catfandango

Representation matters.

It’s #StarTrekDay, and I can’t begin to express how much Sisko and DS9 meant to me as a kid. Not gonna try, I’ll just repeat my fave story.

I got into basically every college I applied to, and when it came down to it I was choosing between Oberlin, Pitzer, and I think Occidental.

I was leaning heavily on Pitzer, which seemed like Oberlin with better weather. My parents didn’t want me to go to LA.

(caps) (LOL joke’s on them on Tuesday when I move there anyway, ain’t it?)

Anyway (end caps).

I was scrolling Wikipedia in my dorm room one night trying to look for facts that would convince them to let me go to Pitzer.

I got to the Oberlin page, basically looking for dirt, and scrolled down to the “famous alumni” section and saw Avery Brooks’ name.

I think it was like 10min later I called my parents and said “I’ll be okay with going to Oberlin, Sisko went there, write the check pls.”

My logic was that, as a famous alum, he’d probably come back and maybe l’d get to meet him.

And my logic panned out– Avery Brooks came back twice. Once to do Death of a Salesman. It was amazing.

He worked with the AfAm Studies and Theatre departments, and came back a second time to give a lecture during my senior year.

I met him the first time and cried (A lot) while trying to explain what he and Sisko meant to me.

He said, “I know. This is why I did it– so *you* could watch it.” Then I cried some more.

My favourite Avery Brooks quote is from one of his Oberlin talks: “Brown children must be able to participate in contemporary mythology.” End description.]

1. will and elizabeth’s love story

2. elizabeth becoming pirate king

3. avoiding sexualizing elizabeth or the other female pirate characters in the first 3 films by allowing them to wear period-accurate pirate outfits that aren’t tailored to be revealing and impractical for ‘sex appeal’ just because they’re women

6. I run a corseting panel at cons and literally use Elizabeth’s lace-up scene as a video clip of what historical corseting was actually like, because the only thing they got wrong in this scene is that tightlacing wouldn’t be a thing for about another 200 years (and you couldn’t tightlace with the corset style Elizabeth is wearing anyway). It’s one of the most accurate corseting scenes I’ve ever seen.

7. Will’s hat.

8. That scene with all the pirates on the gallows where that little boy starts singing Hoist the Colours? Yeah, that’s fucking legendary. The rest of AWE was kind of a trash fire, but that scene gave me goosebumps.

9. There’s this great shot in the first one where they really drive home the class differences inherent in this time period by having the governor talking about progress and civilization to Elizabeth in their carriage, and then they cut to a shot outside the carriage where a beggar gets splashed by mud from the wheel. It’s a perfect way to underline that everything is not, in fact, a nice little upper-class fairytale, and to give some weight to Will’s storyline, because he has a lot more in common with that beggar than with the governor.

10. For its time, the CGI was fucking amazing.

11. And let’s not forget the work of the makeup department, which had to actually invent new ways of putting on makeup for this movie.

12. The governor’s death scene. Holy shit.

13. They could have gone with a Jack/Will/Elizabeth love triangle, but they didn’t. There are some hints Jack is in love (or at least in lust) with Elizabeth, but he recognizes that she loves Will, and that’s that.

2. They had a woman pirate right in the first film, when the tradition is to only show male ones (hell, the PotC ride at Disney had a wench auction scene until recently). And it was a female pirate of colour at that!

3. Elizabeth may not have known how to fight in the first film, but she wasn’t helpless either. Her first instinct was to fight, but she also had the brains to recognize when it was best to hide instead. Plus when given the chance she stabbed Barbosa that one time.

4. Elizabeth’s lack of fighting ability was not simply because she was a woman, it was clear it was due to her societal circumstances, since we saw other women of different socioeconomic backgrounds being able to fight (and when given the opportunity to learn Elizabeth took to fighting like a duck on water).

5. The Hoist the Colours scene where we see pirates of multiple ethnicities and their varying flags, reminding us that pirates came in all shapes and sizes and weren’t just white men.

6. One of the Pirate Lords being yet ANOTHER woman of colour. She may not have had much of a speaking role if memory serves, but even her presence is already a big deal.

Davy Jones CGI is legendary and a ton better than some of the stuff done today 😄

The ships, most stunts, and people were real.

Davy Jones was 95% Bill Nighý with dots on his face for the tentacles to be added later. All the acting and menacing was Bill.

The skeleton crew in POTC 1 used motion capture, then they took photos of the actors in costume to create skeletons over them.

When it’s raining on the ship: they’re on a real ship on a sound stage with water being poured over them.

When Calypso turned into the million crabs they got “greenscreen” balls to drop on the set and everyone to get the flow of the collapsing mass correctly.

In the 3rd film when Jack was hallucinating miniature versions of himself, they made giant hair for the “miniture” shots for him to hold on.

And when he was surrounded by other “Jacks” they were real people dressed like him with Depp doing the close ups.

These people did everything phycial that they could.

And only when they had to, they turned to CGI.

Also Jack pretends to be a carefree asshole, he’s not. He cares about people. If he didn’t care he wouldn’t have saved the slaves or Elizabeth at the start of the film, or 50% of the stuff he did in the films. And that’s what th3 copycats miss: Jack says he’s an asshole with no heart but his actions speak louder than his words and his actions say he cares.

Also all the wardrobe & like 90% of props and environments were real and really looked like that. And had been meticulously designed and created and embroidered.

