Superheroes Are Dorks

Batman (taken back): You have contingencies dedicated to me?

Jim: Yes... Are you mad?

Batman excused himself, walking a few feet away.

Red Robin: He's refusing to show it, but he's actually glad you consider him such a good friend.

Jim (surprised): Oh... Okay. This isn't even the weirdest reaction I've gotten from him.

Marvel please just make them mutants again and Magneto’s biological children. The movie rights drama is over, Disney owns everything, just fix this egregious writing choice in the comics and I’ll gladly pretend it never happened.

She learns Rocky's language the same way she learned every other language she speaks: stubbornness and context clues. This is before she remembers that she stole every piece of translation software that ever existed. Because of this she knows, or can make an educated guess, at how often Rocky swears, which is a lot.

She bosses Rocky around all the time and one time accidentally calls him Dr Grace. She still doesn't remember who Grace is and why it feels so natural to tell him what to do.

* The woman who went from “can we be friends” to “Why won’t you draw my OCs?” within a week. She got absolutely livid when I gently told her we barely talked…

* The guy who accused me having an actual fetish for princess/ballgowns because I loved dressing my OCs up. No, he was not joking.

But one person responded with “My OCxCanon, Canon is kissing OC forcefully and dominatingly, OC is enjoying it but has to pretend she’s not, and her sleeve is falling off her shoulder.”

if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars

literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that. Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?

you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)

if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too

learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life

Every time I come on here, I'll see another 'transfeminist' with hundreds or thousands of notes, talking about a phenomenon that is supposedly unique to 'tma' people, and then I'll squint at it and its literally something transmascs have also been talking about on this site for over a year*.

The entire concept of malgendering (only being gendered one way when it can be used against you)

Invisibility messing with statistics

Being in cis men's spaces often being more dangerous than cis women's spaces as a visibly trans person

Permanent health issues because of gendered expectations growing up even if thats not the gender you identify with

(via An Introduction to The Corruption of Lindsey Graham)

Many other journalists have written about Graham and Trump. Most of them have focused on the personal relationship between the two men. They examine the ways in which Graham’s evolution was distinctive.

I’m not interested in what’s distinctive about Graham. I’m interested in what isn’t. How does his story illuminate what happened to the whole Republican party? How did the poison work?

We need to answer these questions because the authoritarian threat is bigger than one man. Donald Trump’s ascent to the presidency destroyed the myth that the United States was immune to despotism. Our institutions and the people who run them are vulnerable. We have to confront these vulnerabilities and learn how to deal with them before our democracy is threatened again.

So why focus on Graham?

First, because he was a central player in the Republican party’s capitulation to Trump. And second, because he talked constantly. He produced an enormous trove of interviews, speeches, press briefings, and social media posts. Through these records, we can see how he changed, week to week and month to month. We can watch the poison work.

It’s a slow death. The surrender to despotism doesn’t happen all at once. It advances in stages: a step, a rationalization. Another step, another rationalization. The deeper you go, the more you need to justify. You say what you need to say. You believe what you need to believe.