@crossover15 kofi requested the twins meeting Padmé's handmaidens!! (sequel to this)

(kofi requests are open!)

we're not brave, we're not strong, we're not soldiers...

some winx doodles kek

padme's handmaidens are such an underrated concept. i mean, yeah you can call it women supporting women and leave it at that but like. its so much more intense than that. they basically created the persona of queen amidala together. they assigned her specific mannerisms and tone of voice and breathing patterns and all of them studied that well enough to play the role perfectly. they put all of the derangedness teenage girls put into discovering their own identity into perfecting mimicry instead & they did all that knowing that their role will always be to die in padme's place if it comes to that. idk what insane levels of devotion does it take to be like 14 and you've become so intimately familiar with your friend that you can quite literally become her. there's friendship & traumabonding and then theres "my entire life is dedicated to dying for this woman" and then there's that but with added identity fuckery and thats what the handmaidens have going on with the bonus point of being 14

ok yk what tho. thought on this more. theres something about padme growing up with her closest relationships being ride or die devoted and the way that colours her later relationships. shes a lot more isolated as a senator, with most of her friendships at the time being professional & ofc aside from that, her standards for the intensity of your average relationship arent normal so there could be some genuine failure to connect there. and thats the stage of her life where she begins her extremely intense ride or die relationship with anakin. the fandom acknowledges his attachment, loyalty & murder complexes but i think maybe we should consider that padme might have genuinely liked that about him. im straying fully into my personal interpretation here but i love the idea that on some level, the girl who grew up knowing shed have to send her closest friends off to die in her place and then carry on and do her duty would be attracted to someone who gets to lash out and take revenge and who refuses to accept loss

Oh, wow. I love this addition, especially given the context of Attack of the Clones. The movie starts with her handmaiden getting murdered while protecting her. Padme is upset and grieving literally the entire film, but trying to hold it in. The first thing she does after Anakin goes ape shit is to rush off to the planet where she knows her handmaiden's killer is to start some shit. He's, like, her inspiration.

3.2 Genshin spoilers

My favorite part of the archon quest was when Haithan recruited Nilou off the streets to join the Sumeru avengers

Not "It's a product of it's time" as a way to excuse its problematic undertones but rather "it's a product of it's time" to say that the issues it tackles were relevant then and its stances that now seem milquetoast were radical then, and that heavy handed, cheesy driving home of those viewpoints was sometimes necessary, and our acceptance and normalization of those viewpoints is in large part because of media like it normalizing those viewpoints and imagery, and watching it in the modern day turns into a loving study of history of the masses and public opinion

Yes this is about the original star trek

Job applications: I am very passionate (true!) about normal and useful things (lie.)

i said i was going to arrange a list of my favorite articles/criticism about shakespeare, so here’s my first little roundup! obligatory disclaimer that i don’t necessarily agree with or endorse every single point of view in each word of these articles, but they scratch my brain. will add to this list as i continue reading, and feel free to add your own favorites in the reblogs! :]

essays

Is Shakespeare For Everyone? by Austin Tichenor (a basic examination of that question)

Interrogating the Shakespeare System by Madeline Sayet (counterpoint/parallel to the above; on Shakespeare’s place in, and status as, imperialism)

Shakespeare in the Bush by Laura Bohannan (also a good parallel to the above; on whether Shakespeare is really culturally “universal”)

The Unified Theory of Ophelia: On Women, Writing, and Mental Illness (“I was trying to make sense of the different ways men and women related to Ophelia. Women seemed to invoke her like a patron saint; men seemed mostly interested in fetishizing her flowery, waterlogged corpse.”)

Hamlet Is a Suicide Text—It’s Time to Teach It Like One (on teaching shakespeare plays about suicide to high schoolers)

Commuting With Shylock by Dara Horn (on listening to MoV with a ten-year-old son, as modern jewish people, to look at that eternal question of Is This Play Antisemitic?)

All That Glisters is Not Gold (NPR episode, on whether it’s possible to perform othello, taming of the shrew, & merchant to do good instead of harm)

academic articles

the Norton Shakespeare’s intro to the Merchant of Venice (apologies about the highlights here; they are not mine; i scanned this from my rented copy)

the Norton Shakespeare’s intro to Henry the Fourth part 1 (and apologies for the angled page scans on this one; see above)

Richard II: A Modern Perspective by Harry Berger Jr (this is the article that made me understand richard ii)

Hamlet’s Older Brother (“Hamlet and Prince Hal are in the same situation, the distinction resting roughly on the difference between the problem of killing a king and the problem of becoming one. … Hamlet is literature’s Mona Lisa, and Hal is the preliminary study for it.”)

