#politics#important#russia has been out for revenge for losing the cold war for (at least) the last 15-20 years#and keeping pro-democracy parties in power is the only way to stop them via @sick-sad-little-world
And funding Ukraine. The Putin regime must fall and Russian society must be purged of fascism, reeducated and democratized like post war Germany was.
No sex scene in Heated Rivalry is unnecessary or gratuitous.
Each one propels the narrative forward and demonstrates the ebb and flow of intimacy between our two leads as it grows. This, after all, is a romance story.
As an audience, and a queer audience at that, we’re also entitled to want to see sex between queer couples.
Heterosexual people have decades worth of sex scenes.
We’re adults. Some of us like watching sex on screen and getting horny over it. That’s normal. I cannot stress enough how normal that is.
I love Ilya but I would be so pissed off if my multi-year situationship who had been fucking other people the whole time got jealous of someone I dated for a week. Like yes it’s funny in the show but irl I’d be so annoyed like bro I put up with my own jealousy for YEARS and now you wanna say something? I have too many jealousy issues of my own to be dealing with all that 💔
Ilya always assumed Shane must have slept with other people. He even thinks as much in the book when watching Shane’s documentary- that he must have taken some nice boring girl to the cottage at some point for some nice boring sex.
So that’s not what hurts him so much.
Shane is super private, Ilya knows this, and Shane says as much during episode 4- so the fact that Shane went from being private to getting into the most public relationship ever in two seconds flat made Ilya go- oh shit. He’s serious about this.
A lot of people interpret his jealousy as hypocritical, but I don’t see it that way. If he’d somehow found out that Shane had some random hookup, it wouldn’t bother him. It’s the fact that Rose gets to be public with Shane, when Ilya cannot.
He can’t get papped holding his hand without it destroying their lives.
He can’t dance with him at the club, can’t wear his jerseys to games.
He can’t do any of that without risking his own life and Shane’s entire career. I don’t know, I just didn’t interpret it as funny, I thought it was heartbreaking on both sides.
i could be succinct for once in my life & condense this, but my skull is filled with soup rn. first word vomit of this blog ig
tl;dr—skip are really interesting but only as a framing device for privilege & hollanov
like many people i rolled my eyes at heated rivalry, in my case bc of the books & where i know they originated, but was won over. what won me over was episode 3 of all things, tho
for the first 2 episodes of the show we watch shane and ilya struggle to communicate emotionally despite wanting to & substitute their deficiencies with sex. typical trope of erotic fiction. i enjoyed it, but what intrigued me (high quality & acting aside) was that shane is half-asian in one of the whitest hypermasculine contact sports in the world and subtextually autistic, and ilya is a russian esl immigrant with some obvious ptsd based neurodivergence. piled on to them both being queer closeted globally ranked child athletes entering a multi-million dollar sports industry, that's a fucking saw trap
racist exotification and caricatures in these genres are common, especially of russians/slavs & asians, and so is a decorative approach to mental health challenges/disorders. i was admittedly wary of the show's thematic follow through & skeptical it was even aware of the microcosm it held in its palm, except for shane's autism (a hudson williams interview abt shane convinced me to give it a chance). mostly bc ik the vibes of its source material & doubted such a thing would take any interest in a racial narrative, much less an intersectional one
but then episode 3 happened. and oh this was really really fucking interesting
not the contained queer popcorn romance, which is fine, and certainly not scott/kip as a ship (sorry to kip but his actor shares a striking resemblance to #my dad and enduring that was actual psychological torture). what hooked me by the lip was the themes of privilege it introduced
scott and kip communicate basically perfectly, and expeditiously. their circumstances drive them apart, but never each other. there's no mess. they have a romcom style meet cute and altogether bow-wrapped little u-haul romance. even in their difficult moments they support each other and acknowledge the other's needs or try to do so. it's the all american cherry pie wholesome wattpad/hallmark fantasy of closeted gay romances, well made and produced and good enough to stand on its own
but it's episode 3. not a vignette standalone. this is part of shane and ilya's story
