently derived some of the specific tips through great trial and error and much of the book simply did not apply to me, it did give some interesting background on why specific things (open storage, clear bins, open shelving, the concept of having one or two shelves free as a staging area in each place you have shelves) work with rather than against us.

i can see this being useful to someone who has recently been diagnosed as an adult, or is managing a family with multiple adhd/otherwise neurodivergent members, but i certainly wouldn't buy it. her big thing is Get The Fuck Rid Of Your Shit while not really providing a lot of pointers on how to go about that, so i could see how pairing this with one of marie kondo's books might be helpful? neither pinsky nor kondo really give a whole lot of advice on like "so you're an adult, here are things adults have in their house to make their lives easier" so perhaps a third unknown book might complete the perfect trilogy. idk man. im cranky her advice about moving was half a page.

Witches, Princesses, and Women at Arms, a collection of erotic lesbian fairytales edited by Sacchi Green. this was objectively fine. i skipped one completely bc it would have been a fucking hysterical short skit but did NOT translate to the page at all. as is ever the case with anthologies, some of them were decent, some of them not so much, almost none will stick in my brain even though there was some very nice butch representation. the one that does stick in my brain, Woodwitch by M. Birds about a princess trying to break a familial curse re: war, and a witch who follows the army, was memorable more for its leadup and acknowledgement of how a marching army works? like yeah! historically that is how armies move and camp and feed themselves huh, this is surprisingly well-researched for lesbian erotica!

the level of explicit erotica is...sort of on the same level as most modern f/f fic? this came out a good five years ago and people sure are having sex on the page, but there's a lot of metaphor and various other veiled imagery.

unfortunately, i want to read about women gettin absolutely nasty with it. i want to read about a pussy written with the same fervor as the average m/m cock in fanfic.

it's misogyny is what it is.

watching

rewatched For A Few Dollars More (1965, dr. Leone). in my heart he fucked that old man

You Can't Win Em All (1970, dir. Collinson) bc a very western-ish screenshot had me absolutely baffled about why a mauser was in a western. this is not a western, this is about some american mercenaries during the 1922 turkish civil war. this is not a very good movie (my main beef is that it spends twenty minutes trying to convince itself why its leads should work together, and the contrivance it lands on isn't particularly compelling or comprehendible after carting through us a whole bunch of other failed inciting incidents). this movie doesn't even manage enjoyably bad, but it sure is a spectacle of a war movie. great calvary columns riding through the prettiest goddamn landscapes you've ever seen. all forms of transportation are covered, including "armored train" and "trio of biplanes". my personal tolerance for exotic travelogue movies is fairly high, yours may not be.

if you want an actual cowboy western with different triple-crossing american mercenaries played by burt lancaster and gary cooper, Vera Cruz (1954, dir. Aldrich) is like a proto-revisionist western? quite a bit darker than i expected for 1) an american western made in 2) 1954

playing

sort of tied in with the making section-- i am deeply unhappy with how much time i am spending with fallou/t 4 bc it is not a game that makes me happy. however, the startup cost to finding a new game that makes me happy is pretty steep. so i spent some time on saturday flinging games into various folders, bc i forgot that was a thing steam lets you do now. maybe a different organizational system will fix me.

do not need to look at again: lots of demos and prologues from my old job, a couple things that aren't on steam anymore, some stuff that came in bundles that i'm not interested in, any strategy games.

done: my time with this game is at an end but i may want to return to a handy list to remind myself of what i have finished. lots of short indie experiences, wolfen/stein the new order, night in the woods, the portals, firewatch, things of this nature

old faithfuls: fnv, fo4, dishonored, sable bc i love simply zooming about.

hard bounce: this is mostly to make myself stop trying to click with hollow knight. i am never going to like fiddly platformers. and that's okay.

try again later: i'm deeply annoyed i'm not clicking with hardspace shipbreaker bc on paper it's the perfect fucking game for me. in practice even after fucking around with all the sensitivities it's still too fiddly for me. i need much, much more forgiving games with a shotgun-close-enough mentality.

making

important moving prep: cleaned out the storage unit that still had the dregs of my last move plus boxes from three grandparents and my mom. this took three full fuckin days bc it was extremely hot, i had to stop to cry a bunch, and a lot of goodwill trips.

the great thing about siblings is that if you've been caretaking a family heirloom that makes you feel weird due to your fractious relationship with the dead person in question, you can foist it off to a sibling who had a completely different less fractious relationship with the dead person in question.

once again i have failed to take a pic of the baby blanket in real daylight but we are slowly chugging along, halfway through repeat 6/10

[eggcatsreads]

July Reading Wrap-Up

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Favorite Read of the Month:

A Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland (GR review)

Once a young woman uncovers a dark secret about her neighbor and his mysterious new wife, she’ll have to fight to keep herself—and the woman she loves—safe in this stunning queer reimagining of the classic folktale The Selkie Wife.

