Stefi Delly

we recently had a very confused lady who called that her cat was trying to take care of an astounding 8 kittens and brought them in

the kittens were obviously malnourished, and we looked around her neighborhood and sadly found the dead mama, she got hit by a car

it’s a really useful thing that cats will do

sometimes the mom will just have gotten lost and will come back to try and find her kittens and so that can be frustrating, but considering how rough it is for stray kittens, it’s a lot better for them to be in a household and cared for where the parent cat can get guareenteed food and shelter

I can’t tell you how many abandoned kittens we find that can’t make it

it sucks a lot

anyway tangent done

And the safety briefing included the question “So if you’re pregnant, do you want to know or not?”

Turns out there had been a bit of an awkward situation once where the keepers had casually mentioned a woman’s pregnancy in a group, and she herself didn’t even know yet. Turns out the wolves are excellent at telling if you’re pregnant and the keepers can tell based on their body language.  They get all odd and careful around pregnancy. (Even wolves knows that you have to take care of pregnant people.)

So they definitely knew she was pregnant.

And if I remember my BBC documentaries right, a wolf will leave the pack to give birth and introduce the cubs to the pack once she feels ready for it. And maternity leave is flexible but often around 6 months so they’re going “YOU WERE GONE FOREVER! WE WERE SO WORRIED! WHERE ARE THE CUBS?? WE HAVE TO GREET THE CUBS!!“ 

The fact that it’s not a plotpoint makes it even worse. There’s this thing called The Law of Conservation of Detail. If you give a detail, it better be important to the story. Doubly important for a comic where you have a very limited amount of space to work with. Spending pages on warning the characters about the homophobic backlash they’ll be facing and then never following through with it is not world building. It’s is a waste of space that could’ve been better used to develope the actual conflict of the comic.

Which, yeah, isnt like DISOWNING her or assaulting her, but as someone who went through a pretty similar thing, it still hurts. They describe her desire to come out as “getting ahead of herself” and being “over excited.” Which is very dismissive and patronizing.

My parents made it clear that my younger brothers and sister shouldn’t be told, the rest of the family shouldn’t find out, that I should “be careful at school” and then proceeded to basically ignore the fact that I was bi as much as possible. Which is…a bad feeling, and in a lot of ways damaged my relationship with them for a long time. No, it wasnt as bad as it could have been, but it is a reaction that people experience. It isn’t less valid or less realistic just because it wasn’t as bad as it could have been.

Parents who arent assholes but also want you to stay in the closet are a thing that we deal with. It impacts your relationship with them. This all felt very true to life for me. It wasnt the main conflict of the story, but seeing how different people reacted to Korra and Asami dating felt like it did need to be established. Kya shares some lgbt history with them, Mako is awkward because he’s always awkward about his exes, Korra’s parents are overly protective in a way that makes them not want her to come out.

And maybe this is just me, just the Avatar world has always built on real world cultures. We know that imperialist and authoritarian governments are strongly linked to homophobic laws and customs. We know that communities with strong traditions can be less open to lgbt folk, even if it isn’t in the law itself. To look at a show that says YES sexism exists and can be overcome, YES genocide happens and we can survive, YES trauma occurs but we can heal, and then to just be like “what? Homophobia? Thats not a thing” would have rang hollow to me.

Maybe I’m reading this wrong, but it feels like you wish they had either not mentioned it at all, or made the homophobia more central to the plot of the comic. But you also really dont want that because while genocide can exist in your escapist media, you don’t want homophobia to even be acknowledged. Which, you do you. We all react to shit in our own ways.

My point is that it isn’t cheap or lazy writing. Maybe its a narrative choice you didn’t enjoy, but establishing lgbt attitudes in the universe was well over due, and it is absolutely consistent with real world imperialism to have an imperialist power codify anti-lgbt laws while in power, and making those connections is in line with the show’s approach to those issues.

Not to mention how often Korra got herself in trouble or almost died due to getting ahead of herself and not thinking things through. The only reason she didn’t die halfway through Volume 1 was because Amon decided to let her live.

And yes, if they had to bring homophobia up as a topic, then I would’ve prefered if they had made it central to the comic and actually done something with it. To compare it to the whole sexism thing in ATLA: Imagine if in the show Katara had been told by everyone that the Northern Watertribe is sexist and doesn’t allow girls to learn combat waterbending, but then Pakku agrees to teach her immediately without complaint and no one so much as raises an eyebrow at a girl learning how to fight. That would’ve made the entire spiel about sexism unsatisfying and pointless.

When I ask people about their fave movies I always ask for two:

1) Which movie do you just fuckin. Watch over and over again (mine is Groundhog Day)?

