What´s better than beast sskk? ExacTly, beast FEM sskk :)

Two things about this: yes, aku has snake bites, and yes, atsushi is almost all the time half converted. She also eats people ofc ofc. We love the white reaper and we stan girlypops here <3

average experience of any woman (*unimpressed and underwhelmed by a man yet again)

Spellbound (1945)

omg these creepy guys won't leave me aloneee, like im not fucking you GO AWAY!!

PRISCILLA (2023)

~ my thoughts as an elvis fan

(credit to @urpinkstargirl for the photo)

WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD:

so I saw it last night and I’ve been stewing on it ever since as I wanted to be 100% sure in myself before saying this publicly

**brace yourselves**

After just one viewing… I feel confident in saying that I preferred this film over “Elvis” 2022 🤧. It was just so immersive and so deeply intimate that I walked away from the theater feeling like I had just lived a life with Elvis, and experienced all the ugly and wonderful things that came with it

I am seeing it again tonight and possibly tomorrow just to recapture that feeling (which made me cry… three times…)

And although I’m not the biggest fan of Sofia Coppola, there is simply no denying that she has perfected showing “girlhood” in film, and making the most unique experiences, like being Marie Antoinette and being Priscilla Presley, somehow universal to everybody. I haven’t felt being “14” since I was 14, which was a whole 5 years ago, but WHEW… I most definitely felt 14 again when watching Priscilla navigate life in Germany

Also- we all saw how Austin Butler was completely cheated out of an Oscar and so I’m begging that we do not do that again. Give the Oscar to Cailee Spaeny (who played Priscilla) right now 😤 There are no words besides “immaculate” to describe her performance. Her future is so bright as an actress, I just cannot wait to follow her career + she just seems like the sweetest person ever??

And I know it might seem insane to say that I preferred “Priscilla” over “Elvis” and some of y’all might crucify me for that take but my preference solely comes down to the fact that I appreciate Priscilla’s perspective much more so than the Colonel’s, who to me, has always been the least interesting aspect of Elvis’ story

My biggest gripe with having the Colonel narrative/tell Elvis’ life in the 2022 film is the fact that it made the film feel rather impersonal to Elvis as I don’t think the script or the storytelling ever fully allowed for Austin Butler to explore what he was like beyond the stage

And personally speaking, I have a much deeper love for Elvis the person as opposed to Elvis the performer, and I think that “Priscilla” showed the human side of him far more than “Elvis” ever did (like y’all we actually get to hear and see him reading his philosophy books in this!!!)

But before I get into what was actually depicted in film, and all my praises, I thought I would briefly state what I thought could have been done better. Don’t get me wrong, this movie was beyond amazing, however, it was definitely not without its’ faults:

1. If you have seen a lot of reviewers talk negatively about the pacing in this film- just know that they are unfortunately, completely right in that assessment. The whole timeline of Germany felt literally five minutes long, and the 70s also, felt maybe 10 minutes long which just made both the beginning and end feel rather rushed. Also there were at least 5 scenes that just faded to black before going onto the next one, and some very abrupt cuts in scenes which felt a bit awkward

2. Because this is a biopic, and because it’s based on a real life, there is no climax like you would be accustomed to normally in a film and so I think that the average viewer, like someone who may not really care about Priscilla or Elvis, will probably walk away from the film feeling unsatisfied- possibly bored. I saw it with my mom and my sister, and my mom was asleep in like 45 minutes 😭. The movie definitely got repetitive at some points but I acknowledge the fact that life is repetitive, especially for Priscilla in the 60s while Elvis was off making movies

3. While Priscilla (played by Cailee Spaeny) aged realistically and seamlessly, Elvis (played by Jacob Elordi) was essentially the same person (physically) for 95% percent of the film. For some reason, his hair was already dyed black in the Germany scenes, although we know it was brown at that time, and so there was no real transformation for him until Lisa Marie is born. The height of the actor was definitely jarring at first but eventually I got used to it…however…I damn near busted out laughing when they showed him in the Comeback special outfit 💀 His performance was nothing but incredible (ESPECIALLY THE VOICE) and so I learned to get over the physical disparities rather quickly

4. The ending of this film, particularly the song, was overwhelmingly sad and impactful but I was really disappointed that we didn’t get to see Priscilla’s and Elvis’ relationship after the divorce. This film ends with Priscilla leaving Graceland, starting her “new life”, which didn’t make much sense to me considering this movie was adapted from her book, which very much explores that part of her life, especially with Elvis

I would have really love to seen moments like this from Priscilla’s perspective ⬇️

excerpt from “Priscilla, Elvis and me” (avoid this book)

5. NO CIRCLE G RANCH!!! It is borderline criminal to make a film about Priscilla and Elvis and to not include their time spent at Circle G ranch ** which Priscilla has always said were their happiest times together **. I assume that this was likely an issue because of the budget and the fact that they only had 30 days to film but god… I would have really appreciated some of the domestic bliss that Priscilla and Elvis shared while living in the trailer on the ranch. There were many happy moments/sequences (y’all are going to die when you see the rollerblading/go cart scenes) in this movie, but I think their gradual separation/withdrawal from one another (post marriage) would have hit harder if we saw how happy they were together during their ranch phase

6. For those who have read “Elvis and Me”, we all know about the famed LSD scene that takes place and unfortunately, Coppola heavily missed the mark on it. We don’t see Lamar Fike making out with a tree, we don’t see Jerry Schilling in a closet- instead we see Priscilla and Elvis just kind of rolling around, laughing amongst themselves while the room around them turns different colors

There were definitely many key moments/stories like that missing from the film, and I honestly wish that the movie was an hour longer so that we could have seen the book more fully fleshed out

Lastly, here’s just a general synopsis of the scenes in Germany… I was going to do the whole movie but I don’t have the stamina to type it all out 😭. If y’all want to know something specific please feel free to comment below and I will let you know <3!!

After the beginning credits are shown, the film starts with Currie Grant (who was renamed as Terry West) approaching Priscilla in a diner, inviting her to a party at Elvis’ house. After talking with her parents and assuring them that Priscilla will be looked after by him and his wife, it cuts to her in the back of a car, on her way to meet Elvis. The scene is exactly like how it is in the book, Elvis asks her how old she is, he remarks that she is “just a baby” and so on- Elvis then plays “a Whole lotta shakin” at the piano and that is one of three musical performances we see from him

Priscilla is then re-invited by Currie aka Terry via Elvis to comeback to the house again. Elvis invites Priscilla up to his room, she looks around and sees letters from Anita Wood, and a poster of Bridgette Bardot just like in the book. After Elvis talks about Gladys and how he is still reeling over her death, and how lonely he has felt since then, they share their first kiss to the song “Crimson and Clovers”

There are some scenes of Priscilla at school and some scenes of her sort of convincing her parents to let her continue to see Elvis. And they do agree, but just like in the book, they want to meet him first. Elvis is questioned by Priscilla’s father on why he wants to be with her to which Elvis replies that she is very mature for her age and that he likes talking to her since she is from home aka the United States. He then assures Priscilla’s father that she will be taken care of. After that we see them going to the movies where Elvis expresses how much he wants to be a serious actor, and then they share another kiss on the car ride home. It then cuts to Christmas time where we see Elvis giving Priscilla a watch and then BOOM- Elvis and her are on the way to the airport where they say their final goodbyes as he leaves for the United States

The film really does follow closely to the book (at least from 59’ when they meet to 69’- again the 70s were really rushed) and so I really recommended to read that prior to watching the movie

As for the more sensitive scenes-

There is no explicit sex, no graphic nudity, and no scene where Elvis forces himself upon Priscilla. He does say “this is how a real man makes love to his woman” but all he does is kiss her before she pushes him off. There is a rather long “polaroid-taking” sequence where it shows all the outfits that Elvis would Priscilla dress up in but other than that, we only see Elvis and Priscilla make out

And it did show when Elvis accidentally hit Priscilla in the eye during the pillow fight scene in her book, along with the scene of him throwing a chair in her general direction after she expressed she didn’t like a demo of one his songs, and the scene where he grabs all her clothes from the closet and tells her that she should go visit her parents. I don’t think that the scenes made Elvis look abusive: Coppola was surprisingly nuanced in showing that he had reasons for his sometimes bad temperament i.e the pills he took along with the fact that he was frustrated with his film career

It also shows Elvis’ infidelities but really only through movie magazines that Priscilla sees. So it’s never explicitly shown, I would say it’s more hinted at than anything

And there are two scenes of Priscilla with Mike Stone but again, nothing that is explicitly shown, it’s just hinted at

Finally, to finish this up, this is what I wrote on my Instagram account which I very much stand by ⬇️

Just please give this movie a chance y’all, it was so beautiful and so sensitively done… I cannot wait to watch it again <3

The well known joke of how everyone's boomer mom insists she was only like 90 lbs on her wedding day in comparison to her daughters weight or whatever is so crazy and even though I don't have an alive mom and I'd like to think she wouldn't say that - I just wanna say if literally anyone did I'd punch them in the throat till they threw up and then choked on it <3

Like my ex best friends mom growing up used to always tell us how she used to be thin and to enjoy it while we can cause before we know it we won't be anymore and it will be this terrible curse and like said it while she made us food and honestly....what the hell is wrong with people we were like 10....

average girlhood experience lol

Arya Stark has depression

Beginning in AGOT and running through ADWD, Arya displays symptoms of neurodivergence. Learning to cope with it helps to save her life & identity.

Like most children who experience mental illness, Arya develops coping mechanisms that allow her to hide the extent of her depression from the adults around her. This starts earlier than commonly realized. Where initially it seemed her first depressive episode follows Mycah's murder it's actually fair to say she exhibits these patterns of behavior prior to that.

Arya in Winterfell doesn't meet the benchmarks of girlhood that are used to predict a successful future transition into the role of noble womanhood. Arya is aware of this in no small part because her peers (who refer to her as 'Horseface') and the adults in her life (her parents & Septa Mordane who uses Arya as a scapegoat/the "anti-girl") make her aware of this. Given the small scope of her world & her young age, Arya extrapolates that small sample into everybody.

Sansa's needlework was exquisite. Everyone said so. "Sansa's work is as pretty as she is," Septa Mordane told their lady mother once. "She has such fine, delicate hands." When Lady Catelyn had asked about Arya, the septa had sniffed. "Arya has the hands of a blacksmith."

-

Everyone was looking at her. It was too much. Sansa was too well bred to smile at her sister's disgrace, but Jeyne was smirking on her behalf. Even Princess Myrcella looked sorry for her. Arya felt tears filling her eyes. She pushed herself out of her chair and bolted for the door. Septa Mordane called after her. "Arya, come back here! Don't you take another step! Your lady mother will hear of this. In front of our royal princess too! You'll shame us all!"

-AGOT, Arya I

"Lyanna was beautiful," Arya said, startled. Everybody said so. It was not a thing that was ever said of Arya.

-AGOT, Arya II

This last quote isn't necessarily factual (Arya tells us in ADWD The Blind Girl that her parents and Jon did call her pretty), but it's true in the sense that Arya sees her nonconformity as a personal failure.

This could very well be depression speaking, and it starts early. When Arya fails at a task she isolates herself to the extreme: runs away in tears, doesn't believe she can go to her parents or siblings for comfort, decides nobody loves her.

Arya wonders if she's an imposter.

Arya thought that Myrcella's stitches looked a little crooked too, but you would never know it from the way Septa Mordane was cooing.

-

Nymeria was waiting for her in the guardroom at the base of the stairs. She bounded to her feet as soon as she caught sight of Arya. Arya grinned. The wolf pup loved her, even if no one else did.

-

Jon had their father's face, as she did. They were the only ones. Robb and Sansa and Bran and even little Rickon all took after the Tullys, with easy smiles and fire in their hair. When Arya had been little, she had been afraid that meant that she was a bastard too. It had been Jon she had gone to in her fear, and Jon who had reassured her.

-AGOT, Arya I

Arya withdraws socially from places where she believes she cannot succeed or receive affirmation - she leaves the embroidery lesson in a blaze of glory, refuses Queen Cersei's tea invitation on the trip to King's Landing, forgoes attending the Hand's tourney, flees the Brotherhood without Banners. Arya is on average an intensely social creature, however her first line of defense to hide her feelings of inadequacy is not showing up in the first place.

And that's all set in place before the Hound kills Mycah.

In King's Landing, Arya experiences what is possibly her first depressive episode.

Arya had loved nothing better than to sit at her father's table and listen to them talk. She had loved listening to the men on the benches too; to freeriders tough as leather, courtly knights and bold young squires, grizzled old men-at-arms. She used to throw snowballs at them and help them steal pies from the kitchen. Their wives gave her scones and she invented names for their babies and played monsters-and-maidens and hide-the-treasure and come-into-my-castle with their children. Fat Tom used to call her "Arya Underfoot," because he said that was where she always was. She'd liked that a lot better than "Arya Horseface."

Only that was Winterfell, a world away, and now everything was changed. This was the first time they had supped with the men since arriving in King's Landing. Arya hated it. She hated the sounds of their voices now, the way they laughed, the stories they told. They'd been her friends, she'd felt safe around them, but now she knew that was a lie. They'd let the queen kill Lady, that was horrible enough, but then the Hound found Mycah. Jeyne Poole had told Arya that he'd cut him up in so many pieces that they'd given him back to the butcher in a bag, and at first the poor man had thought it was a pig they'd slaughtered. And no one had raised a voice or drawn a blade or anything, not Harwin who always talked so bold, or Alyn who was going to be a knight, or Jory who was captain of the guard. Not even her father.

"He was my friend," Arya whispered into her plate, so low that no one could hear. Her ribs sat there untouched, grown cold now, a thin film of grease congealing beneath them on the plate. Arya looked at them and felt ill. She pushed away from the table.

-AGOT, Arya II

To recap, symptoms of (childhood) depression Arya experiences here are: social withdrawal, heightened anxiety, loss of appetite, sudden changes in mood, low self-esteem, isolation from loved ones.

Notably, Arya's depression lifts when she's a) affirmed by Ned, b) in a manner that shows Ned values her, and c) is set to a task with a teacher who encourages her rather than berates her.

"We have come to a dark dangerous place, child. This is not Winterfell. We have enemies who mean us ill. We cannot fight a war among ourselves. This willfulness of yours, the running off, the angry words, the disobedience… at home, these were only the summer games of a child. Here and now, with winter soon upon us, that is a different matter. It is time to begin growing up."

"I will," Arya vowed. She had never loved him so much as she did in that instant. "I can be strong too. I can be as strong as Robb."

-

[Syrio] tossed her one of the wooden blades. She grabbed for it, missed, and heard it clatter to the floor. "Tomorrow you will catch it. Now pick it up."

-AGOT, Arya II

Panic gripped her throat like a giant's hand. Arya could not have spoken if her life had hung on it. Calm as still water, she mouthed silently.

-AGOT, Arya III

Her water dancing lessons provide her with progress she can be proud of, and mantras for self-soothing, which help her hide her anxiety & depression. This is a coping mechanism she relies on throughout the books.

Arya experiences another pronounced depressive episode when she begins her travels through the Riverlands, after her father has died and her family is splintered. She has volatile reactions to Hot Pie & Lommy teasing her, and her social withdrawal strikes again. Once again, she relies on what she learned from Syrio to soothe herself.

Arya slid into a water dancer's stance and waited. When he came close enough, she lunged, right between his legs, so hard that if her wooden sword had had a point it would have come out between his butt cheeks. By the time Yoren pulled her off him, Hot Pie was sprawled out on the ground with his breeches brown and smelly, crying as Arya whapped him over and over and over. "Enough," the black brother roared, prying the stick sword from her fingers, "you want to kill the fool?" [...] "Every time you look at him, he twitches," the Bull told her as she walked beside his donkey. She did not answer. It seemed safer not to talk to anyone.

-ACOK, Arya I

In the Riverlands, Arya adopts another coping mechanism: she dissociates.

There's no doubt that Arya is a strong warg and that her bond with Nymeria is intense even for the starkling standards. Yes Arya dreams as Nymeria, uses her wolf dreams as escapism from a world in which she feels helpless, but in ACOK Arya speaks of herself as a wolf before her wolf dreams start up again.

I won't cry, she thought, I won't do that. I'm a Stark of Winterfell, our sigil is the direwolf, direwolves don't cry. [ACOK, Arya I]

-

By the time they marched, Arya knew she was no water dancer. Syrio Forel would never have let them knock him down and take his sword away, nor stood by when they killed Lommy Greenhands. Syrio would never have sat silent in that storehouse nor shuffled along meekly among the other captives. The direwolf was the sigil of the Starks, but Arya felt more a lamb, surrounded by a herd of other sheep. She hated the villagers for their sheepishness, almost as much as she hated herself. [ACOK, Arya VI]

-

Yes, Arya thought. Yes, it's you who ought to run, you and Lord Tywin and the Mountain and Ser Addam and Ser Amory and stupid Ser Lyonel whoever he is, all of you better run or my brother will kill you, he's a Stark, he's more wolf than man, and so am I. [ACOK, Arya VIII]

-

Help me, you old gods, she prayed silently. Help me get those men out of the dungeon so we can kill Ser Amory, and bring me home to Winterfell. Make me a water dancer and a wolf and not afraid again, ever. [...] I'm not an evil child, she thought, I am a direwolf, and the ghost in Harrenhal. [ACOK, Arya IX]

-

She had been better off as Squab. No one would take Squab captive, or Nan, or Weasel, or Arry the orphan boy. I was a wolf, she thought, but now I'm just some stupid little lady again. [ASOS, Arya III]

-

Salty is a stupid child, she told herself. I am a wolf, and will not be afraid. She patted Needle's hilt for luck and plunged into the shadows, taking the steps two at a time so no one could ever say she'd been afraid. [AFFC, Arya I]

Arya conceptualizing herself as a wolf (which includes her lambasting herself for not being one) and Arya's wolf dreams are two different things. Arya is a wolf when she feels brave and powerful, whereas Arya dreams as a wolf when she is at her most vulnerable e.g. when the Bloody Mummers are set to discover her, after the Red Wedding, when she loses her sight.

It's a cycle of idealization and devaluation not uncommon to children's black-and-white thinking, but it's often pronounced in neurodivergent kids. At this point, Arya has experienced several traumatic incidents and largely been left to her own devices to grapple with them. While she rightly blames others for her suffering (Ser Gregor, Dunsen, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling. The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei), those people are all far away. Her pack is ever morphing. The only consistently available person she can take anger out on is herself, and her mechanism for doing this is by comparing herself against the ideal version of herself. The self that can be summarized as: the wolf.

By AFFC, she's done this process so much it's seamless. In fact, she can do it in her sleep.

The wolf dreams were the good ones. In the wolf dreams she was swift and strong, running down her prey with her pack at her heels. It was the other dream she hated, the one where she had two feet instead of four. In that one she was always looking for her mother, stumbling through a wasted land of mud and blood and fire. It was always raining in that dream, and she could hear her mother screaming, but a monster with a dog's head would not let her go save her. In that dream she was always weeping, like a frightened little girl. Cats never weep, she told herself, no more than wolves do.

-AFFC, Cat of the Canals

After the Red Wedding, Arya experiences her strongest depressive episode to date.

Some mornings Arya did not want to wake at all. She would huddle beneath her cloak with her eyes squeezed shut and try to will herself back to sleep. If the Hound would only have left her alone, she would have slept all day and all night.

And dreamed. That was the best part, the dreaming. She dreamed of wolves most every night. A great pack of wolves, with her at the head. [...] They would never leave her. [...]

They were never my pack, not even Hot Pie and Gendry. I was stupid to think so, just a stupid little girl, and no wolf at all. [...]

Some of the women tried to put her in a dress and make her do needlework, but they weren't Lady Smallwood and she was having none of it. And there was one girl who took to following her, the village elder's daughter. She was of an age with Arya, but just a child; she cried if she skinned a knee, and carried a stupid cloth doll with her everywhere she went. The doll was made up to look like a man-at-arms, sort of, so the girl called him Ser Soldier and bragged how he kept her safe. "Go away," Arya told her half a hundred times. "Just leave me be." She wouldn't, though, so finally Arya took the doll away from her, ripped it open, and pulled the rag stuffing out of its belly with a finger. "Now he really looks like a soldier!" she said, before she threw the doll in a brook. After that the girl stopped pestering her, and Arya spent her days grooming Craven and Stranger or walking in the woods. Sometimes she would find a stick and practice her needlework, but then she would remember what had happened at the Twins and smash it against a tree until it broke.

-ASOS, Arya XII

Recap: Disruptive sleeping habits, antisocial behavior, sudden changes in moods, low self-esteem, loss of interest in hobbies, isolation. Her coping mechanisms (water dancing [self-soothing through repetitive movement & mantra], positive relationships with others [creating a pack], & dissociation [striving to embody the wolf]) fail her entirely.

In AFFC/ADWD, Arya is in Braavos with the House of Black and White, an arc that nearly succeeds in fracturing her identity. However it's her reliance on her well-honed methods of coping with depression that guide her through this. Syrio taught Arya to practice repetition - as a water dancer, true, but Arya went on to use that to comfort herself, to keep her list of enemies, to consistently return to her ideal wolf persona as a touchstone. It’s already second nature to her in when she serves in Harrenhal, when she’s becoming accustomed to life on the run, as her various roles in Braavos.

Themes of return. An expansive internal world kept secret from adults. Places Arya is always going to retreat to because the world has always felt hostile to Arya Stark.

She padded to her basin on small, bare, callused feet, silent as a shadow, splashed cool water on her face, patted herself dry. Ser Gregor, she thought. Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei. Her morning prayer. Or was it? No, she thought, not mine. I am no one. That is the night wolf's prayer. Someday she will find them, hunt them, smell their fear, taste their blood. Someday. [...]

Skinny as they were, her legs were strong and springy and growing longer every day. She was glad of that. A water dancer needs good legs. Blind Beth was no water dancer, but she would not be Beth forever.

She knew the way to the kitchens, but her nose would have led her there even if she hadn't. Hot peppers and fried fish, she decided, sniffing down the hall, and bread fresh from Umma's oven. The smells made her belly rumble. The night wolf had feasted, but that would not fill the blind girl's belly. Dream meat could not nourish her, she had learned that early on.

-ADWD, The Blind Girl

Enough slaps, and she might stop chewing on her lip. Arya did that, not the night wolf. "I do deny it." "You lie. I can see the truth in your eyes. You have the eyes of a wolf and a taste for blood."

Ser Gregor, she could not help but think. Dunsen, Raff the Sweetling. Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, Queen Cersei. If she spoke, she would need to lie, and he would know. She kept silent.

-

Arya bit her lip. She did not know what she wanted. If I leave, where will I go? She had washed and stripped a hundred corpses, dead things did not frighten her. They carry them down here and slice their faces off, so what? She was the night wolf, no scraps of skin could frighten her.

-ADWD, The Ugly Little Girl

So yes, Arya is neurodivergent. She copes with depression, trauma, and the everyday horrors of girlhood through repetitive soothing tasks & thought processes. Normally diagnosing ABC with XYZ is something I'd abstain from because it can be tricky, but Arya's experiences are so compelling in this frame, so age-specifically intentional, that I think it's worthy of discussion. I know there are a lot of conversations as to whether Arya really comes across as an eleven year old, but in this specific respect I'd say she hits the mark.

Are the kids alright?

According to recent news reports, they seem to be anything but, especially the girls. Earlier this year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a study that found that in 2021, almost three in five girls in high school considered suicide (Ghorayshi and Rabin), a number that has increased by 60% in ten years (Twenge).

Overall, the mental health of teenagers in the U.S.—already burdened by concerns about climate change and school shootings—only worsened thanks to pandemic-induced anxiety and isolation (Webster). This, of course, is on top of things such as figuring out their own individual identities (Webster).

If there’s anything that last week’s discourse surrounding Sydney Sweeney has proven, is that tween and teen girls have always had a rather tough time navigating that weird space between childhood and adulthood, that space where puberty feels like a mortal sin and any legitimate questions and concerns one might have about themselves or the world around them are blithely dismissed or treated as heresy.

But there was once a host of places where tween and teen girls could find some relief from the world at large and commune with their peers away from the gazes of those that sought to mock them. And, believe it or not, one of these spaces was online.

Hi, and welcome to Venusstadt. I’m Jiana. Today, I’m filming with my webcam in true early internet fashion to discuss Rookie, the feminist-leaning magazine founded by a teen for teens and tweens to give them a place to share their thoughts and creativity amid a society in which girls and girlhood were treated as nuisances.

TAVI GEVINSON

First, let’s discuss Tavi Gevinson.

Tavi, the youngest of three, was born in 1996 in Chicago. Her father was an English teacher, while her mother taught Hebrew and weaved (Knight).

Usually in a biography you would hear details like early childhood or adolescent experiences that led to the subject’s choice of career. However, Tavi is unique in that her career started when she was a child, and that that career was one that she chose herself.

Tavi became interested in fashion when she started to make collages in fourth grade out of pictures she cut out of magazines (Widdicombe). She first discovered blogging at a slumber party, when she was shown the personal site of her friend’s older sister, who also enjoyed fashion (Widdicombe). Tavi then used Blogspot to start her own site in 2008, calling it “Style Rookie” to fit in with the trending fashion blogs of the time (Vogue, YouTube, 1:10).

Through her posts, she documented her personal style, her thoughts on runway shows, and random anecdotes from her tween life. She was eventually propelled into the spotlight of the wider fashion industry when New York Magazine wrote a short article about her and her blog, appropriately titled “Meet Tavi, the 12-Year-Old Fashion Blogger” (Kwan).

Tavi’s initial rise to fame came at a time where people were really beginning to pay attention to the potential of the internet. Along with social media sites like MySpace and Facebook, which were already rather popular, people also began to read and start blogs (cite). These bloggers, who were in every niche from politics to mommy blogging to art, were basically proto-influencers. With Tavi also came Bryanboy, Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist, and Tommy Ton of Jak + Jil, all apart of the fashion blogosphere that was viewed as “democratizing” the industry, since it shifted some of the authority away from traditional sources like journalist and established critics to people who more closely resembled the average consumer (Widdicombe).

However, Tavi was unique due to the fact that she was like, 12 (Widdicombe). This, combined with her pretty impressive knowledge of fashion and culture and the mature, conversational tone with which she reportedly wrote, made her a spectacle to the adults of the fashion press (Widdicombe). Her youth also gave her the gusto to wear what she wanted as opposed to adhering to traditional fashion rules.

By 13, Tavi was sitting front row at various fashion shows (“Japan Goes Mad for 13-year-old,” The Cut). She attended John Galliano’s Spring 2010 Dior couture, where she met Karl Lagerfeld and Rei Kawakubo (Widdicombe). Later, she would also be the guest of honor at a holiday party for the latter’s brand Commes des Garcon (“Japan Goes Mad for 13-year-old,” The Cut).

While there were many who liked Tavi, she also had her fair share of detractors. Take, for instance, Sarah Mower of the Telegraph, who wrote of recognizing Tavi at the Dior show with a “sick lurch” and fantasized about yelling at Tavi’s father (Widdicombe). Ann Slowey, then fashion news director for Elle, questioned Tavi’s age and the likelihood that Style Rookie was actually written by her, while FIT’s Valerie Steele asserted that no one would care about Tavi if not for her age (Widdicombe). Tavi admitted that the attention got to be too much occasionally; when New York Magazine first brought attention to her blog, she even took a brief break from the internet (Widdicombe). According to Tavi:

“A lot of people on the internet have a problem with a young person doing well. I felt like, there were a lot of people who were there [in fashion spaces] because of their name, their money, or their family, and I didn’t have any of those things” (Kane).

Outside of her blog and media appearances, Tavi was still pretty much a normal tween, making collages and DIYs, attending public school with her peers, and shopping around at various thrift and vintage stories (Widdicombe). At the same time, she was speaking at conferences and guest writing for publications, using the money she earned from that to buy herself an occasional designer item (Widdicombe).

As with most young people, Tavi’s interests eventually changed, and she began to take less interest in fashion than she did with subjects such as “outsider art, feminism, gender identity, and media” (Knight).

ROOKIE MAGAZINE

As I mentioned in depth in my previous video essay on Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, children are seen as unsophisticated blank slates that can be trained to uphold pre-existing standards, and therefore must be rigorously surveilled and molded for the interest of wider society (O’Connor 4). “Children” here includes teenagers, who, since the category was invented by marketers in the 1950s, have been sites of anxiety and have represented social decline with their necking mobiles and rebellious attitudes (Thompson).

The concept of the “tween,” which denotes young people between eight and fourteen, was also invented by marketers in the early 90s (Guthrie 1). Newsweek in the late 90s described tweens as a “generation in fast forward, in a fearsome hurry to grow up” (Guthrie 1). Guthrie notes that “tween” was a label typically restricted to girls, who apparently felt more pressure to act older than their ages than boys were. Quoting Judith Halberstrom, Guthrie writes that:

“Female adolescence represents the crisis of coming of age as a girl in a male-dominated society. If adolescence for boys represents a rite of passage […] and an ascension to some version (however attenuated) of social power, for girls, adolescence is a lesson in restraint, punishment, and repression” (Guthrie 2).

I don’t believe I have to go into great depth explaining how media can be used to enforce social norms, but there are numerous examples involving media censorship (such as the Hays Code or the current Florida Book Bans) that demonstrate how industries or governments can use the media to maintain a certain status quo.

In their article “Narrative Analysis of [...] Etiquette in Teenage Magazines,” Ana C. Garner, Helen M. Stark, and Shawn Adams highlight a plethora of studies that demonstrated how teens put a lot of weight onto teen-oriented magazines as arbiters of taste and social etiquette (3). These magazines were often the go-to source as opposed to their parents due to their accessibility and ability to be read in private (Garner 3).

Magazines for teen girls largely included content that, you guessed it, promoted the standard gendered social norms expected of young women, such as how to dress, how to use makeup, and how to get the attention of boys (Garner 2). These articles and advertisements played an important role in the acculturation process of the young women who read them, in that they provided a specific set of cultural expectations that the girls figured they were expected to meet in order to be proper women. As stated by Garner, Stark, and Adams:

“…women’s magazines play a socializing function through the stories they tell in columns, features, and advertising. Readers encounter and then may initiate cultural myths of identity. According to Kellner, ‘Media stories provide the symbols, myths, and resources through which we constitute a common culture and through appropriation of which we insert ourselves into this culture.’ Magazines constitute part of the media stories that shape both society’s sense of culture and our sense of self in culture” (Garner 2).

Though such advice on makeup and boys might be helpful on an individual basis, such dictates could serve to be confusing at a time where a young girl is attempting to figure out her own identity, and did not really answer any of the questions a lot of girls would have about adolescence and adulthood (Guthrie 6). This is where Rookie magazine came in, but before we discuss Rookie, we ought to discuss Sassy.

Sassy was a teen magazine that was published from 1988 to 1996. It was notable for being a feminist teen magazine that spoke about serious subjects like suicide and STDs at a time where, again, most teen girl magazines were instructed girls on how to maximize their appearances in order to get dates (Talk of the Nation). Sassy drew a lot of ire from evangelical groups who boycotted it when it first started, which made advertisers not really want to touch it after a while (Talk of the Nation). It eventually stopped publishing and was absorbed into ‘TEEN magazine…which just talked about boys and dating again.

In spring 2010, Tavi mentioned on Style Rookie that she wanted to create a magazine inspired by Sassy and the riot grrrl zines of the 1990s, which were key parts of the third-wave feminist movement (Knight; Feliciano). Founding editor of Sassy Jane Pratt then reached out to make that happen (Knight).

At first Gevinson was in talks to sign on with Say Media to make this idea come to life, but she ultimately decided to pursue her idea independently so that “the man” wasn’t involved (Knight). According to Tavi’s father Steve, Rookie was independently financed “on family borrowing” (Knight).

Rookie first launched in September 2011 as Tavi entered her sophomore year of high school, filling the void that Sassy left in the teen publication industry when it shut down in 1996. In her first Editor’s letter, Tavi asserted that unlike other magazines like Teen Vogue or Seventeen, Rookie:

“…is not your guide to Being a Teen. It is not a pamphlet on How to Be a Young Woman. It is, quite simply, a bunch of writing and art we like and believe in. While there���s always danger in generalizing a whole group of people, I do think some experiences are somewhat universal to being a teenager, specifically a female one. Rookie is the place to make the best of the beautiful pain and cringeworthy awkwardness of being an adolescent girl” (Gevinson).

If you look at Rookie’s visual aesthetic throughout the years, you can definitely see how the riot grrrl zines also influenced it. The whole site had a whole DIY/collage aesthetic. As stated previously, riot grrrl was a major part of the third-wave feminist movement (Feliciano); Huse states that its zines were so important and impactful because they gave girls “an outlet for their own stories, a means to reclaim culture and language through their writing, and the ability to critique mainstream media with their own publication” (Huse 12).

That pretty much also describes Rookie’s primary draw. Like Sassy and its riot grrrl foremothers, Rookie magazine served as a way for teens to read about and discuss serious topics like birth control, mental health, and coming out in a safe space where they would not be shamed or ridiculed (Wilson). It was also feminist-leaning without the terminology that might be found in a Gender and Women's Studies textbook or journal. This meant that the language used was simple and more accessible, allowing progressive concepts to be shared with a younger audience (Kane).

