ok poll time because i am genuinely curious about something (and this is not a call out for anyone, that's just me being in my head)

Speaking of historic costumes bringing potentially more flavor than expected. It's really weird how in period movies/series there's a whole spectrum of visual language between slavish devotion to historical accuracy and stylized but well established clichés... and more often the not, new iterations of the same story/time period just err on the side of cliché, even when writing and tone aim to be gritty/realistic (like, say, a Christopher Nolan movie).

Wait. So the Trump administration really cut funding to the program that would research and respond to the spread of New World Screwworm past the Darién Gap because they blamed it on climate change, and left the joint international program to Mexico and the Central American Countries... And are panicking now that it's reached Texas, and only now that the flies have already made it all the way from Panama to Texas are they building New facilities to produce the sterile male flies needed to eradicate the pest?

New World screwworm had been eradicated from the US since the 1960s, Elon Musk brought it back in a year.

I love this post and I agree with 99% of it but I do disagree with the post that talks about JC looking at WWX as his older brother, because I think they’re close enough in age that their relationship doesn’t quite map onto the more common tropes of older siblings taking care of the younger ones & younger siblings looking up to them.  What I do think is that Jiang Cheng has spent most of his life having it hammered into his head by his father that Wei Wuxian’s perception of what can be done, of what he can handle, of what is possible, is always more correct than his own.  That Wei Wuxian is just ~better~ at Attempting the Impossible, at Achieving the Impossible, and that therefore if WWX says “I can do this” then Jiang Cheng attempting to prevent him from trying because Jiang Cheng believes it to be impossible is Wrong and Bad and Just More Proof that he, Jiang Cheng, Doesn’t Understand How To Be The Son His Father Wanted.