whenever right wing people talk about “parental rights” they are talking about property rights. they are arguing for further political and legal enshrinement of their children as their literal actual property

Sometimes liking a character a lot is deciding that they're black.

nobody understands my humor

Birds of a Feather previous / next

"Like stuff. Don't be someone that doesn't like stuff, and if you don't like stuff, don't be a dick about it."

- David Jenkins

the thing is there's like, a point of oversaturation for everything, and it's why so many things get dropped after a few minutes. and we act like millennials or gen z kids "have short attention spans" but... that's not quite it. it's more like - we did like it. you just ruined it.

capitalism sees product A having moderate success, and then everything has to come out with their "own version" of product A (which is often exactly the same). and they dump extreme amounts of money and environmental waste into each horrible simulacrum they trot out each season.

now it's not just tiktokkers making videos; it's that instagram and even fucking tumblr both think you want live feeds and video-first programming. and it helps them, because videos are easier to sneak native ads into. the books coming out all have to have 78 buzzwords in them for SEO, or otherwise they don't get published. they are making a live-action remake of moana. i haven't googled it, but there's probably another marvel or starwars something coming out, no matter when you're reading this post.

and we are like "hi, this clone of project A completely misses the point of the original. it is soulless and colorless and miserable." and the company nods and says "yes totally. here is a different clone, but special." and we look at clone 2 and we say "nope, this one is still flat and bad, y'all" and they're like "no, totally, we hear you," and then they make another clone but this time it's, like, a joyless prequel. and by the time they've successfully rolled out "clone 89", the market is incredibly oversaturated, and the consumer is blamed because the company isn't turning a profit.

and like - take even something digital like the tumblr "live streaming" function i just mentioned. that has to take up server space and some amount of carbon footprint; just so this brokenass blue hellsite can roll out a feature that literally none of its userbase actually wants. the thing that's the kicker here: even something that doesn't have a physical production plant still impacts the environment.

and it all just feels like it's rolling out of control because like, you watch companies pour hundreds of thousands of dollars into a remake of a remake of something nobody wants anymore and you're like, not able to afford eggs anymore. and you tell the company that really what you want is a good story about survival and they say "okay so you mean a YA white protagonist has some kind of 'spicy' love triangle" and you're like - hey man i think you're misunderstanding the point of storytelling but they've already printed 76 versions of "city of blood and magic" and "queen of diamond rule" and spent literally millions of dollars on the movie "Candy Crush Killer: Coming to Eat You".

it's like being stuck in a room with a clown that keeps telling the same joke over and over but it's worse every time. and that would be fine but he keeps fucking charging you 6.99. and you keep being like "no, i know it made me laugh the first time, but that's because it was different and new" and the clown is just aggressively sitting there saying "well! plenty of people like my jokes! the reason you're bored of this is because maybe there's something wrong with you!"

i still can't believe the LA Times article/interview just. openly admits that the show intentionally, from the beginning, fully removed Gabe being abusive and overtly made him just a nosy loser. Percy's relationship with Gabe is so important to how he navigates the world and the themes of the series. Percy's first monster is in his own home. He uses wards against evil against his step-father and they work. He has overt PTSD that colors his interactions with Mr. D and is why he's so antagonistic towards him for like four books. It isn't until Percy is able to move past his trauma and how Mr. D reminds him of Gabe that he sees Mr. D for who he actually is and understand him and begin to empathize with him. Heck, even into HoO we see Percy having visceral reactions to implications of alcohol/drinking because of Gabe. Everything about Percy's home life colors him as a character. His trauma and PTSD informs his perspective and they explicitly removed his PTSD in the show.

They removed Percy's PTSD. They brush over his experiences as a neurodivergent/disabled kid after the first episode and turned Sally into an Autism Speaks mom. Why. On what planet was that a reasonable change to be made.

Osmosis jones doodles that I’ve been hoarding for literal years for no reason

Some cryptid photos of Vessel (+ ii) that I've collected over the past week. The fact that almost all of them look like they came out of trail cam footage is absolutely sending me

I think respecting trans people comes with a territory of like... just because many people will pass as cis doesn't mean that it's a great idea to use their passing as a way of legitimizing how absurd transphobia is

Transphobia isn't absurd because I "look like a [cis] man," it's because transphobia is fucking ridiculous. It would be ridiculous whether or not I passed or whether I look like a "conventional man." I use myself as an example, but ultimately, passing or appearing normative should never play into whether or not transphobia is bad.

The deeply moralist tone that a lot of discussions about media representation take on here are primarily neoliberal before they are anything else. Like the shouting matches people get into about “purity culture” “pro/anti” etc nonsense (even if I think it’s true that some people have a deeply christian worldview about what art ought to say and represent about the world) are downstream of the basic neoliberal assumption that we can and must educate the public by being consumers in a market. “Bad representation” is often framed as a writer’s/developer’s/director’s/etc’s failure to properly educate their audience, or to educate them the wrong way with bad information about the world (which will compel their audience to act, behave, internalise or otherwise believe these bad representations about some social issue). Likewise, to “consume” or give money to a piece of media with Bad Representation is to legitimate and make stronger these bad representations in the world, an act which will cause more people to believe or internalise bad things about themselves or other people. And at the heart of both of those claims is, again, the assumption that mass public education should be undertaken by artists in a private market, who are responsible for creating moral fables and political allegories that they will instil in their audiences by selling it to them. These conversations often become pure nonsense if you don’t accept that the moral and political education of the world should be directed by like, studio executives or tv actors or authors on twitter. There is no horizon of possibility being imagined beyond purchasing, as an individual consumer in a market, your way into good beliefs about the world, instilled in you by Media Product 

Why the hell, shit, you damned bastard son of a bitch

Someone needs to do an analysis on the way the Kung Fu Panda movies use old-fashioned vs. modern language ("Panda we meet at last"/"Hey how's it going") and old-fashioned vs. modern settings (forbidden-city-esque palaces/modern-ish Chinese restaurant) to indicate class differences in their characters, and how those class differences create underlying tensions and misunderstandings.

Btw if you’re calling the Houthi Movement “Yemen” you are lying to suit your political agenda. That’s really not even the most relevant thing here but the Houthis are not the legitimate government of Yemen, they are a rebel militia. And that’s without getting into the morality of stanning the people that forced the last Jews out of Yemen and regularly force women into sex slavery.

do you ever think about how harry potter as a canon is about a secret cabal of a (((superpowered minoritized and ghettoized ethnic group))) (<- wizards) who control the minds and perceptions of the sheepled masses (<- muggles).

and also that same cabal is the one attempting to commit a holocaust. because it is the muggleborns who are the jews! and it's (((those guys))) who are... well!

do you ever think about it.

Claudia Black as Aeryn Sun in FARSCAPE 1.03 | Back and Back and Back to the Future