looking at the tlj critical crowd’s blogs is like reading the diaries of a celebrity stalker from before they commit some kind of shockingly depraved, vaguely culty crime
It’s not that deep we don’t like the movie 😂 and get this crap out of the #tlj critical tag.
I can’t believe after all my hard work I didn’t make this photoset. Dammit.
You just don’t sound depraved and culty enough, not everyone has what it takes 😘
Same goes for me I suppose. Better get my deranged, cultish game on then
I didn’t even like the movie myself but the criticism from your corner (all of you) is just awful. It’s so bad. You have zero critical thinking skills. You’re just petty, immature and mad that the movie didn’t serve up the same plot points as your fan fiction instead. Disjointed plot threads? Incoherent storytelling? A thematic/emotional letdown? Who cares about that? Certainly not you guys, when you can apparently rend your clothes and gnash your teeth over three seconds of bare chest and the idea of a bad guy (Hux, in this case) being shown being cruel and disrespectful to the heroes. You are genuinely making it difficult to actually give this movie proper criticism BECAUSE PEOPLE ASSUME IT’S ALL LIKE YOURS.
Tumblr is a hotbed of people pulling weird, culty, depraved nonsense, so pardon me if a bunch of people obsessively hateblogging about one, occasionally two celebrities gives me pause. “X die bitch” over and over and over and over for people you feel ruined your favorite fictional franchise is not healthy. It’s not normal. Forming an entire identity around what you love is bad enough, but forming it around what you hate is toxic, and I really, really worry about what’s going to happen in the future. And for God’s sake, if being disappointed in a Star Wars movie is making you suicidal, GET SOME GODDAMNED HELP. I have a boatload of mental illnesses myself and I know not everybody has access to therapy, but if you can, please go. If you don’t, at least try to find another hobby. This is not safe, it’s not normal, and I’m not backing down from my assessment that the whole thing comes off kind of like a mass version of a stalker’s diary. If you feel obligated to run a blog dedicated to how much you hate something, please try to find another outlet. This is for your safety as well as everybody else’s.
On a more concrete note, the blame for what happened with TLJ doesn’t rest with Rian Johnson, or at least not entirely. The fact is, this is what Lucasfilm wanted. I can’t imagine them hiring a guy famous for what is considered one of the best/most shocking episodes of Breaking Bad and not hoping he’d pack it with BIG SWERVES or whatever you want to call what happened in this script. Johnson was doing his job as a standalone filmmaker brought onto the project. There are people whose full time jobs at Lucasfilm are to keep the arcs and continuity between movies intact. They were either not brought in, by people higher than Johnson, or gave a pass. The whole story arm of the company has decided to enforce an auteur approach where it doesn’t fit, and they had the clout to rein it in, but they didn’t, because they approved of what Johnson created. They asked him to write the script while TFA was in post production instead of the logical situation, writing it afterward, because they wanted it to end up like this. He was doing his job as a screenwriter and director, and any blame he holds for not doing a great job with Star Wars needs to be shared with the people whose actual ongoing jobs involve making sure Star Wars stays a unified concept, and weighted more toward them. This includes not only Kathleen Kennedy, but Bob Iger and #tlj-critical beloved JJ Abrams.
For that matter, and I have been saying this over and over again, JJ Abrams had the actors who tried out for Kylo read Mr. Darcy’s first proposal from Pride and Prejudice (the one where he insults Elizabeth’s family and basically tells her even though she comes from trash, he can overlook that because he’s into her- familiar?). JJ Abrams compared Kylo and Rey to the prince and princess in a fairy tale. JJ Abrams cast a white man as an Indian character over in his Star Trek reboot and lied about it in the press for months and months. He’s probably not the savior you’re looking for in Star Wars fandom, and if this is how you guys are reacting after a director you already didn’t trust doesn’t do what you wanted, it actually scares me to think of what will happen when someone you’re actively pinning your hopes on fails them too.
tl;dr get a new hobby and stop centering your entire lives, or at least your online identities, around a director and a movie you don’t like, FOR GOD’S SAKE
You know what, I was planning on responding to all of your bs right up until you pulled your Antisemitic shit on JJ.
I don’t say you have to love his, or even like him or anything he’s done with Star Wars or anything else he’s made. But when you start pulling Antisemitic conspiracy bs out of your arse you’re getting blocked bitch. I’m tired a passive aggressive Antisemitic like you in fandom and having to deal with your kind of bs constantly.
How about you employ some of that critical thinking skill you seem to think you have and start unlearning some of that Antisemitism you schmuck.
