Everyday Bliss @psiquepassionata - Tumblr Blog

forgot to say that, without Howl chasing girls and Sophie resenting him for it, the film completely erases part of the point of Sophie being old. Wynne Jones is using an idea that Beauvoir talked about - that being an old woman is both tragic (as we lose male attention/attractiveness) and freeing (as we are freed from the male gaze). the idea is that with being old comes liberation, and the true meaning of what it is to be a woman, as society no longer forces gender norms on us.

Sophie is free from Howl’s attentions and therefore safe from harm (a big part of the book is the fact that Sophie believes he eats women’s hearts, and him chasing girls proves this to her). she takes solace in the fact that she’s old, and finds it freeing. when she learns more about Howl (notably: that he doesn’t eat hearts and that he’s not evil), she starts to curse her age and resent him chasing girls. BUT she remains old OF HER OWN VOLITION - Howl notes that she’s perpetuating the spell by wishing to remain “in disguise”. there are SO many layers to this, and lots to do with gender politics - if she’s still old Sophie can’t get hurt, she likes the freedom, etc. but of course on a personal level being old is her denying her feelings for Howl, and also a representation of her low self esteem - being old is a defence mechanism and protection, both on a gender level and a personal one.

and the film kinda… loses this? the only thing that remains is being old = low self esteem. which really sucks. because there’s SO MUCH MORE to Sophie being old in the book (perspective I already mentioned), and a HUGE amount of this is gender politics. that the film just erases.

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Also there’s the subversion of that in the book. Sophie’s belief that she’s safe from Howl, isn’t quite true because he fell in love with her while she was under the spell (and in the book, there’s no switching between looking young and old. Sophie is looking ninety the entire time, and Howl falls in love anyway.)

Also, her belief that being old means she can’t go to her stepmother or her sisters, that they’d fail to recognize her or reject her, is also unfounded. Fanny almost immediately recognizes her at the end of the book, and hugs her and cries over her and asks why Sophie disappeared. Sophie’s belief that the love of her family, friends and even her romantic interests is somehow conditional on her appearance is shown to be completely false at the end, which I think is absolutely beautiful.

Like, there’s definitely gender politics and commentary going on about beauty and youth and age and the male gaze and male violence going on, but there’s also this message about how love, real love, transcends all of that.

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I actually adore the movie on its own merits, but I think it absolutely did a disservice to Sophie as a character. When I was doing a reread last month, what hit me was that Sophie is every bit as much of a volatile emotional disaster as Howl is, and that’s pretty heckin’ great.

Howl is a pissy, dramatic asshole even when he’s at his best. He dissolves into green slime when his hair looks wrong. He deals with his problems by getting falling-over drunk and makes the walls shake every time he sneezes just so everyone will take pity on him. He’s a self-proclaimed coward who has to trick himself into taking responsibility for anything.

Movie Sophie deals with this as well as she can. She learns to look past his drama and sees his tender heart and noble intentions. She becomes the mature one in the castle, fixing everyone’s problems, essentially taking up a motherly role to all the other characters.

Book Sophie does the same… but she does it while dealing out as good as she takes. Howl is chasing after every woman except Sophie? Sophie meticulously cuts up his suit into triangles. Howl floods the room with green slime? Sophie hate-magics weed killer strong enough to melt concrete, and chucks it at Howl’s head. Howl can’t stop avoiding his problems? Meet the queen of avoidance, who clung to her curse to avoid confronting her feelings for Howl. Howl has to basically trick himself into taking action? I would like you to meet Sophie, who was too scared to leave her home her whole life, but the moment she’s under a curse is like “WELP, GUESS I’D BETTER LEAVE HOME RIGHT THIS MOMENT AND NEVER COME BACK.”

