#which has a bunch of girlboss roles

[omgthatdress]

Barbie made her debut in 1959. The way she was sold then is a little different than the way she's sold now. These days, individual Barbies come with their own unique looks & usually some kind of unique function or accessories. You can buy clothes separately, but those looks are still secondary to the expectation of buying a lot of Barbies. Back in the day, you bought the one Barbie and then bought her clothes separately. This is why back then Barbie came with a bunch of friends and always came wearing a swimsuit.

The oft-memed origin story for the classic Barbie is that she was modeled on a German sex doll named Lili, which is only partially true. In the 50s, most dolls available for girls were baby dolls that primed girls for being a wife and mother. Fashion dolls were a thing but they were generally more reserved for adults.

Ruth Handler, who co-founded Mattel with her husband and served as its president from 1945-1973 (#girlboss much?), got the idea of making an adult doll for girls when she'd see her daughters playing with paper dolls. Instead of playing with babies, they chose teen-aged and adult paper dolls and played fantasized versions of adulthood. Then, on a trip to Germany, Ruth saw a Lili doll in a store, and asked her daughters what they'd think of playing with a doll like that. Apparently, they liked the idea.

Lili the doll wasn't an inflatable fuck doll. She was based on a popular comic strip character Lili created by Reinhard Beuthien and published in the Hamburg-based Bild Zeitung. Lili was a buxom gold-digger seducing her way through the wealthy men of post-war West Germany.

The comic was definitely adult-oriented, and the doll it created was a popular bachelor party gag gift.

The introduction of a doll with breasts did cause *some* controversy, but it was more pearl-clutching rather than tremendous cultural outrage. Barbie was actually an immediate hit. She fit in very well to late 50s ideals of femininity. I've heard it said before that parents liked her because she helped little girls get into the beauty, fashion, and level of grooming that she would need to catch a husband. IDK if that was intentional, but it seems to fit very well.

I don't want to get into whether or not Barbie is this huge feminist icon or not because, well, she's a toy. I think Ruth Handler was an incredibly smart businesswoman who saw a market demand and met it. Barbie is about the power of fantasy and imagination, and anything that people see in her are the things they want to see in her.

In her incredible multitude of careers, she also holds up an impossible and toxic standard of beauty. Mattel has always been very aware of Barbie's image. I'm pretty sure that the reason Mattel hated "Barbie Girl" so much wasn't because it was wink-wink sexual, but because it nailed the popular stereotype of the time that Barbie was this fake, plastic bimbo who was an unhealthy role model for girls (go listen to Aquarium, now!).

The recent years of Barbie taking on a more empowering, feminist, and diverse lean is because Mattel is simply correcting course and keeping up with the times. Honestly, they've done a very good job of it, but I'm not going to kid myself into thinking they're doing anything other than maximizing profits.

I love me some Barbie but I was always an AG girl, ngl. However, I think Barbie and her cultural context are still incredibly fascinating and worth taking a look at.

#Youtube #Barbie

[homemadegirlbossbattle]

ROUND 4 / POLL 2

Natasha Sidney (@icecreampizzer, art by @slimespecter) vs. Sylnae Nylrithar (@slcknasty)

Natasha Sidney info:

Description: Doctor Natasha Sidney is the main antagonist for one of my current projects in progress, where she’s a very diligent and skilled psychiatrist with very, very high ambitions for herself. She knows how to keep her cool when she’s intimidating someone to bend to her will and she’s very quick on evaluating a person’s emotional weak spots. Her magic mind powers help her with her work and it’s her source of pride and joy. She’s a force to be reckoned with, she fits the evil scientist aesthetic but in psychology now, she has that half-lidded eyes-and-ominous smirk combo, her magic scars look like BLOOD on her hands! What more can you ask for!

Also btw she had a very major role in starting the whole plot in the first place, in which there are two separate cases related to someone dying. Truly a #girlboss

Crimes: Unethical Experimentation, Emotional Manipulation, Perjury, Forging Medical Documents, Awful Opinions about Mental Health in General, Physical Assault

Other notes from the submitter: ERM here’s her toyhouse profile if people want to read MORE about her: : https://toyhou.se/14655164.natasha-sidney

Sylnae Nyrlithar info:

Description: She’s a girlboss, she’s a war criminal, she’s died and come back from the dead… Born in an incredibly unhealthy family situation, escaped, was meant to have a redemption arc and then just got *worse.* Joined up with a gang of equally fucked up adventurers to take down a megalomaniacal technology magnate whose solution to population control was to kill a bunch of people and *still* managed to lose the moral high ground. The party was so morally fucked that the “good ending” for the campaign would have been them all dying and the eldritch blood god we were trying to stop taking over the world. So good at lying she got away with some of the world’s most ridiculous cover stories. Plays both the violin and chess for maximum manipulative villain tropes.

Crimes: Was part of a reactionary terrorist group that considered civilian casualities as an acceptable cost for getting their aims (taking out a well-loved public figure). Has killed multiple people to do so, and also helped cover up multiple murders. Had a contingency plan to murder all of her party members if necessary. Nearly got all of them killed during a heist so that she could fulfil a personal agenda she hadn’t told anyone about. Found a cursed sentient dagger that told her it would grow in power if she killed people with it, went “sure, I can use this” and promptly did exactly that.

Other notes from the submitter: i am so ready to see a batch of terrible women beating the shit out of each other (in terms of popularity but also maybe in a fistfight) (sylnae would lose a fistfight)

#poll #oc poll #hmgbb

[jasper-pagan-witch]

Do you think/veiw Lilit to be the same as Lilith ?

From upg and just basic reading they very are different beings. Lillit being the goddess of the night and Lilith being the first woman in Judaism.

Though there connection is clearly visible as the Jewish people were held in Babylon for quite some time

1: I doubt this Lilit/Lillit is a "real" (read: historically-backed) being, as she doesn't even have a Wikipedia page (even Cernunnos, the poster child for "has only 1 source", has a Wikipedia page).

2: You may be thinking of the Sumerian lilitu, which are a class of demons, not an individual.

3: I know who Lilith is, I've seen all the fucking #girlboss bossbabe night goddess dominatrix bullshit appropriation of her and I know her role as a baby-eating demon in Judaism because I have a bunch of cool Jewish friends who like to rant about this.

4: What part of "I'm not Jewish" is so hard for people to understand, why are you asking me these things.

5: Sometimes things have similar names either completely by accident or because they're from the same area. That doesn't mean that these things are the same entity.

6: I finally get to use this image:

Image description begin: A meme of a hand racing to smack a blue button. The blue button is labeled "talk to a rabbi". End image description.

Because a rabbi would be able to answer a lot of your questions about Judaism, including the Talmud and midrashim and Lilith's appearances in them.

I'm also interested in @will-o-the-witch's thoughts on this, since zhe's a mutual of mine who actually is Jewish and has written many a post on Lilith.

So TLDR: No, I don't think this goddess I've never heard of and can't find a Wikipedia page on is the same as the baby-eating Jewish demon.

Hope this answers your question, anon! Also don't take this to be too mean, I'm just exhausted by these questions and my injured shoulder. Please don't ask the pagan wizard about Judaism regardless of how much stuff I reblog about it.

~Jasper

#answered #anonymous #lilith #once again please don't ask the pagan wizard about judaism

[morally-grey-girlbosses]

Nana Daiba Propaganda Post

Okay this got so very long so tl;dr: Local girl decides to engage on overprotective bs for an entire franchise, and goes from causing a bunch of time loops in the base series, trying to destroy a whole play in the game and both beating all of her friends in combat to lead them to their symbolic deaths so that they can symbolically be reborn also trying to get her roommate to be symbolically dead without that second step. Also she has two swords so she's automatically a girlboss.

Okay so this is going entirely off my knowledge of the anime, mobile game/ReLIVE and movie. If she did anything silly in the stageplays I do not know about it. So Nana is a funny little girl with so many issues. If you like anime girls in time loops, you'll love her, because she chose her time loop herself. She has abandonment issues like no other and she's so scared of her friends all growing up and going their separate ways that she decided to keep winning the auditions (/a series of funny little stage battles. Also there's swords. She has two of them which I think qualities her as a girlboss because lesbians with two swords are inherently cool) and choosing to repeat the same year and few months over and over. She kept doing this for decades, winning against even the top stars of her class, people more visibly talented than her, over and over. She did it partially because she wanted to protect everybody but also she was the only one with her fears so it was ultimately super selfish on her part. Not that she actually grew up or learned anything other that period of time, because so much of her character relates to how she's largely a tall child who did not consider letting go once. Eventually the childhood friends to lovers trope (Hikari and Karen) made it impossible for her to keep going with this, since they both beat her in the auditions.

