#i'm supposed to be writing my dissertation and instead i'm thinking about shit like this

[wildishmazz]

I've watched two versions of Starmania over the past couple of days(I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation about Starlight Express and gender politics so ofc I've found a new rabbithole), the 1989 Rouge Edition and the 1994 English version at the Mogador, and I keep thinking about Sadia and how drastically different she is between the two already drastically different productions.

In the 1989 she is a trans domme with charisma and magnetism off the scale. Her introduction is a showstopper that basically says "I'm a genderfuck and you don't know what to do about me except take me on my own terms. Fuck you if you don't like what you see, but I know that you do"(I didn’t count how many times the word "travesti" appears, but it's a lot). She drops her former co-conspirators in the shit after feeling(whether justified or not) that she's been usurped by a newcomer and rejected by the antiestablishment terrorist group she essentially created.

In the 1994, she's a performatively rebellious child of the elite ruling class, apparently cis and very young, who enjoys slumming it and automatically expects to be put in charge. Her song is altered to "I'm a very versatile sexual chameleon who can roleplay any character type you like, but I’m the one who chooses what it's going to be, not you", with maybe the slightest hint that she's not cis("you deserve a bit for free"). She's unpleasant and immature, it's hard to see how she gained a following of people willing to commit violence at her word, and it's no surprise when she apparently gets tired of the whole rebellion thing after she's not allowed to be in charge any more and returns to the ruling class, betraying her former friends on her way.

I just feel that the 1989 Sadia is a far more compelling, sympathetic, and ultimately tragic character. It's easy today to see her as an example of a child of immense wealth and privilege who gets thrown out of all of that after coming out as trans, who picks herself up and rebuilds herself from the ground up after that fall. As an abuse survivor existing in the margins of a harshly stratified society, she has to develop a lot of coping mechanisms. She is flexible, resourceful, charismatic, tough as nails, and hypervigilant to threats and percieved threats. She finds a handful of misfits, identifies their leader, and stays a step back as the brains of the organisation while he's the face. They are her found family, and relies on them for acceptance and security.

But then Cristal happens. Cristal is the presenter of the tv talent show Starmania(much like Hunger Games' Effie Trinket), pretty, hyperfeminine, the very face of unthinking privilege and wealth, potentially everything Sadia wanted to be before her fall from grace. Sadia still has the right connections and dregs of social capital to contact her with the offer of an interview with the Black Stars, intending to use her platform to further their cause. What she doesn’t anticipate is an explosive infatuation between the Black Stars' leader Johnny and Cristal. It's galling in many ways when Cristal joins them, and with the zeal of the convert pushes for more extreme ideas than Sadia, leading to the Black Stars listening to her instead. The final straw for Sadia comes when she threatens to leave and no-one tries to stop her. In a very short space of time, she loses her influence over Johnny, loses her position of authority in the group(to someone who effortlessly embodies what she wanted to be before her first rejection), and finds/feels that the people she previously trusted, her found family, don't care about her at all.

And she brought it on herself by inviting Cristal to interview Johny.

Her pain, her rage, her rejection - they eclipse what she already felt for the elite ruling class, because a)this has only just happened and b) these motherfuckers should know better than to turn on one of their own when they should be united against a more powerful enemy. It's bad when your family of origin reject you because they don't understand or accept what you are. It's worse to be rejected by the people who do understand and accept your truth, who should be on your side.

And, aside, the more powerful enemy is pledging that "we will no longer be slaves to nature". There might be something in that that appeals to her. Sadia's been hurt and rejected by both sides, but she can get revenge on one of them by playing them against each other - the rising fascist dictator and the antifascists trying to stop him.

She does. Cristal dies. And fascism takes over.

And this version of the character just feels so much more authentic, emotionally cohesive, than the rebelling-against-Daddy-by-being-promiscuous-and-starting-a-terrorist-cell-then-throwing-a-privileged-tantrum-that-gets-people-killed Sadia of 5 years later.

#Starmania #Sadia #character analysis #I can't believe that if Superbia had got off the ground #people wouldn't have been making direct comparisons

[hellmouth]

Okay, so, because I was caught in 4K HD in the tags on @hero-adjacent's post rambling about this theory that I don't think I've heard anyone on the brainwave of before, I figured I'd write the whole thing out. This is probably going to be a goddamn dissertation and I am so sorry. Giving credit where it's due for being the one who first said it, @reetamorgan was the original Oh Shit Oh Fuck mastermind here.

