vampire who turns away in disgust from representations of the holy cross but it doesn’t actually harm her she just resents the omnipresence of christianity in the western world
Between the lawsuit over Black Widow and, uh, that, with Shang-Chi, I was definitely interested to see what shit Eternals would get into and boy howdy.
You know what? I do actually want to talk a bit about Barry.
Very few characters in The Adventure Zone actually have physical descriptions beyond maybe gender and race, if that. Barry is a unique exception in that he is one of the few main npcs that actually has an explicit description. What is that description? A chubby to fat dark haired man with glasses, blue jeans, and pushing 50. In a good portion of fandom interpretations, Barry is allowed to exist as such, but I still see it popping up way too often:
Why do people feel the need to draw Barry young and/or skinny? Why do I occasionally still stumble on art that transforms this chubby, mid-40s average-Joe who works in IT into a scrawny wrinkle-free twink?
I mean I know why. But here’s the thing, if it’s conscious, subconscious, or just some artist’s aversions to learning how to draw fat or old characters (why??), Barry wasn’t really illustrated as such until the introduction of Lup. Granted he had significantly less fan art before the plot pushed him to the forefront, but I also feel as though the introduction of Lup, identical twin to the character described as “One of the most beautiful elves ever”, who fell in love with Barry head-over-heels to the point where the two could be considered inseparable soulmates, did also have an effect on how he was drawn. Because Lup is known to be beautiful, fiery and “Phantasmal and Resplendent” (which is the most fucking phenomenal descriptions of a trans woman character and I couldn’t be happier), but I’ve even seen people jokingly make short-fics, posts and jokes of characters saying Lup is “out of Barry’s league”, or that Lup “could do better”. And then, in some of the tenderest–AND most popular of fan art for the ship– Barry is transformed into seemingly a “more palatable” version of himself (ew).
Fat men are allowed to be handsome. Older men are allowed to be handsome. Fat older men are allowed to be handsome and not just have the most beautiful love story I’ve ever heard with a bomb-ass gorgeous woman who he loves and WHO IS IN LOVE WITH HIM, but be considered HANDSOME and IN HER LEAGUE.
Let Barry be who he is, and let him keep his love story. Stop this subconscious implication that men have to be young or skinny to be considered handsome or worthy of love.
(And if your reasoning is that you’re worried about some age gap thing between Lup and Barry, maybe take the one that doesn’t have a canonical age and make her closer to the age of the one who DOES have a canonical age? Like, Taako and Lup can ALSO be beautiful and be older (or chubby/fat, dark skinned, etc for that matter jesus just let people be seen as attractive without pushing for fatphobia/racism/de-aging etc))
Anyways I’m rambling but
TL;DR: Let Barry be middle aged and fat and still be considered handsome and worthy of a beautiful love story.
all women were not doing domestic work. black women have always worked, just as the tweet says while [monied] white women had the option to not work and have us in their households handling that role.
so i just learned that after disney+ debuted disney shut down a huge chunk of its tv channels around the world such as disney channel and disney XD including the ones in south korea, so for old times’ sake i just spent a good hour or so watching channel shutdown compilations and 90% of these worldwide disney channels just…. got absolutely no sendoff whatsoever. many of them got their plug pulled right in the middle of a show without even waiting for the episode to finish airing and there was no ending jingle or even a voiced-over announcement, only a sudden cut to a soulless monotone blank screen with “this channel is no longer available.” like the stuff of childhood nightmares
you’d think a company with such a family-friendly image would take the time to at least explain briefly to its very young audience that all their fave shows will be moving to another service or something, hell, at least do it for advertisements’ sake so that kids can pester their parents into buying disney+, but disney does not care about you and it does not care about your children and it will absolutely snatch the last shred of comfort from a kid’s hands if it means they don’t have to spend an extra $400 recording an ending announcement in different languages
and honestly i am just sitting here with my heart in my throat like. none of our current art is truly permanent, is it. we like to think that we have better documentation and archiving technology than generations past but all it really takes is for one megacompany to slap some copyright tape over its comic book villain safe and then toss that safe in the ocean for all it’s worth. youtube could potentially choose to do the same and simply wipe its entire site clean overnight. adobe decided to throw flash in the garbage and decades worth of internet content just…. disappeared from reach. i am begging every digital creator out there to backup your content to as many outlets as you possibly can. use different cloud services that aren’t owned by one company. use physical usb drives and hard drives. if programs you used to open your work become obsolete at least document what it was so it can be passed on and remembered by people who want to. jesus christ i need a drink
