I just want you to know that some balkan influencers are so out of touch they'll post "I wish i lived in the 90s the fashion was so good" without a second thought

What About The Kens?

I'm already seeing guys complain about the Barbie movie end, how they wanted Kens to be equal in Barbieland but were only given a small part on the Cabinet.

That's the point.

You're meant to feel bad for the Kens. Believe me, women aren't partying over the 'Returns to Matriarch' ending. Some will be, but the ones who also clocked the meaning behind it won't. Most women will also feel bad for Kens. Because it's an exact parallel to how women are treated in reality.

Men, you're meant to be upset. You're meant to question it. Because you're meant to feel it, and feel what that is like, so you can finally understand women. You're upset at seeing it in a movie, now imagine living it in reality. That's being a woman.

Kens were shit on so you could feel what it was like for women this entire time. Kens were being used as a placement so you could see yourself in a woman's shoes. A world dominated by the opposite sex. When Ken leaves, and sees male presidents (All men) for the first time, men being doctors and lawyers, etc, realising he is more than just a prop for Barbie, that was on purpose. Because that is the feeling that Barbie gave to women. It's why you cheer for him at first before he goes a little overboard.

It's exactly why the real world was an exaggerated Partriarchy and Barbieland an exaggerated Matriarchy. Neither wins. Neither is equal. None of them change for the better. It's why you should want women in the real world to be respected, and Kens in Barbieland to be respected.

The thing is, women also didn't win. Not in the real world. In Barbieland, yes, but not anywhere else. The real world didn't change. But you didn't notice, did you? That Gloria (The mother that helped Barbie) also didn't get a position on the Mattel board? It was still all men? Her idea was ignored until it made a profit, and the men will likely get the credit? She'll still just be the receptionist? The women representing the real world didn't get anymore opportunities, neither did the men in Barbieland.

I was hoping that Gloria would be offered a position on the board, and that the Barbie Cabinet would introduce another entire Cabinet to represent the Kens, but neither happened. They're complete mirrors.

But which one did you actually notice? Which did you actually care about? Now tell me again the ending was unfair. Because it was. For both parties. That's the point.

The difference is, Barbieland is fictional. You will walk out of the theatre with the reassurance that at least it's not real. Women won't. Women can't. Companies not giving women equal opportunities or voices isn't fictional, and that was just one example. There are no women presidents (USA at least) for us to go look at in the real world. We don't have somewhere to go to realise it could be different for us like Ken did. Barbie and make believe is all we had when we were kids, or even now.

You're supposed to be mad, just not at the movie.

To me the joy and beauty of vocal synthesizers has always been that they don't sound real and exploring that to create artistic expression that can't be achieved by human voices, so seeing them become more and more realistic is disheartening, almost? Especially since a lot of artists make the same voice banks sound so different and have their own personal charm. I'm glad that people will be able to make things that sound realistic, but I'm worried that songs that intentionally play out of sounding as realistic as possible will be sidelined, discouraged, no longer created, impossible to find, or unsupported by fans of vocal synthesizers. I don't want things to just push towards being as realistic as possible. There is beauty in how everyone's usage of the same voice banks sound different. There is beauty in the lack of realistic sounding vocals in vocal synthesizers.

people keep bringing up eugenics in my evolutionary bio class

glad watcher responded and chose a plan that works for a lot more of their audience and still allows them to keep more control of their content on a different site they can get funding from. i think it addresses a lot of the fair and justified criticism I saw. i also think that I'm prob gonna keep a distance from the fandom for a while cause some of you really showed your true colors and were fucking annoying and disrespectful lol

guess who finished tlok tonight and immediately had this come to him in a vision!!!!

I know it's such a cliche at this point to the point of garnering eye rolls, but we really cannot lose sight of the fact that 2x97 is the Most Episode of All Time. You cannot ignore Essek in that episode, obviously, but honestly the fact that that happened only serves to highlight how buckwild everything else was. That was when Veth got her body back. That was when Caleb first directly set his sights on Ludinus. That was when Fjord tried to ask Jester on a date and instead ending up thirdwheeling Yasha and Beau, who WERE essentially on a date. That was when Jester locked Sharpe on the balcony. That was when Cad got Beau SO high and Fjord was forced to babysit. That was when Fjord and Yasha told Marius he had to kill someone to stay on the crew.