Okay, so talking with my coworkers reveals that not everyone knows the story of The Selkie Wife folktale - so I'll give a brief synopsis.

Selkies - seal women who can shed their sealskin to become beautiful women (generally, folktales of selkies surround women, although I believe male selkies are believed to seduce women away from their husbands? I'm unsure.)

A fisherman sees a beautiful woman and wants to make her his wife, and instead of talking to her like a normal person, he steals her sealskin - trapping her with him. Selkies can't return to the ocean without their sealskins, nor can they venture far away from it. So to keep her trapped with him, he hides her sealskin. She's forced to be his wife, have kids, etc - until one day one of her children discovers her sealskin and she takes it and runs away to return to the sea. Except in this folktale it's sad that she left her children behind, because of fucking course it is. So it ends with the fisherman staring mournfully at sea, despite him being the legitimately worst person on earth.

SO! IF IN READING THIS, YOU WERE LIKE. HEY WHAT THE FUCK. Then this is the book for you. It accurately displays the violence and horror inherent in the folktale of The Selkie Wife, and also allows "the wife" to escape her "husband" to freedom - AND to find legitimate love along the way. The tension so beautifully ramps up that by the time it was fully happening I couldn't stop reading. Also, it's gay, which is always a point in its favor.

This book isn't out until next April, but I absolutely suggest adding it to your TBR and/or pre-ordering it because it is ABSOLUTELY worth it! I'll be making a separate review post sometime in March closer to the release date, as well.

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Other Five Star Reads:

Song of Silver, Flame like Night by Amelie Wen Zhao

In a fallen kingdom, one girl carries the key to discovering the secrets of her nation’s past—and unleashing the demons that sleep at its heart. 

DO NOT BE FOOLED BY HOW BEAUTIFUL THE COVER IS - THIS IS AN INTENSE AND DARK FANTASY. LESS DAUGHTER OF THE MOON GODDESS AND MORE THE POPPY WAR. It's great, and tbh if I knew how intense the book would be I would have probably read it when it released - but unfortunately the cover made me think it was a fantasy series of intensity close to DotMG and I wasn't quite in the mood for that until now.

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A Dream so Wicked by Tessonja Odette (series)

A Sleeping Beauty retelling in the world of magic and fae, in the Entangled with Fae series.

If you like fairytale retellings, and you like romance, then might I suggest the Entangled with Fae series by Tessonja Odette? I love all of her books in this series, and each one has been a great twist on the classic fairytale. So far she's done - Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty (this one).

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The Spirit Bares It's Teeth by Andrew Joseph White (GR review)

London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than become an obedient Speaker wife. After a failed attempt to escape an arranged marriage, Silas is diagnosed with Veil sickness and shipped away to Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium. The facility is cold, the instructors merciless, and the students either bloom into eligible wives or disappear.

This book is visceral and intense, and really drives the horror home. It's claustrophobic, and you can feel the time limit approaching and the end of the line for Silas - and whether he can save himself or be sacrificed. Gothic horror historical fiction starring an autistic trans man main character, and this book is phenomenal.

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Rest of Books Read Under the Cut:

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

And Break the Pretty Kings by Lena Jeong

Mirae was meant to save her queendom, but the ceremony before her coronation ends in terror and death, unlocking a strange new power within her and foretelling the return of a monster even the gods fear.

The Curse of Saints by Kate Dramis

As Spymaster to the Queen, Aya's blood oath ensures she protects those she fights alongside - including Will, the Queen's Enforcer and Aya's bitter rival. When rumors of dark magic rise in a nearby kingdom, both are sent to investigate. But when Aya's power acts beyond her gods-given affinity, she risks being turned into a weapon in a war she doesn't know how to win.

Mortal Follies by Alexis Hall

Miss Maelys Mitchelmore finds her entry into high society hindered by an irritating curse. However, as the curse progresses to more fatal proportions, Miss Mitchelmore must seek out aid, even if it means mixing with undesirable company - Lady Georgianna Landrake. If one is to believe the gossip, she might be some kind of malign enchantress. Then again, a malign enchantress might be exactly what Miss Mitchelmore needs.

Mister Magic by Kiersten White (GR review)

Thirty years after a tragic accident shut down production of the classic children’s program Mister Magic, the five surviving cast members have done their best to move on. But with no surviving video of the show, no evidence of who directed or produced it, and no records of who—or what—the beloved host actually was, memories are all the former Circle of Friends has. Then a twist of fate brings the castmates back together at the remote desert filming compound that feels like it’s been waiting for them all this time.

If you read Candle Cove you'll like this horror novel.

