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octaviasdread · 3 years

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any girls! dark academia movie recs? i really struggle to find anything not about a group of boys (as much as I love them)

SO MANY!!! This is probably a far more detailed answer than you were expecting but this is a popular question and I want to keep a list for myself and others.

Feel free to add to it/give opinions. I've tried to give a tw for anything I can remember

Girls! Dark Academia Movies/TV Shows

Mona Lisa Smile (2003)

1950s Women’s college

Art professor! Julia Roberts

She’s legit the female Mr Keating of the art & college world

Feminism vs. Tradition

Maggie Gyllenhall x Ginnifer Goodwin; their characters were more than friends. Fight me.

Does not end how you expect

Strike!/All I Wanna Do/The Hairy Bird (1998)

MY FAVOURITE!!!

Free on YouTube under one of its various names

Comedy

1960s all girls boarding school

Young Kirsten Dunst

Group of girls plot to sabotage a merger with a boys school less prestigious than their own

Secret attic clubhouse meetings of the D.A.R aka Daughters of the American Ravioli (eaten cold, ew)

girls get political & advocate for their rights using ANY elaborate and chaotic scheme

TW: eating disorder, vomiting & creepy male teacher but the girls plot against him too

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)

based on a short book I read for uni by Muriel Spark

1930s girls school in Edinburgh

Scottish teacher! Maggie Smith, controversial with a focus on romantic ideals

Spoiler alert, the liberal teacher is actually a fascist

Her group of fave students has cult- vibes and it’s fascinating

Picnic at Hanging Rock

1970s movie or 2018 mini series

Never watched either but I plan to

Wild Child (2008)

00s romcom every UK teen girl loves

Emma Roberts as the spoiled rich American teenager sent to a strict English boarding school

Plots to get herself expelled but oh no she’s making friends with the girls who help her

And the headmistress has a hot son, and he’s nice??? Double oh no

ICONIC SCENES

Everything! Goes! Wrong!

omg she burns the school down

Feel good, comfort, nostalgia

St Trinians (2007)

English girls boarding school

The kids are all criminals, no joke

So are the teachers

CHAOTIC

gay awakening for british girls

Art heist pulled off by school girls

Government tries to shut them down but oh no, the education minister & the headmistress are ex-lovers

Colin Firth x Rupert Everett in drag

Superior cast: Jodie Whittaker, Gemma Arterton, Juno Temple, Stephen Fry, Colin Firth, etc...

embodies the phrase 'problematic fave'

St Trinians 2: The Legend of Fritton’s Gold (2009)

Mystery, pirate ancestors, hidden treasure

omg Shakespeare was a woman

girls disguised as boys to infiltrate and rob the posh boys school

Villain! David Tennant in that ICONIC boat scene

Teen girls vs. ancient misogynist brotherhood

like the first film but MORE chaotic and BETTER!???

The Falling (2014)

1960s all girls school

best friends! but its unrequited love

Agoraphobic + distant mother aka mommy issues

Sudden death and the school suppresses/ignores the students grief, sparking mass hysteria & a fainting epidemic in the girls

Cast: Maisie Williams (GoT) & Florence Pugh (Little Women) & Joe Cole (Peaky Blinders)

TW: teen pregnancy, death, vomiting, underage s*x, sibling inc*st, past s*xual assault

READ THE PLOT SUMMARY FIRST

The Book Thief (2013)

Based on an amazing book by Markus Zusak

set in 1940s Nazi Germany

Daughter of a communist whose family were taken by the Nazis/died is fostered by an older couple who teach her to read & she paints a dictionary on the basement walls

Coming of age story about a compulsive book thief. No joke, this kid steals books from banned book burnings and breaks into the mayor's library through the window

Family hides the Jewish son of an old friend in their basement and he helps her to start writing about her experiences in the war

TW: death, bombings, WW2 anti-semitism

Mary Shelley (2017)

Overall good & roughly biographical

Pretty costumes and aesthetic

Modern feminist take on Mary Shelly in her own time period

So many INACCURACIES for the drama so don’t take it as truth

Percy Shelley slander and not all of it is justified

Cast: Elle Fanning, Douglas Booth, and Maisie Williams

The Secret Garden (1993)

Based on a fave childhood book

1901 colonial India & Yorkshire, England

Orphaned, spoilt & neglected girl sent to live with her reclusive Uncle in the English countryside

Gothic elements, mysteries, secret doors/passages/locked gardens

local boy with a flock of animals, magic, kids chanting around a fire and all around immaculate vibes

Happy ending!!!

