child of the atom

you will never catch me complaining about an actress on a tv show having an imperfectly concealed pregnancy or a character going on a sudden trip somewhere while her actress is on maternity leave. so many actresses (and women working in any other field) are fired, punished and pressured into making reproductive decisions for their employers' convenience & if i have to try a bit harder to suspend my disbelief then that's absolutely what i'm going to do if it means people are getting to exercise reproductive & bodily autonomy without punishment

truly the idea of "this scene is (un-)necessary to the story" is such a fundamentally uncurious and anti-art way of engaging with fiction. the story itself is unnecessary, in the sense that all art is unnecessary, because art is not a fucking optimization problem. that's the beauty of it

also there is no theory of “necessary” and “unnecessary” scenes that is not culturally conditioned and a reflection of specific societal biases. modern Anglophone readers of the Iliad tend to find the Catalogue of Ships and the Doloneia and Achilles fighting the Scamander and most of the violence and killing in the poem unnecessary but an Iliad that removes them and telescopes the journey from Book 1 to Book 24 is not the Iliad in any meaningful way.

*stumbles out of a building covered in blood* i failed a social interaction .