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Validation
ewwww ewwwww gross bugs.... request from @completelysaneapplefarm
a pit of dread forms in your stomach as you parse my "evil baby on board" decal and realize you have a moral duty to rear end my vehicle as hard as you can
this is not an original observation but i really do think so many of BBC Merlin's problems stemmed not from bad politics but from the fact that it was trying to be Arthurian Smallville
SO i confess i have not seen Smallville but the consensus seems to be that it's a solid, competently written television show. BBC Merlin is, um. Not That.
here is the first of the show's major Smallvillisms:
okay so in Smallville the fact that Clark Kent has superpowers is a secret. I cannot speak for Smallville in particular but Clark Kent keeping his powers a secret generally works for audiences bcos 1) it is a core element of the Superman narrative. if he was just publicly Superman that would feel weird and jarring. 2) Clark Kent is a nice and good boy and we understand that he is keeping his secret with the best of intentions
the secret superpowers angle is completely foreign to the Arthurian mythos however; in fact it's kind of the opposite of the usual deal with Merlin as a character? but they wanted to do Young Merlin with a Clark Kent thing going on. OK. now they need a reason why his magic is a secret.
uhh it's bcos they made magic illegal. who made magic illegal? the king. not Arthur obviously. different king. we want to keep the whole Camelot/royal court aspect tho so instead of doing the usual King Arthur backstory he's just uhh normal prince. and magic is illegal bcos it killed his mother. okay now we're cooking with gas. but obviously we want the villains to mostly be other magic users for Merlin to fight. why are these other magic users trying to Get Arthur? well they are mad that his father banned magic. and Merlin has to protect Arthur bcos he's going to be King Arthur one day and save the land. so Merlin's gotta explode all the other magic users. he gotta!!
it never really works partly bcos it's just not an established Arthurian Thing and also bcos it renders basically everything Merlin does extremely sketchy? I don't think it's inherently a problem that he's a morally dubious protagonist (if anything Merlin is kind of traditionally a little bit evil) but the show wants him to be a Good Boy like Clark Kent and frames him as such even though he keeps blowing up other magic users with legitimate grievances. its very strange!!
which brings me to the second big Smallvillism:
Morgana has THAT arc bcos Smallville has a whole thing where Lex Luthor and Clark Kent are childhood friends.
i re-iterate that I haven't seen Smallville but I imagine Lex being the guy in the friend group who is going to turn out evil works bcos Lex Luthor's whole thing is that he's an asshole rich white man. definitely possible to do a character like that who's sympathetic whilst still having it ring true for the audience that they're just gonna be a bad guy.
and like they maybe COULD have made this work with Morgana? but here i suppose we do get into the straight up just bad politics, doing Morgan Le Fay but she's Lex Luthor would maybe involve leaning into the privilege she has as a noblewoman (effectively a princess) but instead they just u know victimised her over and over and then when she snaps and starts exploding people it's like wow Morgana i can't believe you're evil now. stop exploding people Morgana. only Merlin is allowed to explode people.
it's like, i don't know. they didn't realise they couldn't just go directly from s1-2 Morgana (was end of s2 the switch? I forget) to 'oh she's just evil now' without it being really weird and jarring? they didn't realise that a female character could have motives for being evil that didn't revolve around all the men in her life abusing her?
but like im hesitant to even come down on it too hard for being sexist (even tho it was) bcos first and foremost its just stupid. wym she's just evil now. you didn't earn that at all. what are you DOING.
it all comes back for me to that part in s1 where we realise that Sophia's father is and was always planning to sacrifice himself for her and Sophia is distraught and suddenly these 2 characters who hitherto have been straight up evil gain a new sympathy and depth and its like oh no what are they gonna do!!
and then Merlin rocks up and explodes them both. just blows them up like bombs. and its like ok that COULD be a really interesting character moment for him but it. its not. bcos really blatantly what's going on there is they were like 'ok we're out of time, wrap it up folks. Merlin comes in and explodes the bad guys like bombs.'
it feels weird & jarring not bcos it was morally bad behaviour on Merlin's part but bcos straight up its just bad writing.
eta not gonna reblog this again but the OTHER issue w the Smallvilling is that it means Merlin is constantly not just lying by omission to Arthur but flat out lying to his face, manipulating him, on occasion straight up brainwashing him?
and like Clark Kent DOES on occasion engage in acts of gaslighting. see for example this scene. but in that instance its like well yes he did go to great lengths to deceive her but also she jumped out a window in an attempt to force him to reveal his secret so i don't think either of them come out of it great.
ok i said i was done but i am back with another aspect on this:
so Arthur is an asshole in s1. this is fine. he is at the beginning of his growth arc. Merlin training a young Arthur up to be a better king is a Thing in Arthurian literature and this is a different angle on it but nonetheless. growth arc!!
except um. it never really happens? like yeah he matures and becomes less of a manchild as the show goes along but his improvement is pretty limited.
and its like well yeah bcos he can't actually Learn anything. he must remain at all times a buffoon who is oblivious to Merlin's secret magic. he can't ever be like 'hey maybe magic isn't 100% evil after all' or 'hey maybe there's something up with my manservant' without challenging the status quo of the show. and the status quo of the show (i MUST stress this was directly stated by the creators) is that Merlin must remain Clark Kent.