Hidden Figures (2016)

African-American women as mathematicians for NASA

1960s space project

Women balancing a career and family obligations

Deals with racial & gender discrimination

Loosely based on the lives of Katherine Johnson, Mary Jackson, and Dorothy Vaughan who worked for NASA as engineers & mathematicians

Anne of Green Gables (1985) & sequel (1987)

Adaptation L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books

Canada (late 1890s/early 1900s)

Highly imaginative & bookworm orphan is adopted by a reclusive elderly brother and sister duo

Small town & school years comedic drama

Unrequited Enemies -> Friends -> lovers

Inspiring new woman teacher

Girls re-enact Tennyson’s poem and nearly drown for the aesthetic™

Dramatic poetry reading with INTENSE 👀eye contact👀

Writer! Anne & English teacher! Anne dealing with unruly girls school antics

Collette (2018)

biographical drama on french writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Collette

Victorian & Edwardian era France

More talented than her husband so she ghostwrites for him

Fight for creative ownership of her wildly successful novels

Affairs with a woman called Georgie and also with Missy, born female but masculine presenting

Cast: Keira Knightly, Dominic West, Eleanor Tomlinson (Poldark)

Enola Holmes (2020)

Netflix book adaptation

Younger sister of Sherlock Holmes

Victorian era! feminism/suffragettes

Mother-daughter focus

Mystery, adventure, secret codes, teens running away & escaping from (and eventually fighting) assassins

Cast: Helena Bonham Carter, Henry Cavill, Sam Claflin, Fiona Shaw, Millie Bobby Brown

Ginger & Rosa (2012)

1960s England

best friends since literal birth navigating troubled teen years

poet & anti-nuclear activist! Ginger

off the rails but also catholic! Rosa

Shout out to Mark & Mark the gay godfathers we all want

family troubles

TW: older man has an affair with a 17 yr old

Testament of Youth (2014)

based on WW1 memoir by Vera Brittain

young woman (writer & poetry lover) escapes traditional family & goes to study at Oxford University

abandons to become a war nurse

romance, tragedy and war trauma

Cast: Alicia Vikander, Kit Harrington (GoT), Taron Edgerton (Rocketman), Colin Morgan (Merlin)

Little Women (2019)

Writer! Jo & Artist! Amy

Mother/daughter focus and sister dynamics

the March sisters’ theatre club is *chefs kiss*

champagne problems edits of Jo x Laurie are a mood

Ambivalent ending perfectly captures Louisa May Alcott’s dilemma with the book the movie is based on

set in 1860s America

ALL STAR CAST and a Greta Gerwig masterpeice

Lady Bird (2017)

coming of age in early 2002/2003 Sacramento, California

all girls catholic school

writer! Christine aka Lady Bird wants to get outta town and start her life again at college 'in a city with culture'

Mother/daughter dynamics - so realistic!

I live for that Jesus car stunt & the nun's reaction

school theatre program

Cast: Saoirse Ronan, Timothee Chalamet, Beanie Feldstein

Another Greta Gerwig gem

Beguiled (2017)

Virginia, civil war era

Girls school with only five students and two teachers left

Find an injured Union army soldier & bring him inside

Women & teenagers want his attention (v. problematic) before uniting against him

(tbh you'll either love it, hate it, or watch once & forget it)

Sofia Coppola film so its very feminine gaze

TW: violence, death, underage

Legally Blonde (2001)

No questions will be taken

Elle Woods was the blue print

TV series:

House of Anubis (2011-2013)

I know it’s a kids/young teen show but I still unironically love it

ANCIENT EGYPT!!!!

