My Escape Box

i really like how this implies sylvanas just spent like 10 minutes monologuing about her lifestory tho

lol maybe that was the real last straw for delaryn

me:

disney:

me:

If this “Chen Honghui” hates Mulan/Ping until he finds out that she is a woman, that isn’t just erasing Shang’s bisexuality: it’s also sexualizing Mulan and stripping her of all her agency and accomplishment. In this version, Mulan isn’t worthy of respect as a person. She is only worth admiring as a woman. He can’t like her as a warrior, as a strategist, as a friend, as a person; he can only like her as a woman. Let me rephrase this: Instead of giving Mulan a chance to earn the same respect Chen offers to all his other warriors, he’s only going to appreciate her once he sees her as a woman. As an “approved” sexual object. ONLY THEN is it worth noticing her or granting her basic human decency and respect. “Something like love,” as the description tells us, clearly has nothing to do with any of her personality and everything to do with genitalia. Even if he was completely and entirely straight, we should see that he’s at least befriending Mulan/Ping before the Gender Reveal. Straight guys can still recognize another man’s good qualities and appreciate them for what they are. If Ping isn’t even a friend before “he” becomes Mulan, then this isn’t “something like love;” it’s just lust and objectification, pure and simple. The “rivalry” is also bullshit. The fact that “rivalry” can change so quickly into “something like love” means only that for Chen, a set of imaginary genitalia is all it takes to completely shift his perspective on someone from “worthy of competition” to “worthy of sex.” What, so he’s just going to abandon the rivalry now that she’s a woman? Oh - because she’s only a woman. He doesn’t have to compete with her anymore, because that’s not what you do with women. A rivalry would imply that she’s still a man, and at least he can view a rival as a decent warrior; but now, she can be comfortably reduced to Sex Appeal.

Also… what about that personality? “Cocky?” A “mean, bullying streak”? Thinks of Mulan as “his chief rival?” Are you going to strip the male lead of EVERY shred of decency? Li Shang isn’t a bully: he is a soldier who pushes his men (and woman) to excel, because this is wartime and that’s the only way to survive. He genuinely cares about them and shows real pride when they show signs of improvement. He doesn’t see them as rivals; he sees them as friends for whom he is responsible. Sure, he doesn’t like Ping at first, but that’s got nothing to do with gender and more to do with the fact that Ping’s initial behavior is so inflammatory. (Dodges commander’s questions; starts fights in the rice line; holds the other soldiers back in training; cheats on assignments, even if that’s the result of Mushu’s intervention). Once Ping proves himself as a person and as a warrior, Shang doesn’t hesitate to reward Ping with all the admiration Ping deserves. 

Disney is so concerned about removing every hint of bisexuality from its movies, it’s also utterly destroyed any decency they could have in a heterosexual romance. In their attempts to make everything nice and straight and cisgendered, they’re bending their characters WAY out of whack. 

They’re taking Mulan - originally a woman who denies gender boundaries to prove that gender doesn’t matter to personal worth - and they’re turning her into a person who can’t earn respect,honor, or even the admiration of her fellow soldiers until she puts on a dress and can be seen, not as a warrior or as a person but as an object of desire. 

I think it’s fairly clear that she resents Hawke for a number of reasons: knowing Malcolm better than she does (implied at the end of Legacy), failing to save him/acting as the head of the family despite the fact that she’s clearly not stepping into the role or even trying, the dead twin, etc. Moreover, I think it’s fairly obvious that Leandra and Malcolm were very much what would have happened if Romeo and Juliet hadn’t had a typically tragic ending: they were young, impulsive, and in “love,” but once you’ve given up everything, what does that really leave you with? A partner you barely know, who you’ve put all your trust into despite that, and despite however much Leandra says she puts love above all-else, we see even in her conversations with Gamlen that this very much isn’t necessarily the case, and she carries a lot of her bitterness with her. She wasn’t ready for what running away really meant, she was young enough to have very likely acted impulsively on a romantic ideal that didn’t pan out in any way she’d actually hoped.

It’s a really dysfunctional, bittersweet relationship, and I can’t at all blame Hawke for thinking this. Hawke’s already got a guilt complex a mile wide, no matter how you really play it; there’s a reason they take on all this responsibility that isn’t even necessarily theirs. With Malcolm, it’s all responsibility, and honor, and doing the right thing no matter how hard it is, and with Leandra, it’s all guilt, residual affects of growing jaded with where unchecked romance really leads.

She can be a caring figure, certainly, when she feels like it, but finding her to be a truly supportive one it a little harder for me, when she relies on her eldest child the way her younger children do. There’s such a lack of responsibility on Leandra’s part: something must always be someone’s fault, because surely SURELY there must still be some good left to come out of a foolish decision she made as a teenager. Their status in Kirkwall is Gamlen’s fault (which is true enough, but he DOES have a point in that she’s been away from home for 25 years; anything he does to drag the “family name” into poverty and squalor is his own doing, and while it’s hard to support his methods, he’s at least grown up enough to recognize the reality of his situation. Is Leandra’s anger at her brother entirely unjustified? No, but at the same time, she continually fails to recognize that she gave up her status, her family name, and her inheritances, and this attitude doesn’t come out of nowhere, suddenly rekindled after two decades of “hiatus.” It’s a failure to take responsibility. 

TL;DR, I seriously appreciate just how incredibly fucked up and dysfunctional Hawke family dynamics really are. It’s a family full of love that Hawke would and continually does put their life on the line for, but it’s not a healthy one. It’s not a supportive one. And I find it really telling that despite Malcolm’s questionable allegiances as an apostate, it’s THIS name that Hawke chooses to symbolize and hang onto, despite the fact that Leandra is clearly very ready to step back into the role of a noble that she’d “left behind.” Is it any surprise that Hawke seems so used to the responsibility, so easily stepping into the role as head of household when their parents are so embittered, disillusioned, and in Malcolm’s case, paranoid and uncommunicative?

Hawke’s so used to being the parent, being the one to take up responsibility that of course it’s going to kill them when they fail; they’ve been conditioned to impossible responsibility and the constant looming threat of guilt.

Really nice recipes. Every hour.

Let’s think about this for a moment.

Mob Boss Giovanni probably has a gun. Given the level of technological development in pokemon’s universe it’s very unlikely that nobody invented gunpowder or ever thought to put it together into a weapon, or that Giovanni would procure one.

Let’s also assume the average ten-year-old bright-eyed pokemon trainer is not wearing a bulletproof vest, or has particularly impressive gun dodging abilities.

Giovanni shoots child, Giovanni probably dies immediately.

Why?