Black Orphan Reviews

if i were a mutant i could never be an x man bc the moment i save my oppressors life and they say some ungrateful shit id be like this bitch empty! and have magneto on speed dial in a hot sec… that bald bitch xavier? i don’t know him

Gomez gives out better relationship advice than like 90% of dudes.

Gomez Addams is a suave motherfucker who loves his wife more than his own life.

Everyone should want a Gomez. He’s p cool.

Gomez and Morticia Addams actually have a very loving and extremely healthy relationship, both in the old TV show and in the more recent movies. They were also one of the first television couples to be shown to have an active (albeit offscreen) sex life. Their frank attitude towards sexuality was shocking in its’ time, but their relationship and their family dynamic is actually more functional and more…dare I say it…sane than most families portrayed on TV.

The comedy in the show came from the family’s “odd” lifestyle, rather than from infighting and petty bickering, or worse, as was common on other shows of the time, thinly veiled references to spousal abuse. They didn’t make fun of each other or act like their children were creatures from another world. Were they strange and outside of social norms? Yes. Were they united in creating a loving home and being good, supportive parents? Absolutely.

These two support and adore their children, care for an aging mother and an estranged brother, put family before everything, and they love each other, wholly, fiercely, without reserve. They are every bit as much in love after at least a decade of marriage as they were the day they met.

Relationship goals. LIFE goals.

Just remembered in the second movie when their third child became “normal” for a period and although they were shocked and didn’t know how to handle it, they didn’t mistreat the child or love it any less. They accepted the difference, even though it was hard for them. 

Reblogged for truth.

Posts about Gomez and Morticia Addams are almost always uplifting and I’m happy to have them on my dash, but I think my favorite bit about this conversation is what Gomez is actually saying to Fester.

It’s nobody’s surprise that many of the aesthetic and thematic elements of The Addams Family in its various incarnations are influenced by Gothic tradition (not goth, that mostly came later. And not Goth, that was much much much too early), and I think Gomez’s words are a dead bullseye in terms of Gothic mentality.

The sublime is a recurring theme throughout Gothic literature. Although the word (like “awesome”) has lost a lot of it’s original luster over the intervening decades, sublime doesn’t really mean elevated and lofty (or even heavenly) as it’s often used today, but rather something possessing the power and grandeur to induce awe and veneration in the mind of the beholder. Although less than divine, something sublime possessed a wildness and power that transcended human ability to control…or even to comprehend.

Sublime is standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon leaning as far as you dare over the railing and still not being able to see the canyon floor below. Sublime is warrior-queen Galadriel being tempted by the One Ring. Sublime is waking up in the middle of the night in the heart of a wild thunderstorm.

Gomez isn’t advising Fester to treat a woman he fancies like a princess, or even elevate her to pedestal of angelic nature (who’s idea was it to equate femininity with purity anyway? What a laughable and historically damaging idea. Shame on whatever dead (probably) white dudes promoted that!)

Gomez is advising Fester that if he truly loves a woman he must do everything he can to remind her of how she’s an untameable force of nature who’s grandeur brings him to his knees in awe and terror. Just like Morticia, for Gomez.

I’ll sign off with one of my most favorite quotes of all time, because it feels suddenly very relevant:

reblogging again because this got even better

Naomi Campbell, Tyra Banks, and Beverly Peele photographed by Patrick Demarchelier for Vogue Magazine May 1992

A praying mantis ghostwrote this

On subsequent viewings, I’ve come to believe that the big issue with Zootopia isn’t that it functions as an apologia for racial bigotry, but that it’s operating on a fundamentally incorrect notion of what racial bigotry actually is.

Speaking as a college-educated, upper middle class white dude, what I often see among my peers - and I’m not going to claim I’ve never fallen into this trap myself - is a pervasive notion that racism is a rational response to an incorrect understanding of the world. That is, it starts with being given bad information - say, that a particular group is naturally violent - and the actual practice of racism springs from operating under the resulting honest misconception.

Watching the film again, I’m struck that the entire second half of the plot only makes sense if this is how you think racism works. The citywide racial panic that forms the second-act climax doesn’t boil over until Judy inadvertently furnishes the mob with a rational justification for their prejudice, and upon the discovery of empirical evidence that refutes that justification, the tension evaporates more or less immediately.

At a charitable reading, Zootopia suffers from a sort of short-sighted utopianism - i.e., the idea that racism could be cured if only people would understand a few things about how the world works. Less charitably… well, there’s a couple of reasons that this understanding of how racial bigotry works is so popular among my particular peer group.

First off, it diminishes personal culpability for racism in practice, allowing one to say: “my actions were reasonable in light of my understanding of the situation - I’d simply been given bad facts.”

More perniciously, however - and this is a big part of the reason it’s so attractive to the college crowd - is that it allows one to hold up one’s education as a shield against allegations of racism. “I can’t possibly be racist,” the defence goes, “racism is born of ignorance and I’m not ignorant. I have a piece of paper to prove it!”

I’m not saying that this is necessarily a calculated stance on the film’s part, but given the obvious target demographic of most of the background jokes, I’m wouldn’t rule it out, either.

I might go on a tangent here, but I feel like this is the logical application of a specific part of tumblr culture into a broader setting. Or better, it’s like the slippery slope of their ideology. More in detail: I think anon was spot on with the talk of “self-improvement” because it’s exactly the word that connects the dots, and might be the link that I was missing to draw a bridge between two different and very infamous groups on this hellsite: anti-redemption arc, and anti-recovery.

