one of my fav parts of stb is when the beastie boys are saving the federation and it’s badass af but then the music chills just a lil bit while Yorktown receives the jamming frequency and then the part in the song where it goes WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!! hits and the entire Yorktown shield LIGHTS THE FUCK UP WITH EXPLODING BEE SHIPS AND IT’S LIKE SOME NEXT LEVEL FUCK YEAH SHIT👌💯👌✔ LIKE YES FUCK THEM UP YES!! !! ! !!!!!!!!!
D’you guys think that anytime someone questions anything about Sulu’s flying capabilities he has a split second where everything goes red and the disembodied haunting voice of Christopher Pike comes drifting out of the fog to say, “Is the parking brake on?”
Buffy Summers is a depressed, suicidal college drop out who works a minimum wage job to support her family and she still keeps fighting and that is so inspiring to me
I already reblogged a thing about Mad Max: Fury Road and Avengers: Age of Ultron and the contrast between how they deal with motherhood, infertility and what it means to be a woman.
It’s surreal to think that these two movies came out just two weeks apart from one another in the US. In a way I feel a little bit sorry for AoU, because it would have looked like a perfectly okay summer blockbuster if Fury Road hadn’t come barreling down right on its tail and smashed all our pathetic lowball expectations to flaming shards in the sand.
When AoU came out, I had a lot of discussions with people about Natasha’s plotline. Because my gut reaction was certainly a massive eyeroll that the one female Avenger’s deep, dark secret is that she can’t have babies. But also, it’s not like a story about a woman who underwent forced sterilization is something we shouldn’t care about. (And in the US, this is a particular form of restriction of reproductive rights that’s disproportionately affected poor women of color.) And if she internalized the line that was fed to her, that she couldn’t be both a killer and a mother, that certainly doesn’t make it her fault.
But it still frustrated me, and my frustrations were really, really well articulated by this article. You should go and read the whole thing, because it’s excellent. But this is the relevant quote:
There’s nothing wrong with stories about women who are housewives or stories about women who struggle because they were forcibly prevented from having kids as a condition of whatever mission they chose to undertake. The problem is that with so few women in superhero movies, each of these portrayals stands not only for the choices Whedon made, but for all the choices he and many others didn’t and don’t make. The portrayals of Natasha and Laura rankle at some level, for me, not because they are stories about a woman traumatized by not having children and a woman waiting for her husband to come home, but because it’s another story about those two women rather than any of the other bazillion women who could exist in this universe and don’t. If you had five butt-kicking women in this movie, it would seem perfectly logical that one of them might have a story related to getting pregnant or not. Why wouldn’t she?
These, for me, are scarcity problems. They are problems because there are so few opportunities to show women in action blockbusters that I tend to crave something very much capable of moving discussions of what those portrayals can be like forward.
…Scarcity will always drive us back to these same conversations about how every woman carries the obligation to represent What This Director Thinks Women Are For, and absolutely no answer to that question will ever be a good answer.
I think this is an interesting discussion in the context of Fury Road, because, intentionally or not, the movie takes on the scarcity problem in a couple of different ways.
On the most basic level, it gives us lots of women. In a context where studies have found that even background crowds in movies are on average only 17% women, Fury Road is FULL of women. Young women. Old women. Women who are disabled. Women who are physically strong and as skilled with weapons and vehicles as any of the men in their world. Women who are not physically strong but fight anyway. 80-year-old women who ride motorbikes and talk about all the kill shots they’ve made.
Look at the shot at the top of this post. Twelve women on screen at once! That’s more women in a single frame that some movies have speaking parts for.
Max may have his name on the title card, but he spends the movie surrounded by women. Team War Rig starts out as one man and six women; later it’s two men and five women; then it gets supplemented by a bunch more women in the third act. It’s almost an exact flip of the 20% rule of thumb, where one woman for every four men seems normal.
