look I understand it’s the internet and whatever but i am begging you guys to understand: if you try to be playfully/sarcastically mean-spirited to someone who you have zero established relationship with, 99/100 times you will just come across as an asshole.
#define physical harm bc I’d very much like a couple puncture wounds#‘Rose have you learned nothing from all the vampire tales about how eternal life is a curse?’ NO I absolutely have not learned a damn thing#eternal life would let me never feel like I’m running out of time/running behind on some cosmic schedule of my life path#(I know I am not bc that’s not how life works but having infinite years to pursue all interests and projects would be easier#than developing a healthy sense of perspective)#also consider this: blasphemous interpolation of Catholic aesthetics and iconography is pretty great.
Look I won’t judge you* if when you order coffee you only order some syrup and frappe base monstrosity but I will judge you if you order that at 7:45 AM and hold up the whole drive thru line with your dramatic order’s prep time for those poor baristas
My folks are seeing Brandi Carlile (and Wynonna!!!) at the MN State Fair tonight and I am so deeply jealous and sad that I was just in that fine state a couple days ago but have now returned to Misery that I am eating drive thru cheese curds for dinner in a sad approximation of fair food
#if you’re not from the upper Midwest you might not know but the MN fair is a very very significant deal#and I’ve not been in probably a decade because it’s always during the first or second week of school#I love fairs in general I wanna go to your tiny county fair I wanna go to any state’s fair I love it all the crafts the livestock the food#(usually not the rides because I don’t go on rides that aren’t permanently installed but I would like them if I weren’t paranoid)#also did you know that despite being the best fast food Culver’s cheese curds are not right?? that’s not how anyone makes them in WI?#Dairy Queen is where you gotta go
It’s always so hilarious watching students react with vehement disagreement when I tell them the basic premise of postmodernism
#they also walked right into my ‘exposing your heteronormativity’ trap when I asked them#what could be interpreted in the statement ‘I spent the night with Alex’#(yes I know that no name is gendered but we have to meet them where they’re at so ‘Alex’ it was)#now the question is whether or not this group will hate me as much as last semester’s group for introducing them to new ideas & perspectives#I’m optimistic actually but I’ve been burned before
"You've never seen a girl like me"
"Be honest with me, tell me everything, tell me you've never felt this way before"
I have a lot of feelings about kanae being a the previous champion..
Oh no I listened to “Butchered Tongue” and now I’m crying and feel like Hozier himself punched me in the chest
One of my favorite parts of women’s sports getting more airtime on television is getting to watch women just openly cursing in moments of high tension on my screen
I’m halfway through Little Fires Everywhere and have finally realized what it is that elevates Elena beyond your standard upper middle class white woman antagonist to a character I feel physical pain having to hear about because I hate her so much:
Her whole personality is that she is 1000% convinced that American suburbs are humanity’s greatest invention.
#and thus SHE is the pinnacle of human achievement as someone who has been obsessed with the suburbs her whole life#little fires everywhere spoilers#I have enjoyed the time spent on other characters but she would be a caricature were so many white women not exactly like this#I know that part of the continued discussion of Shaker Heights is due to it being Ng’s own hometown#but I am sick of hearing about a place that further solidifies my desire to never set foot in Ohio
Me making my last post:
#I had a wild ass afternoon at work#have gotten home and let myself do something I do not normally do (drink a soda)#and was just going a mile a fuckin minute because I was excited about making the damn meme#and writing a rambling post about all of my half-thoughts#that it wasn't until like the 3rd time i read the post that I noticed the problem in the meme itself#alas.
Okay, I am so interested in talking about that post you just reblogged re: queer fiction! It's interesting because my perspective is somewhat different--I also will not call something "LGBT+ work" unless it is explicit. I'm really curious about the perspective here. I am not opposed to readings, I once presented a whole ass paper on a lesbian reading of Jane Eyre. But I think my well has been poisoned by so many people telling me how life affirmingly and unapologetically gay a show is and then its just, two girls holding hands in a light beam. Does this still hold for you for modern work, or are you looking at a historical perspective?
Ok to be honest most of my response is this:
(EDIT: THE BOTTOM PANEL SHOULD SAY "DOESN'T EXIST" i'm just not very good at memes)
Because I think yours is a very logical approach! If I'm watching a show someone has described as gay I had better get to see kissing on the mouth at least, like Korrasami is a big important deal but that doesn't necessarily mean that the show felt to me, this particular lesbian, like a truly gay show even as I can recognize how impactful it was and probably especially because I know why it wasn't more overt. I know that some of this comes from the interplay between increased demands for representation, media companies that give us just absolute scraps so standards for representation are low, and to some degree audiences' inabilities to discern 'what is me projecting onto this piece of media and what is me reading something in the text?'
When I reblogged earlier, I was definitely thinking more in terms of literature and the whole trend of marketing books based on represented identities and not actual plot or theme content combined with the 'how will we know if they are gay if they don't have a romantic subplot' problem, combined with the gay=good quality mindset that leads fans to reject an otherwise good piece of storytelling as 'bad' for not focusing on lgbtqia romance, combined also with the way people have started to accuse narratives of queerbaiting just because a romance hasn't explicitly happened yet, combined with the accusations of queerbaiting getting leveled at actual real life people (this is, perhaps, the most peripheral issue of the list).
Add onto that a heaping serving of 'just being a judgy mean lesbian' and sprinkle in some 'I love ambiguity so much that I revel in feeling like I don't truly know what's going on with any character and thus have to make an interpretative argument that I know is not definitive" and you get me reblogging that and ranting about The Outsiders in the tag.
But I do think that you get at a key distinction that exists somewhere in my mind, though I don't know that I can place exactly where - it's historical vs. modern, sure, but it's also grounded in a sense of why something doesn't actually move beyond subtext. There's a spectrum from Xena to A League of Their Own (the movie) to official approaches to Pharmercy to Clexa to AO3 fics shipping the Pretty Little Liars with each other to the Taylor Swift secret lesbian conspiracy theorists, but it's not just about pieces of textual evidence, level of delusion, or bad faith participation by corporate marketing professionals, it's about all of these things and more, the why of ambiguity AND the centrality of the relationship/situation in question.
Xena to me is a 'gay show' (a term I'm only using for the sake of explanation) but Legend of Korra isn't because Korrasami isn't nearly as central of a feature to the narrative or setting of the whole show, or even to the characters' arcs, as Xena & Gabrielle's relationship is from what I know and have seen. Pharmercy does better than Clexa because there's at least now actual recognition of Pharah being a lesbian and they haven't killed off either of them yet in what was essentially just a more hurtful sweeps week kiss (the kids don't even know about those these days I think), but it has still very much been a marketing tactic rather than simply loving storytelling and so it's miles away from something like ALOTO. In many cases it just comes down to the "I know it when I see it rule" that is not how congress should be legislating on obscenity, but that is perfectly fine for us to use talking about things on the internet.
But mostly just the meme, yeah.
#lol this post got out of hand sorry for the long answer#but it's a really interesting conversation that is! I think! not as simple in all cases as one way or another#and is as many things are complicated by the lack of literary education that enables a distinction#between a 'gay reading' and 'this show made me headcanon gay ships'
"it's not queer fiction unless the queerness is explicitly declared in the text according to currently accepted terminology and in a way that meets the approval of the entire audience" I mean follow your heart I guess but I trust myself as a queer person to recognise queer themes
"but doesn't this risk giving the author undue credit for queer representation" I do not care about the author
#SE Hinton famously wrote a gay novel and gets very very angry about people recognizing it as and calling it a gay novel#so the only extent to which I care about the author is when we can collectively piss off homophobes and transphobes#simply by being good at reading and refusing to shut up about it#anyway go get your bag lgbtqia+ authors who wanna write like. rom coms.#but I will be reading the books that actually make/let me sit in subtextual subtle performance of queerness desire embodiment etc#that I find infinitely more interesting as a reader who isn’t just looking for escapism that is me-flavored
My therapist: Yassified Nick Valentine isn’t real, he can’t hurt you.
Yassified Nick Valentine:
#WHO IS THAT IN YOUR GAME FALLOUT SHELTER ONLINE????#because it’s not any Nick Valentine I know#Nick is everything and more but he shouldn’t be pretty#he should be beat to shit and look like he should have 36-48 hour stubble despite his face being made of plastic#in case it’s not clear: this is official in game art from fallout shelter online not fanart#I wouldn’t make fun of fan art like this even if I was horrified by it
funniest language thing in modern greek is that the word for baby/infant is “moro” which literally means “idiot.” like someone looked at a baby 1000 years ago and was like “this guy doesnt know shit.”
just to be clear it meant idiot BEFORE it meant baby so like, this wasnt an insult born out of comparing people to babies, it really was people looking at babies and thinking “i dont think theres a better word to describe these things than “moron”” (which “moro” is the root word for)
i just remembered this post. i think i should add onto it:
“moro mou” (my baby) is an affectionate nickname for a partner in greek, the same way “baby/babe” is in english. however this does mean that you are ostensibly calling your partner “my moron <3”
just saw someone say that Riza Hawkeye isn’t any kind of force in combat and I now have to leave the internet forever, goodbye
#did you…. did you watch the show#did you notice any single one of her many many guns.#did you watch her shoot them. did you listen to her talk about shooting them.#because even if you cannot pick up on the subtext implication that she has killed many people#(and that it haunts her every day of her life)#you can pick up on the text text implication that every time you see her shoot someone they die or are seriously injured#(and see that it clearly haunts her every day of her life she is clearly not okay. because of all the shooting and killing people.)#fma spoilers#for fury per a recent conversation#I’m sorry how do you not recognize what Hawkeye is??? she’s right there????????#‘she showed her back one time and that’s it’ I am seeing red just say you hate women#just say ‘she was forced into a deeply traumatic position & has spent every day since trying to regain her agency & I judge her for it’
is finding 'lmao' to be like a statement of extreme murderous hostility just a me thing or is this something everyone agrees on. like ive always thought that this is self-evidently true to anyone under the age of 30 but is this like one of those things where if oyu smile at an ape it thikns its threatening you and kills you (im the ape)
to be clear 'LMAO' is fine thats someone expressing genuine amusement but 'lmao' registers as more genuinely hostile than 'kys' like 99% of the time and i'm not joking
agreeing with the people in the replies saying that the hostility doesn't necessary have to be directed against the person you're saying it to but can be directed towards a third party or the world in general. noentheless conveys a hateful and violent sentiment. its a malediction
“This isn’t some UFO goose chase you’re leading me on, is it Mulder?” says Scully like 5 minutes into episode 2, entirely unaware of the premise of her show
#this is a true relic of the 90’s and I love it#Twin Peaks is obviously a favorite of mine but it’s so distinct in the way it brings aesthetic elements together#so to see a more measured…. ‘sane man’s twin peaks’ from what I can tell is a delightful throwback#I’ve been meaning to watch this show for so long
There’s something extremely funny to me about seeing “critically acclaimed” followed by “mostly negative (12,477)”
It's even funnier now.