you can go back to the past but nobody’s there
Cosmic Funnies

Origami Around
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
DEAR READER

Kaledo Art
we're not kids anymore.

No title available

blake kathryn
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
No title available
One Nice Bug Per Day
No title available
Today's Document

No title available
No title available

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Mike Driver
RMH

Janaina Medeiros

JBB: An Artblog!

seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Australia

seen from Russia

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from New Zealand
seen from New Zealand
seen from United States

seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Malaysia

seen from Belgium

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from Germany
seen from United States
@about-ashly
you can go back to the past but nobody’s there
Some things don't change.
something about the wave of Alfred Molina thirst makes me think of that “Everyone is Beautiful and No One is Horny” essay. shan’t elaborate right now but give me a moment.
I’m sorry, the what essay?
so glad you asked
it was this article, “We All Simp for Alfred Molina” by Chingy Nea, that made me think of it, particularly this paragraph that one assumes the Nea must have composed whilst drooling like a cartoon wolf:
But gravity isn’t all Molina brings to the role [of Doc Ock]; he carries with him a stunning degree of raw sexual magnetism. As a larger man, Molina really carries his massive appendages, moves deliberately with a menacing cool and delivers one-liners in a sultry arch tone. The physicality of the role also plays into it with Octavius in an open trench coat with his titties out and with a bit of his paunch hanging over the metal tentacle corset around his waist, letting us really take in the beauty of his body.
it’s Nea’s appreciation for Molina’s physicality, specifically the fond attention drawn to his visible paunch, that made me think of R.S. Benedict’s essay “Everyone Is Beautiful and No One Is Horny.” it’s a good read but also a long one, so I’ll summarize: Benedict posits that current standards of American attractiveness stem from post-9/11 anxiety - “When a nation feels threatened, it gets swole,” she writes - and has created a national mentality of bodies as commodities to be honed to perfection without indulging in any of the pleasure a body can bring, a vessel disjointed from any sense of self and meant only to be looked at with awe.
she opens particularly by noting the very particular brand of sexless-ness that pervades mainstream media, leading to action heroes whose beautiful faces and implausibly sculpted muscles are attractive in theory but also seem to exist in a world apart from anything like genuine sensuality. their bodies are inhuman in their perfection, and this comes at the cost of doing anything as human as fucking. to quote:
In the films of the Eighties and Nineties, leading actors were good looking, yes, but still human. Kurt Russel’s Snake Plissken was a hunk, but in shirtless scenes his abs have no definition. Bruce Willis was handsome, but he’s more muscular now than he was in the Nineties, when he was routinely branded a bona fide sex symbol. And when Isabella Rosselini strips in Blue Velvet, her skin is pale and her body is soft. She looks vulnerable and real.
Benedict mostly speculates about the neutered nature of DC and Marvel’s movie characters, but they’re hardly the only blockbusters falling into this trend. Alison Wilmore’s “Why Doesn’t The Rock Get to Make Out More Onscreen?” calls attention to this with a particular focus on Disney’s new Jungle Cruise movie, describing Dwayne Johnson and Emily Blunt’s roles as “characters who are to Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn in The African Queen as Funko Pops are to people,” with their inevitable kiss playing out “as though they’re dolls whose heads are being smashed together by a child enacting a rudimentary idea of passion.”
similarly to Benedict’s point, Wilmore notes that “There’s a striking divide between the body that Johnson is so famous for and the characters who are supposed to inhabit it… his characters rarely if ever seem to take pleasure in this physicality beyond its capacity to intimidate and serve as a spectacle.”
and by now you’re probably saying okay Makenzie that’s swell, but what the fuck does this have to do with people thirsting over Alfred Molina? well, look at him.
take in the tits and paunch Nea loves so much, and compare Molina’s body with the kind that have dominated the biggest movies of the last decade or so, since the MCU set the tone for the future of the superhero genre. Quoth Benedict again:
