Ultimate basic white girl name, like the lass who sat next to you in school and had pigtails and drew little hearts over her âiâs. The Duke Leto of the Atreides, House Major of the Galactic Padishah Empire⌠and his girlfriend, Jessica. Hilarious.
She falls in love with the biggest wife guy in the universe, and he wonât marry her. Hilarious.
Duke Leto loves her and trusts her fully, despite knowing that sheâs a witch from the long line of witches who do rapey mind control stuff for eugenecist reasons. He just reckons sheâd never do that to him. And heâs RIGHT â sheâs been painstakingly trained in mind control and she never uses it on him and they just have consensual sex like normal people, thanks very much. Hilarious.
Sheâs been raised, conditioned, and trained so she can accomplish one (1) task: have a baby girl with Leto. When it comes down to it, she reckons heâd be disappointed at the gender reveal so decides to have a boy instead, upending 10,000 years of meticulous planning and concerted effort. THEN, she ends up having a girl with him afterwards anyway. Hilarious.
She births a messiah to make her bf happy and piss off her bosses, and then births an abomination completely unintentionally. Hilarious.
Despite her Bene Gesserit training and bodily awareness and general deep understanding of things, she somehow doesnât realise that going through the Spice Agony while pregnant will have an effect on her foetus??? Corazon mio, smoking a cigarette has an effect on your foetus. Not eating enough spinach has an effect on your foetus. Taking a massive overdose of a lethal drug was probably going to have some foreseeable side effects. Hilarious.
When Leto II and Ghanima are preborn and 9-year-old Leto II tells her that he and Ghani can remember her and their granda getting it on in extreme visceral detail and her first reaction is to that mentioning it was a little gauche of him, actually. Hilarious.
In conclusion Lady Jessica funniest character in Dune actually, no notes
no cuz jessica became the ultimate girl name bc of the character⌠the name spiked in popularity after dune was released⌠i assume herbert just wanted a weird name for his character and it ended up becoming mainstream
âEridians dislike earth because they abandoned Grace.â *Incorrect Buzzer Sound* ya missed the point of the story buddy! Itâs not about someone being âbadâ itâs about the incredible power of love and that love being worth dying for!
Gimmie Eridians who are absolutely heartbroken to hear that humans where so desperate and so scared that they where willing to part with not just one Grace, there were three of them! Gimmie Eridians touched to find that the humans planned a way for their sacrifices to be as comfortable as possible. Gimmie Eridians who send earth a message saying âWe know it must have hurt to send your heroes to die, but one made it and heâs safe here. We lost 22 good Eridians on the journey we would have lost 23 if not for your Grace.â
Give me humans sitting on Earth slowly coming to the conclusion that when we look up not only are we not alone, someone out there is alive because of one of us. That no matter what we think of ourselves a whole species thinks highly of us because we helped save the galaxy. Give me humans who figure out how to send a probe to Erid filled to the brim with messages for Grace and footage of a monument being raised that reads his name, his crews names, and then âin memory of the 22 Eridians who lost their lives on the journey to save the stars.â
I wonder how the issue of Grace being touch starved would be resolved. As happy as he is on Erid, skin to skin contact is a basic necessity. It would badly effect his mental health - especially with the starvation being prolonged.
It's actually kinda sad to think about. He'll never be able to touch another human. He'll never be able to touch his Eridian family without a barrier. The idea of all of them trying to cope with this issue is heartbreaking because, realistically, what is the fix except going back to Earth, which doesn't actually seem like an option.
Unless they figure out cloning. Expand on the meburger science, if you will.
Now imagining Rocky suggesting building a sock puppet arm out of cloned Grace-flesh that he can operate with his xenonite suit after hearing about skin-to-skin contact, and the ensuing conversation with Grace having to seriously consider whether this is a good idea and whether it's more or less fucked up than the me-burgers.
"The last time any human touched Ryland Grace was an act of horrific violence"
Well... Yes and no.
The last time Ryland Grace was CONSCIOUS of any human touch was when he was knocked out. Absolutely true.
