Cleaver

My brain when I want to draw some cute headcanons about them:

Gymnastics has come a long compared to that old footage, but this difference is particularly significant for black girls! Because they have never taken seriously our abilities! Just because the color of our skin is not what they want to see!

Simone Biles’s fantastic performance has been covered by many news outlets all these years! Now we can see the real difference!

What’s fascinating to me is that I can so easily reconstruct what that movie would have looked like. Maybe Booker would have been the hero; maybe Andy still would have nominally been the main character. Either way, his grief and his feelings and how they ~led him down a dark path~ would have dominated the film. Copley would have been a much shallower villain, and redeemed himself by dying. Joe, Nicky, and Nile would have been background characters, with Joe and Nicky’s relationship left to bare hints or turned into a ‘friendly rivalry’. Merrick absolutely would have been played by a bigger-name posh British actor and fandom would have shipped him and Booker and I could go on but you get the point. We’re all so familiar with these narratives that it’s too easy to think about what that might have looked like.

But what that also leads me to is understanding what was different about The Old Guard that made it the emotional antithesis of its fictional shadow, and it really is about the things that we prize in (good) fic. Interiority: fic spends a lot of time on what its leads feel, and the movie stops entirely at two key points to let us breathe along with Nile (as she listens to music at the military base, and in the elevator). Interpersonal relationships: we are given a strong sense of the close ties between all of the Old Guard, and Nile gets bonding moments with all of them, even though her closest relationship is with Andy as her mentor. Normative queerness: Joe and Nicky’s relationship isn’t addressed as a matter of identity, it’s addressed as a matter of love, something to aspire to and envy. Domesticity: there’s space for the team to eat a meal together, to hang out in a hotel room and bet over Andy’s baklava spider senses, in that quick flashback to the kidnapping to watch sports and read books. Character as story: the action scenes are beautiful because the way everybody fights tells you something about who they are, the same way that good action (and sex) scenes in fic advance your understanding of the characters. And, crucially, a thing I see in fic and some mainstream media but which blockbuster movies almost never grasp, which is that you don’t most effectively demonstrate how un-sexist and racist and homophobic you are by Making A Point about those things, you do it by letting queer and female and non-white characters exist unchallenged as the centre of your story.

I’m not trying to say that this type of storytelling, that prizes character and interiority, is the only valid type; frankly not everything needs to be that deep. (The diversity bit is non-negotiable, though.) But I think there’s room for a lot more movies like this, and that even movies which don’t go as hard for it are considerably better when they incorporate some of these elements. Consider the MCU; the movies which are most lauded by fandom and often by critics are the ones which make more space for these elements than their stablemates (CATWS, Captain Marvel, Black Panther).

Curious sea lion giving a snorkeler a kiss 

do you think any of the patrons looked at zukos scarred face - obviously done by a firebender - and immediately think jet was an asshole? like

jet: hes a firebender!!!!

patrons, thinking about the backstory they concocted for zuko and iroh where their home was invaded by firebenders and they barely survived with their lifes so they could come and have a peaceful life selling tea in a city the war doesnt touch: