#foolishmortalreplies

thanks for being you!

I like pillowfort a lot, but it's VERY quiet. There wasn't a huge migration after the last tumblr scare, sadly, but I think if people would give it a chance they'd find they really like it.

the WHAT

Oh boy. So the tom//greg neo//liberal block//list (TGNB) was something that happened in the early HBO Succession fandom. Way back when the 2nd season was airing in the distant year 2019, a bunch of tumblr users were shipping tomgreg, or Tom Wambsgans—the only daughter of the core family’s bizarre midwestern husband—with Greg Hirsch—the core family’s weirdly tall cousin, who’s also Tom’s personal assistant. Because of the dramedic nature of the show and the total absurdity of these two characters even when compared to the rest of the cast, a lot of the shipping was very tongue-in-cheek. The overwhelming majority of the people in the tomgreg community were lesbian, bisexual or trans women, most of whom were in their 20s or 30s. Many of these people were also, significantly, post-Soviet Jews with low tolerance for tankies.

A different group of tumblr users didn’t like any of this. These people decided that the unifying factor between all tomgreg shippers—or tomgregs—was that they were “neoliberals.” I’m not going to define neoliberalism here, because these individuals sure as shit did not know what that word means, and I think that an archaeologist working to decipher it a millennium from now based on their posts would conclude that it indicates a person or group of people who strongly dislikes political repression, or possibly really loves abortion and other forms of bodily autonomy. In any case, the tom//greg neo//liberal block//list was born.

Charges brought against tomgregs include:

Fetishizing gay men

Shipping problematic yaoi (power imbalance, age gap, abusive, so on)

Not adequately engaging with the show’s ultimately pretty rudimentary satire of capitalism and the ultra-wealthy in order to focus on shipping problematic yaoi instead

Making Tom cheat on his wife (who’s already cheating on him in the show)

Being too old for Leonardo DiCaprio to have sex with

Careerism

Definitively viewing the man-made famine that took place in Soviet Ukraine between 1932-33 as genocide (yes, all of this took place not too long before the current Russian regime launched its ongoing invasion of Ukraine; thank you for noticing)

Being ‘suspiciously’ concerned the American right’s extremely well-documented long term plot to force women back into the home by overturning Roe v. Wade (which—yes—has since been overruled; nobody has ever been further from the money than these dumb chucklefucks)

Valuing the right to freedom of speech and expression (I’ve noticed that many of these people have since come around on this one, for some reason)

Liking Taylor Swift music

All of this was very funny and the blocklist quickly became a joke, but I should note that there was actual harassment involved. One woman (who had the kind of public-facing job you could really get in trouble over posts at) was eventually even doxxed either by the original YouTube phenomenon S@r@h Z or one of her followers, who Z endorsed on her tumblr. Ms. Z has of course since been doxxed herself and made a video about the horrors of it [curbyourenthusiasm.mp3].

EXCELLENT cast - Christian Bale + Henry Melling as Augustus Landor + Edgar Allen Poe, respectively, were fantastic; so were my faves Toby Jones + Gillian Anderson in smaller parts.

The relationship between Landor and Poe is SO GOOD and SO INTENSE. crackling with understanding. they're in the middle of solving grisly murders and its serious and they're under attack and they know it and they're treating it with all the respect it deserves -- but they're sort of nevertheless delighted in each other's company? i loved that. they had some scenes I LOVED.

so we get like. two-thirds, maybe three-fourths of the way through movie and we start to drift off course a bit imo. the non-spoiler review is the end of the movie did not work for me, and soured the whole thing a bit

handful of spoilers for the last bit of the movie below, tw for sexual assault and suicide