serbia’s performance has everything. gregorian monks, marina abramović references, a cutting discussion of mental health in a post-capitalist society, a song in serbian and latin, a milf,
thank fuck the election will be done and dusted in exactly one week and I will no longer have to offend my eyes with Murdoch columnists crying over how you should vote Libs, actually, even if you would rather fling yourself into the moon
(also actual fucking lol since when was Frydenberg a ‘moderate’)
Thought it was the perfect time to bring these back:
Also, for those who still don’t know, these panels are not real moon knight panels. They’re still hilarious though, and the actual moon knight comics are even more wacky.
Edit: for those wanting some moon knight craziness from the actual comics, here you go!
i think “representation” being boiled down to counting exactly how many gay characters there are in something has inadvertently killed critical analysis
not to be like miss tinhatter mcgee but do you think possibly that there is some financial incentive perhaps on part of studios and companies to sell you increasingly superficial and nothing stories based on a “look there’s gay people in it!!!” hook to get their hands on your shiny previously largely untapped market of pink dollars? like perhaps your only test for quality shouldn’t be counting respective identities? perhaps?
Probably doesn’t help! But honestly I’ve met so many lazy straight pseudo-allies that act like representation is the be-all and end-all of gay fiction that I don’t know if corporations even needed to do much on this one. You don’t need a marketing scheme to get people to look for shallow, self-indulgent answers to a problem, they do that all on their own.
I don’t disagree with you, but I’d argue that there’s plenty of my fellow LGBT+ individuals who are the same way about representation. The number of things I am recommended not based on “I think this has themes that will speak to you” but “Two girls might hold hands in it” is absolutely wild, and it’s almost always someone from under the banner of rainbow who’s saying these things to me.
I don’t want books and movies and TV show to be gay at the expense of being good, you know? And don’t get me wrong, there’s a lot of shitty straight writing, but speaking to the comment above about ‘superficial and nothing stories’ I think we’ve very much hewed ourselves that particular little log cabin, where I see anything that has a “happy ending” no matter how shallow or unearned, is good if there are identity characters having it.
I think we, as a community, have stripped OURSELVES of good stories at the expense of stories that cannot be criticized. I want stories where a trans man is callous and cruel without having to be excused. I want a ghost story where a lesbian is the shadow of her former self in the light of her grief, and the story HAS to end in her death. I want a story where a gay man hides his entire secret life from his husband. I want MESS. I want COMPLICATION. I want SORROW and DEPTH and ANGER
In short, I want to the things from stories that…I want from stories. I want to be represented in the kind of stories I love instead of this infantilizing bullshit that I think the community has this INTENSE tendency to uplift. And so you get cardboard characters covered in elmer’s glue stories, and all they do is mark off checkpoints: Gay, Trans, POC, Jewish, etc etc etc but they are never allowed to be complex, because the criticism of letting bad things happen to a Character of Identity or letting them be to blame for things is so high.
And largely, we’ve done this to ourselves. I see these critiques come from so many more LGBT+ people than I do straight. I think the idea of something having any kind of literary merit or quality, or being allowed to follow through on narrative beats, is basically dead to people as long as two girls kiss and no one can ever die. (Smaller creators particularly get hit hard by the appeal to Perfect Identity Characters, not to mention the #ownvoices thing being taken as a rule and not a tag note)
This is also part of a discussion on, “was it good, or did you like it?” which most people can’t handle.
[ID: three panels with different pie charts and text.
first panel: “in therapy, I learned that this is a risky form of self-care:” a pie chart with one wedge of pale pink labeled “going on walks” and the rest of the circle colored dark purple and labeled “art”.
second panel: “because… if that one big thing gets taken from you or becomes an obsession you’re left with almost nothing that is truly yours.” the word “nothing” in the text is grey. the purple section of the pie chart from the first panel is gone, and the pale pink wedge now has a worried face on it.
third panel: “so I’m working on making my self-care a rainbow. that way, I’ll have so many colors to turn to when I’m feeling dark blue.” the word “rainbow” in the text is rainbow colored, and the words “dark blue” are colored dark blue. the pie chart now has eight equal sections: a purple wedge labeled “art”, a pale pink wedge labeled “going on walks”, a red wedge labeled “scrapbooking”, an orange wedge labeled “crossword puzzles”, a yellow wedge labeled “swimming”, a green wedge labeled “window shopping”, a blue wedge labeled “lifting weights”, a pale blue wedge labeled “meditating”. /end ID]
“While the kitchen team works serene there, the film crew helped me capture some views of the famous Amalfi coast you won’t normally see on a postcard. Until nature sends us all running back inside.”
