1.05 / Battle of the Labyrinth

btw i do think we should have more movies about lesbians who are fully realized complex characters who ultimately achieve happiness in ways they may not even necessarily deserve and get to ride into the sunset with their lover because lesbians deserve to know that a happy ending is possible despite how unrealistic it may seem and despite a world that doesn't understand or support them. and i think these movies should depict sex and fetish content because it's hot and because lesbians deserve to know that no matter how messy or "weird" their desire seems it's real and it's even worth celebrating. and if you don't agree. well. you should not be allowed to watch movies

thinking about how Humans Are Space Orcs stories always talk about how indestructible humans are, our endurance, our ability to withstand common poisons, etc. and thats all well and good, its really fun to read, but it gets repetitive after a while because we aren't all like that.

And that got me thinking about why this trope is so common in the first place, and the conclusion I came to is actually kind of obvious if you think about it. Not everyone is allowed to go into space. This is true now, with the number of physical restrictions placed on astronauts (including height limits), but I imagine it's just as strict in some imaginary future where humans are first coming into contact with alien species. Because in that case there will definitely be military personnel alongside any possible diplomatic parties.

And I imagine that all interactions aliens have ever had up until this point have been with trained personnel. Even basic military troops conform to this standard, to some degree. So aliens meet us and they're shocked and horrified to discover that we have no obvious weaknesses, we're all either crazy smart or crazy strong (still always a little crazy, academia and war will do that to you), and not only that but we like, literally all the same height so there's no way to tell any of us apart.

And Humans Are Death Worlders stories spread throughout the galaxy. Years or decades or centuries of interspecies suspicion and hostilities preventing any alien from setting foot/claw/limb/appendage/etc. on Earth until slowly more beings are allowed to come through. And not just diplomats who keep to government buildings, but tourists. Exchange students. Temporary visitors granted permission to go wherever they please, so they go out in search of 'real terran culture' and what do they find?

Humans with innate heart defects that prevent them from drinking caffeine. Humans with chronic pain and chronic fatigue who lack the boundless endurance humans are supposedly famous for. Humans too tall or too short or too fat to be allowed into space. Humans who are so scared of the world they need to take pills just to function. Humans with IBS who can't stand spicy foods, capsaicin really is poison to them. Lactose intolerance and celiac disease, my god all the autoimmune disorders out there, humans who struggle to function because their own bodies fight them. Humans who bruise easily and take too long to heal. Humans who sustained one too many concussions and now struggle to talk and read and write. Humans who've had strokes. Humans who were born unable to talk or hear or speak, and humans who through some accident lost that ability later.

Aliens visit Earth, and do you know what they find? Humanity, in all its wholeness.

the parallels between how poc are treated and how animals are treated in nope (2022) was perfect. one of the first scenes in the movie is when oj is on set for a commercial, and i was immediately as uncomfortable as he was. when he introduces himself to the white actress, she looks scared of him because his name is oj. she sees a black man with that name and can’t hide her inner thoughts. then the pa guy is confused as to where the “older one” is, clearly giving the message that he doesn’t trust oj to be a competent person. the pa sees him as an untrained boy, and doesn’t listen when oj tried to tell him not to look in the horse’s eyes. then when em explains the story of the first moving picture, we see that the black jockey and the horse aren’t even on the same level. people talk about the horse, but they don’t know anything about the man riding it.

then, there’s jupe and the gordy the chimp. jupe was a child star in a western comedy, and the poster itself gave me the wrong feeling. jupe and the unnamed black child actor he starred with were so clearly being used as a spectacle. it made me think of blazing saddles, how the idea of a black sheriff is absurd and funny. however, blazing saddles uses that as commentary and as a way to send a message, while in nope, we see that jupe was the victim of a film industry that tokenized him. then, with the chimpanzee, we see that same tokenization. a sitcom of a white family that includes an asian child and a chimp. it’s clear that both are meant to be equally funny; an asian kid is just as absurd as a chimp in human clothes and a birthday hat.

then, when we see him try to use the alien to create the same spectacle he was a part of in his youth, he realizes far too late that he’s made a mistake. that you can’t rely on an animal. his wife makes a comment about how working with trained animals is unpredictable, and we see in his eyes that he knows what’s about to happen. he put his trust in the behavior of a wild animal and now he’s paying the price and feeling the same fear he felt as a child.

not even us.

GONCHAROV (1973)

Honorary appreciation post for this mentally exhausted sweetheart.

