I spent the last ten days of my life ripping off the Smiths
Today I did the laundry, bought a lot of groceries, and accidentally celebrated Bisexual Visibility Day by watching Thor: Ragnarok (2017). I had been warned about Tessa Thompson, but not that I would suddenly start crying at "Asgard is not a place. It's a people." That would be the diaspora.
1. Please enjoy this student dress code protest of 1940.
2. Courtesy of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust: Hari Nef as John Singer Sargent's Madame X. The rest of the series, from last October, is equally good; I especially recommend Erika Linder as Egon Schiele's self-portrait.
3.skygiants liked my collection!
I have now had this cold for a week plus and I am so un-enamored of it. I am even less enamored of the news. I am not on a blackout because that would be like not breathing the pollutants in the atmosphere: it's unavoidable if you want the oxygen, but that doesn't mean I don't resent the crud for existing in the first place.
1. Please enjoy this student dress code protest of 1940.
2. Courtesy of
handful_ofdust: Hari Nef as John Singer Sargent's Madame X. The rest of the series, from last October, is equally good; I especially recommend Erika Linder as Egon Schiele's self-portrait.3.
skygiants liked my collection!I have now had this cold for a week plus and I am so un-enamored of it. I am even less enamored of the news. I am not on a blackout because that would be like not breathing the pollutants in the atmosphere: it's unavoidable if you want the oxygen, but that doesn't mean I don't resent the crud for existing in the first place.
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I know I should apologize to your vision, but that's a wonderful thing to hear.
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I woke up to put the child on the bus and have been living in a comedy of errors ever since, including our new car going in to be made shinier so we got a loaner car but the loaner car had a flat and so on, and plus also a headache I gave myself because I accidentally used the wrong milk on my post-panic snack cereal last night because cereal was all I could do for my stupid self and lactose is my biggest headache trigger and soon I will be eaten by other more sensible people and you were saying about the country?
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Writes good queer Jewish demon stories, too.
I woke up to put the child on the bus and have been living in a comedy of errors ever since, including our new car going in to be made shinier so we got a loaner car but the loaner car had a flat and so on, and plus also a headache I gave myself because I accidentally used the wrong milk on my post-panic snack cereal last night because cereal was all I could do for my stupid self and lactose is my biggest headache trigger and soon I will be eaten by other more sensible people and you were saying about the country?
*HUGS*
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It was definitely a good recent thing.
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Not wrong, but a strange way to look at it since they cut the scene that would have canonically established her bisexuality.
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I'm sorry to hear that. I was going on the general air of taking place in one of those universes where everyone is bisexual and active about it, which may be a mix of subtext and performances, but I enjoyed.
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(oops hit send by accident)
Like you, I'd just sort of assumed it but given the lack of visibility I would have been MUCH happier if the studio had gone along with the director and actors who all agreed in interviews that it was so.
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Agreed. This is like the second filmed-but-cut canonically queer moment I've heard about. I wish studios would not do that. It has to be in the movie to count.
(Interestingly, the idea that the fellow warrior who took Valkyrie's death for her in the battle with Hela was her lover comes through so clearly that I expected to hear it confirmed in dialogue. I don't think it's anything more than the way they look at each other, but it works.)
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Dude, after the movie T was all "So the Valkyries in this were like the Theban Band, right?"
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A LEGITIMATE CONCLUSION.
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Tessa Thompson did her share. And Tom Hiddleston. And, surprisingly, the implied Bruce/Tony contributed by Mark Ruffalo.
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TESSA. I actually didn't like the movie much (apologies), but. TESSA! She instantly landed on the "see whatever movie/show this person is in" list.
I also wanted all the fic of Thor, Heimdall, Loki, Val, et al sailing off to have space adventures and found New Asgardia somewhere. Even more since canon basically spat on that idea.
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I had mixed feelings about the movie itself: it whiplashed so determinedly between the self-undercuttingly silly and the sincerely touching that I think it must have been part of the point, but I enjoyed the effect more in a low-stakes movie like What We Do in the Shadows (2014) than when worlds were crumbling from the foundations out. I liked a lot of the individual character interactions, the design of the world and the characters was consistently fantastic to look at, I'm a sucker for Valkyrie's arc and you almost never see it played by women, and the story ultimately worked out the Thor-Loki relationship in a way that kept them from being static, which was nice because that's one of my major emotional investments in the MCU. I liked the trick of turning action sequences into sculptural tableaux, in memory and in real time. But it gave me weirdly some of the same held-at-arm's-length feel as Whedon's scriptwriting, where every beat of real emotion must be hastily quipped away. I liked all the beats of real emotion here, even or especially the ones as small as Valkyrie's hair unbound as it was the last time she rode against Hela or Loki unexpectedly catching an object he's in the same room as after all. I'm not the best audience for irony and there's nothing to do about that.
I have only seen Thompson otherwise in Annihilation (2018)—where I saw her first, actually—but she is incredibly good there, in entirely different directions from Valkyrie. I understand why you have that icon.
I also wanted all the fic of Thor, Heimdall, Loki, Val, et al sailing off to have space adventures and found New Asgardia somewhere. Even more since canon basically spat on that idea.
Right, because I assume Thanos vaporized half of them. Well, tough luck. Space adventures.
(I was looking forward to the inevitable clusterfumble of arriving at Earth with a planetary spaceship full of refugees plus Loki whom Earth never wants to see again and it's probably mutual.)