But the last human contact he would have had was Yao and Ilyukhina. Who were told that he was scared about panicking during launch and asked to be sedated. Who did all the pre flight checks before the Hail Mary launched. Who would have carefully, gently carried Grace to his bed in the dormitory, made sure he was secure, and initiated his coma procedure.
There would have been love there. Remember Ilyukhina throwing her hands high and saying "welcome to crew!" Remember Yao saying how he hoped Grace would say yes. Remember how much the crew trusted Grace, Stratt's First Officer, the guy who helped them so much, and was so kind to them, and was the one who they entrusted their preferred methods of suicide to. Who thought they were wonderful and brave.
They would have tucked him in. Maybe brushed his hair out of his face. Maybe said something kind to him before initiating their own coma procedures.
Ryland Grace doesn't remember, of course he wouldn't. But the last human touch he ever had was full of love.
This description of what Trump is going through is spot-on. Many historians and medical experts describe Hitler's final days in similar terms, noting that Hitler's behavior in the final months of World War II involved extreme mood swings, grandiose delusions, and erratic outbursts.
These fluctuations were heavily influenced by severe physical decline. #TrumpDeathWatch
I'm assuming that Grace's voice sounds pretty monotone to an Eridian. So... do we think they kinda always interpret everything he says as Very Serious (unless they know him well, I guess, but I think even Rocky's first instinctive reaction for the first few years would still be "oh shit, I need to lock in")? No wonder they are willing to make anything for him in the epilogue, the whole savior-of-the-stars thing aside.
Grace: hey, no pressure, don't bother if it's too much trouble, but it'd be pretty cool if you made me a wristwatch?
Eridians: oh. oh, this is a Life-And-Death Situation. we need to get to work NOW or everything will DIE.
Grace, completely oblivious: you're so kind, thanks guys :D
For all that the 1800s etiquette guides are--obviously--derangedly sexist from a modern perspective? They're also mindblowing in how casually they will assert things that MODERN DAY CONSERVATIVES would scream and cry and shit their pants about.
"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.
Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:
Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."
Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....
....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.
(I realize the phrasing there sounds a lot less strong than my summary, but--trust me on this. When you're familiar with the narrative voice of these kinds of books, this passage is downright radical. The mere acknowledgement that if you treat your kids badly, it's your own damn fault when they don't talk to you? I've genuinely never seen that before in this genre.
Don't freak out over "properly trained", either. It's just a linguistic shift--at the time, "training" was used the way we would say "raising" a child today. )
"Women should absolutely work if the family economy requires it, that is only reasonable. Trying to keep your 'status' at any cost is foolish" and "Of course the wife should be open with her opinions and have full knowledge of the family economy and affairs" - Miss Hartley (The Ladies' Book of Etiquette, and Manual of Politeness, 1860) telling off every rightwing and tradwife grifter
This is legitimately how Iâve broken into a thousand places like just act like youâre meant to be there and if someone actually ends up calling you out on it just be super confused
#I would be an excellent pentester and actually have considered it as a job many a time#when I was a kid (7-14ish) my grandmother was in the hospital a lot and I was a bored kid that no one was really watching#and we spent days and days at the hospital over the course of those years#so Iâd wander around and it became a challenge to see where it could get into without gettting caught#and the answer is basically everywhere#like ther is no legit reason for an 11 year old to be in the morgue but I was tall for my age and I would carry a cup of coffee#and look irritated to be there like someone woke me up for this#and no one would question me#people would ask where are you headed and if you just exhaustedly point through a security door 97% of the time they will swipe their card#-and open it for you
I want to add that I donât make a habit of this now that I am a law abiding adult, but recently I accidentally did this again. Having been used to having my run of hospitals and walking basically anywhere as a child, I was visiting a friend in the hospital just before covid and I was legitimately exhausted and carrying a coffee cup cuz it was like 5:30am or something dumb, and I went to leave and get to the bottom floor and iâm like âthis is not the lobbyâ and I walked around for a bit and people kept holding doors for me so I traveled through many corridors, and nothing looked familiar, and then I realized every single door was a key card swipe and everyone had mag-stripe badges with varying security levels and I realized I had gotton onto a staff elevator with the staff, who had swiped their card to go down into a high-security area of the building, and people had just been letting me through all these security doors.
