i hate “accurate” shakespeare productions where all the actors are white guys. the reason women didn’t act in his plays was because it was illegal in that time obv due to misogyny, and we don’t want that to carry over. there were characters of colour that shakespeare specifically wrote. for example, othello was a part for a black actor and yet there r MODERN productions of othello where othello’s actor is a white dude in blackface.
shakespeare would be thrilled if he knew that modern productions of his works featured diverse casts, complete with not only female actors, lgbt actors, and actors of colour, but interpretations that have been tweaked to showcase modern issues that black communities, gay people, women, etc. face.
if you want to do something, do it. a midsummer production where they’re all lesbians? a romeo and juliet production depicting racial tensions? a twelfth night production where viola is and is played by a trans women? shakespeare’s ghost will give u a thumbs up. (plus his works are out of copyright so u can do whatever the hell you want with them whether he’d want you to or not.)
Would the Takarazuka all female theater be enough? Cause they pretty much do ANYTHING especialy Shakespeare:
Romeo & juliet:
Hamlet:
Puck (Midsummer Night’s Dream):
Rome at Dawn (Julius Caesar):
The two noble Kinsmen:
Shakespeare:
STOP ACTIVATING MY GAY I BEG YOU
Bi panic!
I NEED THIS IN MY LIFE IMMEDIATELY
So my only previous exposure to Takarazuka was anime characters fangirling over the actresses…
…but seeing these, I completely understand why now.
Sigmund Freud: All men secretly REALLY REALLY want to have sex with their mothers
It’s the Oedipus Complex
Oedipus: (Who literally gouged his own eyes out and killed himself when he found out he accidentally had sex with his mother) I’m sorry it’s the WHAT complex
There’s a little discrepancy on the nature of Lorna’s hair color.
X-Men #49: Lorna’s says she was born with green hair.
X-Factor #243: Lorna’s memory suggests her green hair came about when she used her powers on the plane.
What can account for this discrepancy?
Did her foster parents tell her she was born with green hair?
Did she assume she was born with green hair because she has no memories prior?
Was she really born with green hair (and therefore born with her powers), and Suzanna dyed her hair brown to cover it up, only for the dye to come off when she used her powers during the crash?
Just one of those things worth pointing out, needing some blanks filled some day.
This post is about love stories and Polaris, and it’s more personal than anything else so I’m not tagging it.
I’m not a romance person in general. I don’t watch romance films or read romance books. I generally don’t do shipping stuff or shipping wars. I don’t have a “romance OTP” sort of thing like some people do.
However, that does not mean I don’t value romance and love stories.
Final Fantasy IV is, as I’ve said many times before, my favorite video game. One of the things I love most about it is the love story between Rosa and Cecil. People who only glance at the story and don’t give it much thought believe that Rosa is just a “useless damsel in distress,” but she’s not. And they push each other.
Rosa’s love pushes Cecil to overcome his Dark Knight training and the king’s orders to try to be a better person. He resists BECAUSE Rosa expects him to be a better man. Without her love, he would be an obedient lapdog to evil. He ascends to paladin status because though the journey was tough, she was worth it.
Rosa also demonstrates her own greatness through that love if you pay attention. In the story, she spurns the whole “must marry a noble” thing her mom thinks she should go for to be with a “lowly” Dark Knight. When reports come that Cecil died, she doesn’t sit at home and cry about it – SHE GOES LOOKING FOR HIM. She crosses a desert by herself (maybe a mountain too) and only gets desert fever from it. When Kain and Golbez are about to kill everyone, she sacrifices her freedom to keep everyone alive.
The love she shares with Cecil brings out the greatness in her. The greatness in BOTH of them. It allows them to mutually be better people and do greater things than either could do alone.
And through it, you can see with Kain what could’ve happened to Cecil without Rosa’s love and support.
This kind of love story is something that made me admire and wonder about these things when I was a kid. It was my go-to love story that I thought about a lot. I can respect and enjoy good love stories.
And that’s where Havok comes into play: the “love story” of him with Lorna is bad.
They do not build each other up. They do not push each other to greater and greater things. They do not mutually become better people. Their entire history is either undermining each other, or Havok undermining Lorna. Holding each other back, or holding Lorna back.
Lorna abandons the X-Men because Havok wants a civilian life and now suddenly she supposedly does too. Lorna goes into space because Havok’s going there, and Lorna is written as some weeping damsel who needs him to save her so she gets forced out there. Those are the worst examples, but there are so, so many situations I could list. Toward the end of her time in space, just about every scene Lorna and Havok were in together was all about how the two are these huge failures with Lorna acting all sad about it so Havok can “be a man” and “comfort” her.
If this was in the model of Rosa and Cecil (as they’re SUPPOSED to be, not how After Years screwed them over), the two of them would be kicking ass and taking names everywhere. They’d be righting wrongs, resisting mind control, overcoming all kinds of obstacles and challenges that everyone else can’t seem to handle. They’d be embracing their mutant heritage, with Lorna as the leading charge spirit for it. Lorna wouldn’t simply be “the woman behind the man.” She’d be a force to be reckoned with, as a character, not as an asset to boost his prestige.
But that’s not how Lorna and Havok work. That’s not how their history sets them. And that’s why they need to spend 10 years apart, because nobody at Marvel or hired by Marvel is capable of fixing this any time soon. That is not a challenge. That is a blunt fact. There is way too much damage, and it’s not the kind that can be fixed by blowing off safety standards and rushing to get a job done regardless of what gets broken or who gets hurt in the process.
If there’s any chance of Lorna and Havok as a relationship working out in any way anywhere near as well as the one between Rosa and Cecil from FF4, it’s not going to happen now. It needs a lot of time to wash away the stain, followed by a lot of hard work to fix it. Think of it like a radioactive site. Because that’s what it is. It’s too radioactive to clean right now. But wait 10 years, and it’ll be safe to clean.
salarta 