the beauty and the horror

people get so mad when you tell them that their lowbrow entertainment they enjoy is actually lowbrow

everyone wants their self-indulgent romantasy to be considered high literature and whatever new mainstream pop boy/girl to be treated as the next beethoven and their gay fluff show on streaming apps to be revolutionary art changing the world and like, they're not. and that's okay. i'm literally watching the stupidest show right now and it's fine. it doesn't have to be more.

there's also the argument of how pop culture used to be the trickle down from high culture for the longest time but now it's an ouroboros eating itself as access and willingness to engage with high culture have been systematically destroyed and diminished through the last decades so your popcorn flick moviemaker now only gets inspiration from other popcorn flicks when their foreparents used to actually read literally and see art of all kinds and your pop musicians used to listen to all sorts of new and old music rather than just their contemporaries/competition and maybe this absence of any sort of culture outside of our easy algorithms is why everyone's so defensive of what they passively consume and so attached to it as a part of their identity but that's a discussion for another day

the year is 2035. the new beauty standard is for women to cut their ears off, as ears are a masculine trait which make the face look too big and hearing isnt necessary as it doesnt align with being demure. evil feminists say perhaps this is unnecessary and ears are natural. women are agressively proclaiming they are cutting their ears off due to sensory issues

u can be boiling alive in your mind for months and then on a random tuesday ur head gets so clear and life is worth living again and you're like damn what was all that about then

reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way

my problem is not rhaenyra struggling with what she feels she must do, experiencing moral qualms, questioning herself, etc. all good stuff. again it is the recurrent, never exhaustible sense of surprise. always this reset to moral innocence that is continually being shattered, rhaenyra continually having this revelation. this is the absolutely most annoying posture for me in all multiple areas of life, this baseline where clearly we must all be sort of perennially shocked by the presence of violence. i am not shocked. i’m never shocked. i am not shocked by the idea that rhaenyra must murder to keep her throne - why on earth is rhaenyra? why is this the show’s assumed perspective?

maybe this is too woke but i really hate the trope of naked older women = scary or vomit inducing or gross or whatever. like you even see it used in horror on occasion like oooooo so scary theres a woman with saggy boobs and wrinkles. There is something to be said for unconsensual veiwing of nudity. sure. it’s uncomfortable and violating for someone to be nude in front of you that you don’t want to see. but rarely that’s seen as the issue and instead the real ‘horror’ or gross out joke is the very idea of a woman who does not have a body that is sexually desirable to men. The very idea of an older woman’s body is treated like it’s something that we should all know is gross, sick and wrong. It’s just something that really bothers me

#its been in horror a lot more recently and its like. ENOUGH