That Carrie post reminded me of my biggest and oldest pet peeve: adaptations taking a character who's supposed to be ugly, or at least not beautiful, and casting someone perfect-looking. A lot of the time this is simple misogyny, but the inability to allow ugly people to exist also extends to men and boys, and I remember how pissed I was when I started understanding this at around the age of eight.

Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.

Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.

Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.

Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.

The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.

Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.

A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!

And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)

Btw this is why "everyone is beautiful" type body-positivity does nothing for me, and why I'm hyper-sensitive to how people discuss ugliness in reality and in fiction. For example, I love the Just King Things and the Shelved by Genre podcasts, but I think they struggle to see the value of written descriptions of ugliness. They interpret Steven King's descriptions of Carrie as cruel, they interpret Tiptree's description of P. Burke in The Girl who was Plugged In as cruel and fatphobic. Sure, I don't want to give King kudos for all his depictions of women, but he did get it right that time, and Tiptree absolutely did. Describing a character, especially a woman as ugly, genuinely ugly, no not secretly beautiful, actually ugly, and then telling her story, a story about existing in the world as an ugly woman, is really really fucking important. And people keep shying away from it, oh, it's cruel to call anyone ugly, let's pretend that ugly people don't exist instead.

For my fellow ice sport enthusiasts:

Different sports use different kinds of ice!

(not me. sharing bc i found it interesting & figured my fellow hockey nerds would too)

It is still wild to me that I legitimately have to research in a bikini in order to effectively collect data.

And the reason being is that people (of all genders equally) perceive me as a threat otherwise.

Like

Threat vs not a threat

People have said before that they are concerned I’m gonna get them in trouble, but I think the real reason folks get mean is that tourists effectively enter a liminal space when they go on vacations (especially American tourists on tropical vacations) and they don’t want anything to pull them out of that mindset.

So when I show up with a clipboard and wanting to talk while wearing an outfit that clearly says “I’m working, but not in any sort of position that exists in your vacation fantasy,” that pulls them out of the fantasy and they react negatively.

Meanwhile, if I’m dressed the same way everyone else is, even if I have a clipboard and want to talk about the same thing, I automatically become a wacky NPC who is part of the fantasy.

I no longer hear “It’s really weird that you’re just out here watching people” but instead “You get to lay on the beach all day and call it “work?” Hell yeah! Living the dream!”

I often refer to my bottle-raised lamb as my adopted daughter, because it’s mostly true, it temporarily keeps nosy strangers from knowing I’m an eeeevil childfree woman, and it’s hilarious when people find out. And by that time they’re usually too disturbed by the “her-daughter-is-a-sheep” thing to get on my case about the “woman-with-no-husband-or-kids-oh-the-horror” thing.

Most of my friends are aware that I do this, and will back me up in conversations without batting an eye when I reference my daughter. And the best part is that they literally never drop the story. They just 100% all the time accept that I have a two-year-old adopted daughter. The fact that she happens to be a sheep is an unimportant detail, not worth mentioning until an anecdote gets too weird to plausibly be about a human toddler.

Which actually takes much longer than you’d think, since human toddlers apparently have absolutely zero sense. “She bites if you stop paying attention to her” is believable, “she tries to eat rocks out of the landscaping” is believable, “she stuck her head through a fence and couldn’t get out” is believable. “She jumped a five foot fence and came screaming back into the house through the dog door when I left her outside in the pasture” does get some strange looks, though usually not for the right reason.

Occasionally the joke gets turned around on me, though. I posted a picture on my not-tumblr blog of her wearing my glasses, and every comment was “Oh my gosh she looks just like you!!!” “I would never have known she was adopted If you hadn’t told me!!” “Are you sure that’s not an old picture of you?!”

So apparently this is what I look like:

At least she does look cute in glasses.

this got like a thousand views on tiktok and i based the joke off a moment in the @joy-crimes stream so i think yall will like it maybe

One of my favorite stories to tell about myself from when I was a kid is the story how my grandma’s “Catching Fairies” game was banned because of me

So when I was really little my grandma had this game she made up, she’d give me and all my cousins jars and containers and tell us that in her garden there were fairies but they were smart and tricky so they disguised themselves as caterpillars and butterflies and as grasshoppers and worms.

Whoever caught the most ‘Fairies’ won but we had to set them all free because they tended to the garden

One summer day my brothers were at the age they were dreading ‘girly’ stuff so I was playing alone

At this point I had met all the fairies in the garden and I was getting bored without any competition and with finding the same old fairies

But then just as I was begrudgingly heading back to my grandma with the same fairies as usual I found a new fairy!

I thought she was so beautiful! She was resting on the sparkly thread in the leaves and her black body gleamed in the sunlight, she had long legs and a cool red spot on her back

Excited I coaxed her onto my hand and was so giddy I found a new one! I rushed back to the farm house to show my Grandma and Dad, gently carrying my new friend.

But when my Dad and Grandma turned around to see what fairy I caught I saw the color drain from their faces and both of them freeze, I could tell something was wrong but didn’t understand

My dad congratulated me and asked me if he could see the pretty fairy, I let him but felt a little nervous seeing how terrified he looked as she moved into his hands from mine.

Slowly he walked back towards the door, my grandma clutching my shoulders then my dad LAUNCHED the fairy back into the garden which I thought was rather rude

Then we had a nice long talk about Black Widow spiders