Listening to Dan and Phil on Shut Up I’m Talking and man, I love how grown up they are. Like actually, literally, behaving like mature adults who talk about business and marketing and gatekeepers and long-term career choices. It feels good that they are real functioning adults and they make the content that they do, because it makes space for me/us to be real functioning adults and enjoy the content that they make.
Because they’re right; there IS a sense in society that “Dan and Phil” and “YouTube” and being “chronically online” and participating in fandom is juvenile. But guess what? Being fun and silly and weird and gay and hopeful aren’t juvenile qualities, they’re just things capitalism society doesn’t want grown-ups to express. Because being an adult is antithetical to joy, apparently.
But Dan and Phil have created a safe environment for being both grown-up and indulging in joy. Hearing them talk like mentors to younger internet folks like Tom and Jack, and hearing them speak so professionally about their careers really brings out the maturity of their content and I really appreciate that.
‼️SPOILER FOR THE SANDMAN SEASON 2 UNDER THE CUT‼️
And read the tags cause I’m not arguing with people who got mad about my opinions so if you see this argument will be something you know will piss you off just scroll
I’m gonna complain about this because it happening again and I’m fucking sick of it.
A couple years ago when good omens season 2 came out I posted a rant about how much I hated Gabriel and Beelzebub together and how them becoming canon ruined their characters.
And then I guess Neil Gaiman decided he was on a roll with the shitty straight people fan service because The Sandman season 2 ALSO features a forced straight relationship that ruined two of the best characters in the show.
This time I’m talking about Johanna Constantine and The Corinthian, and the parallels between them and Gabriel/Beelzebub is astounding.
First of all, Johanna and Corinthian knew each other for maybe a week max? At least Gabriel and Beelzebub had the decency to know each other for a year. But also I’ve realized how much both ships rely on more gendered stereotypes to actually ‘work’ on screen.
In good omens, Gabriel and Beelzebub couldn’t work without making Beelzebub, a canon nonbinary character who was incredibly androgynous in season one, a very feminine character, a change that included more feminine clothing, a generally higher voice, and a more flirtatious personality, and yeah of course you don’t have to be androgynous to be non binary, but the stark contrast and complete 180 personality change wasn’t done to them because “Gabriel helped them be a better person and they changed for him” because they’d clearly had that stark personality change before getting close to Gabriel.
Gabriel himself is also a very clear example of toxic masculinity, and though he becomes a stupid lovable dork (for lack of a better way to describe his personality, I hate him no matter which way he was) he’s still a good example of it.
So in season one the couple starts as a gender fucky and dangerous person and a very gender role dedicated character whose story inherently revolves around their gender and how that’s presented.
Corinthian and Johanna got the same treatment but flipped who got said treatment.
Corinthian is (in my interpretation) a gender fucky character, his main objective is murder and control and he doesn’t necessarily use gender roles to do any of it. (Unless you count his and Ethel’s conversation where she says he’s a sexist attractive man but I think that’s just Ethel)
Johanna, and not to say this in an insulting way, falls under the sterotypical “femme fatale” stereo type, a beautiful and mysterious woman who, wether she means to or not, kills any romantic interest that comes her way.
In the second season Corinthian gets demoted to “protective boyfriend UwU” and has to take the role of strong responsible man just trying to keep his girlfriend out of trouble, and it’s an insult to both of them. Corinthian gets dumbed down to Labrador boyfriend and Johanna gets treated as almost helpless, needing Corinthian’s help and guidance and the only time I personally have fun watching Corinthian be responsible is when he’s got some kid or another to look out for.
On top of that Corinthian was GAY in the first season and within 2 hours of being alive in the second season he’s head over heels for some girl he met 10 minutes prior (not even) and Johanna was definitely, if not a lesbian, then women leaning. And within an instant that got erased.
Another disrespect towards Johanna was the near complete ignorance of her fear of relationships, going a couple episodes of turning down corinthian’s flirtations before the last 10 minutes of episode 11 to go “never-mind Im not afraid of relationships anymore and I’m magically in love with you” which as a viewer was just really uncomfortable.
The worst part of all of this was just knowing that the sole reason it even happened in the first place was to save money on CGI by lessening Matthew’s character role.
Dan: Says the same things about a Schitt's Creek reunion that he's always said.
