just because alicent isn't complex in your understanding of her doesn't mean she isn't complex. all the claims i see of missing her one note, evil stepmother characterization from fire & blood are so fascinating to me, especially when the showrunners, actors, writers and directors have been so clear about the choices they've made for her in order to better expand her depth and worldview. despite that, we still have people claiming that the lack of portrayal of alicent as a clear cut villain is one that removes her "agency". do you really mean agency, or just your ability to simply hate her as a knee jerk reaction to your own bias and favorite characters in the narrative?
i really do find it so interesting when people claim they can only understand a female character's layers if she makes choices with clear intentions: purely villainous or purely good choices which then conveniently force her into one of the archetype boxes of madonna, mother, whore, bitch, etc, which are not particularly "complex" and in fact a very outdated form of storytelling most female characters suffer from. its the same shallow interpretation of a complex narrative that causes people to reduce a deeply tragic civil war between a family that results in the end of the dragons, mass death and war crimes on both sides into a narrative as simple and boring as "team green" or "team black" - rather than a commentary on the flaws of monarchy, patriarchy, etc.
just because a female character isn't making the clean cut narrative choices you want her to make to support your personal interpretations of "good" and "bad", does not mean she has had her agency or personality surrendered - but rather that you can only understand and process her as a caricature that fits into the judgements you already made about her.
mike is naturally snarky. like that's indisputable. he's a playful little jerk who pours syrup on his sister's plate after she calls his food choices gross and makes hopper's life a living hell for fun. he's a little shit, that's just a fact
but this is what he looks like when he's being annoying on purpose as a way to show affection
the general consensus whenever he starts shit seems to be "well, that's just mike", but no, it's not. it's really not. he rarely looks like this.
the thing with will's campaign was close, because he seemed to be goofing around with lucas as much as anything else, but it was still just... off
either will's being particularly testy, or mike doesn't usually act like this with him, or both. either way, the explosive reaction took him off guard. his playfulness is still present in that dynamic, it just looks different than the usual kind that can easily be misconstrued as being genuinely mean or disrespectful if you look at it in bad faith
side note: it's gotta suck that whenever he stops being so freaking serious for 2 minutes and actually acts his age he's regularly met with hostility and yelling and people storming off
throughout the show, we don't see mike like this a lot or for very long. we see him being genuinely abrasive. that's not personality, it's trauma
i don’t usually bully my boyfriend on the internet but
Read that last sentence again
Fresh new sitcom idea: a spinoff of Modern Family but it's 1536 and the dissolution of the monasteries is in full swing. The patriarch is a secret Catholic and is hiding this from his long suffering wife and children. The guilt is eating him alive but he puts a brave face on things and has a reputation for being a total lad, a real joker, a good-time guy. Spoiler alert: they're all secretly Catholic but hiding it from the others. The family is tearing itself apart at the seams. Secrecy lurks beneath every punchline. It's a fun-filled series of heartwarming, wacky japes, set during the reign of terror of Henry VIII.
i know people make these kinds of posts with fictional characters a lot but like. hank green truly is one of The Most Guys Ever. like. he's one of the earliest youtubers who is still on there. he's a 43-year-old tiktok star. he's a science educator. he got cancer and his response was to make a tier list of the press's coverage of his cancer announcement. the president of the united states sent him a message of support and he told the president that he was pissing out the cancer. years earlier he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and his response was to write a polka song about it. he created vidcon. he's the ceo of a company that produces a shitton of educational series (well, not acting ceo at the moment due to the aforementioned cancer). his guitar says "this machine pwns n00bs" on it. he invented 2D glasses. one of his earliest videos to get popular was about animal sex. between him and his brother, he was known as "the science one" (or "the music one") while his brother was "the writer one," and then he wrote two new york times bestselling novels. his most controversial opinion is that butt is legs. he's done so many things that there is a website dedicated to counting the number of days since he started a new thing. he and his brother use their internet following to (among other things) fight maternal/infant mortality in sierra leone. he has a baked bean furby. hes even bisexual
Women have always worked by the way. Women joining the “work force” and “having careers” and “climbing corporate ladders” only in the last 100 years or so does not erase women’s hard work for thousands of years before. Don’t forget farmer’s wives and dairy maids, housekeepers and schoolma’ams, midwives and healers. Women ran farms while their husbands ran off to Congress or to war. Women who were married did not sit around pregnant all the time. They worked and their work matters just as much as any modern woman’s work matters.
Anyway with anti-sodomy laws back on the discussion table I'm going to repeat that you can personally be squicked out by the consensual sex someone else has, but saying that their consensual sex between willing, active, adult participants should be illegal and is indicative of some sort of moral failing is L I T E R A L L Y a major facet in extreme homophobia and absolutely has gotten people killed.
You don't have to like their business but as long as everyone involved in the encounter is saying yes, it's also really not your business.
This is the precident you are helping further by digging your heels in and saying 'but I think it's gross and makes them bad people'. This is what happened last time that was the reasoning for law, and what is being threatened to happen again.
You know my favorite bits in period dramas are the ones where the heroine is “not like other girls” and chooses not to wear a corset because let’s be real, no inteligent woman in a period drama setting would do that.
And then you can tell it was written by someone without a chest because next thing you know, they’ll be running off across a field or something.
Like girl, you just took off the only breast support you had, and now you’re sprinting across a field?? How is this not an issue??
And then they’re like “I’m a woman of science” but clearly no, because any woman who knows anything about weight distribution wouldn’t choose to fling off their corset whilst still wearing a poofy skirt. Like it’s there for a reason. It distributes the weight and keeps your 50 lbs of skirts from digging into your bare skin. And I cannot stress this strongly enough, IT SUPPORTS THE BUST. WHAT ARE YOU DOING. I’ll make an exception if they’re dressing as a man or have anything gender going on, but otherwise, WHAT ARE YOU DOING??
And then they say it’s because they’re painful or that they’re “instruments of the patriarchy”, except no they fucking weren’t, men wore corsets too, they were literally just bust support and historical corsets didn’t hurt, because they were made to fit your body, and they actually molded to fit it more the more you wore them. I know, I have multiple.
And if you think one couldn’t breathe, yes you could, people wore corset like garments for like 500 years, you think they would wear them if they couldn’t breathe? And no they didn’t lace them tightly except for special occasions and that was only a few people. In fact for most of history, it was physically impossible to lace boned garments any tighter then they were supposed to go because metal eyelets weren’t invented yet. You achieved the small waist look by padding out your hips and maybe your chest and sleeves creating an optical illusion