So bare with me here alright, this is off the fucking walls at first but hear me out:

We never get a specific timeline (to my knowledge) of exactly when Angelus was cursed with his soul, only that it happened when he killed a Romani girl (I'm not using the slur, Whedon, get bent) and the Elder of that tribe had him cursed with his soul for the pain and suffering he caused On Purpose like he was some kind of vampire psychological sadist Picasso. Now, here's where we get into the theory at hand: what if that girl was Drusilla?

Dru was sired in the mid-1800s, Darla was the one who hand-picked her for Angelus to bat around like a cat with a mouse, but it was his decision to sire her instead of kill her because he thought she was special (Angel 2x5). Darla was not 100% on board- case in point:

Angelus: "We turn her into one of us. Killing is so merciful, in the end, isn't it? The pain has ended."

Darla: "To make her one of us? She's a lunatic."

Angelus: "Eternal torment."

And he sires her before she can take her vows solely so that he can have the final laugh. Which... is kind of a big fuck you to just have nothing done about it, you know? What sparked the theory itself is a conversation that takes place in BTVS 2x14 Surprise in an exchange between Jenny and her uncle and the very specific language he uses to describe the situation which is as follows:

"...You just forget that he destroyed the most beloved daughter of your tribe? That he killed every man, woman, and child that touched her life? Vengeance demands that his pain be eternal as ours is!"

Except we do! Because it's my post and I said so and I warned you this might get dissertation length!

So the main reason this made us pause and stare at each other like the slow-pan to look at the camera in The Office after our- what- I think this is our third or fourth rewatch together? Was because he used the word "destroyed". He didn't say killed. And because he used the phrase "eternal pain" directly after this. Obviously that kind of tragedy stick with you for a very long time, but that specific usage very much sounds like something that they are actively still suffering with the consequences of, and not just because Angel is still alive.

We get a little bit of Drusilla's life in Angel the series, granted, with her mother telling her that her visions are an affront to the Lord and a little bit about her sisters, but to my recollection, we don't really get that much about her family life or ties other than this? I would think that it's entirely reasonable to assume that they could be of Romani descent, that her mother may have decided to possibly step away from her family once she was married and embrace a different lifestyle, or one of many different scenarios that would put her and her family slightly out of the frame of that lense, and that the visions Drusilla has could very well be a hereditary thing, something passed down from generation to generation, or possibly one that skips a generation, much like the Elder Woman is mentioned having visions in Surprise when Jenny's uncle tells her that she's seen that Angel's pain is lessening, that her visions are never wrong. This could also be why her mother reacts so aggressively to Drusilla having these visions in the first place, why she was so adamant that only God was supposed to see things before they happened.

Angelus proceeds to kill her entire family in front of her for The Bit, before forcing her to run to a convent to escape him and waits until just before she's about to take her holy vows before he turns her, again, purely for The Bit, and if that shit doesn't get you cursed, especially a curse of that magnitude, I don't know what else says fuck around and find out quite like that does.

I also think that it would be a rather karmic thing if the fate of Angel's soul was quite literally in the hands of the girl he tortured to madness and turned into a vampire, eternally bound to kill to live and still wracked with visions of things to come, whether it be knowing Buffy would become someone that would irrevocably change Spike, the man she herself sired, hence her almost desperation for him to get rid of her when he first comes into contact with her, or even the smaller glimpses at visions she gets throughout the Buffyverse of things that one way or another do come to pass.

It would also serve to tie into the weird connection and mutual trauma that Buffy and Drusilla seem to share, down to the fact that they even share a birthday. That because of Angel and Spike, their lives are always going to be a little bit entwined, they both love Spike in their own unique ways, and they both have a love and loathing for Angel for the attention and love he's given them and for the utter betrayal and frankly sadistic level of malice he has for both of them for making him feel anything for them when he's without his soul, how he's absolutely overtaken by the need to destroy everything that they hold dear, to take every last bit of light in their lives and make them suffer for as long as possible because they made him feel before he kills them or sires them- which I'm entirely convinced that if he got the chance when it came down to it, he'd have tried to turn Buffy too. Because as he said before, death is an end to the suffering. He wants it to last. He wants it to be eternal.

