it's an outrage! a scandal!

please, may i take your t-shirt off?

1. will and elizabeth’s love story

2. elizabeth becoming pirate king

3. avoiding sexualizing elizabeth or the other female pirate characters in the first 3 films by allowing them to wear period-accurate pirate outfits that aren’t tailored to be revealing and impractical for ‘sex appeal’ just because they’re women

6. I run a corseting panel at cons and literally use Elizabeth’s lace-up scene as a video clip of what historical corseting was actually like, because the only thing they got wrong in this scene is that tightlacing wouldn’t be a thing for about another 200 years (and you couldn’t tightlace with the corset style Elizabeth is wearing anyway). It’s one of the most accurate corseting scenes I’ve ever seen.

7. Will’s hat.

8. That scene with all the pirates on the gallows where that little boy starts singing Hoist the Colours? Yeah, that’s fucking legendary. The rest of AWE was kind of a trash fire, but that scene gave me goosebumps.

9. There’s this great shot in the first one where they really drive home the class differences inherent in this time period by having the governor talking about progress and civilization to Elizabeth in their carriage, and then they cut to a shot outside the carriage where a beggar gets splashed by mud from the wheel. It’s a perfect way to underline that everything is not, in fact, a nice little upper-class fairytale, and to give some weight to Will’s storyline, because he has a lot more in common with that beggar than with the governor.

10. For its time, the CGI was fucking amazing.

11. And let’s not forget the work of the makeup department, which had to actually invent new ways of putting on makeup for this movie.

12. The governor’s death scene. Holy shit.

13. They could have gone with a Jack/Will/Elizabeth love triangle, but they didn’t. There are some hints Jack is in love (or at least in lust) with Elizabeth, but he recognizes that she loves Will, and that’s that.

2. They had a woman pirate right in the first film, when the tradition is to only show male ones (hell, the PotC ride at Disney had a wench auction scene until recently). And it was a female pirate of colour at that!

3. Elizabeth may not have known how to fight in the first film, but she wasn’t helpless either. Her first instinct was to fight, but she also had the brains to recognize when it was best to hide instead. Plus when given the chance she stabbed Barbosa that one time.

4. Elizabeth’s lack of fighting ability was not simply because she was a woman, it was clear it was due to her societal circumstances, since we saw other women of different socioeconomic backgrounds being able to fight (and when given the opportunity to learn Elizabeth took to fighting like a duck on water).

5. The Hoist the Colours scene where we see pirates of multiple ethnicities and their varying flags, reminding us that pirates came in all shapes and sizes and weren’t just white men.

6. One of the Pirate Lords being yet ANOTHER woman of colour. She may not have had much of a speaking role if memory serves, but even her presence is already a big deal.

Davy Jones CGI is legendary and a ton better than some of the stuff done today 😄

“Yes. I saw him. I saw him with my own eyes.”

For those of my followers who might not understand, before fast Muslims will wake in the hours before Fajr (the time of our Subh prayers, the first prayer if the day) to eat, like to prepare yourself to fast the entire day. Sahur means A Lot, especially to kids, because imagine the whole family, sleepy, grumpy and only vaguely aware of your surroundings, nibbling on bread, making hearty carbs and drinking jugs of clear water to make sure we make it through the day alright. Someone falls asleep in their soup. Dad is staring at his coffee like it personally insulted his past. The outside world is quiet. It s peaceful and sentimental. It’s made by the people who love and care about you, and you would be surrounded by people you would grow into being able to carry loving silences with.

statistically your generation is having less underage sex & drinking less & doing fewer drugs & generally making better choices than your parents’ generation

the shit you see on tv is just a bunch of middle-aged tv producers (who should know better) sexualizing you & projecting onto your age group. 

Link to donate to KhalsaAid

https://www.khalsaaid.org/donate

This is one of the few cases where I advocate donating to organisations rather than individuals, because right now, in India, the breakdown of medical infrastructure is so bad that money won’t help you. The effort is being carried out now by volunteers who are coordinating resources.

male audiences will happily watch a dozen superhero shows, but then something like Agent Carter or Supergirl turn up and they’re panned from the first trailer and have to struggle for ratings. male audiences will watch countless installments of a franchise as long as it’s about men doing man things but the second a character like Rey or Furiosa or god forbid four entire female Ghostbusters steps up and takes a position of prominence it’s “pandering sjw bullshit”.

this isn’t like… an opinion I’m pulling out of my ass here? this starts where earlier than tv shows and hollywood blockbusters, when all the kids in a class are reading Harry Potter or Percy Jackson or Eragon o Lord of the Rings or Maze Runner or whatever the hip book is right now. the books like that, the ones that become popular reading, are overwhelmingly about male leads, because male is still considered the default. 

there’s a split in YA literature, between books that are “for everyone” and “for girls”, and that’s honestly the entire issue in a tiny little box right there. stories about men are supposed to be accessible for everyone, but stories about girls are seen as 1.) inherently for women and 2.) something that only women will care about.

men grow up in a society that doesn’t make them go out of their way to get into the heads of women and empathize with then. historically it’s been very easy for men to not engage with female-led media if they don’t want to, whereas (like someone else commented on this post) girls and women have had very little choice in the past because everything was about men. we didn’t even question it.

and now the women are arriving in mainstream media in ways that say they’re important and they matter and

small (or sometimes not so small) but loud-enough-to-be-acknowledged groups of men lose. their. shit.

because they think there’s something inherently Not For Them about a woman’s story, and they never learned how to deal with it.

i love books, right? and from the ages of about 11-15 i was insanely invested in teenage/ya fantasy and sci-fi. harry potter, percy jackson, all of the books op listed above- and one of the things that made those books so great was that you could have a conversation about them with anyone! a lot of the guys in my class also loved this type of genre and i’d often talk about books with them (even my own brother has read all of the books listed above) we’d have long, interesting conversations about these books and it was great.

but then i’d mention something about the hunger games, or the divergent series, or uglies, the raven cycle, mara dyer, the mortal instruments, the selection, etc. and the response would always be the same: either ‘i haven’t read it’ or ‘i couldn’t get into it’ or ‘it doesn’t seem like my type of thing’

even outside of the ya genre, looking at something like contemporary fiction or whatever- do you know how many guys will talk endlessly about the great gatsby or catcher in the rye or any other male-centric novel? but when you bring up something as influential as pride and prejudice or jane eyre or practically /anything/ written by/focused around a woman- you get the same responses as before

society has made it so that women have no choice whether to engage with male-centric stories or not: from children, a big portion of the media we consume focuses on the male perspective and like,,, that’s not necessarily a bad thing /in itself/- the bad thing is that it doesn’t work both ways and it’s not an even split. whereas young girls are surrounded by and expected to empathise with films/books/media concerning men, it’s not the same for young boys: they have narratives that either focus entirely or largely around them.