i’m feeling good about dragon diversity tonight!! dragons can just look like whatever and it’s all good. there are barely any design limits which i think is pretty neat 🙂
Cannot recommend WDHDT highly enough. I’ve found it helpful not just for romantic relationships, but also for growing up w a “unexplainable/uncontrollable” dad.
IT HAS ALSO BEEN REALLY HELPFUL FOR UNDERSTANDING ONLINE MOB HARASSMENT.
So if you’ve ever been bombarded w threats to be raped/killed, (so…if you’re a minority and you’ve been on the Internet for a while), this book might be useful for getting clarity around the whole entitled, abusive mindset that drives certain kinds of people to behave that way. And by “getting clarity”, I mean (for me) being able to go “oh, that’s what’s happening” and not really feel scared anymore. Or angry, or drawn out into it, or anything.
And if you’re still standing around going “but how does something like GamerGate happen?” or “but why do men hit their wives?” or whatever – please read that book and learn something.
^^^^ truth WDHDT is fantastic at cutting down MRA bullshit and calling it what it really is
Please consider reading these. WDHDT is really, really helpful. And I know some of you are struggling with abusive relationships, friendships, families, etc. You’re not alone. There is help.
Yo. This family holiday, please, please take care of yourself. You aren’t there to be anybody else’s cushion.
Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
Reading any of these books does not mean you don’t love your parents or family. It’s just self care for helping you cope and not repeat the behaviors.
What y’all think ‘gifted child’ discourse is saying: I used to be special and now I’m not and that makes me sad.
What ‘gifted child’ discourse is ACTUALLY saying: The way many educational systems treat children who’ve been identified as ‘gifted’ is actively harmful in that it a. obliges kids to give up socialising with their same-age peers in favour of constantly courting the approval of adult ‘mentors’ who mostly don’t give a shit about them, b. demands that they tie their entire identity to a set of standards that’snot merely unsustainable, but intentionally so, because its unstated purpose is to weed out the ‘unworthy’ rather than to provide useful goals for self-improvement, and c. denies them opportunities to learn useful life skills in favour of training them up in an excruciatingly narrow academic skill-set that’s basically useless outside of an institutional career path that the vast majority of them will never be allowed to pursue.
Okay, this thing’s core concept is so stupid that it feels like a parody of bad kids movies, which is why I urge you to watch this with no further explaination…
At first I was thinking “This actually looks kinda good. I wonder what OP’s problem with it is.
and then THAT happened.
I wanna shake this casting directors hand
what the fuck
why does this trailer start out so fucking good and then turn into fucking that
I can’t bring this up at all without reiterating “the question we should be discussing is how to get rid of homophobia within the entertainment industry” but with that said I feel like a lot of people iterating the reductive “only gay people should play gay characters” bit focus only on the very few “prestige” gay roles that serve as Oscar bait for straight actors. It completely ignores shit like Laura Dern, Harry Hamlin, Micheal Ontkean getting blacklisted for a DECADE after playing Ellen’s love interest in the coming out episode of her show and starring in Making Love (1982) respectively. And those are just examples of straight actors who managed to bounce back after not getting work for t e n y e a r s, God knows how many more there are, especially since we’ve now started this lovely ahistorical trend of treating straight actors (Rob James-Collier) speaking out against homophobia getting them blackballed as co-opting oppression for attention instead of, you know, being mad homophobia can cost anyone a job. And how do you classify actors like Cate Blanchett and Gillian Anderson, who both identify as straight but have openly revealed having prior romantic & sexual relationships with women?
If you still can’t be bothered to care about any of this because they’re straight people and what about gay people: it’s a much more prevalent and damaging stereotype that gay people can’t convincingly pretend to be straight as actors. Sean Hayes’ negative reviews in the musical (MUSICAL!) Promises, Promises were so based in this homophobic idea that his straight costar Kristin Chenoweth published an op-ed entirely devoted to shaming critics for it. Any piece of media Matt Bomer has been in since he came out is guaranteed to mention his inability to pass as straight at least once, no matter that he did it just fine before he chose to come out.
The belief is so pervasive that it even impacts straight actors, through typecasting. When was the last time you saw Natasha Lyonne play a straight woman? Melanie Lynskey? How many straight actors have you seen have to have to have “transitional” roles from playing gay to playing some sort of sexual menace before they’re allowed straight roles again? Stanley Tucci’s pre and post Lovely Bones roles come to mind offhand, as does Gethin Anthony’s leap from “the gay king from Game of Thrones” to “Charles Manson on Aquarius” (a show which no one watched, but, HMM, NBC renewed over gay-run Hannibal). The gay actor inverse of that phenomenon, of course, is the hyper-masculinity and/or depravity of all Neil Patrick Harris’ straight roles (How I Met Your Mother, Gone Girl) or hyperconformativity to the feminine ideal alongside unthreatening homoerotic humor (Portia de Rossi as the wife of Tobias Bluth, Kate McKinnon in various roles & sketches).
And if all that isn’t enough to convince you that “straight actors shouldn’t play gay roles” is a laughably ignorant statement, I would really encourage you to think about everything we know about the production of the movie Frida. Should Salma Hayak have just not fought to have a Latina wlw on screen? Are we going to argue over whether or not she was the “right” person to be coierced into a sex scene by Harvey Weinstein? Are we gonna do that for Blue Is The Warmest Colour, too?
Or we could just focus on asking how to stop violence, including the innate violence of bigotry, within the entertainment industry. Yeah, let’s do that instead.
Some related, though not comprehensive, links (i.e., not “sources”):
Harry Hamlin & Michael Ontkean’s blacklisting, as well as a brief synopsis of gay & lesbian representation/coding in Hollywood from the silent era through the 1990s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3apqlIjcCC4
Being seen as gay means you can’t play straight typecasting
And again, seriously: it’s nowhere near comprehensive (erases and at times dismisses everyone who isn’t a white gay/lesbian) but please at least watch ‘The Celluloid Closet’ before you make general, absolutist statements about acceptable forms of representation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3apqlIjcCC4
Also worth adding to this post is that the idea that straight people shouldn’t be allowed to play gay characters has been used to force closeted LGBT actors to out themselves, like what happened with Lee Pace.
Viewers don’t know what an actor/actress has or hasn’t lived, and they shouldn’t be forced to divulge personal details about their sexual lives to pass your litmus test, especially since doing so can hurt their careers.
screaming into the void since '89 