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The Crane Husband by Kelly Barnhill

A fifteen-year-old teenager is the backbone of her small Midwestern family, budgeting the household finances and raising her younger brother while her mom, a talented artist, weaves beautiful tapestries. Yet when her mom brings home a six-foot tall crane with a menacing air, the girl is powerless to prevent her mom letting the intruder into her heart, and her children’s lives. Utterly enchanted and numb to his sharp edges, her mom abandons the world around her to weave the masterpiece the crane demands.

House of Hunger by Alexis Henderson

Marion Shaw has been raised in the slums, where want and deprivation is all she knows. Despite longing to leave the city and its miseries, she has no real hope of escape until the day she spots a peculiar listing in the newspaper, seeking a bloodmaid. Though she knows little about the far north--where wealthy nobles live in luxury and drink the blood of those in their service--Marion applies to the position. In a matter of days, she finds herself the newest bloodmaid at the notorious House of Hunger.

If you know anything about the legend of Elizabeth Bathory, the Blood Countess, this is the book for you.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean (GR review)

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairy tales and cautionary stories. But real life doesn't always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

House of Cotton by Monica Brashears

Nineteen years old, broke, and effectively an orphan, Magnolia doesn’t have much to look forward to. One night while working at her dead-end gas station job, a mysterious, slick stranger named Cotton walks in and offers to turn Magnolia’s luck around. He offers her a lucrative “modeling” job at his family’s funeral home. When Cotton’s requests become increasingly weird, Magnolia discovers there’s a lot more at stake than just her rent.

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders. But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

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Books read so far this year: 82

How I rate books.

[cassiopeianscribe]

Goncharov is literally tumblr commedia dell'arte

Ok, here we go.

Goncharov is a very special occurrence because it is not only an example of spontaneous collective storytelling, it is also a storytelling without story at its core. Most myths fairytales etc. are passed down as stories. There are some missing details and you can change the stories if you want, but it has storyline at its core. What makes each telling unique is characterization, accents on certain details, themes.

In a way, Goncharov is complete opposite. It doesn't have a story, but it has characters with vague characteristics (sometimes too vague), it has setting, it has themes (mafia, loss, gay sex etc.), it has some ideas about what we can use to tell a story (clock symbolism, apple symbolism).

And it's great, it provides us with a loose framework in which we can tell stories that are both unique and easy to understand to everyone who knows some basic details. And I think that it is very much the same thing that made commedia dell'arte popular. It has some stock characters with defined basic characteristics (but you can add as much details as you want), some themes that you can rely on and some performance tricks that you can use, but ultimately it's your story. I can say that I am writing Katya/Sofia fanfic and you will picture it tge same way you would picture Harlequin/Pierrot College AU fic - you kind of guess what will be the main characters be like and maybe tone, but nothing about their exact characteristics, their past and their future, what are relationships between them. But you will immediately understand it the moment you read the story.

There are some other examples of collective reimagining of characters devoid of their exact story - Arthurian cycle is the closest, it kind of has a list of key events, but I can also just write a story about Galahad saving some random lady and it will count as a legit Arthurian story even if nothing is said about Grail or Mordred's betrayal or whatever. And unlike stories with public domain characters, Goncharov doesn't have a single source that defines them, they just crystallized from chaos of tumblerinas' collective consciousness.

(btw, I am using examples only from western culture just because I don't know enough about other, but I know that Chinese culture has somewhat similar relationship to its literary canon, so it is not something uniquely European)

[variousqueerthings]

Daniel LaRusso: A Queer Feminine Fairytale Analysis Part Three of Three

(another massive, massive thank you to @mimsyaf​ )

part 1

part 2

8. Queerness and femininity and masculinity and the colour red and *record breaks*

If we spin the record aaalll the way back to this paragraph: “…looking at what it is girls and women in fairytales have/don’t have, what they want, and how they’re going to get it. It’s about power (lack of), sexuality (repressed, then liberated), and men.” Reading Daniel as a repressed, bisexual boy in a society that doesn’t accept his desires it’s interesting looking at how he moves through the world of the Miyagi-verse, at how threatened other men are by him, at how obsessed they are with him.

He’s out in the symbolic woods and these large boys and men see him and decide for whatever plot reasons to come for him. And they are large and violent and attractive and apart from Johnny again, they don’t have the nebulous excuse of fighting over a girl and even that excuse dies by around the midpoint when Johnny kisses Ali just to get a rise out of Daniel. He’s not trying to “win her back,” he’s not even really looking at her. He’s just trying to get a reaction. They don’t have any of the fighters in Rocky’s excuse either of Daniel being a macho opponent. 

You can read whatever subtext into TKK1 and TKK2 (which becomes especially tempting once CK confirmed that the guys he fought at seventeen have been thinking about him ever since – for thirty-five years), but TKK3 is where it’s really At in terms of obsession and lust and forbidden desires.

