So much to do, so little time...

The Old Guard doesn’t sexualize the men either. The men are VERY nice to look at, but they haven’t been put through the Hollywood body-building treatment. I mean, have you read what Hugh Jackman went through to bulk up and be Wolverine? Daily hours-long grueling workouts combined with a high-protein diet of pretty much nothing but boiled chicken, then days of dehydration before a scene shoot because being dehydrated makes your muscles stand out more.

There was none of that in The Old Guard. When Joe and Nicky have their shirts off, this is what they look like:

Normal muscle definition, not body-builders; no veins lining their muscles because they’re not dehydrated. Then, as soon as they’re freed, the first thing they do is put shirts on to fight their way out of the facility. This is Joe and Nicky ten seconds after Andy unstraps them:

I love the way this movie treats their stars. The focus is on the emotions, on the people as human beings, and they aren’t fetishized.

like when you ask people “what is horror?” they’ll tend to give examples of monsters, of killers, of dark places, of sharp teeth and too many legs and lots and lots of blood. which is true, that can be used as horror! but i’d like to call that “the horror of being eaten/hurt/killed” or more succinctly “the horror of vulnerability”. it’s a horror that something, whether it’s a killer or a monster or some phenomenon, has the ability to cause us harm. we see large amounts of teeth and we think “that thing is going to tear us to pieces with those teeth” or we see spilled blood and we think “someone has been hurt, there’s a chance we can be hurt too by whatever spilled this blood”.

but what certain modern sculptures can do is elicit a very physical visceral reaction of a completely different kind of horror. 

it’s “the horror that something is a thing that SHOULD not exist, and you are absolutely powerless to understand what it is, but it is existing in your space, right now, it is real and you cannot make it unreal no matter what you do”

or perhaps, in a shorter fashion, it’s “the horror of wrongness”

like one of the sculptures that made me feel this way is this sculpture here, named “Monekana” located in the American Art Museum in Washington D.C:

“okay,” you say, with a shrug. “it’s a horse made of wood? what’s so scary about that?”. but this is the lie of the photograph! a photograph of a sculpture rarely grasps the experience of standing next to a sculpture. you have to picture yourself walking into this room, practically devoid of people, and coming face to face with this sculpture that is very large and very real.

and your brain screams that “THIS IS WRONG. MAKE IT GO AWAY. THIS IS WRONG”, like at any moment you expect it to move, to twist its head, to follow you with eyes that aren’t simply there. it looks like a horse but it is no horse. you could almost argue that maybe it isn’t even an art piece at all, but it wandered in from god knows what kind of world and it’s blending in with everything else. maybe it’s fooling you. maybe it isn’t.

anyways, i’m not trying to say that this sculpture in particular is SUPPOSED to be scary, it may make other people feel nothing at all (or even positive feelings!), but what i’m trying to say is that feeling i had that day, when i saw this thing, when i felt this fearful instinct to stay away and not stare, it’s THAT feeling that i feel so many writers and makers of horror don’t completely understand. you don’t need teeth. you don’t need blood. you don’t need to make Spooky Scary Skeletons or chainsaw-wielding villains. all you need is to create something wrong in its existence, something to make parts of us fear the fact that we can’t entirely rationalize what we’re seeing.

The experience of sculpture absolutely gets lost in images. I’ve walked into museums and been like WOW THE FUCK even when I knew it was coming.

I love this subject, though. I love “implication horror.” You see something, and the realization of what it means, which often comes a few moments later, is where the real horror lies—not in how splattery or gratuitously shocking it is. The wrongness of a thing in fiction, when done well, is the best. I was watching Melancholia the other day, and what a terrifying example of wrongness horror.

Examples: The Halifax shipyard building made me feel almost nauseous, and I have to drive past this cold storage building in Winnipeg every time I go to visit my boyfriend’s parents. I do not like it one bit. Also, I got to see that sculpture of a giant newborn baby last year. That was very surreal in the way that is described here.

