I kind of wish that the polarities of violence and sex in popular culture were reversed. Like, I wish that writers and filmmakers needed to justify up the wazoo their decisions to show a murder on screen when "they could have just done it tastefully in shadow or something," but no one even batted an eye at a sex scene. I kind of wish that erotic video games were the norm but FPSs were a considered a weird and loser-ish thing to play.
I mean, I really wish that you didn't have to justify either, but it bugs me that, of the two, killing is the one that you can use in wholesome family friendly entertainment but fucking is the one that you forever need to shield your children from even knowing about.
I don't think that this difference is innocent, either. Like, I think that sexual repression is a good means of control whereas the state always needs an army of young men who are willing to kill people.
listen. I understand if you dont want to see sex in a movie. But im begging you to think about how the prevalence of murder and acts of harm being portrayed in media vs. the censorship and hush-hush nature behind sex affects our relationships with it.
think about what this post is saying about the normalization of violence and demonization of eroticism. How sexual repression and the indulgence of violence lets a society be guided in a certain direction.
If you dont want to see a sex scene in a movie, thats fine. But this isnt about personal preferences. This is about how culture is shaped by what we choose to show. For the love of god.
I am a horror movie fan who loves gore and violence and murder, you know, a sicko, and I also think it is extremely weird and unsettling that violence is so much more accepted in media than sex. Compare the kind of violent content you can put in a PG-13 movie with the kind of sexual content allowed. It's fucked up!
Obviously I don't want anyone taking away my horror movies and replacing them with softcore porn or anything, that's not the point. Just... maybe we should be less worried about kids seeing a depiction of consensual sex and more worried about stuff like, idk, being taught that incredibly bloody revenge is a normal way to respond to being harmed, or that the right way to handle criminals is to explode them, or some of the things I think might do more lasting harm than the simple fact of violent imagery.
There was an episode of Deep Space Nine. Back in the... late 90s? I think? That featured a lesbian kiss. This being two or three decades ago now, they received many letters of complaint, a number of them claiming it meant the show was no longer Family-Friendly.
One of the writers responded to one of those letter, asking if it would have been more appropriate for the women to shoot each other with a phaser. He was answered in the affirmative, and his response was that if the person felt it was better for his children to see an act of violence than an act of affection, he might want to reconsider his definition of family-friendly.
ask and ye shall receive:
When I write in Japanese I usually also throw it in google translate to double check that I'm not using the wrong kanji by mistake, and two years ago it gave me very dry and literal translations.
I was doing it today and noticed it had a pretty strong voice added to the output
For reference, to give a dry translation I would put:
Lately I'm into in Hanafuda. Nobody seems to know anything about it here, so they probably wouldn't understand my brilliant jokes. I guess you guys will never be able to understand "Mister November and the Scary Cave".
I have a fluent friend who is able to check my work for me and give me tips on hitting the correct tone (I was going for a comically casual feeling), so I'm confident that I'm expressing the feeling I'm intending. While Google is also hitting the same emotion, I really don't like knowing that it's assigning tone in the first place.
To check if it was editorializing based on informal grammatical choices, I formal'd up the writing to be more polite and remove any non-standard vocabulary.
I'm just like... what is anyone who is translating what I'm thinking into their own language going to think when a translation app decides that it knows my intended tone? When online communication is already so complicated and nuanced? I'm a non-native so I'm spending ages agonizing over 117 characters, but when I'm chatting in English I'm not being so deliberate. How likely is it that tools that 'naturalize' are going to make choices that don't reflect reality and lead to insulting misunderstandings?
I spoke with an English learner just yesterday who thought they were being bullied (they were not, the commenter in question was just excitedly infodumping about sociology) because something was lost in translation, and I wonder if it's because of tools making choices like this.
I'm just a luddite I don't trust stuff like this. stinks of ai asking me if it can rerwrite my email in a more quirky style.
Seen a lot of extremely succinct points about how ofdo falls a little flat when compared to the original series, and asking why that is, and I have so many thoughts about it I needed to make my own post
First, I’m having a great time with ofdo. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’d land a little better if it wasn’t riding on the coattails of ofts. I said this before, but these two shows are about two very different themes. Only Friends explores how different people will have different views about sex— as in, sex means something different depending on who you are. The drama comes from these characters trying to navigate and find common ground despite those differences, and sometimes it works romantically, sometimes it doesn’t.
