I Loved The Movie To Bits But I Really Missed This Scene, So At The Very Least Here’s My Version Of

what she says: i'm fine

what she means: i still can't believe simon's fucking "friends" abandoned him after he was traumatically outed to the entire school, over something as petty as high school relationships. they didn't even take an "i love you but i'm mad at you" approach, they forced him to face returning to school alone, even sit alone at lunch in total isolation. The hate incident happens in the cafeteria and they don't do ANYTHING. they don't stand up and say anything, they don't support simon, they don't even try to stop it. they just sit silently and watch as simon, and simon ALONE, confronts his attackers in front of everybody. yet somehow the narrative portrays them as The Good Guys, the heroes of the story who have nothing to apologize for.

new comfort genre? insanely long and detailed video analyses of the 2010s shows I watched as a tween:

But imagine if Luke’s last name wasn’t actually Patterson, and the Fantom really just looked at that one scene/missing poster a little too hard.

I’m honestly so glad that I still watch children’s television/ tv shows that have very general audiences, even as a university student. If not, I wouldn’t have decided to spontaneously watch Julie and the Phantoms after watching the beginning of the trailer. I thought that it would simply be a goofy show with one-sided characters and juvenile jokes. But I was hooked by the end of the second episode because of how it improved on so many tired and overdone tropes.

rb if you love julie molina, are lgbtq, are neurodivergent, or are angry at netflix for not renewing your comfort show

no one will know which one :)

Maybe finally playing a set of more than one song is their unfinished business? (The sign-up sheet in Finally Free literally says that they have to play 5 songs or for 15 minutes)

who was your childhood crush, and why was it bill from eloise at christmastime?

What if “Crooked Teeth” is about having a difficult home life/ family problems and that’s why it’s about Reggie or why Reggie and Alex think the song is about the other?

i'm not gonna lie i've always leaned into my headcanon that sally, and therefore percy, was of latin american descent. but after seeing walker scobell in the Adam Project i can really see him doing a great job in this role! his comedic timing is fantastic and he has an air of maturity for his age, plus i've seen that he's been a pjo fan for a while, which is always great!

bottom line is he's a kid who just got cast in probably one of the next iconic roles of the decade, it's a big opportunity with a lot of pressure. i hope that everyone supports him accordingly, and that his experience with the project is positive. so exciting!!

To All the Boys, some personal casting complaints

I read the books before the movie came out because I read that they were adapting the first book into a movie and the main character, even though she was half-white and half-Korean, was going to be played by a Vietnamese actress. I was a bit annoyed since Hollywood has a big problem of casting different ethnicities this way, pushing the assumption that all East and Southeast Asians are interchangeable (when they actually do choose to cast Asians at all).

And then I found out that Kitty was being played by a white actress (I have not found anything that Anna Cathcart is Asian at all, so I was further upset that in Disney’s Descendants, her character’s grandmother was played by an East Asian actress, further driving the idea that she’s part Asian). I was pissed, because that’s the other issue with Hollywood casting Asians, when they choose not to at all and cast white actresses instead.

But I tried to be excited nonetheless because I was/am deprived of Asian leads and Asians as romantic leads in US films, and I’m Viet, so that felt like a bonus.

In the first movie, I didn’t really care as much because of that representation hype and because they never discussed race at all. (Literally the only elements of Korean culture they includes was food) Which I guess I understand, if you’re trying to normalize the idea of an Asian-American lead, just don’t point it out. And the advertising did that work for them. Also, it’s supposed to be solely a love story, so I guess it’s unromantic to talk about race.

But in the sequel, it stuck out a lot more to me that Lana Condor and Anna Cathcart are not Korean to me when they dressed up in hanboks, traditional Korean dresses. And, less so, the scene with Lara Jean and Gen, where she mentions jung, a Korean word that describes the connection between two people that can’t be severed. As nice as that scene was, the whole jung bit felt too thrown in there for my taste because we never meet Lara Jean’s grandma, who introduced the term to her and, more importantly, we never see Lara Jean try to connect to her Korean culture.

It just felt weird to me to see a distinctly Vietnamese face and then a white face use elements from Korean culture, that was more than food, in a movie with zero Korean leads. Personally, I didn’t like that Korean culture was portrayed by non-Koreans as plot point.

That is to say, you can always argue the for the subtle integration of Korean culture in the plot and development of Lara Jean.

If it were up to me, I would have tried to cast Korean actresses, and everyone knows by now that there is no short supply of them. Or adapt to the culture of the lead actor/actress, since they could more accurately portray that culture, in my opinion. (I wouldn’t have done so in this situation because South Korea and Vietnam’s history with the US are very different and not at all interchangeable) (This is coming from the fact that I usually see actors and actresses of one ethnicity play side characters who are of another ethnicity and their culture is never all that important to their character development or plot. It’s more of whoever’s in charge seeing East Asian actors as interchangeable)

That will always be a part of why live-action adaptions are so hard to get right, in my opinion.

Personally, I will always believe the books were better, especially since they had the room to address and highlight Lara Jean’s race and ethnicity in a consistent way. (warning: book spoilers from when I read it around 2 years ago):

Halloween in the first book, Lara Jean said that she usually dressed up as Asian characters (ie. Cho Chang [a ridiculous name btw] instead of Hermione Granger) in order for people to recognize her costume. I think Peter and her decide on a couple’s costume, so that year people actually recognized her even though she didn’t dress-up as an Asian character.

New Years in the second book, Lara Jean and Kitty (and maybe Margot, I don’t really remember) dress-up in Hanboks

ending of the third book, Lara Jean spends the summer before college away from Peter and in South Korea (we don’t get to “read” it and it’s kind of brushed over)

I know it’s not a lot, but I remember feeling so seen and understood when Lara Jean addressed how she was always categorized and reduced to as an Asian. I think it really exemplified the other-ness she felt in small town in Virginia.

But the first movie didn’t address that at all, which I guess I’m okay with because of how irrelevant it is to the main storyline, the love story between Peter and Lara Jean. Especially since they never addressed race at all, it could have felt forced if it wasn’t consistent.

As I mentioned before, it felt so out of place for me to see the two non-Korean actresses dress-up in hanboks.

For the last point, I don’t know how the third movie will portray the ending, my guess is that they either won’t or really push that Lara Jean really hates the idea of the trip because it’ll push her away from Peter. I personally hated that she even disliked the idea of the trip when her dad first told her because I believe in the whole “don’t go to college with a boyfriend” idea.

Feel free to disagree with me, I pretty sure I have a pretty narrow (and selfish) view of how different ethnicities and their cultures should be portrayed in media.