For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn. Wrong Size.

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn. Wrong size.

The post I just reblogged made me think about "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" and how, now, in our time of dramatically reduced infant and child mortality and increased abundance, the more statistically likely interpretation of that six-word story is this:

"Extended family and friends have gifted us too much stuff for our kid. They didn't even get a chance to wear these shoes before they outgrew them." And if that's not an indication of amazing progress, I don't know what is.

You're not immune to being the bully btw. You're not immune to being in the wrong

What she says: I hate antis

What she really means: I don’t mind people disliking a ship for their own reason but the anti-shipping movement is driven by hate and bandwagon bullying to police what people are “allowed” to enjoy. They use fundamentally abusive and manipulative tactics on real people in the name of protecting survivors from speculative things in fiction. Antis want to act morally superior over ship wars and claim that to ship something problematic you must be a survivor. By doing this antis force survivors who may be uncomfortable with coming out with their status to out themselves and then hold them to impossible standards. Except when it does come to survivors who ship anti-deemed problematic things we are attacked, harassed, and then pushed under the bus anyway. Antis trivialize terms such as abuse, rape, and pedophilia by using them so often and out of place against a group made up of many survivors and minors– the people they claim to be protecting. They have bullied and suicide baited artists and other content creators they dislike in the name of “policing the bad ships uwu.” All antis are at fault for this, even if an anti claims not to send hate themselves they are still influencing this bad behavior because they are part of this hate group. The entire anti-shipper movement is a toxic cesspool that makes me feel sick.

Another way Saltburn displays some brutally insightful class commentary:

Oliver pretends that he grew up poor, with some poverty porn stereotype of a childhood including mentally ill drug dealer parents, and the Cattons eat that shit up because of course the Poor People have Problems, isn't it just so sad?

And then not one person (except Farleigh, who mostly didn't like Oliver already for personal reasons) even questions when one of the wealthy, spoiled Catton children dies of an overdose and the other one kills herself because she was mentally unwell.

Maybe if that family had spent less time looking for voyeristic poverty porn in the guise of 'friendship' with those less fortunate, and spent more time looking after each other and caring about the problems running rampant in their own home, they might have fared a little better for it.

Unfortunately for them, the mythology of their own importance, their own untouchable perfection, a family with no problems that couldn't be easily fixed or managed or swept under the rug, was crucial to maintaining the myth that they in anyway deserved everything that they had, and thus because they deserved it didn't have to think too deeply about all the ways they used their wealth and power only to benefit themselves.

Flower Fairies of the Spring by Cicely Mary Barker

Some day, I am going to write a treatise on how Oliver Quick based the logic for every single one of his choices in Saltburn on things he was actively, verbally told by other characters, and how this is a core character trait for Oliver that culminates in his choice to tell himself who he is by the end of the movie in his monologue to Elspeth's comatose body.

This treatise will also conclusively demonstrate that Oliver Quick is an impatient bitch who only gets more impulsive in his choices as the story goes on, up until he kills Felix and finally can wait as long as it takes to getback to Saltburn, because he finally knows for sure that the one friend he ever had will still be there in the same place and same state Oliver left him in no matter how long he takes to return.

For now, though, I have too many other things to finish and will not let myself be distracted by a project that will definitely take longer than the brainworms try to tell me.

But yes. It is one of my favorite details of Saltburn. If you listen like Oliver does, his logic may be a little mad, but it's not nonexistent. Every single choice he makes can be traced back to something someone says to him, because ultimately that poor lil' gremlin boy just desperately wanted to fit in and had no idea how to do that.