Actors are more physically perfect than ever: impossibly lean, shockingly muscular, with magnificently coiffed hair, high cheekbones, impeccable surgical enhancements, and flawless skin, all displayed in form-fitting superhero costumes with the obligatory shirtless scene thrown in to show off shredded abs and rippling pecs. And this isn’t just the lead and the love interest: supporting characters look this way too, and even villains (frequently clad in monstrous makeup) are still played by conventionally attractive performers. Even background extras are good-looking, or at least inoffensively bland.
Molina’s Doc Ock isn’t bland; he has character in the form of features that are, increasingly, written off as too ugly or undesirable for film. I think the reason people may be reacting so strongly to him nearly two decades after the movie’s release is that a pretty-normal looking body has now become a spectacle unto itself, by virtue of being so normal.
the current crop of superhero stars are exercised, waxed, dieted, dehydrated, and quite probably steroided into something the average person could never achieve on their own, a body that’s fun to look at but is ultimately alien to anything most people will ever experience. whereas what we’re looking at with Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock is something like a body that many people actually have, a body that many people have known and loved, a body that, frankly, many people have had sex with - certainly more than have ever had sex with, say, Chris Evans’ Steve Rogers all hairless and shiny fresh out of getting shot up with super soldier serum.
it’s a sexy body because it’s a palpably human body, in a genre that increasingly shuns exactly that.
plus, you know, those are just some nice tits.
Both of these articles are worth a read, but this post sums them both up pretty nicely.
got my first positive review lads :)
#literally ive been seeing people lump molina in with the ‘fandom thirsting after every white guy even tho hes *gly’ thing and im like?????? #first of all thats a real human being. second of all he is literally a departure from the usual marvel characters we get nowadays #we should all be happy to get a break #let people think alfred molina is hot jfc
(tags via @clowntv)
Thank you for pointing this out! While I do think that this site’s userbase has an issue when it comes to their Certified Tumblr Sexymen usually being white (or humanized to be white more often than not), these people seem to be ignoring that a lot of those Tumblr Sexymen are also very thin. Doctor Octopus - especially as played by Alfred Molina - is notably not thin, nor is he overly muscular, and he’s not ashamed of that (as well he shouldn’t be). Yes, it’d be great to have more Tumblr Sexymen who aren’t white, but Doc Ock is still a departure from the normal by virtue of being fat. And I for one think that he’s all the more beautiful for it.
(Also, yes, please stop insulting how Molina looks in real life: it’s perfectly fine if he’s not your type or whatever, but that’s still an actual human being you’re talking about. Don’t try and pull that “oh but I’m just concerned about his weight for his own health” shit either; he’s a grown man who knows his body infinitely better than some random fuck on the internet does. We all know what you’re really saying.)
Last words
[ID: images of River Song and the Tenth Doctor from Doctor Who, with texts edited onto the images. River's reads, "I still love you. I never stopped." The Doctor's reads, "i can't imagine a worse occasion to have go ask this but um who is this". /end ID]
Spite can be a incredible motivator
The year is 2056. The 30th doctor is David Tennant. He took over from David Tennant. His companion is played by David Tennant. The villain is David Tennant as David Tennant. The showrunner is David Tennant. You hear a knock on the door. It's David Tennant. He gives you a pocket watch. You open it and remember who you are. You were David Tennant all along.
stop being silly in front of me
Sympathising with my mother but at the same time
universal experience
if you ask me, the guy who put the sword INTO the stone should be king, not the chucklefuck who got it out.
I assume the guy who put the "sword that makes you the king" into the stone, doesn't really want the position
i think the stone should be king since it held the sword the longest
do you guys ever like forget you're interested in something until you start engaging with it again and you go "oh wait i'm like crazy crazy about this yeah"
thirteen: hey just popped in to tell you you're tearing apart reality btw. you're gonna destroy the world and also us
fifteen, not taking in a single word: god so true bestie i DO miss being blonde