Silver is presented as both a handsome prince who saves Daniel and mentors him (where Miyagi is undoubtedly cast in a fatherhood role) and later on becomes twisted into a dark secret that Daniel has to keep, while he turns that thing that Daniel loves (karate, it’s… it’s karate… it’s also men, but it’s definitely karate, because karate makes him feel… things...) into an abusive, violent version of itself.

A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But he’s also offering him something liberating. Whatever is going on in that nightclub scene is about something other than breaking Daniel down. Even the bloodied knuckles aren’t just about revenge. It’s about giving him something that he isn’t, in the end, willing to receive, at least not from Silver. In that roundabout, strange way of these feminine fairytales, it’s exploring hidden desires through the metaphor of karate.

Daniel wears red because it’s his colour. In the movies he wears red a lot. Often in scenes with violence in them (the beach/the hilltop in TKK1 and the date/the destruction of the dojo/the final fight in TKK2), but he also has a variety of shirts (and in TKK3 pants) that pop up all the way through the narrative. He wears a red jacket when he accepts Terry’s training, when he punches a guy in the face, and when he tries to get out of the training again (as badly as that goes).

Did anyone consciously think about red’s link to desire, obsession, and violence when they made these? Eh. But is it there symbolically? When he meets Johnny, when he fights Chozen, when he’s in emotionally fraught situations with Terry? Hell yeah.

Probably the most lust-and-violence infused red is that aforementioned punching-board-until-knuckles-bleed bit – not that I thought Terry was going to pull him in for a kiss, because I knew, logically, of course he wouldn’t right? There’s no way… is there? Or later on when Daniel punches that guy and ends up with blood all over his shirt and Terry once more grasps him, euphorically. Blood is violence. Blood is also desire. Red is Daniel’s colour, even though he doesn’t acknowledge it come Cobra Kai. (Maybe he just needs someone else - cough Johnny Lawrence cough - to inspire it in him again).

Daniel LaRusso’s narrative is exploring that most feminine of fairytale tropes: To want and be wanted by monsters and having to hide those desires.

“Maybe this time that strange churning in my stomach that feels like a mix of anticipation and fear will turn out good for me.” - Daniel’s mind.

At the end of the story, Daniel saves himself, with all of the strange mixed narratives around it, and the acknowledgement that the end of The Karate Kid Part Three isn’t satisfying and its aftermath will likely be delved into in the next season of Cobra Kai.

Nevertheless, he saves himself. Not from Silver or Kreese or Barnes, and not entirely, but he makes a decision not to give in to fear (and he continues to try and live by that decision, making it over and over again for the next thirty-five years, even when the return of Cobra Kai makes that difficult for him). 

He doesn’t do it by being the strongest in the land or even through a lucky shot (although that too). He does it by refusing to be like the male antagonists that surround him, by telling them they have no power over him. The narrative isn’t just his getting lost in the forest and all the monsters he finds there, it’s about how he redefines power for himself within that forest. 

He’s a man who isn’t violent, whose victories include helping out a girl whose ex-boyfriend just broke her radio, successfully doing the moves to a cultural dance he’s trying to learn, sitting with his father figure while he cries over the death of his own father, telling a girl that she’s just made her first friend, and breathing a sigh of relief that a tree that got broken has healed. 

Daniel LaRusso is a good boy is the point!

Karate is a metaphor. It can turn into many things: A series of lessons learned about how to be his own man and take care of his own house, a respect for the history of the father teaching him and sharing his home and story with him, fear, desire, masculinity (and the different forms that can take). 

When a tall, handsome stranger offers to teach him karate in the dark, without Daniel’s caretaker knowing how to help him, and twists that karate into something that hurts him - when he reclaims that, over and over, that means something too. 

This man is fine and definitely isn’t carrying the weight of buried karate-based queer trauma - could a traumatised man do this? *stares blankly at a former tormentor as blood runs down his forehead*

9. In Conclusion Daniel Has Kissed Dudes… Symbolically��� But We Can HC Literally:

So there’s Daniel and his coded feminine fairytale narrative. It’s all a series of fun coincidences.

1. Ralph Macchio is just Like That

2. Red. All the red. 

3. large portion of his storyline is about lack of power. Yes, he regains that power by the end of the first and second movie through A Fight, but generally he is framed as powerless opposite these almost monstrously physically powerful boys/men. And in the third one it’s barely even about physical prowess (he’d still lose a real fight against Barnes or Silver) and more about regaining lost autonomy off the back of a manipulative, abusive relationship with an older guy.

4. The third movie in particular is narratively a mess, but if reimagined as a fairytale makes a lot of sense (because it’s secretly all about how karate is bisexuality and Daniel gets manipulated through that desire to be better at karate).

5. Queerness and femininity and themes about hidden desires that can only be approached sideways through couching those desires in symbolism: Handshake meme.

6. The fact that the more I think about it, the more feral I am for a Labyrinth AU.

7. To sum up over 5000 words of text: The inherent homoeroticism of wanting to be slammed against a locker by a bully, but extended over three movies and ever-more inventive ways of hurting pretty-boy-Daniel-LaRusso.