on the surface it seems like skip is expanding the depictions of what closeted athletes can look like, while assuring the viewer that the writers know how to write healthy communication with compelling drama. that's probably its intention. but it's not what makes it interesting
scott and kip are both white, usamerican, (mostly) neurotypical men. one of whom is an established, respected hockey player (man in the crease notwithstanding) and closeted but self-determined gay man. the other is a normal out gay guy in his 20s/30s with a loving support system, pillared (crucially) by his dad. they both have a great deal of security around and within them, in spite of scott being so closeted
meanwhile shane is mixed race, a model minority asian/japanese icon in his very racist hypermasculine conformist national sport, undiagnosed autistic, and a closeted gay man (Very Confused flavor). he has obvious signs of undiagnosed ocd & given all of this, probably cptsd. he's sexually submissive to the point of deviance. he sits like his limbs are filled with lead and his japanese parent is his manager
all-american cherry pie scott and kip are a framing device to demonstrate how healthy communication itself can become a privilege. bc of their national, political, and personal circumstances, shane and ilya literally can't communicate the way scott and kip do. their relationship is messy and confusing and sexually deviant. it's difficult to explain, categorize, and defies most norms. its fabric itself is queer in a way skip's isn't
ilya is an eccentric & brash russian/slavic esl immigrant living alone in the us on a visa in a foreign league which punishes players for having a personality more interesting than strawberry milk and white knuckles the cold war profile of russians like a woobie. at home he's a russian national athlete with an abusive family in the police/military and a closeted bisexual man (Will Be Jailed/Disowned flavor). he has textbook flags of undiagnosed cptsd/ptsd. he's sexually dominant to the point of deviance and he's financially responsible for his terrible remaining parent who's dying of dementia on the other side of the world (+ his crackhead older brother)
this is why scott and kip are the perfect couple to break the coming out barrier. they're about as ideal & commercially shippable as it gets for a gay couple in a cultishly racist/etc industry like hockey. this is also why so many cishet viewers are so fond of them. it's a recreation of their in-universe narrative purpose—skip are there to win normie audiences over, so you don't stick your nose up at hollanov & the queer dysfunction they depict
they have the potential to be more compelling than a lifetime movie if these themes become foretextual. i want to see them use their privilege in allyship to shane & ilya. this is why they're in the story
that's the core thesis of this entire damn thing, anyway. i can only hope jacob tierney goes balls to the walls with it (and..........is Aware Of It)
thank you ao3 for being an archive and not an algorithm. thank you for letting me like things without consequences, thank you for being free with no ads, thank you for having lawyers to defend our freedom of speech. thank you tag wranglers. thank you to all authors and thank you ao3
To the straight people getting into Heated Rivalry: this show is not racy or softcore porn or all about sex—and if you think it is, I need you to question why you think that.
I could name hundreds of other shows or films that have way more sex, way more nudity, and way less emotional depth or plot, that we call romcoms or dramas or just romance because they centre straight relationships—and sex, sexual tension, and sexual/aesthetic attraction is a common way to depict the development of romance between characters.
The only reason the sex in Heated Rivaly is getting so much attention (despite it never being gratuitous, rather it is intentionally used to drive the emotional arc between Shane and Ilya) is because it’s queer.
So I need all of the straight allies to sit down and reflect right now, and to stop perpetuating this harmful narrative that the sex we’re seeing in Heated Rivalry is any different from any other show or film we see. The only difference is it’s queer love and joy instead of the cis-heteronormative stories we’re so used to. And this othering of queer relationships is what makes it impossible for Ilya and Shane to be out. This othering perpetuates binary systems of oppression for all of us.
Because really, HR is just another show that explores the complexity of romance, and how we navigate barriers and traumas that often get in the way of having relationships. And that is universal.
In episodes 4 and 5 of the second season, there's a lot of throwing around of the word "whim." Ed and Stede both argue that they were just a whim to the other, Stede concludes they they are both "whim-prone" and that whim-prone people shouldn't run off to China together, and Ed cites their "whim-prone"ness as a reason to take things slow as they start to rebuild their relationship.