Honestly, I’m so glad so many people have responded and reblogged this post with examples and stories of their own!! It’s so cool to see just what people think and perceive as this horror of “wrongness”. I also see some people saying that this is essentially the uncanny valley effect, which is only an aspect of this kind of horror - the uncanny valley primarily deals with something we perceive that looks close to human and yet doesn’t quite make it there. It’s just one subset of a really uneasy sort of horror that can be found in so many forms, which may really honestly differ from person to person.

I dreamed that we had left our dog to stay in a kennel for a while when we were away (which happened once or twice IRL). And when we went to pick her up, she walked out and closer to me, very calmly, and looked up at me, and blinked.

But instead of her eyelids closing from top and bottom and making a horizontal line, her lids closed from left and right in a vertical line.

I also recommend this:

Welcome to Build-a-Frog!

She really is becoming more and more willing to turn her back on everyone except for her radfem buddies.

Radical feminism has a massive, massive foothold here in the UK compared to the USA, and if you're coming to the UK from the US like I am, it can be incredibly surprising. After living here a few years, I'm not at all surprised that JKR has fallen in with that crowd - just disappointed.

Radfems prey on and recruit vulnerable women. If you've read JKR's essay on this issue, it's become very clear that she's been incredibly vulnerable in her past, and that she's still to this day dealing with the trauma of that past. That doesn't excuse her actions, but it absolutely explains how radfems got to her. Her essay shows a very typical path from trauma to radicalisation through the residual fear and pain.

This is how radical ideologies pull you in. It is one of their most dangerous weapons. JKR seemed to understand this incredibly well while writing Harry Potter, and she still fell prey to it in her own life.

ONE. AIRBENDER.

Migration

I have somethin I guess? I’ve been the Support Friend for most of my life so I managed to get it down to a formula. TW: dog death

1. Ask Questions

This is mainly to keep them talking, that way a) they feel like they have a confidante in you, and b) the pressure is less on you to Say Things. In fact it shouldn’t be about you Saying Things at all, it should be you figuring out where they’re at and trying to understand.  E.g. “My dog died, I miss him.” Ask questions, and when they start talking, let them talk. “What was his name?” “How and when did he die?” “Tell me about him.” “What was he like?” “What’s your favourite memory of him?” “When did you first meet him?” “Did you teach him any tricks?” Again the point is to keep them talking, the questions are just to get them on a roll. If you’re worrying about what to say next, listen to what they’re saying and ask details of what they’re currently talking about, or mentally prepare your next question.

2. Listen

Let them talk. The more you listen to them talk, the more they feel like it’s okay to talk to you. If they dwindle off, ask them something else to get them talking again. Upset people usually have a lot to say.

Every now and again you can throw in little sentences like “Wow, what a bitch!” “Aw, so sad.” “What the fuck? Why?” just to prove you’re still listening and following, and haven’t wandered off into space.

3. When they’re done, give it back to them

It’s a technique called mirroring. Sum up whatever you heard in short form - if they’ve talked for half an hour about the little details of their deceased pet, say something like “It sounds like he was a very good boy/sounds like he meant a lot to you/sounds like you will miss him.” It’s been known to make people dissolve into a sobbing mess, because this is the part where you prove you’ve done your homework, you listened, you care, you get it.

4. If you really want to offer a solution, ask first. You can just skip this step altogether tbh.

Only when someone has finished talking about whatever is upsetting them, ask if you can help. “Can I offer some advice?”  Now is the time for SHORT anecdotes. Short. It’s not about you sharing your story, it’s about them getting advice. Remember they don’t have to take your advice, again it’s about them and their emotions, and they know themselves best. “When my dog died, I did this. Would that help?” “I read somewhere about doing this. Maybe try that and see how it goes?”

Zuko’s like no, yeah, I totally get it, and just makes her one of his advisors. At first it’s just so she has a good excuse to stay but after the first meeting Toph storms out shouting about how EVERYONE was lying why would you even need to lie about what kind of tea you want??

Zuko: I mean they’re politicians.....but also who, and when, and in what way

They make a subtle Morse code system so Toph can warn him when someone is lying to him without tipping anyone off that she can sense lies.

Little icelandic girl playing with a lost foal. Instant BFFs.