kai

back on my wicked bullshit. on some new and exciting project hail mary bullshit. i write a little. he/him.

[syekick-powers]

extremely underrated subgenre of tumblr post: when someone makes a general statement about something, and another person offers a counter-statement that's just completely nonsensical, and the OP just agrees instantly even if it makes no sense at all

examples:

[tiktoks-i-enjoyed]

[uisceb]

Okay I was in the midst of writing up a very befuddled post detailing my extensive list of questions regarding the weirdly specific use of albino Bats in this scene, but then I got DISTRACTED by this FLOWER and it COMPLETELY DERAILED MY ENTIRE TRAIN OF THOUGHT and now I need to talk about it.

(also I’m sorry if what I'm about to launch into is something that’s already been discussed at length by the fandom and people see this and they’re like yeah we know, tumblr user uisceb, there's already like 5000 posts about this exact thing floating around, where have you even been, and the answer is I don’t know okay, I never know, but this is my own self discovery on my own blog and I’m very taken with this flower and the crazy levels of heteronormativity it’s working with okay like this is new To Me) 

(the Bats were also new to me btw but that’s its own like…whatever, it’s fine, we're not talking about them rn)

Okay so the flower. They make a very big to-do about putting this flower in Glinda’s hair as she gets ready for her wedding to Fiyero, which is of course a direct callback to the moment just before the Ozdust when Fiyero puts an identical flower in her hair.

Now first of all - back to the getting-dressed-for-the-wedding scene - Glinda/Nessa parallels, we love to see them. We’ve just come from the Girl in the Mirror scene where Nessa is longing for the magical night that was the Ozdust, this perfect night where she felt wanted and loved, her whole future was ahead of her and anything was possible. Glinda’s doing something very similar pre-wedding, trying to recreate that picture-perfect night, when she’d just met Fiyero, and had just decided she would be marrying him, and everything was playing out in exact accordance to what she'd grown up believing she should want: perfect fairytale prince, perfect fairytale ending.

Very clearly by Act 2, she’s starting to suspect the perfect fairytale ending is not a real thing, for SEVERAL reasons. Sang a whole bridge about it before slapping the smile back on and sliding right back into denial land again. And given their argument during Thank Goodness, I think Glinda is well aware Fiyero’s interest in her is quickly waning. So like Nessa with Boq, she’s trying to dig her nails in and reignite the fantasy of something that never actually existed, with this very specific little symbol, this same rose Fiyero put in her hair the night of the Ozdust when everything was simple and perfect and exactly how she always pictured her life would be.

But! 

My dudes! My guys! My people! The SECOND she hears her window break, the SECOND she realizes it’s Elphie out there, she dismisses her attendants, and she SNAGS that rose out of her hair and tosses it offscreen.  

I think every single (movie) gelphie shipper alive has pointed out how much the balcony/boudoir scene feels like an affair, but for my own personal little self, I think I’ve finally pinpointed the exact second that affair vibe kicks in, and it’s the removal of the rose - highkey, it’s giving married woman takes off her wedding ring to meet up with ~The Lover~ in secret. But way WAY more than that, there's the heteronormative symbolism of it all.

Now I enjoy the canon of things, so I do very much think Glinda cares for Fiyero, I just happen to be of the opinion there’s nothing romantic about it. There’s WANNABE romantic about it, I think she'd actually give anything for it to be romantic, he's the ideal man, any woman would kill to be in her place. But canonically speaking, everything Glinda does romance-wise with Fiyero is so cartoonishly performative and always has to take place in front of an audience, it becomes all about appearance and showmanship rather than connection, which makes it kind of impossible for me to read Glinda’s feelings for him as genuinely romantic (not to mention her phrasing of "taking things that don't belong to us" and saying "I want him" but never "I love him," he is in so many ways a prop to her). It's like watching someone play-act what they think a relationship is supposed to look like from the outside without ever actually building the relationship itself.