If I'm honest, the whole "love in every stitch" saying for fiber artists does not apply to me, like. I'm trying to get this fucking hook into stubborn yarn and I'll be stabbing it like it owed me money. Is that love because I hope not 😭💀

everyone shut up i need to tell suzanne collins directly that the only part of 'the ballad of songbirds and snakes' that got an actual extended period of laughter in my theatre was the "tuberculosis on legs" joke, a joke made at the expense of a young, suffering, dying, sick tribute as she's about to accidentally ingest poison and kill herself because she's so thirsty and sees water and thinks it will make her feel better. this girl who's so sick because of the living conditions in her district, who was doomed as soon as her name was called, who was probably just so relieved to see an un-smashed bottle of water she didn't think anything of it, too exhausted and dehydrated to think anything of it.

a joke made by the capitol host of the hunger games to try and make capitol citizens laugh and make the horrific things happening in the arena better tv because they already don't see the tributes as people who have lives and who matter and maybe we're so close to her dystopia that we can actually fucking taste it

I find it so very interesting that Sejanus knew that coryo was excited for the Plinth Prize and told him not to get his hopes up.

One could only say he would’ve told him that if he knew the Snows were having money trouble orrrr

the much funnier option, Coryo and him talked/have talked with each other.

It makes it seem like Sejanus and Coryo had spoken/been friendly before. Especially when you take a look at the rest of their interactions in school.

—Sejanus, out of all places, chooses to sit next to Coryo during the announcement of the Plinth Prize and during Class.

—Sejanus, out of all people chooses to be nice to Coryo, unlike with Arachne etc etc.

—Again, during lunch, Sejanus takes the seat in front of Coryo like he’s done it before.

It just makes you wonder, this “delusion” from Sejanus that they’re friends had to come from somewhere. Coryo being nice to him. Yes of course. But the rest of it. Sejanus knowing personal details, that he had high hopes for the plinth prize, that he sits next to in class, that Highbottom believes they are friends and Coriolanus can try to control/soothe him during the games at Marcus’s appearance.

If none of this makes sense it’s because my thoughts are all jumbled i need to consume all canon content and jump into their brains.

Leo Analysis

There’s a popular reading in the Rise fandom that Leo is the strategist of his brothers, but I’d like to propose a counter-theory that, while Leo can be strategic, his actual skillset is in deception, manipulation, and perception. In other words, Leo is good at things involving people.

(Hey, uh, this is pretty long)

In the show, Leo shows a preference to following others’ leads rather than strategize himself. In One Man’s Junk, Leo is the only brother that doesn’t actually think up a plan to find more mystic metal, instead picking sides on who’s plan he thinks is better. This is seen again in Late Fee, where Raph and Donnie being the ones who formulate a plan to return the DVD. Again, in the season 2 finale, E-Turtle Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (god that is long), Leo doesn’t come up with a plan to defeat the Shredder, he instead made everyone turn to Raph for one [2:15]. This all follows a pattern that Leo admits in Battle Nexus: New York, "And we'll do it with our special brand of teamwork: where my brothers do the work but we share equal credit" [1:10]. He’s very lazy (I mean this affectionately), and prefers to follow someone else’s lead. The final nail in the coffin is the movie, where Leo is very distinctly not the one who comes up with the plan to lock away the Kraang. While admittedly that moment is from him learning to build others up rather than try to do everything himself, Leo is clearly characterized to not tend to strategize.

However, there are episodes where he does plan. A notable example being Many Unhappy Returns, where Leo planned ahead around Big Mama to trick her into giving them the mystic collar. Another is The Hidden City Job, where Leo pretended to be a statue to get into Big Mama’s vault in her auction. There’s also Origami Tsunami, where Leo briefly took the leader position, and planned the fake paper shop to catch the paper thieves. Smaller examples include, Man Vs Sewer (two attempts of snapping Raph out of his savage state), Bug Busters (freeing his brothers), and the movie (teleporting Kraang Prime into the portal). However, one commonality in all those schemes is that they’re all deceptions (okay, except for Man Vs Sewer but I have a whole other reason for that). In Many Unhappy Returns, Leo isn’t so much as being strategic but manipulative, understanding who Big Mama is, foreseeing that she’ll shove him in the arena with his dad, and planning around that by appearing stupid. He tricked her into cutting a deal in his favor (allowing him to have a weapon in the arena [17:25]). In The Hidden City Job, Leo’s plan is basically tricking Big Mama again, pretending to be something valuable enough to belong in her vault (almost worked too well there). Origami Tsunami, Leo surmised that the bad guys would want more paper and created the fake paper store. All of those plans involved tricking the opponent based on what Leo understood of them, and they worked. Of course, planning moves around an opponent could be qualified as strategic, but these events highlighted Leo’s skill in reading and manipulating others, not as a tactician.

