ghost, they/them, autistic | icon by @spabes | big fan of: words, art, people, clothes, words, birbs, iodized salt, languages, dancing, laughing, and did i mention words
have been doing a Painting Project and also Editing Time all week and changing my environment and sleeping on the couch and not doing the dishes or eating well and i feel *weird as hell*
and today i must run. medquest. before a full day of socializing + intellectual work. so's i can sleep tonight.
jdjdjfjfjfjfjfndndndnf
- mm✅️
- check message re: meds✅️ oh yay i just rolled a 1 on my earlier search, we're fine, medquest Solved
- spray hair with water so as to die Less✅️
- dishes
- meds for the week
- eat any food. ideally bake something but i get if that's impossible + at least you do have dinner leftovers
- clothes for Real Person Stuff
- move furniture so as to clean walls!? aaaaaaaaaa
More works need to take a lesson from The Silt Verses and include a whole episode of shmoopy cozy romance and then have those characters die badly and then look the audience square in the face and ask “Why does this feel so much more tragic to you than other characters’ previous deaths? Why do you assume having a romantic partner makes someone more deserving of a happy ending?”
And also the aromantic protagonist is having an enemies-to-friends arc with an ex cop turned anti sacrifice cultist by arguing about misremembered song lyrics in the background
That was what that was? I've been so confused about that episode, just a random time out from stuff I was interested in to watch some more shit happen to random people.
Also it had way more foley work than normal and I ended up checking the script to understand what was going on, but I also did not give much of a shit.
#I mean they didn't deserve what happened to them #but that's true of most people
I think the motel episode was an incredibly thematically rich episode, and this—“they didn’t deserve what happened, but that’s true of most people”— is one of the huge points it was making.
The episode was very interested in happy endings, and who deserves them, and who gets them. I saw this, first and foremost, as a microcosm and a warning: do not expect the characters you love to get a happy ending, even if they deserve it after all they've been through. Because deserving a happy ending doesn't guarantee you'll get one - and conversely, ending tragically doesn't mean you did something wrong. There is no poetic justice in the world of The Silt Verses, where the good people are rewarded and the wicked punished. There are only people trying to survive in this world, and making decisions about what they can live with doing to survive. And dying isn't a cosmic punishment for being wrong. It's an episode that reinforces the show's themes of sympathy, of empathy, of understanding that it's not fair that the world works the way it does, and it's not your fault for failing to resist it and succumbing to it.
The idea of deserving has been raised before (prominently with Carpenter's righteous axe-murder rampage that made nobody feel better and accomplished nothing material) and comes back strongly in the finale, with Val and Carson - and equally so does the rejection of the idea of deserving. Did anyone Val did horrible things to deserve that? No. Did the people she did nice things to deserve a happy end? No more so than any of the people she killed. Deserving just, does not come into it. Val consciously decided to give Carson a gentle end because dealing death and violence has never once actually accomplished anything good. Her retribution against the people-she-made-into-her-mother over and over never made her feel better, her destruction of Nesh didn't actually make the world better. She felt better when she sent Chuck Harm away from the carnage and gave him a happy alternate life with his five dogs. Did he deserve that? He was a war journalist, a propagandist, a coward, and one of the first people ever to express concern for Val, all at the same time. Did he deserve a happy ending or not? Mu. It's an irrelevant question. Val could give him mercy, and so she did. As for Carson, I wanted to see Val cathartically rip him apart for so long - but then, there was no catharsis in her other violence, and at the end of it all, she could try something different. Something kind. And Val giving Carson a false happy life and peaceful death far away from war and politics echoes the Rapture and Rest giving Seb and Dev their false happy life and death in the motel.
Happiness and peace aren't a reward for being good enough, they're what we all deserve by virtue of being alive and what we all owe to each other by virtue of being fellow humans. Simultaneously, death and tragedy aren't a punishment for being bad or wrong, they happen to people both good and bad, both brave and cowardly, both humble and hubristic, the people who turned their lives around and the ones who never did. Because this world isn't fair, and it's not a reflection on them or what they deserved.
And when The Silt Verses says the world isn't fair, it's not in a smug or spiteful or cynical way. It's in a deeply empathetic way. The Silt Verses says, you don't deserve to be suffering like you are. I understand. We live in a world whose structures are built to use us up and discard us when they're done, where our lives are only worth what can be extracted from them, and it's not right, it's not fair, and it's not your fault for being ground up and spit out by it.
