From now on I’m only accepting makeover scenes if they are from whoever’s in charge of hair and makeup and costuming on Bridgerton

I think I need a makeover form whoever’s in charge of hair and makeup and costuming on Bridgerton

Ted Lasso is a great example of how if you’re going to make a show with a concept that lends itself to very few female characters, the ones ones that you do have have to be powerful and complex and take up enough space to make up for it.

Ahahaha never did I truly believe that Jonathan’s baby would be canonically implied to be named Quincey Art Jack Abraham Harker that’s so iconic

The best thing studying philosophy has done is cemented that I genuinely would have been a Romantic poet

Reblogging again for s2 release day (also my birthday)

Queer Anachronism in Our Flag Means Death

WARNING: OFMD SPOILERS!

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We need to talk about anachronism and queerness in Our Flag Means Death. One of the funniest parts of OFMD is the creative use of anachronism. Instead of dutifully following historical accuracy like many other period pieces, OFMD plays into campy anachronism for the sake of the joke. In the year 1717, Oluwande wears Crocs on the beach. Roach hits Izzy with a deli sandwich. Stede reads his crew Pinocchio, a story not written for another 150 years. OFMD far from invented comedic anachronism, (Monty Python, A Knight’s Tale, etc. have also fully committed to the bit) but OFMD has unleashed anachronism on a far more powerful frontier: queer imagination. By releasing itself from the chains of “but that didn’t really happen,” OFMD creates space for queerness yet unseen in period pieces, especially comedies. Queer people have always used fiction as a method to represent stories lost to the ages (think Portrait of a Lady on Fire), but OFMD takes queer representation to a completely different stage by committing to the anachronism and fully imaging alternative ways of being.

Jim obviously represents the real historical phenomenon of people assigned female at birth dressing and living as men on pirate ships, but instead of deliberating over how these people might possibly identify today, OFMD imagines a world where Jim uses they/them pronouns, and no one blinks an eye. In this queer playground of a world before modern transphobia but with addition of modern trans identities, Jim allows the audience a peek at what the world could look like. Jim has a romance, a revenge plot, a tragic backstory, all completely distinct from their identity as a nonbinary person. The creation of nonbinary identity as a non-issue is so funny, but it is also radical. The radical potential of imagining nonbinary people outside of transpobia cannot be overstated, and we need to talk about it.

Stede’s reconciliation with Mary turns the tragic marriage trope on its head. Instead of marriage ending a queer episode in one’s life, as it often did in reality and often does in fiction (again, Portrait of a Lady on Fire) or alternatively, falling into the misogynistic trope of the evil wife, standing between a queer love story, Stede and Mary speak openly about their respective lovers. Throughout the entire show, when faced with queerness, the show dares to ask: why not? Oluwande is literally in Crocs, so why wouldn’t we imagine queer liberation that includes wives not as stand-ins, but as allies and accomplices in the creation of queerness? Breaking the rules of history and television and narrative, we imagine a world where a gay man can conspire with this wife of arranged marriage to fake his death so they both live happily ever after.

Knowing (as we do from David Jenkins’ tweet where he told everyone to follow the writers) that at least 4 of the 13 writers on OFMD are nonbinary people of color, it invokes the queer of color perspective on scenes that anachronistically look at race as well as sexuality. During my personal favorite scene of the show, A British Navy officer tells Frenchie to be “quiet, slave” and to stop his “uppity” behavior, and he gets a knife through his hand as a result. In any other show, the fact that the Black members of the crew had to pretend to be servants to trick the Navy would likely have been an unfortunate necessity (if there were any Black pirates included to begin with!) but OFMD treats that racism as a reason to blow up the entire ruse and just start killing people. Because why not? Why imagine a world full of fanciful pirates and gay romances if they still have to bow to racism? And the next time they meet the aristocracy, the trope is flipped further, with Olu pretending to be a king in a trick that ends with all the other servants/enslaved people on the ship riding off into the sunset while their supposed masters die on a ship in a blaze. I won’t get into the INCREDIBLE indigenous representation in Episode 2, since much of that is actually not anachronistic and rather correcting historical falsehoods, the depictions of race in OFMD are delightfully anachronistic and intrinsically queer.

Honestly, OFMD can only be understood as the result of finally giving QPOC a seat at the table, and that is why it’s been the top ranked show for five weeks, and #RenewOurFlagMeansDeath has been trending on twitter for just as long. I am so grateful to have a show that allows queerness to play and thrive in whimsical, but also serious and heart-wrenching, settings.

Update guys - 2 months later and just heard “men’s FIFA World Cup” said on the radio - it’s still going

I cried this morning when I woke up and heard about the funding for women’s sports, and heard “Alanna Kennedy is out of tonight’s World Cup match against Sweden” as a stand-alone headline.

This World Cup hasn’t just been amazing for uniting a nation, or even highlighting women in sport. And men aren’t going to understand this, but every time I see a group with men and women celebrating the Matilda’s equally, it is a genuine shock to the system. Every time, no matter how much I see it, my brain’s first reaction is to question it, question whether it is staged, or fabricated. Something about how my brain actually functions is incompatible with seeing what genuine equality would look like and that scares me.

It’s like seeing powerful female-led movies - is this really what men feel, all the time??

AFTER THIS HARROWING 2 HOUR EPISODE THIS SONG CAME IN LIKE A SUCKER PUNCH SQUARE ON THE FACE WHAT THE FUCKDGKJSHJD

Finding re: Dracula at almost the exact point I lost my place in email Dracula daily last year was the greatest thing that has happened this year

Here I was thinking I’d go to bed early and here I am lying on the couch at midnight with Dracula singing in my ears

Dracula is singing.

I will be more coherent later. I promise. But in light of the episode, the acting, the sound design, and that FUCKING SONG at the end? I need to tell @re-dracula how I feel with all the moods and tenses of the words:

HOLY SHIT

As much as I hate all the sexist shit in this entry I love how much time and mental energy Jonathan puts into justifying it to himself and reminding himself that the doctors thought it was best - cracks me up.

Felix Trench is killing it in today's @re-dracula entry! My heart was aching for Renfield in a way that it never did when I was reading Dracula. I was legitimately almost crying!

That’s when re: dracula and car rides comes into play

kept putting off reading the Long Ass Entries of dracdaily the past couple days and turns out

if you put off these things

you’re gonna have to double up on reading these long ass entries.

hey why are the Van Helsings always the Vampire Hunting Family in modern Dracula stories. Abraham Van Helsing might be the guy who knows stuff but his family is off in the Netherlands and/or dead and totally uninvolved in the plot. Abraham's great-great grandson has no reason to be doing backflips and chopping off heads or whatever

You know who is a family who hates Dracula so so much and would totally teach their kids how to hunt vampires? The Harkers. Give me a modern vampire story where the protagonists are about to die when out pops Quincey Arthur John Lucy Abraham Murray Harker the Fifth, armed with a giant knife and an encyclopedic knowledge of train schedules

Van Helsing’s a little dramatic isn’t he