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Watched 5 eps of Mo Li and finally there is an airing cdrama for me to watch everyday.
Bai Lu plays a schemer FL who doesn't make grand speeches for #girlboss purposes, instead she seems so peaceful and is so good at hiding her emotions and true intent. She has a set of dolls that I think are her hit list, her killing methods are cruel but so satisfying, she talks to the ghost of her maid which is probably due to some trauma and I shouldn't laugh but I can't help it when she talks to her ghost maid in front of other people, it's literally a scene like this:
Cheng Lei is delivering as always. Handsome, strong (his legs are injured so he hasn't fully unlocked this feature yet), yet miserable. And he is so good at being miserable. His kicked puppy lashing out vibes tug at my heart.
And as for the romance between the two, so far I am very satisfied with the way the love plot is going. Schemer x schemer is great especially when both of them are working against the same people but they have no idea about it.
Overall, a very strong start and I am happy with the drama. Now, if only it can keep up this energy till the end. Please drama gods.
Zhan Zhao imprinted really fast on Huo Linglong and Bai Yutang, something which by all indicators is not at all usual for him, and my favorite headcanon for the reason for it is that it's because they were so determined to help and take care of him.
Due to his abilities and his position, most people probably expect him to get along just fine regardless of circumstances, especially since he very much wants to appear to be all fine even when he isn't (probably a defense mechanism considering the life he's led). He never expects any help from others either, he's got the sort of mindset that he can carry his own problems, his friends' problems and probably a bunch of strangers' as well.
Most people probably take his assurances at face value, but HLL and BYT just won't have it, HLL being all offended she isn't allowed to share in this dangerous mission even though they've only just met, and BYT immediately making sure ZZ is safe and as healthy as can be, not to mention not giving him up even to save his sworn brothers (despite at the same time still saying they'll have to have a duel). And as time passes and the three of them get closer, this tendency to make sure ZZ will be fine just grows in HLL and BYT.
It must feel reassuring, at the very least on the subconscious level, because it's not easy for ZZ to let go of the idea that he can manage whatever, possibly right up until the moment it turns out he can't. It takes a while for him to be able to accept that he can rely on others, and that acceptance comes because BYT and HLL very much plant themselves right next to him and make it impossible for him to believe anything else.
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I think one of the things it annoys me the most about shipping a romance/sex repulsed character is that like. if its a friendship i dont care about i can block the tag? but if its shipping with someone theyre something akin to a QPR with in canon and I actually like that dynamic, i cant. because there usually isnt a separate tag for "romantic ship" and QPR. like i can do that on ao3 sure but not if im looking up the tag on tumblr.
and the thing is even platonic fan content will often include romance coded language because thats often the only language we do have for a deep, intense relationship that isnt familial and isnt exclusively friendship. im guilty of this! i often refer to my actual QPP as my partner/bf/gf irl when i dont want to spend fifteen minutes explaining my sexuality and QPRs. but often times i will look at a piece of fanart or a joke post and be straight up unable to establish whether the poster means it romantically or platonically at All.
and its that thing where like sure i Can preemptively block people even if im not sure. but again that would mean risking not actually seeing QPR content at all. and its like. i dont think i should have to sacrifice seeing characters in a relationship like mine that is heavily supported by the canon just because people (usually allos!) just cant help but make Romantic Ship number 358393993
to clarify i mean i dont like it when people ship a sex/romance averse character. just noticed the phrasing is ambiguous in the first part.
and like i feel like people generally understand that shipping a gay man with a woman is like. homophobic. like we do generally understand thats homophobic nowadays!! but ive straight up been called pro censorship for saying that fandom's fixation on giving aspec sex/romance averse characters Default Romantic Relationships that look pretty much the same to common allo relationships is aphobic.
like. I do think aspec relationships and sexual encounters can be fascinating to explore when done well.
but we have GOT to get separate tags and you have GOT to start thinking about why you feel the need to put all of your favorite characters in a relationship at all no matter how little it fits them or how vocally disgusted they are by the idea
and when it Does kind of fit, for a character that is Not vocally, canonically repulsed— you have GOT to start exploring the ways in which that would still most likely not look like your average allo relationship!
Murderbot from The Murderbot Diaries is canonically sex and romance repulsed!! So of course people immediately started romantically shipping it with the closest sad man who i dont care about and to *checks notes* its platonic partner An Actual Literal Spaceship AI. so now i cant look them up without getting hit w marriage jokes.
I would never defend the concept of a non human character being romance repulsed or asexual in mainstream right now because we’re trying to humanize it
Yeah, thats a very fair criticism and one that I would generally agree with! But I would say that Murderbot is the exception to this rule of thumb for a few reasons.