Rookie also featured a pretty wide range of content, from interviews with artists, authors, and celebrities; to short fiction and poetry, film and literature reviews, DIY and personal style guides, cool playlists and illustrations—basically anything a teen might want. Much of this content was submitted by its tween and teen readers (Wilson), and submitting to Rookie was much like submitting to any other magazine. Each month there was a specific theme, and Rookie gave potential contributors ideas of what they could send in. There was also a poetry roundup, where Rookie would publish a bunch of submitted poetry each month. Of course, all submissions had to be unpublished, and Rookie rigorously fact-checked any non-fiction pieces. What was most impressive to me was that they took their young contributors seriously by compensating them for their work and creativity, though it was never officially disclosed how much they paid. The first three themes of Rookie were Beginnings, Secrets, and Girl Gang in September, October, and November of 2011; the last three were Rebirth, Spirit, and Evolution in the same months of 2018.

Advice questions could be sent in at any time. These questions could be answered in columns like “Ask a Grown Man” and “Ask a Grown Woman,” which allowed teens to ask various celebrities for advice (Kane). Celebrities who participated in this included Cyndi Lauper, Paul Rudd, Terry Crews, and even Hillary Clinton during her 2016 election campaign.

The website updated only three times a day, all in the afternoon when teens would be most apt to actually read the content: “after school, at dinner time, and when it’s really late and you should be writing a paper but are Facebook stalking instead” (Wilson).

The Rookie staff consisted of Tavi, a few grown people who handled the business and some of the editing, and other teen staff like Petra Collins, Hazel Cills, Arabelle Sicardi, and more. Staff members largely interacted with each other online via email and social media, but they occasionally met up for events like Rookie Road Trip, which was a four-week long tour in which teen staff members and Anaheed Alani packed into a van and drove across country from New York to Los Angeles to promote Rookie Yearbook One. The staff met up with the Rookie audience in venues like ice cream parlors, record stores, arcades, and theaters, where they did zine/collage-making events, poetry readings, and live performances (Gevinson).

The Rookie Yearbooks were printed yearly roundups of the online magazine content, edited and art-directed by Tavi, along with exclusive interviews and notes from celebrities (Peiser). There were a total of four to cover the magazine’s first four years. In addition to the yearbooks, Rookie also sold t-shirts, stickers, and posters.

END OF AN ERA

But, as I implied at the beginning, this website described by Healy as a “glistening, empowered world of girlhood” did not last. So, what happened?

The simplest answer is social media. But, truthfully, the newspaper industry has been unstable long before then. As Tavi pointed out in her final Editor’s Letter for Rookie, between January 2001 and September 2016, half of all newspaper jobs were cut from the industry (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). It’s also worth remembering that from 2015 to 2018, publications were laying off writers left and right in order to “pivot to video” content, mostly so they could cater to Facebook’s algorithms (Weissman).

According to that same letter, Rookie started running into financial issues as early as 2016, as social media engagement began to make up the bulk of the magazine’s online engagement as opposed to, say, people actually clicking on article links or leaving comments (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). While this technically be a good thing for, say, a zine that was firmly embedded within the social media with no central website, this was bad for Rookie because it rendered their ad-based revenue ineffective (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”).

Tavi had no desire to ask her young readers to subscribe or donate to the site (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). She doesn’t explicitly explain why this was not an option, but my best guess is that she wanted the site to remain accessible to those young people who might not have had the money for a potential subscription or donation.

Tavi had previously been advised to work out some sort of marketing and engagement strategy before things took the turn that they did, but she said she never really listened because…well, she was a teenager (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). Who can blame her.

Anyways, in fall 2017, the Rookie team began searching for investors and/or partnerships they could do to keep the magazine running and strategize to figure out how to expand Rookie’s content offerings (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). However, most potential business partners wanted Tavi to promote herself as the brand’s face to get Rookie back on its feet before passing it off to a new, fresh figurehead that could lead the magazine into the next era (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018;” “Instagram''). By this time, Tavi was wanting to grow beyond Rookie magazine and pursue other ventures like acting, so she was on board with this concept (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018;” “Instagram'').

This didn’t pan out too well. Tavi did more sponsored social media content in order to market herself as an “it girl,” but even though these sponsorships let her avoid taking an income from struggling Rookie, she didn’t really enjoy the “hustle” of doing this, and neither did Rookie’s more progressive-minded audience, who knew when consumerism was being thrown in their faces (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018;” “Instagram”). This particularly came to a head when Tavi was criticized for contributing to gentrification while living in a sponsored luxury apartment in Brooklyn (Gevinson, “Instagram”). She was getting criticized for her personal finances as well since she was so present within the media, but Tavi wrote in Cut magazine that this was largely rooted in a misunderstand of how the media industry works, and that she was never really earning enough to live from such media appearances or photoshoots (Gevinson, “Instagram”). So the plan of Tavi promoting herself as a public figure in order to re-popularize the Rookie website fell apart.

Again, most media companies were already not doing well, so absorbing Rookie without such personality content from Tavi to help it up again was out of the question (Gevinson, “Editor’s Letter 2018”). Tavi explains it all very clearly, again, in the final Editor’s Letter:

“I have spent the fall learning what it would mean to sell Rookie to a new owner who could fund it, build it, or hire more people. I have learned that I can’t take on the responsibility that would come with remaining as its editor, or even transitioning it to a point where I could leave completely.

“…most media companies are also struggling. They can’t afford to buy other publications that are struggling, and/or they are understandably not interested in spending the money to get Rookie to sustainable profitability without the founder/editor/owner since day one—in other words, me. I can’t make that commitment, and at this moment, Rookie can’t exist without it” (Gevinson, “Editor's Letter 2018”).

Thus, on December 1, 2018, Rookie magazine officially ceased operations (Wilson), joining or preceding other sites by women such as the Hairpin, the Awl, the Toast, and Lenny Letter (Blum).

After Rookie folded, the staff at Man Repeller got together to discuss the changing nature of online media. Haley Nahman stated that:

“The part that makes me sad is understanding/learning that content that drives the most traffic (i.e., what keeps media brands in business) is not necessarily the highest quality, and that has become increasingly true as publications that put out good work flail, and those that put out, say, celebrity gossip or SEO-clickbait thrive” (Team Repeller).

Tavi’s goal from the Sassy- and riot grrrl-inspired beginnings of Rookie was always to make great content rather than simple filler articles (Knight). Ultimately, the internet took websites such as these for granted, opting instead to bury them under forgettable filler and clickbait content—something that has clearly continued into the current era. And, though there will always be people searching for good content online, sometimes that minority is not enough to sustain such a time-consuming publication like Rookie and many others.

Fortunately, Rookie remains up as an archival site. So at least we’ll always have the memories.

IMPACT

All in all, Rookie gave young people not only the confidence to share their ideas and express themselves through writing, photography, and DIYs, but also gave them the early experience to pursue such creative ventures at a professional level.

One of the most impressive things about Rookie is the number of names I recognized during my research from today and from my days as an impressionable young teenager on Tumblr. One such name is that of photographer Petra Collins, who was one of the original staff members for Rookie and participated in the Rookie Road Trip that first year in (Kane). Petra published a lot of photography on Rookie that then made the rounds on sites like Tumblr and Pinterest and formed the basis for a good many moodboards of the mid-2010s. She has since moved on to doing photography direction for fashion brands, as well as music videos for artists like Carly Rae Jepsen, Cardi B, and 2021 teen queen Olivia Rodrigo. Other Rookie alumni include NPR Music editor Hazel Cills, another founding Rookie Road Tripper, and Ashley Reese, who once wrote for Jezebel and Netflix’s Tudum, who you’ve probably seen on Twitter. There was also a lot of cross-pollination between Rookie and the Art Hoe movement’s founders and curators. While I don’t believe Ione Gamble ever wrote for Rookie, she was present at meetups for Rookie in London and cites Rookie as the influence for her zine Polyester, as well as Gal-Dem, and One of My Kind (OOMK) (Gamble).

Seeing the sheer number of people who either wrote for or read Rookie during their formative years is honestly amazing. And when you look at Tumblr or Pinterest’s mid-2010 years, it’s obvious that a lot of the “alternative teen girl aesthetic” that Tumblr came to be known for does sort of owe itself to Rookie as well, since so many girls on that site also happened to read Rookie and share images from Rookie to Tumblr or Pinterest. These images ended up on moodboards and continue to inspire online visual content to this day in one way or another. So when former Rookie staff member Arabelle Sicardi declared in 2021 that “pop culture is Rookie” to Teen Vogue—whose progressive content today likely owes a lot to Rookie as well—she isn’t kidding (Wilson). Without Rookie, media for young people, specifically women, girls, and non-binary people, would be a whole lot less endearing.

