Yes-hey-buddy - No Longer Active

new favourite cat photo just dropped

Male comic fans like this need to grow the fuck up. Like sorry you can't get hard to a fictional green lady anymore 🥺

I don't know how to explain it, but I think Toby, Krel, Darci, and Mary as a collective group would be unstoppable

Happy 20th Anniversary Shrek

Steli (or stelija) on an outdoor date??

it seems like all i’ve been posting was cursed shit lately, how about i relieve y’all with some cute wholesome cloudgazing shit instead?

li don’t really care about Harry Styles but i think it’d be really funny if he started balding like. in the next 3 weeks.

I was a brown kid raised among other brown kids in South East Asia and yet, every single time I wrote a story in class or I came up with an idea for a play, I used traditional white European names and all my characters were white. So were those of the other kids. Even with no white people around us, the default race in anything fictional was white.

Every single book I read was white. Enid Blyton, Lewis Carroll, Roald Dahl all wrote books about white kids. The Hardy Boys, Harry Potter, the Meg Cabot novels. All the cartoons, all the early 2000s Disney channel shows, all the made for TV movies. Everything features straight, white children and all anyone wanted to do was to emulate them. When there was some representation of other races, it was secondary, tertiary characters. Or white passing actors. To think that our own stories aren’t worth it unless we acted white enough.

I didn’t want to be Shanti in the jungle or Jasmine in the Taj Mahal or the weird kid in the background everyone made fun of for being an “other”.I wanted to be Hermione and Annabeth and Nancy Drew. I would pretend my name wasn’t my full long Indian name but Keira, or Kara, or Katie and insert myself into the fantasies of my childhood. Even in my own head, I didn’t think I was good enough to be myself. I grew older and called myself Keer when I moved to the UK to compensate and shorten it for white people to pronounce better (why? racism.)

It took me a long time to accept that my story was worth telling, that my skin colour and heritage and religion were not inferior both in real life and on the page. It took me an even longer time to realize that I deserved to see people like me on the screen and the page in a way that doesn’t burden the character to be an ambassador for my entire race but she just exists, like I do. I still am shocked that I can’t even name one single Asian leading character from any of my childhood novels - Asian! The continent with 60% of all humans!

I want the default race to be non existent. I want a class of children to think up a story and not have 90% of them come up with straight white characters. White is not the default. Representation matters.

OKAY WOW wizards was so so good, and i can’t wait to see what’s next for our champions of arcadia!!

but the last shot of the whole team (minus douxie, nari, and archie) ending with jim hugging claire and looking up at the sword, which becomes focused in the foreground......i have thoughts

now we know throughout all of trollhunters, we were given a whole lot of sword-and-the-stone imagery with jim. i know there’s a very good deep dive post with explanations on mythology and references in the show by @cookiesaddict, but i’d really like to give my two cents so please hear me out,,

i remember AT LEAST two instances where the sword in the stone imagery and jim jumped out at me:

1) when he first discovered the amulet and is playing around with the sword in his backyard, and the sword gets stuck in a large rock. he pulls the sword out of the rock:

and

2) in the unbecoming episode, when he chooses to fight gunmar without the amulet, knowing he’ll die. there’s a sword in draal’s back, and jim pulls the sword out of the stone of draal’s back before beginning to walk out and face the fight:

at the end of wizards, excalibur is left without a weilder with arthur dead, but claire and douxie both suggest that it needs a new weilder. claire says, “who better than our trollhunter?”

so jim tries:

and he fails.

and you know what he says? he says, “but without the amulet, am i the trollhunter?”

which i think is an interesting thing to hear, considering the fact that one of the places that we see the sword in the stone imagery IS the unbecoming episode, in which jim comes to the realization that he is the trollhunter, amulet or not. even when given the choice to live a normal life, even without his friends by his side, even without the amulet ever having belonged to him - he knew he was the trollhunter.

so what changed?

well. a whole lot did. the unbecoming episode happens in part 2 of trollhunters, and in part 3 jim makes the ultimate decision to become part troll. it’s a huge thing for him to deal with emotionally, even knowing that it’ll help him defeat gunmar and save arcadia. he moves away from home, and in wizards, he’s corrupted by arthur - which, i think, was what snapped the last straw. becoming corrupted - making the choice to become corrupted (even when it was to save his friends) - that is what i think truly destabilized jim.

all of trollhunters, jim faced what it meant to be a hero, what it meant to be the savior of trolls and humans alike. his identity came to revolve around the hero he was; it’s what helped him through the change from human to troll - that knowledge that he was doing it for his friends, for his city. but of all the things jim went through, never did he ever hurt his friends directly because of the mantle he undertook. but arthur and the arcane order changed that.

they took his amulet, they took his body, and they took his soul. and they used it all to hurt his friends. they turned him from a hero to a villain, and it was all so easy for them.

so yeah, jim looks like he’s back to normal as his human self - maybe a bit scratched up, but overall unharmed. but the psychological effects of being used as a weapon against the people you care about most? that doesn’t go away easily. that changes how you look at your relationships, your life, your identity.

and maybe he doesn’t really realize it now, maybe that’s why he said it the way he did - “without the amulet, am i still the trollhunter” - because he was feeling a lot of things and cited the physical manifestation - the destroyed amulet - of his trauma as the reason he may not be worthy.

i can’t pretend to know everything about the original sword in the stone mythology - all i really know was what was in the show - so i don’t know exactly how one may prove themself to be worthy. but i do think that as of the end of wizards, jim doesn’t think that he himself is worthy - of excalibur, of the trollhunter title, of being a hero. he betrayed his friends’ loyalty - against his will, yes, but that’s most definitely how he sees it as. and what kind of friend betrays their friends? what kind of hero betrays their friends?

so jim is in a dark place. (again.) but i have hope.

in the unbecoming episode, we get this shot when jim decides to stand up and fight, amulet or not:

and at the end of wizards, after jim fails to pull out excalibur, we get this shot:

yes the compositions of the two shots are different, but i can’t help but feel the shot in wizards was intended to be a parallel of the shot in unbecoming. and even if it wasn’t, it’s still eerily similar in a way that i can’t ignore.

both shots have jim, and a sword looming in the foreground, almost as if they’re watching jim. i think they could be considered as physical representations of choice and heroics; the sword in draal’s back represents jim’s choice to become the trollhunter and excalibur, i believe, represents to jim what it means to be a true hero, something that toa has established anyone can be as long as they strive to triumph in the face of fear, but it’s something he may feel as though he lost. and yet, he still looks at the sword.

in the unbecoming shot, he has already made his choice. in the shot from wizards, he is only just beginning to consider the choice again.

after wizards, jim will be at a crossroads - there is no amulet, and, at least for a moment, no apocalyptic threat nearby. he’ll need time to go home, find himself, face what it means for him to be a hero.

and i think jim will forgive himself for the actions against his friends that he couldn’t control and, just as he did in unbecoming, make the decision to have courage in the face of his own fears, to be a hero, amulet or not. and only then, i think, will he be worthy to weild excalibur.

jewish =/= israeli btw

not all jews are israeli and most jews worldwide are abhorred by israel’s actions. there are palestinian jews too. dont turn this into antisemitism (hatred of All jews), make sure it stays anti-Zionism (anti-israel’s colonization of palestine)