1) I feel like most aspecs in media right now are side characters, so we are seeing their asexuality and aromanticism from the outside in where they just get mixed up with the robot stuff and justified by it. The asexuality and aromanticism is depicted as a result of their being a robot and part of why they are narratively shown as less of a person.
Whereas Murderbot is not only the main character, but also our only narrator pretty much thorough eight books. We see the world almost exclusively through its eyes, and while its not a human, its very much obviously and completely a Person even before it admits its one.
Murderbot attributes its sex/romance repulsion to being the kind of construct it is (a SecUnit), but it also attributes a LOT of other things to being a construct that are systematically debunked over the series— Murderbot is first and foremost a person who happens to be sex and romance repulsed, and who happens to be certain ways because its an individual, and who attributes both of those to being a construct mainly because it takes it a long time to accept its a person.
2) Sex and romance averse aspecs in media are often portrayed as cold and unemotional overall, and the sex and romance repulsion are shown as a part of it.
That is why the robot stereotype in media is so harmful. Its bad because it equates wanting sex and romance = being emotional and capable of having deep relationships. It posits that the robot is cold and incomplete for being aspec, or rather that its aspec due to being cold and incomplete.
Murderbot is not at all cold and unemotional. Its full of emotions, even when it would rather not have them, or have them about its media. Murderbot pretends it doesnt care but then it does care, deeply, in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with romance. It has very deep relationships that are not at all romantic or sexual in nature and that it struggles to describe both because of its trauma and because it lacks the language for it.
It is also in no way at all incomplete. Murderbot might emphasize that its not human, but its a deeply humanized character.
The whole theme of the series is that constructs and bots are not human, but that they are just as much complete people with a rich internal life that deserve to live their lives with autonomy and to have support from the people around them.
Murderbot not wanting sex or romance is never ever posited as an issue or as something that its lacking. Its perfectly satisfied with a life doing security work and hanging out with its great support network at the tail end of the series. It has good friendships and arguably two relationships that can be described as QPRs.
Murderbots main problem isnt that its aspec, but that a) its humans keep nearly getting themselves killed by capitalism gone rampant and b) that constructs in this universe are either demonized or infantilized or both. Both sides are shown as wrong and harmful.
I would never say that its perfect representation and I think its totally fair and valid if youre still uncomfortable with it. Like I said, I think it would be best if we saw an openly aspec human or if another SecUnit were shown to enjoy romance/sex.
But as it is, I think Murderbot is actually a great character and Im very grateful that it exists.
gandalf when his chosen Handy Dandy Hobbit of the moment went rogue on problem solving but also potentially created even MORE helpfully enhanced hobbits down the road
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Also, it seems wrong to me that Steven Zhang and Zhu Yilong are the same height. That should not be true. Zhu Yilong should be able to fit Steven Zhang in one of his jacket pockets and Ding Yixi (who is somehow 1cm taller than both of them) in the other. They can ride around and be well-behaved, and in return he can give them snacks.
LOVES me a comic relief character w/ a reputation for The Melodrama—but once you consider their backstory/working conditions you realize they are actually holding shit soooooooooooooooo much closer together than most-o-us could manage in the same situation.
there are MANY goons and mooks and goofy best friend characters this applies to, but i wanna give a shout-out to the Living Prima Donna Embodiment from phantom of the opera.
woman with 20+ years experience, most respected professional in her field, refuses to work under unsafe conditions (aka shitty colleague literally trying to murder her) and instead of listening to her massively justified concern, the new tech bro investors decide to just have an entry-level employee fill in for her.
Carlotta shoulda personally been allowed bring that crummy chandelier crashing down on her shitty bosses' heads!!!
“These things happen” On what planet Mr French Multimillionaire?!? On what planet is that an acceptable working environment! And the Phantom is picking on her and taking her voice because he, one out of thousands, doesn’t like it! And the owners just… fold?!? No!
I feel very defensive about the "goth is bougie" shit because it is historically incorrect, yes, but also and more personally, because it just erases the generations of goth kids who grew up in trailer parks and project housing or just straight up homeless, helping each other out.
it's specifically such a supportive subculture for poor and neglected kids and I really fucking hate that this has been revised and erased. juggalos and goths are very culturally close and many subcultural people are both, and juggalos have the same (and, I would argue, even better defined) culture of collective support. the Skids in Letterkenny are not made up for the show, that's just a real type of rural subcultural person. this has also been forgotten in the interim but in the 90s and 00s we didn't even really refer to OURSELVES as "goths" very much except in a joking way. goths had regional endonyms (like "skids" or "trenchies") even if they could all go to a convention or a club in a city and in that context be all called "goths" together, once they went back home they would go back to being whatever the locals called them or whatever they called themselves. this is a whole linguistics and sociology subtopic that's out of scope for a Tumblr post but is sort of related.
