Medliwaith

🗣🗣🗣 free youtube premiere of the national theatre the importance of being ernest announced!

Up the stakes! Have them get drunk and married in, like, Moosejaw! By the only legal authority who was awake at the time, a very drunk tour guide!

Honest answer is because legally valid accidental marriage in vegas IS the existing trope (in mainstream media & across fandoms including ones set outside the US, to my chagrin lmao). and i was playing with subverting that particular trope directly.

I personally like subverting the trope, as opposed to reimagining it in a different space, for multiple reasons. including that i actually think it would be interesting to poke fun at how often accidental marriage plotlines are written by people who have no idea the bureaucratic nightmare legal marriage is. and also largely because i am quite critical of marriage as an institution. you could say i study the cultural history of gender and sexuality in america & anglophone west, which may shed some light on why i might fantasize about writing a fic that doesn’t, for once, dependant on a politics of inclusion in a deeply, deeply flawed system of hegemonic normativity in order to engineer its primary romantic plotline.

some more ranting about marriage here, feel free to skip. same sex marriage is not marriage equality. there is no such thing as marriage equality. first of all, there are many other groups who are not or even cannot or should not get their legal protections through the legal framework of marriage. (disabled people often cannot access this institution, so we do not have marriage equality. children should not be able to get married, but they still deserve some of the rights and privileges you can often only get through marriage. and the limits on how many marriages you can have keeps many many people from being able to sign contracts to protect themselves and their assets) marriage is inherently a system about deciding who has power and what they can do with it. it is not, historically, a declaration of love. it is maybe a declaration of commitment. but more decidedly it is a binding contract that has legal, economic, and biological implications for (usually two) people, their relations, and their community/ies. historically and in the present, one of those people is subjugated to the other. we can try to rewrite our laws all we want but the foundation of the system is rotted. the only reason not to burn it down is because too often marriage is the core of the legal framework for some of the most basic protections and privileges.

so thats why i was interested in the idea of a fic about a “false scare” of a marriage.

i think it would be really fun to have a fic that grapples with some of these real issues with that institution, while also playing with the established tropes that tend to reinforce the institution’s hegemonic presence. honestly i think part of the joke would even be like, bro, you thought you Accidentally successfully completed a bureaucratic process in a country you dont reside in? and you were too busy angsting to double check on the likelihood of this fanfic trope scenario happens?

which is to say, i understand that it is fun to subvert things. i also realize its really annoying that the default culture for everything is US/american culture and half of all tropes come from hollywood romcoms and sitcoms. i’m not against your idea at all. I honestly think you should write it!!!!

and normally i would never put an anti marriage rant under a post that says x character and y character should get for real married. you can say that all you want and i celebrate it. i actually love marriage and wedding fics, they are fun. (and honestly i disagree with op. i dont mind fantasy worlds where like, two men who teleported from england with absolutely nothing in the way of pesky “identification” can randomly and accidentally get married in 2009!!! thats fun and i like it!)

I just got mildly, mildly annoyed because, of all the fandoms used as an example of how recent American gay marriage is, they picked a series that's actually Canadian, and gay marriage happened a decade earlier here.

I know, I know!! They fly all over the place and you can easily be writing them in a place like Vegas!

I'm just being slightly peeved in Canadian, pay me no mind, pay me no mind!! I try to be a better person, I really do 🤦‍♀️ It's the accidentally being erased that's a button my mind can't resist for some reason. It makes me go all patriotic which is really embarrassing. I even made a map. :: shrivels in embarrassment ::

Anyway I agree with your analysis of marriage! And it's a great fic idea. I love the segway. You are absolutely right I betrayed the rules of improv and fic brainstorming. My apologies.

I haven't read that trope so I didn't recognize the subversion but actually the Canadian gay marriage being a fact of life for Shane would mean he might be more likely to think it's possible in Vegas in 2009!.

& yeah, I squinted at that a bit too. Probably just because HR is The collective yaoi fandom right now. It’s nice to all be into something good.