So then I had to out myself and be like âUm I accidentally broke into you high-security wing, please show me the door, Iâm literally just trying to leave this hospitalâ and I had to get like searched and stuff.Â
And what was funny was that while I was blissfully walking around assuming I belonged, No one questioned ANYTHING and in fact, were violating protocols left and right to let me through, but the VERY SECOND I realized I was not where I was supposed to be and let that show on my face, like three people in the hall confronted me.Â
So the take away is, be confident that you belong, look exhausted and like you donât want to be there, and carry a cup of coffee. It will open pretty much all doors.
No joke, Burn Notice is a great show. If you like Leverage, give Burn Notice a try (its available on Hulu and Prime iirc) and frfr, confidence and an excuse are all you need to get around places
One time while I was in Rome, I was busy admiring the ruins and not paying attention to signage, got lost, and ended up in some kind of archaeological dig or restoration. Not knowing it was off-limits (having missed all signage, as previously stated), I started peeking around all the stone stuff, wandering off the path, and most importantly (to this story), poking around in a hole that had been dug into the ground. I was careful not to touch anything, but still, clearly (to anyone who wasnât as oblivious as me) this was not a place a tourist was meant to be.
I finally attracted the notice of someone who was meant to be part of this restoration project when I came back up from the hole. He quickly came over to ask me, in Italian, what Iâm sure were the very normal questions of âWho are you?â, âWhat are you doing here??â, etc.
Problem: I do not speak Italian.
My brainâs solution: Quick, what language do we speak thatâs close?!Â
And that is how I wandered up out of a hole in a Roman ruin without warning and began speaking ancient Latin to an archaeologist.
This manâs face went through 15 different absolutely floored expressions in ten seconds, like you could physically see him going through the thought process of âHave I encountered a ghost from ancient Rome? No, ghosts arenât real. But if ghosts not real, how Latin??? Fellow researcher??? Supposed to be here???â
So this is the story of how I was allowed to walk away without issue at all after blatantly trespassing upon the ruins of ancient Rome, because if you speak Latin, where else would you belong?
tfw you see some stupid post that paints medieval peasants eating just plain grey porridge and acting as if cheese, butter or meat was too exotic or expensive for them, and have to use all your inner strength to not just reblog it with an angry rant and throwing hands with people. so i will just post the angry rant here
no, medieval people did not only eat grey porridge with no herbs or spices, they had a great variety of vegetables we dont even have anymore, grains and dairy products, not to mention fruits and meats, all seasonal and changing with the time of the year. no, medieval food was not just tasteless, maybe this will surprise some of you but you can make tasty food without excessive spice use, and can use a variety of good tasting herbs. if you'd ever tried to cook some medieval recipes you would know that. medieval people needed a lot of energy for their work, if they would only eat fucking porridge all of the time they would get scurvy and die before they could even built a civilisation. they had something called 'pottage' which was called that because it was cooked in one pot. you could leave the pot on the fire and go about your day, doing stuff and come back to a cooked meal. they put in what was available that time of the year, together with grains, peas, herbs, meat etc etc. again, if you would try to make it, like i have with my reenactment friends, it can actually be really good and diverse.
dont confuse medieval peasants with poor people in victorian england. dont think that TV shows what it was really like. dont think that dirty grey dressed people covered in filth were how the people looked like.
they made use of everything. too poor to buy proper meat? buy a sheeps head and cook it. they ate nettle and other plants we consider weeds now. they foraged and made use of what they found. hell, there are medieval cook books!
most rural people had animals, they had chickens (eggs), goats (milk and dairy), cows (milk and dairy), sheep (milk and dairy) and pigs (meat machine), and after butchering they used ALL THE PARTS of the animal. you know how much meat you can get out of a pig, even the smaller medieval breeds? the answer is a lot
if you had the space you always had a vegetable garden. there are ways to make sure you have something growing there every time of the year. as i said they had a variety of vegetables we dont have anymore due to how farming evolved. you smoked pork in the chimney, stored apples in the dry places in your house, had a grain chest. people could go to the market to buy fish and meat, both fresh and dried/smoked. they had ale, beer and wine, that was not a luxury that was a staple part of their diet.
this post ended once again up being longer than i planned, but please for the love of the gods, just actually educate yourself on this stuff and dont just say stupid wrong shit, takk
As this post is making the rounds again, let me just add some medieval cook books for all of you!
