People Have Pointed Out Before That Zuko Probably Didn't Actually Know Any Of The Gaang's Names Before

Personally, it's always a bit wild to me to see commentators interact with the Hunger Games franchise as if Collins were writing science fiction stories instead of essays with faces. She's just not that interested in fleshing out side characters or digging into the details of the worldbuilding. These characters are concepts and symbols before they're people. There's an almost mathematical precision to who and what she explores and how deeply she does it. This is a step or two away from pure allegory. If she were writing a couple of centuries ago, she'd have named her characters things like Innocence and Anger and Watch-Carefully-Your-Soul-Lest-Ye-Be-Damned, but since she's writing for modern audiences, she has to settle for puns and allusions. If she has another essay to write, she'll assign some faces to it; she's not going to look into backstories or other eras just for the sake of storytelling, and it's not a failing as a writer that she doesn't.

why are star wars planets more boring than earth and our solar system like sure we’ve seen desert, snow, diff types of forest, beach, lava, rain, but like… 

rainbow mountains (peru)

red soil (canada/PEI)

rings (saturn’s if they were on earth) 

bioluminescent waves

northern lights (canada)

salt flats (bolivia, where they filmed crait but did NOTHING COOL WITH IT except red dust?? like??? come ON)

and cool fauna like the touch me not or like, you know, the venus flytrap.. and don’t get me started on BUGS like… we have bugs cooler than sw aliens

BASICALLY like???? come on star wars you had one (1) job where are the cool alien species

Interspecies lesbianism

mcu has done IRREPERABLE damage to the public view of superheroes and im not even kidding. so many people (especially in leftist spaces!) when they think superhero think "soulless profit-driven husk of vaguely liberal ideologies". i am begging and pleading and screaming and throwing up and jumping onto spikes please read a green arrow comic or doom patrol or anything please i promise you superheroes have merit and worth i promise you the mcu is lying to you and superheroes have so much more potential than disney allows them to experience PLEASE *foam dripping from lips*

I feel weird about Arcane S2 because ….. It'd be rad if Arcane was super leftist or w/e, but I never expected it to be. And I was happy with that! I always expected Arcane to continue having its “X-men level” of political takes— “both sides are at fault and we need to come together and have compassion." I don't need a leftist moral political justification to enjoy a fun fantasy story.

But season 2 really did surprise me? by swerving off and being like “actually the political oppression storyline Does Not Matter, never mattered, and won’t even get a resolution— not even a conservative or centrist resolution?” XD

They don't even resolve the political storyline with the classic X-men “both sides are suffering, why cant we get along" type of ending; instead they just abandon it completely. By the last four episodes the show is all about fighting random Evil Outsiders and Magic Robots from the League of Legends Cinematic Universe to advertise upcoming League skins and spin-offs, while the plot about the warring political factions gets completely dropped without any resolution beyond Vague Implications.

I guess my take is that, unlike a lot of people, I was never expecting Arcane to be any more politically radical than an x-men movie— and I still enjoyed it a lot!

But I was expecting it to care about the storyline it had set up? And I was genuinely surprised by how little it did.

In hindsight it now feels odd how much time they spent emphasizing the characters experiencing police brutality and political divides and riots and violence at border crossings and class disparity and being crippled by pollution, because now we know none of this was ever going anywhere? XD

My surprise was not that all that politically loaded imagery was building up to a centrist message about how there are good people on both sides and we need to reach across the aisle. Because that’s always how I thought it would end, and that’s Fine for a fun fantasy show? But I was surprised to realize that none of the imagery was ever intended to be building up to anything, not even a general centrist message about reaching across the aisle. It was using political imagery in a hollow way, without intent, for Shock Value, for the Aesthetic.

the actual story is just a generic comic book fight between humans who want people to live vs robots who want to kill everything; everything else is just there to dress that up.

I've been self medicating my sadness by painting yaks.

How come pro-nuclear leftists never actually address the documented environmental damage and poisoning of indigenous communities of nuclear waste?

Watch Tracy Chapman Start a Quiet Revolution

You guys may be too young to remember, but I remember tuning in on TV with 600 million other viewers to watch Stevie Wonder live at Wembley Stadium for Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday celebration tribute in 1988. There were technical difficulties and Stevie Wonder couldn't go on yet. The crowd was antsy, milling around, singing their own songs. The TV cameras were rolling and the show had to go on, so TOTALLY UNKNOWN ARTIST TRACY CHAPMAN GOT UP ON STAGE AND PLAYED FAST CAR ARMED WITH ONLY HER GUITAR.

The crowd fell silent. Captivated by the absolute raw honesty and talent on display. Did we know we were witnessing history? A black queer artist who would rocket to fame and win a Grammy for this song the following year? I don't remember.

What I do remember is getting to the end of the song and not caring about Stevie Wonder any more. I wanted to know who this woman was!

Watch Tracy Chapman stun a rowdy crowd into silence: