I have a bad feeling about this @sleepisforthe-sane - Tumblr Blog

What do you think of the use of Gray aliens in Spielbergs new movie Disclosure Day? Unimaginative or sensible?

Kat, I am drunk in a tiny village in France trying to sell people coffee and to a lesser extent a new novel by the American writer John Green.

If there are creatures from another world participating in ours, I just hope they drink coffee and/or read.

sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog

i just want you to love something the way i love the world cup.

sleepisforthe-sane

#this is why we knew JG belongs on tumblr #welcome back bro

sapphireh3arts

today is the ten year anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub shooting. a full decade ago, i lost a friend and a coworker. i was lucky. i had friends that lost several people. today, please remember and fight for all those that have died to live the life they should have been free to. i'll always remember you, Cory.

ehlihr

it’s gorgug- keep going.

zarahartist

Katara from ATLA

This is a prize piece for a ATLA stamp rally taking place in MCM London.

noah-wyles

she's the best of us

anarchistmemedistro

rjshope

jinkook jinkooking during Into the Sun | BTS world tour ARIRANG in Japan, Day 1

for @minyoongi-ah✨

[cr.movewithsope]

alexanderwales

I do think it's a beautiful thing when an author is clearly going for a metaphor, but the diegesis gets in the way. The story has symbols, but they're not just symbols, they're real things that exist within the world of that story, and as soon as the reader thinks about this, the symbol can be shattered.

I don't know what it is I find nice about this, but maybe it's the wet impact of meaning-making against base reality.

alexanderwales

I was asked for examples, here are two:

X-men is always the one that comes to mind, where superpowers are a metaphor for being gay, or Jewish, or non-white, but on a diegetic level, superpowers include things like mind control and being bulletproof and blowing up things. So then you have mutant registration drawn as a parallel to the government making lists of undesirables, but what the writers have done is made imagined threat into literal threat, as the people with superpowers actually can effortlessly murder someone. That is, the false rhetoric of destruction has become literalized.

There are mecha shows where piloting the mecha is a metaphor for the overwhelming burdens placed on children, but diegetically it actually is the fate of the world, and so this might be seen to justify things that are completely unjustified. If failing a test is literally going to result in hundreds of people dying, then the cruel authority figures are making uncomfortable triage decisions by putting enormous pressure on the cadets. And if, in the metaphor, the parents need to come to the realization that their children should be allowed to live their own lives ... we can kind of see how that doesn't work if the end result is that a kaiju stomps the country flat.

feotakahari

I swear I read a book that was supposed to be pro-gay that treated its gayness metaphor as a contagious, curable disease. Also, being gay meant you could regenerate from any injury and it felt really good, so before the protagonist got infected, she nearly got killed by accidentally walking in on two gay teenagers blowing each other up with a grenade as a sex equivalent.

jambeast

It's why, I think, in pretty much every story about aliens/robots/elves/mutants/etc, it's a mistake to read the aliens/robots/elves/mutants as a direct one-to-one metaphor where something said about the aliens/robots/elves/mutants is something said about gays/browns/disableds for anything. Because gay people don't come from space, and disabled people can't shoot lasers, and if you were to imply that one were the same as the other you would be wrong, because they are not the same.

But it's always gonna have similarities though, right? Humans react to groups-of-people-that-are-not-like-them in semi-predictable ways, not always the same way, but there are commonalities. It's kind of inevietable that if you had aliens/robots/elves/mutants in your story then people would react to them in a kind of a way, and that way would *rhyme* with the way they react to existent types of people, especially if you want to be remotely interesting about it, even just on an individual psychological emotional level.

And that inevietabiltiy is something that makes it almost like... not worth criticising. Obviously if you interpret the orcs from mordor as a one-to-one substitution of Canadian people then Lord of the Rings would be a horrifically Canuckphobic piece of media, but you really don't *have* to interpret them as a one-to-one substitution!

There's a bad tendency in a lot of lefty media crit to act as though stories about aliens, robots, elves and mutants *aren't* about aliens, robots, elves and mutants, as if that's always just a thin and unimportant veneer laid over stories about real life social issues for a bit of flavour.

But no! Stories about aliens, robots, elves and mutants REALLY ARE about aliens robots elves and mutants! These people care about aliens robots elves and mutants and really do want to write about them!

tanadrin

I think in general there is a tendency by many critics to act as if a speculative fiction story cannot be reduced to mere allegory, it is of no value, because they are fundamentally not very interested in speculative fiction. But applicability is not the same as allegory, and the former is often more interesting (and has more to say).

sunderwight

Yeah, the allegory rarely works all the way down, but that doesn't mean it's not still working as intended.

