straight white people making a romance movie: haha what if it was illegal to have sex? wait what's lawrence v texas. wait what's mclaughlin v florida. wait what's loving v virginia
As preposterous and stupid as this fucking movie's premise sounded (for a light-hearted rom-com, and not The Handmaid's Tale) I didn't want to think about it too much until the movie actually came out, and then I could see if it was somehow more intelligent and subversive than the trailer let on, but guess what, it's even worse!
If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die.
Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allie’s roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. “This night is for the straights,” Swindell’s character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.
This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). It’s also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, that’s not even thirty years ago.
By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They aren’t the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond “repeal” signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...)
(...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. That’s just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheep’s clothing.
yeah i wrote this post having only seen the trailer, but jesus christ. was this movie a psyop LMAO??
also, for the unaware: mclaughlin v. florida was a 1964 supreme court case that struck down a florida anti-miscegenation law that criminalized cohabitation (and thus, as implied, sex) between white people and people of color of opposite genders. anti-miscegenation laws made marriage and sexual relationships between white people and people of color, most often specifically black people, a FELONY in several states in the united states up until the 1950s and 1960s. though it was already struck down by the supreme court, the state of alabama didn't repeal their law until 2000! there were THREE ATTEMPTS at codifying anti-miscegenation into the us constitution!
like yes, the issue here is partially straight white people's ignorance on the united states's history of homophobic policy, but it's also really important to recognize that arguably the majority of the issue here is straight white people's ignorance of the united states's history of codifying eugenics and antiblack racism.
the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.
the problem with tumblr spells is all of you lil sluts are casting and not giving it time to charge so you're all casting cantrips and not 9th level death spells. everyone wants to be the one to take them down no one wants to be the one who assists
Look, I'm not saying I *want* to be full of worms and have every disease, however if a large man gently explained the exact plagues to me so politely and gave me a wet little pat on the head, I would consider following Nergal.
Odo has fed my brain worms and makes me wanna make a 40k day of Adam because that little fuck would absolutely end up aligned or at least playing nice with chaos aligned groups and I want to be silly and spiteful and make more trans Warhammer characters
(I have a 2.5k word long note in my notes app of nothing but darkest dungeon hcs that is just steadily growing . sweats. 3/4 of it is probably exploring characters being trans)
This exploration is mostly going to have to do with Audreys life before the hamlet! I think viewing a lot of the DD characters' backstories through the lens of transgenderism adds a lot of depth to them.
CW(content warning): Abuse, Transphobia, Rich People Being Assholes, Audrey's Husband Being Alive, Poisoning
CW (celebration warning): Audrey's Husband Dying Validates Her Identity As A Woman
I think Audrey transitioned quite early on in her life without telling anyone, assuming the identity of just some noble people just assume they've never heard of. She managed to keep it hidden so well that the man she used to be became a missing person's case that simply went cold. It wasn't unheard of for rich people to turn up in rivers after all, brigands being common and the whatnot. Auds had the money and smarts to shut the right people up after all.
She was probably celibate for most of her life and due to the pervasiveness of the religion that is the devotion towards the Light, premarital sex was probably one of those faux-pas that the higher class ("attempted" to) abide by. Some people probably lauded her for doing so ("Audrey is so chaste!" "What a wonderful Light blessed lady") but I don't doubt people were nasty about it too ("I bet Lady Audrey's a whore with money to shut people up" etc) but the truth was that she simply could not afford to have her secret out lest she put her life in danger, so she simply abstained until she met her husband.
Bottom surgery was probably unheard of for Audrey until she met Paracelsus in the hamlet, though I do believe they did meet previously while Paracelsus was deep in her studies, seeing each other as kindred spirits because they were both trans. They weren't close to each other but I feel Para was more tolerant to Audrey than she was towards most nobles (especially because Audrey to me reads as a well read woman who's rather curious and willing to learn, though not quite enough to invest her life into studies the same way Paracelsus or Alhazred might. However, if they were to approach her with the intent to teach or to educate her Audrey would be more than willing to lend her time to listen)
I don't doubt her husband was "kind" at first. Pretended to be understanding about her "condition" and promised to keep it a secret. But over time he would use it as a way to keep her quiet about the abuse. Misogyny already meant women were expected to put up with nasty husbands but since Audrey was part of a marginalized group he most definitely used that against her to further force her to stay in the relationship. He was able to abuse her for so long because of this fact tbh ("if you leave i will tell everyone about your shame and make sure you lose EVERYTHING"). Her transness was most definitely used against her while he was verbally abusing her too, referring to her with all sorts of nasty transphobic insults in order to degrade and dehumanize her. A part of her was willing to put up with it for so long as well because of internalized transphobia and the need to be validated through a negative social dynamic (If she cannot be a real woman like her husband says then she can at least be abused like one.)
