about me:
i exist

oozey mess

blake kathryn
hello vonnie
macklin celebrini has autism

★
cherry valley forever
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

JBB: An Artblog!

JVL

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

if i look back, i am lost

Kaledo Art
taylor price
h
Sade Olutola
AnasAbdin

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roma★
ojovivo

seen from Malaysia

seen from China
seen from Pakistan

seen from Germany
seen from Mexico

seen from Brazil

seen from Venezuela
seen from Bangladesh

seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
seen from Syria

seen from Philippines

seen from Uzbekistan
seen from United States
seen from United States
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@cupofvilatte
about me:
i exist
“Come with me, where dreams are born, and time is never planned.”
— Peter Pan
sometimes i want to go back
not because i ever thought it was OK
but i was comfortable
i knew where i stood.
~~ vilate
from the window of the ballet studio
while ice cream dripped onto my hand,
i heard the scrubbing in the other room,
i saw the fan spinning.
then ice cream dripped into my lap,
i felt and it smelt so sweet,
and i thought i was winning.
~~ vilatte
David Bowie on the anti-intellectualism of American media:
In American media, particularly sitcoms and animated series, there is a persistent trend that elevates ignorance as a virtue while mocking intellectual curiosity. The ideology of “ignorance is bliss” is woven into the cultural fabric of entertainment, shaping generations of viewers to equate intelligence with alienation and foolishness with belonging. While comedy has long relied on exaggeration and absurdity, the steady glorification of stupidity goes beyond humor and enters the realm of subtle propaganda.
Sitcoms such as Married… with Children, According to Jim, and Two and a Half Men construct entire narratives around the bumbling, clueless father or male lead who succeeds despite laziness, arrogance, or sheer idiocy. These men are not punished for their lack of insight but rewarded with acceptance, family loyalty, and steady laughs. Their smarter counterparts - wives, neighbors, or children - are depicted as uptight nags or outsiders, undermining the value of critical thought. This formula quietly reinforces the idea that intelligence is undesirable, even socially corrosive, while ignorance is charming and relatable.
Animated series often push this further. The Simpsons’ Homer, Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, and Beavis and Butt-Head all became cultural icons precisely because of their stupidity. Their ignorance is framed as endearing, humorous, and quintessentially American. In contrast, characters who display knowledge - Lisa Simpson, Brian Griffin, or teachers and authority figures - are mocked, sidelined, or portrayed as pretentious and ineffective. This dynamic ensures that intelligence is not something to admire but something to ridicule.
The cumulative effect of these portrayals is not neutral. In a society where media shapes identity and aspiration, constant reinforcement of “it’s cool to be dumb” nurtures an anti-intellectual culture. At best, it conditions audiences to distrust expertise and prefer gut instinct over critical reasoning. At worst, it serves as cultural anesthesia, dulling the drive for education and reflection. The laughter becomes a mechanism to normalize mediocrity.
Whether intentional or not, this trend aligns neatly with the interests of power. A population trained to laugh at intellect and idolize ignorance is less likely to question authority, resist manipulation, or cultivate independent thought. The ideology of celebrated stupidity, packaged as harmless comedy, functions as soft propaganda: it perpetuates a culture of complacency where critical thinking is not only unnecessary but uncool. In this way, television comedy quietly reinforces the oldest control mechanism of all—keeping people entertained enough to stop asking questions.
11/11
We shall not see you again, except those who have something divine to believe. Perhaps you’d have thought we’d wane But this quadrennial date we grieve.
This type of impact impressed A generation of classmates, both friend and fiend. Was this, for you, but a game? Or what made you so desperate to leave?
In the realm you now exist Be it a hidden place or something that’s unseen, I hope you trust those still here To do justice to your memory.
dance290
she told me not to apologize that my balance was all off-kilter that i was not taller, or thinner.
does she know what she's been given? an echoey room for girls who have been, at some time or another, not good enough.
she is healing a part of a generation that belong to this world where perfection is god.
every morning, in the small gaps between my awaking, and when my heart breaks again, i see your bundle of love.
yellows and pinks swaddled in a jar on my desk which remind me I'm not all alone, after all: that loneliness is not infinite. i believe we speak a secret language, known only to the blooms, and the gods of healing.
it’s that time again
a list of 100+ buildings to put in your fantasy town
academy
adventurer's guild
alchemist
apiary
apothecary
aquarium
armory
art gallery
bakery
bank
barber
barracks
bathhouse
blacksmith
boathouse
book store
bookbinder
botanical garden
brothel
butcher
carpenter
cartographer
casino
castle
cobbler
coffee shop
council chamber
court house
crypt for the noble family
Neil said, "I was good. I was really good."
i am ready to come home-
i never thought i would say-
but the bed is not mine and the river has turned its cold shoulder
