a normal blog

Meanwhile this was what various medical professionals in that reddit thread had to say about it.

if i shouldn’t use my cane because i can sometimes technically walk without it, it would just hurt like a motherfucker then abled people should no longer be allowed to use potholders to take things out of the oven because i mean

midnight mass is also my one exception to my general distaste for flanagan's works, and it's the only one i'm aware of that's an original screenplay rather than an adaptation, which feels pretty significant. it isn't remotely perfect - i really feel that it could've stood to be a little harsher in its condemnation of the catholic church and christianity as an institution, as although it raises plenty of valid and scathing criticisms, including a refreshingly honest portrayal of the sheer undignified hypocrisy of islamophobia, concluding the story with the community being united by a song of faith as the corrupting influence that warped it flees from the oncoming light of dawn feels like it undermines itself somewhat. it feels like the final episode backtracks a little bit on its own points out of fear of taking too firm a stance against the ongoing legacy of cruelty that the christian faith (and the catholic church specifically) is mired in. for all that this is a story about the blood the church has gorged itself on, it's a little too eager to shift the blame onto a singular demonic scapegoat (and one woman who is not the only one to weaponise faith to enact social and eventually physical violence, just the only one to do so consistently and effectively) in a distinctly christian fashion. it's not the insitution, it's just a few bad faith (literally) actors! give me a break.

i also feel like it fails to capitalise on a potentially compelling throughline regarding patriarchal violence and god being commonly conceptualised as "the father". it feels like maybe it's setting something up there with riley and ali's dads and how their approach to fatherhood is shaped by their experiences and values, as well as their sense of inclusion and purpose (or lack thereof) in the community - both are rendered socially impotent by factors outside of their control and have their patriarchal authority challenged and inflamed as a result of the humiliation this causes them - as well as with the absent abusive father of erin's pregnancy, but then it just doesn't really do anything with that? feels like a missed opportunity.

that said, i do really appreciate it for being a fairly accurate portrayal of both how cults form and prey on their victims, and how closed communities are inclined towards forming an oppressive localised societal hegemony - how miserably isolating and unsustainable that is, forming a twisted thing that goes by a misleadingly pleasant and seemingly unthreatening name (not unlike the "angel"); that eventually begins to starve and eat itself - as well as how it (perhaps not entirely intentionally) touches on the topic of sexual abuse in the church. although pruitt is ultimately given a tragically well-intended motivation for his actions in the form of his love for his family (a flanagan classic), i don't personally feel that this, or the forgiveness his wife offers him, negates the horror of what he's wrought - using one's family as a excuse and a target for one's abusive behaviour is hardly unusual, after all. as well as the numerous scenes that are just straight up assault, frequently at pruitt's hands (eg: joe collie, and especially riley - who earlier foreshadows his fate when he makes a poor taste joke alluding to the unfortunately not uncommon tendency for priests to sexually abuse their altar boys), his own daughter spitting out his blood when he tries to force it down her throat while she's helpless to stop him in order to make her a vampire like him makes for a pretty damning image (and that's not even getting into the mass nonconsensual contamination of the church's wine, associated with cleansing and life-giving, with human bodily fluids, or the miscarriage of a woman whose experiences with sexual abuse brought her back to the community and the church in the first place that it causes). even if it wasn't intentional on flanagan's part, its presence in the text is worth something to me.

if you are non-american then it can be dangerous to hold beliefs about your rights that are only applicable in the US.

i am australian and i have seen young australians have completely us-american perceptions on the rights they hold (or do not hold) in regards to protest, police officers, self-defense, medical care, higher education, debt, and legal proceedings. i am not talking about "boooo americans" i am talking about the genuine danger it might present to have us-centric assumptions in high-stakes situations

The people who like it agree that only some of the entries in the franchise are good and the rest are dogshit - literally no one can agree on which ones are the good ones.

Because of the above point, the fanbase splintered into several distinct smaller fanbases, one of which is centered on a bunch of dead characters with minimal story relevance, and all of those sub-fandoms fight near constantly.

The fandom makes superficial gestures towards discrediting the author but rarely actually address the bigotry in the text.

Terrible British men who are woobified because people think they are hot.

The worldbuilding has the structural integrity of wet cardboard but everyone INSISTS that it makes sense and they can explain it. No two explanations are the same.

Characters don’t have personalities but the fandom is so desperate for it that they just wholesale Make Shit Up and insist it is canon (see: Marauders and nearly every FNAF character but especially the Aftons).

