Anna One Anna Two

Trans bitch get rich I am 25 years of age | she/her | minors DNI | HDG brainworm carrier

[weirdbees]

Funniest part of watching I Saw the TV Glow in theaters is how you Experience all of that and then when youre sitting in shocked speechless silence the cis people just immediately start getting up and going "haha omg that was crazy lol what just happened"

[lunaicfantastic]

just watched I saw the tv glow and maybe im terminally hopeful but I believe that she left that arcade and laid down in that grave that was still waiting for her behind the football field. I think she's waking up now, mouth full of grit, dirt under her nails, and I think she's putting her heart back in her chest

[honeypot-like-the-ant]

one thing im noticing abt ‘i saw the tv glow’ at the very beginning is how beautiful it is that maddy loves tara so much. that she says tara is super hot and badass and how she cries when tara beats the shit out of the monster of the week. how she loves this version of herself so much and she does not yet understand that it is her.

[quietwingsinthesky]

the moment where. where she screams. screaming for help. i’m dying right now! screaming. and there’s no reaction at all. there’s nothing. it’s more devastating than judgment could be somehow. “i’m sorry. ignore me.” before she crumples and chokes. i’m never going to be okay again i think.

[roarinsaurus]

i saw the tv glow is awesome bc its terrifying in a transgender "if i keep pushing this down and down and down i will be slowly letting myself die" way but also its even just scary as "a man in the moon traps you in a dimension out of time built to psychologically torture you with suburbia"

[steveyockey]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

[nmbrs]

i just. when owen tried on isabel's magic dress and maddy blushed and smiled and hid in her hand. the intimacy in how she drew the symbol on the back of owen's neck. an out lesbian showing those feelings for a closeted, pre-transition trans girl who doesn't even seem to know that's true of herself yet. knowing her before she knows herself. don't speak to me i'm literally dust on the floor

[annabstraction]

Antimatter reactor that uses magnetic force fields to suspend and annihilate volatile subatomic particles to generate heat to boil water to turn a turbine

[annabstraction]

I love computers. Also they were a mistake

[proxmox-official]

[sizhens-reborn-deletedonpurpose]

raising the height of my monitor by gently placing two fingers along the bottom edge and pressing upwards, as if it were the upturned chin of a lover kneeling before me, whom I am gazing down at with warmth and affection and barely contained hunger.

[sizhens-reborn-deletedonpurpose]

I'm normal about computers and you can trust me with your technology

[wintersoldierfell]

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

[wintersoldierfell]

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

[wintersoldierfell]

#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

Fucking read.

[captainstarburst]

personally i think a trans woman should allowed to be able to post takes i heavily disagree with and just generally say things i dont like and not have to worry about people trying to ruin her life and run her off the internet. and i think youre kind of an asshole and a creep if you dedicate your entire online presence to cataloguing everything she's ever said that you didnt personally like. like you can just use the block button and if you are doing A Lot More Than That i think you're just kind of evil and transmisogynistic idk

[aropride]

youre monogamous? oh… it’s ethical, right? ethical monogamy? okay good for you! i mean pretty much every monogamous couple i’ve met didn’t work out but maybe you guys will beat the odds! haha. so is it a sex thing? you guys have sex with- just each other? huh. how does that work? i could never do monogamy, i’m too jealous, i’d worry my partner would leave me for someone else instead of dating us both… how do you deal with the jealousy? is it hard? like, how hard? extremely? do you think you’ll break up? i mean in the long run these things rarely work out,

[lilyblisslys]

Breaking in your new girlfriend like you would a kitten, having all your friends come over and pick her up, touch her wherever they want, give her treats, so she gets used to it :)

[dawnflowers]

Born to wake up in the loving arms of my Affini owner, forced to trudge to class every morning and learn boring shit

[revretch]

I was at a teahouse in Portland earlier and heard a woman describing something with such seriousness and fervor I thought she was discussing some kind of religion. It took me a while to realize she was describing Hollow Knight