Icarus takes a fa-a-a-a-a-all!

There’s a new “horror” movie coming out, and the premise is that a female diver gets stuck sitting on a rock 200 yards from shore in what looks like maaaaaybe 30 foot deep water, with a great white “circling” nearby.

It is very stupid looking.

I could make all kinds of arguments about how there are only a few documented cases ever of sharks intentionally going after humans, about how we’re already trying to hunt them to extinction because people are terrified of them for no logical reason, about how the creator of Jaws regretted the shark phobia his work inspired for the rest of his life and became an extremely staunch defender of sharks as important ocean wildlife. I could say how pissed I am that yet again someone is making a “horror” movie whose premise is animals are evil and malicious and go after humans for no reason, nature and man are inherently at odds.

But instead I’m going to leave these pictures here and make the case that this is going to be a very inconsistent, confused film about a big angry fish who apparently changes size off camera.

Here we see the shark doing a Sea World style backflip in order to eat a guy right off his surfboard. (It then chases down guy number two, gets his legs in its mouth, and then… swims backwards? to dramatically pull him away from the rock?)

Aaand here we have a perfectly circular bite in the main character’s leg where the shark apparently shrunk way down, bit in deeply enough to leave a perfect circle of ouch in her flesh, and then let go. Either that, or she’s a giantess and her thigh is as big as a man’s entire torso.

Sharks, even great white sharks, really don’t give a fuck about humans. We are not food for them. They attack divers because they have relatively poor eyesight, and from below, a human paddling out into the water on a surfboard looks like a very fat, slow, awkward seal floundering on the surface. Sharks who do attack humans generally attack only once before realizing that this is not what they expected. That’s why there are shark attack survivors; the shark doesn’t try to eat the rest of the person they just bit. Great white sharks and tiger sharks can be dangerous, but so can any large animal. More Americans alone are killed by chairs, cows, deer, dogs, and vending machines (each, not added together) than are killed worldwide by sharks even on a very unlucky year.

‘Is that a thing?’ for ‘does that exist?’

Deliberate omission of grammar to show e.g. defeatedness, bewilderment, fury. As seen in Tumblr’s ‘what is this I don’t even’.

‘Because [noun]’. As in ‘we couldn’t have our picnic in the meadow because wasps.’

Use of kerning to indicate strong bewilderment, i.e. double-spaced letters usually denoting ‘what is happening?’ This one is really interesting because it doesn’t really translate well to speech. It’s something people have come up with that uses the medium of text over the internet as a new way of communicating instead of just a transcript of speech or a quicker way to send postal letters.

Just the general playing around with sentence structure and still being able to be understood. One of my favourites of these is the ‘subject: *verbs* / object: *is verb*’ couplet, as in:

Beekeeper: *keeps bees* Bees: *is keep*

or

Me: *holds puppy* Puppy: *is hold*

“Is that a thing (that exists)?” “Is that a thing (that people do)?” “Is that a thing (that’s considered normal)?” “Is that a thing (that’s possible)?” “Is that a thing (that’s significant)?”

In a lot of cases “a thing” is standing in for the much more archaic phrasing “the done thing”, as in “is bringing host gifts to a summoning ritual (the done thing | a thing)?”

Dear panzyparkinson,

I’m a little surprised that you would ask this question, as the answers seem too obvious to require inquiry. Still, I press on. 

Gansey is clearly Ariel. Ariel is a heroine defined by her cultural dysphoria; all day, every day is Human-Time. Although she possesses absolutely no reason to believe that she’ll get her wish nor any peers who share her desire, Ariel wants nothing more than to be a human. And although she’s given a lot of crap for being naive, the truth is that Ariel is kind of the foremost human expert under the sea. Maybe there is something the matter with me, she wonders, as Tumblr often does in the tags, even as she longs to be part of a different world. And when she does get a shot at being something more than mermaid, she fumbles benevolently. She fails at being human because she has studied rather than practiced, and her every misstep is characterized by her admiration and love for the culture. Gansey, you noble land mermaid.

Adam Parrish is obviously both Belle and the Beast. I want much more than this provincial world, he sings in a piercing number that takes place in the carport behind his parents’ trailer. Belle wants something out of this world, and moreover, she’s got the tools and logic to make it happen. She’s well-read and self-assured; she’s curious and brave. As Belle, Adam could really do anything, if he didn’t spend at least six hundred pages of the series cock-blocking himself by being the Beast. She’ll never see me as anything more than a monster, he thinks sadly, while throwing a table against a wall.

Ronan Lynch is Pocahontas. For starters, she’s the only princess who even begins to play compellingly with magical realism, and she’s the only one with a talking tree buddy. Pocahontas also faces what seems to be an impossible either-or choice: responsibility or the desires of her heart. Does she attend Aglionby/ marry Kocoum, even though both of them are pretty square? Or does she see what’s just around the river bend? Throw in the fact that she also has a host of animal friends and falls in love with a white guy, and it’s pretty obvious to me that Pocahontas = Ronan.

Blue Sargent is not a Disney princess and she rejects your gd gender expectations. She is Mike Wazowski. Mike is unlike any of the other monsters/ psychics around him: he is not scary/ psychic. Deprived of this essential monster trait, Mike is forced to find a different way to become successful in a world that prizes something that he can never be. It turns him resourceful, hard-working, bitter, wryly funny, judgmental. He makes friends with Sully, who embodies everything Mike can’t be, because the other option is to hate him. Ultimately, Mike finds a way to succeed that no one else has, all while being a lot shorter than everyone else in every scene. Really the only difference is that he has one eye and Blue has two as of the time of me writing this blog post.

I couldn’t think of any dead Disney princesses to be Noah. Mufasa? They both died from blunt trauma. Do any of the puppies die in 101 Dalmatians? He could be one of those.

urs,

stop talking and just fucking stare into space

answer your one word question with five minutes of prologue, appendix, seven sequels, & movie adaptation of what could have been a one word answer

“what was i saying” every two sentences

answer your one word question by just staring at you blankly

try to tell u a really great story about a thing but i forgot 90% of the details so u just get 2-3 REALLY enthusiastic sentences to compensate

not know what expression to react with about a thing you said so i default to laughing & it turns out u were being dead serious

literally just not talk at all

try to make a joke, get embarrassed about the joke halfway through the sentence, and just completely trail off

walk away in the middle of the conversation

lie about my weekend because u asked how it was and i cannot for the life of me remember what the fuck i did

me: (gets paycheck)

me: