Latest Posts by hauntingthethoughts - Page 3

i am not my mother and i am not my father but a third worse thing

i will change my entire life by next week btw

Hunger Games didn’t really eat holes in my brain the way that it did for some other people but god the opening lines. The opening lines. Katniss wakes up in bed and immediately, instinctively reaches beside her, only to find the bed empty and cold. Before we even know her name – before we know literally anything about her or this world or her place in that world – we know that she loves someone. We know that she is reaching for where Prim should be, sleeping safe and warm beside her, but Prim is not there. She is not there, and her half of the bed is cold and empty. People talk about characters being “doomed by the narrative” when most of the time the character was literally just a well-foreshadowed death, but Prim WAS doomed by the narrative. It’s the very first thing we learned. It’s the most key, integral, important piece of information we’re given about everything that is about to happen: Every single choice Katniss makes is to protect her little sister, and it isn’t enough. In the end, Prim still dies. Prim was dead before the story even started. Katniss, reaching. Prim’s side of the bed was cold and empty. There is no version of this story where Prim could have been saved. Katniss, reaching. The very first thing she does in the series. She wakes, and she reaches, but Prim is already gone. THAT is how you do Doomed By The Narrative. Edit: Also it is key that there was literally nothing Katniss could have done differently. If she had not acted to save Prim, Prim would not have survived the Hunger Games. But by acting to save Prim, Katniss accidentally kicked off an entire rebellion and ultimately massively increased the amount of danger Prim was actually in. The key is that this is irrelevant. If Katniss had done literally anything differently, Prim still would have died. If Katniss had faltered or changed course at any point, Prim still would have died. There was never a point where Katniss could have changed Prim’s fate. There’s no version of this story where Prim lives to see the end of it. She’s dead before the story begins. That’s doomed by the narrative.

anne carson come here. did you ever find out where you could put it down

you need to understand i'm undeserving of your love, i'm sorry i can't let myself ever feel completely loved by you

Ugly, Bitter, and True by Suzanne Rivecca

like there comes a point where you think something is fundamentally wrong with you. and then it turns out it’s just Friday and you haven’t washed your hair in three days and maybe you’re also just a little lonely and the combination of all three of those things is whittling a hole into your chest every time you breathe. but also the sun’s up. and you’ve survived everything so far, so you’ll survive this too, even if it hurts, even if you have to survive it many times.

i've been watching myself disappear as i do nothing to stop it from happening

Walker Scobell, Leah Sava' Jeffries, and Aryan Simhadri for Variety (x)

Never ever be normal about fictional characters but please GOD be normal about the people who play them, I am begging you

I’m so tired of hot actors with no actual talent or magnetism. we need more ugly little cuntservers giving performances that fuck so hard you leave the theatre with road rash. willem dafoe if you’re out there

love listening to music and then going oh no a song to apply to a Situation

the song of achilles — madeline miller

night shift — stephen king

euripedes — anne carson

circe — madeline miller

a conjuring of light — v.e. schwab

west wind — mary oliver

the song of achilles — madeline miller

the “i had a good time” factor still the unbeatable metric in deciding if media is good

girls will be like “this shade of green 😍” about every shade of green they see, and they’re right

the number of hours we have together is not so large btw. you can linger in the doorway uncomfortably if you want idk. you can forget your scarf in my life and come back later for it if you even care

"It’s often unhealthy to hyper-analyze your sexuality to the point where how you experience it changes where you belong. This is why the idea that broader terms are somehow more restrictive is baffling. Continuously breaking labels down and creating terminology for each facet of one’s identity shrinks communities until it’s just one person convinced that they’re the only one who relates to their experiences. It isolates people and ignores the importance of individuality within a collective identity."

On Hyperpersonalized Sexual Identity

listening to soon you'll get better by taylor swift and remembering how my great aunt said she liked the doctors on the icu, and how she talked about how the nurses were great, and how i used to wait till it got dark in my room to pray for a god i don't believe in, and how i was there with her in all times they allowed bc her fell out was sudden and my whole family was out of town except for me, and how she kept quiet until i came in to visit cause she was saving the little air she had to talk to me, and how in one of those quiet whispered conversations her words cut through my soul cause even the short breath couldn't keep her from wanting to comfort me by saying "it has been such a pleasure to help raise you", and how she did not know those words would never stop resonating within me, and how i did not know that would be our last conversation

i love saying "get off my dick" even though i don't have one

oh no, no, nonononononono you don’t get to retcon the first series basically being an all white cast because now you’ve realized it’s Not A Great Look by blaming publishing standards and pretending that annabeth is presented as anything other than a blonde white girl in the text or any of the marketing material ever.

you wrote her as white! you wrote all the main characters as white and made it very clear when the secondary characters weren’t! it’s fine to admit you just had a blind spot and self-corrected with HoO and the other series!!! you don’t get to go back and retroactively collect diversity points by pretending annabeth is in any way presented as racially ambiguous in the text now that you’ve decided to make a tv show!!!! gaaaaaaaaahhhhhh

there’s something really special about the way that, during barbie’s breakdown, gloria comforts her with (loosely paraphrased), “it kills me that someone as beautiful and smart as you feels this way”

and the point, of course, is that stereotypical barbie and stereotypical ken have both suffered under the constraints of their titles, that neither have ever had any room for self-actualisation as dolls, but barbie is surrounded by powerful women. doctors, physicists, presidents, judges. amazing women who—unlike barbie—hold massive amounts of power and influence in barbieland outside of just being barbie. stereotypical barbie goes through her arc asking questions and believing that everyone else around her is more qualified, more intelligent, more capable, more-whatever than her, despite the surface thesis of her story being that she has to confront the inequalities still faced by girls and women in the real world. even in barbieland, this utopia for women, barbie herself does not feel on par with her other aspects

because even the narrator pauses the action for a second to acknowledge that, yeah, margot robbie is fucking gorgeous, and any situation where she’s saying she isn’t pretty is objectively wrong. but the narrator doesn’t stop to say, “hey, stereotypical barbie, you don’t have to be called anything special to also be intelligent and creative and worthwhile,” because despite the utopian ideals of feminine power, stereotypical barbie is still regarded as the blonde bimbo who has to rely on others to tell her what to do, even if it’s meant kindly

but gloria, who she’s deeply connected to, whose emotions and fears barbie has taken on, who feels inadequate and small in her own life, looks at stereotypical barbie—before barbie became the doctor or president or construction worker or anything other than a pretty girl in a swimsuit—and says, “how brilliant you are, already, all on your own, without any special titles at all,” knowing that the changes that she needs to go through at the end of her story aren’t to make her smarter or more capable, but simply for her to find her own place

Anyway Barbie sitting on a bench, just having cried for the first time and looking over at an old woman and very genuinely complimenting her beauty was such a lovely moment. Because not long before, Barbie was freaking out about cellulite. But here in the Real World, where everything is so much more complicated than she could have imagined, so much more painful, she looks over and sees a woman who has actually lived. Aging is a privilege not afforded to everybody, and this little old woman, with all these years and experiences inside her, quite happy and at peace and secure with herself (she knows she’s beautiful), represents what Barbie is only starting to understand, that real death is staying the same forever.

That’s why it’s so important that The Ghost Of Ruth Handler, a little old lady herself, is the one who guides her into real life. She warns Barbie that by choosing to live, she must by necessity die. But in keeping with the themes of growing up, of adulthood, of womanhood, Barbie now knows that you can’t ever really return to the version of yourself that didn’t know something. Children, most children anyway, don’t really understand death. Part of the emotional struggle of adolescence and young adulthood is having to come to grips with the inevitable fact that your parents will die someday, as will everyone you love, and you yourself. If you’re lucky, not for many years. But it will happen.

And I think that’s why the turning point is “do you guys ever think about dying?” That’s why it matters that the girl playing with Barbie and changing her is a middle-aged woman. Gloria is grappling with her own morality and stifled creativity and feeling her daughter slip away from her and looking back on those days of innocent joyful play and the thing is that it’s all so sweetly painfully joyously human that it changes Barbie.

There’s a maiden(s), mother(s), and crone(s) aspect at play, and Barbie is all three and none at all. She is Ruth’s daughter and she is at once old (64 this year) and young (a toy for children, sexless and innocent and optimistic). Sasha is her past and Gloria is her present and the old woman on the park bench, filled up with years and life and peace and joy, is her future.

Barbie chose to become human, but it was also never really a choice. You can’t un-know something, you can’t ever go backward, you can only go forward. Humans only have one ending. The only alternative to growing is dying. And death may be inevitable, but better later than sooner. The child must become the adult. The adult must become the elder. The elder must eventually die. And living all those years is a gift even when it’s painful and Barbie embraces it.

John Kelly (b.1965) - Dobell’s Cow - Aerial View. 1992. Oil on board.

Salman Toor (Pakistani, 1983), Immigrant Gathering, 2016. Oil on canvas, 122 x 81.5 cm.

Salman Toor (Pakistani, 1983), Immigrant Gathering, 2016. Oil on canvas, 122 x 81.5 cm.

Salman Toor (Pakistani, 1983), Immigrant Gathering, 2016. Oil on canvas, 122 x 81.5 cm.