it’s a strange thing to be a stranger in your own home- to not belong.
there is a kind of wishing we all do, at some time or another, to want to return to the child one used to be.
how treacherous the day when you lie on the floor of your once-home and let it all go.
those hills, you never climb again, that canal- never swim.
you will never swing from the branches of the candy tree or sled through the divots in the garden.
you will never come back to this place, where you associate both healing and hurting. here you found safety in the constance. here you submit to your monsters, and still forgive them.
goodbye, good riddance, god speed,
to a home where i am the loneliest i’ve ever been.
~~ vilatte
after all this time, i wish you could know:
when i go to my happy place it is still the summer of tall soft grass above a blue sky, laying in sundresses and overalls- making pictures out of cloud. we hummed music and made lists, which i still go back to. when i need a little peace, there is still that stone lodge up the path, and my sister riding through the field on a bike. there’s bread in the kitchen and two picnic tables outside.
even when there were tears, they were cool, refreshing- like lemonade, or the water i carried to my tomatoes that year.
even then, some part of me suspected it was too beautiful to not be fleeting. and though those imagined memories were made so many years ago, they live in me now.
This must be
my dad's church because I imagine,
if I were to leave,
that Jesus would still love me, but for my dad I cannot speak.
~~ vilatte
I know I’ve spoken about my issues with ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ (2023) before, both in my initial thoughts post about the film after it released and a couple of smaller comments since, but I’ve realised something this past week after rewatching the original Disney cartoon and the 2003 non-Disney live-action while sick, and I feel I need to talk about it.
It’s about Wendy Moira Angela Darling.
While I stand by that Ever Anderson was one of the highlights of the film and that she did a great job as Wendy, the Wendy in the film is not really the Wendy seen in Barrie’s book, nor the one in the play and other films adaptations. It’s a very different character in a lot of ways, and while it’s normal for characters to differ from adaption to adaptation - especially over the course of 70+ years - I feel like the Wendy seen in the 2023 is more like Jane, Wendy’s daughter, from Disney’s Return to Neverland sequel in 2002.
Let me preface by saying that I actually love Jane in the sequel as a character - I see a lot of myself in her, and while the sequel in itself is not really my favourite, I do have some nostalgia for it because I grew up with it and it’s a cute little story. I like that Jane is actually different from Wendy in a lot of ways; she’s a lot more headstrong and more of a tomboy, and while she’s also a storyteller at times like her mother (mostly to her brother Danny), she is a lot more practical I think and seems to be opposite to Wendy in that she’s trying to grow up too fast. Wendy believes in Peter Pan and doesn’t want to grow up, meanwhile Jane believes Peter Pan to be silly childish nonsense, that she has to grow up quickly and be more adult due to the war/her father being away - Wendy says to her, “you think you’re very grown up - but you have a great deal to learn”.
Obviously the 2023 Wendy doesn’t want to grow up, that’s still the same, but in terms of personality, temperament and the way she treats her brothers after the broken mirror incident (blaming John for it), she reminds me more of Jane than Wendy. Like Jane, she also doesn’t seem to have a good time going to Neverland (at least not at first?) and she seems to take on a lot more action than Wendy did in the animated film.
Of course, it’s not the first time that we’ve seen Wendy wielding a sword and fighting pirates - the 2003 Wendy was shown to play with wooden swords and use real ones, even remarking, “who are you to call me ‘girlie’?!”. I’m not saying that Wendy can’t be a sword wielding girl and fight because she can, it’s one of the additions I love the most about the 2003 film.
The problem with the 2023 version of Wendy is not her being a main character (she has always been a main character), nor her sword fighting and being generally bad-ass - it’s the erasure of the other qualities that make her Wendy Darling.
One of Wendy’s primary character traits is her mothering nature - she is very motherly to her brothers, and when she hears that the Lost Boys don’t have a mother, she’s aghast and agrees to be their mother. The whole “Peter is father, Wendy is mother” idea is clearly a reference to how kids in the playground will play games like “mummies and daddies” - kids imitating what they see around them. It’s all a big pretend game in Neverland for fun. It’s also undeniable that Wendy pretending to be the Lost Boys’ mother is clearly reflective of her own mother, who she adores and is portrayed as the loveliest lady ever, and how she’s imitating Mrs Darling in a lot of ways during this “game” - singing to them, telling them stories, medicine etc.
Some would argue that Wendy is “forced” into being the “mother” and that while all the boys are off having fun, she’s left playing house, which I understand. But what a lot of modern audiences and filmmakers don’t understand these days is that motherhood is NOT an anti-feminist idea - there seems to be this view that portraying a girl wanting to be a mother or expressing the wish to be married/have children is some old-fashioned misogynistic notion, which is absolutely bizarre to me.
