in Beauty and the Beast: Belle’s Magical Christmasthere’s an evil pipe organ voiced by Tim Curry. many of you will remember this. however, i think many of us (including, embarrassingly, myself) overlooked that he is a magic pipe organ. huh. none of the other servants got magic powers. why does that guy have magic powers now? did the enchantress like him? did her magic interfere with his own pre-existing sorcerous powers? was the existing pipe organ magical and when he was meshed with that pipe organ he got some part of the powers it already possessed? i ask this because he also has my favorite motivation of any DTV disney villain: he wants to stay an evil pipe organ that can do magic. i fuck with that honestly.
everything about this makes sense. it’s a midquel. given the structure of the existing movie, it’s hard for the villain to be someone from the village. it would also be a bit awkward for it to be a stranger because the whole story is predicated on it being wrong to turn strangers away (the enchantress). so you have to have someone inside the castle, i guess. disney writers sitting around thinking, ok though. but if it’s someone in the castle, they’re all on the same team, right? they want Beast and Belle to get together so they can be human again. the reason they’re working together even with meaningfully different personalities is because they are united in common cause. So, you need someone who doesn’t want to return to their former form.
this is how you get Forte, explained elegantly thus:
alright so his motivations check out. If he’s just an organist he’s going to get old and he could easily be replaced. there’s no security in his world. thanks to the enchantress, he now IS the pipe organ. by the way the internet summarized this to me as a man who wants to “remain in organ form”. we recognize this as classic pervert behavior.
anyway though! magic! what’s that about
i get being a weird organ pervert who wants to stay an evil pipe organ forever. anyway with the addition of magic this is an easy choice (evil magic pipe organ voiced by tim curry; ideal lifestyle and absolute jackpot win). but WHY!! why is he also a witch! did you make a saucy little face when the Prince threw out the enchantress and you two locked eyes and she was like can you Believe this guy and you were like Oh i Know, like Don’t Even Tell me About It and she was like yeah you can be telekinetic!! evil pipe organ
anyway hashtag #lifegoals!
Full-time court musician, part-time pervert and magician; sounds like your average Enlightenment-era intellectual to me. Probably writing a picaresque novel or two on the side and keeping up a lively correspondence with Benjamin Franklin.
Exactly, this 100% checks out with the way that the musical patronage system in Europe at the time Beauty and the Beast takes place (18th century) works: your entire livelihood was based on getting money from royalty and nobility, which included commissions, but ideally meant being one particular titled VIP’s “court composer” since that had the greatest stability. Falling out of favor could mean losing your livelihood. (All of this was about to change in a few decades as the Industrial Revolution created an urban middle and non-titled-rich class and also established music conservatories, so we got the composer-as-job model that we have now of being either a professor or running a municipal orchestra, but obviously nobody knew this; the winds of change in the music world wouldn’t make themseles known until the 19th century.) It’s really easy to envision some Salieri type (as in the character in Amadeus, not the real historical guy) getting turned into a pipe-organ-who-does-magic and being like, actually, this is way better! I don’t have to worry about young upstart stealing my thunder and my commissions and my court composer job. I can fulfill my sacred mission from God of serving him by making music, forever. Also, a lot of musicians in general are weird little freaks and would probably enjoy being transformed into an immortal music-producing vessel, especially in the form of an instrument with a gigantic range that is prized for its ornateness and for its historical importance (organs are one of the modern instruments with the longest histories in Western classical music, being used in churches even long before any other instrumental music was permitted) and that has a history of being carefully preserved over centuries. To paraphrase a famous Ralph Vaughan Williams quote: why just write music when you can BE music?
me: oh boy, a new DND campaign. I sure hope my silly character idea isn’t too silly!
player1: I’m playing 3 raccoons in a trench coat. one has rabies.
player2: 18th century french nobleman who got isekaied into this dnd universe
player3: can I be a frog. And also know magic. As a frog.
me: oh no I haven’t gone silly enough
we have obtained another silly weirdo (sentient ooze who is preaching its religion (the one god: the primordial ooze))
i am the only homosexual at the table and somehow I’m the one playing the straight man.
