νρatypical

art is awful i hate art

[betterisbest]

[vpatypical]

Tarts with Hearts: Sex Workers in Love

An anthology of sex worker fiction, by and about sex workers in love.

this is so cool, I hope it gets funded

[sial-nawfed]

"i dont like intersectional feminist terminology because it implies that i have the capacity and means to enact violence and thats unfair because im literally so niceys" - one of the most dangerous and unsafe people youll ever meet

[sial-nawfed]

these people will say "hey dont group me in with all the other white/male/cis/TME people, im one of the good ones" without a shred of self-awareness

[melancholic-whimsy]

they hate me for my flat facial expressions and inability to contribute to conversations

[gilkenansmonsterhouse2006-deact]

i wish i could say “?????????” in real life it would be very useful

[itssquidbian]

feminist retelling shoulsnt be the woman does some girlboss shit femist retelling is she does the same stuff except u actually give a shit abt her perspective and thoughts and feelings as a human being this time

[hoochie-coquette]

Ethiopian sk8er girls (2025) 📸 E_G_S

[ganondorf]

i think this captures the defining pathology of the collective social media psyche right now. we are in the thrall of people who are wantonly cruel but who also demand to be coddled at all times in every way

[tedcruzisthezodiackiller]

[daily-dose-of-dopamine]

AH!

[elbiotipo]

More than "here in the Southern Hemisphere we have inverted seasons :)" thing, which is TECHNICALLY true, I would go a step further and encourage to think about that "much of the world does not exactly has a spring-summer-fall-winter season sequence as they show in cartoons"

[paperdragonsong]

I will scream about this to anyone who listens forever. AUSTRALIA DOES NOT HAVE "ENGLISH SEASONS BUT BACKWARDS" and the insistence that it does creates a massive layer of alienation from the natural world.

I never really realised how much difference it makes until I went to England and realised that here the change of seasons is an obvious, visible, physical change in the world. Like, everything REALLY IS orange and foggy in autumn! In spring there are flowers EVERYWHERE, so much more than any other season, and the trees really do have all blossom and no leaves. Even if it doesn't snow, in winter there's frost all the time and the trees are bare and the sky is visibly greyer all the time. You don't need to be told "this date is the first day of spring", you can SEE IT (although this is getting way messier and less precise due to climate change).

By contrast, most places in Australia the seasons we're taught feel like arbitrary categories - and is it any surprise considering they're colonial constructs? Orange-leaved autumn and blossom-covered spring is a cartoon stereotype with no relevance on a continent where ALL NATIVE TREES ARE EVERGREEN!! Snowy winters are a joke in the desert, and even sunny summers don't ring particularly true considering that much of the country is in the tropics, where summer means monsoons - not that I've ever seen the concept that WE HAVE A MONSOON SEASON taught at an Australian school.

Most Indigenous nations around Australia had six or more seasons, revolving around wet and dry times as much as hot and cold, and marked by the appearances of certain native animals and flowers. Schools need to start teaching the real seasons, and explaining that climate cycles are too complex to generalise globally, or else we will keep raising generations who view the natural world as hostile and unpredictable and climate predictions as generally irrelevent and frequently wrong - and I'm sure I don't need to spell out why that's a problem in the era of climate crisis.

[tiredtransgal]

i want to add that 40% of the world's population lives in the tropics, and the 4 season model just doesn't make much sense for a lot of places in there. usually it's just the wet season/monsoon season and the dry season. it's often hot year round.

the 4 season model as you and i know it is a european invention, though 4 season models aren't unique to europe! most notably china has the same type of season subdivision.

in general the way humans define seasons is largely subjective and varies across cultures. the one you were taught is not at all universal!

[vpatypical]

never read imdb user reviews; these bitches don't know what a theme is

[handweavers]

people like the idea that there is an identity they can claim that will absolve them of the responsibility to examine their beliefs and actions and adjust them accordingly to better align with their values and desired outcomes but there isn't, we all have to practice humility and do the work regardless

[thediscossessed]

[thediscossessed]

In order to explain my gripes with the film properly, I would have to get into the plot and movie that they build scaffolding to support the backrooms. It's a good thing I'm not hungover but even still consider this analysis still under construction:

The performances by Chiwetel Ejiofor and Renate Reinsve are so. so good! I think they played characters who feel this kind of existential dread that draws them to the unknown very well. My gripe comes in with the optics from a racialized lens of Chiwetel's character and nuance not being as present in the writing.