The media:
I am begging the media to just once, just one time, go back and check what Dan said the last time you asked him this same boring question. Or the time before that, or before that. Just once.
okay but Alex repeatedly dreaming of himself as an inanimate object throughout the movie while he and Rosie weren't together versus the end when he could finally be with her and he dreamed that he was himself, that he was a real living human being because the only time he feels like that is with Rosie. In this essay I will-
One aspect of Stolas and Octavias relationship that I think deserves a little more attention is the fact that Stolas is traumatized as Fuck, and growing up with a traumatized parent can have a pretty profound impact on you as a kid. Even if they’re a good parent, even if they try their hardest in every way, their issues always find a way to make themselves known. So even though Stolas clearly loves Via to bits, and she him, I wouldn’t be surprised if her relationship with Stolas was more complicated than what we see onscreen, even beyond the “abandoned her for some random imp” of it all.
There’s not a lot of discussion of this in canon, understandably since most of Stolas and Octavia’s immediate issues stem from the divorce, but there’s a hint of it in Loo Loo Land, when Stolas talks about how much Via used to love seeing RoboFizz:
It’s pretty clear in this scene (at least to me) that Stolas is projecting his own love of clowns onto Via, who was in fact terrified by RoboFizz as a child. He goes so far as to misinterpret her tears as “tears of joy.”
That’s a pretty weird detail, and doesn’t really have anything to do with the Divorce, so there’s any number of ways to interpret it. At first, given Stolas’s character in season 1, it comes across as self-absorbed, but looking back, i could see how that self-absorption might be Stolas’s response to always ignoring his own needs and wants for the sake of others. Stolas spent 17+ years believing he couldn’t make choices about his own life, and constantly sacrificing his freedom and well-being for others (his father, his wife, his daughter). He spent well over a decade being abused in order to give his daughter a normal, happy childhood. If he’s convinced himself his desires don’t matter, one way around that is to do things because “Octavia likes them.” So if he convinced himself Octavia liked clowns,,, you get the idea.
So anyway, in Sinsmas this side of Octavia’s childhood isn’t really the main issue, but I like to think she is starting to realize not only how weird and sad her dad always was, and how much that may have affected her upbringing. We see a tiny hint of this when she confronts Stolas about his pills:
Of course, Octavia doesn’t know the full story, but she knows enough to be upset. She knows that Stolas was unhappy enough to need the pills, and he stayed in that environment for her, and thats a lot to process at 17. It’s not a nice feeling to realize your childhood was an extension of your parent’s trauma. It’s also not fun to realize your parent chose to harm themself for you, even if they did it to protect you. It makes you feel used, like you’ve been made into an accessory to hurting someone you love. In my mind, Octavia is processing all of this, AND that her dad ran off with a random man.
All this is to say, by my wildly non-canonical interpretation, I really feel for both Stolas and Octavia in this situation. For Stolas, making his own choices and following his instincts for once was important for him to do. For Octavia, it’s reasonable for her to feel upset at her dad, perhaps for more reasons than she realizes. She’s looking back on her relationship with Stolas, and how he raised her, and reevaluating everything. Their relationship is changing, and I hope we get to see a bit of that reflected in season 3.
sometimes I look back on the Bartimaeus Sequence and marvel at how well developed the system of slavery was, to the point where, in order to uphold the system, the magicians had to base their whole society around dehumanizing themselves and policing each other.
Think about it. Nathaniel was bought as a toddler, and stripped of his name, his family, and every other piece of humanity he could’ve possibly possessed at six years old. He was then handed over to a magician who taught him to depend on slave labor as not only a source of power, but also an integral part of his identity. He was taught to be dependent on slave labor in every way, and yet constantly fear the beings that he enslaved.
He was taught value political power and safety above all else in order to assuage that constant fear, because the oppressor always fears the revenge of the oppressed.
He was taught to use the differences between humans and spirits to justify their enslavement, because there must be a reason they deserve it and you don’t.
He was taught to distrust kindness and altruism, because if a world exists where kindness and altruism have value, then there exists a world where slavery is wrong. Where all the abuse and pain that generations of magicians have put themselves through to uphold the system of slavery was for nothing.
And in this context the metaphor of the true name as a source of both extreme power and vulnerability for spirits and humans alike, to the point where magicians hide/destroy/forget their birth names and by extension their humanity in order to contain that weakness is just so achingly perfect and scrumptious and I just-
Idk. Sometimes I think about that.