Modern day with Victorian era links to treasure hunters & Egyptian research expeditions (stealing from tombs)

Chosen one plot lines, curses, kidnapping, mysteries, secret tunnels under the school, elixir of life

Teens have investigate & protect themselves cus oh no the TEACHERS are involved in some shady stuff

new American kid at British boarding school is the actual premise not just a fanfic au

Nostalgic, light-hearted, funny, and kinda cheesy but I will accept no criticism

The Alienist (2018 -now)

Mid 1890s, New York

Woman’s private detective agency (Season 2)

Serial killer mystery

Woman secretary turns detective and teams up with a criminal psychiatrist and a newspaper editor to solve crime

TW: violence, child pr*stit*tion

Cast: Dakota Fanning, Luke Evans, Daniel Bruhl

The Queen’s Gambit (2020)

Woman chess prodigy

1950s & 1960s

TW: drug & alcohol abuse

Gentleman Jack (2019 - now)

Based on the diaries of Anne Lister

Victorian Yorkshire, England

Upper-class lesbians

Confident, suit wearing! Anne Lister x shy! Ann Walker

Business woman! Anne running the family mines

Cast: Suranne Jones (Doctor Foster) & Sophie Rundle (Peaky Blinders)

TW: violence

Gilmore Girls (2000-2007)

bubbly/ambitious single mom + intelligent daughter

bookworm! Rory Gilmore gets into a prestigious private school and then an Ivy League college

Small town drama is comedic gold

Fast dialogue packed with pop culture and literary references

Comforting & nostalgic

TEAM JESS

Anne with an E (2017-2019)

Loose adaptation of L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Anne of Green Gables’ books

they completely change the plot lines but it’s still very good content!

Orphan girl with trauma and a love of books/poetry is adopted by an elderly brother & sister duo, bringing light and fresh ideas to a rural community

Feminism, girls writing club, lgbtq safe spaces, girls eduction, black/indigenous representation

Miss Stacy as THAT inspiring teacher

Aunt Josephine’s lavish gay parties have my heart

TW: creepy male teacher tries to marry a student, racial discrimination, indigenous assimilation school

Victoria (2016-2019)

Adaption of Queen Victoria’s life

Victoria navigating her political, royal, and personal life

Albert’s involvement with The Great Exhibition, 1851 (on cultural + industrial innovations)

Alfred Paget x Edward Drummond is exquisite

Gorgeous costumes and aesthetics

TW: bury your gays trope

Derry Girls (2018-now)

1990s Northern Ireland during the troubles

Comedy, episodes 20-25 mins long

English boy sent to an all girls Catholic school with his cousin

✨Dead Poets Society parody episode ✨with a free-spirited female teacher

Sister Michael, the sarcastic nun who hates her job & reads the exorcist for giggles

Wee anxious lesbian! Clare Devlin (plus her friends wearing rainbow pins)

Badass with bad ideas! Michelle Mallon

Main Character! Erin Quinn

Lovable weirdo who would fight a polar bear! Orla McCool

Wee English fella & honorary Derry girl! James Maguire

Dickinson (2019-now)

Loose adaption of the poet Emily Dickinson’s life

Set in 19th century Massachusetts, US

Historical drama with modern dialogue & music that works SEAMLESSLY

gives a great understanding of Emily Dickinson’s poems

💕Vintage gays! Emily x Sue💕

Theatre club, writing, poetry, dressing as men to sneak into lectures, love letters, teen drama, feminism, and an underground abolitionist journal as a brief side plot in season 2

Wiz Khalifa plays death in a horse drawn carriage

TW: opium use

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2017-2019)

Based on great childhood books

Bookworm! brother, Inventor! sister, and baby sister with sharp teeth

Mystery, secret organisations, orphaned siblings figuring things out & fending for themselves against the villain after their fortune

Adults either cartoon evil, comedically incompetent, or SPIES

Boarding school, library owner, scientific researcher, and theatre episodes

Ambiguous time period which is really fun to try and pin point

Killing Eve (2018-now)

Classic detective who has homoerotic tension with the assassin she is tracking down

British Detective! Eve Polastri figures out the notorious assassin MI5 are investigating is a woman, is fired & then put on a secret MI6 case with a small team

Assassin! Villanelle, a psychopath with a tragic past and a mastery of both accents & fashion

Woman MI6 boss! Carolyn Martens, head of Russian section

Travel Europe following Villanelle’s killings and escaping the assassins sent by Villanelle’s organisation

‘You’re supposed to be my enemy and moral opposite but omg you’re the only one smart enough to get me and why am I obsessed with you????'

