RMH
Product Placement
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Mike Driver
styofa doing anything
art blog(derogatory)
I'd rather be in outer space đ¸
trying on a metaphor
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
cherry valley forever
ellievsbear
No title available
Game of Thrones Daily
AnasAbdin
h
No title available
sheepfilms
JBB: An Artblog!
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Misplaced Lens Cap
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Maldives
seen from Malaysia
seen from Malaysia
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Argentina
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from Serbia
seen from Canada
seen from China
seen from Italy
seen from United States
@bioqueen
trams are like if a train and a bus had a baby and then the bus abandoned the family when the tram was just a baby and the train raised it as a hardworking single mother
Trolleybuses are what happens when the bus stays in the picture
A Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes was so good, Viola killed it in her little tampon dress.
thinking about noahâs nameless wife takes inventory
[ID: poem by C.T Salazar. in plain text, it reads:
horse heart hyena heart swan spine silver fish shining in black water yes timber wolf tooth yes pity the ark with its belly full of glowing tongues touch the lionâs paw only while it sleeps the red-tailed hawk with jewels for eyes swallows the field mouse and the mouse was the only proof the field existed what else will be forgotten the hawk will starve soon we will starve soon the dogs will howl like a god learning the word for light and nothing will howl back
end ID.]
Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.
People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"
Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.
I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.
#this excludes writing pedo or incest.
If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:
No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.
Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.
Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.
John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!
Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.
Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.
The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.
It's all fiction.
None of it is real.
The characters are fake and do not exist.
Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.
[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads "Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]
Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression
You really want to try and go there as if that's some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let's go there. I've got sources and free time.
Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It's horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don't have to watch the film, and I don't recommend you do, unless you're actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It's a bad, hateful movie.
I have not watched it in its entirety and I don't really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don't feel I'm going to get anything out of the film that they haven't already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I'm going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.
But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn't stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn't erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn't go back in time and make it retroactively never made.
You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.
You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don't spring it on people who don't want to discuss it. You don't put it on for people to watch without warning. You don't tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.
You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:
âThese animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of todayâs society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.âÂ
You damn sure don't erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.
When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations," you know what happened? It didn't stop racism in film, that's for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.
The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood's European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer's demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.
Despite the Nazi party's outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer's censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.
In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled "The Mad Dog of Europe." The Hays Code was used to deny the film's production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of "not offending Germany."
Said Joseph Breen, "It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.â
Variety said about the subject, âAmerican attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts."
Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film "The Good Earth," due to the Code's explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.
Censorship doesn't help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.
Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn't exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.
My main sources for this post are:
Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty
The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons
The Encyclopedia of Censorship, by Jonathon Green & Nicholas J. Karolides
Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code - Stephen Vaughn
Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mark A. Vieira
Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934), When Sin Ruled the Movies, by Mark A. Vieira
Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, by Thomas Doherty
And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, by Nicholas Sammond
Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898), by Allyson Nadia Field
Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque, by Lawrence E. Mintz
The Original Blues: The Emergence of the blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era, by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott
The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, by Prof. Kathleen B. Casey
Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. And the Long Civil Rights Era, by Matthew Frye Jacobson
Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh
A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, by Geoffrey Jacques
Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers by Donald Bogle
The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film, and Television, by Tim Brooks
Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser
America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
White: Essays on Race and culture, by Richard Dyer
Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood
Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, by Ed Guerrero
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side, by James Snead
Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, by Nancy Wang Yuen
The Hollywood Jim Crow: the Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, by Maryann Erigha
absolutely devastating blow
absolutely devastating blow
Unmute !
this is the best response image ever
One of my coworkers told me that her 7 year old âmansplainsâ to her and itâs like⌠Iâm pretty sure you arenât being oppressed by a child you literally have massive legal and social power over. But maybe take a look at how yr husband talks to you if you think yr kids picking that up from somewhere
Maybe the kid is just being a kid and talking about something thatâs interesting to them!! Maybe they just learned it today day and want to tell you about it!! What is wrong with people!! I donât even have or want kids and I know this!!!
holding my own face in my own hands and screaming âthere is no connection without an open heart! you must be brave! you must be honest! you must be true!â in the mirror
In the name of the faggot, the dyke, and the holy tranny, I bless you. Go forth my child, and have as much gay sex as possible
I adore that weâve censored the word âsexualâ on Twitter User @FAGGOTMOUTHâs tweet.
source
I think Moby Dick might be cosmic horror. Captain Ahab is like "YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND it's not a whale. God is an evil master controlling every living human like a puppet, free will is an illusion, we are caught in a cruel trap made by god. THAT WHALE IS THE MASK OF THAT GOD"
HE THINKS HE THINKS if he can kill the whale, he can break humanity free of the bonds of GOD. and our narrator boy Ishmael is like "uh...i think it might just be a big whale and you have trauma" BUT THEN AT THE END ISHMAEL SEES IT and he's like "oh no. it's god"
and like. IT KILLS EVERYONE IT EATS AHAB AND DRAGS HIM INTO HELL SCREAMING. it IS god. nature is god.
god what a good story
i love too that if you know it from pop culture you know Ahab's leg was eaten by the whale? well thats the more soft version, in the story proper you hear he was basically CHEWED ALIVE, his whole body is held together with HATE and THE WILL TO KILL GOD and WHALE BONE PROSTHETICS.