Here is a great collection of information about medieval cook books from all over europe with links! Here is another simple summary and some cook book links from the british library!
Here two books that I have myself and found great, and am soon going to try to remake some dishes:
The Forme of Cury: oldest known english cook book, compiled around 1390 for the english king (aka they put saffron into everything)
Das BĹŻch von gĹŻter spĂŽse: a german cookbook from 1350, part of the Housebook of Michael de Leone, a prothonotary (so no king this time). Way more down to earth recipes, and sometimes simple but still very creative with different foods and some sounding very tasty (I only know the middle high german version of this, so sorry)
It is also important to note that of course the food was VERY dependent on where you were living! Like wine and grapes were super normal every day food and drink for people where i come from (Vienna) where most of the economy was built on wine and the city (that is in a basin surrounded by low hills) is surrounded by massive wineyards, even today, going back over 1000 years. Where I live now (Norway) life and diet was fundamentally different! The ground is frozen most of the year, it is always cold, but you have a lot of access to fish (no wonder they went raiding).
To the many people on the notes asking over and over again (even though I answered it already) about the vegetables we don't have anymore:
Every modern vegetable used to look quite different, and we used to have a lot more variety of all of it. E.g. carrots: you are probably most familiar with the orange one, but that is just one vaeiation. Even today we have yellow and purple carrots, and back in the medieval period they had even more variants. There are a lot of things, especially salads that have grown 'out of fashion' and thus are not cultivated anymore like they used to be. There are a lot of kinds of peas dying out that used to be an important crop before we had potatoes in europe. Grains used to look very different (think of grain fields as high as corn fields). A lot of foods that need to be foraged also are out of fashion, sadly.
But I am happy so many people agree, and so many people enjoy learning how medieval food was really like instead of buying into hollywood/victorian era propaganda :D
I would also like to recommend Tasting History's Medieval & Renaissance Recipes playlist. A lot of good examples there of how medieval people used spices in their dishes.
When it comes to things getting dated, I keep coming back to this Far Side cartoon in terms of things dating in SUCH a strange way that the creators could never have imagined.
Because yes, Mr Larson, little Billy can absolutely be making this kind of money playing video games. If he's that good, he's probably raking in thousands in sponsorship deals for his esports team. Or promoting products on his twitch channel. Or ad revenue on his retro games youtube channel. Or just plain beta testing. Or making simulators for old games and raking it in on patreon. Or probably even more shit I'm not even aware of.
This cartoon dated badly because these days it just.... isn't a joke.
In which our hero contemplates a career writing about superheroes and pop cultureâand imagines an ending.
Our latest is live! đˇď¸ Joshua Rivera looks back on the first time he wrote about Spider-Manâand wonders if this will be his last:
Itâs unmooring to spend any energy interested in stories about a character who is committed to this central mission of power and responsibility in a world where no one really seems to believe that anymore. Politics in the United States have been overrun by people who call empathy a sin, who believe power is there to be abused, who abhor responsibility, and do not seem to think blowback is real. The world has coarsened, and Iâm not sure that stories that presume we care about one another carry the same weight anymore. We are in a world run by people who see nothing wrong with Peter Parkerâs indifference.
Read or listen to an audio version via the link above!
I feel like tumblr should be bigger fans of The Blues Brothers. It's a movie that has everything we value as a community. Attention and respect to pioneering black musicians, open hostility to nazis, open defiance to police, Carrie Fisher with a rocket launcher and flamethrower, a soundtrack that goes hard as hell, John Belushi so blasted on cocaine that he continues to do somersaults despite having a broken ankle. It's got it all!