Johnny’s not going to be happy when he realises Daniel’s got other ex-rivals buried in his closet...

10. Some Other Stuff Aka The Laziest Referencing I’ll Ever Do

Further reading on trans Matrix

Further reading on masculinity and rape narrative in The Rape Of James Bond

Youtube Video from Pop Culture Detective (Sexual Assault Of Men Played For Laughs)

Some film/TV references in this: Dracula (Coppola), Princess Bride, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Labyrinth, The Matrix, Rocky, Princess And The Frog, Cinderella, Enchanted, Shape Of Water, Swamp Thing, Phantom of the Opera 

Some fairytale references: Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, The Wolf And The Seven Little Kids, Alice in Wonderland, Wizard of Oz, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Company of Wolves (Angela Carter), Through the Looking Glass, Princess Bride

Also referenced is Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel and the subsequent musical Funhome. Further thoughts on this by @thehours2002​ and @jenpsaki​:

https://thehours2002.tumblr.com/post/650033577171533824/daniel-larusso-and-fun-home-click-to-enlarge

https://jenpsaki.tumblr.com/post/650530225997971456/cobra-kai-fun-home-inspired-by-goldstargirls

My list of Cobra Kai meta posts

I wanted to delve into fairytale movies more, but then I was like “fuck, I have actual work to do,” but I was interested in the ways male and female characters are written in these stories:

The Last Unicorn, The Never-Ending Story, The Dark Crystal, Legend, and Stardust.

The Last Unicorn is an interesting one because she’s not really human, until she is. It’s more like The Little Mermaid (the fairytale, not the Disney film) in tone, and of course there’s a pretty substantiated rumour that Andersen wrote that one as a metaphor for falling in love with another man (who eventually got married). 

Andersen in general is just fun to analyse as someone who popularized so many fairytales and exists as an ambiguously queer historical figure – might’ve been modern-day gay, bi, ace, but we’re just not sure. All your favourite fairytales can be read through the lens of queer loneliness and ostracization. Just like horror.

Anyway I didn’t go into the whole Little-Mermaid-Last-Unicorn transformation bit so much as the Monstrous-Desires bit, but I think there could be something to that too, with monsters representing otherhood and all. Stardust is a kinda-almost-this, except she sticks to her human form and all is okey-dokey by the end, she’s allowed to marry the handsome man and be a star.

The Never-Ending Story has Atreyu and Bastian and because of a lack of female characters, an interesting bond between the two of them, but mainly Atreyu is absolutely a go-gettem Hero Type and it’s just interesting to see how Bastian relates to him as both an audience insert, but also eventually as his own character in that world.

The Dark Crystal contains certain… androgynous elements of feminine and masculine coded characteristics in the main character because of how he’s not human, but also they do have a “female” version of his species that he needs to go save (and bring back to life) by the end, so in a way it’s both more and less heteronormative in its characters.

Legend sees another example of a monster (literally called Darkness and looking like a traditional devil) trying to seduce a princess through promises of power, and she “goes along with it” in order to trick him and succeeds in that trick, but is ultimately saved by the male lead. 

In conclusion: I don’t even have Shrek in this.

[jmsa1287]

Once Upon a Time in...Ryan Murphy's 'Hollywood'

Blending fact and fiction, Ryan Murphy rewrites movie history with his glitzy and lavish limited series "Hollywood," coming to Netflix on May 1.

In some ways, "Hollywood" feels like the project Ryan Murphy has been working towards for most of his career. The glitzy seven-episode limited series, which hits Netflix on May 1, follows a group of newcomers to Tinsel Town and their collision with the industry's gatekeepers during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

But Murphy's "Hollywood, co-created with writer Ian Brenna, is anything but a simple history lesson about the trials and tribulations of what it was like to work within the studio system of yesteryear. The series functions like Quentin Tarantino's 2019 film "Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood," in which the director reimagines the historic year of 1969 through the eyes of a washed-up TV actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double (Brad Pitt). With "Hollywood," Murphy and his team rewrite film history and tell a fairytale of what a more accepting and understanding 1940s Hollywood could look like and how it could have brought an early change to the world — the kind of change that many of us are still working on seeing today. As Murphy called it on Instagram, "Hollywood" is a "revisionist fable." In other words, it's the past that liberals want.

For some time, Murphy has been focusing on highlighting diversity both in front of and behind the camera. THis FX drama "Pose" — about queer and trans voguers in New York City's ballroom scene during the 80s and 90s — broke a number of inclusion records and in 2017 (a year before that show aired), he launched his Half Initiative, which aims to "make Hollywood more inclusive by creating equal opportunities for women and minorities behind the camera," its website writes, adding, "Less than one year after launching Half, Ryan Murphy Television's director slate hired 60% women directors and 90% met its women & minority requirement." That sentiment seems to be the driving force behind "Hollywood" but at the same time, the show manages to have a lot of fun and be mostly entertaining in the way some of the best Murphy projects are.