Anyways now that we're done with that overprotective nonsense, let's move onto ReLIVE, where she does it again in a different form. This is the storyline to both introduce students from other schools and the Arcana Arcadia arc, which I'll be talking about now. So in this arc, what was known as Play A was causing all of the students to reach for the Unknown Lead. The problem was that this was fucking up peoples dynamics with each other, but in a way which was the pathway to change and growth. Nana is very anti-change when she sees it as harmful so of course she's back to her shenanigans. Aside from a brief talk with Junna early on, her first big appearance in the arc is when she's having a chat with Mahiru, and the hill Nana decides to die on is that there's not really any point in a lead role if anybody will have to be hurt at all by trying to get it. Mahiru points out that getting hurt is something they're all prepared for, and that was all of their choice. Almost like denying her friends and everybody she loves the choice or chance to face Nana's own fears/get hurt in any way is becoming a theme. Anyways, they have a revue over this, and Nana wins. After this, Nana ends up switching her attention from protesting the idea of plays having lead roles (as one done) to destroying this play as a whole, resolving to take everybody down and free them from what she sees as the madness the play has driven them all into, when they're all just passionate about a role and not really under a spell or being held captive like Nana says in her little monologue. Anyways, this is a bit short lived, because in her next appearance an act later, Maya, a fellow classmate and the top star Nana took down each time she began another reproduction/time loop, decided to invade her stage to fight against Nana. Nana takes this as a chance to talk about how much she thinks the play is hurting everybody, and reaffirms her viewpoint of the play being a source of madness. Maya points out how flawed Nana's viewpoint is, since she's once again selfishly denying everybody the chance to face any sort of hardship and grouping them all together as one thing she needs to protect. Then Nana says something strongly hinting at her reproductions and Maya simply decides not to unpack the implications there in favor of stepping on every moral which was driving Nana and leaving her with the realization that she messed up anyways.

And here's the movie. For context, at the end of the recap movie, which was the anime from Nana's POV, the symbolic deaths of the cast were strongly hinted at, and Nana knew about this. So naturally the next step was for her to beat all of her buddies in a 6v1 and restart the revues so that they could all reach their symbolic rebirths. Except Junna, her roommate/friend/the character she's usually paired with, was, in her eyes, incapable of recapturing her spark, so she ended up offering Junna an opportunity to choose her own end with one of Nana's weapons instead of trying to be symbolically reborn and just dying out pathetically as a result. Junna naturally was not really approving of this, so she ended up taking her sword to instead fight against her while making the point that her stage wasn't something Nana could make for her. And she won and the two of them promised to reunite but all of my emotions about that (which are very positive but are also just painted screaming) don't give her more morally gray or girlboss points while the rest of the revue at least gives her that first variety.

Anyways this girl keeps doing overprotective but very selfish things and also has two swords and the ability to use them so she is my funny little morally questionable girlboss. she also has girlflop traits but that coexists with the girlboss part because she is just a silly girl who has beaten 6 (maybe 5 technically) in combat singlehandedly

#propaganda #nana daiba

[go-learn-esperanto]

Out of all the interpretations and retelling's regarding the story of persephone and demeter, which version do you enjoy the most? I think the first time I've read the story was in one of our english class books, and now that I'm here, It's sad that the specific retelling in that one left out cyane and the fact that cyane was there with persephone

Myths are told different every time. A lot of times you'll know Persephone was accompanied by nymphs, and that they tried to save her, but most will probably leave out their names. (which is sad, because I'm pretty sure Cyane is where we get cyan from).

I don't remember which version of the myth I knew first... I am in this Greek mythology boat since I was at least 5 years old if not less— There's a book I bought in primary school about Greek mythology still with me. Reading it now and seeing that it has things like "Jason and Medea lived happily ever after" is... 😬 Yeah, don't look into that one kids, it's better that way actually.

My preference would be that Persephone and Hades lived happily, and that Persephone ended up enjoying her role as the Queen of the underworld (which seems to be what happened as she is present in a bunch of myths as such) and well, she was always associated with the underworld. Besides the fact that Hades and Persephone had very few affairs.

I really find interesting this part in Persephone's Wikipedia page about Minthe:

Minthe was a Naiad nymph of the river Cocytus who became mistress to Persephone's husband Hades. Persephone was not slow to notice, and in jealousy she trampled the nymph, killing her and turning her into a mint plant. Alternatively, Persephone tore Minthe to pieces for sleeping with Hades, and it was he who turned his former lover into the sweet-smelling plant. In another version, Persephone's mother Demeter kills Minthe over the insult done to her daughter.

Man. Persephone tearing Minthe into pieces... Oh Gods.

So yeah. I quite dislike the newer retellings that are "Persephone was a Girlboss™ and she hates Hades and she'll take the Underworld for herself (and is going to show Hades who's boss!!!) When they where actually known for discussing things together and having equal status in the Underworld. WHICH IS REALLY RARE IN MYTHOLOGY. How can people not realise that Persephone really was one of the better off goddesses. Actually probably the better off (famous) married goddess. You don't need to make the story worse because you subscrive to the idea that Hades is a bad guy because Christianity™ and the Underworld is hell!

It really annoys me when people call the Underworld hell. No. It doesn't work like that. There is no heaven in Greek mythology.

Everyone goes into the Underworld. Hades isn't Satan. Persephone and him have a conduct and punsish people who they (or Zeus) think deserve it but won't touch the ones that don't! He's not evil he's doing his job!

He's also not the God of Death. Scream at Thanatos or something. He's the God of wealth.

Anyway. I really love their story as the explanation of the seasons. :)

#ask #hades #Persephone #hades and persephone #greek mythology

[weirdthoughtsandideas]

Can you make a list of the animes you've seen or simply the animes you liked? :D

Sure thing!!

So I don't think the animes that aired when I was a kid really counts, cause I saw them whether I wanted or not, since... you know, they aired on TV and you couldn't decide what to watch, if you wanted to watch something you had to wait for a specific time for it to air. But I did enjoy Pokemon a fair amount, but my very ultimate favorite was actually Dinosaur King. Idk why, it was just fun. I also did like Cardcaptor Sakura, but the thing with that one was that it was actually not dubbed. They aired it in japanese with swedish subtitles. When it aired, I was still too young to read subtitles properly, so I missed a lot of the plot. I did however rewatch some episodes on Netflix later when I got older, and I remember that no matter how little I understood as a kid, I always wanted to roller skate to school like she did in the show xD

I also really don't think 90s Moomins count. It may be an anime, but if you're from here then the Moomins can only speak finn-swedish and nothing else, no matter the adaptation.

Also I haven't really watched Sailor Moon, I have just watched so many clips from it + summaries about it, so I just. Know the plot haha

Anyway, here's the animes that I watched on my own when I got older:

Rose of Versailles - In some places they just call this "Lady Oscar". Very girlboss show. It takes place during 1700s France. A man has gotten like 6 daughters or something and when he gets another daughter, everyone's like "ah you must be disappointed" and he's like "No. She shall be named Oscar and be raised to be my successor in the Royal Guard!!!!!" Anyway, cut to when Oscar is an adult and we follow her now in the Royal Guard, facing troubles and misogyny for being a woman in a "man's" role. The anime focuses a lot on Marie Antoinette as well, and her life in the palace - we cut between the two a lot. Stuff happens, they ofc tackle the french revolution and how everyone deals with that. Lots of screaming people, lots of gunshots, lots of fights. Also, everyone is in love with Oscar. And I mean everyone. There's a whole thing with women wanted to dance with Oscar (some of them mistaking her for a man, tho), and be like ":00000000000000" when someone actually dances with her. I explained it really badly, but it was a nice anime. It also has a banger intro

Oniisama e - This show is about a girl named Nanako and her best friend Tomoko beginning to attend a prestigious all girls academy, where they meet a bunch of other girls who get them into all sorts of adventures, mysteries and drama. Nanako often deals with all the changes in her life by writing letters to her "brother" about what's going on. In reality, this dude was a teacher at her previous school, but she felt such a deep connection with him that she wanted to keep in contact with him. We don't focus on him a lot, but he shows up a few times, even more the longer the anime goes, and he has a big secret that sort of ties in with Nanako's storyline. But the interesting part to me is Nanako, Tomoko and everyone at the school, and what they are up to. Nanako somehow gets invited to the school's elite sorority club, which gets her into more drama. The leader of the sorotiy club is named Fukiko and is a major bitch. She has a connection to another student named Rei, who's a girl who Nanako more or less falls in love with. Rei is mysterious and often keeps her distance from the other students - she's also addicted to drugs and has an obsession with death. Due to her complicated and destructive relationship towards Fukiko (it's hard to explain their relationship, let's say they have a pretty rough history with ups and downs) she has a hard time making friends. She has one friend named Kaoru, who's a tomboy that likes to play basketball and is generally just a fun girl. She also helps Nanako a lot when she gets bullied and helps Rei when she's feeling the worst. Kaoru also has breast cancer, which is something she hides from the others. There's also a girl named Mariko, who quickly befriends Nanako. However, Mariko is a bit... obsessive. She can be really funny at times, but she's also just very freaky when she wants to. She's against all males - like if Nanako talks to any male, Mariko appears and is like "No. Men bad." While the show has a lot of drama, it mixes well with just good fun. The relationships are mostly platonic, even if there are subtext of romance. Actually, a lot of the romance is just subtext. I know I probably explained the show badly, but it was very nice, had a beautiful animation (and it came out in 1991!) and the characters wore so many nice outfits. I'd recommend people checking it out!

