More Dumb Less Ass

[femlich2233]

reddit's reaction to the finale has me super depressed

Spoilers for episode 9!!!

Jax was explicitly confirmed as transgender, and anybody who argues otherwise is at best ignorant and at worst actively transphobic. It makes me so angry how much everybody denies the obvious truth. I mean, there's literally a long ass montage of all her moments with the song "Isn't she lovely?" and it's focused solely on Jax. She literally comes out to Ribbit in the flashback too.

It makes me so fucking sad and angry how little cis people will even try to understand anything. It's not open-ended. It's not ambiguous. It's blatantly obvious, and if you argue otherwise you are just a transmisogynist. agg it makes me so upset; I'm literally crying rn. I wish gooseworx had just had Jax say, "I want to be a girl" flat out.

Jax's whole fucking arc is a cautionary tale against repression. Its message is to live as yourself and to be honest about who you are. The episode ends with Jax not being able to live as herself. She could have been beautiful and wonderful and lovely, but she wasn't and never will be now, because she was too scared to be herself. That's the fucking message of the character, and yet, even after ALL THAT, people are still denying it and rejecting it and mocking it.

A transgender woman made a series with a self-insert character. A bunny who gets a little girl's room with the colors of the trans flag, who struggles with masculinity, whose backstory is about how she admitted something personal and vulnerable to her mom and was mocked for it, who was given a cute feminine bow and told "your secret is safe with me," whose final moments are set to a song celebrating and mourning the girl she could have been. And still, it's denied.

I used to cynically think that people only see who a person truly is when they die. But reddit has shown me it's so much worse. Sometimes, even after you die. people will still refuse to see you for who you are.

[why-bless-your-heart]

[mahawavy]

[nickyandmikey]

when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳

[nickyandmikey]

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW

[irrelevantlyvalid]

op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light

[chokolattejedi]

Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman

[executeness]

I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

God I’m not okay about it

[ramshacklefey]

Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.

[jbbartram-illu]

I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3

[eregyrn-falls]

Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:

I mean, will you LOOK at this:

This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:

There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.

[doodlemancy]

hello fellow artists. google has fallen. pinterest/duckduckgo AI filters don't work. do not despair; here is a list i made of places to find reference images without having to sift through piles of worthless garbage. (for future editing convenience i am just linking my blog post on dreamwidth.)

✨ good places to find art reference that are not full of AI trash 🌈

[zanthiakhalaplace]

THANK YOU SO MUCH! I have been despairing as it is so hard now to find references and photos of succulents and other things for my designs!! T_T

[feefal]

Curious pond greets butterflies

[polarity-disturbed]

Could you imagine making your own movie, making like 20 million dollars, and then going “awesome, now to install a DVD duplicating machine in my house and personally burn copies by hand like a medieval monk preserving sacred texts”

Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.

It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”

The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”

And like... I can't help but believe he's onto something

[kaijuno]

Barbarian Ross

[flightyquinn]

Man's about to turn you into the scene of a happy little accident.

[slut-jpeg]

snoopy image of the day

[redfagdiver]

[sourcreammachine]

[anothersuperstition]

in 2022 i got to make special MCR MTG cards as a gift for gerard before swarm tour and last year i decided to redo the art as a gift for them all on LLTBP and i forgot to share the art anywhere 🤡

[mjulmjul]

introducing old school team free will

[saturnvs]

fight

[retquits]

reclaiming character designs from an old project ☕

[poneappol]

this fanfiction shit easy

[luminousslime]

GOODBYE MY LOVE

[soloorganaas]

GOOD OMENS | 2019 - 2026

[milliekr]

GO hot take apparently

Imagine finding out you have 90 minutes to tie up a love story that's developed over thousands of years. You create something beautifully in character and completely on point for the plot. You pay homage to the original writer's legacy in a fitting and poetic way and create an ending that not only shows the depth of two people's love for each other but the wider love they have for the thing that brought them together in the first place.

And then you go online to find the loudest outcry is that everyone hates it and "THEY DIDN'T EVEN KISS!"

I feel sorry for people who didn't get anything out of that stunning finale.