SEMI-CONCLUSION

That would’ve been a neat place to end this video, but I am going to get on my soapbox and say that it would be really beneficial if we had some sort of online space for tween and teen girls (and non-binary folks) today. Again, Teen Vogue has filled the younger, progressive void, but that’s not really a site where readers can submit things and be published without a pre-existing resume of some sort.

There’s also traditional social media giants like IG, Twitter, Tiktok, etc., but honestly even though they led to the demise of publishers like Rookie, they aren’t really a good replacement. Though anyone can share their thoughts now, these websites have arguably led to the shrinking of both our attention spans and the internet (Holderness). Also, algorithms are weird and perfectly good content is buried under the noise of search-engine optimization or content that simply isn’t good but very popular (example – subway surfer south park nonsense).

These also frankly aren’t safe spaces for young girls and women. In fact, social media was also linked to the teen girls’ mental decline, thanks to things like cyberbullying and the threat of sexual exploitation (Twenge). This is only going to get worse now that we have this wave of misogynistic backlash online, and teen girls who try to use social media can be at any point met with manosphere podcasters, tradwives, or straight-up violent incels who are typically their own male peers (Ewens). And now we also have the issue of AI-generators and deep fake adult materials; girls who post their faces online are likely going to have their faces stolen at one point or another.

At this point, any type of curated, online space for girls to get away from would be beneficial, but we’re so used to the convenience of social media now as a culture that it’s uncertain what form that online space will come in if ever. Hopefully, in one way or another, a new Rookie more suited to our times will pop up somewhere.

ACTUAL OUTRO

So that was depressing! But if you liked the non-depressing parts, and would like to be notified for more videos like this, be sure to click the subscribe button below. I also provide updates via the social media links listed below. This is obviously still a newer channel and I’m still kind of testing certain things out, so feel free to leave any feedback you have in the comments. For short-form biographies on women in the arts or other fun facts about culture, follow my TikTok or Instagram. Thanks for watching!

SOURCES

“Japan Goes Mad for the 13-Year-Old Fashion Blogger Tavi.” The Cut, 20 Nov. 2009, https://www.thecut.com/2009/11/japan_goes_mad_for_13-year-old.html.

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Blum, Dani. “Rookie Mag and the Shrinking Spaces to Grow Up Online.” Forbes, 5 Dec. 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/daniblum/2018/12/05/rookie-mag-and-the-shrinking-spaces-to-grow-up-online/?sh=29e11c636a66. 

Ewens, Hannah. “Young, Male and Anti-Feminist––the Gen-Z Boys Who Hate Women.” Vice, 28 May 2021, https://www.vice.com/en/article/dyv7by/anti-feminist-gen-z-boys-who-hate-women. 

Feliciano, Stevie. “The Riot Grrrl Movement.” New York Public Library Blog, 19 June 2013, https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/06/19/riot-grrrl-movement. 

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people are saying that potraying furina as a teen is misogynistic and, while I do get that she received a lot of hate (people straight up saying that they would like her more if she was a guy) I really dont get whats misogynistic about interpreting her struggles as a coming of age story. characters like asuka from evangelion, pretty much all of the female cast from utena etc are really good rep of how terrifying girlhood can be in your teenage years. Also considering her experiences now and how shes living alone and having a drink (and getting drunk) for the first time, its very safe to assume that shes narratively barely 18. idk shes one of the best well written characters in the whole game and i wish people didnt treat her and her relationship with neuvi like that

That's so insane like WHAT about it is misogynistic?? In what way is it misogynistic to see this literally barely 18 character and acknowledge that her story is a coming of age? Like sorry this is appalling especially because the average nvfr makes their argument about her being an adult all along rely on ideas like "oh she's just an incompetent grown woman she's just a femalé girl so she NEEDS the older competent man to guide her because she's too stupid to do anything by herself 🥺 how romantic" like I'm sorry but these people literally need to be put down.

Also honestly your comparison with utena especially really hits close to home because... Ok in general i tend not to like comparing other things to utena because utena is very much like its own thing but there are things to be said about genshin making the choice to have teenage girlhood be represented as an endless tormentous nightmare and obviously they are very much not the same type of story like furina's is not a story about abuse but her deal does remind me of anthy just a little bit just in terms of the whole. Inability to grow up and responsibility being thrust upon her when she was way too young and the theme of repetition as part of the torment etc etc. It comes off as an extremely bad faith thing to act like furina has been an adult all along especially yes since we know genshin regularly uses the ability to drink alcohol as an age signifier just in general

seeing the way some people have been talking about girlhood and womanhood and gender etc because of the barbie movie is like. what are you all saying. i don’t know it’s very much like.. remembering that many of the people online are actually normal average people with certain experiences growing up and existing . does that make sense

Average girlhood experience is numb hands and stomachaches from having a stupid crush. Like what do you mean he looked at me? Now I gotta throw up because it made me nervous!!! I do not like the effects he has have on my body!!!! IM GOING INSANE!

I don’t want to make a “touch grass” argument but it’s very evident that a lot of y’all do not have regular interactions with people outside of (primarily online) progressive spaces. When I see people complaining about the feminist ideas in Barbie being “basic” or “not enough,” I’m immediately reminded of all the conservatives that left the movie believing it was “anti-man” solely because it’s a mainstream movie that dared to overtly criticize toxic gender norms.

Like, sure, if you’re knee-deep in feminist spaces and are reading feminist literature constantly, Barbie probably won’t have much to offer you outside of a good time. However, most people are not heavily involved in feminist spaces and something like Barbie can very well be a lot of people’s first exposure to deeper feminist concepts than the average “girl power” Hollywood flick offers. We shouldn’t underestimate the importance of introducing feminist ideas to a general audience in a simple, relatable way like Barbie does.

I honestly do think that a lot of this type of discourse is directly rooted in y’all’s weird assertion that female filmmakers need to cover every possible feminist topic and female experience in their art in order for you to see any value in it. This happened with Ladybird, another Greta Gerwig movie that got criticized by feminists for being “too white,” despite the fact that Ladybird is clearly a personal reflection of Gerwig’s own relationship with girlhood and with her mother- of course it’s white, it’s a white woman’s story. No one filmmaker or singular movie can ever convey the experiences of millions of different women or the thousands of complex concepts involved in feminism. I think it’s regressive to expect them to when you can instead just… actually look for art made by the people within the marginalized groups you claim to care about, instead of demanding it from more accessible mainstream artists working from their own experiences.

@more-than-a-princess asked: 14, 15, and 18 for Anzu, and 17 and 21 for Tsubasa!

14) has your muse had feelings or experiences that seem to / do conflict with their identity? are these general knowledge? does it alter how others see them, or how they see themselves?

Anzu is a very girly girl, all things considered. She likes pretty clothes, makeup, hot boys, being the center of attention etc. She's soft-hearted and cries at sad movies, she likes doing karaoke with friends, and her shoe closet is insane. In most ways, she is the platonic ideal of an average teenage girl, and it's hard to really see her as anything but that, even when witnessing some of her less flattering gremlin-like behavior. She would certainly say that her feelings and her experiences line up completely with girlhood, with no incongruities or confusion at all. Even her most "against-type" hobby/interest (bugs and bug-catching)... her thinking is less that it being common knowledge would somehow affect how others see her as a woman, and more that it would affect how they see her as the cutest woman alive.

That said, there is one big area where her experiences are... complicated. Despite the fact that kabuki was invented by a woman and the original kabuki theater groups in the early 1600s were entirely women, it has been an almost exclusively male-dominated venture for almost 400 years. This is something that Anzu finds complicating, because she loves performing, she loves the exaggerated makeup and the costumes and the stories. She has no concerns about her father accepting her identity in a vacuum - rather, her concern is that her father would say "I love you so much, daughter, now you have to quit performing because kabuki is for men." Anzu doesn't respect the idea that she's somehow not worthy of her job because of her identity.

It doesn't affect her own perception of herself, because Anzu knows the history, she knows the banning of women was a decision rooted in misogyny, and she knows that the excuses that some people cling to about keeping it that way are weak. Overall, her experience is less being worried about her identity being disrespected or invalidated, but rather her identity being seen as a reason to disqualify her from doing what she loves.

15) if the thing that originally caused them to realise / start the chain reaction to realising they weren’t cishet had not happened, how much longer would it had take to end up here?

For Anzu, there was no "one event" in terms of her identity realization. Anzu has understood that she's different since she was able to recognize that she liked her sister's cute clothes more than her own. There's basically no universe where Anzu, being the person she is, doesn't realize that she's different, and be able to put into words how basically as soon as she knows the right words in question. That doesn't mean there's not something interesting to this question, though, because while Anzu had it figured out early, she had a roadmap that she ended up not following.

