Don't leave a voicemail, seriously.

I have way too much to do today to really do justice to this topic, but--


In my experience it's always better to err on the side of "if someone's upset listen to them and treat their dissatisfaction humanely and not ~intellectually." The concept of "not getting emotional" is code to me for "stop having feelings, you emoting cretin." No.

The flavor of this today is: when people express unhappiness with an adaptation of a novel to a film wrt to white washing, it's not really your place to tell them to "get over it" or "I never saw that character that way." The first comment is purely dickish and the second is a function of the fact that your worldview is not theirs, so what's your damage?

Is it really surprising that middle class English speaking white people who read The Hunger Games see Katniss et al as white people? HELLO, welcome to reality. That's cool, no one's telling you not to have those views/perspective. But why do you need to opinionate about other people's perspective? Do you not comprehend that by telling people to not get twisted over this topic you're telling them to simmer down and stop projecting their skanky ~racialized worldview all over the world?

Listen, this is what I'm going to tell you about this: you get the whole world, is there really a reason to care so damned much that people are sad that Katniss isn't mixed race/dark skinned/not a damned blonde? And further, if they're displeased/hurt how is it any of your damned business? Less vomiting your ignorant opinions and more listening to the lived life experience of your fellow human beings.


Live your life, let other people live theirs. If you want to be up your own ass and ignorant, no one's going to come to your house and educate you. However, the next time you're going to lay the law on other people's feelings, how about you eat a cookie or look at porn instead? All of those acts are self-indulgent hedonism, pick one that doesn't hurt other people.

Some evidence of the apocalypse, my day edition:


I was caught out in a hail storm with no umbrella when I went to class today. This is my own fault, I'm sure, because I'm pretty sure there is an umbrella somewhere in my car, but I couldn't find it/it's in the hatch--that's really useful, btw. But it was only sort of raining UNTIL I STEPPED OUT OF THE CAR and a huge piece of hail smacked me right in the face. Then another and another and the heavens pummeled me as I made my disaffected way through the parking lot.

Don't worry, my injuries aren't life threatening.

So, there's this joint near me named the Morningstar Baptist Church. Let that sink in. If you don't get why that's fucked up, google morningstar, I'll wait. Yeah, so it's the Satan Baptist Church. I was thinking about this (again) today wondering (again) what the actual thought process was behind naming this congregation and mostly I figure it was illiteracy, but I like to pretend it was a nefarious plot by a bored demon. This is what I think about while I'm recovering from angels pelting me with ice. In the face.

I passed a sign today that read CIVIL WAR ARTILLERY TRAINING SAT. My first thought was WHAT THE FUCK? It took me a good minute to realize this was probably Civil War re-enactors and NOT militia training for a Tea Party armed uprising. Trust me when I tell you that if you lived where I do, you'd have had the same flutter of terror. By the way, "It's the End of the World As We Know It" was on the radio when I drove by that sign. I had a pretty good laugh about that I would like to share with you.



Now on to the fannish portion of this post.

Yesterday I left this as a comment:


At no point has Arthur escaped his past in any way at all. Of course Bruce and Dick (and Clark at least) know where Arthur is all the time. That's not an issue. He's not hiding from his family; he's obscuring his history from the often dangerously idiotic criminals he currently works with. In a lot of ways dreamsharing crime is one long undercover job. Mostly his associates don't dig very deep or very hard into backgrounds, that's his job anyway--he designed that system.


But there comes the inevitable day that Dick manages to get himself kidnapped/tortured/broken-hearted/shell shocked, basically damaged again/all over and Arthur can't just ignore it. Or more like he absolutely refuses to let Dick blame himself (as per) for shit that rolled down hill from Bruce. From Damian. From Jason. Just, no.

So there's the whole clusterfuck of Gotham and how Arthur doesn't go there anymore but now he is. There's the Manor and the Cave and there's patching up Dick and dealing with the fact that Dick is now back in his childhood room, reappointed of course, but that's not the point at all. The point is that Dick was an adult before he grew pubic hair but hasn't ever really grown up at all. He sort of went from being parented by Alfred to by Alfred, Clark, and Arthur. And Arthur resolutely doesn't think about having to deal with Mr Kent on top of everything else.

In other words, his spine is fused together with stress before he even lands on the tarmac.

And of course there's the Eames situation. That was inevitably going to be an issue, but compartmentalizing is Arthur's specialty.

There is also the fact that he is Arthur now. He's spent lifetimes in dreams as Arthur, as himself, and only twenty-odd years as Tim Drake (Timothy Wayne his papers say). He's Arthur, discrete from the psychodrama of his childhood. Mostly. Well, when he's not watching Dick on a feed from the nanny cams in his apartment managing to burn ramen noodles or doing one armed handstands.

Anyway, so there's all of this bullshit--and he thinks sometimes people who shoot him pitying looks over the Cobbs would shrivel to dust if they knew the depth of the truth of the utter batshit (apt) tragedy he's put up with--and then there's also Eames texting him about work.

R u iguana me?

Damn you, autocorrect!

Ur surgecly attached to ur fone, where r u?

Lather, rinse, repeat.

Dick looks like shit, Arthur hasn't even seen Bruce, Damian's lurking around like Arthur's never been gone, and Alfred looks disturbingly old. He doesn't need to deal with work, too. He steadfastly thinks of Eames as work, half of that is in the figurative way.



*

I guess that was my last ditch denial of this story that I've been telling to STFU since September. So I'm totally writing this. I hope everyone enjoys Matt Bomer (my current Dick) and implied Tim/Dick (implied HAHAHAHA).

Sigh.