Again, I’m not saying Leo can’t be strategic. In Flushed But Never Forgotten, Leo’s plan to fighting Piebald is to camouflage himself with sewer sludge (gross). That’s strategic. In Bug Busters, Leo distracting the guards with an empty laundry bin to trip them into a portal he created behind them is strategic. Leo’s whole stunt with Kraang Prime and teleporting them both into the portal was sick as shit, and strategic. Hell, his whole power with the teleporting/portals requires Leo to think tactically. But, in comparison with his brothers, particularly Raph, Leo doesn’t seem that much better than them at strategizing.

What Leo is characterized to be, is manipulative. Two main examples are Air Turtle and the infamous Lair Games, where, in both, poor Donnie gets tricked by Leo to do something for Leo’s benefit. In both stunts, the emphasis was put on to Leo’s deceptive nature. In the Lair Games, Leo intentionally put his room up as a prize with the knowledge that his brothers wanted to take something important away from him, hiding the fact that that was exactly what he wanted [12:45]. In Air Turtle, he lied to Donnie’s face that he could make the last shot in order to get his own opening/spotlight [10:16, and 11:14]. Unlike with strategizing, these events are made out to be points of distinction for Leo. He’s also shown to be extremely perceptive, as @/our-happygirl500-fan user pointed out in their post of him realizing Splinter had some history with Big Mama. And being the only one to suspect Raph throwing his fight with Donnie in Sparring Partner [9:54]. This all lines up with Leo's role as a faceman, somebody who's good with people. Combined with his performance in Many Unhappy Returns, Leo is shown to be someone extremely skilled in deception, and reading others.

Tldr, I think Raph is the strategist of the group, closely followed by Donnie. And Leo’s actual strength lies in his ability with people, his perception and manipulation. He’s not a strategist, but a trickster. A lying liar who lies (I love him).

Of course, I could be extremely wrong so I would love any input or commentary, especially regarding Leo's strategist status, because I could be glaringly missing something. Thanks.

No but all jokes aside, I really hope they do keep Maria dead. I've seen suggestions that she could somehow survive the ARK raid and be secretly alive the whole time and I just. I really hope they don't do that.

Because it's such a big part of Shadow's progression as a character. Yes, she's dead. She died at the hands of humans. She's a prime example of the needless cruelty they're capable of. And yet she didn't doubt her love for earth/humanity for a second, not even while she was bleeding out on the ARK's floor in front of her little brother. She was dying and she still asked him to protect humanity, to watch over the ones who took everything from him.

And even though she's dead and gone and he's never getting her back in any way, Shadow makes the conscious decision to protect the earth in the end. He finds it in himself to believe that humanity is worth it, despite having lived through the horrors it has to offer.

Idk, I feel it wouldn't hit as hard if we just found out that whoops, Maria was actually alive all along!

*enables you* what happened with TLJ 👃

After all these years I still can't properly find words to explain how deeply betrayed I felt after the credits rolled and I shuffled out of the movie theater with everybody else. There was a TON of hype surrounding this movie, an absolute fuckton. I only saw positive reviews about it, the cast, the director, the plot. I got excited to see where Rian Johnson & Co. would take the ST.

The only remotely negative comment I saw before watching the movie was a fandom blog saying they didn't like what happened to Poe. Since this blog was about racism in fandom, I knew something was off. That was my only warning.

And y'know, it was like, five minutes in? Ten minutes? And Poe makes a "Yo mama" joke at Hux? I used to go into movies with an open mind and spent days gathering my thoughts about them because I was always slow to react, slow to gather my thoughts into coherent strings of words. It's how I enjoyed Michael Bay productions and JJ Abrams' love affair with lens flare. I never got actively angry with a movie I was watching, and I was fucking angry by the time the movie ended. I still remember texting a friend while standing out in front of the theater because I was so confused. The response to TLJ was so positive so why did I come out of the movie so frustrated and confused and dissatisfied with the whole thing?

