I'm gonna say it, I do think that even the laziest person imaginable should have a roof over their head, food in their stomach, and access to healthcare
a lot of people are reblogging this saying that most "lazy" people are actually just disabled or that the concept of laziness itself is a product of our society's obsession with productivity. this is all true, but it is not my point.
even if someone WAS just lazy and simply didn't want to do anything but lie on the couch and watch tv, they should still have these things. it's irrelevant whether some people aren't actually lazy because everyone, including hypothetical lazy people, should have their basic needs met.
if we have the resources to do it, there is no defense of letting people die because they don't want to work, and much less because they can't.
I don't want lazy people to have basic necessities because they "actually" deserve them because they ARE working or CAN'T work. I want lazy people to have basic necessities because they are people, and we shouldn't leave them to die when we have the resources not to.
ok, after actually looking up the term and doing some goddamn research (my goodness somebody on the internet actually decided to look something up before forming an opinion, dear god what a day), i can pretty safely say that everyone hitting this post with the “that’s just a friendship!” bit is wrong! and i can explain why! i myself didn’t get this initially! but after looking into it, i realized that it’s mainly due to the framework i was thinking in! Yeah, there’s actually merit to what these people are saying, this is stuff that’s been considered and these are indeed terms that exist! they were also coined by ace people specifically to describe their relationships!
So what gives? What does Queerplatonic Relationship mean? well i certainly fucking didnt get it at first, but it stems from attempting to define a kind of relationship that there arent really words for in the standard english lexicon! the poster above me is a TERF, and wherever i see myself agreeing with a terf i also see that there’s possibly some flaw in my logic or understanding of the thing. Basically (mind you this is only some very cursory and basic research, just type the term into google lol), QPR’s are a way of defining a relationship that has many of the same obligations and aspects of a traditional romantic relationship, without any of the explicitly romantic parts that come with having a spouse or romantic partner.
the idea of living in the same place, or jointly bringing up children, and performing many other tasks as a kind of unit that society would often mislabel as something done by two romantic partners in a union of some kind (i use that term to loosely define an exclusive relationship, not actual binding marriage, though this can include such). the idea of the QPR isn’t just “friends”, it’s very specifically “individuals in a platonic relationship that perform a number of the social aspects of a traditional romantic partnership”.
like, be real for a second. if someone described their relationship with someone to you and said “Yeah we own a house together, we have a kid that we adopted and take care of, we decided to get a dog last week and we file taxes as two members of the same household.”, you wouldn’t look at that person and assume that they arent romantic/sexual partners of some kind, because... well, traditionally, that’s shit that married people do. getting hit with the additional “Yup! And we’re not romantically or sexually involved at all! She has a boyfriend that she visits on the weekends and I’ve never had a romantic relationship in my life.” would throw you for a goddamn loop! What would you even call that relationship? and that’s where the term comes from: an attempt to define a very specific kind of relationship that certainly can and has existed, but isn’t commonly recognized or talked about!
so i think everyone shitting on these folks owes them an apology, i know i personally do for making assumptions that clearly weren’t true!
This is so important though: "You're gonna get in trouble for that" reveals so much. He was planning on nobody doing anything, not because nobody stands up to him, or nobody objecting to what he says. He expects good people to be goody-two-shoes rules followers, and he expects the rules to protect him no matter what he does.
Important lesson to learn from this standing up to fascists means getting into good trouble. Get into trouble if it's worth it. Fascists will never expect it.
The “nobody” scene in the odyssey is absolutely not just a clever pun—it’s a character defining moment for Odysseus because he refuses to be nobody. He devised an incredible plan that worked and he could have saved his men and returned home much sooner but he just had to yell to the cyclops that he isn’t nobody—he’s Odysseus, king of Ithaca so now Poseidon knows who to curse which severely fucks up the rest of the journey.
The “nobody” scene highlights both Odysseus’s cleverness but also his arrogance and those two traits define Odysseus throughout the entire story. It’s a foundational aspect of Odysseus’s character and cutting the scene displays a shocking level of ignorance and disregard for the themes in the source material.
I posted this originally on Letterboxd, but I want to share with all my mutuals as well
Spoiler Alert!!!!!
I just went back from watching Nolan's Odyssey movie, and I have so many thoughts. Prepare yourselves, this will be a long review.
I will start by saying how I hate the culture war that this film caused. I think I hate both sides of the conversation. I hate the pathetic anti-SWJs and how they made a huge deal of Nolan casting a few non-white actors and a trans actor to play a cis role, as if POC and queer actors never had played roles in Greek mythology films before. But as a Greek mythology fan, I hate how my own camp reacted to this film, being rabid Homer purists and not even giving this film a chance.
It's Christopher Nolan's Odyssey. It's exactly what it says on the tin. He doesn't even try to be historically accurate. Who knew that brutalism would be an architecture style so popular in the Bronze Age Mediterranean? Odysseus travels in a viking ship for goodness sake. This is a guy who has no experience directing period fantasy pieces, so he designed ancient Greece as a generic "the past" with a few fancy costumes. I can't say I'm a fan of this aesthetic, but the film is so much more than that, and I feel like reducing the whole end product to a couple of weird directorial choices is shallow, intellectually dishonest and anti-art.
I can say it right. @the-blue-fairie, @thealmightyemprex, I'm speaking specifically to you because I know you read my reviews and you don't like Nolan's style, this film isn't for you. Everything that you dislike about Nolan's directorial style is present in this film. This doesn't make the film bad, though.