Frank Oz is the jail's discharge clerk when Belushi gets out of jail at the beginning.
Not getting into ending spoilers but Steven Spielberg plays a character who is pivotal to the climax of the film.
Ray Charles fires a warning shot from a pistol at a shoplifter.
They did location filming in a mall that had closed the previous year in 1978. The production fucked that mall up so bad that it remained abandoned until it was finally demolished in 2012.
A total of 60 cop cars are fucking destroyed in the movie.
Itâs got Aretha Franklin as a sarcastic diner owner with her own back-up dancers. Chaka Khan is a soloist in the choir. And the whole scene set to Cab Callowayâs Minnie the Moocher is so spectacular I wonât ruin it for you.
Rewatching Truman Show for the first time in a long time, and the detail thatâs stuck with me this time is the set design.
The characters drive modern cars and hock modern products, but itâs all presented with a veneer of 1950s wholesome applecheeked Americana. Trumanâs life is presented as an escape for the audience from the drudgery of the modern day, and the aesthetic theyâve chosen for this is the post-war economic boom. This is the simple time, the movie says. This is the good time. Doesnât the modern day suck? Letâs go back and see our friends from the days when life was good.
And itâs a lie. Trumanâs life is a lie, and the image of white picket fenced suburbia theyâve presented is a lie. Itâs an elaborate construction to recreate a false memory thatâs comfortable for advertisers. The movie is a satire, but itâs also a very blatant statement against the nostalgia for a golden age which never existed. Itâs a lie. It doesnât exist.
I donât know. Iâm spitballing. Iâm biased because I despise mid-20th century Americana and I naturally treat it with hostility, but itâs very gratifying to see a movie kind of agree with me.
Earlier in the summer, I went to Florida with my friend. We decided to visit a town nearish to where we were staying called Seaside, as we had heard it was a cute place. What I did not know at the time was that Seaside is the place where they filmed The Truman Show. It was a "master-planned community," constructed in the 80s to be the perfect beach town.
Seaside, FL
Seahaven
And yes, it really does look Like That. Not just in their tourist-agency photos, in real life it looks like that. Arguably the irl Seaside is even prettier than movie Seahaven, because the the office buildings where Truman works don't exist; the town is 100% cutesy homes and little shops.
Every single house is pastel with white trim and a white picket fence with the family's name on it in a handwritten font. The streets are paved with red bricks and lined with palmettos, and families bicycle past. The streets are clean, the lawns manicured, the sidewalks pristine.
Soon after we arrive my friend says as we walk, "God I wish I could live in a place like this. Imagine having the money to live in a place like this." I reply, "I don't actually know for me...it's gorgeous don't get me wrong, but there's no grime, you know? Where's the grime? I'd feel uncomfortable. It feels like there's not a dive bar for a hundred miles."
We reach the town center, which is a wide square lined with shops on one side, food trucks on the other. We have a lovely time looking through the shops, though I start feeling kinda weird, and I'm not sure why. Probably the extreme cleanliness of the area is making me feel off-kilter. And the surreal feeling of walking through areas I recognize from The Truman Show only adds to the weirdness.
We go into a clothing store, and it's crowded with people who appear to have stepped out of a Land's End catalog. It sells boring tshirts, shorts, and sundresses in whites and blues, all needlessly expensive. Employees walk through, refolding already-pristine shirts. So perfect. "Anyone buying from here is so rich they can probably smell the poor on us," my friend jokes, "that's why they have so many employees refolding things, it's to fix anything we brush against." "Or even breathe on!" I add.
We continue on to the grocery store where, in the movie, Truman finds Marlon stocking the vending machine and first tells him he suspects his world is wrong. I buy some pasta salad there to eat for lunch (all the cafes are quite expensive), and we find a place to sit and eat. As my friend finishes up her food, I write a postcard to my sister, telling her about my trip overall and my day in Seaside, describing the town as 'vomit-inducingly picturesque.' (It has been weeks since my visit and she still has not received that postcard)
Lunch done, we decide to walk down to the beach and have a swim. And I realize something about the surreal feeling. "Weird question," I say to my friend, "have you seen any non-white people here? Am I imagining that?"
She pauses. "The lady cleaning the bathrooms?" she asks.
"No I mean vacationers. Guests, customers. Other than you, I haven't seen a single one who wasn't white."
"...No. I haven't either."
And now that we see it, we can't unsee it. It's a wealthy area, so I had been expecting it to be pretty white, but the fact that there is not a single nonwhite person who isn't working a service job feels so gross. It's as though the place is somehow still segregated, like we have stepped back in time, but not to the fun, fake, rock-n-roll-and-soda-parlor-nostalgia version of the fifties, but to the real racism-and-repression fifties.
It is so fucking weird and sinister. I feel I have stumbled into another realm. All these people giving us sideeye, riding around on their golf carts in their pristine $45 seaside-branded tshirts, taking pictures of the perfect houses all lined up in perfect rows. A whole town of Meryls wearing lulu lemon.
We walk on. It's hot, and a swim is exactly what we need. Surely they can't ruin the ocean. I myself am extremely excited to swim, because now that we've spent a few hours among the pompous populace, I want to piss in their perfect ocean more than anything in the world.
We walk along behind the beachfront bar patios that line the beach toward the access point, and the ocean looks so blue and inviting. Although the hedge growing between us and the dunes is strangely tall. "Huh," I think. "It's weird that they'd grow it like this, it blocks the view for everyone sitting on the patios."
We arrive at the boardwalk, and there is a man standing there. He says "Hold on! Do you two have a beach access pass?" I look at him in disbelief. It's a public beach, but the sign behind the man says you have to rent a beach chair to use the beach, and it's $35 per person. We glance at each other, turn wordlessly, and head back to town.
I seriously consider trying to sneak onto the beach somehow, because at this point I am very invested in the idea of pissing in their ocean, but I realize that with the tall hedge it would be nigh-impossible.
We went home after that.
So many reviews for Seaside on travel websites mention how they love to visit Seaside because they feel transported, they feel it reflects a "simpler time" or a "peaceful life." It's been weeks and I can't stop thinking about my experience. It really drove home how...complicit people can be in their own ignorance. A lot of people want to live in that perfect bubble, and especially if they have the money, they can maintain that barrier. It reminds me that part of the reason I often have trouble persuading these types of people is because they simply do not want to be persuaded. They're so proud to be the place where The Truman Show was filmed, but I rather doubt they really think about what it means that they live on a movie set, in a surreal dream.
Honestly visiting Seaside was a 10/10 unique experience. I would highly recommend it as a place to go for a couple hours if you're gonna be nearby and want to feel like you've been kidnapped into The Truman Show and/or your brain has been put in an easy bake oven. It's like a zoo for superrich WASPS. We had a really good time loudly making fun of how insane it all was, invading their little paradise with our riffraff energy. Treat it like an excursion into the jungle; you're gonna have to park a half mile away minimum, and bring all your food and water with you so you don't have to buy anything. You don't want to give them any money. They have enough.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, next time I go to the panhandle, I will be going to the nearest free public beach access to Seaside, and I will walk to the Seaside area of the beach, and I will piss in their ocean.
what the success of project hail mary has proven is that we need more movies about nerds. The original twisters, jurassic park, national treasure, Atlantis, all of these movies are centered around one big nerd and the people love it
This interview with Ncuti Gatwa crossed my dash again, and I was reminded of how much I like it. Because it makes the rare Third Argument for representation in fiction, the argument I think is the best, and I'm always happy to see it. I quote:
At times, Gatwaâs casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in âbox-tickingâ. Gatwa scoffs. âFirst of all, you donât know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out⌠it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets â open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.â (source)
What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.
It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.
These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.
But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.
3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.
For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.
For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.
And that's why Argument 3 is my favourite. I do want the world to be a better place, of course, and I think art is a part of that. But the main job of art is to be good as art. And diversity in all aspects of the production of art makes art better.
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