And even right from the beginning, before she’s even met him, she hears that Prince Fiyero will be coming to Shiz, and she immediately glams herself up to an IMPOSSIBLE degree, and when she finds him, it’s all surface-level interaction, including from Fiyero’s side of things. Fiyero himself doesn’t actually show any real interest in Glinda until he sees her trick Boq into asking out Nessa, at which point Fiyero’s like oh samesies I also casually use people and then toss them aside, and then they both congratulate each other on being perfect and therefore perfect for each other with never a single moment of real connection or understanding between them, but by the end of the night, Glinda’s still telling Elphaba YEP THAT’S THE MAN I’M GOING TO MARRY ISN’T THAT ROMANTIC GLIYERO 5EVER <333333

Fiyero’s the glamor, he’s the costume, he’s the image, he’s the key to making Glinda’s life look like the pinnacle of perfection, and Glinda has conflated that with romantic love. And Fiyero’s first gesture of playing that role for her was to put this little pink rose in her hair before the Ozdust, so now right before their wedding, Glinda is attempting to manifest that idealized romance into something real with this little visual cue of the moment she committed herself to the most perfectest heterosexual relationship ever in the history of forever at the wise old age of 18.

But then ELPHABA shows up on her balcony and all of a sudden Glinda cannot get rid of Fiyero’s mark on her fast enough. 

Her getting rid of the rose isn't for Elphaba btw, and that's actually very important. Elphaba wouldn’t see the rose in her hair and see it as some representation of Fiyero; she wasn’t there for that part of Dancing Through Life, it wouldn't even register as anything with any significance. She already knows Glinda and Fiyero are getting married, plus the wedding dress and the ring are sort of hard to miss, so it's not like Glinda is trying to either hide something from Elphaba, or communicate something to Elphaba. Getting rid of the rose is very private and personal to Glinda herself, no one else.

Like not even joking, in the last twenty minutes of my life, this has kind of become Glinda’s gayest moment to me. And there are a LOT of gay moments to choose from. This one isn’t even that overt, it's literally just her and a flower. And yes there’s the clear illicit love affair vibe to the whole scene itself and chemistry on fucking fire when she's actually with Elphaba, but it’s this little moment here that's really getting to me, the intentional removal of the rose, the intentional removal of any visual link to Fiyero, especially when the visual of Fiyero is the most important aspect to her. So her absolutely needing to rid herself of that symbol before she runs into the arms of her lover runs to the balcony to find Elphaba, is such a distinctly secretive shirking-the-heteronormative-illusion moment. They made such a show of putting that flower in her hair only for her to take it out to be alone with Elphaba.

I have to go on a little aside here just to address the fact that I know people throw around the phrase "no heterosexual explanation for this" a lot and tbh it's oftentimes just two characters like...looking at each other. But in this case I am genuinely racking every corner of my brain for a heterosexual explanation for this whole flower situation. Like I am actively searching for heterosexuality, which is not a thing I typically do. And I can't find it anywhere. There is literally No Reason for them to have her take the rose out of her hair, except for the symbolism of it all. I'm at the point where I actually want someone to provide me with a heterosexual reason for it, because for the life of me, I cannot come up with one, and this is like proof beyond all proof of comphet Glinda to me. It is an incredibly privately gay moment. I don't really know what to do with myself.

Anyway whatever getting back to it - the removal of the rose also does on a smaller, much less emotional scale, kinda call to mind the Ozdust duet when she sees Elphaba dancing alone and sets the wand Morrible gave her aside, choosing Elphaba over the fantasy she has of herself. She isn’t ready to make that sacrifice on the Greater Good moral scale yet, and by the beginning of Act 2 she's backslid enough without Elphaba that in many ways she's arguably worse than she was at the beginning of Act 1, but something I've always loved about Glinda is that her changes are incremental as opposed to instantaneous, and those little moments of her unthinkingly setting aside a symbol of self-glorification because of Elphaba are what pave the way for her to eventually become the more stripped-down selfless Glinda we start to see emerging by the end of the story.

The rose/balcony/boudoir scene sees us squarely in Selfish Act 2 Glinda territory as opposed to Ozdust Cautiously Starting to be Better territory, but I do really love that even in her most selfish eras, she allows these little bits of her true self to show because of Elphaba, and that the true self in question here is one that’s secretly desperate to shed herself of the heteronormative palatable image she’s trapped herself in so she can be with the woman she loves.