Egyptian Queens and Male Reviewers: Sexist Attitudes in Antony & Cleopatra Criticism (about more than just reviewers; my favorite deconstruction of shakespeare’s cleopatra in general)

Strange Flesh: Antony and Cleopatra and the Story of the Dissolving Warrior (“If Troilus and Cressida is [Shakespeare’s] vision of a world in which masculinity must be enacted in order to exist, Antony and Cleopatra is his vision of a world in which masculinity not only must be enacted, but simply cannot be enacted, his vision of a world in which this particular performance has broken down.”)

misc

Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert (poem that makes me fucking insane)

Dirtbag Henry IV (what it sounds like.)

Cleopatra and Antony by Linda Bamber (what if a&c… was good.)

C A R D I N A L  W I T C H E S  | Glinda (North) - East - South - West

Guys, whoever, no one at all, I have so much to say about The K2, watched it twice now in the midst of a third. A bit obsessed, but really what’s a little obsession like this

I wanna watch it over and I’m not even done with my current stream, but also, I cannot with this.

The antagonist should have been the love interest especially with the story the writers gave her, and that fucking incredible actress, the actual female lead is so bland in comparison, and all I really feel for her is pity on some occasions. This isn’t a slight against the actress, I love her, but the writers did not try with her at all. They made her so monotone, and she rarely shifts from her constant anger. She’s been through so much shit and yeah that’s fucking terrible, but they made her so naive and helpless, and she just shows up sometimes to motivate Je Ha and then goes back to her melodrama. 

The fucking chemistry between the male lead and the antagonist compared to what little seemingly forced thing he has with the female lead is like phenomenal it is incredible. The actual romance is disappointing af, it’s just cute in its Korean way, but there isn’t the same substance to it. There’s this sort of complete acceptance between Je Ha and Yoo Jin that there isn’t with Anna. Anna has it, too ig to some extent, but hers is the kind of turning a blind eye and almost “as long as you’re there to save me in my time of need” kind of thing. She relies on him so completely that she endangers the both of them more than once, and it gets really frustrating quickly.

There’s nothing hidden between Yoo Jin and Je Ha, no doubts, they know the best and worst parts of eachother, they know how to hurt eachother and they know exactly what the other needs to pull them back up. they actually support each other for their selfish reasons but there’s this immense respect for each other from the very beginning, 

and I would add a yt clip or make a gif of that if I knew how but I’m talking about that funeral scene with the umbrella and the “keep your head up, your enemies are watching” and Yoo Jin constantly giving him free reign to do as he pleases and basically consort with Anna, fully knowing it would not in her best interest;

this^ whole part, where he didn’t have to say shit for her to know exactly what was wrong and figure out exactly how to save him.

I’m annoyed that they ruined the makings of a pretty perfect thing in keeping with the Korean cliché of the angry wronged hero having his walls broken by the sweet innocent girl he saved, and the vile woman whose trauma is not an excuse the way the man’s is and who deserves her misery because she made do with what she had and was forced to become ruthless to ensure her survival the only way she knew how, despite losing all the hope she had and being betrayed by a husband who should have loved her, over and over. She was grasping at straws, and the man she loved thought so little of her that he fully believed for more than a decade that she would hurt a person so dear to him when all she wanted was to be able to love that same person with him. And she was killed off with no one caring for her death in the least, with another man she seemingly fell in love with, living at the expense of her life.

My Sassy Princess ep. 5

LAND OF OZ MASTERPOST

Now seems as good a time as any to remind everyone that all of the original fifteen Oz books are public domain and up for free online.

Happy reading! 

The Wheel of Time S1 - Tar Valon by Filip Štorch

boop

pushing daisies really was a modern retelling of orpheus and eurydice in which they knew they wouldnt make it out of the underworld so instead they simply built a life together on the stairs

"The magic system isn't explained properly" bro as if anyone these days understands how a computer works

Let’s do another poll!

it's the most kpoppiest kpop song to ever kpop