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Bittersweet Forever~

@waverlilyhime / waverlilyhime.tumblr.com

HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOOO~ My name is Waverlily~~ I am a Lolita who especially loves bittersweet and pastel goth styles. I've devoted this blog to posting bittersweet coordinates, my own outfits, purchases I make, and other outfit inspirational things.~
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I forgot I was scrolling through my dead ass blog and kept trying to heart things.

I'm so fucking funny.

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atop-the-hill
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earlgraytay

okay, there are many legitimate reasons to dislike disney, but can we please stop using “disney tells stories based on folktales!!11!!!” as one of them? pretty please, with cherries?

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moral-autism

Why is this not a legitimate reason? Isn’t it sad, to see all the most iconic and familiar-to-most-children forms of folk tales be under copyright?

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earlgraytay

…The problem isn’t that Disney makes stories based on folktales, though. Honestly, I don’t think the problem is even the copyright. (Though that sure doesn’t help.) The problem is that Disney has the brand recognition and the deep pockets to freeze out anyone else who tries. 

I know, it’s a subtle distinction. I’m going to use dolls as an example, because Special Interest Hell. Bear with me for a second. 

A while back, Mattel made a doll line called Ever After High. Ever After High had a gimmick- it was a doll line based on fairy tales, but instead of being based directly on the fairy tale characters themselves, it was based on their children. This meant that they could create iconic and memorable designs for the characters without being accused of ripping off Disney’s designs.  

This is an original “basic” Ever After High doll: 

The dolls are almost fully articulated- they have 360 degree head rotation, articulated shoulders, elbows, wrists, and knees. Their costume designs are complicated, often featuring multiple layers of fabric and lots of accessories. Each doll came with a stand, a hairbrush, and a bookmark that told their “story”. They retailed for $16.99. 

The dolls came in two factions: “Royals” (the children of heroes) and “Rebels” (the children of villains). Each one had a backstory and a motivation, and they had an accompanying webseries that told those stories. 

(I swear there’s a reason I’m going into Excruciating Detail.)

Even though I didn’t like the sculpts… Ever After High was a pretty good doll line, and it was moderately successful. It brought in 53 million dollars- not nearly as much as Barbie, but still a decent profit.

… Disney didn’t sue Mattel for this. Copyright never got involved. But they didn’t need to sue. They did two things that killed Ever After High dead. 

The first was that they took the license for the Disney Princesses away from Mattel and gave it to Hasbro. Since that’s, obviously, a big money-making license, that was a pretty nasty punishment. 

But the other thing Disney did, the thing that I think was what properly killed Ever After High… they massively expanded the merchandising for Disney Descendants. 

…Now, it looks like Disney Descendants was already in the works when Ever After High started coming out. I don’t think Disney got so OMGSCARED of Ever After High that they made a product directly to compete with it. And I can’t say anything bad about the movies because a) I haven’t seen them and b) I think @bpd-dylan-hall will kill me. 

But the two franchises share some notable similarities- they’re about the teenage children of fairy tale characters, who are split into two factions: “hero” and “villain”. They’re very ‘modern’, with colorful hair and flashy, iconic designs.  

This is a basic Disney Descendants doll: 

I own both Ever After High and Descendants dolls, and I gotta say: the Descendants are way lower quality. They’ve got almost no articulation- just wrists, hips, and knees. They don’t come with a stand or many accessories. Their costumes are much simpler, and most of the designs are screen-printed on. They’re not crap dolls, don’t get me wrong, and I like their sculpts more than EAH- but by comparison, they’re not very good. 

But that made one important difference: The Disney Descendants basic doll retailed at $12.99. 

Now, riddle me this: if you’re the parent of an eight-year-old girl who loves dolls, which are you more likely to get: the high-quality expensive doll with a lot of small parts she’s likely to lose, or the cheaper one with a brand name on it that you recognize? 

Disney was able to massively undercut the competition. Mattel couldn’t keep up. They made cheaper versions of the Ever After High dolls -they went for $9.99 or so, they’re absolute garbage, and collectors and kids both hated them. 

Mattel hasn’t officially canceled Ever After High. But the show’s not coming out anymore, the dolls aren’t on shelves anymore, and we haven’t heard anything about either since 2017. Disney won, and they won hard. 

If Disney didn’t have the kind of money they do, if Disney didn’t have the kind of clout they do, this wouldn’t have happened. I mean, sure, all doll lines end eventually, that’s the way of the world, but Disney deliberately undercut the competition. Depending on how much dolls cost to make and ship, they might even have been making them at a loss.

But Disney could afford to do it because they’re Disney.

The only time anyone’s ever really been able to successfully make a fairy tale franchise without getting shot down by Disney was Shrek, and that’s because Disney didn’t want to touch the aeShrektic with a ten-foot pole. They were scared they’d ruin their image. Any other time anyone does anything with fairy tales (or princesses, or talking cars, or talking fish, or pirates, or…)  Disney can make their own version and sell it at a loss, driving their competitors out of business. They have more money than God. They can afford to lose money on one theme park, let alone one toyline or one movie.

The problem with Disney is that it’s a monopoly. and like any other monopoly, Disney can freeze out anyone who tries to compete with them. I think if you trustbusted Disney- left them with their animation studio and maybe their theme park division, but took away Pixar and Marvel and ESPN and all their television outlets and all the other crap they own- they’d have a harder time undercutting everyone else.  you’d see more stuff based on folklore and fairy tales, and it’d have more than a snowball’s chance in hell of being successful. 

said it before and ill say it again fuck the rat

#disney#idk
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violetoblivion

We regret to inform you the writer who

  • Created a race of slaves who are happy to serve, whose abolitionist allies are seen as out of touch or weird
  • Created werewolves who were metaphors for AIDs and then made a character who deliberately infects people
  • Has only given LGBT+ representation outside the actual content of her works
  • Appropriated large portions of Native American culture and spirituality in order to make an American School!AU
  • Made Jewish caricatures out of Goblins and had them all run banks

Might not be a good person.

#political#things to remember
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val-ritz
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bogleech

Things food snobs are wrong about

  • “Organic” isn’t better for you or for the environment. It actually means nothing of any significance at best and is sometimes even the more wasteful, more hazardous option.
  • A shitload of “natural” food including a lot of imported produce is grown and harvested through slave labor in inhumane conditions.
  • Pizza, fried chicken, french fries, fast food, candy bars and chips ARE nutritious. They are loaded with good things. Just because they have an abundance of excess fats and might not be healthy as a staple doesn’t mean they are “nutritionless” or that their calories are “empty.” Those are hokey buzzwords pushed by the people in charge of how much you pay for the alternatives.
  • Eating healthier costs more. Much more. Looking down on people for their reliance on cheaper food is extremely classist and expecting everyone to be able to live off fresh veggies and cage-free meats is insultingly unrealistic in the modern world.
  • “Processed” literally only means the food went through some kind of automated process. This can be literally the exact same thing a human being would have done to the food for it to be labeled “unprocessed.” Being processed does not make something less healthy.
  • Chemicals with long, scary names are part of nature. An apple is full of compounds you probably can’t pronounce. A shorter ingredients label only means they didn’t bother listing all 300 things the product is actually made of and HAS to be made of.
  • Preservatives, artificial flavors and other additives are not the devil. Most are harmless and in general they are part of the reason you haven’t already starved to death or died of a food borne illness.
  • MSG is not bad for you at all.
  • The fact that something might be made of “scrap” meats like pig snouts or chicken necks only means one thing: that we didn’t waste perfectly normal, edible meat.
  • I DON’T KNOW HOW I FORGOT THIS IN MY FIRST VERSION OF THIS POST BUT GMO’S ARE NOT DANGEROUS TO EAT. GMO’S ARE SAVING LIVES. YOU’VE ALREADY EATEN GMO’S BEFORE YOU EVEN KNEW THE TERM. IT’S FINE. EAT THEM.
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bogleech

So I’ve literally done this twice before and so have several other people but here are sources on all of these, most of them fairly recent academic studies or otherwise the most up-to-date I could find:

  • Organic food isn’t better for you: [1] [2] [3]
  • Tracing food industry slave labor: [1]
  • Healthier food is more expensive: [1] [2]
  • Saturated fats (i.e. “junk food”) still provide needed energy, aren’t as bad as people thought: [1] [2]
  • “Processed” isn’t synonymous with less healthy, because it means a lot of different things: [1]
  • “Chemicals” also means a lot of things and many food components are misunderstood by the general public: [1]
  • MSG is not harmful: [1] [2] [3]
  • GMO’s are not dangerous to eat: [400 sources collected here]
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olive-the-olive

It looks like your sources on organics are mostly on the health impact. Do you have any on the environmental impact? bc that’s the reason I feel like I should buy organic.

Also, it always bugs me that the GMO debate is over whether they’re bad for you. Like of course they’re not bad for you but the patent issues around them are really concerning.

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bogleech

Oh yeah, I forgot!

Comparative analysis of environmental impacts of agricultural production systems, agricultural input efficiency, and food choice - a massive 2017 study, which is also included in a collection of other research here: “Is organic really better for the environment?” The general conclusion right now is basically “it depends,” but it depends on the produce we’re looking at as well as the type of environmental harm:

If this chart is a little obtuse to read, here’s a breakdown:

GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS: organically grown meat and dairy is better for the environment in terms of greenhouse gases. For all other foods, there isn’t a big difference.

LAND USE: all organic foods are worse here, using much more land.

ENTROPHICATION: all organic food is STAGGERINGLY worse here, HOLY SHIT.

ACIDIFICATION: all organic food is worse, once again.

ENERGY USE: organically grown cereals are worse, all other organic foods roughly the same or better at overall energy use. There isn’t a category here for pesticides, but it’s important to know that “organic farming” DOES NOT AND HAS NEVER MEANT PESTICIDE-FREE. Apparently over 95% of people who choose organic food say they do so because they don’t want to be eating pesticides. That’s pretty fucking alarming, because organic crops are pretty much equally likely to be sprayed with something to kill weeds, insects or both, and just because those pesticides are certified organic in origin doesn’t mean they’re harmless to humans or to the environment. There’s more about that in this article.

Anyway, the biggest failure of organic foods is that “entrophication” thing, which most people have never even heard of. It refers largely to fertilizer and organic waste runoff, i.e. “extra food” dumped into the environment, which SOUNDS better to the average person than most forms of pollution, but is in fact absolutely devastating to entire ecosystems.

Nutrient pollution means food for microorganisms first and that is what causes population explosions of bacteria, fungi and toxic algae. This can kill off every single living thing in a given environment, like the “red tide” blooms that recently ravaged Florida. Overall, organic farming is a mess of poorly understood advantages and disadvantages in different areas.

#informative#important#food
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