i will continue to hijack him

2024 reads / storygraph

The Final Curse of Ophelia Cray

fun YA adventure

follows a girl who’s seen as cursed because of her recently hanged notorious pirate queen mother, and runs away to the navy where nobody will recognise her

and her half-sister who’s desperate to find her before she’s arrested for using a fake name, to bring her home to their dying father & save the family business

both get on the bad side of some pirates and have to brave storms to find each other

aroace MC, sister relationships

arc from netgalley, out april 9

My question is did Bram Stoker ever visit Texas, or ever speak to a real Texan in his life before writing Dracula, or was he basically like the 1800s author version of this

i will go full mount rushmore on his ass

no but also i'm thinking about all the ways in which someone's way of speaking via text can impact others' perception of them and it's sorta killing me. example situation: someone's just finding out that a character they liked dies in canon. they're not bursting into tears irl, but they're pretty bummed out. so: "NUUUUUUU but i love him so much!!!! TToTT" vs "noooo, i love him so much!"

also, the way older people type. my mother excessively uses emoji, especially :) -- and it's not the :) of despair. i've heard of others using lots of ellipses, even if they're not trailing off dramatically. it's all learned, and i suppose if my mother learned to text in different times, her manner of texting would be way different.

but what i'm getting at is -- sometimes it's all you get! and that's a bit scary if you think about it, because for the most part i feel like how you communicate online depends on where you hang out and what you're used to, so someone who's mature and well-spoken might type like a child with only a vague awareness of commas, etc, or someone who's kind and friendly might come off as mean simply because they've been hanging out on twitter too much.

(and then there's picking up people's mannerisms just because they seem fun, something that i do without even noticing it both off- and online, which muddles things up even more because you might wonder why i'm being so salty and angry out of nowhere, but i'm actually just emulating an incredibly funny blogger who spoke in this or that particular way in a strictly humorous context.)

communication is hell and one can never understand another person perfectly and completely. etc

tumblr users will be like “south park is the worst show ever created and anyone who watches it is irredeemable” and then reblog a post about it’s always sunny… as if both shows don’t contain (intentionally, for the purpose of satire) awful characters and jokes.

Grelle would absolutely be a proshipper because she ships herself with Sebastian who is absolutely uninterested 🥰

Exactly!!

have i ever mentioned how much i hate dan and phil

that's what the point of the mask is

@icebarefoxy @sundial-junk

ice dont look at tags :3

Just say that every gay trans man who disagrees with you is a cishet woman with a fetish so you can say whatever you want!

yeah at first I was like “man it really feels like Duck is the one (technically) dying and getting tormented the most out of the clump I wonder if that means anything” and then I remembered that Red got all his blood drained out of him by a literal family tree and Yellow was tormented by a worm so hard that his face melted and I’m like nvm.

Random Barbie thoughts:

Seeing people say that Ken represented women in Barbie but IMO while the KenS represent how women are treated (explicitly stated, I can't believe how many people somehow miss it), Ken himself represent men. Men who can't really take no for an answer even though you make it clear you won't date them. Men insecure and vulnerable who end up falling into incel/right-wing ideology. Men performing what they think is expected of them and suffering because of it.

And, you know, even though Ken suffers in Barbieland, he's still treated better than Barbie was in the real world. He suffers, he struggles, he's unhappy. And that's shown. That's integral to the story. But guess what? Barbie's own suffering is also shown. Even though it's the focus, it doesn't take away from Ken's. Both men's and women's sufferings are shown at the same time, none of them negate the other. There's not one greater than the other. It's just that the main focus is on Barbie's, and thus women's, suffering. We don't forget about Ken's, about men's, of course but it's not Ken The Movie. He's not the main topic. The movie is about the place of women in society, Barbie discovering herself and her place in it, what being human is.

And that's why people calling him the main character is so deeply gross. Ignoring completely EVERYTHING in the movie to focus on the man and his struggles. Ken was the antagonist. He wasn't the villain, but his actions were antagonistic. (Yes, the overall bad guy is the patriarchy and toxic masculinity but Ken was used to represent them, even though he didn't like it). That's why people like him, we usually gravitate towards the antagonists, especially now that they're more sympathetic and understandable.

We saw him fall into that rabbithole. So we feel attached. But also he didn't have the most development like some people say. Even after losing, he still wanted to be with Barbie and confessed he did all that because of her. He was at the same point as the beginning of the movie, only more open about it. Barbie is the one telling him that he needs to learn to be himself and that he shouldn't live only for her. She's sharing what she learned with him and telling him he needs to be his own person. And THAT is when he will develop as a character. THAT is Barbie's own development shining.

(It's a bit ironic IMO because even his growth is caused by Barbie and not by himself. However they've been established as dolls and have a weird way of thinking. Barbie only deviated because of the person playing with her. Not many people play with Ken dolls so it would be difficult for him to realize he can be his own person too. My own personal interpretation is that because he couldn't achieve this realization on his own, he did everything he did in the movie instead of questioning everything like Barbie did. Anyway!)

Ken was hilarious. He's the comic relief. He was the goofy antagonist. The fact so many people adore him shows that the movie worked at least partly. The jokes landed. But he's not the whole movie. If you stop thinking, if you don't bother seeing beyond the jokes, then you're stupid. I'm sorry but it's true. Critical thinking is a thing. The movie was crystal clear about its themes, its messages, its metaphors. You have to be purposefully obtuse to ignore everything but the funny man on screen in such a movie. I guess some men related to Ken, what he represented, and his struggles more so that's why they ignore everything else?

Anyways, I'm leaving it there because it's messy and ramble-y. Originally, I was only going to talk about what was in the first paragraph. I think it's really fun and incredible what the Barbie team managed to do! They put in so many things in a simple-to-understand movie. One character can represent so many things all at once! Thinking about it scratches an itch in my overthinking brain.

hehehe I'm so weird and strange and I was the weird kid at school and cringe culture is dead!

DNI: weirdos, freaks, anyone with slightly different opinions than my own

stop being weird in my inbox im going back to bed