actually turning a nonbinary character into a girl is bad. yeah changing their pronouns at all is not good actually. no sorry it doesn't make it better than changing them into a boy.
similar note: no, actually, just because that character uses "she" or "he" alongside their neutral pronoun that means you can always use that specific pronoun. yeah you still have to call them by their neutral pronoun sometimes. yeah sorry you shouldn't actually assume that she/he pronouns means you can push them into boxes.
my futile wish is for people to understand that "sex scenes in movies/TV don't have to serve the plot and can genuinely just be for pleasure" and "sex-repulsed people are allowed to complain about how rare it is for media made for adults like them to be something they can enjoy completely" are both true statements. unfortunately society hates both sex and people who don't like sex, so everyone gets far too defensive about any sex or lack thereof in fiction to actually have this conversation
"the VA is a male/female so i can call them whatever i want" just because the characters in the among us show have both feminine and masculine voices it doesn't mean you get to misgender the characters you dumb fuck
I'm rereading The Brothers Karamazov right and I'm still really early in the book (only 130+ pgs in) but I'm thinking a lot about the boys and their relationships between one another. And i ADORE the relationship between Dmitry and Alyosha bc they so clearly love each other, but I want to highlight the relationship between Mitya and Ivan because it deserves more attention.
Like Ivan, despite the fact he wants to differentiate himself from Dmitry and their dad, is acutely aware that he has the same "Karamazov blood" in him (ie he's hot-blooded, has an alcohol dependency, and is likely a womanizer - this we aren't given explicit confirmation except for the fact that the 'Karamazov blood' as described by Dmitry and Fyodor is being 'voluptuairy'). And despite the fact that Ivan pretends he doesn't care for his family or really anyone in particular, we see that he's ride or die for his big brother like:
Dmitry: asks Ivan for himself on some land business so he can get his supposed inheritance
Ivan: Yeah I got you.
Mitya: Asks Ivan to essentially date his fianceé so it'd be easier to dump her and date Grushenka
Ivan: I... I guess *falls in love accidentally*
Mitya: Gets 25 to life for a murder he didn't commit (but definitely should have done and lbr he really really wanted to)
Ivan: deep sighs and not only finds out who the real murderer is, when that doesn't end up working out plans how he's gonna bust his brother out the pen and smuggle him out the country to America with his new girl, all while he's battling his own demons and almost dies of alcohol induced hallucinations
And it's so important to point out that by the narratives own account these two boys (none of the brothers really) didn't grow up together and never even spent time in the same house up until just before the events of the story take place. Like they all really met as 20 something year old but Ivan immediately became is big brothers partner in crime, partner in cahoots and I think that's beautiful
can we bring back the term "fair-weather friend" bc I feel like if fair-weather friends got called that more this whole argument about whether or not you should be there for your friends when it's inconvenient/at what point of personal inconvenience it's ok to bail on your friends would kinda fall apart bc like. we literally have a word for "friend who's only there when you don't need something from them" because the baseline expectation is that a friend should be there even when it sucks. like we used to make fun of people for bailing on their friends.
I'm going to expand on this to the best of my abilities, keep in mind that it's not really a theory about the movie, more so an interpretation. Also I spent most of the movie with my eyes closed. Also I'm on my way to school right now and not feeling well so this might not be the best
Parallels between the backrooms and long-term nuclear waste warning messages
Frist of all. For anyone who doesn't know what long term nuclear warning messages are:
a series of different concepts, all with the purpose of making whoever will be on earth in the far future (10,000 years or above) not fuck with the atomic waste buried in the ground. The concepts include a lot of creepy, very hostile architecture (landscape of thorns is the most popular one) that would in itself suggest that you should NOT be here, and also make the land unhabitable. They also should include some kind of written and illustrated message explaining why the place is so dangerous,(assuming that future civilization will be able to read it). Here is what feelings a message and everything surrounding it should invoke:
The messages should over time increase in complexity in this order
both photos are from the Wikipedia article for long term nuclear warning messages
Now, the backrooms. They're above everything very hostile, anyone would probably have the feeling that they SHOULD NOT be here after entering, they are a maze very clearly dangerous and unhabitable for humans. but despite that they can serve as an archive and proof of our existence, since they are full of various human paraphernalia and have the golden record constantly playing on repeat. This in itself is very nuclear waste warning to me.
Now getting to the established wearing messages I showed earlier
"something man-made is here".
When Clark enters the backrooms the first thing he sees is furniture. People all around the world use furniture, it's one of the most univerally understood man-made things. It's VERY important for nuclear waste warnings to be understable for as many people as possible.
"Something man made is here, and it's dangerous"
ignoring how weird and scary the backrooms look by themselves, the thing you see after wandering for a bit is, a stop sign. A STOP SIGN!!! Stop signs are purposefully similar all around the world. Even if you didn't know what "stop" means, a red octagon is used in many countries to indicate the same thing, if not an octagon just a red sign!!! Almost everyone will have some sense of "maybe I should leave" after seeing a stop sign no matter where they're from.
"what, where, who and how" and complex information
is what the researchers and Clark are trying to gather. Clark especially as we see him making maps
"Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture."
the golden record playing constantly by the caveman cutout
"The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us."
the further you go the weirder and more dangerous the backrooms get. They're also below the store and the montage showing Mary's old house turning into a part of the backrooms looked like it being swallowed by earth, going lower and lower. The danger is below us
"The danger is to the body, and it can kill."