And I know we all like to joke about U-Haul failboats in love, but they aren't whim-prone. That's not what's going on here.
The first time on the show that we hear the word "whim" is in s1e4, when Izzy says "For years, I've followed your every whim, I've managed your increasingly erratic moods, I've massaged this crew when they were worried about your judgment." But from what we see of Izzy's interactions with the crew, he's not a massager, he's a sledgehammer, and the crew respect Blackbeard a hell of a lot more than they respect Izzy. Ed's moods don't read as "erratic" at all if you pay attention to what he's responding to; he's an emotional guy, for sure, but mostly even-keeled until highly provoked. And as for "following [his] every whim," Izzy can barely follow orders as given - committing insubordination at least twice that we see; not telling Stede that it was Blackbeard that wanted to meet him in s1e3, and flat-out ignoring Ed's "we're not doing this" in s1e6 when he challenges Stede to the duel. So I don't see Izzy as a reliable narrator when he suggests Ed is "whim-prone" - it might look like that to him because he doesn't try to understand Ed on his own terms, but it is v. much a construction that Izzy is imposing on Ed; not an objective character trait Ed possesses. After all, you don't get a reputation for being "history's most brilliant tactician" if you're not, at the heart of it all, a planner.
Stede is also a planner. Mary accuses Stede of abandoning his family on a whim, but that's also inaccurate. Thanks to all the hard work @nicnacsnonsense did in her marvelous 1st season timeline video, we know that SIX MONTHS elapsed between Stede proposing with his model boat that they go to sea at the anniversary debacle and the night of Mary's apology when Stede had already committed to actually leaving. That's not a whim - that's plenty of time for serious deliberation. It LOOKED like a whim from the outside because of their disastrous communication failures, but that doesn't make it true. Unabandoning his family was not a whim either - Chauncy was the catalyst, but only because he created a high-pressure situation that validated all of the insecurities we'd seen Stede struggling with all season; guilt over abandoning his family, and his crater-bottom self-esteem that the people he loved were better off without him. Even in season 2, we see more of this long-game behavior, where Stede takes his drudge job in towels and elevates it by applying scent; a move that LOOKS whim-prone from the outside, but primes him for success when it comes time to escape, because it means he knows the guards are used to deeply inhaling the scent of the fresh towels he gives them, and is thus he is able to trick them into chloroforming themselves.
There are times in the 1st season where it might LOOK like they are being whim-prone, but for the most part, those things are mostly time-critical circumstances . The impulsive decision to go to the French Party Boat? The invitation was for that night, so it's not like another opportunity like that was just going to come along. Stede's impromptu Fuckery? He'd JUST been introduced to the concept that morning, and the ships on which he wanted to try it out were three days away. If you'll recall, Ed actually tries to talk him out of going through with it with such a short turn-around time, and likely would have succeeded if Izzy hadn't interveined to further his "Kill Stede Now" agenda. The Treasure hunt? Stede was anxiously scrabbling for ANYTHING to keep Ed's attention (AFTER he confirmed there were no oranges for sale, not even for ready money) because Ed said that his plans for the day included "planning for the next adventure" and leaving. Act of Grace? Signing away ten years of your life for a man you've known for a month IS a lot, but the alternative was letting Stede be executed. Running away together? I'll give you that China was quite the absurd swing, but they WERE in jail for all intents and purposes - no sense staying longer than absolutely necessary, and there theoretically could have been time for re-working the plan once they were just away had circumstances not arisen.
So while I think it's fair to call the boys whimsical with their love of dress-up and lovely perfumed things and theatrics and tasty sugary treats, I wouldn't say whim-prone is an accurate descriptor (and the fact that they are accepting that it is makes my heart crack wide open for them, because it's evidence that they're still both uncritically absorbing the labels applied to them by people who don't really understand them at all), nor the problem they need to address.
