icandothis-icandothis:

Rian Johnson has some real problem with male maturity. He took two oldest members of the new cast and gave them storylines about boys.

Keylo is fucking 30 yo, he’s been in his edgelord-space-nazi-killer-of-innocents phase for 10 years now. And yet he’s framed as a “boy” by the narrative, starting with Snoke literarly calling him that, to showing him constantly vulnerable and emo and and cowering or having emotional outbreaks (*cough* tantrums *cough*) He was childish in TFA but in TLJ it’s actually given a sympathetic angle, he’s not “childish” he’s young, delicate and conflicted, he’s “coming to know himself” and all that bullshit.  He’s also given a “tragic” backstory and is constantly shown to be somehow abused by older people (snoke, luke). Almost up untill the very end, he’s shown to be coerced/forced/influenced by the circumstances and people older and stronger than himself.
He’s thirty (30) and he’s given a tragic “coming of age/discovering oneself” story fucking 10 years too late.

Poe is 32, a commander in the Resistance, a rank you don’t just get overnight and without loads of field experience, and yet, somehow, he’s regressed in TLJ to a stage of a young, hot-headed, irresponsible buck, a kid with too much audacity that needs to “learn a lesson”, needs to mature by being put down. During the entirety of the first half of his arc, he’s not once treated seriously by neither the narrative nor the other characters. He’s treated like a disobedient child who needs to be taught a lesson. Leia, his superior officer, slaps him to punish him. Then when she gets to him during his mutiny, she just wordlessly stunts him into unconsciousness as if he’s not worth any negotiations, any reasoning, cause he’s just a stupid child. The same thing happens later when Holdo and Leia leer over unconscious Poe and say they like him cause he’s a troublemaker – they are two military leaders saying that about a subordinate officer who’s just lead a mutiny, like, they are not once treating the situation with the gravity it deserves. The whole thing is framed into a loving and wise parent forgiving a petulant child for acting out, but it’s a grown ass man, a Captain leading a rebelion against the military chain of command!

And, apart from all of the above, any “coming of age and learning important life lessons to be less childish in the future” storyline given to a 32 y-o grown ass man is completely illogical

Of course it’s symptomatic that the white vile villain is given the sympathetic, “sweet child o’mine” story and the latino hero is reduced to an agressive, irresponsible teenager.

And it’s also symptomatic that the story about being young and finding yourself somehow bypasses the characters who actually need that story.

Rey? She’s like, a literal teenager who did not really have a childhood, she’s nineteen and thrust into a completely new world. She needs to learn about it, she needs to find herself in it. Instead she’s given the tired “woman tries to safe a douchebag” trope.

Finn?? He’s just a little older than Rey, he’s just pretty recently finished his childhood years without having an actual childhood, he’s just come of age and symulteniously has just freed himself from under soul-crushing abuse. He needs a “finding oneself” story on so many levels. His “coming of age” story has so much potential angles to it, so many themes to explore! Yet the only thing he gets to know abt himself is that he’s a Rebel scum (and isn’t it Resistance scum?) but the actual road to him starting to identify with the movement is just not shown at all. You don’t actually see what he’s transitioning from, because the “personal to political” shift in his involvement is just barely sketched out.

tl;dr: rian gives teenager storylines to grown-ass men, and not actual teenagers or young people and that’s fucked up and also racist and pretty sexist, the end

Regulus Black & Barty Crouch Jr. – A Relationship Analysis (Based on the Renascentia-verse)

preciousreyofsunshine:

I suppose this chatter applies to my Harry Potter headcanon in general, originally born out of the Barty & Regulus writing that @amorremanet and I wrote some decade or so ago (back in the BL days!!), but over time, it has sort of branched off into Headcanons Inspired By rather than borrowing her Barty characterization exactly. This particular discussion pulls specifically from the Renascentia series that @djemso and I are currently writing, in which Barty/Regulus is not a blatant ship, per se, but very much an Unresolved Thing That Never Was. Because Regulus is a POV character in Renascentia, whereas Barty isn’t (though he WILL have some POV in upcoming backstory), the examples pulled sometimes differ on whether they stem from canon versus the fic-verse, but in the fix, Regulus has a serious case of Unreliable Narration when it comes to his bff, so I want to thoroughly touch on both. Each section is titled in association with one or the other, but honestly, they both get discussed pretty thoroughly in each other’s sections.

Of note: Not all of this information is explicitly written in the series, at least not yet, but it’s not so much a matter of “spoilers” so much as “this is the characterization I have formed in my mind, and the details are being gradually peppered in over time.” And I tried to write out all of my thoughts, but doing so always runs the risk of forgetting things, so who knows, may add more in the future.

  • Regulus Black and the Persistently Rose-Colored Glasses

  • Barty Crouch Jr. and the Tendency Toward Obsession

     

  • Regulus Black and the Case of Misunderstood Sexualities

Keep reading

Putting my ramblings under the cut:

I don’t even want to think about what
might have happened if Regulus had told Barty anything about his
„traitorous“ plans – I’m sure Barty would’ve tried to dissuade
him first, especially given this meta, but even if he had
thought that Regulus only wanted to leave and not that he literally wanted
to destroy part of Voldemort’s soul, he still would’ve resented Reg
for making him choose. The #1 instance where Reg’s secretiveness was
definitely a Good Thing.

I’m kinda conflicted about him anyway: I
mean, the Barty we see in canon was definitely not okay after Azkaban
& the Imperius, so it takes some speculation to figure out
what he was like before. (And there’s still a scope of possible
headcanons that fit easily with canon and the details are a matter of
personal preference, just like with Regulus, but now I’m getting
off-topic. I really enjoy both speculating and reading other
people’s though ;)) Anyway, it is understandable that he did everything
Voldemort wanted in GoF, but as you said, he clearly did horrible
things before that, and there’s no indication that he ever had any
doubts like Reg did – though it’s certainly possible, which is part
of why I can’t determine how I feel about him (my headcanons about
him are as unstable as his mental health). But I do feel sorry for
him because of the Dementor’s Kiss; obviously I don’t think anyone deserves
that and he didn’t get any kind of trial for that either.

Crouch Sr as a Hufflepuff makes
Hufflepuffs seem 10% scarier. Also it’s ironic that for all his
dedication to justice, he was the one to commit a serious injustice
by not giving Sirius a trial (ugh I can’t believe I just wrote the most overused
pun in hp fandom but now I’m leaving it there).

Regulus definitely came across as demi-
or asexual. Especially the nervousness about having to marry
eventually, lol. Too bad he couldn’t just adopt someone and continue
the family line that way or something. Also, he probably needs to understand that
caring about someone doesn’t mean trying to defend them/not being
able to admit they did something wrong, and making himself miserable
if he can’t do that. I mean, the fact
that it seems like he never stopped caring about anyone important to
him is one of the things I like about your Regulus, but. So.
Unhealthy. (The Rose-Tinted Glasses have been broken and taped together a hundred times, and he is still trying to look through them and feels upset and guilty when that doesn’t work.)

free software alternatives

smellslikebot:

i never stop talking about some of these so i might as well banish them to a single post! you might know about a lot of them already, but feel free to look anyway

freeware can be a great opportunity to get a feel for something and learn a new skill. and in some cases, the free versions are almost as powerful, so you might find that you saved a lot of money but made work that was just about equal to what you might have done with paid software!