Ineffable!

Sent by Anonymous :

i never regret watching something as much as i regret watching shadowhunters. people were always talking about malec and i decided to give it a shot. i regret it so so so much. +

+ and the books are not good neither IMO. but alec? and izzy? they are so precious. i just want to hug alec and protect him of all the selfish people that he cares about

Honestly I feel like a good rule of thumb in this franchise is that the Lightwoods deserve better. All of them.

Also eh, I can’t say I regret watching the show per se–I knew what I was getting into, more or less–but yeah, the hype around it and Malec in particular is vastly underserved in my opinion. Then again, Malec is clearly a pairing designed to appeal to The Straights ™ not to represent actual LGBTQ+ experience (because honestly the way they are onscreen and the way the world rearranges to avoid discussing homophobia makes zero freaking sense lbh)

Alright look, I’m still Bitter about X-Men: Apocalypse because honestly, we had such a good cast set up in First Class and then DOFP killed most of them and now XMA comes along and the entirety of secondary characters get sidelined in favor of Scott and Jean, as if we hadn’t had three freaking movies of them doing…well, basically what they do in Apocalypse which is help each other accept their powers (plus the frankly gross UST moment during Logan’s cameo like??? Ew?? She’s a teen?)

I mean, even leaving aside that putting Charles & Erik forward is putting two cis straight white dudes at the forefront of a franchise centered around minorities, and even gritting our teeth about the part where they’ve grossly defanged Mystique, the movie introduces two of the most beloved (to my knowledge) characters with Kurt & Ororo, characters whose backstory we were waiting for who ended up being sidelined in favor of the JeanScott boner of the studio.

And I mean, the way it’s done is super gross too? Like, my knowledge of comics is limited but I know that Ororo’s backstory is that she was worshipped as a goddess for her powers as well as a respected leader (also was queen of Wakanda at some point)…yet somehow XMA decided the way to go was to turn her into a street rat who makes dust clouds to steal food, who then gets her incredibly powerful powers from the villain?

(Yes, it was for a BSG AU that’ll probably only live in my head and yes if you want to make me a happy woman for the day you can come talk to me about it)

Anyway, in His Dark Material, daemons and the moment they take on their adult and stable shape are pretty explicitely linked to puberty and, more specifically, the sexual aspects of it:

• The child/daemon separation is compared to castration and excision
• The scene where someone touches Pantalaimon without consent is written like a rape scene
• Pantalaimon keeping the shape he had when Will first touched him comes within the context of Lyra being the ‘new Eve’ and having a sensuous (& lowkey sexual imo) experience with Will a few chapters prior

However, as we know, puberty (and more generally, becoming an adult) is not intrisically linked with having sex, despite the metaphor. I mean, Ace people exist, for one, and allosexual people don’t all have sex during going through puberty, that doesn’t prevent them from becoming adults. Going from there, I think we can reasonnably assume that someone touching your daemon (a sexual-or-close-enough act) isn’t the only way one’s daemon can settle.

(Otherwise we assume that Ace peeps and/or peeps who never have sex remain children forever and that’s pretty icky)

I posit that a daemon taking their permanent form is actually more linked to an intense emotional, character-defining experience (which a first sexual experience can definitely be) than sex itself. Which kind of also implies that, like patronii, a daemon can change in case of life-altering experience–positive or negative.

Imagine a person whose daemon settles, not when they first have sex, but when they figure out what they want to do with their life. Imagine a person whose daemon settles when they discover the word to describe who they are (be it trans, gay, bi, etc.) or when they get diagnosed with Autism as an older teen. Imagine someone who’s been questioning what was wrong with them for a long time having their demon settle down when they finally get a diagnosis on their mental illness–or hell, the first time they meet someone who has a similar problem. Imagine someone’s daemon settling into their permanent form when they manage to get out of an abusive relationship–not even in a dramatic way. Just getting out, and then suddenly your daemon settles down.

Conversely (and in a less pretty way) you’d also have people whose daemon settles down the day after a traumatic accident or after something terrible was done to them (abuse, assault, you name it) and at first it’s really sad because it seems like they’re going to be defined by what was done to them, but then as time passes their daemon’s fur starts changing color. Maybe their pug daemon grows into a german shepherd as time goes by, maybe they go from a cockatoo to a budgie. Either way, they can see the way they heal over time, and that would be so important too. I just…really love that idea.

terresdebrume:

I want to watch After Earth again.