So the motel episode was a thematic setup, and also a warning shot: don't expect poetic justice. Not here. These randos you don't know or care about will die despite doing their best, and eventually so will the protagonists you love.
However, The Silt Verses is ALSO extremely interested in amatonormativity, and the motel episode was an exploration of the theme of deserving in terms of amatonormativity as well. It sets up a cute cozy romance between two sad men who have not done anything more wrong than anyone else in this world, finally finding a modicum of understanding, of happiness, of peace, in their romantic connection. And then the episode rips it away and kills them both. I saw it as very blatantly turning to the proverbial camera and asking: was this uniquely tragic? Was what happened to Seb and Dev sadder than what happened to Vaughn, to Hembry, to Eliza, the Linger-Straits woman Val turned into her mother and then dismembered? Did Seb and Dev deserve life and happiness more than the others? Why? Because they were in love? Why does that make happiness more real, and tragedy more tragic? They didn't deserve to get consumed by this god and then die. Of course they didn't. And neither did Vaughn, or Hembry, or Eliza, or the Linger-Straits woman. The kind of relationship they're being ripped away from - a lover, a friend, a sibling, parents, the self - doesn't make a person's death worse, doesn't make someone deserve it less. And that was a big thing I got from "All Lovers Part As Dust" too, that questioning of amatonormative narrative expectations that says that finding romantic love is a unique happiness and losing it is a unique tragedy. It's all happiness. It's all tragedy. No one deserves to be eaten by a hungry god or an uncaring capitalist system. And yet it keeps happening.
This little scene really highlights why im so insane over the way tlt is written. It is brilliant mix of beautiful prose and stupid stuff. There especially is just Something about how nona feels envious for... not having a mother for Pyrrha to punch of an airlock. Like yeah, not an emotion I have had, but yeahhh girl I understand what you mean. Ough.
Gideon has history. She has context.
Nona collects old people and doesn't have a lot of time for the tinies. Nona sprang out of nowhere. Nona is hungry for memory.
In light of recent events, I have begun submitting bug reports when I see mature content labels applied inappropriately to posts, especially if an appeal has been rejected.
for what it's worth: after a few months of submitting help tickets as 'feedback' when i saw a post inappropriately flagged as mature, i tried following this suggestion instead. today i got my first-ever response from tumblr support on this issue, letting me know that a post i'd submitted a ticket before has had its mature content flag removed.
I wish people were as scared of getting into a car accident as they are of being true crime'd. Maybe then they wouldn't be on their phones while driving.
[as if this is not a normal and natural human thing to want] yeah i just really want to connect with people for some reason. Like some weird loser freak
Recent work on queer kinship has helpfully redressed a neoliberal gay and lesbian stance that seeks to reify "families we choose" (Weston). These scholars, in particular, Eve K. Sedgwick, David L. Eng, and Judith Halberstam, highlight the ways in which attempting to reconceive the family in terms of queerness, to construct affective bonds and grant them legitimacy and public recognition by aligning them with normative family structures, both works to erase racial difference and also limits what constitutes intimate connections. Sedgwick's reading of the avuncular in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) brings into relief the ways uncles and aunts trouble the importance of the Oedipal familial structure and introduce new avenues for queer family seduction. Yet ultimately, she argues, "redeeming the family isn't, finally, an option but a compulsion; the question would be how to stop redeeming the family" (72).
-- Carolyn Tate, "Lesbian Incest as Queer Kinship: Michael Field and the Erotic Middle-Class Victorian Family"
They also specifically contacted members of the leather community, used them as models iirc, and donated $100k to Outright International. They talked the talk and walked the walk and put their money on it too. I don't really care that I can't afford and don't want this merch, I love to see my community getting the respect it deserves. Levi's said, "We make jeans which gays wear lots of jeans? Oh leather daddies? Let's call them."
I think Levi's donates to Outreach International every year too, as well as sponsoring pride events and other community support. They were offering Same Sex domestic partner benefits to employees in the 90s, and have been very public about their support for pro-lgbt legislation all through the 2000s.
So, you know, a giant corporation that walks the walk pretty consistently.
dededos
prguitarman
kianamaiart
izzy806
tangentwithtanner
