let me help

what's so awesome about miranda hamilton is that she knows full well that revenge brings nothing good and that it will probably make her and her loved ones and many innocent uninvolved people more miserable and that it would not be what the person she lost wanted and she has no illusions about any of it. but when push comes to shove even if the end she's been fighting for for two seasons is in sight she simply cannot let the bastard get away with it

it’s so hard to exist in leftist spaces when you know literally anything about antisemitic dogwhistles. i’ll go into any socialist space online or in person and not be able to stick around for more than a minute before i see them railing against The Elites.

There is no drug on earth that can replicate the absolute euphoria of hitting a writing flow state at 2:00 AM. You aren’t even typing anymore. You are a vessel. You are a channel for the gods. The characters are speaking directly into your brain and you’re just the stenographer trying to keep up. You feel like you could fight a bear. You feel like you invented the alphabet

it really is kind of interesting how attached people are to the idea of the improvised line and the genuine reaction in film. nearly every single famous moment or line has some sort of claim floating around that it wasn't in the script and was either made up on the spot by an actor or was sprung as a surprise on the actors to get their 'real' reaction. you know, sometimes people do come up with good lines in advance and write them down, and sometimes people can pretend to be have a convincing emotional response on screen

I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where y’all lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was “hetslop”—this person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually don’t think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post that’s been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that they’d need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldn’t have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of y’all are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. it’s not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.

reading about the house of detention is making me understand more of why there was so much effort in the early days to define lesbian sex as consensual, soft, unaggressive, and non-penetrative. It wasn’t about separating it from heterosexual sex as much as it was about separating it from the realities and images of prison sex.

and you had all kinds of incorrect, illegal sex going on between prisoners. prisoners were trading sex for medicine to help them cope with the unbearable trauma of being imprisoned. prisoners were assaulting one another. prisoners were using consensual sex to cope with non-consensual experiences recently imposed on them. prison environments are very constrained, so all of this was going on in full view of everyone, but also only to the people walling themselves off in the shared reality of sex. you also had guards, and their effect on reality, and the effect of prisoners willing to turn in other prisoners to the guards. you had prisoners who agreed with guards that there were kinds of consensual sex that need to be constrained and regulated (even in an environment as dehumanizing as a jail or prison). you had prisoners emerging into civilian life convinced that the only correct form of sex was opposite in every way to the sex they observed in prison. you had prisoners emerging into civilian life convinced that the only way they survived their experience was the time their body spent in the company of lovers.