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Aamer Rahman: GAME OF TROPES PART 2 (more spoilers)

aamerrahman:

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Wow. Apparently Daenerys Stormborn’s other title is Mother of Fandoms, since angry nerds across the world are telling me to STFU like I just insulted their mum. Here’s a Top 10 list of the things angry GoT fans have said to me about my first post (…

You make very fair points, just a few clarifications. All foreign cultures in GoT are stereotypical and basic, because GoT is written from a Western POV (all the POV characters and ‘focus’ characters in the show are white). But Westeros (very subtly named) is based on England and is portraying a historically realistic situation where people from other races and cultures are looked down upon. Sure, that sucks, but Dany’s desire for everybody to get a say in their own lives is one hell of an idealistic (this is her biggest weakness and I am waiting for it to kick her in the ass) if entitled wish originating in someone who was herself oppressed but also raised into enough privilege to know she can change things. If Dany were trying to liberate white Westerosi women, I’d be happier… but she does learn Dothraki and makes sure people call her Khaleesi and insists they are her Khalassar, that is, she becomes part of the culture and THEN changes it from *within*, which she has to, seriously, they treat women like shit. Her values also don’t seem to be due to her upbringing but her personal ethics (ie. her brother). GoT has plenty of ism problems but I quite liked the ‘nobody can give you your freedom, you have to take it’ bit and adoration seems like a logical reaction for a person who risks everything to help you, a complete stranger, have a chance at all.
Also, while it is not perfect, it is a more realistic possibility in their world than slaves having an upraising of their own volition.
If you think of the show as a parallel Tudors, the race!fail is historically accurate.


I want to stress this again: In many, many parts of the country right now, if you want to go to see a movie in the theater and see a current movie about a woman — any story about any woman that isn’t a documentary or a cartoon — you can’t. You cannot. There are not any. You cannot take yourself to one, take your friend to one, take your daughter to one.

There are not any.

By far your best shot, numbers-wise, at finding one that’s at least even-handedly featuring a man and a woman is Before Midnight (on 891 screens) so I hope you like it. Because it’s pretty much that or a solid, impenetrable wall of movies about dudes.

Dudes in capes, dudes in cars, dudes in space, dudes drinking, dudes smoking, dudes doing magic tricks, dudes being funny, dudes being dramatic, dudes flying through the air, dudes blowing up, dudes getting killed, dudes saving and kissing women and children, and dudes glowering at each other.

Somebody asked me this morning what “the women” are going to do about this. I don’t know. I honestly am at the point where I have no idea what to do about it. Stop going to the movies? Boycott everything?

They put up Bridesmaids, we went. They put up Pitch Perfect, we went. They put up The Devil Wears Prada, which was in two-thousand-meryl-streeping-oh-six, and we went (and by “we,” I do not just mean women; I mean we, the humans), and all of it has led right here, right to this place. Right to the land of zippedy-doo-dah. You can apparently make an endless collection of high-priced action flops and everybody says “win some, lose some” and nobody decides that They Are Poison, but it feels like every “surprise success” about women is an anomaly and every failure is an abject lesson about how we really ought to just leave it all to The Rock.

At The Movies, The Women Are Gone : Monkey See : NPR

The whole article is fantastic, as is pretty much everything Linda Holmes writes.

(via kdhart)

Pretty much. And the movies that exist are about women falling in love or out of love or somehow in relationships, which is all we know how to do (exist in relation to men, since of course it’s all heterosexual all the time).

ifoundwhatwasmissing

ifoundwhatwasmissing asked:

The author of the great gatsby is a male. His name is Frances, but he is a male. Your post says "her". Just an FYI :)

The author of the Great Gatsby is not the person i am quoting. It is his daughter talking about HER parents, one of whom is named Scott and is the proclaimed author of the novel; the other being named Zelda and having been heavily quoted in said book, too (one of the many conflicts that arose between Frances’ parents). Frances was nicknamed “Scottie” after her father but she was a woman. Hope that clarifies matters!

Their daughter, Scottie, wrote after their deaths:

I think (short of documentary evidence to the contrary) that if people are not crazy, they get themselves out of crazy situations, so I have never been able to buy the notion that it was my father’s drinking which led her to the sanitarium. Nor do I think she led him to the drinking.[85]

Frances “Scottie” Fitzgerald, on her parents Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.
It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald (I believe that is how he spells his name) seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

—Zelda Fitzgerald, in a review of her husband’s book in 1922 (via trishahaddad)

Reminder that F. Scott Fitzgerald stole his wife’s writing, many times, while suppressing her works. See “Save Me the Waltz”, which he forced her to revise so that he could use parts of it in his own book “Tender Is the Night”. And which author do we study in school?

(via rubyvroom)

I didn’t know this.

(via alienswithankhs)

(Source: trishahaddad.com)

One’s idiosyncrasies, preocuppations, obsessions, laxities and pet hates got sorely exercised and highlighted. You had to be prepared to explain and justify your prejudices, intolerances, dismissals and non-reactions, not constantly but at inconvenient moments. All those things we attempt to keep obscured, avoided, camouflaged, dressed up or private can be suddenly yanked into the forefront, thrown at you when you never thought anyoneon knew: this person thrusts them before whoever else happens to be present - the world. To him they are facts, and facts are for all to know. Everything is fact.
From Gifted children with Asperger Syndrome by Peter Carter in ‘Gifted children: a guide for parents and professionals’
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