something really cool happened today that i wanted to share:
my nephew is 9 years old, and a stereotypical little boy. he likes dinosaurs, minecraft, and ninjas.
today i walked in on him excitedly watching Nimona with my dad. (minor spoiler warning!)
i had never heard of it, but i sat down and watched some of it, just to see why he was so happy.
he started narrating it, anticipating parts of it, almost as if he’d seen it before. he had.
we didn’t get to finish it, but i watched it on my own, because it looked fun and i wanted to see how it ended.
and i loved it. it was a fun, exciting, fantastical adventure about the importance of acceptance people who are different to us.
and it had a very clear queer subplot.
one that my nephew hadn’t mentioned at all in his explanation of the film. his summary was “it’s about a monster who helps a knight that was framed for killing the queen”.
and honestly yeah, that is what the film was about.
before sharing it with us, he had watched it all, engrossed himself in the story, took it in entirely, and the part he cared about most was whether Nimona got her acceptance. he wasn’t indoctrinated, or confused, or questioning anything about himself.
he didn’t bat an eyelid over a gay love confession. he just enjoyed the film, raved about it, made my 60 year old dad watch the movie about the monster who didn’t fit in.
he’s still the same little boy who’s been asking us how to get a girlfriend.
the only thing a movie centred around queer and queer-coded characters taught my nephew was that those who are different to him are not monsters. that’s it.
and that dragons are really cool.
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As much as I adore conlangs, I really like how the Imperial Radch books handle language. The book is entirely in English but you're constantly aware that you're reading a "translation," both of the Radchaai language Breq speaks as default, and also the various other languages she encounters. We don't hear the words but we hear her fretting about terms of address (the beloathed gendering on Nilt) and concepts that do or don't translate (Awn switching out of Radchaai when she needs a language where "citizen," "civilized," and "Radchaai person" aren't all the same word) and noting people's registers and accents. The snatches of lyrics we hear don't scan or rhyme--even, and this is what sells it to me, the real-world songs with English lyrics, which get the same "literal translation" style as everything else--because we aren't hearing the actual words, we're hearing Breq's understanding of what they mean. I think it's a cool way to acknowledge linguistic complexity and some of the difficulties of multilingual/multicultural communication, which of course becomes a larger theme when we get to the plot with the Presgar Translators.
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pathologic but it's a lost 1920s german expressionist film [id under cut]
[id:
image 1: a digital drawing of a fake poster, using bright colours and rough, painterly brushstrokes. the title, 'pest' (german for 'plague'), is written at the top in spiky black text. in the foreground a man dressed as a tragedian is staring intently at the viewer, his hands raised and splayed as if in horror. in the background, the town is framed against a red sky, with the polyhedron in yellow behind.
images 2 and 3: fake casting sheets for the film, with the names of the actors and the characters they are playing above a black-and-white portrait photograph of them. all the text is in german. in english it reads:
'Pest', a film by Robert Wiene
Alfred Abel as Victor Kain
Ernst Busch as Grief
Lil Dagover as Katerina Saburova
Ernst Deutsch as the Bachelor
Carl de Vogt as Vlad the Younger
Marlene Dietrich as the Inquisitor
Willy Fritsch as Mark Immortell
Alexander Granach as Andrey and Peter Stamatin
Bernhard Goetzke as General Block
Dolly Haas as the Changeling
Ludwig Hartau as the Haruspex
Brigitte Helm as Anna Angel
Brigitte Horney as Maria Kaina
Emil Jannings as Big Vlad
Gerda Maurus as Yulia Lyuricheva
Lothar Menhert as Georgiy Kain
Asta Nielsen as Lara Ravel
Ossi Oswalda as Eva Yan
Fritz Rasp as Stanislas Rubin
Conrad Veidt as Alexander Saburov and Tragedian
Paul Wegener as Oyun
Gertrud Welcker as Aspity
image 4: four digital sketches of set designs for various locations. all are strongly influenced by expressionist imagery, using extreme angles, warped perspective, and dramatic shapes. they are labelled 'street 1' (a street lined with houses), 'street 2' (a square with a lamppost and a set of steps), 'polyhedron exterior' (the polyhedron walkway), and 'cathedral interior' (the dais at the far end of the cathedral).