🚨 GO IN FOR A KISS AND THEN STAB YOUR ENEMY 🚨

Cable Girls/Las chicas del cable (2017-2020)

Spanish drama set in 1920s Madrid

Four young women at a telecommunications company form a group of friends and help navigate the difficult situations they are all in

Secret identities, dangerous pasts, murder, crime, lgbtq couple & throuple, trans man character, feminism/suffragists

girls commit crimes for humanitarian reasons and cover! it! up!

UNDERRATED SHOW!!!!

Gorgeous costumes and set

Haven’t finished it yet and I’m catching up

TW: abuse, violence, death

Outlander (2014 - now)

haven’t watched yet but plan to

Woman time travels to Scotland, 1743

Rebel highlanders, pirates, British colonies, American revolutionary war

Time jumps between 18th & 20th century

#CO posts #answered asks #asks #dark academia girls #dark academia recommendations #dark academia recs #dark academia women #dark academia movies #dark academia tv

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nofomoartworld · 7 years

Text

Hyperallergic: An Illustrated Portrait of Lolita Fashion

So Pretty/Very Rotten by Jane Mai and An Nguyen (all image courtesy Koyama Press)

“Life was like candy. So what if it was deceitful?” says a girl clad in a Rococo-inspired outfit, after breezily explaining that the way she got her money for shopping was by telling her clueless father a bunch of sob stories; she has no friends but she doesn’t care: clothes make her happy. “My happiness was at stake. It’s not wrong to feel good. That’s what Rococo taught me. But actually my soul is rotten.”

So Pretty/Very Rotten by Jane Mai and An Nguyen, published by Koyama Press (2017)

This monologue, uttered by the Lolita fashion-obsessed protagonist of the cult movie Shimotsuma Monogatari (“Kamikaze Girls”) (2004) served as the inspiration for the title of the book So Pretty/Very Rotten, written and illustrated by cartoonists Jane Mai, based in Brooklyn, and An Nguyen, from Ottawa. Recently released by Toronto-based Koyama Press, the book is a collection of essays, illustrations, and short comics that attempt to give Lolita fashion a broader cultural and sociological context.

Lolita fashion quietly began as a subculture in the Tokyo district of Harajuku in the 1970s, but did not fully flourish until the ‘90s, its outfits a synthesis of Victorian and Rococo styles (with Marie Antoinette and Alice in Wonderland being the ultimate muses). Pop culture took note. Manga artists, for instance, have drawn plenty of inspiration from Lolita fashion and so has the movie industry: other than Kamikaze Girls, notable movies include Gothic and Lolita Psycho (2010) and X-Cross (2007).

So Pretty/Very Rotten by Jane Mai and An Nguyen

But Mai and Nguyen’s book comes at a peculiar time for Lolita fashion: Cult-like magazines entirely dedicated to Harajuku subculture and Lolita fashion have folded in the last couple of years: CUTiE, the first magazine that used the term kawaii in reference to Japanese aesthetic and fashion, ended its run in 2015; Kera! ceased publication in April 2017; Gothic and Lolita Bible “went on hiatus” in May 2017; and FRUiTS magazine printed its last copy in February 2017 — its editor and chief photographer Shoichi Aoki said that “there are no more cool kids left to photograph.”

Being a “cool kid” that photographs well, though, is only a surface-level aspect of Lolita fashion. As Mai and Nguyen show through entertaining but educational storytelling, Lolita fashion is full of complexities and contradictions. The name Lolita, for example, is purportedly inspired by Nabokov’s nymphet, but in fact has little to do with her portrayal in the novel; rather, Lolita fashion is meant to convey an idea of perpetual innocence. The origins of the name “Lolita fashion” itself are unknown, though some theorize the name is meant to reclaim Dolores Haze’s innocence, eliminating Humbert Humbert’s male gaze. “Prior to the novel, Lolita was the nickname for Dolores and did not have the nymphet connotations,” Mai and Nguyen write in the “Frequently Asked Questions” chapter. The innocence embodied by Japanese Lolitas, however, is perceived by the conservative Japanese society as a provocation and disturbance to the nation’s strict conformism. Novala Takemoto, the author and fashion designer who inspired the movie Kamikaze Girls and whom Nguyen interviewed for So Pretty/Very Rotten, has previously argued that the Lolitas’ eternal childlike appearance is their own “form of resistance […] They don’t exist to please anyone.”