And that's why one day she decides she has enough and poisons him 😌 . I imagine she gets the idea from the small cliques of noblewomen that naturally form from gossip and whatnot. Though they were probably nasty people in other regards, Audrey's group probably learned of her abuse while Audrey was venting her rage about her husband (though aptly keeping her transness a secret simply out of safety) and her friends jokingly suggested poisoning him like any other wife would ("Oh Audrey darling why don't you poison him like any other maiden would? Arsenic does the trick without any smell I've heard. Get a new one and kick the old rag to the bin" and then they'd laugh and talk about some poor person they scammed)
I will attempt to explain why the act of poisoning her husband was positively validating to her identity as a woman. All this time she learned from observation that women are meant to be helpless pretty things who should put up with abuse because that is how a "proper" woman should be. In essentially being "granted permission" to fight back her first act of fighting back was given to her by people who she considered "real women" and in doing so successfully she acted like a "real woman" which validates her identity as a woman by doing so and flips the entire negative social dynamic on its head. Through poisoning her husband and standing on her own two feet she breaks the self imposed expectation of not fighting back if she wants to be seen as feminine, hence planting the seed for the more combat oriented femme fatale character we see today in the hamlet. 🙂↕️
I will probably write more on Audrey because I LOVE writing her as a very messy woman. Girl . Absinthe is basically 74% alcohol and you are just shotgunning it out on the battlefield and then swinging your pickaxe at the nearest thing that moves arw u ok 😭😭😭😭
Thanx for taking the time to read this all have some Audrey shitposts i drew on my phone
personally i am an absolute sucker for trans men playing up/making themselves more vulgar and crass as a way to compensate and protect themselves i can see dismas picking up every single bit of foul language and gross behavior he can to just paint himself as unladylike as possible
like he makes a point to cuss and say foul shit all the time around reynauld in particular because they share a room to just throw him off any slight inkling that dismas is not a normal man, refusing to bathe with the other men and acting like it's just because he doesn't think he needs to and when he does have to bite the bullet and wash up still insisting on doing it alone and citing the fact he doesn't trust anyone to not be tempted by the bounty on his head and not fight him while he's unarmed
and like he's learned to piss standing up convincingly enough that if you're not looking super hard from behind you're probably not gonna question it too hard, just well enough that if most of the others came across him, they'd just hopefully turn around and leave him be to finish up
also dismas treating his pistol as a stand in for his penis thematically like having the holster for it across his lap to hide his lack of a bulge and being protective over it and i think it would be cool in art or fics to have it be like a symbol of his own strength and manhood in the sense he's had to earn his perception as a man through violence and fighting and presenting himself as a dangerous and vile creature
and with him being underweight when he reaches the hamlet, he just hasn't had enough meat on his bones to really have his breasts be visible with his jacket and layers on but as he starts packing on weight again at the hamlet from having more consistent access to food they start filling out and him trying to find a good way to bind that doesn't hinder him too much on combat because he is absolutely not coming forward to anyone with this problem except maybe para and that's mostly because there's only so much he can do to keep her from giving him exams and check ups when he gets injured but he still isn't really seeking her out for help with that
and if any of the men around found out about him being afab his immediate reaction upon finding out they know would be "oh, you're a threat to me now, i need to kill you and run far away from here" because he'd rather be hunted as a killer than persued as a woman so he tries to immediately fight them even if they're bringing it up peacefully
also dismas trying to fake an injury on the rare occasion he gets a period unexpectedly, like having that fun expierence of waking up to find you're bleeding and remembering it's about that time, because at his age they don't come often anymore but he's got a few left in him or him just trying to change rags/wash them discreetly
i don't think dismas has any sort of label for what he is other than just not a woman but he's not truly sure if man is right either because he's not a man like his fellows in the hamlet so while he doesn't stop anyone from calling him a man he tends to talk about himself like he's an animal, like calling himself a dog or a rat or a pest or vermin
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