AT SOME POINT he just HOLDS SOME LIGHTNING and everyone is like "Captain ahab is so cool i'd die for him" and the only one going "hey this seems weird" is the main character
but yeah every time i'm like "GOD MOBY DICK IS SO GOOD" people are like "the whale hunting story?? with the stinky boring men???" and i get sad.
Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; Iâd strike the sun if it insulted me!
Thatâs not cosmic horror thatâs Christian propaganda. Same thing I guess.
No, Moby Dick isn't the Christian God anymore than, say, the angels in Evangelion are christian angels. It's a god, yes, a God with a capital G too, but also explicitly not benevolent. You're not supposed to see its slaughter of the crew of the Pequod as a righteous punishment the way the Bible wants you to view God's various smitings, but rather as a tragic inevitability when humans go up against a force that is entirely beyond them. The book manages to be pretty clear on this point.
transmasc fall is coming up, you know what that means
i don't know what i was going for with this post
it was a prophecy and a warning.
"I think we should see the fear of gays, drag queens, etc. as part of the same thing as defunding libraries, increasing cops, anti-homelessness, true crimeâit's all about demonizing all public space and culture.
It is much easier to control people when they are lonely, isolated, and do not experience anything outside of individualized, corporate-controlled spheres of influence.
It's a self-feeding system. The less you are exposed to the diversity of experience inherent to public spaces, the more you want to replicate the tightly-controlled world you inhabit. The more scared you become. Thus more willing to support what replicates your privatized world." -P.E. Moskowitz
OH MY GOD.
âI was 14, I didnât know what I was doing.â
whaT THE FUCK
This story has no goddamn brakes
(transcript because I couldnât find one in the notes)
Stephen Colbert: A lot of writers say they were nerdy kids, unpopular, like outcasts, or that sort of thing; was that your experience growing up?
BJ Novak: I think thatâs exaggerated, I think a lot of people love to say, âoh I was such a nerdâ or âI was such a rebel, I sat in the back of the busâ. Most people sat in the middle of the bus. Thatâs how buses work. So, you know, people say-
Colbert: So you were sitting in the middle?
Novak: Yeah, thatâs where I sat! I mean, I did my homework and y'know, dreamed of being a bit of a rebel. I did a very nerdy version of rebellion, which I guess is sort of my way of balancing where I sat on the bus. When I was 14, I got it in my head that I wanted a fake ID. and I committed what- the only term for it is âidentity theftâ, to get this fake ID. So this is the kind of nerd- Iâve never told this story before, this is pretty much the nerdiest way you can be like, âa bad kidâ. I went to the Newton library where I grew up, and I went through their polling records⌠buckle in.
Colbert: I think youâve already - just that sentence has violated a federal law, but go ahead.
Novak: Yeah, thereâs a handful of these, and I actually tried to google the statute of limitations on this before the show and couldnât get the WiFi.
Colbert: Okay.
Novak: So I looked up -this is true- I looked up someone that was 21 years old, through their polling records.
Colbert: And youâre 14.
Novak: I was 14 years old, I looked up someone who was 21 who had my same first name and initial, because I thought, âif I get drunkâ -I had never been drunk. I was like, âif I forget my name, I canât get bustedâ. So I found someone who was âBenjamin J. [something]â. So I found this guyâs name and I thought, âif I can just forge all his documents, I can go to the DMV and say I lost my license and theyâll give me a new license with his pictureâ, this is my plan. Â So first I need to know where heâs born so I can get his birth certificate, so I call his house. I ask for him, I donât know what i would have done, I get his brother and I say âI work with Ben, weâre doing a crossword puzzle based on his life for his birthday. Can you tell me what town he was born in?â. So he told me and I took the subway there and I got his birth certificate.
Colbert: How- You went to the- You went to like the county clerk and said-
Novak: They didnât ask for ID, they just gave me his birth certificate. Then I opened up a mailbox in his name and wrote- I was 14, I didnât know what i was doing- I wrote to the IRS.
Colbert: Uh-huhâŚ
Novak: And I filled out tax forms in his name. And then I went to the DMV and said âI lost my wallet and I need to-this is all i haveâ. And i looked 14 years old, but I had these documents, so they sent me to the backroom with this woman who sized me up and said âI canât give you this, you donât even have a pictureâ, and then said with a wry smile on her face, âOpen your wallet right now.â and like a true method actor, the only thing I had in my wallet was a library card I had signed in his name. And she approved it, and for the rest of high school I had this actual driverâs license, with my picture on it. [audience cheering] Novak: Iâm glad we have some support. You have a look on your face- I donât know if that was funny or if you just broke the lawâŚ
Colbert: It was fantastic, I just hope you have a good lawyer.