Their real problem is actually the exact opposite of flitting from whim to whim; that, once they've committed to something, they are all in, 100% ride-or-die. It's why Ed resigned himself to going down with the ship when it turned out he'd miscalculated the date instead of trying any evasive maneuvers with the fog to give them cover. It's why, when Stede didn't show at the docks, Ed went full pillow fort until Lucius was able to talk him around into life going on without Stede. It's why Stede threw himself into trying to be all the things he thought he'd failed to be as a husband and father when he came back to his family, and was committed to staying, even though it was making him miserable, until Mary tried to murder him.
Ultimately, the solution for both these conditions is the same - slowing down. But it's not a matter of making sure this is serious and not just a whim for either of them; it's a matter of taking the time to understand exactly what it is that you're committing to. So I object to the term "whim."
All of this screams queer. If I saw any of these people in a bar I'd be like "Yep, one of us." The gender fuckery of it all. The feminine and the masculine all thrown in together in perfect combinations. Decoration for its own sake. Jewelry and flashy adornment and gorgeous peacockery.
And we love it. The fandom is going absolutely feral over these looks, these actors, as we very well should. There is not a single member of this cast who has not had beautiful art lovingly made depicting them.
Fuck the male gaze, fuck the female gaze. Give me the queer gaze. Give me queer creators making queer media for queer audiences and absolutely nailing it. These people are not at all what Hollywood usually thinks sexy looks like, yet we want to devour every one of them. This is what queer beauty looks like. What queer sex appeal looks like. What queer desire looks like.
"A certain critic—for such men, I regret to say, do exist—made the nasty remark about my last novel that it contained 'all the old Wodehouse characters under different names.' He has probably now been eaten by bears, like the children who made mock of the prophet Elisha: but if he still survives he will not be able to make a similar charge against Summer Lightning. With my superior intelligence, I have outgeneralled this man by putting in all the old Wodehouse characters under the same names. Pretty silly it will make him feel, I rather fancy."
(P. G. Wodehouse, via Wodehouse Tweets (@inimitablepgw) at Twitter)
hey i said this in a group chat earlier and honestly it fucks, so i’m gonna post it here too
Feel disgusted by something? Don’t immediately act on it. Deconstruct your disgust!
Be just a little curious about it. Why do you feel disgusted by something? What is it about the thing that disgusts you? Is it the whole that disgusts you, or just a part? Do you feel disgusted because you’re supposed to? Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Are you just disgusted because something looks unfamiliar to you? Do other people seem disgusted or are there people opposing your disgust (or do they, on the flipside, like it?). Is there a cultural context you might be missing? More importantly, could there be biases like racism, sexism, classism, homo- or trans-phobia at play? Is the object of your digust actually causing harm? Does someone benefit from your disgust politically?
Disgust is a powerful emotion, but one that deserves a lot of self-reflection. It’s easily weaponised and often deeply flawed.
…is this supposed to apply to finding wet moldy produce in the back of the fridge, because I don’t see how, and if it isn’t supposed to apply to that, how are users supposed to tell when to use it?
Mould is an excellent place to go to talk about the application of interrogated disgust. There are a lot of cases were foods are intentionally laced with mould for the flavour it produces. We control rot and mould in a lot of ways in food - kimchi, stilton, sour cream, they’re all produced by allowing things to rot in specific ways. And some ways are more blatently obvious than others! You can look at stilton and see the green penicillin moulds used to create it, whilst you might look at bread and go ‘this isn’t going off’ - but yeasts are creating alcohol and CO2 inside the bread, which is a sort of spoilage.
In relation to food in the back of the fridge, absolutely throw it out. You’re not harming anyone by not wanting to eat food you know is past its best. But there are cultures who ferment foods in ways we might immediately balk at because your brain connects the mould in your fridge and the sensible ‘probably not good to eat’ warning with something harmless, and that’s the danger of disgust.
You might genuinely find them disgusting. Icelanders can do what they want, nothing about kæstur hákarl (fermented greenland shark)* appeals to me and I think I’m fine in saying I’m disgusted by it. All theirs.
But, you can see how this could be weaponised, yeah? There are plenty of cultures and peoples where ‘they’re disgusting, vermin-like’ were used as legitimate reasons to oppress and destroy. In that case, their food - harmless and controlled as the spoilage might be - might be used as evidence to prove their point UNLESS you interrogate your initial gut reaction to their fermented foods.