If any ONE of these things had happened on top of the Essek reveal, it would've been notable or memorable, but no, the BREADTH of unhinged happenings in that episode is actually stunning.

"Fandom is just for fun/escapism" means there's no quality threshold to meet to be allowed to contribute, and it is generally a space to share a common love for something rather than spend time hating.

It does NOT mean "everyone gets to publicly say, write and draw absolutely anything and be free from criticism, nothing can possibly have ties to real life harmful ideas and reinforce them, nothing should be taken seriously, everyone turns their brain off and analyzing fan content is pointless", especially since that attitude will automatically allow bigoted content to flourish and will push marginalized people out of fan spaces, or at the very least make those spaces hostile and put them in a position where they have to argue with the bigots empowered by that attitude. If it’s escapism, then make it an escapism that’s accessible to most people, which means being mindful of the consequences of the content put out, or else you’re just creating more spaces minorities are excluded from

Maybe I'll make a post on this at some point but like, something deeply fucked up about TNP and Po3 that people have totally forgotten about is how badly they try to whine that "Tigerstar Had Good Traits :("

Firestar does it, Brambleclaw does it, and they keep doing this after it becomes this GRAND irony that Firestar almost gets Tiger'd to death in a fox trap because he was too trusting. Bramble gets his pity award of keeping deputyship and then cries to his son about how No One Saw The Good In Tigerstar :(

And it's wiiiiild that no one else in this fandom has done anything with the fact that Leopardstar broke the Warrior Code to appoint Hawkfrost, who had no apprentice, an extremely aggressive and warmongering Tigerclone who says things like "Tigerstar wasn't the worst cat to look up to." ONLY qualifying trait was being kinda like Tigerstar.

And she practically did that the SECOND Mistyfoot went missing. And then Leopardstar continued to be one of the most violent and xenophobic leaders through Po3, joining with WindClan to attack ThunderClan.

What I'm getting at is that like, a few years ago, with books like "Blackfoot's Reckoning" and "Shadow in RiverClan" it's like they suddenly decided to retcon in a bunch of "redemption arcs" in hindsight. They just pretended like there was this grand high reckoning with TigerClan, when there literally wasn't, and if anything that caused SERIOUS problems for the cast that the authors didn't fully acknowledge as such.

And now ppl haven't actually read the main series and are just working with their recent memory of all these retcon books.

But TNP and PO3 are still there, and you can go and see the ACTUAL timeline where Leopardstar is really not apologetic at all, and Blackstar is a useful stooge for the very next wannabe dictator that strolls in, in spite of the new side content that COMPLETELY mischaracterized them for their plots to work.

Being fighters against oppressive systems is cool until it's a white blond billionaire who doesn't utter a word about the genocide happening in maybe the recent longest geo-religious-political conflict ever that her country (she proudly represents) funding it. Oh and we might hurt her feelings for that because she just went through a breakup with a racist. Oh and she doesn't need to speak up about anything it's not her job, but commenting on a tiktok to disprove pregnancy rumors is so feminist and really shows how people need to stop commenting on women's bodies! It's serious matter.

I find it interesting that out of all the party, Laudna and Orym are following in Ashton's footsteps a bit in hiding things from the party (Orym with the Nana Morri deal, Laudna with her interacting with/talking to Delilah more and more), and I wonder how much of it is the residual impact that Bor'dor's betrayal had on them.

oohhhh, a new recommended 5-hour-long video about how the star wars franchise is overall repetitive and shallow... I too believe this, but, crucially: do I yet care enough about star wars to watch a 5-hour video about a star wars opinion that I already know I agree with going in...

wait sorry i'm still thinking about fanon and the "no metas in gotham" thing and i have to dunk on bruce in sb94 #85 for a second. every time i think abt this line i just

this is one of the most egregious issues re: bruce being shitty about metas. it's also frankly kind of ooc in that... like. this guy? is supposedly friends with superman? and wonder woman? etc? lol? but in the doylist context, it's simply that batman is being written antagonistically, to show kon being a good friend to cass by standing up to him when he's being an asshole.

