no.

second handshake

like,,,,,, come one ! !!

# ILYA ROZANOV IS A COMEDIAN  

Screenplay written by Celine Song

Past Lives (2023) dir. Celine Song

It’s been a point of debate for twenty-seven years and counting, ever since Mulan was released to American theaters all over the country on June 19, 1998. You still see debates about it on the internet, you still see people aggressively insisting that Shang is 100% heterosexual and only fell for Mulan after she was outed as a girl, you still see people making bisexual edits of Shang and holding him up as a “bisexual icon” and accusing Mulan (2020) of practicing LGBTQ+ censorship by removing Shang’s character.

My personal belief is simple: Shang was in love with Ping, but the cisgender and heterosexual filmmakers were not thinking about bisexuality when they wrote his and Mulan’s love story.

Sound confusing? Yes. But I’ll try to break it down for you in simple terms, so you’ll hopefully understand where I’m coming from. Hopefully, it might even make you want to rewatch the movie and look for what I’m talking about, because I think it’s very obvious if you’re just paying attention to the film itself, not internet discussion based on nostalgia.

The thesis is this: Shang was unconsciously drawn to Ping, Mulan’s male disguise, but only believed his attraction was “brotherly love”. He felt brotherly affection and respect for Ping at first, as indicated by him smiling at Ping for “his” impressive progress in the second half of “I’ll Make a Man Out of You” and looking back at Ping for the “You’re a great captain” comment. These feelings slowly started to change off-screen, somewhere between the training montage over three weeks (“I’ll Make a Man Out of You”) and the time passing montage of the platoon traveling (“A Girl Worth Fighting For”), as he felt more and more drawn to Ping during their off-screen friendship and comradery in the army.

I never thought I'd say this but Rick being so involved in this tv show was the worst thing that could've happened to it.

First, it makes close to impossible to critique anything without The Cult of Riordan jumping you and shutting down each and every discussion with responses like this one.

the show should have been animated.

season 2 was amazing! nao and urehara’s relationship matured a lot and they were doing so good! so many cute moments! then natsume’s bitch ass had to come in and ruin everything. he fucking sucked, nao and urehara let him stomp all over their relationship and they treated him kindly like he didn’t just ruin all the character development that they had. urehara should have murdered his bitch ass for kissing his girlfriend not once but TWICE. he was truly the villian of the season and deserved a good ass beating. PUNCH HIM AGAIN UREHARA. how could you kiss your best friend’s girl as she’s crying about her insecurities, what can kind of douchey asshole would do that? oh yeah fucking natsume. i was so tired of his bitch ass there was no need for him to be in every single scene after nao rejected him PLEASE GO AWAY.

1. in the way beginning, tashi is clearly flirting more with art than patrick, and patrick is visibly annoyed. art sees right through it and even challenges him like “okay, let’s leave”, and has this little smirk on his face because he knows patrick won’t give up on tashi.

2. tashi immediately sees the visible tension and love between art and patrick, and literally orchestrates their first kiss. she sees right through their repression, and even calls herself a “home-wrecker” but still entangles herself with them, especially patrick because he’s clearly the better tennis player at that point and that is tash’s ONLY true love. tennis. that’s what she desires most in him, and patrick knows that. he even calls her out on it in the dorm room scene. but they have this mirroring fire in each other that neither of them can give up, not until patrick breaks the balance and bails — tashi’s injury is literally a metaphor for the balance shattering between all three of them when patrick leaves her.

3. before this, patrick sees right through art trying to break them up, and even admires that quality — maybe even feels smug and flattered because art is jealous and feels left out from both tashi and patrick. patrick has known this all along, we saw it in the “tick-serve” scene, where he even swears to tashi he won’t tell anyone but he still tells art, who is desperate to feel a part of them and patrick wants that, too — even keeps that close intimacy with art that we see in the churro scene (swoon swoon swoon).

4. haven’t you noticed that arts desire to be great is only ever tied up in patrick and tashi? how he needs to beat patrick to win tashis affection, how he needs to win in tennis so that tashi can live through him, how he lives up to his potential in the ending only because tashi and patrick push him to it, in their little fucked up ways? he knows this — he even admits that he’s playing for tashi, that he knows she’s living through him. he even admits he’s playing a fucked up little game with patrick when they’re in the sauna. yet he still does it. again, he knows what’s happening, sees right through them — still does it, still loves them.

5. when tashi calls patrick to come pick her up he knows it’s not just to tell him to throw the match — and despite how she battles him about it, they still have sex in the car, because he already knows. he’s so fully aware of her and her game and he’s so willing to be caught up in it, the same as art.

just some examples of how they all have moments of clarity and agency and yet they still choose to be entangled in one another because they’re all fucked up in their own, individual ways, and they’re all living through each other for their own specific needs. arts is to be seen as worthy, as great, but only through their gaze. tashis is to have the career that was stolen from her. patricks is truly to be in love and in lust with both of them, because we even see that from the beginning that tashis love alone will never satiate him; it has to be arts love, too. that scene in the sauna when he thinks he’s lost it from art is the most sad and fucked up we ever even see patrick. on top of tashi asking him to throw the game — he’s so defensive of arts feelings.

in short this is an actual love triangle (and i would go as far as to see it as a polyship). you can’t erase one without the whole thing unraveling, and you can’t say one character was the “worst” without picking apart the motivations and pointing to the fact that their bad behavior was never a secret or left unchecked.

even at the end, patrick signals to art that he slept with tashi — art knows and they still have that intimate completion at the end, all three of them. art living up to his potential and embracing patrick fully (id argue this could even be a metaphor for embracing his bisexuality), patrick having both tashi and arts affection again, and tashi playing a phenomenal tennis match through her little white boys — in such a visceral, emotional way that she cries out like she did in the beginning and the last frame is her smiling.