i love yapping about stuff i like

now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense

Turns out it's Yuri Day, so please enjoy my yuri comic about dreams and first dates!

i mean the protagonist doesn’t ever have any agency so no, it’s not a girl power movie, but the only litmus test to see if you’re more susceptible to cult recruiting tactics is if you’ve recently been traumatized or if you’re even just going through a period of transition in your life. a lot of the movie is spent on establishing that the protagonist is very in this vulnerable state. like sorry, but you don’t necessarily get better at avoiding cults if you’re smarter or more analytical. that is part of the thing that makes them scary

The scary thing about cults is that anyone can fall victim to them. No matter how smart or cynical you are. If, like Dani, you're in an extremely vulnerable state they can take advantage of that. Surrounding her with love and reverence and adoration so she doesn't realise that it's actually a cult.

And since Dani’s our main character and we’re rooting for her, the whole gutpunch point of the film is that you reach that ending with some part of you still getting the Revenge Fantasy kick at the same time that the whole tsunami of Oh God The Cult Got Her comes crashing down on you. You’re supposed to feel both: the combination of attraction and repulsion is the heart of horror.

Exactly!! And I feel like so many people go “good for her” and just stop there, even though it’s really intended to give you mixed emotions

Seven hour video that goes in depth into the Swedish nationalist symbolism and critique in midsommar don’t mind if I do

It’s so embarrassing to have gotten totally Got by the trick of this film and to have read it initially as a sort of “man bad” feminist movie but wow is it so much better as a movie about how easy it can be to be suckered in by a cult

I think the key really is that the men are SOOOOOO awful in this movie. Dani has no one who is nice to her. Her boyfriend barely tolerates her. So when they’re all dead it honestly does feel like a relief, even if none of them deserve to die (outside of the moral reasons that often mark characters for death in horror movies). You want so badly for Dani to experience care or comfort you kinda stop caring about where it comes from.

Okay I finished watching this. An incredible piece of criticism. Bravo.

You can make a movie with where the only white character is a man named Ray Cism whose one line of his 16 seconds of screen time is “I seriously hate women and minorities.” and you’ll find fifty bajillion reader x Ray Cism fanfics and renaissance style drawings of him with a halo of golden light