that being said. it's absolutely wild to me that there are people who act like bruce being an anti-meta prejudiced raging asshole is a chill and normal quirky trait that's perfectly acceptable when even when it's shown up in canon, it's received pushback immediately from characters around bruce:

or like in batgirl (2000) when he's being controlling over cass, clark shows up to tell him like. dude. chill the fuck out.

idk where i'm going with this exactly, i guess i'm just kinda thinking of how [white] fandom often does not engage with the implications of forms of bigotry that don't have 1:1 parallels in reality. like yeah metahumans don't exist in real life but. i'm sorry man but a man telling his prized possession of a daughter "i don't want you near his kind" re: a boy he considers dangerous is... not the sort of thing that exists in a vacuum. like... does the racism metaphor really have to be spelled out even more blatantly than that for people to realize it's, like. right there??

and i mean. i don't think the people going "oh lol bruce hates metas XD and everyone in the batfam is just chill with that haha" are intending to be like "yeah bruce is a racist dickwad and the rest of the bats are chill with that". i don't think they even realize that the way bruce, when written as being anti-meta, speaks about metas has direct parallels to real-world racist arguments. but that's also kinda the exact problem. why do you not realize this...

Accusing people, some of whom incidentally are likely LGBT themselves, of not viewing wol///fstar as canon because they "can't read queer-coding" is the cope of the century and borders on delusional. it's also condescending and disrespectful- why is your personal analysis of a work of fiction more valid than anyone else's, particularly when that analysis is almost certainly driven by confirmation bias? Have you asked yourself whether the "signs" you think you're reading in the text are actually there or whether you just want them to be? It's fine to want them to be and to add two and two and get six, personally I've done that with many works of fiction and I will continue to do so, but objectively there's no evidence that holds up to the slightest bit of scrutiny that jkr actually intended Sirius and Remus to secretly be in love.

Leaving aside the fact for now that this is JKR we're talking about and all that entails, it honestly verges on conspiracy-brained at times. Besides that, using homophobic stereotypes as "evidence" is, to put it plainly, shit. Some of these stereotypes might seem fairly innocuous yet still manage to be offensive (e.g. "tonks is queer-coded because she has short hair/is cool/has this personality trait or physical characteristic) but others honestly cross a line. Think for a moment about the logical leap you're making when you claim that werewolves being an allegory for stigmatised illnesses like AIDS is proof that R is gay. What equivalence is being drawn here? worth thinking about

I just want to say this is a work of children's literature and we're all free to interpret whatever we want and make up whatever silly things that we want with it. But you're not smarter or more special than anyone else because you think there's a gay way to look or speak or act, or for seriously believing that JKR created some kind of mad convoluted mental backflip conspiracy to specifically fuck with what was at the time a fringe element of online fandom that she likely wasn't even aware of. Apply Occam's razor here and go with the simplest explanation, which is that JKR, a heterosexual woman, wrote a children's book in the 90s with a majority heterosexual pairings and one token gay character. From there, do whatever you want. The end

That one post which I can no longer find about how Laudna and Imogen simultaneously embody "I can fix her" and "I can make her worse" truly hit the nail on the head about them. They are each other’s tethers, keep each other grounded and help the other remember there’s a reason to go on, they taught each other that they don’t have to be lonely and isolated and feared, that they can be loved unconditionally not despite that which makes them dangerous and different but in part because of it, as an inherent part of themselves. They will fight for each other’s happiness tooth and nail.

But they are also the 'together either way' couple. Laudna would follow in Delilah's footsteps and burn the world and herself for Imogen. If she thinks Ruidus and Predathos are Imogen's destiny, what would make her whole and happy, she would encourage her to embrace it, Exandria be damned. Imogen exalted because of her love for Laudna. She was prepared to do just about anything to get Laudna back from the dead and is equally prepared to do anything now to stop it from happening again. She offered to let Laudna eat her soul. She's so so tempted by Ruidus and knows, even in her struggle, that the person she loves most would never hold it against her even a little bit if she gave in.

Zutaras are really the original self-insert, "we understand the story soooooo much better than everybody else" girlies and they just never moved on