But Fury Road deals with the scarcity problem in another way, too, one that I think is particularly important given the film’s content. It gives us six women all reacting to the same circumstances of slavery and sexual violence, and allows them to have different, individualized, and sometimes contradictory reactions, all of which are presented as valid.
So we have Toast, who counts bullets and loads weapons, who hacks off her hair to spite Joe, who grabs his gun at a key moment and gets pistol-whipped for it, who spits on his corpse when he’s dead. Angharad, who self-injures, who uses her status as Joe’s favorite against him, who can be fearless, or reckless, with her own body, but also clings to nonviolence even when that tactic has limitations in a violent world, who stops Furiosa from killing Nux, but then pushes him out of a moving vehicle seconds later. Capable, who holds onto kindness, understanding and compassion, despite all the violence around her, who trusts Nux when Furiosa is pointing a gun at him and growling, “Get out,” and proves to be correct in her instincts. Dag, who retreats into her own head, but is often the first to sense danger, who hurls insults at her abuser, and also at Max while he’s pointing a gun at them. Cheedo, who gets scared and tries to run back to the person who hurt her, but then later uses her perceived fragility as a weapon. And Furiosa, who holds on to her rage even as she fights her way up the ranks to become Joe’s trusted lieutenant, and finally uses it to end him.
And none of these reactions are treated as better or worse or right or wrong or the correct way to be a survivor of violence. It’s okay to be angry; it’s okay to be kind; it’s okay to be scared. Because there are so many women in the movie, each one of them gets to be a unique character instead of an avatar of What This Director Thinks Women Are For.
Extend that to all of filmmaking, and to all the many kinds of identities that are underrepresented on screen today. That’s how you deal with the scarcity problem.
Luke and Leia have exactly zero percent fear response to sensing the Dark Side. This will definitely never backfire on anyone ever.
The handmaidens regularly take turns going on missions with Vader. Usually there’s two of them; there’s almost always at least one. Padmé slightly hates herself for sending them, but has no intention of stopping sending them. She hates herself a lot more for a lot of other things she’s still doing. The handmaidens don’t answer to Vader and Vader doesn’t answer to the handmaidens, but they DO occasionally remind him what Padmé said in the briefing.
Padmé has nightmares every time that Vader is too far away to sense her having nightmares. She has no idea if this is because that’s when she has the room to or if it’s just because he’s out of her reach, and she doesn’t want to know either way.
I may have mentioned this before but OH MAN, does Vader feel SO CONTENT in the Dark. Like, it is warm and soft and cozy as FUCK to him. He loves it. It’s GREAT. Which, well, he’s probably accessing it through mostly positive emotions, barring some murder-rages and the like, so that should probably make sense, buuuut that also means he’s fueled more than a few horrible slaughters on the power of love, lol. Not even in the VENGEFUL AND PROTECTIVE sense, either, just literally the soft happy feeling of Padmé’s lips pressing to the corner of his mouth or the twin’s little hands in his.
Eventually, Padmé is accidentally going to genuinely injure Vader in bed. It is not going to go well. The WAY in which it is not going to go well remains up for debate.
Oh God, here we go. So @littlestartopaz asked me to do all of these for Ouran and…yeah, I’m going to put it under the cut because I like to pretend that I have dignity, sometimes. Please do not read this if you aspire to still have any respect for me at all, and I’m blaming @twistedangelsays because she’s convenient to blame.
I literally cannot believe I let someone talk me into writing this. Whatever. It’s written. Another chapter is forthcoming. Blame @twistedangelsays for everything.
He wakes up and the first word he hears is wait! and his lips start to form the word burr? but then he sees the speaker: a woman with red hair wearing something obscenely, splendidly tight and he wonders if this is heaven and God is more of a tomcat that he suspected – but then he tries to move and pain flares down his spine, one greedy white jag, and he amends his original assessment: this is Hell, surely. “Pray tell,” he says, “where am I?” and the woman is joined by a sandy-haired man with some strange flesh-coloured apparatus curling around his ears. “New York,” says the man, “who’re you?” The man has a bow. The arrow is notched and aimed at Hamilton’s face. It is frightfully, laughably primitive – but then again the Indian braves have done much damage to westbound farmers with less and so Hamilton bites his tongue on some of his more hysterical questions and says, “My name is Alexander Hamilton. I’m at your service, sir.”