Anyway, that's the Overview of the "what if Drusilla is the reason for Angel's curse" bit that Wills and I have been tossing back and forth like Apollo's prophecy dodgeball. This was way more words than I had originally intended but goddammit I do my research when I have quite literally nothing better to do with my time. This has been Theories With Boofer, thanks for tuning in, that's my time.

#buffy babbles #this got so much longer than I intended it to I am So Sorry #curse of cassandra #passion and pain #you still don't get a tag Darla in this house we Hate You #soul and sacrifice #calender girl #that summers girl #witchy woman #the dru theory

[nulienna]

been thinking a lot about how much i love that tolkien chose to make aulë and yavanna a married couple. the “queen of the earth”, responsible for all growing and living things, who loves the trees most of all, and the “maker”, the great smith who delights in creation and invention, are representations of what are often seen as opposing forces in tolkien’s writing: industry vs. nature, the organic vs. the inorganic... 

that he chose specifically to show them as living in harmony with each other, not always agreeing but finding a balance, having not only respect but love for each other, is really poignant to me idk. sometimes it’s easy to think that tolkien was just straight-up anti-industry in all its forms but i think his choice here shows that that isn’t quite true. it’s more that he understood how important that balance was, not only the dangers of not respecting it but also how powerful a positive relationship between the two sides can be.

#this probably doesn't make sense but idk how else to explain it #i'm supposed to be writing my dissertation and instead i'm thinking about shit like this #which is incredibly on brand for me tbh #aule #yavanna #my dumb ramblings

[evilwriter37]

Dirty talk. And for the characters: Hiccup, Astrid, Ruffnut, Tuffnut, Fishlegs, Snotlout, Dagur, Heather, Viggo, Eret, Gobber, and Stoick. (Sorry not sorry lol.)

Holy shit, well, you're giving me something to do today! Thank you! Here is my dissertation on whether or not the HTTYD characters like dirty talking.

Edit: Just now realized I was supposed to write them reacting to it, instead of like, how they feel overall about it. Whoops. I'm keeping this up though. Might reblog with their reactions at some point.

Hiccup: Hiccup likes to do dirty talking when he's really in the mood, but if he's not, he just feels awkward about it. He's better at receiving dirty talk than giving it.

Astrid: 100% dirty talking. She's usually the one doing it, but she also likes receiving it. But yeah, I can just picture Astrid topping someone and dirty talking while doing it.

Ruffnut: Also 100% loves dirty talking. She might get a little weird about what she says though. (I think Snotlout would secretly enjoy that.) She also very much likes receiving dirty talking. She doesn't want to be the only one doing it in the situation.

Tuffnut: He wants to do dirty talking and is comfortable with it, but he's bad at it. Like, pretty damn bad. It has led to some hilarious things happening in bed.

Fishlegs: Will not dirty talk. Nope. Not a word of it. Blushes profusely while being dirty talked to, but kind of likes it a bit.

Snotlout: He thinks he's good at dirty talking, but he's not. Not at all. Ruffnut wants to give him some pointers. I think he'd enjoy receiving it, but he's not into it as much as some other kinks.

Dagur: Dagur fucking loves dirty talking. He does it all the time, maybe even to the point that it becomes redundant. Though, he's not quite sure what to do when he receives it, because he's so used to being the one to do it.

Heather: She'll do some dirty talking. She likes it, but it's not her biggest kink. She gets very aroused when Astrid does it to her though.

Viggo: Viggo makes dirty talking sound like silver. He's somehow elegant about it, in a way that almost everyone seems to love. Receiving it is not something he likes though, because he feels like it's degrading to himself. (He's got problems that he probably shouldn't solve with sex.)

Eret: Not the biggest fan of it. He might say one or two things that count as dirty talking, which really gets his partner aroused, because like, it's Eret. Come on, he's hot. He's more of the person that would do it because his partner enjoys it. Receiving it would probably make him blush.

Gobber: Gobber is like Snotlout. He thinks he's good at dirty talking, but really isn't. His partners tend to go along with it though. He likes receiving it too, I think.

Stoick: Ah, the hardest egg to crack: Stoick the Vast. I don't think he dirty talks. Like, at all. He probably says really sweet things while having sex. I think he'd be surprised to receive dirty talking in bed, but find that he likes that part of it.

And now I want to write smut...

#asks #character kinks #nsft