do you know what?
I miss long seasons.
I miss seasons that had 20 episodes and half of them could be cut and nothing would be lost to the story.
I miss the episodes where nothing fucking happens but you get to see the main cast goofing around with one another. You get to see their interactions, their relationships develop, their day-to-day lives and how they all fit together in them.
You get the Christmas/halloween/valentine's special -is it needed? certainly not. but is it good? is it entertaining? does it give the show and characters life? do we, the viewers, enjoy it? YES!
give me long stories!! give me little quarrelling spats between characters that can be resolved in one episode with no need to have an impact on the greater story! make these stories real!
let me enjoy them before they end!!!
I absolutely love Hazbin Hotel and the little world that's been created, but I can't help but feel disappointed we're only getting two seasons of 8 episodes.
back in the early 2000's 16 episodes would have been ONE season, never mind the entire thing.
show my angel dust and husk and nifty and sir penthouse living their daily lives in the hotel! show me Charlie brainstorming ways to redeem sinners! give me Charlie forcing the hotel staff to do cringe-y exercises! give me an entire episode of Vox trying to follow alastor through security cameras! Give me husks typical day! Give me a special through the eyes of nifty on a mission to irradiate the hotel of bugs! Give me sir penthouse and the egg boys up to no good!
give me something other than the bare necessities to make the story flow
6 months have nearly gone by in the hotel, and it feels like 1 month.
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I think what makes Our Flag Means Death so remarkable in terms of representation is not just the broadness of it, but the depth.
We have an indigenous lead character, but he's not only that. He's also queer. He's a romantic interest. He's middle-aged. His arc portrays surviving trauma and abuse. It also portrays mental illness. And it portrays breaking free from toxic masculinity. And it never tries to put him in a box when he explores his masculinity and femininity.
We have a non-binary character, played by a Puerto Rican NB actor, but their arc is not about their gender identity and their coming out is simply a case of "Just keep calling me Jim". They have a romantic/sexual relationship with a black character, and never is this relationship or either of their sexual orientations or Olu's sex appeal as a fat person or "who even is the man in this relationship hahaha" questioned. When they get into a poly relationship, it's just accepted, instead of questioned or even defined.
These are just a couple of examples. It's not that Our Flag Means Death is the only or the first show with queer/BIPOC/disabled representation, because it's not. What makes the show remarkable is the unique combination of queerness, ethnicity, age, disabilities, life experiences, etc. that each character carries within themselves, yet none of these characters exist solely to appear as representation of any minority on screen. Their identities are not glued onto them, they're ingrained, but in the end, they're just people. Just like in real life. Identities do not work as plot points. Being queer is not a plot point. Being non-binary is not a plot point. It's just a small part of the whole complex experience of life.
OFMD is a perfect example of telling a queer story that doesn't focus on telling a story directly about the queerness itself. Because we have stories about queerness already. We have so many of them that it just feels like tokenism at this point to see yet another story about coming out or forbidden love or anything like that, even if it's well made.
This show took me by surprise with every new way of representation it offered, because each time it did the total opposite of what I expected. It took all the tired tropes and said, "Yeah, see these? We're not gonna do any of that." It delivered something I never thought I'd see on screen.
It never explains the characters' identities to the audience. It simply shows them exactly the way they are and lets you decide whether you see yourself in them, and I think that also allows the audience to question their own identities, to explore gender and sexuality freely without immediately putting labels on things.
People who never thought they might be trans or non-binary or queer in any way discovered their identities through the show. People who struggle with mental illness or trauma saw someone like themselves portrayed with kindness and respect on screen and were finally able to extend the same kindness to themselves. People who are always left out of romantic stories because of their age or body shape or the color of their skin finally saw themselves portrayed as desirable and worthy of love and romance.
That is why so many of us feel that, in the words of Ruibo Qian: "OFMD woke me up."
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Renée Minkowski is extremely into the abstract concept of Crew Bonding in such a way that it impairs her ability to actually bond with the particular crew that she has.
She wants them to have Christmas dinner together and give each other Christmas gifts, but she's not made an effort to learn Eiffel's feelings about December 25th and to think about what he might like to do that day.
