Misanthropic Raptor

She looked at my files and said “So…what are your plans?”

“My plans?” I asked.

“Yes. You’re a dishwasher. You don’t want to do that forever, do you?”

“Maybe not, but I’m happy with it right now. It pays surprisingly well, I never have to work weekends or overtime, and it’s the sort of job I don’t have to bring with me home mentally. It frees up a lot of time to do the things I like”

“Like what?”

“Hobbies, my family, friends, my pets. I don’t want to hate my job but I don’t want it to be my whole life either, eating away at the things that give my life meaning”

She looked at me for a few seconds then said “You know…the older I get I understand that mindset more and more”

And then she went into a very long, very personal rant about how she has started feeling like she wasted her life on high demand jobs and how taxing and mentally draining her current job is because she has to make huge decisions that can ruin people’s lives and how do you not take that home with you? She loved drawing too but she hadn’t picked up a pen in years and-

So the conversation went from “Your life must be a bit shit with a job like that” to “Oh my god my job is shit and I’ve wasted my life on it!”

Source is Instagram user thatmodernlife. Per Reddit, this post was deleted quickly, and was captioned:

And look, okay, listen. I have a film degree. Im not in any an expert on cinema nor am I a film scholar but I do have some higher formal education on the topic, and I am a trans person who has, unfortunately, been 21. Here's my 2 cents:

Firstly, trans-coded villains in horror movies (namely the "man in a dress" archetype) is pretty cinema 101. It IS so extensively talked about that you were probably drawing an eye in the back of the lecture hall if you dont remember anything being said about it. If you ever take a horror movie class specifically then you are absolutely guaranteed to have this conversation and have the plethora of scholarship about it thrown at you for required reading.

Secondly, I do not like this idea that simply being a bit rude or short with someone of a particular demographic is always and exclusively rooted in a prejudice towards the identity group(s) they are a part of. There is a VERY big difference between active transphobia and just being a bit of a dick, and conflating the two is going to make things very messy and potentially dangerous. For starters, you are going to create an extremely paranoid and jumpy bunch of young trans people who are absolutely convinced that the entire world is out to kill them when they inevitably encounter some random asshole in the real world. And you are going to give a whole bunch of conservatives a whole bunch of ammunition to say that we think every minor inconvenience or moment of discomfort is a targeted attack against us, frankly because you are acting like it is.

Additionally, every 21 year old has a very weird superiority complex. I did, you did/do/will. It just comes with the territory. Youre having your first taste of true independence and are probably in undergrad, which is an environment that drip-feeds you a lot of rewards for doing essentially what you just did in high school again but at a slightly higher difficulty with less social ostracism. If you live on your own or in the dorms with other 21 year olds, you will all just feed into each other's superiority complexes. You end up convinced that you and your friends are the smartest people alive and the first ones to ever come up with certain ideas, that I promise have been thought of by millions of 21 year olds before you. This includes "has anyone else noticed that trans-coded villains are common in horror movies?" And I think its justified to have a bit of a reality check in someone saying "yes, everyone has, this has been discussed extensively for generations, youre just 21."

Finally, I do not appreciate in the slightest the response to this tweet being "silence of the lambs has no artistic merit and should be scrubbed from the media landscape entirely because of Buffalo Bill." If you personally are not comfortable with/do not have the ability to look past the trans-coded villain archetype you dont have to watch it, but to act like the presence of a poorly-aged trope completely negates all the very real positive impact a foundational film did for modern horror is infuriatingly anti-intellectual and betrays your one-dimensional morality around media, as well as your complete inability to look at something objectively.

aye aye 🫡