But with all that said I do still have questions about the albino Bats.

[mascingtape-deactivated20230626]

[lesspopped]

please wear sunscreen!!! I've seen "fuck the beauty industrial complex" posts about complicated skincare regimens and am 100% with them except sometimes they mention sunscreen and no. no. absolutely not. sunscreen is a wonderful supportive friend who wants to keep you safe, and you should let her do it. throw out all your other cosmetics and skincare products if you want, but keep your sunscreen. and if you're not wearing sunscreen, start wearing it!!!! this is not about terror of aging, this is not about every tiny imperfection our fucked-up culture has made you feel insecure about, this is about protecting yourself from skin cancer. wear the damn sunscreen.

[valencians]

fantasy: the kingdom has been ruled by one family for 10,000 years

science fiction: a new species evolved in 30 years

[c-53]

Please take my white ass to anor londo

[shadowysiren]

*grabs you with my long gargoyle-like arms and flies off witj you*

[c-53]

Oh thank god hold me tight you scary motherfucker

[live-and-learn]

If you see this, schedule it to be posted exactly two months from when you’re seeing it. Like to let me know that it’s scheduled. DO NOT REBLOG IT DIRECTLy. Whenever you see this post, always schedule it for two months away.

[live-and-learn]

43 notes as of February 29th!

[live-and-learn]

100 on May 29th!

[strawberrysunrise15]

yes i do of course think that “you don’t even have a dog” is a very cold and unfair line (especially with an aroace grace lens) but also like. i fundamentally do not think it would have mattered one bit to stratt if grace had a dog or a family or anything else and that was just something she said to make him (and herself) feel better. the center of her character is that she will do anything to make project hail mary a success, full stop. she would adopt that fucking dog herself.

[lady-glinda]

Thinking about how Glinda's skirts get progressively longer and more voluminous as the show progresses (not counting the bubble dress in NOMTW since that's out of order chronologically)

And the obvious reason for this is that it shows her maturing and gaining more status as the show goes on, but I wonder if there's also something to be said about her clothing becoming more cumbersome and restrictive. The bubble dress is heavy (I believe they tend to range about 12-15 lbs) and it's something that a lot of actresses complain about. Glinda in act 1 tends to have a lot of energy and very over-the-top body language. This is most apparent in popular, which varies between performances but usually involves a lot of jumping around, high kicks, even sometimes splits and attempted cartwheels. She loses this in act 2, both because she wants to project a more serious image as Glinda the Good and because she's just a lot less happy than she was in the first act. But there's also the additional fact that she couldn't do most of those things even if she wanted to, because of her clothing. The persona of Glinda the Good restricts her in a metaphorical sense and the clothing restricts her in a literal sense. She is physically unable to be as lively and expressive as she used to be. And I'm not sure this is intentional (there's also a broader point to be made here about women's clothing in general) but I think it's interesting nonetheless.

[eeeurydiceee]

Haha Jonathan, gas leak

[dogpuppy]

[strawberrysunrise15]

finally reading son of a witch and the people in my phone weren’t kidding glinda really is homotron 3000 this entire book dear god

[strawberrysunrise15]

this within five pages of her introduction which takes place like twenty years after her thing with elphaba is absolutely bonkers

[strawberrysunrise15]

finally reading son of a witch and the people in my phone weren’t kidding glinda really is homotron 3000 this entire book dear god

[strawberrysunrise15]

knitting and crochet patterns make you do some truly unfathomable bullshit to get a slipknot

[dark-magician-girl-meets-world]

Fortuneteller, turning over the Death card: Don't worry. It isn't literal. It simply refers to some form of change. Me: Phew Fortuneteller; turning over the Gets Eaten by the Fortuneteller While Trying to Leave card: That can also mean many things

[frodo-in-a-fez]

in light of recent news. bbc. if you give me $200, an iphone camera, and the most lesbian actress ever, i can fix doctor who right now