You know the biggest loss of the decline of physical media and the rise of streaming? DVD special features.
I love you DVD commentaries I love you making-of documentaries I love you behind the scenes footage I love you bloopers I love you deleted scenes I love you silly little videos of the cast dicking around 💖
i dont really know how to articulate this but its crazy just how many people dont even realize they dont care about female characters. all their faves are men. they never talk about girls without being led into it. and when you try to point this out to them they try to defend themselves that their faves are just the archetypes they like, despite clearly not caring when that same archetype is a woman. like i feel like at a certain point it is your problem with the common denominator if you cant find a single female character to enjoy
Redo of This Post because i missed alot and had more to add
reading the receipts on how bethesda resorted to fucking extortion in a pathetic attempt to force Leona (a trans woman) to resign without pursuing a discrimination lawsuit by holding her fucking surgeries hostage & holy fuck
her experience at bethesda was a harrowing but depressingly familliar one filled with a sudden loss of respect by her superiors, public outing by her manager, falsified reports on her yearly review to convince corporate that she was a liability...
i struggle to find the words to descrive how i felt going through it all.
fuck this fucking industry. you cannot fix this. it is beyond saving
Literally every trans person, especially trans women because misogyny is at the heart of the entertainment industry, inside the gaming or entertainment space is dealing or has dealt with this shit.
Myself included.
Companies will absolutely say "WE LOVE DIVERSITY! WE LOVE THE GAYS! HERE'S OUR BIPOC AND LGBTQ MERCH FOR CHARITY! CHECK OUT OUR ICONS THAT WE PUT UP IN SOLIDARITY!"
And then treat their BIPOC and Queer employees like this or even worse.
And then we end up jobless and untouchable because we are labeled as "difficult" by the industry because we hold them accountable for the things they promise.
We're all tired. We all want to work. But now we're all broke and jobless.
my tumblr dashboard hasn't gotten the updated UI yet so hearing more and more people I follow gradually post about the nightmare they're currently living just feels like I'm in the first fifteen minutes of a horror series where Troubling News Stories are starting to crop up on the radio and on blurry background TV sets
in general, i think engaging with star wars from a place of realpolitik and political analysis is a fun thought exercise, especially with the canon and legends lore fleshing out the world a bit beyond lucas's archetypal story. there's a whole swath of authors who have written books and comics for adults that all take the premises of the movies seriously, the work of james luceno jumps to mind, so you can choose to dig into that lore and take it seriously as well.
the politics of the saga are related to but greatly simplified from our reality, and there is much that can be said about the way that the galaxy is designed, from george's viet cong inspired rebellion to his prequels era citizens united and bush era executive overreach. i think it's a mistake to take the jedi's role in government too seriously, as they are kind of a hand-wavy organized militia answerable to the legislative branch (and later executive during the war).
they're both a symbol of how the system works at its best and its worst. under the flourishing galactic republic, they're ideal ambassadors of peacetime diplomacy, whose arrival at a conflict resolves it using negotiation and limited force, before those conflicts sprouted into inter-system military engagement. but under sidious, they're arguably willingly misused to enforce peace on a wider scale, due to sidious's design of breaking the galaxy with a civil war.
i see many, many takes that say that the jedi should not be involved in politics at all, but i really think that's missing the point. you can take how they are being used as like a health test of the body politic, they're an epiphenomenon dependent on the republic as a whole. by the era of the prequels, they were a tool of an age that no longer existed, a more civilized one, where conflict could be resolved locally.
should they not have participated? as george has said many times, they were in a bind. would you act to save civilian lives from an invading army of droids who didn't care for or actively sought collateral damage? could you live with yourself if you had the power to help but did not? it was doomed from the beginning, they were in a trap and about to die, but is it better to fight or run away?
anyway, i got slightly off topic. engaging with star wars politically can be a fun and meaningful exercise, which even academics are not immune from the lure. here are a few articles that i enjoyed reading, if anyone is interested:
Charles, M. B. (2015). Remembering and restoring the republic: Star wars and Rome. Classical World, 108(2), 281–298. https://doi.org/10.1353/clw.2015.0014 (link)
Conor Casey & David Kenny (2021): How Liberty Dies in a Galaxy Far, Far Away: Star Wars, Democratic Decay, and Weak Executives, Law & Literature, DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2021.1991610 (link)
Rackaway, C. (2020). Star Wars: The Fascism Awakens: Representation and its Failure from the Weimar Republic to the Galactic Senate. Studies in the Social Sciences, 1(1), 7-22 (link)
have at them and enjoy :)
ocd is not fucking destigmatized
"intrusive thought" gets thrown around by assholes talking about putting strainers on their heads or stepping on a leaf who in the next sentence will say "if your thoughts are about actually hurting people they should put you in a psych ward". compulsions and rituals get seen as proof you're "crazy". ocd insight CAN be delusional, even. pocd and sexual ocd is especially demonized, though even something as "harmless" (to others. not *us*) as contamination OCD is still mocked, belittled, and seen as a sign something is fundamentally wrong with you. I have seen people twice my age advocate for violence against anyone who thinks the way I've been forced by my mental illness to think since i was 6, maybe 7 years old.
OCD is not destigmatized.
girlbulge is such a choice look i really wish it was more normalized
No offense to the droves of nsfw blogs reblogging this, but this was actually not meant to be a horny post. Let trans women exist in public spaces in their natural bodies without having to tuck or take other uncomfortable measures. I deserve to be able to wear tight clothes or go to the beach without having to be uncomfortable or in straight up pain from tucking just because some fragile cis people might think it’s some kind of perverted sexual display if there’s any sign of a bulge. So again, girlbulge is a choice look and I really wish it was more normalized and not seen as something inherently sexual, because it’s literally just how our bodies look in certain clothes.
got my first terf shitstain in the notes throwing a tantrum about this which is part of why i think it’s so important to normalize it. people being driven to seething rage at the mere thought of having to see a little bump under someone’s clothing is not fucking healthy! trans people deserve better than to be treated that way! i should be able to safely wear what i want without having to worry that my body is gonna send someone into a complete fucking rage!
