places dark and places strange

me nd my pirate girlfriend

sorry to be legally blonde blogging on main once again but i just wanted to talk about how easy it would’ve been to screw that movie up. the entire premise is based around a girl doing the most to get a guy, the main conflict of the film is the one between elle and viv, elle and her friends are stereotypical girly girls, etc - all that is just a perfect setup for a kind of passive aggressive lowkey misogynistic film that aims at actual feminist themes but falls short at #girlboss. but it doesn’t! while vivian is certainly catty to elle at first the insults aren’t sexist, vivian is just threatened but the confrontation is surprisingly and refreshingly... levelheaded? is the best way i can describe it. there is none of that one scene that a lot of 90’s movies seem to have where the two female protags have a fight where they insult each other’s appearance and then latch onto each other’s hair and yell bloody murder. ya know the one. there is none of that, none of the throwing around lowkey insults to women left and right, and in the end it works out quite beautifully because the only character we meet who is actually outright sexist is warner, which sets him up to be a gigantic asshole without having to have him like kill a kitten or something. it’s clever writing! and for a movie that came out in 2001 to toe that line between empowerment and sexism so well and come out the other side an enjoyable story with realistic women that does not fall under sexist tropes and stands the test of time is very admirable imo

Because I saw this mentioned in the comments, I think what cis men describe when they speak about feeling ‘emasculated’ is very different than the feeling of gender dysphoria. It is an ego bruise. A dent. Anything that makes them feel like they are not an upstanding, radioactively, toxically masculine member of dominant gender. “I won’t eat any vaguely phallic fruit because it might look kind of gay and being gay makes you less of a man.” is very different than “My body, the way that I am forced to present myself and the way others perceive me is at odds with my inner self and the core of my identity as a human being and it hurts.”

fumbled the interaction

secret organizations for studying paranormal phenomena are always calling the creatures they find like "specimen 58008" or some fake latin taxonomy or something vague and ominous like "the red angel" or whatever and thats all well and good but i want a story about a bunch of cryptozoologists going around naming things the way people name like actual birds and lizards and shit.

Skiing Joker