Backrooms are obviously dangerous but the still life are essentially human bodies changed in some unexplained way. There's also a theory in the reposts about capitan Clark being the real Clark, which would tie very nicely to this
"The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."
yeah
This is not a theory about the backrooms being a nuclear waste warning, just writing out similarities I noticed. Sorry if it doesn't make much sense or I forgot to mention something, feel free to add to this. My head hurts from the heat
actually turning a nonbinary character into a girl is bad. yeah changing their pronouns at all is not good actually. no sorry it doesn't make it better than changing them into a boy.
similar note: no, actually, just because that character uses "she" or "he" alongside their neutral pronoun that means you can always use that specific pronoun. yeah you still have to call them by their neutral pronoun sometimes. yeah sorry you shouldn't actually assume that she/he pronouns means you can push them into boxes.
Something just came to my mind. Previously one of the minor criticisms I had about the Backrooms movie was the scene where Mary yells at Clark. It kinda took me out of the film because even in the stressful situation that she was in, I don't see any reasonable therapist yelling at a clearly mentally deranged man like that, which could've easily turned things farther south and thus put both the therapist and their client in harm's way.
The more I think about it though, and maybe this was pretty obvious to some, the more I feel like that was intentional. Mary is not a good therapist. In the sense that she thinks she has to "help" her clients. Now maybe that's confusing. Isn't that the job of a therapist? Well, not exactly, as one of my previous therapists said to me: "I'm not here to help you. I'm here to guide you."
This all ties into her own trauma of dealing with her mother as a child. How she couldn't help her then and is still stuck up on that as a full grown adult. When Clark vaguely informed her that he was somewhere else via phone call, she couldn't have just called the police and request a welfare check like any sane and reasonable therapist would. No, she had to go search for Clark herself. She had to be the one to help him. She was breaching boundaries by personally going to the store.
So then we get to the dinner table scene where she yells at Clark. She does this out of frustration for Clark's behavior and inability to take responsibility of course, but she's equally frustrated that what she's been doing hasn't been working. Because she saw Clark as someone to she had to help instead of guide. To fix. To solve. To save. To bring up the same therapist again and paraphrase something they said to me regarding my mental state: "I do want you to get out of the shitbucket, but if you stay in there on your own choice, there's only so much that I can do." Mary basically went through one big wake up call in this movie.
All of this begs the question on if she actually cares about making her clients better or if she chose this job to make herself feel better about what previously happened in her traumatic past. To have some semblance of control that she didn't have when she was dealing with her mother.
I am having a TIME thinking of my disaster beloved Dmitri Karamazov tonight - like i LOVE that he dreams of "the babe" and wanting to help the poor and calls it a good dream - i LOVE that he so earnestly begs Andrey the troika-driver to forgive him "for everything" - i LOVE "god and devil are at war, and their battlefield is the heart of a man" - i LOVE how often and how emphatically he tells Alyosha he loves him - i LOVE "the hymn of the underground" and his heartfelt desire of spreading hope and joy and the love of God to his fellow-prisoners and i love that he's thinking about that while his own fate is in the balance - i LOVE that the narration notes (as if we didn't know him well enough by then) that he really really was not capable of being as "calculating" as the prosecutor was insinuating - i LOVE that he remembered the random German doctor who bought him a pound of nuts as a kid with so much gratitude - i LOVE that he wanted to make sure all the singers and dancers and servants got their share of snacks and drinks at his last wild revel - i LOVE that he was so fussed about apologizing to everyone he was slightly rude or impatient or threatening to (which, given his temper, was a lot of people) - i LOVE "in a thousand agonies, I exist! I see the sun, and if I don't see the sun, I know it's there - and there is a whole world in that, in knowing that the sun is there" - i LOVE that he thinks the world of Ivan despite Ivan's disdain - i LOVE that he was determined to "give way" and let Grushenka be happy with her officer and befriend him if that would actually make her happy - i LOVE how his love for Grushenka (always passionate and admiring) grows to something really noble and kind and self-abnegating - i LOVE that he was so moved by someone's simple gesture of putting a pillow under his head - i LOVE how much of his plot is simply trying to redeem his honor - i LOVE how he takes the police's interrogation in friendly good-faith and isn't like, concerned about incriminating himself because he's just speaking the truth and these guys are just doing their jobs - i LOVE him randomly quoting poetry while making his confessions to Alyosha - i LOVE his goodwill and sincerity in his introduction with Zossima - i LOVE him talking to Alyosha about the fierce passion and lust for life of the Karamazovs, and the 'ladder' they climb to new heights (or depths) - i even love seeing his struggles with himself, as he thinks with disgust and regret of the damage he's caused and what he can do to put a stop to it . . .
I just don't know if I've ever encountered a character who more dramatically compassed the Struggle of like - having our impulses and our temptations and our sins, having our pride, wanting our way, yet having our thirst for righteousness and honor, our subsequent self-loathing, our love for life and love for people and passion and humor and warmth and gratitude and generosity - all our human contradictions! Who is doing it like him?? T-T We Stan a Human Disaster
still caring about internet friends you lost touch with years ago is so embarrassing. yeah i had a deam we met up irl recently. the last time we spoke was maybe 7-8 years ago. i still wear the laces we randomly decided was a sign of our friendship. i dont know what any of your socials are or if youre even active on any. sometimes i see someones art resemble yours and i wonder for hours. do you still go by that name you chose? whenever i see it i wonder if its you. we couldve passed each other in this vastness a thousand times and not have a clue.
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel «Crime and Punishment», Christian motives play an important role, helping to better understand the inner conflict of the protagonist.
In the beginning, Raskolnikov believes that he has the right to commit a crime for the sake of a higher goal. However, as the story progresses, he is confronted with the consequences of his action. He realizes that he cannot escape punishment.
Gradually, Raskolnikov realizes that only through suffering and redemption can he find peace of mind. Rodion's meeting with Sonya Marmeladova is an important moment in the novel: the girl embodies Christian love and compassion. Thanks to Sonya, Raskolnikov accepted the need for repentance.
