may I offer my contribution
PSA for new tumblr users!
This place is a message... and part of a system of messages... pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
When you have to foretell doom to thousands of people per day, but still have a sense of style.
Found on twitter, going to adopt this now
Writer friends, tell me how many WIPs and how many UFOs you have. I have 2 WIPs and [redacted] UFOs (jk it’s around 16 across my three main fandoms)
Had Padmé been 20-30 years older than anakin instead of 2-3 it wouldve fixed a significant portion of the franchise, including padmé's own chracterization
he whole "'woah we're doing something we shouldn't this is going to ruin both of our lives" doesn't ring true in the original movies cause they're just two beautiful young people doing what they're supposed to do in a story. the cliché kills the dramatic tension. give me a 45 year old woman ruining her career life and reputation because a dumbass 19year old monk is pathetically throwing himself at her feet THAT'll give the audience something to be anxious about. It's not something people expect to happen.
Would also explain why all the authority figures are like "Sure, lets put this notoriously disobedient and hotheaded beautiful youth as the sole escort of an equally beautiful young woman who's had the entire world on her shoulders from childhood. no prophecy twins will result from this". i could see obiwan allowing it because he can't deny anakin anything, but what about the rest of the jedi council??? What about padmé's own people? The choice of anakin as bodyguard looks like bad optics even if nothing actually happens. What about her reputation??? It would've been satisfying if they'd actually leaned into it instead of vague hints. Like padmé says its improper but nothing in the surrounding world actually makes it seem that way. The prequels at least didn't do a good job establishing the jedi as sexless and chaste. They just seem like cool hot guys with swords of COURSE they fuck.
but if she's 45, even if she's beautiful, a lifetime of dutiful service to the republic would make most people go "ah she would never sleep with a teenage monk, doesn't matter if he asks". Plus the general social standards of star wars being actually identical to those of our own society they'll probably be like "well what would a 19year old even want with a middle aged woman?" the thought wouldn't even occur. She'd be desexualized by virtue of her age so of course give her a hot young bodyguard no one (including the audience) is gonna see potential for impropriety
AND NOW WE COME TO ROTS. Its not impossible for a 45 year old woman ti get pregnant (average menopause is 50 i assume also in space until proven otherwise) but it is rarer, and it would make sense of anidala not to have been expecting it. It would also underline, again, that this pregnancy is a genuine threat to their lives and careers, because two young people in love secretly married having a baby is literally fine. its normal. the audience will forgive and even applaud even if the wider society in the movie doesn't. but a 45 year old senator with a secret baby?? that she's KEEPING?? like already in the original she shouldn't have kept the baby but the movie is christian and the audience too the vibe is "noo pregnancy is beautiful its luke and leia awww". We should be SCARED about the pregnancy.
And then, anakin having nightmares about padmé dying in childbirth are no longer obvious prophecies. like young padmé is healthy and rich, she'll have the best medical care theres no reason to think her pregnancy will have complications. It's actually kind of stupid and dismissive for people to say anakin's nightmares are nothing to worry about, especially considering he's had them before! but if padmé is pregnant at 45 the risk of complications is very high even with good medical care, and it would make sense for anakin to just have regular nightmares about it. The pregnancy is not a good thing! its a big risk they're taking in a lot of ways!
It also complicates the "unavoidable fate" thing they did in rots. Like in the original had anakin not tried to do everything to prevent padmé dying in childbirth she actually wouldve been fine. She died of grief while fully healthy which i think everyone can agree was fucking stupid. But if anakin's descent into the dark side, 100% ensured padmé dying (strangling a 45 year old woman who's already endured a huge amount of stress and throwing her to the ground? narratively speaking, either she's not making it or the baby isn't), i think it would be good if we weren't told with absolute certainty "had anakin stayed a jedi she wouldn't have died". It would be more compelling if we didn't know for sure!!
Plus it would make anakin's freakout so much easier to empathize with. Like sure its scary to think of your loved ones dying but the whole movie she's presented as obviously not at risk. Anakin worries but we don't. We should worry! Are we so much better than him? Wouldn't we also be desperate in his position? Or alternatively we refuse to sympathize with his decision to fall in love with a middle aged woman which is uncomfortable and leads us into much more complicated moral questioning than "become evil or stay good?". It would add drama either way!
And it would make both padmé and anakin so much more 3 dimensional as characters. Now they're making strange, emotionally driven and unexpected decisions instead of following the script for romantic lead 1 and 2. Padmé has actual depth and complications! She makes decisions we can't necessarily appove of, keeping the baby becomes a genuine decision with genuine cost instead of "duh, what else is she gonna do?" Her falling in love with anakin actually adds depth to her character and tells us something about who she is instead of turning her into a cliché. Replaying the trilogy in my head with older padmé instead of young padmé she immediately feels like a character with agency instead of a cardboard cutout of the ideal dead wife.
Even in the delicious wonderful scenario where obiwan and padmé have an affair after anakin joins the dark side, if padmé is young it doesn't feel like a decision she's making so much as the circumstances acting upon her, it feels like obiwan is betraying anakin but it doesn't feel like she's actually betraying anything? she just doesn't have enough agency for that to be the case. Giving in to emotion is what a romantic heroine is supposed to do. But older padmé sleeping with obiwan after losing her extremely young husband to the dark side while at most 5 days away from giving birth is like...an actual decision. A complicated woman making unsympathetic choices, giving in to emotion when what's expected of her is dignity. For the THIRD time, she acts out of feeling instead of reason and seals her fate. Its kind of a misogynistic character arc but i don't care id watch the shit out of it. And she HAS a character arc now, instead of nothing.
*as listed by the UN. post in the tags if you're not from one of these cities!
I feel that this is an important case study in Tumblr demographics and what the polls are actually reflecting
actually based on my math this is currently pretty representative! 2.7% of respondents live in the most populous cities, which would be 216 million people (of 8 billion), and the total population of those 9 cities is just over 214 million!
Sorry, no free space on this one. I want real answers because I believe this question is at the heart of what makes us people. Reblog (please and thank you <3) for larger sample size, etc.
Palpatine looks like an evil Colin Mochrie
but why would you hide this in the tags though
Blind people must save a lot on electricity.
stomatium
They do actually!
I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.
Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.”
She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”
And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”
She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea! The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn. I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did. So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”
My moms a sign language interpreter, and she’s signed with people from all over the US. According to her, when she signs with people from the south they sign with a “drawl.” They have slower hand movements and exaggerate certain parts of the sign. People from the Midwest sign very fast and people from the south sign very slow.
So we were at a restaurant once and my mom started interpreting for someone who was trying to order and she was like “oh you’re from the south!”
And they were like “how did you know that?”
And she said “you sign with a drawl.” And they were really surprised that it came through that much.
It’s really interesting that even when not speaking verbally accents and heritage come through.
urbanfantasyinspiration
Humans are so fucking fascinating
I'm like a girl who wants to read more books but doesn't
“Author of 25+ best-selling Pride & Prejudice variations”
Yeah, no.
When will I get what I deserve (a Diego Luna, Gael Garcia Bernal, Oscar Isaac, Pedro Pascal super-movie)
Add in Santiago Cabrera and Rodrigo Santoro for funsies