As a feminist myself, I believe that there is no clear cut definition of “womanhood” or what it means to be a strong woman with autonomy. Some women want to have careers and not have children, and that’s fine; some women want to have children, that’s fine; some women want both, and that’s fine. What matters is that it’s the woman who is deciding what she wants.
For me, Wendy has always been this remarkable and extraordinary character to look up to because she chooses to grow up - and for her, that means having her own children to tell her stories to. That’s what she wanted, that’s why she went back to England, and that’s part of her character arc, realising that by growing up she has things to look forward to.
For some reason, when 2023!Wendy thinks “happy thoughts” to make herself fly when being walked off the plank, her vision for the future that she looks forward to involves piloting automobiles that haven’t even been invented yet and then dying alone? Which… I mean, if that’s how someone wants to live then fair enough but that’s not Wendy. That’s not the Wendy Darling I grew up loving.
A lot of my issues with the 2023 version of Wendy do in fact link with other issues of the film in general: the Lost Boys including girls, for example. Like I get wanting to be inclusive, and I 100% wanted to be a Lost Girl growing up, but the Lost Boys are boys for a reason (“girls are much too clever to fall out of their prams”), and when Wendy arrives it’s a huge deal because they’ve never actually lived with girls before, and the only concept of girls they have is their memories of “mother”, which is why Wendy becomes their mother figure - because they literally don’t have any other female figures in their lives to compare her to other than the tiny scraps they remember of their mothers.
There’s also the issue of the thing prompting Wendy not wanting to grow up being changed; in the original, it’s because it’s her last night in the nursery and moving from the nursery - aka the room she has spent her entire life thus far in - to her own room is a HUGE transitional worry that a lot of kids probably go through (usually it’s in the form of moving from toddler beds to big kid beds but still). In the 2023 version, she’s being sent off to boarding school for some reason which doesn’t really make sense to me because the Darling parents a) are so poor they have to have a dog as a nursemaid and b) love their children so much that they would never do that to them. I’m not saying that being shipped off to boarding school ISN’T a worry for a young girl or a huge deal, but it isn’t one that I think necessarily fits with the story.
There’s the fact that Wendy is no longer the storyteller; in most versions, the reason Peter visits the nursery is because he likes her stories. Instead, the reason he comes to the nursery is not because he likes her stories but because he used to live in the house? And instead of bringing her to Neverland to tell stories, he comes to take Wendy away as he apparently heard her saying she didn’t want to grow up? It just doesn’t sit right with me, but maybe that’s just my opinion.
Also, for some reason, Wendy and Peter don’t actually seem to like each other at all in the 2023 version - I’m not saying there should have been romantic hints or whatever, but even just in a friendship way they really don’t seem to care in any way about each other. They just seemed rather indifferent towards each other, and it’s kind of jarring to see.
In some ways, I feel like 2023 Wendy was made a little too bad ass and on the nose super feminist: “this magic belongs to no boy!”, slapping Peter across the face (which was just…??? Why?!?!), constantly criticising Peter/Neverland, having WAY more action and heroic moments than Peter Pan himself… maybe in a different story it could have worked but for this one, it came across forced at times, like they were intentionally trying to show “look! Look how badass she is! She can fight off grown men all by herself! She doesn’t need a boy to help her! She can do everything by herself!”
This is why I feel like the 2003 version of Wendy is the best one (so far): while they modernised her slightly by making her sword fight and express an ambition to write novels about her adventures, she was still a storyteller and motherly figure to the Lost Boys/her brothers. For me as a child, seeing Wendy be the storyteller and her journey of acceptance about having the grow up was really important to me because I could completely relate to it.
Of course, I recognize I’m very biased because this is the one I grew up with (along with the animated Wendy of course) so I’d be interested to hear other people’s thoughts!
i’ve somehow stumbled myself into the Peter and Wendy fandom (apologies if i don’t know the proper title for the community) and I’m all here for it.
this post is just about everything i’ve thought, said, and wanted to say about the 2023 film vs other adaptations and why i think it doesn’t capture the heart of the original story
Hook: How do I get rid of my inner child? Wendy mentioned I had one and I don't know what magic nonsense is affecting me but I'll have no children on me ship.
Smee: I think that's just a metaphorical thing Capn, we were all kids once and-
Hook: I was never a child.
Smee: But how-
Hook: NEVER, do you understand Mr. Smee? Wendy must have assumed I was one, how ridiculous. How insulting! To insist at one time I was small and stupid.
Smee: But we were children... weren't we?
Hook: I don't remember such a time.
Smee: ...I guess I was wrong, I don't remember either...I could've sworn...