just had a really good mango it was so good that i had to illustrate how it made me feel afterwards.

Im so glad this meme is my legacy

Thank you animorphs wiki

Not to be atheist on main again, but like: I really do think this wing of tumblr, as a whole, is getting way too comfortable with being reflexively pro religion. I've been to mass, as a child and as an adult. I'm grateful I was not raised religiously because I can say this for certain: the things that get taught in mass are often hateful and deplorable, and it it is not uncommon for children to develop a deeply harmful relationship with those teachings.

I simply do not doubt that a great many lesbians required to attend mass during their formative years would have developed traumatic guilt and self loathing as a result.

"Oh, so now having all the adults and authority figures in your early childhood talk about how the being that runs the entire universe will torture you forever in fire if you do something bad is somehow 'traumatic'"

I mean, not every mass or Christian actually teaches that, but like... a lot of them do.

and all that without mentioning that this is lesbians, and the catholic church teaches that women are inherently lesser in the eyes of god (sure, they might avoid saying that explicitly but there is literally no other way to take eg the priesthood thing) and that homosexual desire is "intrinsically disordered". gosh i wonder why lesbians might struggle with catholic upbringings

“Ariel sold her voice for legs just because of a guy“

Meanwhile Ariel with legs;

Ariel already loved the human world long before meeting Eric (you don’t get a collection like hers overnight) and when she finally got a chance to explore it, she took it.

Ursula made it more about Eric than Ariel ever did.

and i mean hell this has been talked about before in more depth than i can, but when people complain about how the ending was changed (the original fairytale does not give ariel a happy ending, she dies trying to protect the prince), i think about the fact that this was written by a gay man in the 1980s

and i think it’s entirely valid (and gives her an extremely strong connection to the queer community) to change the story so she doesn’t die because of who she loves

Triton made escape a necessity. Once someone goes to the point of destroying your possessions in a violent rampage, there is no staying and sticking it out, there’s no safety. (And Ariel, even in Ursula’s lair, gave Triton more thought than he deserved at the time.) Nowhere in the ocean she could go and be safe. Everyone’s always ‘why don’t they just leave :|’ in abusive situations until the leaving is not something they find 100% worthy of approval.

Ursula made it about Eric. She didn’t have to. Ariel had to get out from under Triton’s thumb, it could have been literally anything. Ursula took advantage of a desperate victim for her own agenda. Realistic predatory behavior toward a vulnerable person.

And also

1. There’s always the ‘Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek’ criticism - FIRST OF ALL he started out looking for a woman who wasn’t silent, and second of all what part of the carriage driving bit (or any of her other actions on land) is meek, exactly?
2. People above have noted the queer subtext. Now, on the subject of Ariel being willing to leave her family, aside from the baseline ‘this is an abusive environment and she was not safe there’ angle I already mentioned, consider: Ariel’s father made it clear he would stop at nothing to crush and tear down who she was and replace it with what he wanted her to be. Now - what demographic might that resonate with? And given Ashman’s involvement, do you think that was a coincidence?

there has been scholarly discussion about the idea that the og little mermaid story, where she dies at the end, was written as a queer allegory.

so taking that into account… there is something very touching about taking this story from hans christian andersen from beyond the grave and being like “things are different now. they get to be happy. she gets to live.”

also in re: “Eric didn’t want her until she was silent and meek” the meek part’s been discussed but can we please talk about how when he first met her he thought she wasn’t the girl with the voice that he was trying to find and was disappointed, but that he slowly fell for her anyway? He’d explicitly wanted Ariel WITH her voice, but came to love her without it.

The bit about Howard Ashman being queer is finally giving me some glimmer of understanding of why the teenaged girl mermaid is named “Ariel.” Because, although the Disney movie single-handedly changed popular perception thereafter, Ariel is a boy’s name. Howard Ashman absolutely knew that.

(Ariel in Shakespeare’s The Tempest also has male pronouns, in case anyone was struggling to remember.)

Another thing I appreciate rewatching The Little Mermaid as an adult is although he does ultimately grant her wish and say goodbye to her at her wedding, King Triton destroying Ariel’s collection effectively ends their relationship. Like no. You dont go on a violent rampage on your daughter’s most beloved possessions and expect that relationship to ever be restored. He makes good to her by essentially letting her go and live the life he tried to deny her. And I kind of appreciate that.

I am a regular guy. I can enter a space. I am a regular guy. I can enter a room. I am a regular guy. I can do that transaction. I am a regular guy. I know how to answer the phone. I am a regular guy. I know what sleep is. I am a regular guy. I know how to wake up. I am a regular guy. I know how to move through space. I am a regular guy. I know what it means to be me.