Up until very recently, I’ve always thought of these two groups as completely separate; after all, one deals with fiction tropes and the other with tumblr subculture of often mentally ill people touching the delicate subject of forgiveness and overcoming. Yet several times I’ve ignored parallels and overlaps of rhetoric, and then this ask happened and I went “Oh, but of course!”

It’s almost like for the anti-recovery ideology to be consistent, for the insistent and sometimes violent message that you’re not only perfect as you are*, but you are also not allowed to change from this “perfection”, the opposite must be true as well, that if someone is evil (or makes a mistake) then that too cannot be changed. Because if you allow that someone bad can become good, you have to logically admit the opposite as well: that someone good can become bad. And that’s something that is difficult to accept for some.

I’m curious to know @freedom-of-fanfic’s opinion on this (not an obligation at all!)

*I’m also thinking of some replies to the body-positive movement that complained that once again it was all about making X beautiful and perfect and pretty and gorgeous, ironically still alienating and delegitimizing those who have flaws, because instead of accepting that those are flaws and it’s totally normal and okay to have them, the message became a sort of brain-wash into making them beautiful, like something ugly has not the right to exist and still be worthy. I find this kind of pendulum-ideology extremely common here on tumblr 

thanks for the poke! 

I generally agree that it’s tied to the ‘you can never actually change (so why bother trying)’ and its flip side ‘you’re perfect as you are (so only assholes encourage change)’ dichotomy that goes on in spaces that seeks binary definitions for everything and everyone.

tumblr social dynamics also kind of de-incentivizes people to heal or grow or cope successfully.

so all this, and add a dollop of tumblr mechanics to really trap the opinions of the world at large about you in the past/based on your most controversial moments:

and why would anyone bother to try to change or get better? you can never escape from your past, tumblr will never let you forget, and the better you feel the more of a jerk you will be perceived as.

The Stanford prison experiment tapes were so stupid when I watched them in AP psych and so stupid when I watch this film about them. Literally they could’ve all sat and played cards and got $15 a day to tell ghost stories all day and be best friends. But masculinity and whiteness and power created this violent irrationality that positioned young ass men to be met with brutality and trauma and disrespect even when it was obviously taken too far. and it makes no sense. If someone put me in a room with Black girls and said I would get paid $90 a day (that’s the equivalent apparently) to be a prison guard, do you know how fast I’d be sitting with them and learning about them and exchanging Instagrams and like.. sleeping.. like what the fuck was the point of any of that…

My psych teacher introduced us to this study and literally before she showed us was like “don’t ever confuse a study based on one type of person (white men/boys) to be an example of an Everyman situation. There is strong evidence that if this was recreated with diversity, or even just with girls, that the results would have been drastically different. This is an example of bias and sexism in the medical research community.”

“Other, more subtle factors also shaped the experiment. It’s often said that the study participants were ordinary guys—and they were, indeed, determined to be “normal” and healthy by a battery of tests. But they were also a self-selected group who responded to a newspaper advertisement seeking volunteers for “a psychological study of prison life.” In a 2007 study, the psychologists Thomas Carnahan and Sam McFarland asked whether that wording itself may have stacked the odds. They recreated the original ad, and then ran a separate ad omitting the phrase “prison life.” They found that the people who responded to the two ads scored differently on a set of psychological tests. Those who thought that they would be participating in a prison study had significantly higher levels of aggressiveness, authoritarianism, Machiavellianism, narcissism, and social dominance, and they scored lower on measures of empathy and altruism.” http://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/the-real-lesson-of-the-stanford-prison-experiment

The thing about this study is that whether or not it’s generalizable to the public is debatable at best.

But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.

“But it’s certainly generalizable to the population of people who tend to be drawn to prison system and law enforcement jobs because that’s exactly the demographics that tend to show up in those positions.”

(via yonderly4me)

@luna-lobo

this is so true I’m so mad I didn’t realize that

(via sourlily-likes-sourbellies)

viola davis: *breathes*

me:

That’s amazing how people hate and roast you for your actions aimed to save THEM. Yes, THEM because you can never know when you’ll become the next random victim of police brutality. Cops already proven that they can kill or beat you regardless of your actions. They shot at people who followed all their orders. And when people should be mad at cops, they are mad at those who want police to do their work better.

I was gonna take a nap but everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked.

Happy Halloween

😍😍😍😍😍 omg awwwwwww

Yup. This is it. I officially want children

watch out for ideological colonization says the papal state

I can’t decide if this is a step down from calling us “nuclear bombs” or if it’s even more insidious

Please admire this rabbit who made a plan, then carried it out with calm determination.

i’ve been informed that the person running @hivliving lied about their HIV status and other personal details. if this post is accurate, both of the mods of that blog were complete fabrications.

this is particularly upsetting because @hivliving was one of very few blogs on tumblr consistently sharing good information about HIV and pushing back against HIV stigma. the liar behind it obviously did their research, because their HIV posts (that i saw) were consistent with what i know from my real-world AIDS activism.

please don’t give up on demanding dignity and care for people living with HIV because of this person’s deception.

here are some other HIV tumblrs i recommend:

@thegranvarones is also an excellent blog that addresses HIV regularly.

if you’re on twitter, there are TONS of good people and groups to follow there. ACT UP New York, POZ Magazine, VOCAL-NY, GMHC, HIV Is Not a Crime, The Sero Project, HIV Equal, The Body, Black AIDS Institute, Talk HIV, Health GAP, and so many more that you’ll find if you explore for yourself.

keep learning, and keep fighting.

White feminism is getting angry at Bernie for telling Hilary to let him finish speaking BUT not angry when Hilary told a BLM girl to shut up when she tried to voice her concerns