My problem with Harkness Test discourse is that in practice it's only ever an issue when somebody wants to fuck a male or not-obviously-gender-coded (and thus male by default) cartoon animal. Give that cartoon animal long eyelashes and chest bumps that kind of look like tits and suddenly wanting to fuck it is respectable!
bees-with-swords asked:
I'm constantly reminded through your use of language that you're part of the same demographic as the majority of tvtropes contributors
prokopetz answered:
Joss Whedon fans?
More seriously, it's not really that I write like TV Tropes editors, or that they write like me – it's that we're all using a consciously affected academic register to talk about stuff that isn't usually seen as warranting it. In the case of TV Tropes editors, it's because they want to be taken seriously as authorities on the topic at hand; in my case, it's because I think it's funny when a post written in a conspicuously formal register ends with the word "penis".
@tembryglintstoneold replied:
Never watched a joss whedon movie outside of toy story
Well, the trick is that you don't have to. TV Tropes was originally a Buffy the Vampire Slayer fansite, more or less. It started out as a site about cataloguing recurring motifs in media written by Joss Whedon, and only later evolved into a site about cataloguing tropes more generally, and that still informs how the site operates today. I've talked in the past about how all systems of categorisation are at least partly prescriptive, in that how the categories themselves are defined and related makes certain implicit assertions about how the thing that's being categorised ought to operate, and TV Tropes is a great example of that. In terms of its basic notions of what a trope is and how the boundaries between tropes ought to be drawn, even twenty years on it hasn't fully escaped the fact that a framework of classification that's useful for describing media written by Joss Whedon isn't necessarily useful – or even coherent – for describing media more generally.
Remember:
1. Genres are not Pokémon. You’re not obliged to argue that your favourite media fits into as many of them as you possibly can.
2. Taking a common and well-accepted category and stuffing it full of technicalities and edge cases until it doesn’t really describe anything at all doesn’t mean you’re clever for spotting connections that no-one else did, it just means you’re hard to communicate with.
Forgetting these thing is how we get TV Tropes. Do you wanna be TV Tropes?
tv tropes doesn’t say or imply tropes are negative; it repeatedly specifies the opposite. cinemasins is bad because it actively frames the existence of tropes as a bad thing.
TV tropes- this trope really explains this one part of the movie
Cinemasins- this movie has a beginning middle and end, setting, and characters so :/:/:/:/
I think the best analogy I’ve ever run into for why decomposing media into simple checklists of tropes isn’t a useful critical lens is imagine that a wizard turned your house upside down: it would still contain all of the same essential components, in approximately the same configuration relative to one another, but the experience of living in it would be very different!
Loki stripping any and all trans elements from its presentation of a female Loki character, yet still finding ways to invoke transphobic media tropes-- all while making visual allusions to Agent of Asgard, which is the most explicitly trans Loki text to date
Wanda//Vision whitewashing the main cast and completely changing Wanda's backstory so as to erase any references to Romani narratives, yet still finding a way to include antiromani media tropes-- all while making visual allusions to Scarlet Witch (2016), the first book in years which actively explored Wanda's Roma identity.
don’t forget the falcon and the winter soldier taking pains to revitalize the violence vs. non-violence debate and martyring a young, female, mixed-race refugee to make the point that the wishes of the state are good, actually, on the heels of a worldwide movement for agents of the state, the police, to stop murdering black people in the streets
One of my favourite tropes is when all of the characters in a piece of media are weird monstery things you just sort of assume are roughly human-size, then the plot briefly intersects with the human world and it turns out that they’re all like a foot tall. The casual reveal that the main characters are Actually Small is honestly better than a hundred shocking plot twists.
dose anyone want to hear my very surface level analysis of androgyny in media
so like, depictions of androgyny generally fall between two categories ive been calling gender minimalism and gender maximalism:
gender minimalism tends to be the go-to for modern nonbinary characters in particular and leans towards soft-masc anime twink androgyny, where as many traditionally gendered traits as possible have been stripped from a characters design
gender maximalism on the other hand is more common in older media, usually to depict someone as a hedonist or otherwise outside the norm, and involves just putting as many overtly gendered characteristics on a character as possible
theres been a move away from gender maximalism since nb presence in media started being more positive, primarily because a lot of people associate those visuals with more derogatory depictions and dont want to fall back on bad stereotypes - which is fair. i also think the prevalence of gender minimalism promotes a very thin, young, white and afab-centric idea of androgyny that harms people through idealisation
theres a whole other conversation about ‘good representation’ vs ‘resonant representation’ and how the sanitisation of marginalised identities in media for the purposes of palatability to the masses just leads to hollow, beautiful vessels with no substance behind them but this post is too long already. basically i just think people need to be less afraid to get weird with it
the amount you dont understand could fill oceans. to the salt mines with ye
thanks to bad comment, being chubby and hairy is now mandatory. go eat a burger and roll around on a bathroom floor right now or you're not queer anymore.
