when u see those posts that are like “ha ha england isnt even that big us big scary americans will drive 4 hours across a state for a day trip” what are you thinking?
like, do you feel annoyed? intimidated? confused? impressed?
what’s your thought process?
if you think about it, america is kind of like Breath of the Wild’s Hyrule
it’s big, lots to explore, and there’s WAY more weapons than a reasonable person would guess.
My mother’s guests’ son showed up wearing high-waisted black tights, a crop top, and body glitter. I have been desperately searching through my closet for my “GAY” NASA shirt because I do not wish to be so grandiosely out-gayed in my own home.
Did you out-gay him, son?
No. I can’t find my shirt!!!! This calls for desperate measures… time to break out the unseasonably warm Denim Jacket With Rainbows Pouring From The Nipples and High-Waisted Jeans.
It’s 8 PM and I wanted to change into my Data Star Trek Pajamas but those aren’t gay enough.
God dammit! Nowhe’s playing some kind of bubbly Carly Rae Whatshername pop. What do I do??? How do I relaliate….? Is Janelle Monae enough to save me? Joan Jett? Lads, I don’t think I’m gonna win this one.
Update: his mom inadvertently tipped the scale a little in my favor by saying, “Oh, nice jacket! Jake, come look at this jacket, you’ll love it!” and then I got to explain that I painted it myself:
I don’t think Janelle Monae helped much because the only songs of hers I have downloaded onto my phone are the ones about robots. I know robots are gay culture and all, but does he know that???
But then he pulled ahead of me by striking a pose in my dining room and I swear to god, his thigh muscles rippled like Glittery Gay Gaston. Ugh.
SCORE!!!! I switched to playing MIKA and moonwalked aggressively down the hallway and his own grandmother stepped out of the bathroom and said, “Oh, I thought you were Jake!”
Clearly she mistook my powerful gay energies for his, because we could not look more different.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. Time to Sit In A Chair Funny.
You know what?
He wins. He’s out here living his best life while I gave up using dating apps because I wanted to divert my emotional energy into making YouTube skits about noir detectives who eat cigarettes.
Like ABBA said, the winner takes it all. I guess that means I’m straight now.
are…are gay people cats?
Where did you get that idea?
This entire thing is beautiful
Does this mean we don’t get to seethe Data pajamas?
They’ve got detachable footies, but I did not want to dirty those on a convention floor.
Did you just slide a glass cup off the counter for a joke
While I’m at it, I’m really not happy with the way Tumblr is restoring “the innocence of youth” culture to 1990s-purity-ring levels.
It’s somehow transmuted a few good principles–adults shouldn’t have sex with underage people, underage people shouldn’t take part in porn, very young children shouldn’t be exposed to explicit sexuality–into bullshit like:
– All fiction involving underage sexuality, even non-sensationalized written descriptions of the kind of sexual relationships teenagers often have with each other, is child porn
– Sex education that talks about dealing with STIs and pregnancy and rape is okay, but teaching teenagers about sexual pleasure is gross and anyone who does it is probably a pedophile
– People under 18 all find sexuality frightening or offputting and don’t want to be exposed to it (I’m sure some feel that way, but if you think this is a universal or majority thing, wow, you must’ve gone to a very different high school than I did)
– Having adult content somewhere that minors could stumble across it is as bad as going to the playground and pushing it in kindergarteners’ faces
– Even acknowledging the existence of underage sexuality is suspicious, why would you be talking about this if you weren’t some kind of pedophile
It’s tough to talk about this because it immediately puts you in the company of people who really are being creepy about it, but I think it’s important to push back against these things. Young people have sexualities, they aren’t “innocent” and many of them don’t want to be, and it is possible to acknowledge these facts without exploiting them.
i don’t actually agree with statements like “if you learned about *insert theory here* from tumblr all the info is wrong and you need to go straight to the source rn” like yes its good to do your readings and own research but i don’t think its fair to dismiss all the folks on here who are super knowledgeable and take time out of their day to circulate info and break down difficult concepts! and also not everyone has the ability to access academic theories and texts and that’s fine!
for example the lady who coined the term misogynoir has/had a tumblr! so like, yes we get a lot of microcommunity discourse and hellsite antics and gross oversimplications on here but the same could be said of a lot of mediums! including academia! the real issue is trying to be selective about what posts you absorb and circulate 😮
i used to think that a foot of parchment was a lot and feel bad when harry potter characters were assigned to write that much
but then i realized the paper i write on is 8.5 by 11 inches.
so a foot of parchment is the equivalent of like, a page and a half of paper.
they complained SO MUCH about essays that were like
a page and a half
wtf guys
get your shit together
No wonder Hermione always got onto the boys for not doing their homework.
it’s honestly not even a foot and a half it’s just one sheet of paper. a foot is 12 inches. like dang if i had to only write one page long essays in school about cool magic shit then i would have been ecstatic.
also 12pt times new roman— the standard assigned size and font for a lot of essay assignments— produces significantlysmaller text than a muggleborn teenageer with a pen and ink quill would be able to manage on the regular, no matter how dedicated she was. ron and harry are frequently noted to be using large handwriting on unlined paper. their homework would have been about three short paragraphs if they were feeling studious.
no wonder hermione was so fucking exasperated! muggle students their age would have strangled them.
forgot to say that, without Howl chasing girls and Sophie resenting him for it, the film completely erases part of the point of Sophie being old. Wynne Jones is using an idea that Beauvoir talked about – that being an old woman is both tragic (as we lose male attention/attractiveness) and freeing (as we are freed from the male gaze). the idea is that with being old comes liberation, and the true meaning of what it is to be a woman, as society no longer forces gender norms on us.