Like let's take the X-Men example. While it's true that in-universe there's more of a case to be made for regulating super powers that let people just like, turn a car inside-out with their mind, than drummed up hysteria about immigrants or something, it's also the case in-universe that the people pushing for so-called regulation are more concerned with controlling/weaponizing any useful abilities for their own gain and experimenting on or otherwise persecuting those who aren't exploitable, and that lumping everyone from the guy with the world-shattering psychic abilities to the kid who just kind of looks like a fish into a singular category that would all become indefinite wards of the state is bad business.

This highlights that even in cases where you might think, huh I wouldn't mind actually if someone in a uniform came and took that particularly destructive asshole I know away, you must be careful not to actually advocate for that, because you will be playing into the hands of people who do not have anyone else's best interests actually at heart. Like, maybe you did get mugged by an illegal immigrant or something, that would really suck and desperate people do tend to do shitty things, but it still wouldn't make endorsing ICE the right thing to do.

And that is the serious real-world applicable point the narrative is trying to make, where even if the bad guys have a leg to stand on that doesn't mean you should automatically agree with how or why they want to go about doing things. X-Men goes, you have to pay attention to who is really doing what, not just who scares you more.

But if you try and extend it too far it will break and stop making sense. Because it's fiction.

captainlordauditor

The thing about X Men is that there really are genuinely are people out there who will claim with their whole chests that Jews are horned lizard people who control the weather and drink the blood of babies. These are real conspiracy theories that I'm not making up that people actually believe. So I don't think saying "well people are right to be afraid of the weather controlling people because they control the weather" is necessarily a helpful critique, because there are people who think that way in real life. Obviously it's true on the less ridiculous end of the scale, like getting mugged by an immigrant or assaulted by a gay person, but it does in fact go all the way up to and include "these people control the weather" in real life.

The question X Men is fundamentally asking is "hey, if there was a group of people who really did control the weather, would they deserve human rights?" and then comes down firmly on the side of "of fucking course they would".

oneiric-wanderlust

"You think there's something inside of you? Let's cast her out. Together."

Mother Mary (2026)│Directed by David Lowery

#this movie is For ME

thegenderal

i have a lot of key favorite titans vs young justice(mostly core 4) differences is that the titans are actual adults and yj are like some weird proto adults. Theyre pupating. This mostly manifests when dick is complaining about how he never gets to see his friends anymore and tim is like Just Go Hang Out. And dick will be like goddamn i should . Im gonna call donna. And then he calls donna and they compare schedules and the next time they both have half a day free on the same continent is next october (it’s febuary) so he calls wally who is booked solid until his kids go to summer sleepaway camp in july. And he calls roy who’s busy doing god knows what god knows where until god knows when with his ex fiancée and his little brother (UGH) and kory is with roy and his little brother doing god knows what god knows where until god knows when (UGH) and this goes on and on down the line of friends until dick is forced to realize that tim is still in his larval stage and in spite of his crammed schedule still has larval adult hangout times and in spite of thinking of tim and him as close in age Dick is wrong and is actually Fucking Old.

thegenderal

another favorite thing is that YJ are infinitely more supportive of and kind to each other. When the titans did bar crawls back when they were of an age where they had time and the inclination to do anything other than stay indoors and drink beer and wine with a charcuterie board if one of them got too drunk to continue they fucking abandon them. loose and plastered on the streets of new york city. If dick throws up theyre like get him out of here he fucking lost and its only 3 am. YOU LOST DICK. YOU LOST. stuffing him in a taxi and sending him home alone. Core 4 is a No Man Left Behind Operation. Tim took One shot and started crying at 11 PM? We’re All Going Home!

thegenderal

one time tim drunk as fuck texted dick some blubbery nonsense that dick to this day doesnt know what tim was saying (did he type this with his face?) and dick texted back like YOU GOOD? And cassie FACETIMED him on tims phone while the whole group had like packed around him to get him safely to a cab even though he was walking mostly fine and was like “hi dick!!! Tim is okay :) we are all going home now he just didnt eat enough before we went to the bar :) say hi tim!” And tims like DICK . HI. IM DRUNK. And dick is like… you’re All going home? ALL of you? And theyre all like yeah… why wouldnt we be. And dick’s like flashing back to the time that they punted donna into a cab like a football because she started crying in a bar & the time that they lost roy for almost 12 hours and the time that he broke his nose walking into a lightpost and had to go to the ER and the only reason anyone came with him was because he didnt want to go. and is like no reason. have fun guys.

thegenderal

this isnt to say that the titans dont love and support each other but its a significantly different type of love and support and also they fight SO much more often. To date there have only ever been three titans parties that havent ended in some kind of fight (verbal and/or physical) and yj like never fight or at least not in the same way. YJ are crazy codependent and the titans are Messy.