#polley

AU: Mythtale (personal ver)

Type: Sans

Age: Baby to Toddler

Race: Skeletal Plant Viper

Size: 1 to 2 inches

Diet: Bitty baby milk / fresh egg (1) / fresh red & white meats

Personality: Bold / Mischievous / Curious / Protective

Likes: Naptime / Cinny's company / Warmth, warm things/areas

Dislikes: Strangers / Cold things/areas / Having their flowers touched by strangers

Compatibility: Does best with a Cinny bitty but can get along with most others as long as they have the time to get used to them.

Features: Light grey bones with spots, dots, stripes or/and splashes of charcoal black or beiges. Their spine is attached to a emerald green, thickish, snake esque plant 'stem'. Both this snake stem and their upper bones grow flowers; the position of flower growth on their bones varies but all individuals have a universal flower growth on their skull via their eye socket, typically the right. These flowers vary in species and colors. Their eye lights are burgundy or mahogany red with slit pupils. They have snake fangs.

Difficulty: Easy

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Polleys needs to eat three times a day. Allowed additional snacks if has had good behavior (toddler age).

Polleys will grow up into a Pistil bitty but how long they stay a Polley bitty varies from months to years.

It's not mandatory but it's advised to adopt a Cinny bitty alongside your Polley bitty.

Polley bittys will 'migrate' to any and every area in the household that's warm so be aware of areas that aren't suitable for baby/toddler bitty and try to keep such areas cold to discourage your Polley to squeeze in.

Caution: Polleys are venomous and will bite if they feel scared in a situation or if someone they're not familiar with tries to handle them or touch their flowers. The venom isn't deadly to bigger creatures or other bittys but it will cause mild to severe pain, swelling, redness and breakouts in welts or minor boils so if you require to handle your newly adopted Polley it's highly advised to wear protective gloves.

DO NOT defang your Polley, it's extremely traumatizing and emotionally distressing to them and takes away their primary defense mechanism.

The other day, Terry Gilliam threw out an opinion no one asked for; that the #MeToo movement has become “mob rule” .  “It is a world of victims. I think some people did very well out of meeting with Harvey and others didn’t,” he added. “The ones who did, knew what they were doing. These are adults; we are talking about adults with a lot of ambition.” Gilliam also claimed that some of the women didn’t actually suffer, but used Weinstein to further their careers, and that he knew women who walked out of meetings with the mogul before getting sexually abused.

In light of this garbage hot take, it’s interesting to consider an interaction he had with actress/director Sarah Polley in 2005.   He and Sarah had a history- they starred in a movie together when Sarah was very young.   In 2005 he was about to make another movie with another young girl and Sarah wrote him a letter detailing some of the struggles she had during the movie she and he had filmed in hopes that it would make him more aware of and sensitive to the ways that the entertainment world can steal agency from young actors, especially young girls and women.

Basically, I remember being afraid a lot of the time. I felt incredibly unsafe. I remember a couple of trips to the hospital after being in freezing water for long periods of time, losing quite a bit of my hearing for days at a time due to explosives, having my heart monitored when one went off relatively close to me, etc. I remember running through this long sort of corridor where explosives went off every few feet, things were on fire, etc. I cried hysterically in my dad’s lap and begged him to make sure I wouldn’t have to do it again, but I did. I think I did it quite a few more times. I remember the terrifying scene where we were in the boat and the horse jumped out and ended up surfacing a plastic explosive that went off right under my face. I remember being half trampled by a mob of extras and then repeating the scene several times. I remember working very long hours.

...

So here’s my point: who knows whom you’ll cast and what their parents will be like. My suspicion is that you might need to be constantly analyzing whether you would put your own 9-year-old in the positions you’ll be putting this kid in. Because it’s entirely likely that the child’s own parents will be (for whatever reason) incapable of making the right call. This is a huge responsibility but I’m starting to think (from watching other kids and parents) that this is a fundamental part of the job when you’re working with kids who should really be in school anyway.

She went on to offer him some advice on how to recognize and address ways in which a child actor might be put in frightening and uncomfortable situations and how he might better address them.  

Gilliam’s response foretells his current views on the ways that Hollywood steals agency from the vulnerable.  He tells Polley, rather patronizingly, that she was never in danger rather than acknowledging the validity of her feelings and the imbalance of power that made her unable to advocate for herself.  He tells her that she was “too valuable to the production” for her to have met any real harm instead of giving her the respect she deserves as a coworker and as a human being.

There’s no question based on this and his current stance on #MeToo that he trades heavily in victim blaming and paternalistic gaslighting .   But it’s too easy to see him as an outlier.He is far more emblematic of larger issues that have sparked the #MeToo movement.

One of the big concepts he seems blissfully unaware of is the concept of power structures and how they might come into play. How an adult man in a film production might have all of the power when it comes to voicing his discomfort whereas a child might be afraid to speak up or more likely to be ignored.

How someone just starting in the entertainment industry might, when coming up against a Goliath like Weinstein, be all too aware of how easily their career (and indeed their life) might be crushed should they choose to speak out about assault or abuse.

Your pins deserve the Polley. A Dr. Martens take on the classic Mary Jane shoe featuring a T-bar fastening and durable AirWair sole. Photo by emmatrevena.