MDZS Fic Compilation

dragon ball z was so good i wouldnt even consider it an anime. it was more like a documentary it was so good

Terrible imo.

Dragged fights on for literally 10 episodes, same storyline over and over again, plot armor a mile thick.

goku did so much, so much for the planet and you’ve done? I’m sorry… who are you?

ive never seen star wars

@iconuk01

IM SORRY IM LAUGHING SOSO HARD RIGHT NOW BUT YOUR TAGS MADE MY NIGHT AHAHAHAHHA

image 1: a wooden board nailed to a tree in a forest with a corded phone on it. text reads ‘(caps) Phone of the wind (end caps). This Phone is For Everyone Who Lost A Loved One. It is a phone for memories and saying the goodbyes you never got to say. Dedicated to Dale Sparks’.

image 2: a tag reading ‘i thought this was gonna be stupid and then i cried’. end id.

addendum to image description: this was part of the Telephone of the Wind project! the original is in Iwate Prefecture, and there's lots:

(I specify "was" because the directory says "Unfortunately, this phone was removed as the installers did not get permission from the park." but Michigan has others!)

Source

Bears have a real joie de vivre u know. they live in harmony w their inner child….. we can only watch and yearn

big fan of characters with abandonment + attachment issues so profound that they leave claw marks in everything they touch but would sooner gnaw off their own leg than admit they just want someone to stay for once. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course.

big fan of characters who are always leaving. who constantly have a suitcase in their hand. characters who start planning their exit the moment they arrive and get nervous when the people in their lives start to Know them. in a totally normal well adjusted and not at all projecting way of course

as you may know, reading tumblr posts about Dean Winchester is an experience surprisingly akin to auditing classes on gender performance and masculinity at a graduate level media studies program. at least if you read enough of them.

which unfortunately I have! and now I have some thoughts.

see, there are character archetypes that crop up over and over again, and particularly often in 90s and 00s genre TV shows. I am vastly oversimplifying, but let’s boil them down to the Three Main Kinds Of Dudes you are most likely to see in these shows.

Let’s start with the Guy Who’s Not Cool, And Knows It. he’s all over the place: he’s Xander on Buffy, and later Wesley. he’s Julian Bashir, Rodney McKay, Seth Cohen and (at least early on) Alec Hardison. he’s usually not the main character, but he’s up there in the main credits.

and he’s textually, overtly anxious about his masculinity. this is something that other characters comment on, and sometimes he admits to it himself. his long-term character arc is — at least in part — about resolving that anxiety, confronting it and growing past it over time.

(he’s also, often, a self-insert for the guys in the writer’s room. but we don’t have time to unpack all of that.)

our second category is a bit more of a grab bag, because in some ways it covers all the guys who don’t fit into categories 1 or 3. but, broadly, we can call him the Guy Who Doesn’t Need To Make A Big Deal Out Of It. he’s the guy who comes across as quietly secure in his masculinity, who has nothing to prove on that front and whose story doesn’t need to be about proving it. Sometimes he functions as a foil for the Anxious Guy, sometimes he’s just quietly ticking along in the parts of the story that aren’t about Proving anybody’s Manliness. He’s Giles and Oz and Gunn, Eliot Spencer, Ronon Dex, Benjamin Sisko.

and then there’s the Cool Guy.

the Cool Guy is a main character, or he has top billing in an ensemble cast. the Cool Guy is a walking, talking grab-bag of heroic mannerisms. He’s tough and strong and he doesn’t talk about his feelings. he’s a ladykiller. he’s a flirt. he has the popular imagination version of Captain Kirk’s personality, and the popular imagination version of Han Solo’s sex appeal. he kills bad guys and drops a witty one-liner afterwards. he can fly a plane, or a spaceship, or drive a cool car or ride a motorcycle. he walks away from explosions without flinching. he’s not doing this ironically. he’s not performing. he’s just Cool.

as written, he has the depth of a cardboard standee.

but he’s played by an actor who’s, you know, a real human person, and wants his character to have some kind of interiority. so this weird alchemy happens, over and over again.

here’s the thing about that grab-bag of Cool Guy traits and mannerisms: there are real men, in real life, who do most of those things. and most of them probably aren’t overcompensating for anything! but also? none of them have the whole grab-bag. They have, like, two at most.

no one does all of them unless they’re doing them on purpose — unless they’re putting on a performance. but the Cool Guy as written isn’t performing. and the actor playing him has to embody that impossible character while giving him some kind of depth.

So what happens? Dean Winchester. John Sheppard. All the Cool Guys who are meant, textually, to be Effortlessly Performing Masculinity… and subtextually read as desperately overcompensating for their queerness.

whoops!

and somehow tv writer’s rooms keep doing this! they think that if they just pile on more Cool Guy traits, they’ll make the performance convincing, when they’re actually just undermining him more and more.

(sometimes the Cool Guy isn’t even meant to be heroic! the writers of Smallville tried, as far as I can tell, to make Lex Luthor come across as a suave, worldly, sophisticated ladykiller. what they got was a man who makes way-too-intense eye contact with a buff farm boy while suggestively drinking fancy bottled water.)

(also I didn’t watch Teen Wolf but I am given to understand that Derek falls in this category? and Stiles is for sure an archetypical Anxious Guy.)

the thing about the Anxious Guy is that because his anxious masculinity is textual, it can be addressed and resolved in the text. Because the Cool Guy is not textually performing, not textually anxious, he just has to keep on being that guy without the text ever acknowledging that there’s anything weird about it. and all the while the subtext is screaming that this! man! is! trying! too! hard!

and we as viewers with eyes in our heads can see that tension, between what’s said and what’s shown, and tbh most of the time the simplest and most obvious way to resolve it is to say “ah. okay. that man is Not Straight.”

so that’s why Dean Winchesters keep happening. thank u for coming to my ted talk.

This makes me want to see how this kind of templating works out when atypical characters are dropped into roles like this, especially the Cool Guy roles. Like, if your cool guy is queer, is not a guy, isn’t like standard western culture sort of character. Especially when the writer’s room and much of the production may be either majority like your usual white cis straight etc etc guys who have all developed the Cool Guy, or people who at least grew up on it.

I mean, someone who started watching Supernatural from the start, at age 15 is now 30. And they’ve potentially grown up with the Dean Cool Guy who is also sub-textually Anxious About Queer perhaps firmly in their mind, and bringing this new mashup archetype into writers rooms of the future along with, we hope, some greatly shifted cultural norms and that is interesting as heck to me.

yeah!!!

the thing about the Cool Guy is that he is in some ways the product of a really specific time and place — he mostly only exists, can exist, in the context of a 90s/00s network TV genre show that’s kind of garbage at women characters.

the Anxious Guy has a slightly larger habitable zone — Xander is my archetypical Anxious Guy but there’s no room for a Cool Guy on Buffy. the only guys who could possibly fill the niche are Angel and Spike, but I feel like they don’t fit, because the Cool Guy is a) the protagonist or nearly so, b) the product of a late 20th century white cis dude upbringing, and c) completely un-self-aware.

someone in the notes pointed out that John Crichton has a lot of the Cool Guy hallmarks, which made me go !!!!! because yes, technically! but he’s a potential Cool Guy thrown into an environment where he’s always, always wrong-footed, where he’s never at home and never in command of the situation, where no one around him shares the socialization he grew up with, and where he’s almost never the most capable person in the room. Also he drinks his respect women juice, which the Cool Guy doesn’t. he’s not a traditional hero. he says it himself — he’s not kirk. he’s dorothy gale.

also like. i said earlier that the Anxious Guy is a writer’s room self-insert. which he super is. and in a lot of ways the Cool Guy is a writer’s room power fantasy. but the Cool Guy only ends up Like That when he’s the product of a writer’s room that is dominated by writers who have that power fantasy. so any writer’s room that’s more diverse than the ones that have historically produced Cool Guys are just… not going to fall into that trap, because theyll have different self-insert characters and power fantasy characters.

just had a galaxy brain realization: if Dean Winchester was not trapped in the toxic masculinity hellscape universe of a CW genre show, he would be Jake Peralta

yes I will elaborate but I’m about to leave for work so it’ll have to be later

okay okay so. Jake Peralta 🤝 Dean Winchester:

however! Jake is not a Cool Guy. In early B99 Jake is trying to be a Cool Guy, but the narrative knows this about him. If it’s textually a performance, it can be addressed and resolved in the narrative — which it is! that’s like his whole character arc!

because Jake lives in universe where his performative masculinity is allowed to be acknowledged and interrogated, he gets to grow up and out of it. he gets to have a healthy, non-performative identity! and we the audience don’t have to keep asking ourselves what the fuck this man is trying to compensate for.

and also, because Jake is the product of a creative team that’s like. capable of being normal about queerness? they could absolutely just say “oh and also Jake is bi. that’s a facet of his identity! just fyi.” and we as viewers could take that information as the absolutely non-earth-shattering trait that it would be. It would explain some stuff about him, but not everything, because he was allowed to build an identity outside of Cool Guy performance.

whereas Dean’s writers were faced with the choice between ‘let him be bi so the show makes sense’ and ‘burn it all down.’ and, uh. well. they made a choice.

Anybody else got that Evergiven sized writers block

“Where’s the next chapter?!” Well buddy you’re never gonna guess

What’s the comic sans trick?