Now that I think about it, it would actually be more historically accurate to write USAmericans crossing the border to get married in Canada. You obviously lose the easy possibility of accidental hijinks element because it’s Such a process. But it was absolutely part of expanding marriage access here.

To be fair, I think Vegas is pretty unique in terms of how it does genuinely have a famous industry based around tacky, cheap, potentially drunken weddings. Even that is exaggerated in media, because of how bad of an idea it is to get married on a whim. (Eg i think in a lot of those chapels they wont let people get married if they are too intoxicated). I think people get really intrigued by the concept of doing it on accident and run with that. There was a Friends episode and a Katy Perry music video which are what I think of first, lol.

Up the stakes! Have them get drunk and married in, like, Moosejaw! By the only legal authority who was awake at the time, a very drunk tour guide!

Honest answer is because legally valid accidental marriage in vegas IS the existing trope (in mainstream media & across fandoms including ones set outside the US, to my chagrin lmao). and i was playing with subverting that particular trope directly.

I personally like subverting the trope, as opposed to reimagining it in a different space, for multiple reasons. including that i actually think it would be interesting to poke fun at how often accidental marriage plotlines are written by people who have no idea the bureaucratic nightmare legal marriage is. and also largely because i am quite critical of marriage as an institution. you could say i study the cultural history of gender and sexuality in america & anglophone west, which may shed some light on why i might fantasize about writing a fic that doesn’t, for once, dependant on a politics of inclusion in a deeply, deeply flawed system of hegemonic normativity in order to engineer its primary romantic plotline.

some more ranting about marriage here, feel free to skip. same sex marriage is not marriage equality. there is no such thing as marriage equality. first of all, there are many other groups who are not or even cannot or should not get their legal protections through the legal framework of marriage. (disabled people often cannot access this institution, so we do not have marriage equality. children should not be able to get married, but they still deserve some of the rights and privileges you can often only get through marriage. and the limits on how many marriages you can have keeps many many people from being able to sign contracts to protect themselves and their assets) marriage is inherently a system about deciding who has power and what they can do with it. it is not, historically, a declaration of love. it is maybe a declaration of commitment. but more decidedly it is a binding contract that has legal, economic, and biological implications for (usually two) people, their relations, and their community/ies. historically and in the present, one of those people is subjugated to the other. we can try to rewrite our laws all we want but the foundation of the system is rotted. the only reason not to burn it down is because too often marriage is the core of the legal framework for some of the most basic protections and privileges.

so thats why i was interested in the idea of a fic about a “false scare” of a marriage.

i think it would be really fun to have a fic that grapples with some of these real issues with that institution, while also playing with the established tropes that tend to reinforce the institution’s hegemonic presence. honestly i think part of the joke would even be like, bro, you thought you Accidentally successfully completed a bureaucratic process in a country you dont reside in? and you were too busy angsting to double check on the likelihood of this fanfic trope scenario happens?

which is to say, i understand that it is fun to subvert things. i also realize its really annoying that the default culture for everything is US/american culture and half of all tropes come from hollywood romcoms and sitcoms. i’m not against your idea at all. I honestly think you should write it!!!!

and normally i would never put an anti marriage rant under a post that says x character and y character should get for real married. you can say that all you want and i celebrate it. i actually love marriage and wedding fics, they are fun. (and honestly i disagree with op. i dont mind fantasy worlds where like, two men who teleported from england with absolutely nothing in the way of pesky “identification” can randomly and accidentally get married in 2009!!! thats fun and i like it!)

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

awesome i love you trans girls

i love you so much

the fellowship breaks on his watch

forced to choose who to follow

runs over 200 kilometers in under four days

thinks merry and pippin are dead

meets the reborn gandalf (a rare win), immediately has to do a 180 and ride to edoras

immediately after that needs to ride to battle

takes part in a battle which takes place over the whole night

gets maybe 20 hours of sleep over the course of the whole week

In the middle of this whole mess. March 1st, aka he day that he meets Gandalf again and has to do an immediate 180.