не\переносимость амбивалентности

Elli, do you HAVE to have so many opinions nobody cares about???

Shawshank Redemption:
- VERY little violence
- homos are scary & bad (UGH)
- the narrator always comes across as being in love with their subject (Great Gatsby!!). was this intentional for King or an artifact of the adaptation?
- Maine is VERY hhhhwhite, casting Freeman is inspired
- Andy had waited intentionally, could've skipped earlier. obvious question: waiting for Red??
- 'i'm tired of being afraid/scared all the time' - Red when released on parole
- very sanitised portrayal of violence, prison order, relationships. even sanitised masculinity! no wonder it comes across as VERY homosocial (esp Andy&Red's friendship), but everyone among prisoners are best buddies, and even guards (not everyone! just the warden and that one guy!) only screw over Andy specifically. no everyday violence. no grounds to be horrified w/the way the prison system is set up, as if it's mostly equitable - just philosophically the *idea* of losing your freedom. i think it perpetuates a myth abt prisons being just psychologically hard, nothing about terrible physical hardship & indignity & a thousand injustices & wolfpack ethics. not grounded in reality and not embodied.
- REALLY homosocial. Andy & Red's bond is - oh, i don't have words for it. they don't write fic that good about them, not even close.

- ofc nothing about racism b/c who cares. in a movie abt prison. right???
- but the narrator is not a second fiddle or a buddy or a sidekick. he's *our eyes*, we the audience are invited to identify with him and we are privy to his inner life thus we have the strongest bond with him. ...ok *maybe* the movie doesn't *quite* balance that ideally. http://www.kimgalovich.com/images/3002%20Final%20Paper.pdf
'color-blindness, which can also be called ‘color evasiveness’' 'a white audience in the 1990s would probably find it easier to ignore racial issues and keep the real world out of their film.' ROLLEYES
also a v.good article Vera, Hernan, and Andrew Gordon. "The Shawshank Redemption: True Romance"  here

- i need to read King's story. 'Andy was a part of me they could never lock up'

- Ebert: 'The key to the film's structure, I think, is that it's not about its hero, but about our relationship with him - our curiosity, our pity, our admiration. If Andy had been the heroic center, bravely enduring, the film would have been conventional, and less mysterious.'
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-the-shawshank-redemption-1994

- violence:
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-09-23-ca-41876-story.html
'envisioned the rest of the cons as a bunch of swell and softhearted guys who were probably put away for overzealous toenail clipping'
' The inappropriateness of having them in the same film with vicious attempted gang rapes seems not to have occurred to anyone with any influence.'
'The film's periodic bouts of violence are probably also intended as a reality booster.'
' "Shawshank's" zealousness in trying to cast a rosy glow over the prison experience'

haha i'm trying to remember what kind of sex ed i had in school (early 2000's). would be fascinating to ask fellow russian ppl about theirs.
i think it wasn't so much 'abstinence' as 'nothing'?? iirc, they were too ashamed to actually talk to us about sex, but there were a couple of lectures where they separated us girls from the boys and told us to not be afraid of puberty / menstruation and gave out free tampons (which i still bless them for b/c i wouldn't have dared to actually buy myself some and thus would've been stuck with pads which are much less comfortable for me; but there were too many myths about actually sticking smth 'down there' for me to dare and try tampons without encouragment). i think they also said some pretty gross stuff about how we needed to wash more often 'those days' and that our bodies' smell was more noticeable, for example to boys?? noticeable and disgusting, was the vibe. like, that actually did mildly exacerbate my body issues afterwards yay.
anyway, other than these tentative attempts, my parents also bought me a couple of popular  translated sex-ed books (mostly abt the physical stuff, the birds and the bees, but the tone was still striking in its complete lack of judgement!! a fucking breath of fresh air tbh) and called it a day.
also b/c i was very young (younger than kids in my grade) and poorly socialised during my school years i fell through absolutely any and all social nets that were supposed to give me a crash course into sexuality; i never talked to fellow kids, almost never even watched popular movies to get the discourse from. i read almost exclusively classics (and thanks to my lit teacher for implying that Dunya's attitude of 'rape is worse than death' in 'Crime and Punishment' is admirable!! jfc still having nightmares about that that one). and also some trashy magazines of my mom's that taught me to be afraid of rape in a neurotic way; yeah in retrospect that wasn't appropriate for my age.
so my late teens (up to 20) have been, in order, a rude awakening to and repulsion from the theme of sexuality in general; then finding fandom and getting discourse and education here, bless you. to this day, when i don't skip explicit scenes in fics that aren't *utterly brilliantly* written, as would be my first inclination, i do it because i *need* a source of sex positivity in my life (and being ace in our culture tends to skew me the other way automatically) and there just isn't any other comparable one.

 writing (pointless inelegant) essays about A.'s fics in the comments section under A.'s fics on AO3...
#likeaboss

'before you point out that I’m hypocritical, consider that I could just hate myself, which would make me perfectly consistent' (c)

Q, an omnipotent entity from Star Trek, as written by Alara:
"I know you don't think less of women.  But you think of them differently."  He began to pace again.  "It's wired into the fundamental nature of your brain, the deepest biological distinction you can make.  You apply it to nonhumanoids, you apply it to inanimate objects, it colors every perception you have.  If I changed sex you couldn't help but look at me differently.  And since gender is irrelevant to me, it'd be a difference that wasn't real, wasn't based on something I chose.  If you look at me differently because I'm behaving differently, that's one thing.  Even if I didn't deliberately choose that, it's still the result of a change in me.  But if I change sex, that's not a change in me-- it matters to me not at all.  But it matters to you, to all humans, profoundly.  So to you there would be a drastic change and to me I would not have changed at all.  And I don't think that's honest.  I do try to be consistent, at least."

In the latest TF fic by Astolat there's the canon idea of robots having gender (based exclusively on the ability to "contain a spark" - hold a new robot's 'soul' while it develops - which is apparently a minor design difference), but as Astolat's written it, gender doesn't seem to have any social implications in the cybernetic society. You just... change the pronouns.
And it really breaks my brain a little, because, yes, I *do* think about men and women differently, and that's just logical. In our world *any* gender is steeped in ages-deep context and anyone who *has* a gender has formed *some* relationship with that context.
Take Galvatron, for example - the crazy megalomaniac Deception overlord, who loves war and power and commands with an iron hand, given to violent unpredictable outbursts. When you say "Galvatron, he" - I just easily accept it, it's a very basic archetype. If you say "Galvatron, she" - my brain starts running around in circles, trying to pattern-match the idea against any other examples of women-in-power, yet the database returns no results - powerful feminine archetypes are built on very different principles. Then the brain starts to imagine some 'human' context in which Galvatron could exist and her relationship with it - a simple yet inescapable mistake. And if I don't catch myself in time, I either drastically rewrite Galvatron's personality in my head or I conclude that it's impossible for her to exist. Oh, well.