Back to our questions - Does the person telling you about the fermented foods have an agenda? Yes, they do, bigotry. Is your unfamiliarity playing in? Yeah, you’ve never actually tasted the food, you don’t know what it’s like. Is there cultural context you’re missing? Might be! Again, in the case of kæstur hákarl, Iceland is a hard place to grow food and you make edible what you can. Has someone told you to feel disgusted? Yes! Do other people disagree with the speaker? Yes - the culture that created the food think it’s swell!
In this case, you might want to hold back on acting on your disgust. There’s enough rhetorical evidence here to suggest it might be displaced.
(* I’m using kæstur hákarl as an example because the sort of strongly fermented fish products scandinavians make are a good example of food you might not want to eat that doesn’t have any other strongly anti-Scandinavian things attatched to it. I can discuss a theoretical here in a way that means I don’t have to walk into someone’s pre-existing biases. White Scandinavians don’t have to worry about it, no-one is actually using kæstur hákarl to oppress Icelanders.)
I had things like kink culture, purity culture ect. in my mind when I wrote the original post, and you might be able to see now how weaponised disgust is used against fandom and kinksters. A gut-level disgust is what drives a lot of homophobia and transphobia too, when you scratch down deep enough.
I hope that gives you some more context on why I wrote what I did and how you might apply it to the real world!
It’s a good example of how easy it is to assume “deconstruct” or “interrogate” means “throw out” or “disregard” or even “treat in the opposite way you would otherwise.
…It’s something that I think is both interpreted and intended - a lot of the time, someone will say “you should question X”, but really they mean “You should decisively be against X.” Honestly, it’s kind of rare for someone to say Question and really mean it, like what OP is doing. Refreshing!
okay but can we talk about how Aziraphale’s offer is, essentially, Mr. Darcy’s first proposal?
Mr. Darcy’s first proposal, if you haven’t read Pride and Prejudice, is a famously-bad train wreck. he spends most of it dunking on Elizabeth’s family and circumstances and saying outright that he’s better than her. then, after all of that, he still asks her to marry him and implies that she would be insane not to accept. understandably, Elizabeth completely rocks his shit when she turns him down.
from Crowley’s perspective, that’s exactly what Aziraphale’s offer is. he points out that Hell is awful and suggests that Crowley’s life would be better if he came back to Heaven—the ‘good guys’— with Aziraphale. he can’t understand why Crowley would ever turn him down!
like Mr. Darcy, Aziraphale is doing what he thinks is best for the person he loves. but just like Mr. Darcy, he completely fumbles the proposal because he doesn’t fully understand what that person wants, or even who that person is!
Con O’Neill, MCM Comic Con panel with Nathan Foad and Kristian Nairn, London May 27, 2023
Q: As someone who was a teenager for Section 28 Part 1, I just want to […] say a massive thank you for speaking up about Section 28 Part 2. What’s it been like at the moment, working on a show that has got such cool and interesting things to say about gender broadly and masculinity more specifically?
General thoughts about the state of superhero movies at the moment? :D
Well, a hot take it ain’t, but they have a problem, and the problem is not superhero movies in specific, it’s the movie industry. It’s the Indiana Jones and the Dial of Churning, it’s the promise of Batman: More, and Captain America: Plodding New Content.
Throw the entire cinematic universes out the window, slash the budgets, let filmmakers make movies again. If some of them are about superheroes, even specific superheroes for the nth time, great (Spiderverse)! But the endless sludge of AI-generated IStandForNothingMan 256B is just exhausting, and that’s even when you just watch the gifs on Tumblr.
Ok, by popular Twitter demand here is my extremely nerdy write up on breathing and breathwork in Our Flag Means Death, specifically looking at Ed and Stede’s “Your Wear Fine Things Well” scene. I’m a professional theater person and coming at this from a live performance lens, and this is film/TV acting, so take some of this with a grain of salt, but most of our best actors come from a theater background (I know Taika studied theater in college ). So fuck in, let’s dive in and overanalyze the hell of out something.
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