So Pretty/Very Rotten by Jane Mai and An Nguyen

The strength of So Pretty/Very Rotten stems from the manifold approaches the authors take toward Lolita fashion. They taxonomize it: for example, they explain and draw, in detail, the differences between demure “classic Lolita,” fond of tapestry-inspired fabrics and muted hues, the “sweet Lolita,” who favors pastel colors and images of cute animals and cakes, and the “gothic Lolita,” who adopts a more funeral-inspired attire and might carry, say, a coffin-shaped bag. Mai and Nguyen study it as a culture intersecting with other cultures, such as shojo (a cultural concept that can be used to refer to a “little girl,” “maiden,” “young lady,” and “virgin”) and the indie music scene, especially the glam rock movement Visual Kei. Mai and Nguyen, who have firsthand experience with Lolita by dressing in that fashion, observe the psychological ramifications of the lifestyle itself, particularly how it’s fueled by a very materialistic drive, which can cause a state of permanent dissatisfaction.

Nguyen actually obtained a PhD in anthropology with a thesis on Lolita fashion, and we can find excerpts and adaptations of her academic work in So Pretty/Very Rotten. While painstakingly collecting information on the topic, she had a persistent thought: “If only I could draw about this concept rather than use words to describe it.” In 2014, she asked Jane Mai to collaborate with her and that was the genesis of their book.

So Pretty/Very Rotten by Jane Mai and An Nguyen

Mai and Nguyen approach the subject through different perspectives: Mai’s work veers on the macabre and is strictly focused on the toll a consumerist culture like Lolita takes on those who partake in it. She gets her point across by sprinkling her comics with more than a light touch of horror: “My clothes are perfect, I will be ok,” says the protagonist of one of her comics while scratching her bald, scabby scalp that she hides under a doll-like wig; she had just coughed up a massive amount of blood, but she still looked perfect.”

Nguyen takes a more anthropological and interpersonal approach. One comic features Nguyen herself interviewing several Lolitas (something she actually did for her doctoral thesis) and the answers she receives are insightful: “Do you prefer to be cute or beautiful?” is answered with “Beautiful things seem far away somehow, like out of my realm. It’s for someone else to say, not for me to define or desire. But cuteness seems more attainable and at hand, so it’s something that I can imagine being.” “Do you think Lolitas are strong or weak people?” is replied with, “Lolitas are weak because we are overly kind, but we are strong because we are not afraid to be different.”

The drawing styles of the authors differ to a great degree, too: where Mai uses bold lines, rounder shapes, no grayscale, and illustrates heavily stylized characters that occupy the page without being constricted into boxes, Nguyen has a more ethereal style, and does not use as much black as Mai does. Their comics have a no-frills sketchbook-like quality: this allows us to focus on the enlightening dialogue rather than on, say, the flowers adorning a Lolita’s bonnet. And this is certainly not due to lack of drawing skills: in fact, in the bumper illustrations and fashion section devoted to the different styles of Lolita, Mai and Nguyen made sure they reproduced even the most delicate ruffle in the utmost detail.

In his interview and essay featured in So Pretty/Very Rotten, Takemoto bemoans how, in Japan, Lolita fashion has hardly ever been accepted as a worthwhile research topic, hence the lack of significant documentation save for strictly fashion-centric content. With few exceptions, like Masafumi Monden, scholars have confined Lolita into brief chapters of books exploring fashion subcultures in general. An accurate and comprehensive book on Lolita fashion is still to be written. In the meantime, Mai and Nguyen’s work is an invaluable resource for whoever wants to get acquainted with a culture that, underneath its frilly garments, is a paradoxical form of empowerment and self-assertion.

So Pretty/Very Rotten by Jane Mai and An Nguyen is out now from Koyama Press.

The post An Illustrated Portrait of Lolita Fashion appeared first on Hyperallergic.

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