Akage no Anne - This is the anime adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which is a pretty well known story so I feel like I don't have to explain it a lot. I will just say, this is probably the gayest adaptation I've seen. So much of it focuses on Anne and Diana's relationship and Gilbert is like, barely there haha.

Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid - YES I KNOW. Hear me out. Yes, there are some... questionable things, obviously... but I really like just... the fun chaos with a woman just living with her dragon gf and their dragon daughter, yk? There were some episodes that I just found really cute. The moments when they're just hanging out, chilling? The dragon backstories?? ;v;

Sandybell - Ok, this one is my guilty pleasure. Sandybell is a fairly simple anime about a girl who grows up in Scotland and then moves to London, where she later becomes a reporter and travels Europe to get scoops. But I am not here for the plot - I am here for the absolutely terrible, but utterly hilarious, swedish dub that this anime has. I found a DVD box of all the episodes for like, a pretty cheap price?? This wasn't a second hand store either where you would expect to find DVDs of old shows and movies, no this was a store that sold new movies on DVD and BLU-ray as well. They just had released this in a DVD collection. And I was sold. It was wonderful. I can't really show any clips since, none of you would understand, but this show has so many hilarious lines from the swedish dub that it was such a party to watch. Also, Sandybell's french intro is very funny, because it is the exact same music as the italian intro for an anime called Cat's eye. The more you know.

(Side note, they have a full 3 minute version of the italian intro of Cat's eye on Spotify, it's very catchy. I really need to watch that anime sometime lol)

Also, I don't think this counts at all, but I did watch the 4 part anime adaptation of Corpse Party. Watched that when I was 12. Still sad over Seiko :,D

#thanks for the ask!

[smileytiger28]

Quantumania thoughts, by character

The Heist Guys

I love and miss them and removing them from this movie was its biggest flaw. Except the one played by TI because TI is a scumbag.

Scott

As much as everyone, especially my dad, loves Paul Rudd, I don’t buy him in this movie as a dramatic actor. Probably has to do with the tropey writing and stuff more than Paul’s actual chops but there’s no small parts etc. this movie just tried so hard to be taken seriously that gave up its pedestrian, relatable humor — the thing that made the first two movies so great, and the thing that attaches Paul Rudd to this character — and replaced it with contrived and tropey drama. It felt sometimes like Paul Rudd was trying to imitate Generic Action Hero, which he isn’t great at and nobody wants. Highlights of his performance include: the end where he’s like “oh shit did I just mess everything up? No I didn’t, denial time!”, the part where all his “possibilities” pile on each other all saying “Cassie” because they work together driven by the purity of a father’s love.

Cassie

why did they recast her. I loved Emma Fuhrmann in Endgame and felt really bad when she only learned she has been replaced through comiccon/d23/etc. From a casting perspective, I get it; Fuhrmann was meant to fill a small role in a huge movie, so they probably recast when the part became much more significant (setting up for a young avengers movie). But Kathryn is just not very good. TBF the only other movie I’ve seen her in was Detective Pikachu in which she was much worse. Not sure if it’s the acting or the writing that hurts Cassie more. But her character in this is basically “I am an activist that cares about people” like that’s great in real life but I want to be invested in her and I’m not

hope

Literally did nothing but effective altruism in the beginning of the movie, what a downgrade

Hank

By far the character with the best upgrade in this movie. From movies 1-3, he’s gone through great character development, learning to respect Scott and Hope in their own right. He’s also gradually gone from dry exposition dumper (1) to once-in-a-while joke-maker (2) to “summoned an ant army to defeat a multiversal conqueror”/nerdy/perhaps even autistic about ants (3). I love when he admitted to reading Scott’s book: “every goddamn word”, said both proudly and teasingly.

Kang

Current legal shit aside, I was not expecting to hate him this much. I didn't like Majors in Loki, but I figured that had to do with the direction, not the acting chops of Majors himself. When I saw the reviews for this movie, which generally sold Majors as the film's only merit, I was expecting something great from his performance. Instead, we got Majors doing what I guess was either his best Morgan Freeman impression or a really bad trans-atlantic/English accent (posh vowels and clipped t's). Whatever he was trying to do simply did not work for me. The Council of Kangs post-credit scene looked to me like a bunch of Party City costumes.

Jentorra

Played by Katy O’Brien, who I know from my brief stint watching Black Lightning and who gave an equally meh performance in The Mandalorian S3. The one thing I like about this character, who is otherwise a pretty basic stoic/traumatized my-entire-species-died-and-now-I-am-a-badass-warrior-woman, is her dynamic with Cassie. Yes, Hope could have been Cassie’s female role model, and she basically did nothing in this movie, so that’s kinda sad. But there’s something nice about the Jentorra and Cassie finding what they need in life from each other: Cassie a strong voice for justice and a girlboss internship, and Jentorra a piece of innocence and hope she was too jaded to hold onto. I wish we explored that a bit more.

MODOK

If I read any comics featuring MODOK, or even watched the Patton Oswalt MODOK show, I’m sure I would hate Darren/MODOK. And in a lot of ways I do. But he works most of the time as comic relief, half-satirizing his own role as the old enemy that "came back better than ever!" It never got old when he would introduce himself, a main character would be like "Darren?" and he'd be like "Not anymore! I've been reborn as a new and improved version of myself! mwahaha!" And the main character would be like "Umm improved, sure." I loved when Scott was comming him and he'd only answer to MODOK.

Re: the redemption arc. Before watching the movie, I saw a leaked screenshot of the death scene where he says “at least I died an avenger.” That spoiled the MODOK=Darren reveal + death scene + redemption arc for me, but I was mostly upset that the movie would do something so blatantly cheesy with the dying scene. When I saw the movie, I was mostly glad that the scene wasn't meant to be taken seriously; that monologue is treated as self-righteous rather than earnest. However the redemption arc still does kind of come out of nowhere and it's lame.

Other Minor Characters

I liked Bill Murray as a sleazebag that reeeeally wants to give Hank the impression that he slept with his wife. I liked the group of weirdos fighting against Kang, and the "drink the ooze" scene was cute. Lowkey wish Scott and Hope ended up trapped in the Quantum Realm and became benevolent rulers for a few years. Overall, meh movie, would not watch again. Hope the fanfic is better.

#quantumania #mcu #tiger roars 🐯

[talenny4life-archived]

Oooh!

#my theater teacher announced that next year’s musical is gonna be Pippin #which has a bunch of girlboss roles #and I’ll be a junior so I will have a shot #can’t wait!

[cactus-joke]

the thing i will never wrap my head around is introducing sylvie as a frankenloki & then giving her absolutely no depth despite her being the key protagonist of season 1... like mike must hate women for the fact that

1) all the tva women of color are sidelined immediately (at least the two w the most prominent & interesting roles/backgrounds) for a white ladies development

2) you can count all the tva lady agents we see onscreen w one hand

3) frankenloki aka sylvie has a bunch of gaps for a character like where’d she get blonde hair dye. if ure hellbent on revenge why are u making stops at wallmart 2 get a box of hair bleach. where’d she get asgardian leather but SPECIFICALLY for her top (she’s wearing baggy pants & combat boots w that ensemble??? which as i say it also sounds like those corny wattpad “put my hair in a messy bun, wore my combat boots” fanfic outfits 😭), why and how did she get the AoA loki horns, she didn’t have them when she was taken. if she hates the loki association why’s she wearing the horns & the color green which is... the biggest target to be perceived as loki

4) if she’s an important part of the self love metaphor romance why does she always make this face “😐🤨🤢😐🤨😐” when loki talks (berating him & betraying him in the end aside ofc!)