Murphy — who helped shape the TV landscape with programs like "American Horror Story," "American Crime Story," "Glee" and "Pose" — left his home at Fox to work for Netflix in 2018. "Hollywood" marks his second project for the streamer (the first being the bumpy series "The Politician"). It's ultimately the kind of series Murphy should be developing even though it simultaneously spotlights the best and worst tendencies of the out producer/writer/director.

We first see "Hollywood" with World War II veteran and aspiring actor Jack Castello ("The Politician" star David Corenswet), a conventionally attractive midwestern white man who moves to the city with his pregnant wife Henrietta (Maude Apatow). It doesn't take long before Jack realizes that getting his foot into Hollywood — or Hollywoodland as it was called at the time — isn't as easy as he thought. After failing to get into the industry and going totally broke, he meets the charming Ernie (Dylan McDermott), who runs a gas station, and offers him a job to pump gas. Except...that's not the job at all. Jack soon realizes the station is actually a front for a prostitution ring (this is based on Scotty Bowers explosive book "Full Service") in which Ernie's handsome employees go home — or to hotels — with his clientele (which mostly consists of good-looking older women and good-looking younger men). But it's how Jack actually gets his break and meets a number of the main cast members of "Hollywood," including Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone), the wife of the head of a popular movie studio.

The rest of the season darts and bobs between younger characters like rising director Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss) and his girlfriend Camille Washington (Laura Harrier), a black woman who is having difficulty getting parts that aren't roles for the help. There's also Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope), an aspiring screenwriter who is black and gay and works with Jack at Ernie's gas station. There, Archie meets sweet and closeted actor Roy Scherer (Jake Picking), who would later be renamed Rock Hudson by his diabolical Harvey Weinstein-esque manager Henry Willson (played by an absolutely wild Jim Parsons in perhaps his best role ever), who did manage Hudson in real life along with a number of other beefy men, including Tab Hunter and Robert Wagner.

Once that group of starry-eyed newcomers gets together, they begin working on a groundbreaking movie with the help of Hollywood's old guard, like Avis as well as producers Ellen Kincaid (Holland Taylor) and Dick Samuels (Joe Mantello). They attempt to use their position and power to get the movie through a racist, homophobic and misogynistic studio system by convincing naysayers and company men, like Avis' husband, Ace Amberg (Rob Reiner), that the movie could change lives.

But the fun of "Hollywood" is the way in which Murphy and co- ("Pose" writer/director Janet Mock and "American Crime Story" writer Reilly Smith) use the Golden Age era as a sandbox. Henry Willson and Rock Hudson aren't the only real-life figures who pop up: Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), one of the first Chinese-American actresses, has a small role, as does Hattie McDaniel (Queen Latifah), the first woman of color to win an Oscar for her role as "Mammy" in "Gone with the Wind." Her costar Vivien Leigh (Katie McGuiness) also shows up. "Hollywood" also has a lot of fun recreating iconic film history stories, including filmmaker George Cukor's infamous dinner parties where Hollywood's powerful and closeted gay men would get together and have various relationships with younger men, most of them looking for their break in the industry.

"Hollywood" is a Murphy project through-and-through and nothing is subtle. The highs are high and the lows are low. Because the show is on Netflix, Murphy is unfiltered and free from the constraints of cable TV: there's shocking nudity, swearing, as well as dynamic and heartfelt moments. It's no surprise the co-creator of "Glee" is behind "Hollywood" as the show often feels like a musical and that a character could break into song at any moment. Scenes are tense and fast; actors attempt the transatlantic accent and Murphy and his writers employ the quick and snappy way of talking from the era. When it's at its best, "Hollywood" gives off the same vibes as "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel." But there's a lot of awkwardness as well. Some of the writing is jarring as a 2020 sense of awareness is injected into some of the dialogue, pulling you out of the moment. Some actors can sell it and others noticeably cannot.

"Hollywood" is polished and is ultimately an interesting endeavor even if it isn't always successful. (The show falls apart during its endgame.) It's Murphy's best project since "American Crime Story" where his lavish vision of a loving and more accepting past overcomes exploitation, racism, homophobia and corrupt power. And at this moment in time, that feels pretty good.

[the-knights-who-say-book]

Girls made of snow, language made of thorns, and putting ourselves back in the narrative

I’ve had some ideas swirling around my head ever since I finished reading Girls Made of Snow and Glass by Melissa Bashardoust that condensed while I was reading Leigh Bardugo’s short story collection The Language of Thorns, so I want to talk about it a little.