my point is that people who wore actual rags, and sharpie instead of nail polish, and wet n wild eyeliner instead of black lipstick, and dyed their hair with markers or food coloring or kool-aid, were and are the core of the goth scene. the majority of the pictures the mallgoth blogs are posting are from catalogs, fashion shows, costume events, yearly balls and fetes like Wave Gothik Treffen, and other places where people save up literally all year, or many years in a row, to put together ONE outfit. and there's nothing wrong with that, personally I'm proud and pleased that our hard work is being recognized and preserved. but just like formal studio photographs from the Victorian era, it is not representative of the daily or even weekly (for clubs) reality of people in the scene, some of whom were completely out of goth clothing during the day or week just to fit in at work or sometimes just to get along without being bothered at home by family members who thought the Cure was Satanic.
the people who RUN the scenes, the promoters and DJs and gogo dancers and independent designers and people who run the mailing lists and websites, the people who organize the room parties at conventions, and yes even most of the original Burning Man camps like Thunderdome, they mostly live in poverty. especially if they're young. when people organize club nights and shows, they're lucky if they break even. I wasn't aware of any of this until I started working at DNA Lounge in San Francisco, which hosts one of the oldest goth nights in the country, Death Guild. I got to know the owner of DNA well enough to find out about the financial reality of the entire scene, even the people who own the means of production and the actual property in this case, and it's not lucrative. I mean, it sometimes is, if you're running a bar for normal people and have investment captain etc, but the majority of legit subculture economics is just barely breaking even. every single event is 90% volunteer labor.
the issue of labor is maybe the confusing thing for the zoomers who are confused. goth outfits take actual physical work. maybe the Aspirational Spectacle of Labor that makes up most of TikTok has made it appear unreal to the audience rather than something you can just sit down and do?
it takes forty seconds to make the fishnet tights into a shirt. you don't need instructions, you really can just look at it and figure it out. then you think, hm, if I can make fishnets into a shirt I wonder what other things I can turn into something else. your brain will amaze you. my mom would save her tights from her formal work outfits for me when they got holes or whatever and I would just go crazy with scissors and safety pins. lots of young designers are getting attention for this layered, tights-n-pins look at the moment and it really is a fantastic aesthetic but I wonder if people think there's something special about the people who make these clothes? there isn't. you can just do it at home while you watch trashy youtubes.
one time, around 2008 or so, @gothiccharmschool and I were at the photoshoot for tabletop RPG Unhallowed Metropolis. we were there with a bunch of local goths to all make the pictures for this book together. we had all brought tons of our costumes from home to cobble together outfits for the book illustrations, and there was a moment when I just handed Jilli a pile of black skirts and some pins and said hey Jilli, could you please make me up a bustle skirt for this model real quick while I shoot these other models? and of course she did, and they were beautiful, because she knows exactly what she's doing, and because that's all a bustle is: it's a way of bunching up a skirt with another skirt. you can do it at home. you don't need instructions or to hire a seamstress or watch a video. you can just look at something and say hm does it look like a bustle? let's drape it and play with it and pin whatever works. and then you wear it for the photoshoot, or to the club!!! and then next week you pin it a different way and it's a cape instead and you wear it again!!!!!!!
I suspect this may be the topic that draws me out of my torpor about updating the actual Gothic Charm School site, but some quick asides here:
The majority of goth fashion in the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s was DIY out of necessity. Even when there WERE pre-made goth clothes (Lip Service, Bogies, indie designers), most of us couldn't afford them. Even basic goth staples like fishnets and black lipstick or nail polish weren't available year-round. We waited until Halloween and cleared out the costume aisles of our local big-box retailers. A group of friends spent an evening pouring over the pages of the big fall fashion edition of Vogue that one of us bought so we could see what dark style clothing would be trickling down to the mall department stores so we could hit the clearance racks in January, or the thrift stores in March. We memorized the discount day schedule for thrift stores and bought wedding and prom dresses to hack apart and dye. We saved for shitty plastic-boned "corsets" from Frederick's of Hollywood to wear over those hacked-apart dresses.
Goth, especially in the previous decades, was about getting whatever you could afford and figuring out how to make it spooky. Plain black leggings + thrift store or clearance black slip + layers of thrift store or clearance belts were a standard "goth uniform" for femme goths. Did we look amazing? No, not even half the time. But we took whatever we could afford and made it work as well as we could.
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This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.
e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.
I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.
This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.
And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.
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