image 5: four digital drawings in a black-and-white watercolour style, showing fake stills from the film. all are similarly distorted and lit by dramatic lighting. the first shows katerina's bedroom, with katerina standing in the centre of the floor. the second shows the interior of an infected house. the third shows daniil staring out of the frame in horror, one hand on his head and the other raised as if to ward something off. the fourth shows an intertitle with jagged white text reading 'the first day' against a dark background.
end id.]
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ok so I think I might just be really sad about all the Doctor Moments™️ we’re not going to get with 15? you know, with a new doctor there are all these Things you get: running around in the old outfit, the wooziness of the post-regen period, the first “I am the Doctor”, the first time they see their new tardis…… and here it was all. david tennant? I’m not even going to go back on the 13’s clothes situation bc everything has already been said but 15’s first moments having to do with comforting 14? 15’s first “I am the Doctor” moment being in response to 14’s? showing 14’s reaction to the new tardis instead of 15? idk man. feels bad.
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Something I love about Heartbreak High is how when we first see Amerie's perspective of what happened at the festival everything is good and Harper is happy and jokes around with her but then when we see Harpers perspective you suddenly notice how unsure and uncomfortable she actually is. Like she doesn't smile as much and it's a little more fake and she's being much more serious, for example with the "I think my house is haunted" moment and also when her dad texts her. But Amerie didn't notice. Which is why she didn't realize something was going on with Harper and why she couldn't imagine that anything had happened that day. In her memory everything was great and perfect when it in fact wasn't. And I think that's a really cool way of showing both their perspectives because while overall they both remember the same things, their perception of How it happened is different
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bad blood is one hell of an episode. it literally opens with mulder straight-up murdering a regular teenager via stake-through-the-heart and he and scully are like pretty sure the FBI is going to be sued and they're going to be doing some serious jail time. except both of them remember the story differently. scully's story is predictably logical and straight-forward. the killer was drugging his victims before bleeding them out, mimicking a vampire attack by wearing fake fangs (which are proven to be fake. this is crucial. this kid was wearing plastic fangs when mulder stabbed him. in the chest. with a wooden stake.) what is also crucial is that mulder was a victim of this murderer's attack and so he was tripping hard when scully intercepts the killer. mulder - whilst tripping balls - is convinced that the killer has glowing eyes and flew across the room before running out the door. and so - whilst tripping balls - he gives chase and ends up stabbing the kid through the heart with a wooden stake.
and of course this is the x files and so while scully and mulder are arguing over who gave who the hardest time in their percieved series of events, it turns out that mulder was right. the kid was a vampire and the stake didn't actually kill him. the fangs were fake because he was copying the sorts of vampires that you see in books and on tv. he was a real vampire.
and it's not just the kid. there are bunches of vampires, including the sheriff. the whole town are just. vampires. the lot of 'em. and the second they're found out, they just up and leave without a trace.
sometimes the extent to which mulder turns out to be right in this show is borderline ludicrous, it's amazing, I love it. but what was even better was that the biggest point of contention between scully and mulder's stories wasn't even the vampire thing, it was whether or not the sheriff was actually hot.
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wilbur, tasked with entertaining grian's chat: *flounders and eventually tells a joke about nuns trying to drink*
grian, sounding incredibly betrayed: i trusted you
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Literally the greatest fanfiction I've ever read bro this is a full length novel and I've read it twice now. Besides some minor nitpicks this is the closest thing to a disco elysium sequel I think I'll ever see. It adds so much to the world of elysium while still keeping it completely within the original games setting, the author literally comes up with original elysium-y terms and events for every little thing. Like "oh the term 'lesbian' wouldn't exist in elysium because the island of lesbos doesn't exist so I'm gonna make up a communist lesbian named 'violetta' who was executed by the coalition and now all lesbians on the isola call themselves 'violets' after her" WHAT
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