“I think that one of my favorite memories was when they showed [Tiana] to me in color for the first time. It was a surprise. They played this footage for me, and I just started to cry. So moving to me, and so amazing. I had no idea that she would look so much like me. It was such a great, great honor.”
– Anika Noni Rose, the voice of Tiana in Disney’s The Princess and The Frog
Not to lesbian purity or something but there are some narratives you can’t ABSOLUTELY write m/m aus of. Revolutionary girl utena? The handmaiden? They are stories centered around the abuse and violence men uphold on women and women finding freedom in the love between them how can you find it appropriate in the slightest to write m/m angst of it??
Washoe was a chimp who was taught sign language.
One of Washoe’s caretakers was pregnant and missed work for many weeks after she miscarried. Roger Fouts recounts the following situation:
“People who should be there for her and aren’t are often given the cold shoulder—her way of informing them that she’s miffed at them. Washoe greeted Kat [the caretaker] in just this way when she finally returned to work with the chimps. Kat made her apologies to Washoe, then decided to tell her the truth, signing “MY BABY DIED.” Washoe stared at her, then looked down. She finally peered into Kat’s eyes again and carefully signed “CRY”, touching her cheek and drawing her finger down the path a tear would make on a human (Chimpanzees don’t shed tears). Kat later remarked that one sign told her more about Washoe and her mental capabilities than all her longer, grammatically perfect sentences.“ [23]
Washoe herself lost two children; one baby died shortly after birth of a heart defect, the other baby, Sequoyah, died of a staph infection at two months of age.
more about Washoe:
after the death of her children, researchers were determined to have Washoe raise a baby and brought in a ten month chimpanzee named Loulis. one of the caretakers went to Washoe’s enclosure and signed “i have a baby for you.” Washoe became incredibly excited, yelling and swaying from side to side, signing “baby” over and over again. then she signed “my baby.”
the caretaker came back with Loulis, and Washoe’s excitement disappeared entirely. she refused to pick Loulis up, instead signing “baby” apathetically; it was clear that the baby she thought she was getting was going to be Sequoyah. eventually Washoe did approach Loulis, and by the next day the two had bonded and from then on she was utterly devoted to him.
*information shamelessly paraphrased from When Elephants Weep by Jeffrey Masson.
Even more interestingly, after Washoe and Loulis bonded, she started teaching him American Sign Language the same way that human parents teach their children language. It only took Loulis eight days to learn his first sign from Washoe, and aside from the seven that his human handlers learned around him, he learned to speak in ASL just as fluently as Washoe and was able to communicate with humans in the same way she could.
now if y’all don’t think this is the tightest shit you can get outta my face
Next of Kin by Roger Fouts is an excellent book that tells the story of Washoe from her childhood through adulthood and raising Loulis, recounted by one of the leading researchers who worked with her for years.
Finn after Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ & Rey as Lady Justice commissioned for May Fourth by @finnreyfridays !
May the Fourth be with you :^)
My current job has me working with children, which is kind of a weird shock after years in environments where a “young” patient is 40 years old. Here’s my impressions so far:
Birth – 1 year: Essentially a small cute animal. Handle accordingly; gently and affectionately, but relying heavily on the caregivers and with no real expectation of cooperation.
Age 1 – 2: Hates you. Hates you so much. You can smile, you can coo, you can attempt to soothe; they hate you anyway, because you’re a stranger and you’re scary and you’re touching them. There’s no winning this so just get it over with as quickly and non-traumatically as possible.
Age 3 – 5: Nervous around medical things, but possible to soothe. Easily upset, but also easily distracted from the thing that upset them. Smartphone cartoons and “who wants a sticker?!!?!?” are key management techniques.
Age 6 – 10: Really cool, actually. I did not realize kids were this cool. Around this age they tend to be fairly outgoing, and super curious and eager to learn. Absolutely do not babytalk; instead, flatter them with how grown-up they are, teach them some Fun Gross Medical Facts, and introduce potentially frightening experiences with “hey, you want to see something really cool?”
Age 11 – 14: Extremely variable. Can be very childish or very mature, or rapidly switch from one mode to the other. At this point you can almost treat them as an adult, just… a really sensitive and unpredictable adult. Do not, under any circumstances, offer stickers. (But they might grab one out of the bin anyway.)
Age 15 – 18: Basically an adult with severely limited life experience. Treat as an adult who needs a little extra education with their care. Keep parents out of the room as much as possible, unless the kid wants them there. At this point you can go ahead and offer stickers again, because they’ll probably think it’s funny. And they’ll want one. Deep down, everyone wants a sticker.
This is also a pretty excellent guide to writing kids of various ages
Valkyrie with a twist combo on both of her outfits from the movie. Gotta have them guns out, but with the royal colors.
exac:
“this character did a problematic thing-” its a story helen, commonly including things like conflict and drama
The thing an astonishing amount of people keep ignoring is framing. It’s not enough that a character Did A Bad, how does the piece of media present that action?
There’s a world of difference between:
a) this character Did A Bad and That’s Bad
b) this character Did A Bad and the creators don’t seem to be aware of this so it’s Just A Thing That Happens
c)this character Did A Bad and That’s Great, people who think Doing A Bad is Bad are Wrong.
Like, both Atlas Shrugged and Bioshock are about a guy who’s sick of people and their “rules” and “caring about people other than yourself”, and decides to build his own paradise hidden away from the world where he doesn’t have to kowtow to any of that tedious ~morality~ other people seem to have for some reason. In this kind of reductive mindset, both must be equally hashtag problematic.
In Atlas Shrugged, the book is so keen to trip over itself in glorifying the mindset behind the story that it literally stops dead for sixty solid pages of the author giving up what little pretence of actual narrative the story has to just pasting The Objectivist Manifesto into the mouth of one of the book’s many, many empty mouthpieces. The guy is so right, he’s a genius and could revolutionise the world if only those pesky normies with their ~ethics~ would just get the fuck out of his way and let him do whatever he wants.
In Bioshock, the guy’s glorious monument to self-interest falls apart into a hellish dystopia only a few years after being constructed because, shocker (heh), gathering an entire city’s worth of amoral “rational free thinkers" would result in everybody turning on each other and their unchecked scientific experiments turning everyone into barely-human monsters. Because safety laws and the bounds of ethics are for squares!
One of these is an unabashed advertising tool for the ideology behind it, one of these is a satire of that same ideology by presenting a realistic prediction of how the original set-up of an objectivist “paradise” hidden from the world would actually play out anywhere on Earth that isn’t inside Ayn Rand’s head.
Framing, my lovelies. It’s very important, far more important, in fact, than the immensely shallow surface-level reading of “in media A character B did thing C and thing C is bad therefore everyone who so much as thinks about liking media A is literally worse than Satan”.
Then again, actually engaging with media on any level beyond the immediate surface isn’t conducive to holier-than-thou Hot Takes so ¯_(ツ)_/¯
L.J.'s Obsessions 