#i feel like someone just asked me to eat dirt for my health

wingdings' true purpose as a font

Wingdings holy shit some of y'all are on a whole different level of galaxy wizard brain batshittery and I am in awe.

Exciting. When I don't want to see what I'm writing I just make the font color almost indistinguishable from the background color. (Do not do this.)

(I don't think the secret to the comic sans hack is comic sans itself; I think it's any deflation of being intimidated by your canvas.)

Hold on I need to go look something up immediately.

... you can't say that and not give the link.

Looks like you can even make it something other than kittens, by appending ?search=dinosaur (that's the example the page gives) to the end of the URL.

@andauril

@gattmammon

first day in the time loop i suspect nothing

second day in the time loop i still suspect nothing

third day in the time loop i realize that it has been tuck him in tuesday for 72 hours

fourth day in the time loop i realize that spending money has no long term consequence. i go to waffle house 15 times

fifth day in the time loop i am now sick of waffle house. i look up how much horses cost

sixth day in the time loop i buy a horse. i dont know how to ride it

seventh day in the time loop i buy the same horse again and watch youtube tutorials on horse riding

eighth day in the time loop i buy the same horse again and i am getting better at riding it

ninth day in the time loop. i once again buy the same horse. i can ride it successfully. it seems to know me

tenth day in the time loop i buy the same horse and ride it to waffle house. i feed it hashbrowns and sweet tea

i just cant get over the lobster scene. like his friends are actively begging him, do not get into the lobster tank. please eddie. tom hardy you were in mad max fury road dont do this. and tom hardy looks at his friend like “i know i shouldnt do this. i shouldnt be getting into this lobster tank but i’m going to anyway. i’m already mostly inside. cant stop now. i’m sorry i dont want to be doing this either there’s just no other choice for me.” and then he takes a bg bite out of a live lobster that’s still in the shell and everything. 

tom hardy doesn’t actually know he’s being possessed by an alien yet in the story. he’s just resigned himself to whatever fucking meltdown he seems to be having. he doesn’t even seem particularly surprised that things have gone this way for him. like ten minutes later he finds out his heart stopped working and hes just like “you asshole” and he throws his alien parasite against the wall like a water balloon. and then he just leaves and is immediately kidnapped. what a fucking wild ride tom hardy is on. 

tom hardy’s actual superpower is being the exact same level of dysfunctional no matter what is happening in his life. so when everything’s going ok for him he self-destructs spectacularly, but when literally everything that can happen to a human being happens to him, he does, like, unrealistically well. climbing into a lobster tank and eating a live animal with large claws just like… “well, this is what’s happening to me today. i’m so sorry you have to watch this, man. anyway here goes, i’m going to bite into a living creature with my human mouth and then LOSE CONSCIOUSNESS”

this movie’s fucking killing me from the inside.

IT WASNT EVEN IN THE SCRIPT TOM HARDY IS JUST A FUCKING GENUINE MADMAN

i actually dont give a shit if hamas did everything and worse that israel accuses them of it still doesn't justify killing 30000 random civilians

this is literally the least radical position you could have btw it's literally just normal fucking morals. every day i live in disbelief that people are saying "it's complicated". there's nothing complicated about saying "killing 30000 civilians including children, journalists, doctors, and human rights officials is bad"

WHO KEEPS DOING THIS

Paperbacks should be $1 and hardcovers should be $2

honestly nothing shows the sad and pathetic state of media targeted toward minors better than the fact that inside out 2 does not and cannot introduce "horny" as one of the new pubescent emotions

this may read like a shitpost but i do mean it genuinely, it's frankly depressing that you cannot make a piece of art exploring the feelings and internalities of middle schoolers that actually explores the realities that middle schoolers experience. like the real-life experiences of average middle schoolers are considered "innapropriate" to put in art intended for middle schoolers!

if you put an uncensored account of an average middle schooler's day to paper, it would be rated adult media and middle schoolers would be discouraged from reading it. that sure doesn't feel like how the world should work.

if i can impart any one piece of wisdom to y’all, it’s to, whenever possible, assume good intentions

assume people are trying their best, want to be good and treat others well, and that when their behavior doesn’t align with those goals, it’s because of outside factors that are pushing them to their limit

it’s hard to do, it doesn’t always come naturally, but it’s worth it

$20 to rent a movie online for 48 hours i need yall to get so real right now bc that is insane. “that’s the average cost” which is a problem!! if im paying $20 i better get the film on dvd to have and watch forever

and before i get the “what about seeing ig at the movie theater” comments

i dont have a 60 foot screen and high tech surround sound audio and fancy seats at home. i will pay $20 to watch a movie once with friends for the experience in the theater. i will absolutely not pay $20 to watch a movie on my laptop lmfao

my favourite button ever is "open link in new tab"..