Checkmate

I'm gonna start a new aesthetic, it's called "badpunk". It's an alternate retro sci-fi look except all the technology is terrible and looks bad. Somebody add pictures, I need examples.

Great work everybody these all look like shit

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.

hey have you guys met my swiss nb friend Yodel, they/he, who -

@lightraize

i was gonna release a post about httyd3 complaints soon, but im curious. all my followers, what do you think of that movie.

again this is mostly for my followers but hey, anyone can vote. you can voice your opinion of course as well. I just want to see.

imagine i get one vote and its myself voting lol

My boyfriend is trying to explain cricket to me again. “He’s only got two balls to make 48 runs”, he says. The camera focuses on a man. Underneath him it says LEFT ARM FAST MEDIUM. A ball flies into the stands and presumably fractures someone’s skull. “There’s a free six”, my boyfriend says. 348 SIXES says the screen. A child in the audience waves a sign referencing Weet-Bix

The first time he showed me this I assumed he was pranking me

if people haven’t been exposed to cricket before, here is the experience. The person who likes cricket turns on a radio with an air of happy expectation. “We’ll just catch up with the cricket,” they say. 

An elderly British man with an accent - you can picture exactly what he looks like and what he is wearing, somehow, and you know that he will explain the important concept of Yorkshire to you at length if you make eye contact - is saying “And w’ four snickets t’ wicket, Umbleby dives under the covers and romps home for a sticky bicket.”

There is a deep and satisfied silence. Weather happens over the radio. This lasts for three minutes.

A gentle young gentleman with an Indian accent, whose perfect and beautiful clear voice makes him sound like a poet sipping from a cup of honeyed drink always, says mildly “Of course we cannot forget that when Pakistan last had the biscuit under the covers, they were thrown out of bed. In 1957, I believe.”

You mouth “what the fucking fuck.”

A morally ambiguous villain from a superhero movie says off-microphone, “Crumbs everywhere.”

Apparently continuing a previous conversation, the villain asks, “Do seagulls eat tacos?”

“I’m sure someone will tell us eventually,” the poet says. His voice is so beautiful that it should be familiar; he should be the only announcer on the radio, the only reader of audiobooks.

The villain says with sudden interest, “Oh, a leg over straight and under the covers, Peterson and Singh are rumping along with a straight fine leg and good pumping action. Thanks to his powerful thighs, Peterson is an excellent legspinner, apart from being rude on Twitter.”

The man from Yorkshire roars potently, like a bull seeing another bull. There might be words in his roar, but otherwise it is primal and sizzling.

“That isn’t straight,” the poet says. “It’s silly.”

“What the fucking fuck,” you say out loud at this point.

“Shh,” says the person who likes cricket. They listen, tensely. Something in the distance makes a very small “thwack,” like a baby dropping an egg.

“Was that a doosra or a googly?” the villain asks.

“IT’S A WRONG ‘UN,” roars the Yorkshireman in his wrath. A powerful insult has been offered. They begin to scuffle.

“With that double doozy, Crumpet is baffled for three turns, Agarwal is deep in the biscuit tin and Padgett has gone to the shops undercover,” the poet says quickly, to cover the action while his companions are busy. The villain is being throttled, in a friendly companionable way.

An intern apparently brings a message scrawled on a scrap of paper like a courier sprinting across a battlefield. “Reddy has rolled a nat 20,” the poet says with barely contained excitement. “Australia is both a continent and an island. But we’re running out of time!”

“Is that true?” You ask suddenly.

“Shh!” Says the person who likes cricket. “It’s a test match.”

“About Australia.”

“We won’t know THAT until the third DAY.”

A distant “pock” noise. The sound of thirty people saying “tsk,” sorrowfully.

“And the baby’s dropped the egg. Four legs over or we’re done for, as long as it doesn’t rain.”

The villain might be dead? You begin to find yourself emotionally invested.

There are mild distant cheers. “Oh, and with twelve sticky wickets t’ over and t’ seagull’s exploded,” the man from the North says as if all of his dreams have come true. “What a beautiful day.” Your person who likes cricket relaxes. It is tea break.

The villain, apparently alive, describes the best hat in the audience as “like a funnel made of dove-colored net, but backwards, with flies trapped in it.”

This is every bit as good as that time in Australia in 1975, they all agree, drinking their tea and eating home-made cakes sent in by the fans. The poet comments favorably on the icing and sugar-preserved violets. The Yorkshire man discourses on the nature of sponge. The villain clatters his cup too hard on his saucer. To cover his embarrassment, the poet begins scrolling through Twitter on his phone, reading aloud the best memes in his enchanting milky voice. Then, with joy, he reads an @ from an ornithologist at the University of Reading: seagulls do eat tacos! A reference is cited; the poet reads it aloud. Everyone cheers.

You are honestly - against your will - kind of into it! but also: weirdly enraged.

“Was that … it?” you ask, deeming it safe to interrupt.

