😎

[jaenlaen]

I am begging does anyone have a screenshot of the Ethel Cain tweet that says I am a Florence and the machine can first and an American second 🧍‍♀️🙏

[jaenlaen]

I love Alicent and she is my favorite character but if I was rhaenyra I would have murdered her

[nadiea]

thoroughbreds (2017) original screenplay 

[tibby]

good evening everyone i’m thinking about how lily turns back after amanda snores. she’s already killed her stepfather, she’s already wiped the blood all over amanda, she’s already staged the crime scene so she can go on with her life. and then she goes to leave, but amanda snores, and it awakens something in her, and she turns back. because it’s so human and so real and the tiny sound is enough to break lily and make her understand what she’s just lost. she’s past the point of no return and she’ll never have amanda again, never hear her snore again. and so she gives herself one last moment with amanda, curls up in her arms and cries and it’s just the two of them and amanda is passed out (she drank the drink, she knew that lily drugged the screwdriver and she drank it anyway, did something so selfless and so fucked up for lily and lily alone), and lily has nothing to gain from this, and it’s the only time in the movie that she’s not playing pretend, because it’s just her and amanda it’s the last time they’ll be together, and they’re both so deeply fucked up but maybe that’s why they understood each other. more than anything or anyone. most of all.

because i think i loved you. 

[jaenlaen]

I feel like people judge characters in period works on modern standards which make absolutely no sense. Like you guys are mad this medieval wench isn’t a perfect feminist?? 😭😭 Saw an article about how Alicent Hightower is complicit in the patriarchy and is somehow by modern standards similar to an current American conservative because she doesn’t challenge the patriarchy enough. It’s 100 AC how challenged do you think the patriarchy is gonna be by one(1) woman, and a woman that is visibly unable to cope. Not that she’s totally moral or something (it’s game of thrones come on) but the impossible standard (usually) female characters are held to is ridiculous. You just have to imagine being in someone else’s shoes for 30 seconds to avoid these god awful takes 😭

[cardassiangoodreads]

It's late and I should go to bed instead of talking about media again but I've had Utena on the brain because Reasons and I keep thinking about how much I love the Juri/Shiori relationship, especially because of what a fucking mess it is. And how much it speaks to the brilliance of that show. The usual "closeted gay kid falls in love with their best friend" story goes a couple of ways: a) best friend is gay or bi too and falls back; b) best friend is straight, but is really nice and lets them down easily and they stay friends. Now, it's not like that never happens that way in real life, it does, but it's an ideal and a fantasy...and not right for a series that's about exposing and deconstructing the truly vicious and brutal aspects of adolescence and especially adolescent sexuality and the way those experiences can fuck us up for life. So instead, we get the story of two girls whose feelings are mutual, but one of them is deeply, existentially terrified of those feelings, so she lashes out at her "friend" in rage at forcing her to confront them. Even before she knew what it was she felt, Shiori was competing with Juri over boys because she refused to conceive of bonds with girls as anything but competition. And her rage in "Thorns of Death" shows that she is still largely in denial. She can't openly love Juri, can't even admit to herself that she loves Juri, so she instead takes pleasure in punishing her and watching her longingly as she suffers ("I love the look in your eyes when I hurt you" in the sword-pulling scene...)

This is why Shiori is a Black Rose duelist and especially Juri's Black Rose duelist. Juri at this point has accepted that she's a lesbian and what she feels for Shiori, even if she's not totally happy about it; they share the same struggle, but with the main duelist much further along in that journey, whereas the Black Rose duelist is still struggling with self-actualization. (Yes, you can apply this to every single pair there, though that's a longer essay.) This is why I love the Black Rose arc so much, btw, and I rewatch those episodes so often.

Lots of shows like this can go into the pain of unrequited love; in fact, Utena has one of the best examples of that in anything with Wakaba's story a few episodes later. (If watching "Wakaba Flourishing" doesn't absolutely stab at your heart, I'm not convinced you ever were a teenager?) But the pain of requited love, of opening yourself up to that kind of vulnerability, especially when the particular part of yourself you're exposing to that is one you never wanted in the first place...and you have to do that on top of the general confusion of being a teenager who is new to all this relationship stuff anyway? That's something you see a lot less, and it takes a show as special as Utena to really tease that out that way. I also think it's something that's pretty familiar to a lot of us who are gay, whether we've been the Juri or (hopefully not) Shiori in this situation.

I think Juri and Shiori can eventually come out of it into a healthier relationship, but in the middle of the show, when it's still like this, I love how toxic it is because it's such a cathartic kind of toxicity to watch if you've ever been a lonely gay teenager.

[jaenlaen]

Utena Tenjou truly built diff bc if the girl I liked physically stabbed me in the back I’d just flop on my face n stay like that

[kristina100000]

[paper--machete]

??? Sad mommy?

[buriedknight]

'You're starting to understand something, aren't you?'

[jaenlaen]

Lady Maria and Malenia are gay… don’t ask me how I know

[queencalanthes]

I feel like you and I got off on the wrong arm. Maybe we should try the other.

SEVIKA and JINX Arcane, season 1

[jaenlaen]

1x17 I feel like this at the end of the episode implies some kind of deeply repressed feelings on shiori’s part for Juri

[jaenlaen]

“You we’re right I don’t need a boyfriend when I have you :)”

MAEVE AND AIMEE R LESBIANS PLEASE

[jaenlaen]

Idk y but I imagine poison ivy and Batman’s dynamic as

Ivy: I’m gonna go stop this chemical plant from contaminating the water in Gotham-

Batman: yes! U go girl!

Ivy: -with murder

Batman: *muttering under his breath* can’t have shit in Gotham

[jaenlaen]

As much as I love Carmilla I can’t help but feel her character was poorly written. They built her up as a villain for two seasons just to have her die against night creatures in what was essentially a side quest for Isaac. Every character is given a “human” side no matter how bad they are and her whole ‘I killed the man who turned me’ felt so cheap especially since they had her bring it up everytime she spoke. Ambition as a villainous trait is nothing new, but she was killed so that her war would never happen. But it already wasn’t happening! Lenore, morana and striga were decidedly planning to call off the war effort already. The fact that they have her flat out state she is overly ambitious is almost hilarious because by season 4 they have her flat out stating her dry motivations. Her biggest offense ends up being that she was delusionally drawing maps, and that Isaac personally didn’t like her that much since he loved Dracula. She was such a badass character but by the end they made her so two dimensional and ruined her potential in the story. Her final fight scene was amazing, but I really felt that her motivations and arc was stupidly black and white especially compared to the other characters.

[rosepresse]

Clytemnestra, John Collier, 1882 / Gone Girl, David Fincher and Gillian Flynn, 2014

[princepestilence]

“I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete, ne'er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually–the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness become a kind of shorthand for each other–I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”

—

“Dream House as Queer Villainy” from In The Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

(via

biandlesbianliterature

)