The moment of Howl and Sophie getting together in the book isn’t “Sophie fixes everything through her inherent goodness.” It’s “Sophie realizes that Howl has been secretly scheming to fix all her problems exactly the same way that she has been secretly scheming to fix all his problems because neither of them is a normal functioning adult, and they both look forward to yelling at each other for the rest of their wonderful lives.” And losing that, losing all of Sophie’s flaws and ridiculous moments as well as Howl’s efforts to fix her life as much as she’s trying to fix his, means that we’re left with a typical romance trope of a woman having to fix all of a man’s problems and be the perfect, mature one in the relationship, while he can coast purely on charm. The revelation that half of Howl’s antics were actually schemes to break Sophie’s curse or even just make her happy is important because for once it goes both ways. Not just “woman fixes man with her love,” but “people fix each other with their love, sort of, except for all the parts that will never change and that’s okay because flaws can be just as attractive as virtues, and if he laughs when you throw weed killer at him then he might be the one.”

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Omg YES

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It’s a little off topic, but I also hate that the movie reduced Sophie’s low self esteem to just ‘wah I’m not pretty :(‘ while book!Sophie was constantly held back by the belief that she was inherently a failure and that anything she tried to do would be doomed to fail, so there’s no point in trying to do anything just for herself or improve her own life, because she’s just gonna fuck it up anyway! And a lot of that was connected to fairytale logic that Sophie was doomed to failure because she was the oldest of three, and maybe that wouldn’t translate well for a movie that’s primary audience was Japanese because that’s a more western trope, but god Sophie loses so much when her insecurity is all about her looks.

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This is by far the greatest thing I’ve found in a junkyard.

So about a year ago me and my friend Nathan were walking around the “Pick-a-Part” in Clarksville Tennessee… We were searching for car badges and a spoiler to put on his trashy conversion van. While going through the lot we found what is probably the single greatest car to ever drive on any road in the world.

You are looking at… a Dora the Explorer themed gangster car… I’ve seen spongebob themed cars, Newport themed cars, sports team themed cars, but THIS.

trumps them all.

OH BUT IT GETS SO MUCH BETTER!!!!

You see… there has to be a reason that a car like this…

Would end up in the junkyard… SO me and Nathan did some looking around and tried to figure out why…

I still can’t believe the decals on this…. wait…

HOLD ON ONE FUCKING SECOND!

OH!

OH MY FUCKING GOD!

YES! SOMEONE ACTUALLY GOT SHOT WHILE DRIVING THEIR DORA THE EXPLORER CAR IN CLARKSVILLE TENNESSEE!

And THAT, is the single greatest thing I’ve found in a junkyard to this day.

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okay this is totally wild but i RECOGNIZE THIS CAR

and i actually have a picture of it from its functioning days - this is dated 2012 -

parked in front of an adult store!

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Dark tumblr show me the history of this car

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world heritage post

lanangon

Dennis Mukai

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be there for u

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edit🥀

mrspider-deactivated20221213

whoever invented stuffed animals really just understood whats important in life. sometimes you just wanna hold a guy

kreature-ofthenight

Im sorry but this calls for a story time

This is Margarete Steiff, founder of the Steiff Toy Company (They make mainly stuffed animals in case you didn't know)

She was paralyzed due to Polio and was discriminated against very much for growing up in conservative Germany in the 1840´s, the townspeople literally arguing her father should just let her drown one time because she would never be “of any use”

But she was very determined to make something of her life, when an operation meant to help her walk failed she said she had to find something else to focus on, so she started sewing dresses, more importantly she started sewing dresses with a sewing machine (because it was easier to handle with one hand) wich received major backlash because bigoted people don't like new things or disabled people doing things differently

Anyway she also made needle cushions to sell, and these were elephant shaped, She quickly realized that children love these things to play with, wich was a fairly new thing because most toys were made out of hard material or rag-dolls at the time, so stuffed animals really weren't a thing

Steiff loved the concept and quickly turned to make more “animal dolls”, she even asked her brother for help going to local Zoos sketching the animals so she could use it as reference

The concept quickly took of and She was able to found a company giving work to many more seamstresses in town, but then the economy crisis struck and the Steiff company was on the verge of closing down

The last hope was a toy fair, if they could sell a large number of stuffed animals there it might save the company, And they indeed did get lucky, because they meet an overexcited American who fell in love with the stuffed bears they had made, for they were so life like, the man bought the entire stock and ordered thousands more in advance wich saved the company

Now you may wonder, why does one weird American need thousands of stuffed bears? Well to advertise for the presidency campaign of Theodore Roosevelt wich resulted in the stuffed bear becoming widely know as the Teddy Bear