i need some more gifs of barbara howard in the pink and blue outfit she wore in the finale!! frances turner is so beautiful but i think that outfit is my favorite on her these past two seasons.
irony, satire, and subversion in media is so rarely done correctly & it’s starting to piss me off 😭
& the main problem with this is bc most creatives never really go into detail about what exactly their politics are and don’t affirm the subversion they’re stating in their art so a huge part of their politics/the subversive message tends to be whatever their audience project onto them/it.
this becomes an issue bc the original theme/message becomes construed & highly dependent on audience’s interpretation (that is colored by each individual’s perspective and nuance they’ve lived & also internal biases) instead of the intention of the original material. so it ends with the audience agreeing with the ironic, subversive narrative instead of what the narrative is trying to highlight &/or “call out” with those literary devices. so now instead of it being subversive it looks like the artist/message is endorsing potentially harmful rhetoric & being seen as a representative/mouthpiece of those ideals.
for example: Arcane writer, Amanda Overton & others and their character Mel Medarda:
In explaining her characterization of Mel Medarda, Amanda states that Mel is supposed to be a subversive spin on the common femme fatale trope, which usually depicts a woman who embodies beauty, mystery, seduction, and danger, using her looks to manipulate people where she wants them mostly with ill intent. Amanda says that she subverts this trope from Mel because as the series goes on the audience is met with Mel's nuances, trauma, emotional turmoil, vulnerability, and compassion that are used to distinguish her away from the trope and subverts it. So the affirmation of the subversion or the switch of Mel not being the trope anymore was when we saw her become vulnerable with her love interest, Jayce, & with her mother about her being exiled from her homeland & learning she became a councilor to prove to her family that she can be powerful/successful outside of their ridged expectations of power/success.
But this subversion failed because Amanda & the other arcane writers ignored how depicting a Black female character as a manipulative, seductress reinforces the jezebel caricature rather than challenging the femme fatale trope as they initially intended. They also highly underestimated the audience’s (comprised of mostly white/non-Black people) unwillingness to unlearn their internal biases of villainizing a Black female character to acknowledge the subversion/switch in the narrative. both leading to the misinterpretation and mischaracterizing of Mel as representation of the harmful stereotype rather than a subversion of it. this shows how the consequences of not explicitly affirming subversive messaging can result in the messages being misconstrued instead of understood, because without this clarity, the artist's intent is overshadowed by the audience's perception, ultimately leading to the reinforcement of the very narratives that were meant to be challenged/critiqued.
(it’s also important to note Amanda has done this to numerous Black female characters she has written & every time she fails to do the subversion, she claims to put in the narrative correctly)
The Epstein Files are and have always been a piece of political theatre, a football the bourgeois parties in the USA kick around to accuse each other of being pedophile rapists constantly, knowing full well that the contents implicate many members of both parties. Hyperfocusing on these files, and even going so far as to claim that the real material movements of the bourgeoisie are a "distraction" from the theatre (!!) is completely misunderstanding politics, taking politics to be the spectacle and not the real movement of the real machinery of the state. What is the Trump administration actually doing? It's pushing for yet another imperialist war, this time on Venezuela; it's continuing Israeli colonial efforts in Palestine; it's pushing increasingly militarised ICE and other federal agents into US cities in order to brutalise immigrants and even just anyone who looks non-white at this point. What are the Democrats doing? The best they've been able to do about this is to is temporarily take away SNAP benefits from 42 million people who depend on it while also ensuring that ATC and other critical services fail to pay their workers in a failed attempt to get Trump to capitulate on demands he was never going to capitulate on using a lever which doesn't actually move him. This is where real politics can be found - in the movement of money and the deployment of troops - not in a exciting fanfare which has the affect of reducing politics to a spectator sport where you are encouraged to engage through posting on social media and speculating about which politician you hate is the biggest pedophile. If you're someone in the USA and you want to take politics seriously, if you want to produce change, you need to understand this and find how you personally are best able to enter into real material politics - get organised, agitate around the idea of a general strike which could actually bring the US economy to its knees, confront the enemy where you are truly being attacked. This, not yelling at the cinema screen hoping to convince the actors to change their actions, is how you change the world. Power is with the people when they are organised and militant.
I hate you pushing away female characters so they dont get in the way of your m/m ship, I hate you making female characters the "braincell holder" or the "mom friend", i hate you demonizing random female characters that didnt do anything but making male characters that are in the wrong weridly sympathetic and sad, i hate you people hating female characters but prasing male characters for doing the same thing, i hate you people saying they dont like a female character cuz she has nothing going on but give a male character 2 billion headcanons expanding apon him, i hate you making a female character only revolve around a male character, i hate you writing where they fail the bachel test, i hate you "girlboss" and "girlfail" and "mommy step on me", i hate you people only making female characters nice and quiet, i hate you fridging, i hate you people who only put 1 wlw ship in the background of ur fanfic and ignore them, i hate you fandom misogyny
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