Originally posted by nowadayz

the thing about writing is that it's very hard unless you have to leave the house in 15 minutes or perhaps go to bed

a thing that was so interesting about the vampires in Sinners is genuinely what huge losers they are. get bit and immediately start talking like the most annoying youth pastor you know.

which is a really cool choice because it emphasizes how deeply Off they are. there are obviously the big tells in their behavior, like Bo not reacting to a man getting mauled five feet away or Cornbread getting weird at the door, but the way they speak is also really off with the cadence of the movie the audience has gotten accustomed to. the characters are friends, family, they know each other enough to make jokes, trade barbs, argue, swear. they talk in an informal, natural way with each other. one bite later and it's "excuse me my brothers and sisters in the one race, the human race, won't you pretty please let me come inside to rejoice in your company 🥺"

the kkkouple that remmick turns first are a really effective storytelling shorthand. we know basically nothing about them pre-vampening except that they're trigger happy racists, so when you see them turn up all smiles at a Black juke joint parroting everything remmick says you immediately get a pretty solid grasp of what getting bit does to a motherfucker

obviously I'm arriving to this party really late and I've already seen almost every bit of this movie dissected down to the minutia, but I've not seen anyone talk about klanwife's line about how the vampires are "starting a new klan, built on love." crazy good line, made me figuratively need to take a seat. really cuts right to the heart of the dissonance between what mr. o'vampire says he believes and the nightmare bullshit that he's actually doing.

I keep thinking about the big vampire group song because it's like. god this scene is good. it circles back to my point about remmick being a loser, because getting a couple dozen new vampire thralls and using them to do an elaborately choreographed song and dance is peak loser shit.

but it's also horrifying, absolutely horrifying, for the living characters who are looking on because a.) they're watching their dead family and friends and neighbors, most of whom are covered in blood and visibly injured, get danced around like puppets and b.) it's the first time the characters are really getting a taste of the hivemind bullshit the audience has already been clued in on and c.) sure, they're just dancing for now, but they're realizing just how many hungry vampires are waiting outside to kill them at the first opportunity and take Sammie. so that's a nightmare for them.

so you could read that as a deliberate intimidation tactic on remmick's part, trying to overwhelm the survivors into giving up, but then you're like, okay, maybe in his mind this is a display of how good it is to be a vampire. isn't it good? doesn't it look fun? look how much fun we're having! you could come have fun too if you want! just let me in :3 I don't think that's impossible, that he'd be totally oblivious to how he comes across. the newly-turned vampires seem pretty bad at faking their interpersonal skills; all memory of how to act human beyond the most superficial level seems to really go out the window pretty immediately. remmick seems a little cannier than that, since we see him try to play on people's emotions more than once--appealing to the kkkouple's fear of the Choctaw to gain their shelter when he realizes they're klan, trying to lower Mary's guard by sympathizing with her over her dead mother, pressuring Grace by threatening her daughter. obviously some of those efforts are more successful than others, but he at least seems to have an ability to read the room that other vampires lack.

but it's also not a stretch at all to think he might sincerely be that clueless, because that whole song and dance number is remmick's whole thesis statement, which is that when he says he believes in "equality" he means that he'll kill anyone and turn them into one of his tools regardless of who they are. like sure, whatever, I'm willing to believe that he does sincerely find the klan objectionable, but he's also just packed full of shit. his version of equality is one where everyone's equal under him, acting out his own culture and history for his pleasure. thinks he's not racist because he doesn't care that Sammie's Black but still wants to take away everything that makes Sammie an individual and just keep the musical talent to perform a crude facsimile of being Irish.

and this is getting so long but that scene of all the vampires dancing in step in the dark, cold and washed out, is contrasted so well with the earlier scene inside the juke where everyone is warmly lit, revolving around Sammie but not beholden to him, dancing in their own styles side by side with spirits of the past and future blending different styles and cultures. that scene is such a gorgeous visualization of musical traditions persisting through time and place, connecting people across generations, growing and changing fluidly as people take inspiration from the past, while all of remmick's songs show people being very forcibly trapped in the past, unable to grow or move on. when he encounters something beautiful in the present all he can think to do is own it, destroy it, bend it into the shape of history. pathetic!

One trait I find interesting about Cassie Animorphs is that she is the one of the group who is most shown displaying embarrassment towards her parents (i.e. during the tour in book 12, the "Nice is Neat" incident, all of book 50 when the parents are hiding out with them). It's a pretty typical trait for a teenager, but I find it interesting that the authors chose to highlight it more in her than the others when it would be so easy to stereotype her as "the moral one, so the naive Good Kid one who never develops that distance from her parents and annoyance at their old person behavior". Especially when in terms of her outlook on life she seems to owe more to them than any of the others, with her passion for and understanding of animals developing from being around her parents' veterinary career. But showing how she feels that embarrassment strongly, how she wants to distance herself from her parents' naïveté and form her own moral view of the world, really shows how at the heart of this character is not childishness but a desperate, even monomaniacal will to grow up - to be able to form fully into an adult from her experiences without being either being kept a child by her parents or twisted by the war into something that is neither child nor adult but a soldier who has learned nothing from the world at all except what pertains to the narrow scope of fighting. And that growing up is something she tries and fails to safeguard for all the others, too.