unrequited love for life

gene 🌟 EN/FR✴️ illustrator & animator but i dont put that here often cuz im shy ⭐ he/him tme 🔭 twt @geneathan

[geyfrog]

Referring to someone as your “partner” sounds as if you are deliberately obscuring their gender and may subtly out you. “My ex”, however, is entirely unobtrusively gender-neutral. #breakupallrelationships

[ninakaina]

(putting on my mariner hat again) i think charybdis is a really good example of the worldbuilding problem in nolan's odyssey because according to nolan he wanted to have the gods express themselves through the natural world but in the movie the natural world is not very compelling. the only thing i thought was cool was when they show "a river of fire meeting a river of ice" as a river of lava meeting a glacier. Which is in the fucking background for like 30 seconds maximum. Can we get some drone shots in here for the love of god. we should be FEELING the wrath of poseidon from the sea even if odysseus denies it, not watching the crew get splashed by offscreen buckets. we should get dreadful shots of storms coming on or get jumpscared by white squalls. we should see rogue waves. Christopher Nolan has never made a sea movie before and so for all his gritty action chops he doesn't seem to know how to for example make a wave look real big, and that's honestly just not acceptable if you're going to take on the odyssey, and maybe that's why i was so unimpressed by the cinematography. The fucking Wolf Of Wall Street does the wrath of poseidon better in a 5 minute sequence. and for a writer/director who allegedly wants to make the magical feel natural, this total disinterest in actually portraying the majesty and gravity of the natural world made charybdis one of the biggest disappointments of the movie for me. To be clear i don't think there's anything wrong with doing a pirates of the caribbean style charybdis. i think that's awesome and charybdis in pirates of the caribbean was super exciting and scary when i saw it as a kid. but if you are going CGI whirlpool for your 3 hour summer action blockbuster you need to actually outdo or at least MEET fucking disney's pirates of the caribbean at the bar they set. instead we got a 5 second shot of a moderately(?) large and very fake-looking vortex in the middle of a calm sea just sitting there with no teeth or anything.

the thing is if you're actually trying to do realism over spectacle, charybdis is a huge opportunity. charybdis is my favorite maritime element of the odyssey because she IS EXPLICITLY a natural phenomenon. when she's described in the poem (living under a small rock on one side of a narrow channel, swallowing water and belching it back up periodically) i UNDERSTAND that this is a near-literal description of a strong tidal vortex in a dangerous narrows. that shit 100% happens in real life and it is scary and even today mariners treat these places with a mythological fascination. look up seymour narrows and the devil's hole in british columbia (there used to be a rock in the seymour narrows that according to local lore would create an even bigger vortex than the devil's hole before the canadian government blew up the rock so people would stop dying in the narrows). I also have seen some crazy breaker behavior on remote surveys that had me drawing a charybdis in my notes as a reminder of what to report for the coast pilot. so like. umm. if christopher nolan had any interest in depicting a natural world of mythological scale why on earth was charybdis so fake???? he had odysseus try to approach charybdis for some fucking reason-- why not justify it w odysseus thinking he's such a clever and excellent mariner he can make the passage at slack tide? why not set up and present charybdis as the scariest passage in the known world, the way she is in the text? mostly it comes down to nolan being a completely incurious filmmaker who thinks he's above the source material and above literally the entire physical world, and of course leaning in to the hollywood trend of including no one with any maritime knowledge in the development of maritime plot elements, which again is just not acceptable for THE ODYSSEY. and don't even get me started on the allision with scylla's rock. this guy isn't very good at boating

[regging]

eating disorders and abortions are two things that are like, spoken about in most mainstream discourse as though they are pretty rare and aberrant, but then when you’re actually friends with a lot of women you come to find out that they are extremely extremely common and kind of banal & mundane

[badymaru]

🏹

[kittenchomp]

elden ring turtle girl

[chicknwire]

I love tumblr more than IG bc IG feels like I’m posting looking for a job but on here it’s like I already lost the job and my wife and the house and I’m just sitting on the curb talking to myself

[ninakaina]

my other pervasive problem with the movie (aside from its treatment of women which i cant even start on yet) is nolan's attempt to have the gods display their power in "natural" ways so that their diegetic existence or involvement remains in question. like how odysseus says his crew believes he's cursed by poseidon, it's left so explicitly ambiguous whether calypso is mortal, and athena's appearances to him are revealed to be a PTSD hallucination. I actually don't have a fundamental issue with this as an adaptational decision although i think its execution turns it into a matter of culturally christian theology, but the thing is that it's stupid. Because there's a Cyclops.

