#media thots

[puri-kura]

i was really thinking of that monumental moment in season 4 of shameless when i watching the club scene in heated rivalry ep 4

in 'hope springs paternal' when he's pressed for a kiss, mickey looks around a crowded gay club, and realizes he's safe. so many people in his life have found out over and again that he's with ian; no one cares. his father is an anomaly. no one is watching, literally even in the club not a single person is looking at them, and he can have what he wants.

in 'rose,' shane and ilya are specifically coming face to face with just how high profile any romance is for them, that everyone is watching. the opening sequence starts with shane in more and more advert shoots, ilya publicly making out with women, and all they can focus on is each other, until by the end of the sequence we can see people around them clocking their distraction. hayden wants to find him a woman. the chair next to shane, across from his married parents, is empty. people notice. and people REALLY notice when shane does get a girlfriend.

so when we find our boys in the club, staring each other down just like mickey does when he finds ian in his club (s4e7), they are having an epiphany too.

that it's not enough.

and that they can't.

[edgarallanhoetry]

Living for those rare pieces of media in which the impact of committing violence isn’t diminished even when it is enacted out of self-defense or against an abuser, while ALSO honoring the rage and need to be harmful coming from the survivor, while ALSO somehow not devolving into an overt tell-don’t-show moral-dispensing medium.

[puri-kura]

in my mind ian and mickey have more growth to do post canon. i would love to see mickey getting more of what he needs from ian. mickey is more closed off and petulant and less directly communicative in s11 than s5 because he's still burned by ian not meeting him where he was at repeatedly after going through So Much personal development by s5, of which ian was a major catalyst. (part of this is also a shift in his communication style to being kinda benevolently manipulative to meet ian where he's at s11).

do i sound totally off the wall if i say that mickey is significantly more emotionally intelligent than ian, though doesn't necessarily have all the tools to articulate those emotions to someone like adult ian, and is kinda floundering a bit

[edgarallanhoetry]

One of the reasons Darlings works is because the two central women make opposite decisions and neither are condemned. In fact Badru is able to walk away from her husband because she has her mother to go to. Her mother, her who has consistently been a source of love and support, her mother who she has consistently shown she wants to be similar to, her mother who is only able to be there for Badru because she killed her own abusive husband so long ago. Badru says she doesn’t want to sink to her husband’s level and kill him and her mom agrees with her, understands the impact taking someone’s life can have on you. But even in that moment, both their decisions are understood and respected. In fact their decisions are only possible because of each other. And looking at Shamshu who is free from her own husband, who looks and sees her daughter free too, who has her cooking business, and maybe even a new love, it’s clear that there’s not a single piece of her that regrets the decision she made.

[edgarallanhoetry]

Main Hoon Na might be the definitive gender roles Bollywood movies of our time. Sanju’s entire character arc is about learning to be feminine after rejecting because her dad wanted a son, and it’s the only way she gets what she wants. Ram and Lucky provide two alternative forms of masculinity with Ram’s more traditional, disciplined version being heralded as superior. And the entire thing is reinforced by the nationalist agenda of the movie. It’s a thesis in what it means to be the right man or woman for your country.

[edgarallanhoetry]

there just has to be a third line of thinking beyond team “let-people-enjoy-things” and the group of people who work really hard to connect every fucking piece of media they watch to their values, because those are bad and reductive enough on their own, but the intersection of them is what led to that absolutely bugs for brains tumblr post I saw once that argued Brooklyn 99 is a feminist show.

[edgarallanhoetry]

~2022 is the year of Genre Fiction~

Science Fiction

The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin

Octavia's Parables Podcast

The Matrix Series

Pet - Akwaeke Emezi

The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories from Dirty Computer - Janelle Monae

Horror/Thriller

The Haunting of Hill House - Shirley Jackson

Scream series

The Cabin in the Woods

Alien

Parasite

Jennifer's Body

Romance

YOU MADE A FOOL OF DEATH WITH YOUR BEAUTY - Akwaeke Emezi

Murder Mystery

The Afterparty

Murder She Wrote

Death on the Nile (will this be terrible? surely. will I still reread the original book in preparation and then go watch this? undoubtedly.)

Knives Out 2

Genre Influencers/Transformers

Buffy the Vampire Slayer rewatch + accompanying Insect Reflection essay series -@herinsectreflection

Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes - Edith Hamilton

Translation work by Anne Carson (Antigonick, Grief Lessons) and Ursula K. Le Guin (Lavinia)

"Notes on Camp" - Susan Sontag

"The Poetic Principle" - Edgar Allan Poe

[edgarallanhoetry]

A fanfic pet peeve of mine is when someone racebends a character and then does little with that outside of making them a person of color in the tags and including a description of their ethnic features somewhere in the story. Like it or not, race has a real impact on how people are raised and how they group up to approach situations and value things. This is not to say that all people of a single race can be treated like a monolith or that someone’s entire identity can be flattened to their race, but tbh it’s lazy writing to pretend there’s no material impact on how someone engages with the world if they were white in canon and they’re not in your writing. And it especially Grinds My Gears when the character in question has motivations/behaviors/backstory that align with them being white or read as white. If a character should thematically be white, then write them as white! And work harder on writing better versions of your characters of color!!!