5) why do we not know her nexus event? why do we not know why she chose the name sylvie? why does she have no prominent character traits outside of having a vagina? why is she cis? why did she get taken at the tender age of an elementary schooler but not when she was born if her crime was being born a girl?

6) has mike waldron ever met, spoken to, or seen a woman? has he engaged in critical, intelligent conversation with anyone, really?

7) can i be emotionally compensated by disney for simultaneously the most BORING (how do you make.. the god of mischief & tricks... boring is beyond me) and convoluted overstuffed show for wasting my time?

I don't know that Mike hates women, but I do think, based on his interviews and the resulting product he made, that:

1) It was certainly a choice to make the two prominent black female characters slaves to a fascist organization and one essentially a leader of it. A choice I don't think anyone involved in creating this show spent a second to think about.

I don't think they were necessarily sidelined on purpose, however. I just think it's an inevitable by-product of the show's terrible pacing and even worse writing. That scene one between B-15 and Renslayer, a scene I think was ultimately a waste of time, made me think that they probably did want to highlight at least those two characters on their own merit. They failed, of course, in the end, and with the set-up I think the intention or lack of intention doesn't really matter since we get what we get, you know?

It's not really a shinning example of giving your characters of color time and care, either, but I do have to highlight B-15's moment of doubt, a scene I think Wunmi Mosaku absolutely killed (seriously, everyone needs to check out her other work, she is effort and talent personified.).

Besides that, if you ask me, no character in this show has any real development anyway, including Sylvie. It is an uneven display of screen-time because obviously she's a main over everyone else but, like, can it even be said that Sylvie particularly benefited from it? I don't really think so. As you said, she has no depth, she is just an empty girlboss fantasy, and the diversity in general in this show feels empty to me.

2) I didn't really even want more TVA foot soldiers to be women. It wouldn't be a diversity win so much as just more empty pandering and Marvel's typical (military) propaganda fuel.

Anyway, I'd like to highlight some youtube creators of color who make great in-depth videos on this issue:

Khadija Mbowe: Color-blind vs. Identity-conscious casting and examining Hamilton and Malcom & Marie

Town of Tawiah: Performative Diversity and Colorism in Film | Dear White People Review, My Wife & Kids,HTGAWM & More

Cheyenne Lin: GOOD Representation Matters | Colorism and Casting

There's obviously way more, but these videos are a good starting point to expand on this topic from people who know what they're talking about. I put a link to their videos while the link on their names will lead you to their respective channels.

3) Sylvie's whole appearance is bullshit from the get-go. They deliberately used comic book references on her to confuse us and make their dumbshit twist of: oh, see, she actually is a Loki variant!

I remember seeing a post essentially saying whoever thinks Sylvie is a Loki variant with 100% certainty is media illiterate lmao, so I guess it worked on some people.

So, you know, IMO, it doesn't matter that it doesn't make sense for her to wear Loki's signature colors and the iconic AoA head-wear, she just does because fuck you.

Also, "if ure hellbent on revenge why are u making stops at wallmart 2 get a box of hair bleach." lmaooo - she just wanted to be her own person, you know, visually, but only with her hair and nothing else :)

4) Sylvie so very clearly doesn't even like Loki all that much, certainly not as much as he likes her (she is a girlboss after all, "she's got shit to do!"). It would be funny if it wasn't tragic. I do feel bad for Larry from accounting :(

5) I'm guessing we don't know her nexus event because they kinda never bothered to define what it was and they don't care. Maybe Renslayer saying she doesn't remember her nexus event was supposed to be this moment of like cold truth, or an attempt to hurt Sylvie because she knows but won't tell her, or, you know... actually, who cares.

6) I think Mike has spoken to women and I think he's had plenty of intelligent and critical conversations at his level. Which is a relative zero to a generous one. Perhaps two on a good day.

Idk though, jokes aside, his writing on this series is childish and lazy, his view of Loki is boring and reductive, his original script he used for this show is absolute shit, and that's all I can really say for sure.

7) I wish. The show really is boring when it isn't actively infuriating. It still boggles my mind how this mess even happened. Like, I knew the show would be bad, but this bad? Man oh man.

#reply #goddamn shitshow #loki series critical #loki series negativity #loki series criticism

[astradrifting]

This is kind of inspired by this recent ask I sent to @esther-dot about Jon’s characterisation and Jonsa shippers’ apparent disregard for it, because it made me think of another part of Jon’s characterisation that is really integral to who he is. Mainly, that Jon really loves his brothers. Especially Robb. His rival and best friend and constant companion. Jon envies him, competes with him, buried a formative traumatic memory where he was deeply hurt by him... but ultimately loves him. Complex relationships with his brothers, both the Starks and his Night’s Watch brothers, are a running theme in Jon’s chapters.

Speaking of Jon’s brothers...

Aegon VI and Robb have a lot of potential parallels, actually. The “Young” moniker, red-haired counselors who are also their parents, trained to be the heir to a great kingdom from a young age, the barely younger half-brother Jon borne of their father’s dishonour of their mother… one that they might both have a good relationship with despite that?

The show tried to play with Jon ‘accepting’ his Targaryen lineage through the jonerice romance, very unconvincingly because it was simultaneously undermining it at every opportunity, in what was maybe a half-assed attempt at Pol!Jon (”They’ll all come to see you for what you are” isn’t anything but a threat in all contexts).

Jon will ultimately choose the Starks over everything else, that’s not really a question. But if Jon were to genuinely connect with another Targaryen, it’d likely be easier for him to find kinship with a half-brother than with an aunt - he has a basis for positive relationships with trueborn half-brothers, while the only aunt figure he’s ever known about is a) long dead and b) actually his mother. I think it’d both make more sense and be more compelling for GRRM to leverage Jon’s existing complex relationships with brotherhood by having him interact with and build a relationship with Aegon, than a rushed and out-of-character romance with Dany. 

Jon also is already primed to believe that Aegon is the real deal, that he was saved as a baby, because he’s already done the exact same thing himself - he swapped out a baby of royal blood who was in danger for a common-born boy, and then sent him halfway across the world for safety (side note: if Septa Lemore is Ashara, and if the baby was actually Ashara’s son as theorised here by @agentrouka-blog, that would just strengthen the parallel, because it would be his body double’s mother caring for him, as Gilly has to do for Mance’s son).

They’re definitely going to come into conflict first - politically, Jon will likely be in a position of power in the North by the time they meet, maybe as the KitN through Robb’s will or regent for Rickon, and probably will fight for Northern independence, while Aegon is fighting to be king of the Seven Kingdoms, not 6. Personally, it will be hard to get past the fact that Jon is the direct result of Rhaegar dishonouring Elia, plus that the Kingsguard who should have been protecting her were all stationed in Dorne, guarding Jon’s mother (in whatever capacity). But these interactions, a conflict and eventual friendship/brotherhood between them, would all be a lot more layered than jonerice can really offer. If a relationship between Jon and Dany was truly all that GRRM has been building up to, then there would have been no need for R+L=J - it adds nothing to that storyline, it doesn’t even make it a forbidden romance, because aunt-nephew is hardly the worst incest the Targaryens have engaged in.

It’s almost inevitable that Da*nerys is going to kill Aegon VI/Young Griff in the books, likely by burning him with dragonfire, in the Second Dance of the Dragons. The weird Dragonpit meeting in the show was very contrived, but it does make sense for Dany to meet the ruler on the Iron Throne at least once in a semi-peaceful context. In the show, she used her dragons only to intimidate Cersei, but she didn’t have a personal grievance with her. Aegon is in much more danger during such a meeting. After all she will think he is a pretender, and she doesn’t much care for the rules of safe conduct, as she showed to the envoys from Yunkai.

Dany shrugged, and said, "Dracarys."

The dragons answered. Rhaegal hissed and smoked, Viserion snapped, and Drogon spat swirling red-black flame. It touched the drape of Grazdan's tokar, and the silk caught in half a heartbeat. 

[...]

"You swore I should have safe conduct!" the Yunkish envoy wailed.

