Amortised Complexity

We dressed up as pirates and went bowling.

We dressed as vikings and went to the grocery store. The security guard told us we had to move our longship because it was illegally parked.

We dressed as Romans and went to Blockbuster. The staff chanted, "toga! Toga! Toga!" at us.

This was a world before widespread internet, before sites like fanfiction dot net let alone anything like AO3, and long before queer media became more widely acceptable. The Hays Code, which forbade Hollywood from depicting “sexual perversion” which gay representation was considered, was only repealed in 1968, and many still unofficially stuck to it and that part especially for longer. Original Star Trek was canceled in 1969, the same year as Stonewall. But in the early 70s, fans were collaborating and making fan zines containing writings about The Premise, distributing physical copies at conventions and creating mailing lists. Later came private email chains.

In a world with so many factors working against it, large groups of fans decided they were so invested in the idea of these two men together that they would MAKE ways to share their work and acquire new content from others.

Kaworu: yes. we are going to eat ice cream :)

Misato: that's fine, have fun!

Misato, as soon as Shinji turns his back: I know what you are

Eventually she decides that before confronting him she must first prove definitively that she's not homophobic and the only way to do that is to become a lesbian but unfortunately she doesn't know a lot of girls so

Misato: chaperoning the double date, bored out of her mind

Rei: making intense eye contact with Kaworu

Asuka: fuming with rage

Kaworu: returning Rei's eye contact; holding Shinji's hand

...WUT??

Iroh alone in his cell:

The most popular browsers in different countries in 2012 and 2022.

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

[ID: Gif image from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with Gaston leading a large group of villagers down the road holding a torch. The atmosphere is dark.

Wikipedia screenshot containing the following:

According to accounts by Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, the police however was acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages' safety, which forced the hostages to negotiate for their life and release with the robbers on their own. In the process the hostages saw the robbers behaving more rationally than police negotiators and therefore developed a deep distrust towards the latter. Enmark had criticized Bejerot specifically for endangering their lives by behaving aggressively and agitating the captors. She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire. She was also critical of prime minister Olof Palme, as she had negotiated with the captors for freedom, but the prime minister told her that she would have to content herself to die at her post rather than give in to the captors' demands. Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.]

Excerpts from “See What You Made Me Do: The Dangers of Domestic Abuse That We Ignore, Explain Away, or Refuse to See” by Jess Hill

Here are some other facts you should know about Nils Bejerot: He had a major influence (this involved founding the "Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society") on Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to drug use.

And he wrote "Barn, Serier, Samhälle" (Children, Comics, Society), basically the Swedish version of "Seduction of the Innocent"; an infamous anti-comics book by Fredric Wertham that led to the Comics Code Authority.

Bejerot described comic books as a "significant mental hygiene and cultural problem that concerns us all."

me: