I’m obsessed with these pictures of the Indianapolis Colts Cheerleaders wearing their real world professional work attire as their cheer uniforms
Cher destroying gender
Spirited Away (2001) dir. Hayao Miyazaki // Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017) dir. Rian Johnson
guys listen
mermaids would have to be dark-skinned and chubby to survive in the ocean
water isnt a great means of protecting oneself from the sun
theyd have to be very dark if they were shallow mermaids and they didnt want to be constantly sunburnt
and they may be paler if they lived deeper in the water but theyd have to be buff and/or chubby as hell to resist the water pressure and cold of the deep sea
what im saying is pale-ass white skinny mermaids are just unrealistic
I love this tea
Fat isn’t a defense against water pressure, it’s an insulator. So the colder the water, the fatter the mermaid.
Scandinavian merfolk would be tubby, evolving more for persistence hunting in the freezing coastal waters, possibly relying more on siren-song to lull prey into effective range. The less moving the better! Gotta keep the chub on to survive the winter.
Whereas Mediterranean/Polynesian merfolk would spend their time among the fertile reefs in warmer waters, competing with other predators. They would be built for speed and agility, buff like sprinters. Darker skin would be harder to spot under the surf, and more resistant to the glaring sun.
Also: it’s not hair, it’s scillia that they use to filter plankton out of the water, and it stings like a jellyfish if you touch it.
I would imagine that merfolk come in many different colors, maybe they even have the ability to shift their skin tone to assist in hunting? I guess that depends on how intelligent your mermaids are.
Tldr; cold water mermaids would probably be chubby, warm water mermaids would look like Serna Williams.
Another thing to take into account is Deep-Sea-Gigantism. It’s not fully understood why many animal species such as the colossal squid and whales typically grow to unimaginable sizes in high-water-pressure areas, but it’s assumed that it develops as some sort of defense mechanism. This would imply that deep-sea merfolk would be a sort of Leviathan-class eldritch horror.
Hell yeah hell yeah
disney: mulan live action movie
me:
disney:
me:
The change from Li Shang is concerning, and not only because it’s erasing a very distinctly bisexual character. Forget sexuality: even if you prefer a more platonic interpretation (which I don’t), Li Shang clearly respects, admires, and likes Mulan as Ping and as a person. He loves her as a friend long before he loves her as a woman, girlfriend, or wife. The entire point of the movie is that Li Shang loves Mulan as a person (platonically, romantically, either way), not just as a potential mate. The entire point of the entire ending is that people do not award women the same respect offered to men. (Mushu: “Huh? You’re a girl now, remember?”) The entire point of the finale is that Shang and Ping’s friends do give Mulan the same respect as a woman, because her gender doesn’t matter: she is still the same person with the same good strategic sense, and they’ll trust her whether she’s wearing armor or a dress.
If this “Chen Honghui” hates Mulan/Ping until he finds out that she is a woman, that isn’t just erasing Shang’s bisexuality: it’s also sexualizing Mulan and stripping her of all her agency and accomplishment. In this version, Mulan isn’t worthy of respect as a person. She is only worth admiring as a woman. He can’t like her as a warrior, as a strategist, as a friend, as a person; he can only like her as a woman. Let me rephrase this: Instead of giving Mulan a chance to earn the same respect Chen offers to all his other warriors, he’s only going to appreciate her once he sees her as a woman. As an “approved” sexual object. ONLY THEN is it worth noticing her or granting her basic human decency and respect. “Something like love,” as the description tells us, clearly has nothing to do with any of her personality and everything to do with genitalia. Even if he was completely and entirely straight, we should see that he’s at least befriending Mulan/Ping before the Gender Reveal. Straight guys can still recognize another man’s good qualities and appreciate them for what they are. If Ping isn’t even a friend before “he” becomes Mulan, then this isn’t “something like love;” it’s just lust and objectification, pure and simple. The “rivalry” is also bullshit. The fact that “rivalry” can change so quickly into “something like love” means only that for Chen, a set of imaginary genitalia is all it takes to completely shift his perspective on someone from “worthy of competition” to “worthy of sex.” What, so he’s just going to abandon the rivalry now that she’s a woman? Oh - because she’s only a woman. He doesn’t have to compete with her anymore, because that’s not what you do with women. A rivalry would imply that she’s still a man, and at least he can view a rival as a decent warrior; but now, she can be comfortably reduced to Sex Appeal.
Also… what about that personality? “Cocky?” A “mean, bullying streak”? Thinks of Mulan as “his chief rival?” Are you going to strip the male lead of EVERY shred of decency? Li Shang isn’t a bully: he is a soldier who pushes his men (and woman) to excel, because this is wartime and that’s the only way to survive. He genuinely cares about them and shows real pride when they show signs of improvement. He doesn’t see them as rivals; he sees them as friends for whom he is responsible. Sure, he doesn’t like Ping at first, but that’s got nothing to do with gender and more to do with the fact that Ping’s initial behavior is so inflammatory. (Dodges commander’s questions; starts fights in the rice line; holds the other soldiers back in training; cheats on assignments, even if that’s the result of Mushu’s intervention). Once Ping proves himself as a person and as a warrior, Shang doesn’t hesitate to reward Ping with all the admiration Ping deserves.
Disney is so concerned about removing every hint of bisexuality from its movies, it’s also utterly destroyed any decency they could have in a heterosexual romance. In their attempts to make everything nice and straight and cisgendered, they’re bending their characters WAY out of whack.
They’re taking Mulan - originally a woman who denies gender boundaries to prove that gender doesn’t matter to personal worth - and they’re turning her into a person who can’t earn respect,honor, or even the admiration of her fellow soldiers until she puts on a dress and can be seen, not as a warrior or as a person but as an object of desire.
And they’re taking Shang - originally a man who cares about his fellow soldiers and who respects Mulan regardless of her gender presentation - and turned him into a cocky asshole who only cares about himself and is only able to appreciate Mulan when she is female, and even then, only because he’d like to have some sex.
What the fuck Disney. What. The. Fuck
Reblogging this here as well because this pisses me off.
All of this, but also, let’s stop teaching young girls that it’s ok to be with boys who are assholes to you?
All of this, but also, let’s stop teaching young girls that it’s ok to be with boys who are assholes to you?
Detail shots of my “Welcome to Inlé” sculpture, completed early July, 2014. Please see my blog for another photoset of this piece—I couldn’t fit all the images into one post! (Link: http://blackrabbitsculpture.tumblr.com/post/98614748684/as-promised-heres-the-turnaround-photoset-for-my)
I realize I mentioned writing more about the piece when I posted these, but now I can’t for the life of me remember what it was I wanted to say.
Watership Down was one of the first novels I read as a child, probably at 10 or 12. I saw the animated film soon after, and it’s clear to me that both the book and the movie made an indelible impression on me. I reread the book every two or three years, and it hasn’t lost any of its power or impact. Most of all, I’m enthralled by the rich stories the rabbits share with one another throughout the novel. My love for mythology was certainly encouraged by reading WSD as a child.
Thanks for the wonderful response to this piece so far, you amazing folks!
Materials and dimensions and all that other good stuff can be found on the turnaround photoset that’s posted on my Tumblr, right below this post.
ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.
humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.
i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy.
i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more.
have a cookie.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
1. The universe is indifferent. We ought not be.
2. A good quote: There are two kinds of people. Those who think, “I don’t want anyone to
suffer like I did.” And those who think, “I suffered; why shouldn’t
they?”
3. Two good quotes by Kurt Vonnegut: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
And: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do
not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your
sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may
disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
#hopepunk
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark
I really needed this right now. Thank you
Indeed.
I think it’s important to clarify that radical kindness doesn’t mean you have to be kind to your abusers, or to asshole men in power (like the orange one or his horrible judge). It’s not biting your tongue, smiling, and allowing yourself to be mistreated in order to fulfill some sort of fucked up ideal of “the high road” or whatever. It’s refusing to allow anyone else to be mistreated without comment. It’s extending kindness to other survivors and other folks facing oppression, even when that oppression is different than the kind you face. The folks in charge want us broken down into easily-controlled bite-size chunks. Empathy, compassion, communication, cooperation, collaboration - these are kindness, and they are powerful, radical tools that we can use to help one another heal and to build our communities into something stronger and better.
Be kind out of spite.