hyperfixating on a fictional woman who went underdeveloped in canon is literally FUN and the 80-90% of fandom people who only do the same for background character men have no idea of the degree to which they are fucking missing out

no tumblr i have faith that this post will be found by the enlightened 10-20 percent

ALT

[ID from alt: the "post without tags" pop up. End ID.]

hour 1 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: idk it would've been nice if she had more screentime

hour 100 of thinking about an underdeveloped woman: ok but despite having only eight lines of dialogue she is literally THE most interesting nuanced and tragic character in the entire series and these writers had no idea what they even had. how is no one else seeing this it's literally so objectively obvious

I understand that you were aiming for a morally grey protagonist, but in practice what you've ended up with is more of a moral beige.

@ancient-tree-with-deathwish replied:

how do you distinguish grey from other colours beyond black and wite?

Distinguishing features of moral beige:

1. The protagonist is constantly agonising over Hard Choices; however, circumstances always conspire to prevent them from actually having to make those choices, so in practice they're just angsting over stuff they might have done.
   
2. The text exhibits a recurring pattern whereby the protagonist seems to to have made a Hard Choice, but new information is reliably revealed shortly thereafter which retroactively establishes that whatever they did was the morally upright course after all.
   
3. The protagonist's moral impulses are straightforwardly heroic, except in one specific context which lacks any clear real-world analogue; for example, being prejudiced against telepaths.
   
4. The protagonist's actions are consistently reasonable based on the information available to them – they're merely operating on bad information basically all the time due to a bizarre conspiracy and/or a series of increasingly implausible misunderstandings.
   
5. The protagonist always ends up doing the right thing (for some fuzzy value of "right"), but, like, they're really grumpy about it.

i saw someone describe dog day afternoon (1975) as “more radical than any film [warner bros] has released since” because of its depiction of a trans woman in a secondary role. and you know that actually wouldn’t be true even if the film was released today based on just how secondary her role is (she’s a helpless victim to everyone allll the way) but also you gotta understand that gay men and trans women were still very much a curiosity in american film in the 70s. they (both eden and the gaudy, unasked-for “sonny all the way” protesters) were included not as a grand political thesis but rather because, not to put too fine a point on it, it was the 70s and studios knew the audience found it fun to look at perverts. it’s like the golden age of porn equivalent of how 2000s films would have a chinese character there to do flips and not have a character arc. and even though this particular director does present them in a relatively sympathetic light, he’s clearly including them in service of his argument of “it’s new yawk city! you can’t do anything without all sorts of wacky figures showing up”

It sucks that we cant pour oil down the sink like we can't have anything

not many people know about “goldilocks code” from the 80s where queer men would have hot porridge in their left pocket if they were a papa bear and cold porridge in their right pocket if they were a mama bear

im obsessed with this photo is from a play rendition of The Gilda Stories, a Black lesbian vampire book from 1991 by author Jewelle Gomez