I'm Edward, 23, English/British, he/him/his pls, enthusiastic fan of Period Dramas, Harry Potter and Doctor Who, tired and bitter fan of GoT, proud creator of three (3) Les Miserables posts, on this blog we stan Sylvia Tietjens and only Sylvia Tietjens. TERFs can fuck off please
I think the psychology of Jeremy Renner is very funny, like not as an individual but as a specific location within society. I’m thinking about what Parkins (and Engels and etc) said about the petit-bourgeoisie being marked by a deep abiding terror over the instability of their own fortunes, that unlike the aristocracy there is not the same institutional guarantee of intergenerational class reproduction, and so the middle classes are terrified of every shadow on the wall for fear it could ruin them financially. So strong is this terror that this is a subjectivity inhabited by successful and unsuccessful people alike. And I’m also thinking about that Indigo F video essay about the gaylor phenomenon where they talk about how people who like extremely popular things (like the MCU) feel a deep insecurity over their own mainstream tastes and want to position themselves as being cool in the culture (thus a potential explanation for the gaylor phenomenon as a post-hoc justification for liking the most popular musician on the planet).
And so combining these two things together, to be an actor in something so dominant as the MCU, there also needs to be a similar bourgeois terror/hegemonic insecurity right ? We all heard what Martin Scorsese said about those movies. But at least if you’re Robert Downey Jr you’re something approaching a real actor on top of being one of the A-list stars in said hegemony, so there’s a certain level of security there. But Jeremy Renner is Hawkeye. You are marginal gentry in the McMansion kingdom, but you don’t even get the security of being gentry, you’re just bourgeois. So you create an app themed after yourself. The Jeremy Renner app. That is an articulation of a deep unshakeable terror at your own existence. Every time he appears on camera you can see the horror in his eyes no matter how well he tries to mask it
As a general rule of fantasy and sci-fi naming, the closer to the back half of the alphabet the average letter in their name is, the eviller they are. A name that doesn’t contain any consonants north of R is poison frog colouration. If it uses Y as a vowel in a non-terminal position you’re basically fucked.
That single “e” is doing a lot for you, Mr. Prokopetz.
Well, yes; a lot of Western fantasy and sci-fi media’s propensity to villain-code the back half of the alphabet boils down to Western authors being Weird™ about Slavic cultures, and I’ll give you three guesses where my surname comes from.
i fear some of you forget that the destiel queerbait went on for TWLEVE (12) years which is why it’s actually not comparable to whatever ship you’re pretending it’s comparable to
they dedicated multiple in-universe canon episodes and comicon panels to making fun of us and calling us perverts. the queerbait cannot be replicated.
it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like… do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? …wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i’ll add this phrase– nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it’s going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won’t feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?
“Dogs don’t know what they look like. Dogs don’t even know what size they are. No doubt it’s our fault, for breeding them into such weird shapes and sizes. My brother’s dachshund, standing tall at eight inches, would attack a Great Dane in the full conviction that she could tear it apart. When a little dog is assaulting its ankles the big dog often stands there looking confused — “Should I eat it? Will it eat me? I am bigger than it, aren’t I?” But then the Great Dane will come and try to sit in your lap and mash you flat, under the impression that it is a Peke-a-poo… Cats know exactly where they begin and end. When they walk slowly out the door that you are holding open for them, and pause, leaving their tail just an inch or two inside the door, they know it. They know you have to keep holding the door open. That is why their tail is there. It is a cat’s way of maintaining a relationship. Housecats know that they are small, and that it matters. When a cat meets a threatening dog and can’t make either a horizontal or a vertical escape, it’ll suddenly triple its size, inflating itself into a sort of weird fur blowfish, and it may work, because the dog gets confused again — “I thought that was a cat. Aren’t I bigger than cats? Will it eat me?” … A lot of us humans are like dogs: we really don’t know what size we are, how we’re shaped, what we look like. The most extreme example of this ignorance must be the people who design the seats on airplanes. At the other extreme, the people who have the most accurate, vivid sense of their own appearance may be dancers. What dancers look like is, after all, what they do.”
— Ursula Le Guin, in The Wave in the Mind (via fortooate)
This paragraph went in so many different directions before it ended. What the fuck Ursula
you queers who grew up in “small towns” really overestimate how unique your fucking experience of alienation is.
There is no mythically accepting place to be queer in this world. The weird self-righteousness is insufferable.
The American mythos of the pure, good, rural salt-of-the-earth innocence is as durable as it is insipid.
Absolutely incredible how many of you will grow up surrounded by conservative, right-wing norms and mores, pull yourselves out of them when you realize you’re queer, and then re-establish those same norms and mores with the only change being you’ve crossed out “jesus” and written over it with “leftism” in magic marker.
Too many of you carry this very Christian idea of morality, purity, and supremacy and its a real bad look.
Yeah I grew up on a true-blue suburb and was assaulted on a weekly basis for being perceived as queer. before I even got to high school so like, again, not unique to red state ruralsville
Tumblr is weird because sometimes you go to a mutual’s page and like/reblog half their content like you just broke in their house and imediately ate a little piece of all their food, tried out some of their clothes, sat on their sofa, and then just left.
And sometimes the mutual notices and does the same to your house.
employers are like “we have hired exactly enough people for our business to function as long as everyone works perfectly and nobody takes a day off. if our employees are having trouble that’s a them problem.”
businesses post the 2k8 recession are like “actually we hired 60% of the people we need to function because we realized we could just work the employees harder and let the customers yell at them and no one remembers how it was before!”
It’s more comforting to convince yourself that all men are assholes then it is to face reality which is that your ex boyfriend wasn’t destined to become an asshole but for a variety of complicated societal and personal reasons he ended up that way anyways even though he could’ve chosen to not be an asshole
Your dad doesn’t suck because he’s a man. Sure, him being a man probably contributed to the various circumstances in his life that caused him to suck and believing that men are destined to suck gives you an easy to understand answer of why the world is this way but in reality your dad sucks for a variety of complicated reasons. You’re probably still justified in throwing ice water in his face and cutting him off but he didn’t drive you to that as an inherent extension of his manhood. He drove you to that because he personally sucks. A lot of men personally suck for a lot of complicated reasons but unfortunately there isn’t one universal easy to explain answer as to why that is.
Oppositional sexism is a very useful term actually. Like, so much is better explained by the idea of “there’s a societal belief that men and women should remain opposites and should have no overlapping traits” than “this is homophobia/transphobia”. Why does society hate displays of femininity in men and masculinity in women? It’s oppositional sexism. They hate that you’re proof that masculinity and femininity aren’t inherently opposites. Thank you julia serano for another banger
the way this combines so well with her other term traditional sexism: the belief that masculinity and maleness are fundamentally better than femininity and femaleness. Like not only is there this pervasive belief that the two genders are mutually exclusive opposites that can/should not overlap, but also one of these two categories is considered fundamentally worse in every way. Like, it’s such an elegant way of explaining why effeminate men are consistently such a media phenomenon in history compared to masculine women (giving up masculinity/embracing femininity is seen as embracing weakness, compared to vice versa), and it goes a long way towards explaining why being a trans women in particular is so stigmatized. thank you julia serano
ALT
