schrödinger's twink

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
tlirsgender
brakshow

The thing that makes no sense about the Star Wars sequel trilogy. Even more than Rey/Kylo (awful.) Even more than "somehow, Palpatine returned" (wtf?) is how did the First Order come to power in the first place? Why would anyone let that happen? If the new republic was so great, then why would it?

The new republic being formed after the fall of the empire makes sense. They overthrew the previous fascist dictatorship. Palpatine (was) dead. The rebellion won and reformed the galaxy. So... A neo-fascist First Order was formed (by an apparently not-dead Palpatine) to fight against that and return to imperial ways. Including Ben Solo Kylo Ren, son of Leia Organa, one of the most powerful politicians in the galaxy. AND they have an extremely powerful space military to boot, much bigger than the one by the New Republic, somehow. Okay. Sure. I knooowww there's a ton of extended canon (or whatever it's called now) about why or how this happened, but it had to retcon a number of things in order to explain itself. And if you need to read 37 books for the movie lore to make sense, the movie lore wasn't planned very well.

It would have been way more interesting if the New Republic was also corrupt instead of "now we have a good government, who has to fight the same evil bad guys, again." They're not "resisting" anything. They're already the ones in control of the galaxy. Would have been a lot cooler if Leia ended up being the leader of this New Republic and enacted some kind of false-utopian totalitarian regime in the name of keeping control. If You ask ME.

brakshow

if it's about the cycle of violence, I think Senator Princess Leia Organa, who spent her whole life on her political career, would have ended up power hungry. She was so much like Anakin it should've scared people. It would've scared Obi Wan. She was full of anger when the Jedi were never supposed to feel hatred. And while Luke learned to use the force and trained to be a Jedi, Leia never was. She was passionate and used her temper to drive her. She overthrew the Empire and was motivated by the loss of Alderaan, just like Anakin destroyed the Jedi, and was motivated by the loss of his mother. Leia was more like Anakin than anyone else.

star wars leia organa q
thesebloodydays
lady-of-the-spirit

I think most stories could benefit from having two characters whose relationship is just "those two guys" (gender neutral). Most of the time if you look for one of them you'll find both of them. They can hate each other or be the best of friends or something in-between but they just can't find that same spark with anyone else. Their relationship is best described as "do not separate them". They are fully fleshed out characters individually but if either of them are left alone without the other for any reason it feels so wrong.

astercrash

image
stubb and flask kgkgjgkg no but yeah totally tropes
ashleybenlove
ashleybenlove

"Every whale-ship takes out a goodly number of letters for various ships, whose delivery to the persons to whom they may be addressed, depends upon the mere chance of encountering them in the four oceans. Thus, most letters never reach their mark; and many are only received after attaining an age of two or three years or more."

Yeah, maybe don't depend on whale ships for postal service.

what choice do they have though etc etc well i suppose they could send it to a harbour??? whale weekly
thebibi
prettyboysdontlookatexplosions

i feel like this year a lot of dracula takes have focused in an interesting way on the ways that the horror of dracula includes how he makes his victims be or at least feel complicit in their own victimization. some of this is supernatural vampire stuff like the prohibition against entering uninvited or the ways that vampiric hypnotism seems to include as part of its nightmarish quality the experience of a desire that you don’t actually have, which we see the vampire ladies exert on jonathan in the castle and can extrapolate as a drac-power as well. but a lot of it is the straight up weird psychological manipulations and power play dracula does to jonathan in the castle - the emphasis on “enter freely and of your own free will,” all the little moments of dialogue where he makes something jonathan’s fault or purports to presume jonathan’s desires in a way that leaves no room for jonathan to dissent. it’s a kind of horror that still rings as genuinely unsettling today because it remains an unfortunately familiar and very human kind of violation. and actually even the more magical vampire stuff translates pretty easily to a metaphor for familiar human experiences, right? how many people in the midst of a traumatic event have frozen, like jonathan does when the ladies set upon him, and felt the shame afterwards of their inability to fight against what was unfolding? (cw sexual assault) it’s also well attested to that human bodies sometimes react in situations of sexual assault/abuse with physical responses that overlap with those that accompany consensual sexual experiences, something survivors of sexual violence have spoken about as part of what can make it so difficult to emotionally process what happened - and that’s not even getting into situations of coerced consent or other forms of manipulation that result in experiences only recognized as nonconsensual in retrospect and often with much difficulty and doubt.

anyway. it’s a really rich vein in the novel for me on this reread and i’m grateful for all the posts pointing out the count’s language games in particular, which didn’t jump out at me but once my attention was drawn i couldn’t stop seeing them. but while i am on principle neutral about any individual adaptation doing Whatever with the material, tracking this aspect of the novel’s horror has given me a new dimension of But Why for the sheer prevalence of adaptational choices and academic analyses that have looked at a novel that so viscerally captures so many aspects of violation and gone, “but don’t you think she kinda wanted it?” or even that have looked at dracula’s choice of victims and tried to find or place in them some appeal or weakness inherent in their essences rather than their status as victims of opportunity and vulnerability and dracula’s ability to use them to demonstrate his own power and control, which is how he operates in the novel and which is also an extremely strong parallel for how serial predators operate in the actual world. like any individual movie or retelling or whatever can do whatever it wants, but it is hard to look at the ways the contours of the story as “known” through cultural osmosis have morphed across the century-plus of its popularity and not feel like the versions of it that have lingered have done so in ways that ultimately tone down the horror by placing it more in line with many common cultural misapprehensions about abuse & sexual violence.

dracula meta