archival sideblog @danzigdancer - Tumblr Blog

Tumblr isn't social media, it's a habit. Like smoking. We're all gathering by the dumpster in the cold, reblogging posts.

vympr

i love reading sad books bc when your own grief is stopped up inside you like a clogged drain you can grieve for a character on a page and understand that you're also grieving for yourself a little bit

petrichara

‘There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you—may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn’t that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.’

-Anne Carson, ‘Grief Lessons: Four Plays By Euripides’

vampireapologist-archive-deacti

i love jane eyre but honestly imagine being friends with that bitch. like imagine trying to convince her to leave rochester and she’s like idk and you’re like he called u ugly???? he keeps his secret wife locked in the attic???? wake up???? and then you think she finally has it sorted out and she calls you a few months later like “his wife killed herself and burned down the house so it’s cool we’re getting married” like !!!!!!!!!!!! HOW DO YOU GO TO THAT WEDDING!!!!!!

the-resurrection-3d

The real measure of a writer is what oddly specific tropes show up constantly in their work and make you question What Happened

tunemyart

New rule - you don’t get to comment about how Xena is queerbaity if you haven’t watched the show.

tunemyart

so here’s what I really mean by this.

We keep seeing you guys tagging your current wlw fandom experiences as “not as queerbaity as xena!” or similar. And I could do the thing there I throw chapter and verse at you about how, specifically, Xena is not queerbaiting, but for the sake of brevity, here’s why that makes us furious:

1) you really mean it.

2) you have no idea how good we, as a community you belong to, had it twenty five whole years ago

3) which means that in your conception of wlw rep and what’s possible, you’re left with shows that are actively queerbaiting you. That these queerbaity fandoms are the only shoulders you have to stand on when you’re looking to build your way to a newer, better future.

The fact that Xena is still so revolutionary today speaks VOLUMES about the current wlw media landscape. The fact that whenever we get new people in the fandom - myself included, just three years ago! - the universal wide-eyed response is, “I had no idea.” It says so much.

It is both astonishing and infinitely disheartening to me that the world has forgotten about Xena - or rather, that the world has been cajoled into forgetting about Xena, dismissing it as “ugh that lesbian show” by the greater media canon before modern gay rights was a thing. And there’s a lot more too that I want to say about how the fact that we are #blessed to live in the current era of truly unprecedented gay rights does not mean that we also live in the best era for gay representation in media - but that’s another (albeit very very related) post.

But the greatest travesty is that you, modern wlw viewer, have been convinced to dismiss it yourself and among your communities, sight unseen, and have become complicit in EXACTLY the erasure it received at the end of its run for - get this - BEING TOO EXPLICITLY GAY.

How’s that for irony?

And in doing so, you’re actively participating in the erasure of not just wlw media history, but also the possibilities of what actually good wlw media can look like in the future. You are actively pushing over the shoulders of literal giants on which all wlw media rep - even your current show, the one you’re tagging “not as queerbaity as xena!” - is standing on.

I’m sorry your show is hurting you. We can all do better. We can all demand better. But first - actually watch Xena, and see what better already has been.

rachandroll

Y E S.

And I will just add, I think part of why people don’t understand how good Xena was in this regard is that they are so goddamn used to canon wlw ships being the ones that are off to the side that they don’t realize that Xena is explicitly ALWAYS centering Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship. There are two driving factors of the narrative: Xena’s guilt over her past, and their relationship. If you removed it, it is not an exaggeration to say that the show would not function. It’s absolutely integral. And that’s the main thing missing with the scraps of rep we get these days. You mostly get three flavors: tacked on, pushed aside, and queerbait. With Xena, Xena and Gabrielle’s relationship is a core part of the show and the main way all of the themes are expressed, so it’s not tacked on; Xena and Gabrielle are the ONLY main-main characters (there are lots of other reoccurring characters sure but none of them are at the same level) so it’s impossible to push them aside…so that leaves queerbait right? Which clearly it must be because 90s am I right? WRONG. Before Ellen came out and had her career ruined for years because of it, Xena and Gabrielle kissed. They are explicitly, textually, soulmates. They find each other in life after life. They are something we never seem to get - narrative centers.

I could rant about this for hours, there’s so much historical context here on so many levels that makes Xena just…mindboggling even now, but I’m gonna restrain myself. tldr;listen to tunemyart and watch the damn show

cookie-sheet-toboggan

I’m also noticing that younger wlw are defining what’s canon and what’s not, in very limiting ways. Actual, purposeful subtext and subtle main text in media is being considered not canon and queerbaiting, which is just not true. Xena was a subtextual (and very often pretty damn textual) gay love story. This is canon. It wasn’t a marketing ploy to get gays to tune in, it was the narrative.

This conversation has also come up within the Warehouse 13 fandom pertaining to Bering and Wells, yet another subtext canon love story between two women who people dismissed as not canon and queerbaiting despite the actors admitting that their characters’ were in love and they played their scenes as such.

Just because you don’t have full on coming out scenes, kissing scenes (tho Xena had those), a spoken confession of romantic love scene, or a ‘they slept together’ scene, it doesn’t mean a show isn’t purposely telling queer narratives. Not all subtext is accidental turned queerbait.

#Xena Warrior Princess

wongkarawai

In The Mood For Love (2000) dir. Wong Kar-wai

#wong kar wai

the-night-picture-collector

Joseph Sterling, From The Age of Adolescence, 1961

evilwriter37

Remember the good old days when “I ship this” used to mean “I like these characters and their dynamic is interesting. I would like to see how a relationship plays out”, and not “I think this is ideal and healthy and I want this in real life”? I’m still using the old definition of shipping, and I don’t know when it changed but I don’t like it. Fuck the purity movement. Another word twisted out of its original form.

evilwriter37

This years old post somehow gained traction again. I just want to say: Yes this absolutely does apply to those ships you can’t stand and find gross and morally reprehensible. People are not bad for what they ship. Stop reblogging this saying: “Oh, except for x, y, and z.” If you do that, the point flew right over your fucking head.

sugarmint-dreams

recent cat paintings

my shop | free mobile wallpapers!

#nice things

bronwynn

#my journey was geocities > forums & lj > ff.net > ao3 #i miss old fandom culture

disteal

I love how this website is so surly and disinterested in the neo-internet content experience that every feature imported from twitter/insta/whatever is met with an indignant fury like the French being told they cant smoke on a bus and setting the town hall on fire in protest