Come On Yall Vote Bombalurina Please, Dont Let Her Lose To TRINA From FALSETTOS

Come on y’all vote Bombalurina please, don’t let her lose to TRINA from FALSETTOS

Musical theatre girl competition, round one

YAS Queen!!!!

my turn to go FERAL this fic is amazing!!!

IT’S COMPLETE

THE CATS MUMMY AU IS FINITO

HAPPY ENDINGS ALL ROUND

Thank you to everyone who has commented, reblobbed, liked, or read this silly fic. Know that I am sending you a virtual warm bowl of soup with bread and a spread of your choosing.

The biggest thank you (and therefore also soup) to my bestie @storyweaverofgondor for being my beta and putting up with all my tomfoolery and shenanigans :)

VOTE PUSSSSSSS

Round 4 Group 8

Puss in Boots (Puss in Boots) vs Schrödinger's cat (you know the one)

VOTE LUCILLE

Bracket H Round 1

Poll 2

Lucille (@vifandom) vs. Devi Fuentes (@ditzycranium)

451. Lucille (@vifandom)

She/They/It

She is a simple gremlin who loves to make people laugh. Her clown high-fashion is unmatched.

She has long, straight pink hair, with a shiny black clown nose, and reddish-purple lipstick and cheek paint. Her skin is a light pastel green.

452. Devi Fuentes (@ditzycranium)

she/they

shes a silly nervous wreck and very #quirky bc she is emo and collects dead bugs. she also is a bass player. also shes a homestuck oc X3 also also they are hispanic and are you really going to put hispanic trans women down??

a lanky tannish teen with bleached chin length blonde hair with dusty blue highlights. small downturned eyes.  a shirt with a blue moth on it. black skinny jeans with a studded belt and converse.

LMAO a hot second

Renfield

My dumb little gay brain has hyper fixated on this upcoming vampire film so I wanted to talk about it. Really long post under the cut, so read on at your own risk 👍👍👍

So Renfield is this movie about Dracula’s minion, Renfield, and I got really excited about it when I saw the trailer. I’ll probably still go see the movie, the aesthetic is cool and I like the colors, but based on that trailer, I had an understanding of the plot that did not pan out. Maybe I’m wrong and the advertisement was misleading, but as I’m aware of it, the plot goes like this:

Renfield is your average guy, save for one thing: he works for the narcissistic Lord of Evil, Dracula, who I think serves as a literal representation of his low self-esteem and self-worth. To help alleviate this problem, he goes to a toxic relationship counseling group, who see his panicked rambling about his boss’s powers as hyperbole. His job is to bring Dracula people to eat, and, in exchange, (by eating spiders??? I think???) he gains superhuman strength and agility. But Dracula treats him terribly, and he’s looking to get out of their bargain. He, at some point, saves a bunch of people, and teams up with a police officer lady to an unknown degree. I assume the movie will end with him defeating Dracula, symbolizing him overcoming his mental struggles and finding peace.

Now, I thought this movie was gay. Perhaps that’s my gaggles (gay goggles) talking, but given that he goes to relationship counseling, the bizarre intimacy shown in the promotional material, as well as my inkling that it would have its romantic/sexual undertones addressed narratively if either Dracula or Renfield was a woman, I think it’s justified. So my first thought was, “Cool! Gay vampire action movie with Nick Cage!” And then I thought, “Oh, not gay vampire action movie with Awkwafina.” And some of my initial enthusiasm dipped. But I figured, “I can’t’ve been the only one who caught on to these subtleties, right?” So, to the Internet I went.

Come to find out, almost everyone saw the very homoerotic subtext between the dominating evil fancy man and his submissive good-hearted henchperson. 

Of course, some certain corners of the Internet, such as Pinterest, Tumblr, and Ao3 are perhaps a bit hardwired to see two men in close proximity and diagnose them with gay, but I think that says more about how writers write these characters, and less about how the fans see them. Since straight relationships are largely unappealing (read: unhealthy and possessive) as portrayed in modern media, and a majority of characters with speaking lines and interactions are male, gay pairings are an essential part of the shipping conversation. The top ten pairings in Ao3 fanfiction are all between two guys, for Pete’s sake. 

So why aren’t canonical gay relationships more common? The obvious answer is, obviously, the aggressive heterosexuality of Hollywood, action movies in particular. Sometimes it seems like hetero romance is a quota to fill, as if while making these movies, they thought, “We have to make these to opposite-gendered characters kiss,” with very little reasoning or logic behind it. And even if a straight romance is given buildup and payoff, it seems that many writers are uninterested in actually writing about two people in love, beyond the falling in. (The Thor movies are actually a great example of this, as the relationship between Jane Foster and Thor in the first movie is a pretty well-written one. But then they’ve broken up in the second film, Jane isn’t in the third one, and then she dies.) Indiana Jones has three different love interests for three straight movies, Maverick gets back with Penny in Top Gun 2 for literally no good reason, and Endgame ends with Captain America having gone back and inadvertently removed Peggy’s agency to get his romantic ending. In my opinion, straight romances are largely superficial, not impacting plot or characters in meaningful enough ways to be included. 