Honestly I wouldn’t say it’s the best Sci-Fi movie ever, but I think you should all watch it (and I do mean all) if only for the experience of watching a major movie with only one (very minor) white character.

I mean, I could be mistaken but that’s really the impression the movie left me with, and the realization halfway through that “oh, that’s what’s been bugging me” is both disturbing and important imo

So I thought about Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (which I livewatched a couple days ago) andit reminded me of this post I did about after earth.

And the thing is, there’s no white person in CTHD either (and there I literally do mean zero white person, not just zero speaking white person) and I realized that it didn’t bug me at all.

Maybe it’s because it’s been a year and I’ve progressed, maybe it’s because I’m used to thinking of black people as “more” different from white people than (Han) Chinese people (the fact that I learned Mandarin Chinese for a couple of years also plays a role in that)

But I think what plays a big role too is the storytelling.

After Earth is, very clearly, an USian story. It hits pretty much all the hollywood tropes, complete with the ridiculous “I’ll injure myself further so I can do a military salute” at the end–it’s your basic Hollywood SF flick but with a flipped black actors to white actors ratio, which makes the combination very unexpected and, yes, disturbing (if only on first viewing, tho I guess that varies between viewiers)

However, when you watch CTHD, it’s clearly a Chinese story. I have no doubt that it’s adapted to make it more palatable to western viewers in som way (though I’d be unable to pinpoint to what extent exactly) but the fact remains that CTHD is a Chinese story, and since I don’t expect Chinese stories to have white people in it, watching a Chinese movie with only Chinese (or Chinese-something) actors in it doesn’t cause a dissonance with my expectations the way After Earth did.

The common point, however, is that both are stories I would have dismissed if I hadn’t had a certain background/incentive to go watch them. I watched After Earth because tumblr has taught me to spot racism & racist tropes and I figured ‘eh, might as well put my money where my mouth is’. I thought it was a decent flick but it didn’t get me all that engrossed–would it have succeeded better if it had been filled with white characters? Difficult to say. I hope the answer is ‘no’ but I can’t discount the possibility.

Similarly, the CTHD franchise didn’t interest me in the least before I learned that Harry Shum Jr was in the second movie, and my main incentive to watch CTHD was that I’ve only seen HSJ in shows with terrible scripts so I wanted to know if he’d be better when given better starting ground (he is. A lot.) Before that it was like ‘Eh. Kung Fu movie. Boring.’ And when I watched it, I found it interesting and liked it, but I can’t say it got the same levels of enthusiasm from me as, say, the MCU, LOTR or Battlestar Galactica got from me.

And like, clearly the genre is not the problem here–I like Science Fiction and Fantasy and frankly Kung Fu movies, like any genre, have their good ones and their bad ones. So the obvious conclusion here is that what made me tick about After Earth and not-tick about CTHD are racial expectations–the expectation that US movies will/should be about white people. What part of that is just habit and what part of that is racism, I don’t know yet. It is, however, interesting to think about because it means I can figure out what led to that state of mind and, from there, hopefully work on correcting it, either by consuming more US fiction about black americans (and on that note, remind me to give Luke Cage a go) or by consuming more fiction/material about black people in general or by trying to, idk how to formulate it, rewrite my own programming, so to speak?

Literally I'm fuming about the #Shadowhunters promo for #Malec what the fuck even??? 1st of all #MagnusBane is being RUDE AS FUCK

— Queer as in fuck you (@TerresDeBrume) March 26, 2016

So, the latest Malec promo. I made the mistake to use #Malec in one of my tweets about it (pictured above) and, unsurprisingly enough, it lead to pretty strong reactions. Unfortunately, Twitter is extremely impractical when it comes to trying to share complex arguments (especially in my case, I’ll admit. I’m a wordy fucker) so I figure I might as well try to articulate why I’m so upset about this preview.