"Do all the Yunkai'i whine so over a singed tokar? I shall buy you a new one... if you deliver up your slaves within three days. Elsewise, Drogon shall give you a warmer kiss." She wrinkled her nose. "You've soiled yourself. Take your gold and go, and see that the Wise Masters hear my message."

(ASOS, Dany IV)

"Ah, there is the thorn in the bower, my queen," said Hizdahr zo Loraq. "Sad to say, Yunkai has no faith in your promises. They keep plucking the same string on the harp, about some envoy that your dragons set on fire."

"Only his tokar was burned," said Dany scornfully.

(ADWD, Dany VI)

So Dany will burn the Blackfyre pretender, and everyone will be happy and cheer to see the rightful queen, the last Targaryen, Slayer of Lies, Breaker of Chains, Insert-The-Million-Other-Titles-Here. Right?

Except how would she prove that he’s an imposter? She can’t exactly roll up with an Alt Shift X video pointing out that Illyrio has said some weird things about Aegon. Is Varys going to have an attack of remorse and explain his whole plot, complete with Blackfyre family tree? Or maybe she’ll explain that she went on a vision quest in Qarth and Aegon totally matches up with the vague symbolism that a bunch of drugged up warlocks told her before she set them on fire?

I don’t think it’s going to matter if Aegon is fake or not, and we might never find out either way. The mystery of his identity isn’t his main narrative, and all of his significance to the story and to multiple other characters is removed if he’s proved to not be Aegon VI. Him being proved fake would just make this plotline a weird, unnecessary digression on Dany’s journey to being the righteous and true queen, his death just another #girlboss moment for her. That’s definitely going to be her perception of it, but once she reaches Westeros we won’t have to rely on only her POV of her actions. History is written by the winners, and no one’s going to miss that it’s a lot more convenient for Dany if the boy with a stronger claim than her turns out to have been fake all along. Arianne and the Dornish are definitely not going to take it lying down, and neither is Jon. He’s not going to fall in love with the woman who murdered his brother, especially by burning him alive. ADWD has plenty to say about how much he hates death by fire.

“Men say that freezing to death is almost peaceful. Fire, though … do you see the candle, Gilly?”

She looked at the flame. “Yes.”

“Touch it. Put your hand over the flame.”

Her big brown eyes grew bigger still. She did not move.

“Do it.” Kill the boy. “Now.”

Trembling, the girl reached out her hand, held it well above the flickering candle flame.

“Down. Let it kiss you.”

Gilly lowered her hand. An inch. Another. When the flame licked her flesh, she snatched her hand back and began to sob.

“Fire is a cruel way to die. Dalla died to give this child life, but you have nourished him, cherished him. You saved your own boy from the ice. Now save hers from the fire.”

(ADWD, Jon II)

Funnily enough, the same fire as a kiss imagery from Dany burning the envoy’s tokar appeared there too, also used as a threat. 

If he is not a kinslayer, he is the next best thing. [...] What sort of man can stand by idly and watch his own brother being burned alive?

(ADWD, Jon IX)

So Aegon’s death is not going to be a triumphant victory for Dany, after which everyone proclaims her the true queen. It’s likely to just solidify opposition to her, from every corner of Westeros. If it happens during a summit or negotiation, it’d be even more of a tragic parallel to Robb and the Red Wedding; the young king murdered off of the battlefield, at an event where he was promised safe conduct. Featuring Dany in the role of Roose Bolton and Tywin Lannister. Tywin’s already died a very undignified death, and Roose Bolton looks to be on his way too.

I think the tragedy of Aegon’s death would also hit harder if we see it through Jon, as a main POV, or at least the aftermath of it. Jon was integral at the Dragonpit meeting after all, and probably would be at a peace summit or negotiation between the leaders of Westeros and the invading force.

In ASOS, there’s a curious lack of Jon’s reaction to Robb’s death. We see his initial reaction to Bran and Rickon’s supposed deaths when he gets back to Castle Black, but he doesn’t even know about Robb’s death until Stannis arrives to defeat the wildlings, and we’re not shown the moment he’s told about it. He barely even thinks about it, not even a mention until he meets with Stannis on top of the Wall:

“Your brother was the rightful Lord of Winterfell. If he had stayed home and done his duty, instead of crowning himself and riding off to conquer the riverlands, he might be alive today. Be that as it may. You are not Robb, no more than I am Robert.”

The harsh words had blown away whatever sympathy Jon might have had for Stannis. “I loved my brother,” he said.

(ASOS, Jon XI)

And that’s literally all we get that is specifically about Robb’s death - the rest of Jon’s chapters, his guilt and grief is about the loss of all his siblings, and the idea of stealing Winterfell from them. It doesn’t really make sense for him to not think about it at all, considering how close they were. This reminds me of how he has a non-reaction to Sansa’s marriage to Tyrion as well, as talked about in this post by @agentrouka-blog. Part of this could be Jon’s tendency towards denial and suppression of all his feelings, but it also points to GRRM explicitly obscuring his reaction - perhaps because he’s going to explore it in the wake of another brother dying a very similar death? One that this time he’ll be there to witness?

#astra rambles #meta #speculation #half speculation half 'my wildest dreams and hopes' #anti daenerys targaryen #anti jonerys #jon snow #aegon vi targaryen #jon and aegon #anti got #because i do dunk on the show a lot in this lmao #i've spent far too long on this and had to delete five tirades against the show already

[fragranceman]

what makes the dsmp’s story stand out

Why the dsmp is so special and why it distinguishes itself amongst the insane amount of media that we could be consuming instead right now.

So basically, this is really obvious and simple and i think we all kinda know it without thinking about it but i still felt like writing it down because it’s super important to me.

The thing that makes this story stand out amongst so many others (apart from the fact that it’s a mc rp lmao) is that all the character’s are treated like people. What i mean by that is that they can’t be treated simply as ways to further the plot, they can’t just kill off characters in favor of contributing to some other character’s arc, they can’t have stuff like “manic pixie dream girls”. and that’s because each character IS a real person, if they tried that, if someone suggested that stuff someone in the discord call is gonna go “hey, what the fuck man, you can’t just kill me off like that”.

Each character is therefore special, none of them can be 2d because they are people, they all exist as people instead of being plot devices. There aren’t any extras (except arguably the guests like drista, lil nas x, etc) there aren’t really any side characters*, because it’s everyone’s story, all the characters have someone sitting there that actually care about them and are interested in making that character special, they won’t be neglected.

that’s also why, often the characters just… don’t fit in tropes. they don’t really exist the way normal character’s do, they don’t have this “purpose” that movie or books characters do, like hero, trainer, soft character that teaches the main character about love, comic-relief, or love-interests that’s only there for 3 chapters because they die for the mc to teach them about grief.

They’re only there as, themselves. They don’t fit in one trope because people don’t do that, there’s more to them then that, they’re complex. they’re closer, more similar to real people than anything that’s been made in a really long time, and that’s because they all have a person to take care of their little character. 

there was this really cool thinking written by @/mt-words which i’ll link here about techno not fitting in a trope and that possibly fucking with people’s expectation of his characters. i think the idea that we’re so used to getting the same tropes regurgitated back to us over and over again that we don’t know how to handle stuff that doesn’t fit in them is very funny (and also a bit sad). Like, has media really become THIS repetitive and unoriginal??? But i digress.

anyway, time for quick examples, i was watching the “healthy competition” stream from 07/26 and i noticed something cool. So basically c!wilbur asks c!ranboo to ”pick his brain” and then asks him a bunch of questions about his morals and they discuss his alignments and other similar stuff right? And we can see clearly that c!wilbur is completely baffled at the stuff c!ranboo is saying about him not disliking anyone and not really having any strong stances at all. he just genuinely doesn’t understand c!ranboo and can’t relate at all.

Yet 10 mins later, he’s pouring his heart out to him and more importantly he’s talking about how he feels like c!ranboo really gets him. Obviously they are super similar in lots of ways, like their paranoia and anxiety, how they’re both kinda people pleasers, etc.

the fact that they can be in complete agreement on a topic and be so similar in certain aspects while also being complete opposites and being genuinely confused at the stuff that’s coming out of the other’s mouth on other topics really shows how multifaceted the character’s are, how 3d and real they feel.

I’m going to be adding another example from a post i just read by @/shrugofmud here it is :). It’s basically about how c!jack and ghostbur are cool because they balance comedy and drama. I’m gonna talk more about c!jack here. basically he’s comedic relief and he leans into that role right? but he’s also so much more than that, the way he balances the jokes and the clear comedy of his plotline with the sadness and loneliest he clearly feels and let’s that seep through in his jokes. He’s more than one thing, he’s more than comedic-relief, he copes with humor and covers his desire for a sense of belonging and to be heard by a bitter hatred and desire for revenge on c!tommy.