Today, films are made for investors and investors only. Profit is made by shitting out crap as fast as possible and trying to wiggle out of paying anyone for their labor. Opening weekend is the only thing that matters because no one buys DVDs anymore (and the revenue from streaming is negligible) – and so art becomes flashy CGI and storytelling becomes cheap plot twists. That’s why spoilers are so closely guarded; without the twist, the story has nothing to offer. A Swiss-cheese plot and Party City costumes don’t matter if movies are made to be seen once and forgotten within a month. And if you spend more money than you absolutely have to (e.g. contracting a vfx company besides the lowest bidder) – that means you’ve forgotten that your real customers are the shareholders.

And now with the help of ai, they don’t have to pay anyone anything! Yaaaaay!

“The Jotun must learn to FEAR me, just as they once feared you!”

Loki’s reaction to Thor’s line when he’s arguing with Odin. Neither of them are looking at him, they’re too busy shouting at each other so we get to see him unmasked for a moment. This is the first time he’s able to think properly about what happened on Jotunheim. They’ve been running for their lives up until now and now they’re safe he can try and make sense of it all.

And what’s the first thing he hears?

That Jotun should be scared of Thor.

He’s shifted in seconds from Thor’s mischievous little brother to thinking he’s something appalling. Something Thor is willing to fight with to keep them in their place and you know what?

This makes him Thor’s enemy. Suddenly home has become a very hostile and insecure place.

Now I know that Thor is completely unaware of what happened so he can’t really be held responsible for hurting Loki’s feelings in this moment but it goes a long way to explaining Loki’s behavior from here on.

During this argument, he just stares at them both like they’re strangers to him, because they are now. Everything he knew has been turned around. These people aren’t family, they never were and he starts to wonder if everything else in his life was a lie.

This is the start of a series of communication disasters. Every time there was a chance to change Loki’s opinion, something gets in the way.

If Thor hadn’t have been banished, he’d have been there when Loki confronted Odin and he’d have been able to comfort Loki and tell him it made no difference if he was Jotun. He was still his brother and still loved.

When Loki eventually confronted Odin, he got a piss poor response and then Odin passed out before anything was resolved. The only person who managed to actually say anything positive was his mother but Loki didn’t need it from her. She’d never done anything to make him feel inferior up to that point. She basically tells him everything’s alright and Odin always has a plan.

Yeah we got that part thanks. Odin’s great plan for Loki was to use him to unite Kingdoms. Knowing that doesn’t really help right now and now Loki’s been handed the throne and the power of a King while he’s still reeling from the shock of thinking these people he once called family think of him as an enemy.

“The Jotun should learn to fear me.”

Well, what do you do when you think someone’s going to come and get you? You make a plan to attack first. A disastrous, drastic plan to get people’s attention.

Once Thor and Odin turn up again - everything Loki feared becomes the truth as far as he’s concerned. Because of his actions, he is Thor’s enemy after all and Odin confirms he’s not good enough. That he’ll never be good enough.

And why can't Marvel Studios let go of him? IMHO, he's basically a cash cow for Marvel Studios at this point.

I'm scared and tired rn.

It's not even Marvel Studios not letting Loki go, it's their constant attempt to try to get rid of him and/or try to say he sucks and then keep bringing him back after that.

I get into a whole rant about how much I hate the casting of Doctor Doom and how everything I hear about what they're going to do sounds awful but....

Like, at least when Tony Stark died it was because RDJ at the time legitimately wanted to move on to other things, and at least some significant amount of time and a lot of behind-the-scenes production changes had come to pass before the actor's return. Now it's still yet to be seen what version Loki this is going to be, but not a lot of time has passed between Loki grand exit to his return. What makes me ask, what was the point of getting rid of him.

Also

but then the directors felt like it didn't feel right unless Loki had to sacrifice himself.

That is not just unfair towards Loki it also kind a shoots teh worldbuilding in the foot

Rant about loom bulshit

O.K. so

In a very rare case of set up/pay off in the show, it is established that teh loom doesn't just spin raw time in to the sacred timeleine it also creates energy while doing so

-> It's not establised if that is an extra thing it does or if it is a side product from the loom but "1893" establises that te original proto type loom had originalyl beeing build to create energy from time and nothing else

It is also established in the first episod eof teh second season "oroborus" that the loom is responsible for the TVA's ENTIRE energy

-> Loom is overloading => power surges in the TVA

So where am I going with this?

There's no reason to keep TVA around, but the MCU and the creative staff is deadset on keeping them, writing sense be damned. Doesn't matter if they work for a false cause and are quite literally part of the universe threating problem. The TVA needs to remain while Loki needs to be the one to suffer because otherwise it would be too easy.

In T1 he acts tough and calculated yet cold, just like Odin, he also copies his ways of dealing with problems.

In A1 he talks about how freedom is a lie, and displays bursts of anger/humiliates people like the other members of the Black Order and The Other do.

In TR his hand gestures and use of words remind me of Grandmaster.

I am no specialist, but as far as I'm aware it's not uncommon for abuse victims to copy the abuser's behavior, partially because on subconscious level they want to understand why are they being abused, why is the other person doing it, appeal to them, etc.

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

Texts from my mom look like this now:

Call me! 👻

call me 🥑 🥭

Call me. (No one’s dead I just want to talk.)

Meanwhile other neurodivergents are like

Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.

The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.

What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images

But when Trump is arguing that native americans "don't have birthright to live here" and is trying to "deport them"

It means we go in the same camps immigrants are going in

Mexico and other countries aren't taking the immigrants the US is "trying" to send back, he's going to kill us

The US is making death camps, and they are taking everyone they find undesirable to send there