It started with the realization that Girls made of Snow, while it is a Snow White retelling (or perhaps better called a reimagining), completely leaves out the whole seven dwarves part of the story. In my review, I pointed this out as something I liked — the story didn’t need to sidetrack there, and it kept us focused on the real core of the story: Lynet’s relationship with her stepmother, Mina. Lynet being Snow White, Mina is the Evil Queen.

The book alternates chapters between Lynet’s present day and Mina’s journey from the daughter of a sorcerer to the bride of Lynet’s father, making Mina the second main character. This is where the book’s “feminist fantasy reimagining” tagline comes in. The point of Bashardoust’s story is to explore the stepmother-daughter relationship and how they could come into conflict without it being about who is the fairest of them all.

The point of tension Bashardoust goes for is about politics and power, a much more satisfying reason than “well, women get angry when another woman is prettier, that’s all”. But the framework of Snow White also gives her plenty of room to work with how women’s appearances and age are seen and judged. What if Lynet’s beauty binds her to her dead mother in a way that strangles her, while Mina struggles with knowing her beauty gains her what respect she commands and aging could steal it away? The commentary that emerges isn’t new — I think we all realize how damaging the value placed on women’s appearances is — but using the cultural touchstone of Snow White makes this version powerful. It’s probably my favorite thing about the book, even above giving Lynet a female love interest, which is something we’re going to circle back to.

Consider, for example, Mina’s power to control glass. The idea of giving a woman who is forced to care about her beauty the power to make looking glasses into weapons (the power to control what controls her in the original story) has an inherent message that’s only as powerful as it is because the iconography of Snow White is so well known to Bashardoust’s audience. That’s why she can give us a handful of Snow White parallels and then leave out one of the biggest story points and still have us understand the commentary she’s making. The messages are built in; she doesn’t have to build them first in order to tear them down. They’re already there.

Because we know fairytales. Reference Cinderella’s slipper, Sleeping Beauty’s spindle, or Snow White’s glass coffin and you can easily call up a whole set of values, assumptions, and feelings with hardly another word. Our reservoir of shared stories (consider also the Greek myths) is essentially a resource for writers who want to make it obvious they’re subverting our cultural mores. It’s shorthand for “Society is fucked up, hold my beer and watch this”. It’s a way of making subtle commentary in an... obvious manner? It’s a unique way of balancing obvious and subtle; it’s the equivalent of roadsigns you only need to glance at to know that you’re driving towards; it’s an ocean of potential stories waiting to be overturned. The ability of writers to take any of these classic objects or situations and drop them into their stories and immediately add a whole slew of connected ideas is fascinating to me. It’s magical.

Which brings us to The Language of Thorns. The collection isn’t exactly labeled “retold/reimagined faiytales” anywhere (it’s a collection of stories that would be read to children in her Grishaverse), but Bardugo says in her author’s note, “That unease [with the ending of Hansel and Gretel] has guided me through these stories […] The more I listened to that note of warning, the more inspiration I found.” The stories indeed feature a retelling of Hansel and Gretel, a prequel to The Little Mermaid, and a reimagining of The Nutcracker.

In one of my gleeful posts as I read the book I ended up gushing that “by writing her own fairytales [Leigh Bardugo] gets to play with our expectations, because we get all the references to our own stories — gingerbread houses, labyrinths holding monsters, clever talking animals — so we have a false sense of security that we know where it’s all going, and then she treats the ending of the stories more like writing a novel and adds more complexity than we expect of stories like Cinderella or Hansel and Gretel” and yes I’m going to quote myself in my own essay-thing because I still think that was a good reaction.

The first story of the collection, Ayama and the Thornwood, makes Bardugo’s intentions clear when the main character literally retells three different tales with improved endings to satisfy the boredom of a beast who finds fairytales too predictable and unrealistic. So it’s, you know, meta.

There’s an excitement there, in reading the fairytales you (sort of) know with their seams torn open to make room for you, stitched into something new. In Bardugo’s stories, the Grimm brothers’ female villains are reexamined, blame is shifted, new ideas are put forward (not all connected to feminism, but the treatment of Hansel and Gretel and The Little Mermaid’s villains, and the creation of a new female villain in Bardugo’s The Too-Clever Fox, make a clear argument about the roles women are given in our fairytales).

This is a nice connection to Girls Made of Snow and Glass: the deeper treatment of women’s motives that make familiar tales new. I’m almost disappointed The Language of Thorns didn’t include a Snow White story to compare and contrast with.

But let’s circle back to Lynet’s love interest in Girls Made of Snow: Nadia, the castle physician. It was the promise of a gay Snow White that drew me to the story, and it’s still a wonderful aspect of the book. Putting women into slots reserved for men is almost always a breath of fresh air, especially when the rest of the story isn’t then adjusted to keep it heterosexual. One reason is because it eliminates the “man always saving the woman” aspect by making it one woman saving another — consider Nadia filling the prince’s role in awakening Lynet from her coffin, and the female river spirit of Little Knife winning the hand in marriage of the beautiful girl. But of course the major reason is getting to see non-heterosexual people in fairytales.