Mostly, it’s got to do with two things: one, the idea that Alec would automatically be miserable in a marriage to Lydia is something that I strongly disagree with. And two, it bothers me that this preview shows both Magnus and Izzy acting without Alec’s knowledge (and therefore, without his consent) to go against something he initiated himself (aka the wedding) which is not a new phenomenon in the show. So without further ado, let’s go on to the full reasoning behind my position, once and for all.

I. Alec, his wedding, and being miserable

I think the first mistake that people make when analyzing this wedding is that they forget it’s a political wedding. Alec proposed within days of meeting Lydia, much too early for any real connection to take place. Furthermore, he didn’t hint at love at any point in his proposal, only at how he and Lydia could make their families/their names great again, which is very clearly a political goal.

Considering both of them are aware that they’re getting married for practical reasons rather than love, there’s absolutely nothing that says they have to remain celibate forever to honor their marriage. Nothing prevents them from presenting themselves as a couple and then having their own life on the side. Nothing prevents Alec from being married to Lydia and dating Magnus at the same time (provided that both Lydia and Magnus agree with the situation).

Yes, it requires a lot of communication—something that has been sorely lacking in the show so far—and no, there’s no guarantee that it would work, but there’s no guarantee that either Alec or Lydia would be miserable either.

And it bothers me that people use this line of argument against the Alec/Lydia marriage both in the show and in real life, because it’s a fatalistic outlook on things and it ignores the fact that different things work for different people. It presumes that the only way Alec could be happy is by being 100% with a dude (and, very often, by coming out) and that’s not the case for everyone. For some people, coming out is not an option—in fact, there are still too many people today for who coming out would be an actively dangerous and harmful thing. And no, I’m not just talking about the people who live in countries where homosexuality is punishable by death.

The idea that Alec can’t be happy while being married to Lydia, which he does in order to conceal that he is gay, bothers me because it furthers a line of thinking that every Queer person must publicly identify as such in order to be happy when it isn’t, and has never been the case. In the past, queer men and women have married each other for convenience, simply because it allowed them to, outwardly, conform to social expectations (thereby making their lives easier) while still being free to fall in love with whoever they wanted (and have an extra support on the side).

Honestly I can not, for the life of me, understand why the concept of a marriage that is not based on romantic love seems so impossible to so many people. Marriage is only as much of a sacred thing and commitment as you make it to be, and if both Alec and Lydia are willing to make it work, it’ll work.

So far, both of them have shown to be duty driven, to abide by the law and try to do what’s right. Those are core values in which they seem pretty compatible and they’ve also shown mutual support and acceptance, and while we don’t have a clear indication of Lydia’s life outside of her relationship to the protagonists, it’s still one of the most supportive relationships Alec has in the show so far.

Frankly once you have common goals, similar ways to reach those goals and mutual respect, I consider you pretty well set for a long-time partnership, whether it’s a marriage or anything else—no, it’s not a guarantee, but it’s still a pretty good set of odds in my opinion.

Sent by Anonymous :

How are Wolf packs portrayed in Werewolf media different from Wolf packs in real life?

Okay so I haven’t done any detailed reading in a while so this is super simplified but

Usually werewolves in media are this weird, super-macho fantasy of the big dude who punches his problems around, growls a lot and is generally physically intimidating and/or violent (see: the entire genre of paranormal romances and were-anything male leads tbh)
This is because for a very long time, wolves were studied in zoos, where the packs lacked sufficient space and were artificially made which caused stress and an overabundance of violence as a result (sort of like shoving a bunch of semi-celebs in a house with cameras and seeing what happens. Ever notice how weirdly over-the-top those poor people sound?)

But recent (and not-so-recent) studies conducted in the wild have shown that wolf packs are more like family units, where the Alpha couple are basically everyone’s mom and dad. In the wild (where they’re all family and coperation is essential for survival) pack units are actually pretty closely knit and work together to find food rather than fight one another for power.
Problem is, as a society we have trouble letting go of the macho fantasy because, simply put, it appeals to and justifies the patriarchal model we’re used to, with the Big Strong Dude protecting/hitting/controlling everyone around him. After all, if animals do it, it means it’s natural and there’s no reason to change it, right?

If you’ve got more questions on wolves, I recommend you check @wolveswolves, it’s a pretty good educational blog on the topic and they have a lot of posts debunking the more egregious misconceptions about wolves :)