Sophie is free from Howl’s attentions and therefore safe from harm (a big part of the book is the fact that Sophie believes he eats women’s hearts, and him chasing girls proves this to her). she takes solace in the fact that she’s old, and finds it freeing. when she learns more about Howl (notably: that he doesn’t eat hearts and that he’s not evil), she starts to curse her age and resent him chasing girls. BUT she remains old OF HER OWN VOLITION – Howl notes that she’s perpetuating the spell by wishing to remain “in disguise”. there are SO many layers to this, and lots to do with gender politics – if she’s still old Sophie can’t get hurt, she likes the freedom, etc. but of course on a personal level being old is her denying her feelings for Howl, and also a representation of her low self esteem – being old is a defence mechanism and protection, both on a gender level and a personal one.
and the film kinda… loses this? the only thing that remains is being old = low self esteem. which really sucks. because there’s SO MUCH MORE to Sophie being old in the book (perspective I already mentioned), and a HUGE amount of this is gender politics. that the film just erases.
Also there’s the subversion of that in the book. Sophie’s belief that she’s safe from Howl, isn’t quite true because he fell in love with her while she was under the spell (and in the book, there’s no switching between looking young and old. Sophie is looking ninety the entire time, and Howl falls in love anyway.)
Also, her belief that being old means she can’t go to her stepmother or her sisters, that they’d fail to recognize her or reject her, is also unfounded. Fanny almost immediately recognizes her at the end of the book, and hugs her and cries over her and asks why Sophie disappeared. Sophie’s belief that the love of her family, friends and even her romantic interests is somehow conditional on her appearance is shown to be completely false at the end, which I think is absolutely beautiful.
Like, there’s definitely gender politics and commentary going on about beauty and youth and age and the male gaze and male violence going on, but there’s also this message about how love, real love, transcends all of that.
I actually adore the movie on its own merits, but I think it absolutely did a disservice to Sophie as a character. When I was doing a reread last month, what hit me was that Sophie is every bit as much of a volatile emotional disaster as Howl is, and that’s pretty heckin’ great.
Howl is a pissy, dramatic asshole even when he’s at his best. He dissolves into green slime when his hair looks wrong. He deals with his problems by getting falling-over drunk and makes the walls shake every time he sneezes just so everyone will take pity on him. He’s a self-proclaimed coward who has to trick himself into taking responsibility for anything.
Movie Sophie deals with this as well as she can. She learns to look past his drama and sees his tender heart and noble intentions. She becomes the mature one in the castle, fixing everyone’s problems, essentially taking up a motherly role to all the other characters.
Book Sophie does the same… but she does it while dealing out as good as she takes. Howl is chasing after every woman except Sophie? Sophie meticulously cuts up his suit into triangles. Howl floods the room with green slime? Sophie hate-magics weed killer strong enough to melt concrete, and chucks it at Howl’s head. Howl can’t stop avoiding his problems? Meet the queen of avoidance, who clung to her curse to avoid confronting her feelings for Howl. Howl has to basically trick himself into taking action? I would like you to meet Sophie, who was too scared to leave her home her whole life, but the moment she’s under a curse is like “WELP, GUESS I’D BETTER LEAVE HOME RIGHT THIS MOMENT AND NEVER COME BACK.”
The moment of Howl and Sophie getting together in the book isn’t “Sophie fixes everything through her inherent goodness.” It’s “Sophie realizes that Howl has been secretly scheming to fix all her problems exactly the same way that she has been secretly scheming to fix all his problems because neither of them is a normal functioning adult, and they both look forward to yelling at each other for the rest of their wonderful lives.” And losing that, losing all of Sophie’s flaws and ridiculous moments as well as Howl’s efforts to fix her life as much as she’s trying to fix his, means that we’re left with a typical romance trope of a woman having to fix all of a man’s problems and be the perfect, mature one in the relationship, while he can coast purely on charm. The revelation that half of Howl’s antics were actually schemes to break Sophie’s curse or even just make her happy is important because for once it goes both ways. Not just “woman fixes man with her love,” but “people fix each other with their love, sort of, except for all the parts that will never change and that’s okay because flaws can be just as attractive as virtues, and if he laughs when you throw weed killer at him then he might be the one.”
Overdressed & Underappreciated 