Dream On (so far!! I know we haven’t seen all it has to offer!!) has been more about how having a romantic/sexual history with someone affects those dynamics. It’s about navigating exes and old/new emotional feelings, which is its own conversation. It’s different to the goal of ofts which I think is why it feels so different!
I think what people loved about ofts is the boundaries within the BL genre it was willing to push. Like, because of the fixed pair system we KNOW which couples are going to have a happy ending, but ofts managed to (at least for me) suspend my disbelief while it was happening. The highs were so high, and the lows SO low at points I wondered how these characters could possibly come back from it. There were real stakes that were so realistic to a messy queer friend group (I’ve had friendships with more convoluted arrows on the chart lol) and cross-pair relationships needed to happen in order to build that sort of immersion.
Dream On, so far, has been more unwilling to push those same boundaries. Idk if it’s because of pushback during the original from fans seeing their faves kiss other people, or the Corporate Branding that GMM has adopted more heavily as a company since the original was made, or some other secret third thing, but to me, the stakes aren’t really there.
Boston is there, being messy ofc, but we haven’t seen him kiss a single person when he absolutely should/would have (again, not sure if that’s Neo’s choice moving away from queer roles, or a decision on GMM’s part to keep the sanctity of branded pairs). His motivations are sometimes strange/unclear to me and he feels watered down. It’s a little jarring. Several times I’ve caught myself going, “WHERE ARE WE?? CHURCH???” Especially the cutaway during the Boston/Tua flashback. Idk that especially felt like #notmyboston. I get he’s more of a plot device than a main character in Dream On, but still.
Another thing is that in Dream On, the conflicts have been being solved so fast to the point I’m not really convinced any character’s motivations are much more than lackluster pot-stirring. Raffy exposing Dean’s host job could’ve (should’ve?) been a way bigger deal than it was. Jack & Dean have admitted they love and need each other over and over and we’re not even halfway through the show. We already kinda know how the Arnold/Tua stuff will go down (once Arnold finally comes around to committing he’s gonna find out about Tua being the one to pay him and it’s gonna be a Big but Ultimately Very Forgivable Betrayal).
Idk. We’re being told about all their character traits but not really shown. Jack is especially nebulous to me. We’re told he’s stubborn and hardworking, which I guess is there a little bit but he’s also folded at every opportunity of even a little pressure. We’re told he’s leading Raffy on, but to me none of their interactions have given me any reason to believe that, or justify the idea that Raffy’s feelings are anything more than a crush.
I guess my problem is that everyone’s allowed to be mean-spirited but not downright mean, sneaky but not conniving, horny but not in a way that takes you out of the branded pair system. It’s like they’re afraid of us hating any one character, which was not an issue with the original, even when we were eventually explained why everyone acts/thinks the way they do.
And one last thing, WHERE ARE THE WOMEN??!! If I remember correctly we only have one woman with a name, and of course it’s Raffy’s Evil Mother. Others have pointed out the irony in Jack erasing Juliet and making a theatre department even more of a boy’s club than it already is. The girls are only there to be the ones gossiping about Dean or being the annoying brainless fujos the boys are soooo much smarter than. In ofts we had Chueam and April, Yo, and Sand’s mom who were fully fleshed out complex characters who actually contributed to the plot without taking focus from the main mlm couples, if that’s what they’re worried about with Dream On. The women of ofts weren’t perfectly written or freed the show from misogyny allegations, but at least they EXISTED lol.
There’s only one thing that can save us from the vaguely misogynistic undertones here, and it’s a Lesbian Voice of Reason. Miss you AprilChueam (ChueamApril? Did we ever establish that?)
That’s all for now. I’ll prob have more to say and my opinions will absolutely change in the future. And again, I’m biased towards ofts and my love for SandRay in all their dysfunctional glory but I’m also enjoying Dream On. I just think they’re different shows, which is fine.
Okay, actual question. do you enjoy salad? and by salad I mean a bowl full of greens with some sort of topping.
Honest opinion only, please don't answer one way or the other based on what you think you should say.
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