May you step on a Lego every day of your life.
With all due respect I fail to see how suggesting a man who, as an individual, has a long history of being called out for dudebro-y fandom decisions (including whitewashing an Indian character originally played by a Latino actor), who helps oversee the Star Wars franchise, and who commented that he thought TLJ was so good he wished he’d written it himself, has *a share of* (not all of, but a share of) the blame for TLJ being a really uneven, messy film and might not have plans to undo that messiness, is holding his being Jewish against him, especially when he, as a writer/producer, is also known for often valuing shocking plot twists over coherent storytelling (which was one of the biggest complaints against Lost) and that’s one of the biggest issues with TLJ.
Winning the villain over to your side is a power fantasy.
Like, a really big one, too.
Social emphasis has it that men should value strength,
aggression, and violence, and women should value kindness, empathy, and
community. But really, anyone who has
learned to prefer social success to might/aggression is going to favour a
strategy where you can make your enemies into allies of some kind, over one
where you just kill them. As a display of dominance, killing is overly
simplistic. And it’s also hard to ignore the reality that luck usually has more
to do with most fights than actual strength.
So, many people vastly prefer stories where the villains don’t
die, but instead, get won over by the hero. It’s also a much more prevalent
power fantasy among women than it is among men, because women are often taught
that violence on our parts is inherently distasteful and ignoble. If you can’t defeat your enemies by putting a
bullet in their heads, then what could
be more satisfying than convincing that enemy to come and fight other people on
your behalf instead?
This is a major component to why villains end up as popular
shipping material. I honestly don’t think it’s the ‘bad boy’ impulse, or some
branch of misogyny, or at least, not in a majority of cases. It’s a total and
sincere power fantasy. Someone going ‘all I care about is myself and all I want
to do is DESTROY THE WORLD MWAHAHAHA’ meeting you and then being like ‘oh no
wait I also want to please you and spend time with you and I want that so much
that I will now give up those other things’ implies an intoxicating level of
charisma.
Of course, like most power fantasies, it pays to tread
carefully with it. Because real life rarely accommodates such things, and as
with some muscle-bound hero easily lifting a house over his head, being able to
take a wholly selfish being and convert them into a devoted companion is… unlikely to happen outside of fiction.
For a lot of reasons.
However, I bring it up because I am C O N S T A N T L Y
seeing the compulsion to ship characters with villains misattributed to A)
agreeing with the villains, B) some form of self-hatred, C) a noble impulse
towards compassion and understanding, or D) sheer stupidity, and really… it’s
just another power fantasy. Wonder Woman punches a tank. Tony Stark buys an
entire island. Storm calls down a lightning strike. Batman outwits all his clever foes. And some seemingly random,
ordinary human woman convinces Lex Luthor to chill out and stop trying to kill
Superman. It’s all power, displayed
in fantastical proportions.
(Which isn’t to say that you have to like it or think that
every such relationship is good and healthy, gods no, but once you realize that
everyone’s just pretending to be the Superman of relationships, it’s easier to just go ‘oh that’s what you’re after’ and… y’know… fret less.)
I feel torn about tumblr’s love of southern gothic. There’s a lot of cool stuff in that genre to be admired, but I feel like sometimes those posts (especially when made by people who don’t live in the south- and hey, neither do I) come across as “aren’t poor people spooooky?”
As a born-and-raised southerner, I was surprised to discover this literary convention because a lot of modern southern gothic fantasy written by southerners focuses on old-money families who turn out to be [witches/werewolves/vampires/etc]. I didn’t encounter the “scary redneck mountain people” variant in non-fantastical media until later, and it baffles me because the modern southern elite are TERRIFYING.
Endlessly smiling hypocritical senators in tacky palatial houses with wives who espouse “traditional values” while being poisonously sweet and cutthroat? Those make much more frightening antagonists for gothic heroes/heroines to fight. If you live in the south you will probably never meet backwoods demon sibling-spouses but you’ve definitely seen the void staring out of a “Live, Laugh, Love” picture frame.
ACCURATE
Tumblr inherently misunderstands the function of Southern Gothic literature and has appropriated it for its pervasive almost supernatural poetic style. They don’t understand its themes, why it was written, or how to properly write it. Actual Southern Gothic literature is not as melodramatic as one might think and it isn’t about aesthetic style points. It’s style is actually scathingly sarcastic in a nearly caustic way, and it’s meant to amplify structural violence by turning upstanding members of society into villains. It does make the poor grotesque at time, but in the same novel also redeems them by showing how societal ills have painted an unfair picture.
