How People Talk About Crime Alley Shows Off Their Classism. The Poorest Neighborhood In Gotham Would

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.

Thanks so much for the support on this post!!! Glad to see people like it :)

Tony stark. Like yes he is and was awful but that’s the point and just because he’s a beyond fuck up doesn’t mean he didn’t help people. He genuinely wanted to help people: that holds true no matter what he’s done. Moreover it also holds true that at times these attempts to help people were in fact doing more harm than good (think Stark Industries weapon’s business). What makes him interesting is this exact conflict. How does an unbelievably rich, narsosistic man redeem himself and live with his sins? He doesn’t. He fucks up. However, the attempt still matters and the consequences of it matter too.

Fundamentally he’s a symbol of wealth and power which is why it is so difficult to see the man underneath, and without seeing this man it is even more difficult for the audience to root for him. When we don’t root for him it’s easy to see strictly his flaws; Everything we are meant to see on a surface level. However, as an individual we find that he is unhappy with himself and with his life, each act of heroism is an act of suicide. He’ll never be a truly good man, he never can be. The point was never the success but the attempt.

characters have to be a little bit awful in ways that you cant defend. its good for the ecosystem. your honor he did do that. He did in fact do that

here’s the closeted furries “hey man… can u bum me a cig” and “the one uncle nobody invites to the family reunion but SOMEONE keeps telling him where it is anyways”

if you want an idea of what john is like, imagine hau from pokemon sumo

ALSO the ppl who kept asking me for trans thomas art, HERE he’s trans in this au (; 

ft John:

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh

> Even when you’ve disappeared I can’t get away from you

Honestly, this one (1) lyric makes me think of them so badly. I promise I love them

Textless under cut:

Beautiful :)

Average day at LOV headquarters

Do you think the bats send Tim random photos of kids they see with bad bowlcuts? Just like some kid at the park and under the photo they just type “this you?”

The best thing I’ve ever seen 😍

Have I just been stabbed 😀 anyhow beautiful. Wonderful. I’ll think of this instead of my family when I die.