ok you know what tahani is more fucking valid than anyone because she never wanted anything that wasn’t 100% justified
her parents treated her like garbage and she only comes across as full of herself because literally not a single one of her achievements was ever fucking recognized by anyone around her, least of all the two people whos opinion she actually cared about, her parents
nothing she wanted ever was detrimental to any other person in any way
it wasn’t about making everyone around her think she was a saint, she just wanted to do something that would finally be seen as enough
it wasnt even about outdoing her sister it was just about being recognized for her accomplishments in her own right
so dont sit there with this she was doing good things with bad intentions stuff
she was doing good things for her own reasons, and it wasnt about the magnanimity of helping people, but that doesn’t make her motivations bad objectively
and like her final test to see whether she was a good person was to walk down that hallway lined with rooms where people were gossiping about her
and she passed by aaalll the doors of aaall the famous people and socialites that she talks about all the time and the one room she finally did stop at was her parents!
there’s nothing vain about desiring approval from your parents! she just wanted acknowledgment. from her parents. there’s no fucking realm of reality where you can frame that as vain! she wanted her parents not to treat her like complete fucking garbage for one goddamn second.
like having bad parents is a bad enough environment to grow up in but having them treat you so unjustly your whole life while watching that so completely opposite and juxtaposed with the way they treat your only other sibling. thats so horrible.
and tahani stopping to get some closure on that CANNOT be termed selfish. theres just no fuckin way
This is the point of the series. The “good/bad place” system is built on Kantian absolutism and a complete rejection of anything even remotely near moral dessert, but the fact that it qualifies *as* a very clear and obvious moral dessert completely invalidates the moral logic underlying the selection system. Which is *why* Chidi’s wide-ranging philosophical lessons lead the characters into contradictions within the framework. Even Michael can’t deal with the “good/bad” paradigm’s rules in the face of something as “simple” as the trolley problem.
Michael’s experiment exposed the fundamental flaw in the system.
Elf androgyny and dwarf androgyny and orc androgyny are like three very different forms of androgyny and defiance of the binary and they’re all so good
Elf: everyone’s pretty, but has no ass.
Dwarf: everyone’s hairy, but has no ass.
Orc: everyone’s SHREDDED and can crack walnuts between their cheeks.
rocky horror is the worst and is also transmisogynistic can we please finally get over this shit movie
ok but like the writer is transgender nonbinary and the language used in the play was the preferred language by trans people of that time can we not deny parts of our history because we’ve evolved since then thanks
So fucking much this.
PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do.
PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.
Man okay when I got my wisdom teeth out it was a fucking experience. Before the surgery wasn’t too interesting but as soon as I woke up I saw the nurse next to me and was all like “hey… i think… i died… and now I’m in a parallel universe… and i gotta go back to my house and kill the me from this universe” and he was just kinda like “alright, you do that”. And then the other nurse kept going in and out of the room to get things and I thought there was like 5 of her that kept coming out of the room, and then so when she was wheeling me out in a wheelchair I was like “damn… why are there so many of you… there’s like 5 many of you” and she was just kinda like “alright, you do that”.
Anyway I got to the car and my dad was there and he was like “how ya feeling son” in the dadliest way possible and I was like “MAN I AM PUMPED LETS GET SOME JUICE I’M STARVED” so we drove about 3 blocks to a jamba juice, whereupon I say “I’m good I can do this” and run/drunkstumble 30 feet to the door. I burst in the door like a viking returning from some fucking battle and holler “WHATS UP FUCKS” to everyone in the store, which was thankfully just the 2 people behind the counter, who looked probably as scared/confused as a jamba juice employee could look.
So anyway, as my dad explained the situation I looked up at the jamba juice menu and was utterly fucking lost in it. Like I swear I was looking at this menu board for a year, deciphering this Rosetta stone of fruits. I distinctly remember that I was looking at each item in a smoothie, thinking of how it tasted, then moving on to the next thing and thinking of how that tasted, and how they would taste together. Since most smoothies had 3 or 4 items, this took some thinking. So my dad sees me in this extreme brain blast state of mind and says “hey are you going to order or what”. Keep in mind I’m on the first fucking smoothie on the list here. So I just say “shush man I’m trying to do fruit science”, and then when I realized that this process could take literal years, I just said “yeah give me a smooth regular” which for the uninitiated, isn’t actually a real thing on any menu. Oh, also I asked them if the “boosted” smoothies would give me super powers and then pointed my fingers at them and made “lightning noises”.
