💙 Miku Hates Fascists 💙

He is played obviously camp and dramatic, for a start, and there is the aforementioned "hate your hair/not likely/yikes yikes yikes/let me guess you have a great personality" summary dismissal of all his potential brides. Then he spends dinner asking Yzma about Kronk ("so he seems nice? He's what, in his late twenties?") and otherwise being slightly obsessed with him.

Then there is the whole Adventure of Doom with Pacha, him being ever huffy about the Kiss of Life, and then the restaurant gag where Kuzco takes to playing Pacha's fake wife and dressing up in ladies' clothing with great gusto (reinforced by the waitress' "bless you for coming out in public" remark when Pacha says they're on their honeymoon). Then when he is finally de-llamafied, we don't see him paired off with the obligatory girl from the lineup earlier, as might otherwise be expected in a Disney movie. Instead he is still single, but goes to found family it up with Pacha, Chica, Kronk, etc, which dare we remark is a very queer trope.

In short, I have no idea how a Disney movie with no white people (all the characters are Indigenous/people of color), a gay king, cross-dressing jokes, and the most offbeat plot of all time actually ever got made (can you imagine the Family Friendly Mouse doing that today? Let us also talk about Kronk because he is a brilliant deconstruction of both toxic masculinity and the musclebound henchman stereotype.) Other than that this was the Chaos Hour of animated movies in the late 90s/early 2000s, and yes.

Please, read this article if you have some time. This story is wild, and involves directors being pitted against each other Bake-Off style and a shockingly intimate documentary created by the wife of Sting who, himself was heartbroken by the decimation of the songs he wrote for the film including cutting a fantastic Yzma villain song sung by Eartha Kitt that is SO DAMN GOOD but would not ever have fit the more nailed-down Yzma we would eventually come to know and love. It’s so catchy though, I’m doubling up on calls to action but please listen now:

Like I need people to understand the mental image here of a multimillionaire internet creator personally overseeing DVD production in his own house like he’s running an underground bootleg operation out of a basement in 2007.

It’s weirdly charming because there’s something very “old internet” about it, this energy of “I made a thing, and now I will physically hand it to people myself like an artisan at a craft fair.”

The man really said: “The future of cinema is me standing next to a humming disc burner at 2am”

A) Yes, he does seem to have gotten these specifically for Iron Lung.

B) Just to clarify, in the original post I was joking about “bootlegging” in a tongue-in-cheek way, but I’ve seen enough people who genuinely think along those lines, or assume that is what the technology is for, that I feel I should address it directly.

DVD and CD burners are not devices that exist exclusively for bootlegging. They are just tools. If you make a movie, an album, a game, whatever, you are entirely free to burn copies and distribute them using that same kind of hardware.

When I say "I can't help but believe he's onto something," that's what I'm talking about.

Not that everyone should suddenly start mass-producing DVDs in their basement.

I mean the underlying idea.

That we've become so accustomed to everything existing at the mercy of platforms, storefronts, algorithms, licensing agreements, and corporate infrastructure that we've almost forgotten creators can just... put things out into the world themselves.

There is something appealing about physical media as an act of ownership and preservation.

And I think we've collectively become a little too comfortable treating the continued existence of creative work as something that should be outsourced to social media platforms and streaming services.

There's value in remembering that if you make something, you can put it on a physical object and hand it directly to another human being.

Just a thing that came from your mind, made with your hands, existing in the world because you decided it should.

I think we should be doing more of that.

Even if you're not a fan of Markiplier, even if you have absolutely zero interest in Iron Lung, I think there's something genuinely inspiring about what he's doing here.

The willingness to look at the modern content ecosystem and go, "No, actually, I'd like to put this thing on a physical object and hand it directly to people."

That creative work can exist as a thing in the world, sitting on a shelf, surviving platform changes, algorithm shifts, licensing disputes, and whatever fresh catastrophe the internet invents next week.

Maybe it's the preservationist bug in my brain.

Maybe I'm just old enough to find comfort in media that continues existing after somebody forgets to renew a contract.

But regardless of if you're a fan of Iron Lung or not, I think that's an idea worth being inspired by.

and by “it” haha, well. let’s

just say. mimimi