Everything is gray, dark, moody; the film takes itself as seriously as a shipwreck. It doesn't allow a single moment of levity. And it still embraces the fantasy elements.
Contrary to past adaptations, like the Hallmark miniseries or even the Tiktok concept album, it embraces the fantasy elements without embracing the wonder. The magic feels offputting, strange, like a disquieting apparition.
Polyphemus doesn't speak properly, just proffering a few otherworldly and inhuman ramblings after Odysseus and his crew blind him, asking for Poseidon to curse them.
The Lastrygonians aren't rock-throwing giants , but an army of ruthless giants in full metal armor who don't rest until they kill as many of Odysseus' crew as they could find.
Circe isn't a beautiful sorceress in a huge temple filled with nymphs, she's almost an old hag living in an old hut who has to manually twist the bodies of Odysseus' crew to turn them into pigs, in moments of visceral body horror. There's no Hermes here.
The ghosts of Odysseus' fallen men don't just haunt him, they try to physically attack him when they journey to Hades.
There are no Lotus Eaters. Calypso is drugging Odysseus with lotus flowers herself, making him forget almost everything and making him live in a mist of confusion for years. All that to make him forget the horrors he saw.
Telemachus and Penelope share a very tempestuous relationship for a son and mother, with Penelope bitter about being powerless as a woman, constantly arguing with her son, belittling him, while Telemachus is constantly trying to prove he is fully capable of leading Ithaca.
And more, there are no gods here. Only Athena appears, in brief visions Odysseus has, before it's revealed in the end that she's wearing the face of the young priestess that the Greek army killed when they profaned Athena's temple in Troy. It's left ambiguous if she's Athena herself or only a manifestation of Odysseus' guilt for the horrors he took part in. She has tears in her eyes when Odysseus remembers the priestess being killed and Athena's statue beheaded.
Everything is meant to be unpleasant, not fully into horror territory, but extremely upsetting, strange. Maybe other directors could have made it more striking. Nolan has a too down-to-earth style. He films fantasy like he films sci-fi, but the guy is effective at what he wants to portray.
He makes you feel like you are right there inside this world. No matter how anachronistic this Greek world is, it feels like it exists. You won't see any bad CGI or bad special effects. The combination of score, camera angles, and editing choices immerse you completely in this story, as if the adventures and horrors are happening all around you.
And all this lack of wonder has a point, because the film has a central theme: Hospitality and decay.
Hospitality in this world is not just courtesy, it's a sacred law that guides this civilization. You should accept and treat well everyone that reaches your residence, be it a noble or a beggar, because they may be a god in disguise. Yet, people are constantly exploiting or breaking the laws of hospitality, the sacred laws of Zeus: From Antinous and the other suitors abusing Penelope's hospitality for years, from Polyphemus eating Odysseus’ crew, from Circe turning them into pigs when they were almost starving, and lastly, when the Greeks offered the Trojan Horse as a gift of peace to Athena before slaughtering the whole city.
This single act of breaking the laws of hospitality is what dooms this entire world.
This film is set during the Collapse of the Age of Bronze, the period of dark ages between Mycenaean Greece and Classical Greece, a period in which the epic poems were meant as a reminder of all the glory lost in the process.
This is a world in decay, where everything is dying and collapsing.
At all times, there are constantly mentions of the Sea People and how they may attack and destroy their kingdoms at any time. The Sea People are an unknown people who are theorized by some historians to be one of the causes for the Bronze Age collapse. It’s one of the threats that makes the suitors’ situation even more urgent. Ithaca needs someone who can protect it from the Sea People.
And then, almost by the end of the film, it’s revealed: The Sea People are the Greeks who sacked Troy. The memory of what they have done, of how they broke the laws of Zeus spread through the Mediterranean, and that has caused a cascade effect of every rule that governs civilization starting to collapse.
This is the main reason for why Odysseus can’t go back home, he can’t live with what he has done. The whole journey is him dealing with his constant guilt and trying to make things better, but only making them worse as a result. He knows what he has done has consequences, and he’s watching as it spreads to the whole world.
In the end, Odysseus and Penelope exile themselves to a journey into the west, while Telemachus rules Ithaca as king, but even though our main leads are happy, it’s evidently clear that as a whole, this world, all kingdoms visited are doomed. Everything will collapse and the songs about their feats and mistakes will be the only things remembered.
The Trojan War is depicted as both this world's Götterdämmerung, the Twilight of the Gods, and its Original Sin, the primordial crime from which every subsequent horror symbolically descends.
This film has a happy ending, but it doesn’t end on a hopeful note. The final shot of the film is the Trojan Horse ablaze, symbolizing the violation of the laws of hospitality and how that symbolizes the decay that will destroy everything.
We are living in times of economic recessions, environmental catastrophes, and liberal democracies in decay. Despite all the dubious choices Nolan made, the text is incredibly rich. Maybe this is the story for our times.
one time I went over to a friend's house and their housemate was making paper in the living room, and we saw this big tub full of water they were using to dissolve old scrap paper into a slurry, and everyone was immediately like "oh, you need scrap paper?" and started turning out their jacket pockets and producing expired coupons and bus tickets and crumpled receipts and old shopping lists and whatever else they'd been carrying round with them for no good reason, and passing it all to the paper-making housemate to make sure it was suitable before it got torn up and dropped into the tub, while people took turns stirring the slurry with a big wooden stick. it was strangely ritualistic, like presenting an offering to some kind of temple elder for inspection before placing it in a watery shrine to be devoured and reformed. pulp for the pulp god.