Coming off of Is God Is has gotten me aglow with joy over mentally ill black people being the film protagonists!!! And in a way Backrooms does that as well. But the character ultimately "Clark" is ultimately written to be a misogynist in a dead end job with little interiority beyond that. It wouldn't be so apparent if he wasn't the only black man in the film, and if he didn't become an antagonist in the second act, antagonising Renate Reinsve's character, his white woman therapist, "Mary."

The narrative external to the backrooms becomes a story about a black man who's unable to change from being fundamentally angry and violent who's just unable to be helped by the caring white therapist (who is not on some melfi timing fr she was dogs hit but also a therapist who sold VHS tapes so character accurate perhaps?). Over the course of the film, we see these two roleplay out scenes of domesticity, with Mary pretending to be Clark's Ex-Wife who's also a white woman!

Later in the film, Clark incapacitates Mary and kidnaps her, doing his heel turn into being a villain who's content in his derangement. This blow is softened with his eventual self-sacrifice, as he dies being eaten by the backrooms' memory monster of him. The defanging that added a Scary Guy brings to the backrooms aside, the monster is a kind of warped caricature of the man. And while ultimately not explicitly offensive, feels the reheated nachos of the race politics in the cinema of yesteryear.

[thediscossessed]

@ghomanimation first of all, thank you for telling me this! Second, WHAT THE FUCK?

the most succinct argument that I can make right now is this: tall monster performer man isnt responsible for all the questionable racialized choices in this movie BUT‼️ I have never seen Doug Jones do blackface

[thediscossessed]

Okay I wanna talk about these kinds of responses I've been seeing to this post. I may edit this later when I'm feeling more collected and less aggravated but.

I fear in attempts to be so adamantly anti racist, people are just looping back around to being racist again (I'm talking that first tag reply specifically).

And, (in reference largely to the second tag reply) thee solution encountering that a film that has racist elements (problematic I should say generally speaking) is not to Disavow your relationship to the art completely. Honestly, it reads a lot like wiping your hands of the situation in absolution that you'd NEVER consume something with racist undertones or messaging!

Now. Am I endorsing the film and telling to go pay and see it? No, not really. But I also am not saying people block out everything the film and put their heads in the sand. As I said in my initial post, I love Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance in the film! He honestly saved that theater experience for me, but I can't pretend that there aren't broader issues with the film to pick apart. Personally? I'd say pirate it, it's very well acted and visually appealing, and is worth study as an adaptation of internet horror that inherits prejudiced storytelling conventions of the medium.

I don't do that digital circus shit but both it and backrooms have been useful examples for talking about the implementation of racism in film media, in all its multifacetedness. But that's a post for another time.

[sumikatt]

It is so interesting that a lot of people’s knee-jerk reaction to learning that a piece of media has racist elements or otherwise problematic undertones is to disavow it completely (I guess “cancel” it for lack of a better term) or completely deny that it is racist/homophobic/etc and people are overreacting. Is it because in such a consumer focused society where culture is an industry, we think the media we consume is completely reflective of us?

I think it’s important to analyse media and dig into both its intended and unintended messages, to contextualise the work where and when it stands (because media cannot exist in a vacuum, as it is the space and material between sender and receiver, and relies on shared cultural codes and signs so it may be understood)…

Like there will never be an “unproblematic” or “pure” piece of media because we do not live in an unproblematic or pure world. It’s a useless endeavor to try and categorize entertainment into “morally good” and “morally bad” you have to be critical and specific

[krasnoarmeyets]

i bet it feels good as fuck to intend to do something and then actually do it

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

I will always take the cat's side. "she's drooling on me" you're so lucky "he always wants to be petted" then pet him "he's mad I won't let him on my desk" make room on your desk for him. I am your cat's defense lawyer and the cat is always innocent on the grounds of them being A Little Kitty Cat.

[lifeafterpsychiatry]

"I'm only criticizing the people who are lazy on purpose" is just not the reassurance people think it is when nearly every disabled person has been accused of not really being disabled and just being lazy on purpose