So my dad just orders me the first thing on the menu and I go to sit down and stare out the window or some shit and my thoroughly amused dad just looks at me and says “how ya feelin?”. Now at this time I was feeling a lot of things, but most noticeable to me was the gauze in my mouth, so I just look at him and say “there’s these fuckin… tiny sheep in my head” which at the time was the best way I had to convey this feeling. Anyway about that time, the jamba juice guy brings us our drinks and he gives me a small thing of mario kart stickers and I swear I almost cried from the tsunami of emotion that gift made me feel (I still have them).
Anyway the rest of the story is we drove home and I explained this programming project I was working on to my dad in perfect detail somehow and then I came home and went on facebook and posted a comment on my friends status (because I couldn’t find the status update bar) that read: “i just took a lort of painkillers and yelled at everyone in a jambo juice”
This may be the funniest thing I have ever read. There are actual tears coming out of my face.
When Superman: Man of Steel came out people were saying that the film was too gritty and cynical and it was that cynicism that destroyed the Superman we have always know and loved.
That it was that very cynicism that had Superman break his cardinal rule of do not kill and had him that very thing, kill.
As the reviews come out about Batman vs Superman and the bleakness and cynicism of that film I posit that the reason Superman has killed and the reason he is so unrecognizable as the hero we grew up with and the hero we loved and looked up to is because every essence of his Jewishness has been meticulously and calculatingly been scrubbed out.
Superman was written by two Jewish teens in the early 30′s and they imprinted onto Superman a Jewish identity.
Superman is in Diaspora. His homeland gone, his language, his culture, and his heritage both alien and foreign to were he lives. Living day to day with a part of himself hidden so as to be live a somewhat unmolested life.
He must struggle with what it means to be a member of his people while not having his people or culture around him and while having the outside culture imposed upon him and expected to assimilate to this outside force.
A great example of this can be seen oddly enough in Man of Steel when Lois Lane asks Superman what the S on his chest stands for. He tells it means hope in his people’s language and Lois responds by saying that here it is a S.
Superman is expected to accept this new reality and to let go of his culture and understand that he must rather assimilate instead. That he must let go of what it means in his language and culture and understand that it is now a S.
It is the internal struggle of the Jew. To survive in Diaspora. To endure and still maintain a sense of self and one’s roots. To keep your people’s language, customs, and culture alive especially surrounded by a world where you are the alien. You are the foreign being and you must assimilate and then be grateful that you were allowed to be forced to assimilate in the first place.
Superman has two masks. The mask of Superman and the mask of Clark Kent. Kal-el, is the face of Superman and not the mask. Kal-el is the struggle to survive when you are the alien.
Superman in the films and especially Man of Steel and even more so in Batman vs Superman is meant to be a jesus figure. A Messiah.
But that is not what he really is. He is rather the personification of Tikkun Olam.
Tikkun Olam is that each and every person is obligated to fix the world. To leave it a better place that when it was when you got there. To work towards justice, peace, and truth, the three pillars of Judaism.
Superman is meant to reflect what each of us can be. What we should be and should do. That when given the opportunity to good we should take it with both hands. That is whatever way we can with whatever our own abilities and powers are we should help others when given the chance. That is Tikkun Olam and that is Superman.
The new Superman does not fail because it is cynical. The new Superman fails because he is not Jewish.
You forgot to mention that kal-el, which in Hebrew is famously and intentionally spelled קל א-ל means “voice of G-d”. His story specifically was based on that of Moshe in many ways. His father and mother – knowing that if he stayed with them he would only find death – placed him in a basket. And that basket, they floated down a vast river. The river of stars and particles, and seemingly nothingness. A nothingness that swallows everything which has falls into it. And that basket came to a place where he could grow up, and where in the end, he was needed. I personally don’t know much about the movies – my job as colony paper pusher leaves no time for such fun, but I agree with you. To erase superman’s jewish identity is to erase superman and create an entirely new character, empty and devoid of its original meaning and purpose.
you’re on the beach passing by one of those airbrush t shirt kiosks that have a million unlicensed characters on them but you see one with your exact face and name on it and he won’t sell it to you
androidboy 