“No,” says the person who likes cricket, “This is second tea break on the first day. We won’t know where we really are until lunch tomorrow.”

And - because you cannot stop them - you have to accept this; if cricket teaches you anything, it is this gentle and radical acceptance.

I don’t have notes enabled in my tumblr activity so sometimes when I open the app it just shows me one of my own old posts (that’s gotten a note within the past 30 seconds) and then vanishes. Today it showed me the gracklesong cricket graphic.

I’m sorry friends, but “just google it” is no longer viable advice. What are we even telling people to do anymore, go try to google useful info and the first three pages are just ads for products that might be the exact opposite of what the person is trying to find but The Algorithm thinks the words are related enough? And if it’s not ads it’s just sponsored websites filled with listicles, just pages and pages of “TOP FIFTEEN [thing you googled] IMAGINED AS DISNEY PRINCESSES” like… what are we even doing anymore, google? I can no longer use you as shorthand for people doing real and actual helpful research on their own.

OK SO

Have any of you guys ever played Dreamworks Super Star Kartz? Well, I just found out it existed and HOO BOY-

Basically its just Mario Kart but more janky and also with Dreamworks characters including some from httyd.

So you’ve got Hiccup, right? Little man in a little kart, nothing to see here. AND THEN THERES TOOTHLESS

THEY PUT A FREAKING DRAGON IN A GO KART

WHAT IS THE PURPOSE

LOOK AT HIM

So yeah I watched a play through and it’s freakin hilarious. I’ve compiled a compilation of Hiccup and Toothless being ridiculous for your enjoyment. Have fun.

This video is so much better than it looks like it'll be.

I think it's really interesting that the whole first movie Stoick is defining what Hiccup 'isn't', and the movie kinda revolves around Hiccup figuring out what he 'is'

Like Stoick is always saying 'you're many things Hiccup, a dragon killer is not one of them', 'i knew who I was, what I had to become, Hiccup is not that boy', 'you're not my son', etc etc, he defines Hiccup by what he isn't until Hiccup shows him what he is

The royal wardrobe of QUEEN PADMÉ AMIDALA in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (1999)

‘redditors need to know this’, ‘twitterinas need to know that’… no. you need to know one thing and that is that you are not allowed to complain about werewolf fuckers. this is the werewolf fucking website. grow up and go fuck a werewolf.

What does this gif have to do with werewolves?

if you have to ask you’re not ready

can you explain? i don’t get it

This is like someone just informed the newcomers about the devils sacrament taking place every full moon and the devil itself popped up asking “what sacrament?” with a cheshire grin.

if you have to resort to the "Race to the Edge isn't canon" argument then you've automatically lost the debate, just saying.

Anyone who uses that argument only uses it because they ran out of real things to say.

It’s like debating anything else with “yeah well you’re stupid!”

Using that argument is like throwing a tantrum.

And it always comes off as bullying, tbh.

Plus, some rando making that claim means nothing.

HAPPY SUMMERWEEN!  (click to embiggen)

This year the theme is “Tall Tales and Legends”, and so, we have:

Dipper as Pecos Bill.  One of the tales involves Pecos Bill using a rattlesnake as a lasso (the snake’s name is Shake, which leads me to believe the snake is kind of okay with this? In this case, Mabel created a plush version for Dipper to carry.)

Mabel is Annie Oakley, who was a real person, but around whom legends have grown.  Famous as a sharpshooter, nicknamed “Little Sure-Shot”, I figured Mabel would be into that connection.  Plus her outfit is awesome (that skirt with the rose applique is one that we have photos of Oakley wearing).

Stan is dressed as Captain Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, a legendary giant sailor from New England, who is mostly remembered today as the subject of sea shanties (and also the name of a hard cidery here in Massachusetts).  Stormalong was the sea-going Paul Bunyan – 30 feet tall, his ship was so big its mast had to be hinged to let the sun and the moon pass by.  Stormalong had a lifelong rival with the Kraken… and so one of the young Pacific tree octopuses (from 2020′s Stan Twins Birthday pic) is hitching along as a guest star in the role.

Speaking of giants… Ford, of course, is Paul Bunyan, with Waddles obviously done up by Mabel to play the part of Babe the Blue Ox.  I’d like to think that Ford develops the same kind of fondness that Stan has for Paul Bunyan, who after all, with the statue in town, is a Gravity Falls fixture.

Finally, Fiddleford is Johnny Appleseed – another real person around whom legends grew. John Chapman really did go from state to territory to state in the early 19th c., introducing apple trees to parts of the upper midwest.  (And speaking of hard cider – I read an interesting theory that most of the varieties that John Chapman planted were not really good eating apples, but would have been more valuable for hard cider-making, which was a staple at the time.)  Anyway, Fiddleford was halfway to the look already.

The Tall Tales theme was a lot of fun to research and do.  And I can never resist folkloric stuff for Gravity Falls; it just fits so well!

(from June 2021)

the family photograph that lives in my head

Fire Nation Soldiers vs Toph