They’re more than just one thing, they aren’t reduced to a trope or a key personality trait the way characters often are. there’s so much to them, different parts of their personality that work together to make a whole, like a person :)

I also believe this is why the fandom as so much character analysis material and just keeps going, but it’s also why there’s so much disagreement on the characters and their personalities, like “oh people are villanizing c!wilbur too much” or “people are reducing c!niki to her villain arc and turning it into a ‘girlboss moment’” or “people are making c!tubbo too soft”. the character’s are harder to write into fanfic properly or analyze because you have to take into account all the different subtleties of them.

some people chose to focus on certain aspects of the characters, aspects they find more interesting or aspects they relate to, while other’s chose to focus on other aspects, which causes a bit of confusion.

It’s what makes this story so original and cool to think about and make the character’s so fucking compelling. It’s what makes me sit down for 6 hours straight and watch VODs so i can better understand different characters, it’s what makes me excited for each lore stream. it’s how human they are, how real they feel.

And this is why i’m the biggest believer and will always push for STUFF CAN BE TWO THINGS!!

#dsmp #dsmp analysis #dream smp #dream smp analysis #dream smp fandom #mcyt #mcytblr #character analysis #dsmp meta #dream smp meta #c!jack manifold #jack manifold #wilbur #wilbur soot #c!wilbur #ranboo #c!ranboo #tubbo #c!tubbo #niki nihachu #c!niki #ghostbur #long post

[ifeelallwrite]

Let’s talk about Hospital Playlist. (KDRAMA REVIEW)

note: does contain spoilers

When people ask me what is my favorite Korean drama of all time, with no doubt, IT’S HOSPITAL PLAYLIST. This drama has the comic relief, the emotional scenes, realistic characters-just to name a few. No toxic relationships and petty revenge fights. Nothing else will stop me for saying that this is the ultimate feel good drama.

SYNOPSIS: The drama shows insights into the daily lives of doctors and nurses working at Yulje Medical Hospital. It focuses on 5 doctors who have been friends since medical school, who also play together as a band.

This drama encompasses so many elements and characters so bear with me yo this might be real long 

Hospital Playlist is produced/written by the Shin-Lee PD and writer pairing, whose previous works were the renowned Reply trilogy and Prison Playbook (which are *chef’s kiss*) I really like that all their dramas really highlight humanism, and puts emphasis on creating a heartwarming and realistic series. There isn’t always a major conflict to be resolved, but instead it showcases how different people-in this case mostly those in the medical field-go on about their daily lives.  I also liked their reasoning to produce a medical drama which was that hospitals were where the most dramatic moments occurred, for example during births, deaths or sickness. And since we are still in the Covid-19 pandemic, it ties in greatly to be paying homage to all the medical personnel saving lives. Hence, props to those who were involved in this meaningful masterpiece <3

The drama is not the usual 16 episodes, but has 12 episodes for each season (SEASON 2 IS COMING SOON YAAS) Good thing is I felt that they were still able to weave a dynamic storyline in the first season even with lesser episodes. The writing was just top-notch with the witty humor bits. Additionally, the music is AMAZING. I love the concept of the main characters being a band and playing different songs every episode too.

Okay, now onto the characters. I thought that every character in this drama was well rounded. Starting of with the main five characters, also known as The 99ers, whose distinctive personalities and natural chemistry make all of them extremely likeable. All main characters are professors of different specialties, and I find the male OB-GYN (Seokhyeong) and female neurosurgeon (Songhwa) very refreshing. Also, I like Shin-Lee dramas always have characters that might be realistic yet hardly seen in other dramas or films. For example, Professor Ahn Jeongwon. Despite being a chaebol (inheritor/heir), he isn’t depicted as a spoilt brat or a cold character, instead as a warm Pediatric doctor who uses his wealth to secretly support patients in need. However it makes him stingy to his friends LOL

To be honest, I really thought I was gonna dislike Junwan due to his cold and tsundere nature. I pretty much believed that he was going to be the party pooper type of the bunch, but with the writer being a master of character development, he turned out to be really sincere and hilarious at times. Same for Ikjun, who apart from his enthusiastic and happy go lucky exterior, cares the most about the people around him. Although Seokhyeong seemed detached and introverted, he shows a emotional side to his friends as well as his mother. Songhwa is literally a girlboss though haha she’s smart, capable and gets along with everyone well. And she’s the most sane out of the bunch. 

With all the main characters, we have the relationships. Junwan is the first to date seriously with Iksun (the dog or Micky? jkjk) who is Ikjun’s sister. When it first happened I was like not again Jung Kyung Ho (bc he dated his best friend’s sis in prison playbook too LMAO) I think their relationship was realistic and open. It also showed a more sensitive side to Junwan who would do anything for her. I especially liked how he said he didn’t need access to her phone because he trusted her. Yet as all couples do, they have their fair share of ups and downs. Like conflicts on getting married and a long distance relationship as Iksun moves overseas for graduate studies. I don’t really know how to take the ambiguous ending for these two, as Junwan receives the returned box (that has the ring he sent) I really hope nothing bad happens to these two though.

I’m sure we all love Wintergarden couple though, tbh they’re kinda my OTP at the moment 🤣 It was pretty much a ‘will they won’t they’ relationship with a relatively slow build. I think Gyeoul turned out to be one of my favourite characters. Shin Hyun Been did a good job at portraying her as a straightforward but innocent Resident, who is pretty much openly crushing on Jeongwon. The scenes they had together were adorably awkward (and the scene where he gives her chocopies omg) And when Jeongwon battles his inner conflict to become a priest, the final decision where they kiss was beautifully shot, with the actors both showcasing their emotions extremely well. 

Then we have Chihong who pursues Songhwa, his professor. Midway through the drama, it is also shown that Ikjun and Songhwa might have had romantic feelings for each other. Songhwa ends up rejecting Chihong’s confession. In my opinion, Chihong was quite a interesting character but I didn’t really like him at the end. (I like the actor though) He did a real jerk move during drinking games, insisting on Ikjun to confess his feelings towards her even though he is already trying not to put Songhwa in an awkward spot. Although his character did end up making a cool exit and when I thought about his incredible story of soldier to doctor, I kinda regret disliking him that much. As for IkSong, In the final episode Ikjun confesses to her one last time, and we are left waiting for Songhwa’s reply. As much as I love this pairing, I don’t think that the ship will sail or maybe not as quickly as we think. I believe Songhwa would meticulously consider the sacrifices to their friendship or other aspects and might not be able to bring herself to it, but I hope it’s otherwise. 

Lastly not forgetting Seokhyeong and Minha, another Professor+resident pairing. This one’s a bit ambiguous though, mainly because there hasn’t been much romantic development. To me, the most impactful scene came from Minha who had been irritated by continuous night shifts and was on the verge of a breakdown. She ended up remarkably saving a patient, starting off surgery on her own for the first time. Oh man Minha was such a lovable character, I remember feeling so bad for her but extremely proud of her for her accomplishment. Although Seokhyeong seemed a bit aloof and distant (which was intentional bc he’s an introvert) I think the backstory and all the hardships he faced with his family really made me feel for him. I hate to break it to you, but I’m not so sure if the ship will sail because of the phone call from his ex-wife and Minha’s somewhat rejected confession. But who knows, they might pull off a twist 👀

Apart from all these characters, there are more characters HHAHAH However, I think this is the killing point of ShinLee dramas. Unlike typical dramas which usually focuses on a main character and 2-3 side characters, they like to cast a diverse range of actors (especially those from theatre/musicals and lesser known drama/movie actors) while actually give their characters personality or a reason to be there. I’ve seen many dramas where extras or side characters were kind of irrelevant thus making me feel that they weren’t needed to build the storyline, yet ShinLee dramas hit different y’all. Every role, no matter how small, holds significance to the drama. It really seemed like a collaborative work that shows off every actors skills (and not forgetting staffs) and teamwork.