SO much ableism.

Weirdly catholic.

Fanfiction so popular it practically becomes grafted onto canon and made a part of the series.

Genuinely terrible spinoffs and merch which are so bad it’s an enigma that people still purchase them at all.

Created the careers of people infinitely more talented than the creators, but who will always be seen as part of the franchise, despite not being involved in it anymore (ex. Daniel Radcliffe, Markiplier)

Aesthetically kind of bad but everyone seems to like it anyway.

they at several points feature strange hasty retcons because the creators hadn't thought through something they had written earlier and had painted themselves into a corner.

see: harry potter introducing time travel and then having “wait why didn't they fix this by time travel” be an obvious question. and so then like a book later a character bumps into a table that has Every Time Travel Device on it. so we can't do time travel anymore because it fell over :(

I'm gonna run y'all through a brief list of plotpoints and I am not making up a single one of these. And I want to preface this by saying each of these plotpoints are all just from ONE SEASON of this show

The Penguin gets electro-shocked into being a good person, Alex DeLarge from Clockwork Orange style and during this time he meets his long lost dad. His dad loves the fact his son is a "Dashing gangland kingpin" and is all set to leave him the entire family fortune which pisses off his dads gold-digging wife and awful children. So his step sister tries to fuck him to get him to keep them in the will. When this doesn't work his step-brother offers to try and fuck him next. The step-mother, not willing to follow in the footsteps of Corey Chase, comes to the conclusion that re-enacting the plot of a Families Tied porn scene ISN'T going to work and so she instead poisons her husband to death and she and her kids make Oswald their live in cook. When he finds out he MURDERS HIS STEP SIBLINGS, COOKS THEM AND FEEDS THEM TO HIS STEP-MOTHER

Michelle Gomez shows up for two episodes as an assasin talent scout that operates out of a crime lord lesbian bar and she sends a face eating cannibal to try and kill Jim Gordon

Jim Gordon's ex wife becomes a supervillain who ends up in a bisexual polyamorous relationship with a BDSM assasin and her brother (God there's so much incest and cannibalism in this show it's like an episode of Game of Thrones...or a gathering of the RNC), a supervillain with an ancient grudge against the Wayne Family who wants to use a string of false flag supervillain terror attacks to get himself elected mayor. Jim Gordon LITERALLY HELPS A CRIME LORD MURDER HIM. However, the batshit insane mad scientist who is the head of Arkham Asylum resurrects him as a nigh-unkillable zombie assasin that's been brainwashed to believe he's a Holy Warrior of the Order of Azrael, a Knight Templar cult. This leads to him going on a killing spree as said unkillable zombie soldier. He dies for the second time when the Penguin shows up on the lawn of Wayne Manor out of nowhere with a rocket launcher, blows him up and then just peaces out

The show basically deciding sometime halfway through season two that it didn't want to be a crime drama about Jim Gordon but would instead like to be a black comedy about Gotham's villains was honestly such a good call <3

the more it just embraced being fuckin insane the better it got :D

And yeah, the show deciding to make Penguin and Riddler a Toxic Yaoi supervillain couple was CHEFS KISS <3

There WAS an Alfred series that was indeed him working to bring down a fascist dystopian government in Britain that seemed like it was heavily "inspired" by V for Vendetta

(Count Olaf voice) Inspired is a BIG BIG word that means "please don't sue us Alan Moore"

And yeah it was indeed set in the same universe as Gotham

Genuine plot point in this show: Riddler falls for a woman who looks like his Sexy Dead Girlfriend and Penguin has her killed because he's jealous which sparks a supervillain feud between the two. At one point when he thinks Penguin is dead the Riddler gets high as balls so he can hallucinate Penguin because he misses him. At another point Penguin has the Riddler FROZEN IN ICE so he can gayze at him like a weird frozen trophy

"What if we kissed during a supervillain gang war caused by me killing your Sexy Dead Girlfriends doppleganger...and we're both guys....

hahaha just kidding

UNLESS....."

Being supportive of binary people is relatively simple, they have decided to sort themselves into one of the boxes that we have lots of experience interacting with. Being supportive of nonbinary people can be comparatively tricky, because you have to resist the urge to create box C and drop them all there. That's how we end up with various prejudices like "woman lite". Humans really, really like to categorize things. It helps us think. Unfortunately, sometimes it helps us think wrong.