“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”
— Bojack Horseman creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg commenting on how weird gendered defaults in entertainment are, and why we should think twice about them. Excerpted from this longer original post.
(via 360degreesasthecrowflies)
Tell me when you get bored. A story about doses. [x]
I posted this on twitter and had a variety of aggressive ableism thrown my way.
This is a story about changing what I can in spite of what I cannot for the comfort of my loved ones. The thing that others find to be hurtful about me is that I like to spend time in silent solitude. People who love me often feel hurt that I tend to solve my own problems instead of leaning on them.
When we spend too much time together, people find my neutrality to be concerning, and it becomes too much for people to be unable to read me.
To show the people I love that I enjoy their company in ways they can understand, I pool my energy together to be high-energy, peppy, and social. Since this is not my natural state of being, it takes effort, which can only be expended in small doses. I amplify the things people like in me while filtering out everything they dislike about me when I am in their company.
I change my behaviors for those I love, but at the end of the day, I cannot change my neutral state of being, which is the thing that they want most out of me.
This is a story about me accommodating people in the best way I know how, not the other way around. I would truly appreciate it if people don't misconstrue this anecdote as me asking for dismissal of hurtful behavior when in reality, people find hurt in the fact that I simply exist, and I must change for them.
my most toxic trait is i fucking love work gossip. i play neutral not to be the bigger person or take the high road but to hear slander and hearsay from every side. two coworkers complained about each other to me in the same afternoon and i nearly blacked out from the rush
“Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”
I wish depression were an emergency. I wish someone could take one look at how sick I am and go “oh my god, we need to get you to a hospital!” and then when we get there I get rushed into surgery and the surgeons say “it’s a good thing you brought her here when you did, this is a seriously advanced case” and then they put me under and spend the next ten hours pulling metres of long, sticky black strands of gunk out of my body, throwing it immediately into an incinerator so that it can’t infect anyone else. And then they could stitch me back up and I could rest a few days, and when I leave the hospital everyone can see how much better I am and they congratulate me saying “well done, you’ve been so brave, I’m so glad you’re ok. I love you.”
if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it being the last line of the brokeback mountain novella is so crazy it makes me feel like my guts are falling out. if you can’t fix it you’ve got to stand it. jesus fucking christ
dededos
theartofmadeline
turnnoffyourmind
janainaart
stormborns
origamiaround
ellievsbear