Originally, she had always intended to sort of keep her gender to herself, and her sexuality within her close friend circle only, until she was college-age or even after graduating. That was when certain legal options open up to her anyway, and while she wouldn't have been happy about it, Anzu is nothing if not an excellent performer. She assumed that would be easier than being open about everything. But, while she was looking into moving back to Tokyo and enrolling in HPA, she got back into contact with Shinobu, saw how she was finding ways to assert her identity in what is basically a hostile environment, and that willingness to perform cisheteronormativity basically immediately shattered in Anzu. If someone with a million more reasons to keep things close to the chest was being open, then Anzu couldn't find her own justification to keep herself from doing what she wanted, though her parents' knowledge of things is still a bit hazy.

18) how does their family feel about the matter? friends? coworkers?—and does their thoughts matter to your muse?

As far as family goes, Anzu's older sister, being an HPA staff member, knows and is keeping it a family secret for her. Her mom has some idea that Anzu is kind of unique, but the full extent hasn't been conveyed - she probably thinks that Anzu is just a crossdresser, and as someone with her own background in the entertainment industry, she doesn't find that particularly strange. Anzu's father is the one who really doesn't know much at all, and that's because while she knows he would accept and validate her, as stated above, she's worried he might try to keep her from the stage because of it, and she needs to prove that she belongs.

Her friends and coworkers are a mixed bag. Her personal friends all know and naturally they're supportive and kind (they wouldn't be her friends otherwise). Her coworkers... They don't call her 'Anzu,' but rather 'Goto-san,' or 'Goto-senpai,' so it doesn't always come up. Her stage name is gender-neutral, but it isn't like she picked it - there were 11 men that used that stage name before her, so in the context of the theater tradition, it's still understood as a man's stage name. For people doing short stints, who knows how much they know, but anyone who has any length of time working with her gets the picture eventually, and if they're not cool with it, they can find another theater because "I'm a better actor and a bigger star than you❤️"

Basically, Anzu very rarely (if ever) feels personally shaken in that part of her identity (now her personality? what kind of person she is? who Anzu Tachibana really is? those are different stories). She knows she's an incredibly cute and sweet girl who anyone would be lucky to be in the presence of, so the opinions of others to the contrary don't bother her. When it becomes a problem, and where she feels unease, is the idea that other people might think they understand better than her how she should interact with the world because of her identity, and what things should and should not be available to her.

17) how are their feelings towards pride and related phenomenons?

Big fan, no complaints! Tsubasa considers themselves as needing that kind of thing less than other people (author's note: ehhhhh), but their guiding philosophy is that people should live their lives as they want to. You like a certain hobby or interest? Awesome! You want to dress a certain way? If it makes you happy, it's the only way to live. You want to use a name or pronouns that are different than some previous set? You got it! Everyone should be the only administrator of their own body and their own surroundings, in Tsubasa's eyes, with no one else getting to have a say about it.

Because Pride is, in a lot of ways, a celebration of that, Tsubasa's happy to attend. They know that for a lot of people, it's a liminal space where they can express something that can't easily be expressed elsewhere, and they're glad that it exists to give people that safety. Seeing people unashamedly enjoying themselves and living authentically or exploring how they want to live charges their cyber angel batteries and gives them a lot of joy. Plus, also, Pride is a great place to meet cute gay girls. 10/10.

21) what words do they reclaim, what are they okay with being reclaimed, and what do they do not want to used to describe them?

As it relates to like, uncomfortable words, Tsubasa is really only okay with "queer." As a general rule, even if a word doesn't bother them, they don't know if it might bother other people, so they steer away from anything that could be considered sensitive or offensive. As far as for themselves, their preference is only non-gendered terms. Partner, child, person, skater, cyber angel rather than man/woman/boy/girl/son/daughter/boyfriend/girlfriend etc. They are nonbinary, and they also accept being called x-gender, and while they are a lesbian, they are not a woman and they don't want to be understood or referred to as such. They're more likely to accept "masculine" terms as gender-neutral (dude, bro, that kind of thing) than "feminine" ones (sis, girl, etc.), which is partially personal preference, and partially that, as a skater, they see those masculine terms as almost "subculture words."

That said, Tsubasa is a laid-back person, and they're more likely to consider something as being born of ignorance rather than malice. They'll correct someone rather than get angry (most of the time, at least as it relates to themselves), and even someone who is being actively, purposefully malicious, they try to stay cool, since a big emotional reaction is usually what that person is fishing for. The best way to know their stance on a word or descriptor is to ask them about it - they don't bite unless you ask them to.

I have lots of thoughts about how girls and boys in the US (and lots of places, I just didn’t want to overgeneralize) are brought up in totally different social, cognitive, and linguistic silos that we’re raised in from the earliest part of childhood. As soon as we can talk and our words are corrected by the people around us, based upon their perception of our gender, we’re being socialized into a gender silo.  Now, before I go on with this, I want to point out that for all kinds of reasons - unusual upbringing, gender identity/conformity, neurodivergence, being raised in a culture space without strong homosociality norms, etc - it’s possible for someone not to end up in a silo from early early childhood. So there being no one biologically essential experience of girlhood or boyhood, can absolutely co-exist with the existence of social and cognitive silos.  The thing with these silos is that, in my opinion, men and women have more of the same experiences and emotions in common than not. I am not saying - necessarily - that men and women are the same.  What they’re taught is completely different expected social norms around these things, and different ways of dealing with conflict within their groups and with their friendships. Now, if you are my age and you’ve read Deborah Tannen then this seems like a no-brainer. But I don’t think people really think about how far down this rabbit hole goes, or the probable Sapir-Whorf-adjacent implications of the whole thing.  Boys and girls are given completely different messages by children’s programming and by the world around them about how they’re supposed to interact, communicate, and even PERCEIVE THEIR WORLD, and what words they’re supposed to use to describe their emotions.  Depending upon how sealed off their silo is - they may grow up thinking that only *their* gender experiences specific emotions or life experiences. For example, some women thinking all men are inherently predators, because they’ve never known any men except the ones who preyed upon them. Some hetero-attracted cis men thinking ALL women can get any sex they want, and are never lonely, and that the rich, mean hot girls represent the attitudes of all women - because they’ve never known, in their entire life, unrelated girls or women outside of a very specific social context. Women with almost identical types of attitudes thinking that entitled incels are always male. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.  It always looks like, from within your particular social silo, the opposite sex has actually different emotions and needs as opposed to being socialized to talk about those things differently. Like... it became really clear to me that “bunny boiler discourse” and “crazy ex girlfriend discourse” in the 80s and 90s was actually a conversation about female-on-male abuse and/or predation, filtered through an 80s average male-normative vocabulary instead of the therapy-influenced language that we’re taught as middle class women is “the right way to describe things” (particularly in a social environment where men are ALWAYS seen as victimizers and never victims). When you actually listened to what these guys were saying instead of getting pissed off at their choice of words, you actually absorbed that there was a legitimate experience being described here that cut across gender lines... guys just didn’t use the same words to talk about it, and were dealing with the social minefields of *their* particular silo in trying to articulate this rotten experience that was happening to them (that happens to all genders), and were just as socially slapped for using the wrong choice of words as women are.  And when middle class girls talked about the same experiences, they were often directed away from blunt, short/succinct “working class” or “male” language and reinforced to express their thoughts/feelings in terms of the “polite” therapeutic or academic language that passes for Obligatory (White) Middle Class Female English in your particular era. Further, they were reinforced by practically all adults and all media that it was their job to police the speech of any boys in their presence. What’s frustrating is that a lot of upper class feminist approaches don’t really acknowledge that Compulsory Middle Class Female English is practically constructed so that women DON’T succinctly describe their experiences and feelings, yet this particular style of feminist discourse tends to present this form of communication as the *only* valid communication and actively problematizes other styles of communication.  A big problem with a lot of approaches to feminism is that they don’t question the existence of this metaphysical silo or even try to leave it. You’re stuck inside Plato’s Cave, thinking that’s the whole universe. You don’t try to dismantle it and in many cases the things you’re doing that you think are “feminist” actually just reinforce this cultural silo. And I think it may even go deeper than the most popular approaches to Deborah Tannen’s analyses because there’s a whole Sapir-Whorf Adjacent metaphysical worldview/cognitive component to being siloed, it’s not *just* what words you use... but how you’re taught to relate to the world based upon what words you use and how it may even affect your development.   And it’s also the fact that these silos act as social protection rackets that reinforce compulsory gender-conformist behavior. 