[ninakaina]

i unfortunately need to rewatch the hercules movie starring dwayne johnson because to my memory it's not a Great Film but it maintains the heart of the Hercules Question while actually accomplishing what christopher nolan tried to do with the odyssey. which is to say that if you're doing greek myth without apparent gods, everything else has to be kind of scooby doo shit. the cyclops has to be just a pretty tall dude who's missing an eye or has a birth defect and kills two of your guys per day for stealing his shit. odysseus has to invent circe's magic wholecloth to get sympathy gifts and glory from the phaeacians or whatever. there is an interesting direction to go here ESPECIALLY when the most fantastical aspects of the original story are diegetically narrated by a liar. it could be really cool to play with odysseus making shit up. but nolan wanted to eat his gritty and realistic cake and have his CGI too so whatever

[mens-rights-activia]

[mens-rights-activia]

I would like to note that I left flowers for her afterwards, just as a “sorry for using your grave for content”

[weepyemperor]

doc, my advice fetish is taking over my life, i just dont know what to do.......... (lecherous look appears in my eye)

[marxism-ex-silium]

Socially, the narrative of the woman as gold-digger is exceedingly pervasive. It is the punch line of many jokes that get millions of laughs, it's the topic of many manosphere videos as well as incel's laments. Its also an idea that garners a lot of sympathy from men and women alike when spun the right way.

People are very fast to bring up, condemn, and dehumanise women 'using men for free meals and nail sets and dresses' as though this is some massive injustice endangering the financial stability of men everywhere, rather than just something pretty rude but rather inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

Already, we could point out the obvious: if a man pays for a date and a woman rejects him anyways for any plethora of reasons he can of course call her a gold-digging whore. Dehumanise her. Paint her as greedy, morally bankrupt, a hoe and a bitch, all for simply rescinding her interest in romantic partnership. From the outside, no one can tell if she 'did it for a free dinner' or 'tried dinner and didn't feel a connection'.

The gold-digger label is one that exists to control women, to socially pressure them into saying 'yes' due to fear of these accusations and how they may harm her social standing and reputation among her peers. It is not a term born out of the need to call out the Terrible Abuse of Men's Wallets, but to control and restrict women's way of asserting their autonomy. Hence why the term has no masculinised equivalent.

All of this has of course been said before, but what i do think is often missing in these discussions is how little people link this to the reality of economic abuse. Men may pay for the first date, but it is men (not women) who use their partners once in a relationship as a cash machine.

Recent studies from the UK found over 1/3 women from 16-24 have experienced economic abuse, with 1/6 of women being a victim of economic abuse within the last 12 months. Economic abuse of women is increasing at a drastic rate in the UK, by 78% in the last year alone! And yet the average person still believes that a high percentage of the female population are capital G Gold-diggers, and that this is a Serious Issue that needs to be address.

And yet when we look what do we see? We see the shattered lives of countless women who where economically abused by their male partners for years. We see the dead bodies of women too, with one woman dying every 19 days in the UK in relationships where financial abuse in involved.

In a world where MRA rhetoric flourish and the anti-feminist backlash is in full swing globally, it is important to fight these pervasive narratives about women and recognise them for what they are: Misogyny.

The gold-digger label is designed to control and limit the choices of women in the modern dating scene and obscure the real relationship between gender and economic abuse, which always sees women getting the short end of the stick.

Articles and sources used (not ordered according to appearence)

1: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/mar/05/economic-abuse-partner-deaths-report

2:https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/09/domestic-abuse-technology-finances-control-uk-charities

3: https://survivingeconomicabuse.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Seen-yet-sidelined_SEA_2023.pdf (my main source as well as cited articles for satistics)

4:https://survivingeconomicabuse.org/

5:https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/sep/03/he-took-every-penny-the-women-left-with-a-debt-mountain-by-coercive-partners

6:https://www.theguardian.com/money/article/2024/jun/17/i-was-abused-twice-first-by-my-partner-and-then-by-my-bank

All presented social media comments where found within a 10 minute browse on: Reddit, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.

[rpfofficial]

under my regime all male film directors will be harvested for their meat like farm animals

[oneheadtoanother]

[sabertoothwalrus]

its wild that no ones even pointed out that two of the tumblr sexyman contenders were in the same show together

[sabertoothwalrus]

[detectivehole]

[everydaylouie]

LOUIE'S PICKS VOL. 1 - vinyl/cd/cassette/guitar picks now available on needlejuice records!! a compilation album of some of my favorite tunes from over the years, one side of vocal tunes and one of instrumentals

(please pardon the album art, i made it in 2023 when i was still a blender newbie lol)

[everyday-cutephoto]

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.