Anyways because there are way too many characters and too many scenes for me to mention them all, I’ll just talk about some honourable mentions heheh

1. Sunbin and Seokmin confession scene (ahh so cute)

I kinda sensed that they liked each other at the start but I didn’t know Seokmin would ask her out on a date at the end. Even though it’s kinda awkward that they are dating and working with each other though (both are in the same department) but hey the confession was cute and awkward and just warm and fuzzy 🥰

2. MAMA ROSA IS THE QUEENN

I think we all (would) love Mama Rosa because she’s a real one ☝️ (probably the coolest mother ever) She’s feisty, hilarious and kind to others. Plus her friendship with Ju Jong Su was just adorable and super wholesome. The scenes where they were supporting one another through tough times and hanging out with each other when they felt lonely always put a smile on my face. Oh and how Mama Rosa treated Gyeoul was extremely sweet. (as well as Seokhyeong’s mother) Despite her tough exterior, she’s a likeable character for being a strong but caring woman.

3. Just Do Jae Hak

I seriously love this guy so muchhh omg he’s so funny

Do Jae Hak has a funny amd clumsy personality, though it’s clear he’s been through a lot and is strong willed person. From admitting his indecisiveness to counselling Jun Wan on his love issues, there’s literally nothing to hate about him.

4. Uju and his dadd

The father and son chemistry between these two is so good omg. The scenes with these two are so adorable and heartwarming (not to mention hilarious) It’s amazing to see how Ikjun cares so much for Uju despite his hectic workdays while going through infidelity issues with his ex-wife. Uju is matured for his age and shows his love and appreciation for his dad too, making their interaction a great portrayal of a healthy family relationship💞

5. the food stealing the show🥘

Who doesn’t love food and when a show has great food scenes? Some of the best scenes are definitely when the 99s gather to eat. It really showcases each character’s personality with the tiniest details as well as highlight warm delicious meals. Just don’t watch this when you’re hungry at 2am in the morning guys you’ll be drooling all over your screens HAHAHA

Of course there are way more aspects, like Hongdo and Yoonbok, Ikjun and Iksun’s pigeon jokes and raps, or Jeongwon drunk crying in the chicken shop with his brother (who was his coach in Reply 1994 when he played Chilbong LOL)

Most importantly, I think it is the themes and messages that you get from the drama that really create such a lasting impression. Not only does it hit you in the feels with the hardships of hospital patients, or the hardworking doctors+nurses who are working long shifts saving lives, it also tackles topics of friendships through the possibilities of platonic and friends-to-lovers relationships. However I think the biggest lesson for me came from Seokhyeong, who learns to live his life doing what he want, with the people he treasures. Although the drama might seem slow at times (mainly because there isn’t really a main plot line/conflict occurring), but this drama would still bring you on a journey where you would laugh, cry and finish the series, begging for season 2 ✌🏻

#hospital playlist #kdrama recommendations #kdrama review #kdrama #yoo yeon seok #jo jung suk #kim dae myung #jeon mi do #jung kyung ho #shin hyun been #wise doctor life #netflix korean drama #netflix #asian drama #medical drama #friendship drama #korean drama #korean #korean drama review #hospital playlist review

[orsumeuphoria]

Lucky Lectures. Gender politics in homosexual ships. 

Are you a consumer of fanfiction? Do you live in a society? 

There may be heteronormative patterns in your gay fanfiction! 

“But how?” you ask, “It’s two dudes!” 

Well, funny thing is, when you live in a patriarchal society that has worked hard to establish that submissive = female and dominant = male, it becomes very easy to transpose these traits onto any individuals ever and perpetuate heteronormativity and gender structures of power! 

Let me explain.

First, we must accept the reality that we do exist in a patriarchal society that has taught us that Man always comes out on top (pun perhaps intended) and Woman has three essential roles: be pretty, be submissive, and be quiet.

Of course, with the different waves of feminism, the portrayal of Woman in media has shifted and now we have Girlbosses and whatnot. Except, the root of the problem hasn’t yet been addressed and millions of people who grew up either before or during these periods of change were still influenced by patriarchal teachings, and that’s not something one can easily get rid of, especially when media and other cultural artifacts that help spread and reaffirm societal cues were (and are still) plagued by this “Man strong, Woman weak” mentality (that is of course far more nuanced than that but this is not a gender studies course).

Now, what does this have to do with homoerotic fanfiction?

Short answer: the people who write fanfiction exist in the same society you and I do, and literature like any other artform is inherently a mimicking of the real world. Anything we see in the real world will end up, whether by choice or not, in that which we create.

There’s more to this, though.

Romance specifically is a big point of interest for us if we’re going to be diving into this subject.

When you look at the population who’s creating fanfiction, a lot of them are, in fact, very young AFABs. Let the record show I’m not exerting criticism or opinion in these lines, merely stating a fact.

The thing with these very young AFABs is that they: a) grew up in a patriarchal society; b) were exposed to patriarchal media that portrayed a very specific type of “romance”; c) likely also read fanfiction written by other very young AFABs with little to no real-world experience to help diversify or add nuance to their writing, so they exist in an echo chamber of, “This is definitely what romance is.”

You may be inclined to disagree and point me toward examples of fanfics and/or fanfic writers who do not fall into this pattern, and I see you, I have my own exceptions too, but for the sake of argument, we have to look at the very broad patterns because they are the most worrisome; the minority, in this case, is actually the one with the advantage.

So, let’s look at some examples of my thesis. Specifically within heterosexual fanfiction.

Some prime examples of this would be After (2014), Twilight (2005), and 50 Shades of Gray (2011). Do you see the pattern yet? The main romance arc in these novels is not a great example of actual romance, right? In After we have an abusive main male character. Twilight leaves us with a main male character who’s mostly emotionally absent and who leads to the main female character to, quite literally, jump off a cliff to try and get his attention. 50 Shades is abuse disguised as kink, leaning heavily into the excuse of a D/s dynamic. And what do the female main characters in these three do? Continue to thirst after the main male character even while suffering at their hands.

“Those are awful examples, Luck!”

Yeah, well, I’m a hyperbolic motherfucker, sue me.

Seriously though, I don’t think they are bad examples. They may be the worst of the worst but that’s exactly why they serve perfectly to illustrate my points. The fact that these three do exist points towards an underlying issue wherein we see these pieces of media and, even when they’re awful, we let them happen. We let them become cultural phenomena. None of this would happen, theoretically, if it didn’t have space to exist, if the ground wasn’t primed with centuries of patriarchal brainwashing to permit, if not encourage, these representations of romance.

If people weren’t still consuming stories like these, where abuse and unhealthy interpersonal dynamics are thinly disguised as romance, they wouldn’t exist; but people do consume these stories because they subscribe to patriarchal thinking and that creates a market, blah blah blah, I’m not here to give you a lesson on supply and demand. I’m merely here to tell you that people, even in 2021, are misogynistic and openly enjoy consuming misogynistic media, because they don’t perceive it as misogynistic! They think it’s normal!

“What does this have to do with my sacred homoerotic fics, Luck?” you ask. To quote Siken (2005): “Shut up/ I’m getting to it.”

I ask you, what is the big difference between heterosexual fics and homosexual fics in their representation of romance?

I say, none, really.

I’ve read plenty of fic in many different fandoms, raging from anime, literature, TV shows, RPF, and I can tell you the fics that portray queer relationships with any sort of nuance are few and far in between.

And this is where I remind you that most fanfic writers are people who were socialized as girls, who haven’t experienced enough to portray romance much differently than how their main examples (the misogynistic media, as we established) do.

So we have a bunch of young AFABs whose vision of love has been heavily influenced by out-of-whack power dynamics and a lack of affective responsibility. And what do they often do?

They buy into yet another set of absurd ideals! Remember when gay relationships were stereotyped as being between a Dom Top and a Sub Bottom? I’m sad to inform that it’s a prevalent thing and a vehicle for heteronormative structures of power to be passed onto queer fiction. Because, what are Dom Tops if not Man and Sub Bottoms if not Woman?

These kids, because they are kids, will take one look at a pairing and call the big dominant one a top and the dainty quiet one the bottom. Sometimes, they’ll cling to these ideas with a vice and start arguments if you challenge their structure.

“Why is this a big deal?” you ask, and I appreciate your curiosity.

It’s harmful because it continues to perpetuate some awful ideas about relationships and it ends in the fetishizing of homosexuality, and that’s not even mentioning how inaccurate of a portrayal they are of real life. Impressionable kids can, and do, and will, interact with this content and grow up with a twisted perception of reality that they, too, might reinforce in their own immensely flawed works of fiction. It could harm them in their real life too, there’s studies going on right as I type this regarding porn addiction in young AFABs because they start consuming smut fiction at very early ages. Kids could grow up desensitized to abuse. Kids could get in harmful relationships and miss the warning signs because they were romanticized in their favorite fic.

