Where Has This Been All My Life????

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ウインク！ GIF anime

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might make some stickers :>

Comparing Haymitch and Katniss' narrative styles is so funny to me because he's a yapper and she's a gatekeeper. He drops more lore on D12 in the first two chapters of SOTR than she does in the entire trilogy.

Haymitch is like "Yeah, so this person is related to this person who's related to this person and things are this way because of this and this thing actually came from here and this person is actually my best friend and also here's this extra tidbit of random info cause all my lore dropping comes with it's own additional bonus content and all my unnecessary commentary."

And Katniss is over here like "Tf do I care for if y'all know all the lore of District 12? I'm talking about my beautiful husband's beautiful eyelashes."

Happy Birthday Tony Stark! 💙✨🎂

The superhuman society that everyone fantasized about and admired is a thin, fragile pretense. What’ll happen if you get that back? It’ll just happen again. Being shown only the sparkling stars, while the truth gnaws at someone else. A future with All For One in control still makes more sense than that.

James: Regulus is playing hard to get.

James: Little does he know, I'm a master at playing hard to get rid of.

Anyone else listen to “see I’m smiling” and think of civil war-stony?

Specifically in which Steve had feelings for Bucky in the 40’s but when he woke up from the ice he fell in love with Tony? Even though he still had feelings for Bucky and always would in some way? But then Bucky comes back and he runs off to rescue him, because he can’t move on from the past and it manifests in him desperately needing to save his first love? And Tony’s totally okay with that at first, but it puts a strain on their relationship. After everything, they finally meet up again and Tony just wants to fix things and Steve does to but he’s so blindsided and emotionally invested in helping Bucky that he can’t take the steps to mend his and Tony’s relationship. Which is proven when he has to leave for a Bucky related reason mid way through Tony’s b-day date. Tony tries being understanding but he’s so tired of being placed below Bucky and so tired of Steve (unintentionally or not) being an ass to him that he lashes out?

Yeah me too :)

When I catch you Suzanne Collin’s when I catch you

here’s a little meme I made

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To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.