She wants them to each say what they are thankful for at Thanksgiving, but when she says she's "thankful to have such a great crew on this mission", it sounds extremely unconvincing, as if she's just saying what she thinks a Commander ought to say at a Thanksgiving dinner on a space station, rather than expressing any genuine sentiments or revealing anything personal about herself.
She wants them all to participate in the talent show "to boost morale... bond as a crew, and... have a great time doing it", but Hilbert and Eiffel's reactions make it clear that talent shows do the opposite of improving crew morale for them.
Christmas celebrations and thanksgiving dinners and talent shows are all things that could potentially have a positive impact on morale and bonding for some hypothetical space crews, but in the way Minkowski approaches them, none of these things are particularly helpful for the morale and bonding of the people who are actually in her crew. Minkowski puts real effort into group bonding activities for her crew, but they are always based on general ideas about crew bonding, rather than on thinking about the individuals around her and what she can do to connect with those people in particular.
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as true as the jokes about “everyone wants to rewrite ninjago” are i feel like smthn people forget when complaining about the inconsistencies of the show is that…. it wasn’t planned? it’s not like most other animated shows lately - it didn’t start with a deeply fleshed out world or a meticulously designed pitch bible with grandiose plans for a long-term story or character arcs. the ninja don’t originally get their powers from heredity because they weren’t hereditary powers yet. the magic system doesn’t make sense bc they literally just made it up as they went! they go back and forth on stuff like whether non-elementals can learn spinjitzu bc it’s a collaborative piece of media made by people with vastly different levels of control over the story, the animation, the sets, etc. that varied over the course of the series. it’s totally understandable and exciting to see so many people reworking the early stuff with the lore and logic later seasons introduced but i personally feel that… if you’re doing that. you need to understand why the show is like that instead of writing it off as being bad and shitty. it was working with what it had. it’s only what it is now because of that awkward troubleshooting phase, not in spite of it
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Lord of the Lost being absolute kings and staying true to their word 🏳️🌈
"Yes, I am thankful for living in a country that – other than many other countries in this world – is able to socially catch me and others. With heavy limitations of course, we could now talk in lengths about our health care system or Hartz 4 [German unemployment benefits] for example. I am not someone who will step forward and say 'Fuck the system!', because I know that without this system many here would be lost, me very likely included. At the same time, you won't see me going to ESC with a German flag, swollen with pride. And I would also refuse to run around with a German flag there if anyone were to demand me to do so. I rather hold and will vindicate the mindset that, of course, we will inevitably compete for Germany, because we are from Germany, and the concept of the ESC is to have countries vote for other countries, and somewhere you have to draw lines at such a competition. But these lines, these borders, are man-made, which is why I say that I rather want to compete for those people that are into this kind of music and who were missing – broadly speaking – alternative music at the ESC. That is how I feel about it."
- Chris Harms
@kajaono @magoriasocrah
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The train is late and your family is dead
I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it. ― Jodi Picoult, Leaving Time
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking | The Mentalist season 1, episode 7: Seeing Red | Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief | The Mentalist season 2, episode 23: Red Sky in the Morning | teashoesandhair, grief | The Mentalist season 1, episode 5: Redwood | Lemony Snicket, A Series of Unfortunate Events (for Beatrice) | The Mentalist season 4, episode 23: Red Rover, Red Rover | The Mentalist season 5, episode 2: Devil's Cherry | Anne Carson, Glass, irony and god | Jamie Anderson | Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides | The Mentalist season 7, episode 13: White Orchids | Glennon Doyle Melton, Love Warrior
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so interesting that a certain group of shippers insisted that gina and ej’s conversation on the couch, where they established that they didn’t really understand each other, was fine because it gave them a chance to get to know each other and that’s all good and well but gina telling ricky that she didn’t know who she was or if she even liked herself before getting to east high and having that change because of him, appreciating that he sees and knows and understands her, that she craves that kind of understanding and gets to experience the great joy of being known because of him is so crazy when you think about it
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we've all heard of the red-blue trope belonging to the gays but blue-purple and red-green belong to the bisexuals and I have evidence to back it up
blue-purple (aka magic mfers)
Jim and claire (trollhunters)
raven and Dexter (eah)
mal and Ben (descendants)
red-green (aka fighters)
love square (miraculous)
loid and yor (spyxfamily)
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