2) Which movie do you recommend to other people/to me specifically?

Hi, welcome to my Ted Talk, today we will be dealing with something that has bothered me about Disney’s Robin Hood since I was a kid and I still cannot get over to this very day.

And it all stems from THESE THREE PEOPLE:

Maid Marian, Prince John, and King Richard

I’m going to preface this entire thing by saying THIS version of Robin Hood is very very VERY different than the source material, much like all Disney animated films, but it wasn’t really DISNEY who did the big changes… those just came over time with making things more… I’m just going to say “normal for society”, which is ultra double lame.

BUT that’s not the point, because that stuff happens everywhere and with everything, and if I started to complain about THAT we’d be here all day, and I’m already going to take more of your time than needed to complain about something SUPER unimportant from a children’s animated movie made in 1973.

ANYWAY!

So, in the movie the titular character, Robin Hood, is a fox.  Makes total sense, foxes are crafty, hard to catch, cunning, and known for getting into and out of situations that other animals would have difficulty with.  Take that and turn it into an anthropomorphic character and you’d get someone who would easily be against the normal laws, not BAD, but would do BAD to do GOOD. Robin is a show off when he wants to be, and quiet when he has to be.

He’s a pretty perfect Robin Hood, especially in the case of animated kids movies, his characteristics just work SO WELL with his personification as a fox. GOOD STUFF, if I do say so myself!

Little John, meanwhile, is a bear. Not just any bear, but a big ol’ lovable brown bear. This plays on the idea of Little John being a cheeky nickname because Little John is a big, strong, and above all the calm, cool, and rationally smart one of the two. Robin may be clever, but John is the big picture guy. Pun intended.

These two designs and animal choices work SO well with each other, and it’s because these two are so different yet they get along and honestly NEED one another that makes the differences so perfect.

ALAN-A-DALE IS A ROOSTER. BRILLIANT. I don’t even have to go into this, do I? What a GREAT call by making Alan-A-Dale a rooster.  Though, I feel a bit of his characteristics were also borrowed from Will Scarlet for the Disney version, but even that still fits everything. And, honestly, I don’t mind the blending of Alan and Will, it kinda works? Especially with the movie being as short as it is.

ROOSTER BARD. ROOSTER. BARD. So good, I mean c’mon. It’s perfection.

The Sheriff of Nottingham being a wolf is… okay. It’s okay. I get it though, having the wolf hunt the fox. Haha. Cheeky. Cliche, but cheeky.

I really have nothing to say about him, he’s just…okay. Dude’s a cop, so whatever. Not a fan of bootlickers, and the fact that they’re dragging wolves in the mud by making a wolf into a cop is… whatever. /He’s A Wolf Cop/

Personally, I don’t like Friar Tuck as a badger. It really doesn’t make sense to me, and I lowkey hate it that they totally missed so many opportunities. DOVE OF PEACE? LAMB OF GOD? Like FOR REAL, you coulda done something super cute like that, but NOoOoOoOoOoO… he’s a badger. And they kinda pick on him for half the movie, for no reason, and I don’t like that.

Still, Friar Tuck is cute, and a really fun character and they do some clever animation stuff with his “badger”-ness. Still a bit of a missed opportunity.

OKAY NOW THAT WE’VE GOT THESE OTHER BIG ONES OUT OF THE WAY, IT’S TIME FOR MY ACTUAL PROBLEM!

MAID FRICKIN MARIAN IS A FOX.

WHAT THE FRICKEN FRICKITY FRACK?!

ABSOLUTELY NOT! Disney did this JUST because they wanted Maid Marian and Robin Hood to be THE SAME ANIMAL, and that’s ABSOLUTE BUNK!

WHY? Well there’s two BIG reasons that is irks me!

First, the idea that they HAD to be together because they were the same animal or they were made to be the same animal so it wouldn’t be “weird” that they were together.

LAME! UNINSPIRED! BULLSHI-

*ehem* Nonsense. Nonsense.

And it’s even MORE nonsense because of this little fact…

PRINCE JOHN AND KING RICHARD ARE HER RELATIVES!

MAID MARIAN THE NIECE OF PRINCE JOHN AND KING RICHARD!

Okay, you could argue that Maid Marian was adopted, or that King Richard married a lovely fox woman and the fox woman’s relative had a daughter and THAT was Maid Marian. And YES, that would make the situation plausible…

EXCEPT!

This is MEDIEVAL ENGLAND and they are ROYALTY and that kinda stuff wouldn’t fly even IF King Richard is the King.

WHAT I’M SAYING IS…

I really recommend reading the rest, it’s gold