And that’s, I think, at the heart of why I can’t stand romantic subplots in action movies. Their superficially and toxic insanity. I can count on two hands the amount of movies with enjoyable and well-progressed romantic subplots. (Howl’s Moving Castle, Shrek, and Tangled come to mind, though that might be my animation bias showing.) It feels tacked on. Cheap. Unimportant. It’s hard to get invested into when the characters are so… not interesting. And when it’s not boring me to tears, it’s making me question the sanity of whoever signed off on it.

For an excellent comparison, look at the 1999 and 2017 Mummy movies. In the ‘99 film, Rick and Evie’s romance couldn’t be removed without substantial changes to the narrative. They positively drive each other’s development. Rick by feeding into Evie’s more outgoing and adventurous tendencies, and Evie by driving Rick to be more open and compassionate. They’re totally focused on each other, and time is given to developing their relationship naturally. It also provides a good foil against the villain, Imhotep, who was destroyed not once, but twice by his obsession with Anck-su-Namun. 

But the 2017 version has one of the most heterosexual stories I’ve ever seen in an action film. The protagonist, Nick, has two love interests, the paranoid researcher Jennifer, and the mummy herself, Ahmanet. He’s linked to Ahmanet through some psychic BS, and she wants to marry him. But he also has a past with Jennifer, and ends up sacrificing himself for her. But instead of these relationships serving as juxtaposition, one driven by genuine caring passion, and the other driven by desire and selfishness, one just keeps getting in the way of the other. At the end, neither are developed or compelling. Too much time is spent with Nick bemoaning his ties to Ahmanet to grow into his relationship with Jennifer, and too much time is spent with Nick angsting out with Jennifer to elaborate on his relationship with Ahmanet. And they’re all such boring characters that you can’t even really bring yourself to care.

So, along comes Renfield. A film with the perfect opportunity to structure most, if not all, of its story around a romantic relationship, albeit a failing one. It felt (and still feels) incredibly What We Do In The Shadows, given the poppy neon lighting, dry-humored dialogue, timeless atmosphere, and campy characters. And, above everything else, a lot of very gay subtext. (Of course, What We Do In The Shadows is a lot more overt with the character’s obviously not-straight sexualities.) Because while the common Internet users seem to look at this movie and say, “they’re gay,” the more official, widespread Internet journalists and film critics seem to look at this movie and talk only about how cool it is that not-so-subtle meme king Nicolas Cage is playing a classy-classic tuxedo vampire. (And, don’t get me wrong, I love that too.) Is it the gaggles rearing their homo heads again? Is this just something we’ve read into too deeply?

I don’t think so. Any millennial/ gen-Z consumer of vampire media, excluding maybe the die-hard Edward versus Jacob Twilight fans, is familiar with the homoeroticism that comes with the genre. Carmilla, widely considered the very first vampire novel, is literally about a lesbian romance! The sexual tension between Jonathan Harker and the Count in the first few chapter of Dracula is wild. So much vampire media is queercoded, if not outright gay, so I think assuming a 2023 “modern monster tale” would address or lean into these expectations is reasonable.

(As a side note, whatever Renfield and Dracula’s relationship is, it’s a toxic one. If my assumption is correct and Dracula represents Renfield’s internalized insecurities, that’s a pretty bad basis for a romance. The promo material has made it very clear that Renfield is unhappy with how he is treated by his boss. His journey in the movie is about getting away from that.

Online fandom culture has an unfortunate habit of romanticizing (fetishizing) gay men in toxic relationships. Look no further than the enthusiastic Killing Stalking fan base, who think a psychopathic, unfeeling murderer and an emotionally unstable, abandonment-issue-riddled nervous wreck should be together romantically. Oh, and the murderer kept the nervous wreck locked in his house for months, physically, emotionally, and sexually abusing him, while feeding into his Stockholm-Syndrome mentality. Such a relationship is similar to Dracula and Renfield’s. A lot of this culture stems from teen girls, which I am, and I don’t want to feed into that.)

If Renfield is gay, it has an interesting opportunity to write an extremely interesting queer romance about a gay dude breaking away from his abusive old boss, and perhaps finding new love and comfort in his sexuality. I would suggest the police officer, but, on top of the fact that she would bring it back to the realm of heteronormativity, she’s unfunny and annoying. (Although, her name is Rebecca Quincy, and Quincy P. Morris is the name of the bisexual Texas cowboy himbo from the original Dracula novel.) Oh, well. She’ll probably be his love interest anyway.

It’s possible that I’m just wrong and Renfield will have all this “good queer writing” that I didn’t expect, and this whole essay will be null and void. (I seriously doubt it.) Honestly, though, I’m really just using Renfield as thinly- veiled window dressing for other romantic- adjacent topics that I’ve wanted to organize my thoughts on for a while. 

Thanks if you read all this way. Lemme know what your thoughts on stuff like this is.