From the two sessions we had
Isekaied Frenchman is very obviously a vampire and hiding it poorly
Slime man privately confronted him on this. My character has figured it out but decided that he’s just gonna fuck with the dude until he decides he’s dangerous or not. This includes me handing him silver things and making pointed comments about how evil vampires are
Three of us had made our characters kleptomaniacs for different character reasons, so whenever something shiny is in the scene it’s honed in on by a raccoon, a giant slime blob, and a halfling
Haven’t been able to use it much, but I’m doing a bit where my character owes a LOT of money to “important and dangerous people” (his ex wife and her lawyer, for alimony) and it increases by 1k gold when’s ever someone asks how much he owes (the interest rate was in scientific notation)
Slime blob (described in both sight and taste as “Baja blast gone bad”) keeps leaving religious pamphlets in a language nobody can comprehend and keeps trying to preform slime based religious rites
Frenchman keeps trying to use Baja blast slime man secretions as deodorant
One of the raccoons is a chef who basically conducts anthropological studies of whatever culture the food is from, but he’s also nonverbal and communicates through snarling
the more i talk w/ leftist friends the more i start to realize that they think culture is only defined by food or “traditional” (i.e. “ethnic”) garb and nothing else
mentioned how white americans do in fact have a common culture and they genuinely thought i was joking. culture isnt something only granted to the Cool People of Color. just feels like among progressive groups there’s this dichotomy created in which only the virtuous oppressed minorities have culture and anyone who is privileged some sort of void cultureless being
As someone with a background in anthropology, culture is everything and everywhere. It’s so all-encompassing it’s hard to even wrap your head around. Everything you do, say, think, eat, wear is wrapped up in culture. Even being deliberately counter-cultural, by consciously defying the expectations of your culture, is still an engagement with culture (often by adopting a sub-culture).
Sure, it’s the “simple”, “surface-level” things that people tend to think of, like
In your culture, how many meals a day are you generally expected to eat, and when are you expected to eat them?
In your culture, which clothes are considered “formal”, and when would you wear such clothes?
But it’s also so much more:
If you were dating someone, at what point in the relationship would you be expected to introduce them to your parents? That’s culture!
How much respect is given to artists? Are people like poets or musicians revered as an integral part of society, or is the predominant attitude “get a real job”? That’s culture!
How much value is given to education? What’s considered more socially embarrassing - academic failure, or academic achievement? What’s the intellectual landscape? Do people tend to respect experts, or denigrate them as “elitists”? That’s culture!
Which things are generally considered to be “high culture” or “low culture”? Which kinds of media and art are considered “for the masses” versus “for the elites”? That’s culture!
How are politicians treated? Do people tend to respect them as their “betters”, their “leaders”? Or are they assumed to be lying, conniving, corrupt, the worst of society? What kind of thing would end a politician’s career? That’s culture!
What’s considered more egregious behaviour - bothering other people, or asking someone to stop bothering other people? That’s culture!
If you were attending a job interview, how would you want to come across? How would you be expected to dress and behave? Would it be better to come across as very bold and confident, or humble and subservient? That’s culture!
If you found yourself in a tricky situation - say, broken down at the side of the road - would you confidently expect strangers to come and help you? Or would it seem really weird for some random person to come and involve themselves in your situation? That’s culture!
How are you expected to communicate? Is it seen as rude to be very blunt and straightforward, or is it considered rude to beat around the bush and make allusions and try to soften what you’re saying rather than quickly getting to the point? That’s culture!
I could go on (boy could I go on). This is so not meant to be all-inclusive; this is just a tiny sample of the things that make up “culture”.
To put it bluntly, a lot of the time the word “culture” seems to be used to mean, essentially, “the things that make people of colour different from white people”. Oh, this guy eats this different kind of food; that’s culture. This lady wears these clothes to a wedding; that’s culture. But we white people, we don’t have “culture”; we just do what’s normal. But it’s all culture! Everything! All of it! And culture isn’t just the result of where in the world you come from - class, occupation, rural/urban location, minority status, political affiliation, all these things and more can result in cultural differences even within a small area. Multiple cultures often co-exist, blend, overlap, and borrow from one another within the same place, which is especially noticeable in places with legacies of migration. People bring different cultures from around the world, and these interact with the dominant culture in all sorts of interesting ways. But a culture being dominant doesn’t mean that it ceases to be a culture.
Claiming that certain groups of people (generally, whoever is the dominant majority group in a particular context) “don’t have culture” is just as dumb as when people claim they “don’t have an accent” simply because their accent is the most common one where they live. There is no “default”, every deviation from which is “a culture” or “an accent”. Everyone has an accent. Every community, everywhere, has culture(s). If you aren’t aware of your culture, or don’t think you have an accent, you’re probably just so used to being considered “default” and “normal” that it doesn’t occur to you that no such thing actually exists.
exiting a uquiz halfway through when it becomes clear the creator’s narrow and immature world view and cultural knowledge leaves them totally unequipped to tell me which peanuts character i am with any degree of accuracy or insight
I’m watching The Big Bang Theory in its natural setting—playing in the background of a hot spiral room—and I can say within that specific context, it is a very charming show. Like the saltine crackers of media.
Hospital room. A hospital room. Not a hot spiral room. What a nightmare idea. And you all rolled with that idea. The idea that I was sitting in a hot sweltering spiral prison watching the Big Bang theory is actually what hell is. Bazinga.
this is the single greatest line of dialogue that has ever or will ever exist im so glad the big bang happened and life progressed to the exact line of circumstances that allowed this to happen