“…In the words of one teacher captured in a recent study by Professor Edward W. Morris, “[T]hey think they are adults too, and they try to act like they should have control sometimes.” Such comments demonstrate that stereotypes of Black girls, interpreted as “loud,” are imbued with adult-like aspirations, and perceived, in turn, as a threat. The same study recorded teachers’ describing Black girls as exhibiting “very ‘mature’ behavior socially (but not academically) sophisticated and ‘controlling at a young age.’ ”

This interpretation of Black girls’ outspokenness may be associated with the stereotype of Black women as aggressive and dominating. Differences in physical development based on the onset of puberty may also play a role in adultification, in light of evidence that “on average, African American girls mature physically at a faster rate than [w]hite girls and as a result can be perceived as older.”

Another important aspect of adultification for Black girls lies in culturally rooted fantasies of Black girls’ sexualization. The commonly held stereotype of Black girls as hypersexualized is defined by “society’s attribution of sex as part of the ‘natural’ role of Black women and girls.” Noting the long history of perceiving Black women as hypersexualized, Monique W. Morris has observed that adultification results in applying these stereotypes to Black girls:

Caricatures of Black femininity are often deposited into distinct chambers of our public consciousness, narrowly defining Black female identity and movement according to the stereotypes described by Pauli Murray as “‘female dominance’ on the one hand and loose morals on the other hand, both growing out of the roles forced upon them during the slavery experience and its aftermath.” As such, in the public’s collective consciousness, latent ideas about Black females as hypersexual, conniving, loud, and sassy predominate. However, age compression renders Black girls just as vulnerable to these aspersive representations.

Three dominant paradigms of Black femininity that originated in the South during the period of slavery have persisted into present-day culture, which “paint Black females as hypersexual, boisterous, aggressive, and unscrupulous”:

• Sapphire (e.g., emasculating, loud, aggressive, angry, stubborn, and unfeminine);

• Jezebel (e.g., hypersexualized, seductive and exploiter of men’s weaknesses); and

• Mammy (e.g., self-sacrificing, nurturing, loving, asexual).

These images and historical stereotypes of Black women have real-life consequences for Black girls today. According to Blake and colleagues, “these stereotypes underlie the implicit bias that shapes many [adult’s] view of Black females [as] ... sexually promiscuous, hedonistic, and in need of socialization.”

For example, “teachers may subconsciously use stereotypical images of Black females ... to interpret Black girls’ behaviors and respond more harshly to Black girls who display behaviors that do not align with traditional standards of femininity in which girls are expected to be docile, diffident, and selfless.” Such “tainted perceptions ... result in patterns of discipline intended to re-form the femininity of African-American girls into something more ‘acceptable.’”

The consequences of educators’ tendencies to associate Black girls’ behavior with stereotypes of adult Black women can be far-reaching. For example, Edward Morris observed that Black female students “appeared less restrained by the view of femininity as docile and compliant, and less expectant of male protection than [w]hite girls in other educational research.”

Morris found that teachers trained their focus on condemning such comportment at the expense of guiding their academic progress—effectively disciplining Black girls for perceived loud and un-ladylike behavior that challenged their authority. Others have similarly observed that Black girls are under greater surveillance of their decorum than their white peers. Perhaps most concretely, researchers suggest that the phenomenon of adultification may contribute to increasingly disproportionate rates of school discipline for Black girls.”

- Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake, Thalia González, Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood

Noémie Merlant: "I remember very well the pride I felt on the red carpet."

One year ago, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, by Céline Sciamma, won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival. The actress, who gives the lines to Adèle Haenel, looks back on the events that accompanied her contribution in this sensual, feminist film, made of glances, painting and flames. To be seen this Tuesday, May 19 on Canal+

Noémie Merlant remembers precisely July 14, 2018. That day, she went to her third audition for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, the new film of Céline Sciamma, in the presence of the director. At the end of her audition, the director said, "it's for you.” “My mind was so confused that I couldn't understand what she was telling me," said Noémie Merlant laughing. “I felt both a tremendous pressure and a tremendous desire because I measured the importance of the film and the role.”

The actress, who’s now 31 years old, seen in Curiosa, Heaven Will Wait and Paper Flags was thus chosen to be Marianne in Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and to play, with Adèle Haenel, two of the most beautiful film heroines of 2019, and certainly the most beautiful couple of women. Marianne, the painter in the carmine red dress who must secretly capture from memory the features of Heloise, who was promised to an arranged marriage.

In the staging of this incandescent lesbian love in the middle of the 18th century, the two actresses have irradiated the Cannes Film Festival. Contacted by phone while she was confined in her apartment in the 15th arrondissement of Paris ("in the street where I was born!") Noémie Merlant looks back on the few months that separated her from the ascent of the staircase, and the fever that gripped the Croisette after the film viewing.

"When I discovered the film, I couldn't talk. I felt dizzy from what I'd seen."

From the filming, which took place between Quiberon and la Chapelle-Gauthier, in Seine-et-Marne, Noémie Merlant keeps the memory of a special moment, suspended in time, "very cocooning. The atmosphere was very much like the one in the movie. We lived in a benevolent cocoon created by Celine Sciamma, a mixture of strong friendships that were beginning to emerge, of creation and artistic exchanges. I quickly felt a very strong sense of cohesion in the team." After seven weeks of shooting and several others of editing, Noémie Merlant discovers the result of their efforts. "I knew what we had done was going to make a great film, but when I found out, I couldn't speak, I felt dizzy from what I'd seen, what I'd participated in. A very strong sensation, which I could express later by walking down the street with Celine for a long time afterwards.”

In April, the team learns about the selection of Portrait of a Lady on Fire in competition at the Festival of Cannes, the first time for the director, who is a regular on the Croisette, after Water Lilies at Un certain regard (2007), Girlhood at La Quinzaine des Directeurs (2014) and My life as a Courgette, an animated film by Claude Barras that she co-wrote, also selected for La Quinzaine in 2016.

Looking back, Noémie Merlant realizes how "lucky" she was to be surrounded by people who knew the ins and outs of the world's biggest film festival, where all eyes would be on them. "Adèle is used to it, she was my guide. She keeps a certain distance from the event and its "big masquerade" side. If Cannes is also a place to have fun, we kept in mind why we were there. We knew what was at stake and the importance of this selection, and the fact that we were very close to each other made it easier for me to meet the Festival.”

"There was a burning feeling abroad about the film, a great expectation from the audience"

On May 19, 2019, the film crew, a magnificent band of women dressed in black or navy blue, walks the steps on the exhilarating female chorus that can be heard in one scene, composed by Celine Sciamma's lifelong friend, Para One, with Arthur Simonini. A moment of great intensity for Noémie Merlant. "I remember very well the pride I felt on the red carpet. The pride of having contributed to a film that speaks so well of love and sorority.”

At the end of the screening, the film was greeted by nearly ten minutes of applause, notably in front of Marina Foïs and Claire Denis. Noémie Merlant, her eyes filled with tears, embraces Adèle and savors this moment that will become unforgettable. "When the whole Grand Théâtre Lumière stands up and applauds, it's impressive, and I might only experience it once in my life," she whispers. Then comes the time of the party given for the film, and several hours of meetings with the press from all over the world. "Intense days. I'd never done interviews before, with a lot of small formats that tire you out before the longer meetings." The film was awarded the Screenplay Prize, a small disappointment for the director. "Céline made us come back to Cannes so we could live things together until the end. Of course, we would have liked to get more, especially in terms of directing. That's what struck me the most when I discovered the film. Its sobriety and elegance. But the trophy for the screenplay remains, of course, a very nice prize."

Portrait of a Lady on Fire was released in France four months after its screening in Cannes, and achieved an average score in theaters: it drew a little over 310,000 spectators, but was a real hit internationally, with more than 1.3 million admissions in 36 countries. 

“There was something burning around the film abroad, a great expectation from the audience, seized by this love story. This film carries a different voice, and allows it to be heard. Before working with Celine Sciamma, I had never heard of "male gaze" and "female gaze". Portrait of a Lady on Fire allows these important discussions, without any violence, only as an invitation to an another point of view." The film has particularly ignited the lesbian community, which has finally been able to identify with an other imaginary, different from what is usually represented on screen.

On Adèle Haenel's speech to Mediapart in November or the last evening of the César awards, Noémie Merlant prefers not to express herself, even if she stills says that she "admires her courage", and thinks back on this evening as "a movement, a renewal, a reconstruction". Of which the actress is certainly a part.