those little Anodynes

i get a $250 million production budget to adapt beowulf into a summer blockbuster and at the end beowulf is contemplating his reign as king in his old age and the passing of time and we hear some kids say something he doesn't quite understand and he says stoically "it's as if the English i speak is becoming old..."

Every time Hollywood does something racist everyone blames china for some reason.

Climate change, exacerbated by capitalist exploitation, is going to force more people to leave their homelands. Get more pro-immigrant and reject nationalism now!! We only have each other.

Should vampires be bigoted? Was the daughter they got killed insensitive to her father's trauma? Why don't these ancient monsters have my exact same progressive 21st century values? Must be bad writing. Was the abusive noblewoman relatable? Were everyone's pronouns respected? Was all that incest and torture really necessary? Are the murderers my friends?

i’m not going to call myself “the friend who’s too woke” or hedge around my opinion because this is my deeply considered belief: horror literature is the theater of disgust, and the disgust that drives the vast, vast majority of classic horror media from the 1890s-1940s—dracula, jekyll and hyde, king kong, nosferatu, the mummy, universal frankenstein, the wolf man, cthulhu, and more—is the exact disgust that drove the worldwide tide of violence in the 1930s and 40s, a tide that has never fully receded, and you have NO business adapting a piece of classic horror media if you aren’t willing to put in the work to identify what is portrayed as disgusting in that property and enter into some form of dialogue with it. if you don’t want your movie to be “about” race or class or gender or sexuality or ability, you’re free to choose a source material that isn’t already about that, but unluckily for you giant hypersexual apes do not exist in a vacuum

omg finally

i’m going to blow up everything forever.

I always feel so cheated in stories when characters are walking around with this Big Guilt and then...you find out that the thing wasn't their fault at all. And not in a "they thought they did it but it turns out they were set up" way, or even a "accepting that just because they did A which caused B which caused C it doesn't mean C was their fault", way but where they finally lay out the sequence of events and it's clear that any thinking person would not connect them. Like, fucking commit!!! The character isn't LESS compelling if they actually did the thing! You can't have the haunted brooding meow meow who is...also completely blameless