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Yeah, the original Guardians had the same kind of whiplash (as did Farscape, which Guardians owes a lot to) and I was trying to figure out why I love those but the same kind of technique in Ragnarok turned me off. The "He's a friend! From work!" thing just left me cold. I think a big part of it is I enjoyed Thor and Thor 2 a lot and feel kind of defensive of them (they're both so gorgeous).
it gave me weirdly some of the same held-at-arm's-length feel as Whedon's scriptwriting, where every beat of real emotion must be hastily quipped away.
I had the same reaction, and I think that's a general MCU problem -- go for the quip! Lean on the laugh line! It doesn't always work, even if the general audience does laugh.
I have only seen Thompson otherwise in Annihilation (2018)—where I saw her first, actually—but she is incredibly good there, in entirely different directions from Valkyrie. I understand why you have that icon.
I think I saw her in at least one other thing first but she really popped off the screen for me in "Make Me Feel," Janelle Monae's video, with the SMILE and she was just so beautifully expressive. The Val icon was also my default for Pride Month. Smallest of gestures, but it just made me feel good to see her.
Right, because I assume Thanos vaporized half of them. Well, tough luck. Space adventures.
Even better, Infinity War opens with Kenneth Branagh delivering an emergency signal ("We have wounded, and women and children, we are unarmed, we are a refugee ship....") and Thanos kills Loki AND Heimdall IN FRONT OF Thor, and we don't see if anyone got away. Thanos also says "No resurrections this time!" The Thor fans were pissed.
(I was looking forward to the inevitable clusterfumble of arriving at Earth with a planetary spaceship full of refugees plus Loki whom Earth never wants to see again and it's probably mutual.)
There's a really cute fic where they show up and nobody knows what to do with them, and Darcy winds up arranging refugee status with Coulson's help IIRC. (....and now we're in the Age of Orange. //sob)
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I had problems with both Thor and Thor: The Dark World, but "make the next one more like Guardians/Ant-Man" is not the solution I would have gone with.
(For the record, I really enjoyed Ant-Man and the Wasp. It's consciously small-scale, visually-spatially clever, does a couple of things with its characters that are low-grade absolutely against convention, and while I am not thrilled with the ambiguity of the antagonist's fate, I had been desperately afraid the movie considered her disposable and it turned out it did not. As in all other things I am pretending that Infinity War didn't happen.)
I think that's a general MCU problem -- go for the quip! Lean on the laugh line! It doesn't always work, even if the general audience does laugh.
That is probably true, that it's a general problem. I am certainly not saying that Taika Waititi ruined Thor. I just don't like being reminded of Joss Whedon!
The Val icon was also my default for Pride Month. Smallest of gestures, but it just made me feel good to see her.
Good call.
and Thanos kills Loki AND Heimdall IN FRONT OF Thor, and we don't see if anyone got away. Thanos also says "No resurrections this time!" The Thor fans were pissed.
This is just such a stupidly mean-spirited crossover. Why, if you have millions of dollars to throw at a screen, is this what you want to spend it on? "Oh, so dark! Oh, so edgy! Families ripped apart! Loving relationships sundered!" Do you read the fucking news, my dudes? I am literally watching film noir as a coping mechanism. At least it's nightmarish about the ways the world is.
There's a really cute fic where they show up and nobody knows what to do with them, and Darcy winds up arranging refugee status with Coulson's help IIRC. (....and now we're in the Age of Orange. //sob)
Well, they've put us in the Age of Thanos, too, but that doesn't mean the other stories aren't worth writing.
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I have heard it is good! I meant to see it in the theatre and I think I kept getting sick or the heat kept waving or some damn thing. Same thing happened with Ocean's 8. I love Luis from the first one. (Imagine Luis narrating Ragnarok.)
As in all other things I am pretending that Infinity War didn't happen.)
EXCELLENT CHOICE
That is probably true, that it's a general problem. I am certainly not saying that Taika Waititi ruined Thor. I just don't like being reminded of Joss Whedon!
Yeah, it's definitely a general movies problem, but it seems especially pronounced in the MCU (Infinity War basically turned the Guardians crew into walking jokes). I actually saw most of Ragnarok again on the small screen out of curiosity, and scaling it down seemed to help -- at least for the parts where I had been fighting vertigo and migraine in the theatre, hi ho.
This is just such a stupidly mean-spirited crossover. Why, if you have millions of dollars to throw at a screen, is this what you want to spend it on? "Oh, so dark! Oh, so edgy! Families ripped apart! Loving relationships sundered!" Do you read the fucking news, my dudes? I am literally watching film noir as a coping mechanism. At least it's nightmarish about the ways the world is.
It was SO PETTY! So mean-spirited indeed! I mean, there's always been a problem with the MCU movies lining up not just chronologically but plot-wise, as in when some directors ignore or straight up toss out previous setups, but that was TRULY bad. And the Russos played coy about it, but we didn't even get to maybe see Val and the surviving refugees escape either. I mean this was before the opening credits. It certainly was truth in advertising about what a hopeless nihilistic bummer IW was. Thanos Wins!
they've put us in the Age of Thanos, too, but that doesn't mean the other stories aren't worth writing.
I've been talking forever about a fic where Jane and Sif show up in some kind of jerry-rigged ship to help Val and the refugees AND HEIMDALL....I mean, they killed Idris Elba. Why.
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*wonders slightly if we should all be standing on chairs*
*doesn't like standing on... things*
*WILL DO IT ANYWAY BECAUSE MCU-BASED STUMP SPEECH ABOUT EDGY POST-NOIR GRITFESTS*