It's been years and we all know how this movie divided the Star Wars fandom and just... broke Fandom Spaces in a way I never expected. We all know what TLJ did and didn't do, and how TROS provided the final nail in the coffin that was the ST experiment. But back then, all I saw was positive commentary about the themes and messages of TLJ, how it portrayed failure and the dangers of putting someone like Luke Skywalker on a pedestal, how the Force was female, how... important it was to see Poe get characterized as a hotheaded hotshot who needed to be demoted, slapped around, and stunned in order to learn some kind of lesson, how important it was to see Finn lose everything he gained in TFA so that he could relearn how not to be selfish or something while starring in a fucking incredibly tone-deaf B plot, how Rey... I'm not sure exactly what because she didn't need training anyway and then spent most of her time trying to bring Ben Swolo back to the light????? Rose was so promising as someone who grew up under the FO's thumb but she and Kelly were fucking abandoned by Disney so I don't know if Rose existing was actually a good idea if it meant giving Kelly unending trauma. Mark slipped up by calling Luke "Jake" and expressing his displeasure in front of cameras, and I was so fucking baffled and alienated by his character after knowing how his story ended in ROTJ that I couldn't connect with whatever lessons I and he are supposed to be learning. JJ set up Snoke like a mystery box and Rian just yeeted him off without so much as a fucking explanation so what was the point of that? Hux was a fucking joke. Phasma was barely there. The only character that Rian cared about was fucking Kylo Ren and Adam says years later that he was never supposed to get a redemption arc anyway.

Like, this was the movie everyone hyped up? This was the movie that didn't answer any questions left unasked by TFA and didn't bother to move forward with character development for any of the known characters? I spent money watching a slow space chase that ended on a planet made of salt and killed off Luke for Reasons? Am I stupid? Am I dumb? Am I a peasant incapable of understanding the masterpiece Rian directed, this so-called Best Star Wars Movie Since ESB?

But I couldn't say anything. I couldn't be dogpiled for hating such a empowering movie for women, a diverse and inclusive movie that had the likes of John and Kelly and Oscar. I couldn't be lumped in with the Star Wars dudebros with their raging misogynistic and racist takes on the movie, the cast, Kathleen Kennedy and Lucasfilm, Disney, etc. I couldn't be seen as one of them just because I didn't like a movie that I should like, I'm supposed to like. So I sat in silence, read meta, witnessed the fucking catastrophic explosion around some wild ass AO3 fandom essays written by a racist OG member of OTW about Finn/Poe, saw hate piled on black and bipoc fans, saw r*ylo fans come for John and John clap back at them, just saw an absolute fuckton of hate, and so by the time TROS came around I just... checked out. There was no way JJ could salvage what Rian had done and I was right. TROS was a corporate-run soulless garbage end to the Sequel Trilogy, but it ended just as The Mandalorian finished its first season and regained a lot of good will with this small story about a lonely Mandalorian bounty hunter who encountered a Force-sensitive Baby Yoda.

And then TBOBF/Season 3 of the Mando Show happened, just like how TLJ happened. All the promise, all the unanswered questions of the previous movie/season, all fucking dropped or provided with the worst, most unsatisfying answer. I'm sure others have found better answers and can live with what Star Wars gave us, but I haven't been able to. TLJ came out years and years ago, and I am still so bitter today. I'm still so bitter because TFA had such an incredibly compelling setup with such promising characters, and then TLJ Did That.

I got so heated while writing this. I'm still so mad. I'm still so bitter. I bury my head so deep in the sandbox I built for myself so that I don't have to think how Disney is twisting and contorting all these Mando'verse shows so that they all eventually lead to the ST, their precious hot potato child that just... didn't have to end the way they did if they actually had a fucking plan and fucking stuck the landing. I'll give the MCU this - their Phase 1? They fucking stuck the landing. I fell off the train tracks and haven't really watched the MCU since Captain Marvel, but at least they had a fucking plan and didn't fucking derail themselves like Disney did with the Sequel Trilogy.

I could be nice to people who like this movie but I'm not going to be. They can be nice on their own blogs.

Man, I can't even watch Knives Out or Glass Onion because my blood starts boiling. Just. TLJ did a lot to ruin what I hoped would be a positive and creative connection with Star Wars, and it took the Mando Show and the 2 minutes where Din and Luke locked eyes on the Imperial light cruiser to bring me back.

I'm gonna stop before I get way too heated for sleep.

KEEP TAKING CARE OF EACH OTHER. AND TELL EVERYONE WHAT WE DID ON THE MOUNTAIN.

~ so this is love ~

If I had a nickel everytime a Nickelodeon pairing from my childhood came back as adults and stabbed me in the heart with all the feels, I'd have 3 nickels, which is not alot but it's weird that it happened three times right?