Soccer players are the horses of sports. They run around in fields for hours on end. They stub their toe and they die. They fall and they die. They run into each other and
the sewing machine is like if a horse and an inkjet printer had a child
advertising lemonade is pointless. the human body already knows it needs it
on the topic. can we talk about how megan's music videos have cornered the market on the genre of like, absurdist erotic horror.
Thot Shit is the most obvious, its essentially a short film in which a powerful white man politician who enacts misogyny to women like megan while getting off to their bodies, is forced to go about his life unable to escape black women shaking ass in a hostile manner, and the video ends with a shot of the man having had his mouth surgically turned into a realistic sfx vulva. similarly, BOA is a short film clearly parodying creepypasta about haunted video games; three teens play a clearly haunted copy of "Curse of the Serpent Woman," and meg kills each of them, including killing a guy by literally crushing his face with her ass.
in Mamushi (probably the least absurdist), she's a shape-shifting serpent woman who seduces men at a sauna, kills them, and then her partner turns them into an undead army (in a scene inspired by a story from Akira Kurosawa's film Dreams). Roc Steady is a direct reference to Jennifer's Body, and it shows Meg being a quirky cheerleader who graphically kills and dismembers men. most recently Whenever is a music video that is literally set in a Salvador Dali painting (The Persistence of Memory), & while its less horror it is very absurdist in a specifically erotic way, with megan and her eroticism being associated with the strange, shifting room the music video takes place in, and is contrasted with a older woman who watches everything in quiet confusion. and that is accompanied by the repetition of "it's whatever, bitch," brushing off the need to make sense to other people.
commonality in all of these is how she blends horror, absurdity, and eroticism. her being sexy in these videos is not incidental to the horror or absurdism, and the horror isn't softened by her being sexy. the final shot of Thot Shit is genuinely unsettling; its a man with a vulva for a mouth, done with very realistic sfx makeup, clearly in horror himself. in BOA the deaths are depicted in a cartoony but still visceral way - the guy's face literally crushed by megan's ass, the girl's head blown up by being constricted by a snake. in Mamushi, megan swims through the water of the sauna, using her arched back to imitate a snake's movement in water. but when she turns into a giant snake, its just a Fucking Giant Snake. its huge and scary and a snake and it kills the guy who was admiring megan's beautiful human body. and then her victims are depicted as helpless bodies dragged away and repurposed, made into an undead thing for megan to order around.
erotic art isn't taken seriously as art. and incidentally, neither is/was horror and comedy for the most part. because all of these genres seek to create and explore certain felt experiences (desire, dread, humor) and historically art that "appeals to the base senses" is associated with the lower classes and "low culture" while art that "appeals to the mind" is associated with "high culture" (& there's plenty more to be said about all of that). megan's art specifically as a Black woman whose art is very Black and very erotic is often seen as shallow and "base." when people can't deny her obvious lyrical and performance skill, they try to separate her ability to write hard as fuck bars and deliver incredible flows from her identity as a freak bitch. so i find it really interesting how her music videos explore eroticism through horror and horror through eroticism and unites those two forces through absurdity, playing in the face of those who don't take her art seriously by actively making it a mindfuck that serves her own artistic purposes.
work like a red onion
play like a white onion
fuck like a green onion
tumblr kinda lives in a weird paradox where lemon demon is cringe drivel but neil cicierega is cool and respected
everyday i get more pissed off at the sequels bc like i can read a really great book doing so much heavy lifting setting up the politics of the cracks in the new republic and the beginning of the first order and leia’s growing disillusionment with her life’s work and make me care about a man named ransolm??? all for it to still be leading up to those nothing burger thoughtless planless blockbuster movies that didn’t care to give nearly as much of a shit as one single book does
they told me not to get lost in the weeds, but these are lush, beautiful, and ecologically necessary native plants so it's probably fine
samantha in the back fighting for her life while homotron 3000 goes for a thigh grab
I can't believe this was only posted on the 3rd of August 2025. "samantha in the back fighting for her life while homotron 3000 goes for a thigh grab" feels like a phrase I've been living with for years
graffiti wall
Peter Krause as Captain Bobby Nash 9-1-1, S02E06
The last will and testament of Hawkeye Pierce.
Where There's a Will, There's a War - M*A*S*H, S10E17
i just rescued a pill bug they’re gonna reward me with a million pill bucks i’m gonna be a fucking pillionaire
💵🫲}([[[[[)
I JUST MADE ONE PILLION DOLLARS