And this isn’t to say that all the responsibility lies in the hands of the fanfic writer, because anyone who engages in fandom does it out of their own volition and because of that should do so carefully. But this is to say that if you are a fanfic writer, you need to look at your own biases and be a little more critical with yourself and your world view, lest you continue this cycle of patriarchal nonsense.

#lucky lectures #your lucky day #this wouldn't leave my head #fanfiction

[starsailorstories]

Thoughts about Deb, owner of the cafe across the square from Tilina’s shop (mentioned in Desolina in The Worldlight and some other stories, appears in that Tilina AMA comic, and has a bit of a speaking role in vol. 2):

She’s Elorican, which is a culture I really want to do more with because their resilience and adaptation to everything that’s gone on in their part of the galaxy is very cool (tl;dr, they lived quasi-nomadically on big spaceships in the Elorica quadrant of the galaxy until about 700 quinturns ago when a bunch of asteroids containing the material to synthesize vitruvol were discovered and Industry Moved In, they’ve been majority asteroid miners/trawlers for several generations and are responsible for most of that industry subculture)

Her birth name is Idbver, she goes by a nickname because most of her clientele are Cadrians and Basillans who work in the intergalactic shipping industry (or are involved in space racing which is a huge thing in Desolina) and they can’t pronounce it

She’s bi and has been in a (casual by Andromedan standards but very loving) relationship with a bi Cadrian dude for centuries. Her sisters aren’t disapproving about it but they do find it Very Cosmopolitan Of Her

(the girlboss/malewife vibes of this should really go without saying)

She’s like 10-ish quinturns older than Tilina and absolutely adopted her when she was new to the neighborhood, the cafe predates the mechanics shop by a few quinturns in terms of establishment too

(It’s hard to keep a little start-from-scratch co-op like both the cafe and the shop are running anywhere in the Cadrian home systems and neither of them expected to hang on as long as they did, but they’re both known for being very good at what they do and they support each other and the local community a lot so the times they’ve been threatened by pushy developers and whatnot they’ve always fought and won. There’s certainly a prevailing “keep Desolina weird” spirit in the spacefaring community, but the people who are really preserving the local color are, for the most part, veterans or former auxiliaries of the First Rebellion.)

#worldbuilding #desolina #sweet chariot #i should really collect all these infodumps about minor characters in a tag #at some point

[shuuos]

I think you should ramble about those ocs. As a treat

anon you are so right and i will ramble about All Of Them right now

SO we’re starting off with the miraculous ocs and we’ve got Selkie, a seal-themed hero whose weapon is an ocarina that she can use for pied piper shit OR as a bludgeon bc i think it’s a funny mental image. they don’t have a civilian name and neither does their partner (yet) but their kwami’s name is Splaash! her partner is Swan Queen, who has a fancy ribbon baton that she uses to sap magic from other miraculous users and strengthen either herself or her partner, and his kwami is Cynng :D i don’t have any art of them rn but they definitely have some kind of performing arts theme (maybe opera singer for Selkie, DEFINITELY ballet dancer for Swan Queen)

uhhhh i’m thinking they live in milan bc again, performing arts, and they def know each other’s identity bc fuck it, i think it’d be very funny if they were besties and went to each other as soon as they got a Miraculous like “omg guess what happened”

the funny thing abt my kid icarus oc is that she’s actually been around forever but i kept updating her and then never talking abt it ANYWAYS! her name is Faolan and she’s the daughter of the goddess of justice (Dike) and a sorceress (Lupe), except Hecate, goddess of magic and wilderness bc yknow how kid icarus is with making up shit and then throwing in actual mythology in there, foresaw that Faolan was meant to be her successor and jumped to the conclusion that it meant she was going to kill her and take her place (it did not mean that) so Hecate tried to have Faolan killed, halfway succeeded, tried again, and then Faolan got her ass in self-defense and ended up taking her place anyways lol

she’s super not prepared for her new job, and is a lot more proactive than other gods when it comes to issues in other realms bc the concept of sending other people to do things for her is very weird to her and i love her for it. anyways here is a picrew i made of her (original picrew here)

and my marvel oc!!!! mx. Elliot Flores who is Definitely Not A Self-Insert I Prommy!!! (that’s only a half-lie. i thought it would be cool to make a character that i would play in the alternate universe where i am an actor and also a director)

the basic premise of their theoretical show is that a. dragons are real, b. there is a giant dragon in space that has the ability to manipulate…. space (which is why she is in space), and c. she has reached the end of her lifespan and is now looking for a replacement to keep her powers safe and possibly take up her role as the guardian of you guessed it: space, and once she dies her soul is send careening towards earth in the form of a shooting star/the last dragon firetear rip-off

so there are two people out there who are wanting to reach this shooting star first and their names are Stephen middle name Strange, sorcerer supreme, and Circe new character, aspiring girlboss supreme. Circe is the Bad Guy with Malicious Intent <- this is important for later

HOWEVER!! the dragon takes a look at both of them and is like “the vibes are completely off. i like that random kid walking by after an 11pm trip to the gas station better.” they end up becoming her replacement and have to deal with Circe trying to kill them + a whole bunch of other shit, yknow how it is. they chill at the Sanctum Sanctorum sometimes and Dr. Strange tries to teach them how to use their powers, uhhh they’ve got a mentor-mentee relationship except Dr. Strange thinks he’s a father figure and Elliot does not think that at all.

they get the nickname/superhero name Starcatcher bc. they got their powers by catching a “star”, and uh they want to be a cool, mysterious hero but they cannot stand to be by themself and they overshare with everyone they meet. i love them (original picrew here)

anyways tyvm for the opportunity to talk abt the characters i hardly ever talk abt i love them and i love u heart emoji

#ask #starcatcher #elliot flores #the only one i’m gonna tag bc they’re the only one with an official tag and i am lazy #anonymous

[aftgficrec]

Okay I've see the headcanon that when Neil switches identities he sometimes switches genders too and that'll lead to present day mishaps like responding to 'girl' names and the foxes being like ???. Do you have any fics that follow that idea?

I thought for sure we would have a bunch of things to fit this, only to find that I was quite mistaken. (I do know that one blog which had some bullet fics that fit this well has been deleted.) So I did my best to find some material that at least touches on this aspect of a genderfluid, enby, or trans Neil on the run, even if it’s just a brief mention/allusion. If any of our followers have any other recs, please add into the notes! -F

Nonbinary Neil HC by @girlboss-agatha-harkness [Tumblr, 2021]

as a nonbinary person, i’m so done with nonbinary neil headcanons that are like “neil is nby because on the run mary made him appear as other genders so nathan couldn’t track them and beat him if he slipped up so eventually he was like uh oh i’m not a boy because i was forced into different gender roles as a kid” because it always feels like it’s implying there’s something wrong with being nonbinary, that his trauma led to being nonbinary, and honestly feels similar to “well you can’t tell kids about gay people because then they will turn out to be gay!”

(tw: implied/referenced child abuse) 

genderfluid neil by @wholesomeromy [Tumblr, 2020]

Genderfluid Neil! Because I love this hc and don't see enough of it >:(. Also I'm keeping Neil as "Neil" when presenting as both he/him AND she/her because it just makes my life a little easier :). 

(tw: misgendering (accidental))

Maybe It Was Worth It by monster_without_a_name [Not Rated, 610 words, Complete 2016]

A short drabble re-imagining parts of the book with trans!Neil.

(tw: surgery, tw: scars, tw: deadnaming)

and you tap and you cut by minycrds [Rated G, 790 words, Complete 2017]

tumblr prompt: anything with trans neil

Neil Josten + his scars.

(tw: scars)

trans Neil HC by @spanglebangle [Tumblr, 2017]

Confession time: The first time I read tfc I legit thought Neil was trans for like the first 3 chapters? He kept ranting about his binder (I'm not a native speaker and I had never really seen the word binder out of the trans context) and added with his reluctance to take his shirt off. It took so long for me to realize he was talking about a binder for papers and stuff, i felt so dumb haha. That being said, do you know any good trans neil hcs or do hou have some yourself?

(tw: implied/referenced transphobia)

#fic #neil josten/andrew minyard #mary hatford & neil josten #universe: pre canon #universe: canon divergent #theme: trans character #theme: genderfluid character #theme: nonbinary character #theme: character study #theme: fluff #theme: the foxes #theme: foxes react #theme: on the run #theme: body image #theme: transitioning #tw: implied/referenced child abuse #tw: implied/referenced transphobia #tw: scars #tw: surgery #tw: deadnaming #tw: misgendering