Southern Gothic is a genre for the poor, the colored, the queer; it’s not about signs that say “Hell is here” or forcing tired stereotypes that fundamentally misunderstand poverty, racism, and homo-/transphobia onto the South in a sweeping sensationalist way. Appropriated Gothic Americana aesthetic takes the voice from Southern authors who want to talk about real systemic wrongs and evils in a way that provides accurate social commentary.
That’s not to say that the neo-gothic Americana style that Tumblr has no merit; it’s just difficult as a southern writer to watch people play around with serious topics for the sake of dramatic aesthetics and not realize that they’re being harmful and sort of mocking a tradition that they haven’t bothered to really study.
30k comments in and somebody finally understood what I was getting at.
I know my night is your noon,
But at least we get to share the same sky and dream under
the same blanket of breathtaking stars,
We get to breathe the same air,
We are even comprised of the same stardust,
Most importantly our souls are made up of the things that rattle the most fearless people,
That move writers, artists,
That shake entire universes,
That breathe life into everything they touch,
That love,
so deeply, so desperately, so profoundly,
That wrap themselves around each other,
In a mess of thoughts and ideas,
Completely enveloping each other in their infinite love.
Our bodies might be separated by this distance,
This distance that seems to span entire light years instead of oceans,
But my love,
Our souls have been intertwined from the beginning of time,
The stars told me they quietly watched our souls colliding like two meteorites,
An explosion of two very strong personalities,
We weren’t pastel pink and baby blue,
We were Jet black and the deepest shade of burgundy,
even before the earth was formed,
The time our galaxy was still fast asleep.
Our souls haven’t left each other a nano second since they collided.
Magic, stardust and hope holding them together,
Fate protecting us fiercely.
This is meant to be,
We are meant to be,
No distance can change that,
Because our souls recognized each other from two ends of the universe,
It took decades, centuries, eons for them to find each other,
We can’t just throw something like that away,
We can’t give up on us,
For the universe has conspired to bring us together long before me and you were born,
When the sun was still young,
The planets not even conceived yet,
The sun’s rays kissing every part of our galaxy, trying to create life in space.
You need to believe in me,
The sun, the stars,
the galaxies are proof that there is a certain kind of magic at play,
The same magic that bought us together,
In this place,
In this time,
In this very moment,
This very moment that fate thought would be perfect for us to collide the way we did,
Just like our souls collided eternities ago.
Everything is a sign screaming that your hand belongs in mine,
That every inch of you is something I want to see everyday I wake up,
Drenching me in liquid gold sunshine and a bucketful of twinkling stars.
Your soul makes my soul shake softly with laughter,
It makes my soul burn brighter than the light of a billion suns,
It lifts the heaviness, the inconsolable sadness that sits deep within me,
And sets it free.
My dear,
Distance is so minute compared to the enormity of the feelings I have for you.
-distance cannot separate souls, then what happened to us?
I have a giant stuffed lizard that I won at the fair when I was fifteen and slept with continually for years until his stitches popped in like six places. I plan on fixing him, just haven’t yet. His name is Paddington.
I used to draw weird snaky dragons with butterfly wings almost constantly. (Sadly, I am not much of an artist so they were not particularly good weird snaky dragons with butterfly wings.)
When I was a little kid, I was super into building castle-and-garden complexes out of colorful wooden blocks. Then I’d take a photo of the castle so I could have a record of my achievement while still gleefully knocking it down to start over. 🙂
When I was seven I had a bronchopneumonia that landed me in the hospital for several weeks on oxygen and fluids. When I got to the hospital my lips had started to turn blue from lack of oxygen and the doctor told my parents I could have died from the fluids that had started to build up in my lungs. I missed almost two months of school just from how weak it made my immune system and honestly I’ve struggled with various health issues since then that I’m entirely convinced has something to do with that experience.
i’m one of those weird mutants that can’t eat cilantro because it straight up tastes like soap to me. (seriously, if there’s even a tiny amount in something, i know right away) and i find it funny when i tell people this they try to make me eat it more! then i’m like “do you hate me, martha? do you really want me to be unhappy? because some people CAN’T taste it like YOU can and it makes me sad that you are actively trying to shove it down my throat like that’s going to cure or change my taste buds!”
I feel that in the last year, my ability to fully experience emotion has increased drastically as my depression has started moving on. I feel like I’ve been born as an entirely new person, but this post is the first time I’ve felt comfortable calling it a permanent change.
Penhales 