We don’t get this when we’re younger. At least, I didn’t, though I hope that starts changing for kids now. So to read stories where the women love women, where men can love men and women (to reference The Language of Thorns specifically, since we get a bisexual protagonist in one story and a wlw couple in another) feels like — to quote a certain musical — putting ourselves back in the narrative. I can’t change the stories I was read when I was little, but I can (we all can) read the stories that are slowly but surely filling up goodreads’ “lgbt retellings” shelves.

(Possibly it’s weird to use the phrase “putting ourselves back in the narrative” when I’m actually not sure about either author’s sexuality, but this is mostly about the perception of queer readers getting queer retellings anyway. If I read Julia Heslin’s Once more recently I would have loved to add something about her version of reimagining queer fairytales but it’s been a bit too long for it to be fresh in my mind.)

“I put myself back in the narrative” isn’t a flawless parallel for other reasons as well. After all, the whole point about “Eliza and the narrative” is that she took herself out of it in the first place, and then put herself back in. The first action was as much an act of power as the undoing, and queer people never took ourselves out of fairytales in the first place (I don’t think that’s really a thing that happened, anyway). But I couldn’t get that line out of my head as I thought about this, so it seems like the right way to end this ramble.

When we put ourselves back in our narratives, when we tell our touchstone stories with us included, it’s automatically a powerful statement that we belong there. So yes, while this has mostly been me trying to figure out how to say “we all recognize fairytale elements at such an essential level that it gives authors an amazing tool to work with to make their works more nuanced and gives them a basis to build social commentary on”, I want to end this with the point that works created with these tools, narratives constructed on these foundations, are so liberating and important and wonderful because they not only make use of our childhood tales but tell us we belong there.

[bataddictedloony]

14, 20, 22 en 24 :p? also i hope ur doing ok! exams are stupid :^(

They certainly are, I hope yours will go well and that the studying isn’t too stressful, boi~

14. Favorite book you read this year?Ashamed to say I haven’t read nearly as much as I wanted this year. This year has been a general let-down, I think we can all agree. But the books I DID read, were all really enjoyable in their own ways. I read (most of) the Lunar Chronicles which were incredibly well-written, I read them as if I was watching a movie! King of Shadows was very self-indulgent because YASSSS MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM IS DA BOMB and Four Sisters by Rappaport, a book about the Romanov princesses, was very interesting and emotional and self-indulgent because by god am I a sucker for tragedy. BUT THE BOOK THAT TAKES THE CAKE is Language of Thornes by the fabulous Leigh Bardugo (author of Six of Crows YES YES YES YES YES YES) which is a collection of reimagined fairytales and MMMMM THE BOOK IS PRETTY IT HAS EVOLVING PICTURES AND IT’S GAY AND TRAGIC AND SURPRISING AND I LOVE IT WITH ALL MY HEART.... So yeah, read that.

20. What’s something you learned this year?Stuff changes at a ridiculously fast pace. Opinions, situations, moods, atmospheres,... Last year I was broke, I’m anything but right now, but that can change any minute. I had 2 uncles last week, I only got 1 left today, it can change to 0 at any second. Last April I was super happy and content and nothing could go wrong, then last October I was back in a dip and I thought I’d never get out of it this time, right now it’s back up again and tomorrow it could be even better or worse, who knows.Basically, stuff changes all the time so it’s better to focus on the present for a good 5 seconds and then move the fuck on because whatever’s bothering me in the present could be gone the next morning. Last month I was 100% sure I was ace as fuck, now I’m considering I might actually be demi.

22. Favorite place you visited this year?I mostly went traveling on my own and with my mom this year, strangely enough... I honestly can’t decide between going to Phantasialand with my friend from Germany or to the Harry Potter studios with my mom... Germany was fun because I did the 5 hour drive on my own and it was actually kind of relaxing and fun? Also Phantasialand was absolutely magnificent and seeing Debby again was

24. Did you keep any New Year’s Resolutions?I don’t remember making New Year’s Resolutions in January because I was 99% sure I wasn’t gonna keep them anyway. I was planning this summer to start eating more salads and go swimming every to weeks. I did the salad thing but the swimming completely faded from my mind... Woops. I guess, the resolution I have every year is to keep growing, which I think I definitely did this year. I’ve gotten more responsible, more independent, less rash, more neutral, more in control of my own emotions, I’ve learned to say ‘no’ more, I’ve learned to not let people walk over me, even when they yell at me in a rage that I’m just being selfish, I’ve learned to grow past people who refuse to mature and I’ve learned to trust again with lots of breaks (baby steps on that last one, traumas are hard to overcome). 

All by all, a little of an ‘ugh’ year, but still a step up the ladder, all be it a small step after tumbling down two :p