Edit: I think I may have unknowingly plagiarized this from @agape-emo-eros so uhhh, just gonna tag them here. Idk it was in my mind palace or smth. Sorry dude.
Following-up on this post, here is the very specific list of things I would add/change to Make Stranger Things Good (mostly seasons 3 and 4):
Lucas gets to go off on his friends for being assholes. Seriously, the whole basketball situation made my blood boil. Lucas is one of the only Black kids in a tiny Midwestern town in the 80s, of COURSE he’s gonna want to avoid getting bullied? His white girlfriend’s brother literally tried to murder him not too long ago…joining the basketball team and playing nice with the white jocks is not such a crazy idea in that context, but the other kids act like it’s the biggest betrayal in the world. Plus, even without the racial aspect, not supporting your friends hobbies/not going to his games is still a shitty thing to do. Lucas deserved better.
Less hero worship of Eddie from the writers. I’ll admit I’m partly just bitter because of how his storyline connects to Lucas’s, but I also think the whole underdog-monologue thing was a bit much. It’s the white nerd inferiority complex I mentioned in the original post. I’d much rather they treat him like what he is, which is a 20-year-old who’s still in high school playing dnd with freshmen.
El never gets jealous of Max in s2. Sexist stereotype, sorry 🤷🏻♀️. El wasn’t raised as a girl, she was raised as a science experiment, nobody taught her to fight other girls for male attention, so projecting that onto her implies that it’s an inherent female trait and I Don’t Like That. More exploration of El’s gender in general could be interesting but it’s not a necessity.
More El and Will sibling bonding time.
Pothead!Jonathan is taken, like, 10% more seriously. The poor boy has spent his whole life supporting his mom and brother, let him catch a break I beg you. Also let’s respect Argyle a little more while we’re at it, he’s a cool guy.
No more Stancy PLEASE I thought we were past this 🥲. Nancy is actually a fun character when she isn’t being dragged into superfluous boy drama and when she has a gun. Let Steve move on. We all have.
On that note, more Nancy and Robin would be fun. Could be wlw but I’m flexible. Steve being a sapphic magnet would be a funny turn of events.
Now for an actual hot take: Hopper actually does die in s3, but not before losing his marbles a little bit. Hopper got so violent at points in s3 it honestly disturbed me, especially given that he’s a cop. I think it could’ve been interesting to lean into that and gradually make his behavior even more erratic and more questionable. It would be really tragic because we would still be rooting for him as the guy we know and love, but also know that he’s straying further and further from justification. Then by the end when he sacrifices himself to close the portal, it’s almost like a redeeming act, a final glimpse of his old self (I’m not 100% sold on this, btw but I think it might be cool).
Also that way we avoid the entire Russia plot, AND the stupid plot-point where Joyce uses all of El’s inheritance money without telling her. And the thing where Joyce ditches her family to go chase Hopper even though that’s been her number one priority since day 1.
Finally, there’s a specific conversation between Steve and Robin at the end of s4 that I would tweak—it’s where they’re talking about Robin’s crush and she says that she feels stupid agonizing about a relationship when there’s so much else going on. BUT that’s exactly what all the straight couples have been allowed to do the entire show and I think she needed someone (Steve) to point that out: it’s okay for gay people to take up space!
Ok yeah rant over I hope it didn’t sound too angry. It’s funny, I’m not even that invested in Stranger Things as a show, it’s just so perfectly frustrating in certain ways that it sends my Film Major Brain into overdrive.
You know how “LGBTQ” is an umbrella term for what is actually a multitude of unique individual identities? And you know how, if you think about it, even the individual labels within that acronym are also just umbrella terms? As in like, the social grouping of “Lesbian” doesn’t equate the internal, ultimately label-less experience of every single person who uses the term, but merely suggests an approximate similarity? You know how all identities and experiences are without names or titles until we choose to give them one?
Yeah. Dan and Phil do that but with relationship titles.
By refusing to put a definitive label on their relationship, they encourage people to look beyond the formal categories of romantic and platonic, and instead see them for who they are and how they treat each other. Furthermore, the labels they DO reference casually—best friends, companions through life, actual soulmates, tortoises, ranch metaphor—imply a certain level of obfuscation between romantic and platonic love. Because not only can friendship and romance coexist, one is not more important than the other. Both can exist within a single, nonspecific, unlabeled relationship between two people. And they do. And I love that.