You don’t realise how much swearing is in a song until you listen to it with your parents.
artbyblastweave
irockthereforiam-blog asked:
Drop your Lois Lane hot takes
(also if you're not a Superman fan, what would you recommend starting off with?)
So MAWS Lois Lane very pointedly has some significant character flaws, generally justified by her backstory and often the opposite side of the conventional “positive” Lois Qualities that she exhibits. Trust issues stemming from her canon-typical dysfunction with her father, upstream of her whole truth-to-power thing. Self-esteem issues and a sense of inadequacy, upstream of her tenacity and singleminded pursuit of her goals. Downstream from her self-esteem issues you’ve got a sensitivity to perceived betrayal or the idea that people are only pretending to value her. Self-assurance and confidence… that manifests as bouts of myopic thinking or lack of consideration for others. There’s a level on which I like this more than S:TAS- she was fun in that, but the purpose there wasn’t to give her any kind of arc. She’s much more dynamic in this, she has a palpable crisis, and it all combines into a perfect cocktail demonstrating why she reacts so very, very badly to being out of the loop on Superman. In her position it’s not insane to assume that Clark expressed interest in her just to jerk her around and sabotage her investigation more thoroughly.
But in practice… I (and those watching with me, who joined me in screaming at the TV a bunch during the last couple episodes) felt that the narrative was both-sidesing the dynamic a bit uncomfortably, because Clark has very good reason to not trust Lois specifically with sensitive information. Their first interaction involved her manipulating him for the sake of advancing her career. She’s been screaming from the rooftops that she dislikes Superman, wants to expose Superman’s secrets, and he was on the verge of coming clean with her before that came up. She functionally threatens to kill herself to force him to out himself, right after he got back from the government (and very likely her father specifically!) trying to assassinate him. Very little of this was coherently voiced when they’re having it out, and as a result it felt like the narrative was much more sympathetic to Lois’s stance than Clarks, treating his concealing the information as the root of the problem here. And when Jimmy brings up that he’s known for years but understood that it was probably a deeply personal situation that Clark would bring up when he was comfortable- that’s not a catalyst for introspection about whether Lois is entitled to the information, it isn’t used as the point to push the idea that both parties have valid motivations here. It’s mostly just the catalyst for another gag where now Jimmy is upset that Clark told Lois first (without. You know. the context.) I walked away thinking that Clark doesn’t have a disproportionate amount to apologize for in this situation. Not nothing, but not the brunt. The reconciliation arc really breezed past the fact that she threw herself off a building to force the issue. Any relationship where throwing yourself off a building is a tool in the toolbox seems like it might be on shaky ground, communicatively!
The thing is, well, honestly there’s a few things. I’m willing to accept off the bat that I might be lily-orcharding a perfectly unobjectionable creative decision to some extent, because by default I’m really biased in favor of anyone trying to keep deeply compromising information about their identities away from their loved ones for fear of their negative reaction, and that’s coloring the intensity of my negative response. Another thing is that I think the show is kind of a victim of the megashort season runs of contemporary cartoons- I mean we’ll be lucky if we get 30 episodes of this show total, every arc is gonna be at least somewhat pinched when you get 10 episodes and change per season. And a third, final thing is that the season isn’t over yet, and they’ve left themselves with a great springboard from which to address my misgivings.
Clark leans into the idea that he’s the one at fault, begs forgiveness, and so on, but that’s actually in character for this version; given that one of his biggest drives is to be accepted, it makes sense that he’d do whatever he thought he had to get things smoothed out as quickly as possible, even if there’s still a lot going unaddressed below the surface. And Episode 7 (6?) is basically entirely about how Lois’s character flaws, scaled up and appended to power, can turn out really really bad. Kryptonite is introduced in this continuity by a bunch of alternate-universe Lois Lanes who try to kill Superman without giving him the benefit of the doubt- all while never expressly communicating to anyone that the root of their concern is how badly things went with their own Supermen. Lois meets an army of herself and immediately, correctly assumes that they aren’t on the up-and-up, that they’re holding something back. And the episode ends with her in possession of both a Superman-killing tool and information engineered to set off her well-established paranoid tendencies about Clark.
So if the show is being smart- and there’s a very good chance that it is- the next leg is going to be about how for a superhero, just being open about your secret identity to your loved ones isn’t necessarily going to be enough to defuse the underlying tensions and failures to communicate; the fact that they really speed-ran the reconciliation is going to turn out to be deliberate, a bandaid fix on the deeper problem, and a much worse reckoning is in the pipes once it becomes obvious that Task Force X is headed by her estranged father. (Which seems like the twist they’re going for with that- they’ve never said the general’s name out loud, so I think they’re going for a fakeout where we all assume it’s Wade Eiling but it turns out to actually be Sam Lane.) However. I’ve definitely watched a bunch of shows where I kept going “If the show is smart,” “If the show is smart,” and then the show wasn’t smart, and it just turned out that the writers themselves hadn’t chewed on the implications of what they were depicting as much as I had. I’ve got high hopes, though.
(tagging @st-just, @best-wizard, and @howlingguardian, who all also asked for the elaboration.)