They tell him where he is. He does not believe them. They tell him when he is and he does not believe them – just a moment ago, just a moment ago, there was Burr, the gunshot, the smoke and the blood and I died I died I heard my heart lurch to a stop I saw God, the great beyond and –
They say a lot of words. There is a man in a slim black suit with obnoxious facial hair and he talks far too much and Hamilton is too quivery and out-of-place to understand the absurdity of such a condemnation (Hamilton says Tony Stark talks too much; in other news, a garden pond accuses the Atlantic of being overly wet.) He understands. He weeps. His children are dead, his grandchildren are dead. His legacy is –
there’s a musical, says Stark in a hush to Captain America (tall and blonde and how ridiculous, how perfectly absurd, this nation should not have saints or idols or – )
“A musical?”
There is a musical. There are books and television and the internet – God help the modern world, Hamilton learns about the internet and the first thing he does is write a twenty five thousand word blog on why the memory of Jefferson is overrated and false. He gets Jarvis to proofread it. He gets Jarvis to stick it on the New York Times and there’s a mass panic about someone hacking into the website for the sole purpose of slagging off a long-dead Founding Father. Nick Fury explains about firewalls and internet security. Hamilton rants at him – the Avengers listen through the door, hear things like Sally Hemings and how would you feel if the worst person you knew was remembered a hero and the article is taken down but somehow, somehow Hamilton learns what a blog is.
Things Hamilton loves about the modern world: twitter, blogging, Lin Manuel Miranda, swearing, loose sexual morality, Starbucks, minimal slavery (it still counts, he says hotly, in Africa and Asian it’s still there it isn’t gone yet – )
Yes he meets Lin Manuel Miranda. He rebukes him at length about inaccuracies. He thanks him. He sees his own play fifteen times and starts thinking about a sequel.
Oh yes. There’s a sequel.
Because the fact of the matter is this: Clinton’s corrupt and Sanders is well-meaning but doesn’t have the support and Trump is just…well. Hamilton breaks his nose and writes op-eds for every paper in the country declaring why he was right to do so.
Look: American politics is a mess. And in comes the Founding Father Without A Father, the Bastard Son of a Whore and he says: so what did I miss?
And he claps his hands and grins and says I’m not throwing away my shot and the internet goes mad and the public goes mad and no one is saying he’ll win this election but the next one, oh the next one. Four years is an eternity in politics and Senator Hamilton has the one thing he needed most: more time.
people who complain about dinosaurs “not being scary anymore” because its been discovered they have feathers and are closely related to/ancestors of birds are so bizarre like
its not about how scary they are, they are/were real life animals and what matters is learning more about them, not how well they fit into your science fiction horror film lol
can you imagine a 13 foot chicken running at you with full intent to eat you??? thats fucking terrifying holy shit
peacocks are synonymous with vain, frivolous beauty and they will attack cars. they will attack you while you try to get to your car. they’re like six feet of useless feathers and they will destroy you. imagine if they were carnivorous and had functional spurs.
a t-rex could look like a gay disco ball and i guarantee that you would fucking book it if it had a problem with you
listen
listen
have you ever met a swan
if anything the birdier they get the scarier they are
Also, I personally am quite fond of the mental image of a Majestic As Fuck pack of feathered raptors that are also capable of brutal evisceration.
I mean, what part of that doesn’t sound deeply, viscerally alarming?
As a kid, my family kept geese as guard animals. And these geese were the most effective GUARD ANIMALS because they would rush at anyone while simultaneously beating their 3 foot wings and biting. Once they broke a man’s femur who was trespassing. A grown ass man’s LEG.
Yeah, if I knew that a 6 foot tall goose lived in the world, I might never go outside.
