Disney's unconventional "Cinderella" (1950) (long)

Having watched most of the many adaptations of Cinderella, I've come to realize what a unique adaptation Disney's 1950 animated classic really is. Unlike Snow White, which only had a few stage and screen adaptations before Disney produced its groundbreaking film, Cinderella had already been adapted many times before Disney's turn came, and Disney's version makes a surprising number of departures from the standard Cinderella "formula." It was definitely a fresh, creative Cinderella when it made its debut, and it arguably still is. Yet because it's become so familiar in pop culture, and today so often serves as our childhood introduction to the tale, it's easy to overlook its inventive storytelling choices. The 2015 live action remake uses several classic Cinderella adaptation tropes that the original 1950 film actually subverts!

Here's a list of the often-overlooked ways in which Disney's Cinderella stands out from earlier adaptations, and from many later ones too.

Really obsessed with star trek tos being 1960s progressive. People think this means it's either Wildly Offensive or Still Relevant Today but it's actually both. It kind of takes turns

Tos is like. It's progressive for the 1960s. It's less sexist than any other show I've seen from the same time period and this doesn't make it Not Sexist it's just also 60s feminist. Tos is antiracist and it will paint a white actor brown to have him play an alien to make a point about how racism is bad. Tos is more committed to being against xenophobia than most of today's leftists. Groundbreaking showstopping incredible. DEEPLY flawed by today's standards. Nobody's doing it like her

I mentioned something in a previous post about the casting of actors of color for the roles of Starfleet flag officer Commodore Stone, Dr M'benga and Dr Richard Daystrom.

They just peppered the corridors and other shipboard sets with actors of color, acting like it was a normal thing to do in the 1960s. This example from the episode Balance of Terror stands out:

The wedding of Tomlinson and Martine; among the attendees; another African American female crew member, who's not Uhura, and possibly the only Asian female crew member seen in TOS.

There are a few more Asian crew members that are women!

In A Taste of Armageddon, we have Yeoman Tamura.

In That Which Survives, Lt. Rahda as a character is ostensibly South Asian, as she wears a bindi. (However, the actress herself is not South Asian. Still, I do think it was a good-faith attempt to include characters of color, though they could have done more.)

Also, aside from other Asian women as crew members, there was at least one more Black woman as a crew member—Lt. Charlene Masters in The Alternative Factor.

wait i forgot about her crab shirt

—

Rookie, The Season of the Witch

For readings on the correlation in horror between puberty and the monstrous, see:

I will add Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chain Saws here, although she’s concerned more with identification, monstrous-feminine as men’s horror, and the maternal aspects of possession tales (including a section on possession as oral penetration). Although both Creed and Clover are important feminist horror theorists who work in Psychoanalytical lenses, Barbara Creed talks more about transformation than Carol Clover does. And transformation is key to horror movies about how women are terrifying.

For variations on a theme, watch Ginger Snaps, Carrie, and Teeth together.

(Bonus: here is Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection for free online)

happy lesbian visibility week

"that woman character in your art straight up looks like a dude!" hey man i don't mean to scare you but sometimes there's women who look like dudes. in real life

Something so refreshing about Polite Society (2023) is that we have this film about a teenage girl who wants to become a stuntwoman, who is actively working towards it, who improves across the film, and is allowed to actually fight? And it’s also completely detached from her gender? (People just bag on her dream job because it’s a difficult entertainment-industry career path).

Like Ria is a purple belt in her martial art (looked and sounded like karate but purple belt so maybe ju-jistu?) which is a high rank, meaning she’s been working towards it for a long long time. She’s also got a boxing bag hanging in her room that we see her training on, her sister holds pads for her, and she has two dummy’s in her backyard. Plus - her YouTube channel showcasing her progress and stuntwoman practice. Ria is living the martial arts dream tbh.

Ria and other characters use pieces of multiple martial arts in the film (I spotted Muay Thai, BJJ, Karate, Boxing, and of course Kung Fu). And while much of the fight scenes are stylised, there were very practical self defence elements mixed between (the double elbow strike down to someone grabbing your throat, for example). I love that Priya who played Ria apparently eagerly tried every stunt that she was allowed to because she knew Ria would have wanted to.

Overall, I just loved this film and the subtle details. Nida Manzoor has made a brilliant debut feature film and I want every to see it.

The way that most of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories’ most horrible villains are rich dudes that are abusive to women, in a time such as the 1880’s, compels me.

There’s a whole subset of Sherlock Holmes stories that could be labeled Asshole Guys Try to Control Women’s Money.

Yup, there’s a huge number of times where Sherlock Holmes is the ONLY person to take a young woman’s complaint or worry seriously and finds out someone is up to some serious evil.  Holmes also shows a lot of compassion and empathy with the victims over and over again.  (This is why I find “Secretly a woman” or “Trans” Holmes headcanons much more convincing than “sociopath” Holmes.)

I am never going to shut up about how much I specifically love The Adventure of The Copper Beeches because it is literally Sherlock Holmes listening to a young lady he does not know except as a potential client, agreeing with her that a potential job she has interviewed for that she thinks is SUPER SKETCHY is, indeed, sketchy as fuck and when she says she’s probably gonna take the job anyways because the money is good and she needs it going “OKAY I GUESS but for the love of god please write to us so we know you’re okay we will literally drop everything and jump on a train if you want us to”.

The job turns out to indeed be sketchy as fuck, she writes to them, Holmes and Watson drop everything and jump on a train when she asks them to. I read this story for the first time when I was twelve and it made a HUGE impression.

This is also the basis for a lot of speculation about Holmes’ family life.  The idea that he has been a victim of abuse, or his mother was abused (or even murdered by his father.)  There’s definitely SOMETHING that makes him very aware of how dangerous isolated families can be, and the dark things that can happen behind closed doors.  Plus, of course, the motivation to devote himself to stopping crime.  And yes, so much of it is of the personal type. 

dude see this is one aspect of the original books i NEVER understand why modern remakes (cough cough) don’t go all in on. Like, in the 21th c we HAVE all the dumb forensic shit that made Victorian Holmes stand out, but we STILL DON’T HAVE uh….you know, compassion for women and minorities, or the willingness to believe them, adequate community support for domestic violence or hate crimes, etc. etc. which you’d think is exactly where a renegade consulting detective would come in handy. A good modern day Sherlock Holmes remake, instead of trying to convince us that Holmes is some super genius for being better than fingerprint analysis or whatever, could have him just be…a good person who helps out people the police can’t and won’t help. There you go. That’s how to write a relevant modern Holmes.

One thing that annoys me is how much the BBC version of Sherlock (and the fandom around it) focus on police cases or cold cases.  In the stories, Holmes’ bread and butter cases had fuck-all to do with the police and in a few stories, he actively works around/against them, or outright lies to them.  Of the many, many things I wish that show had done differently, this is one is particularly obnoxious since it’s such a gimme.

There were very few actual murder cases in the Canon, and Holmes handled them either one of two ways:

Option one: The murder victim was innocent while the killer was an abusive bastard, see Speckled Band. Conclusion, arrest and have the killer charged (Or in the case of Speckled Band, indirectly murder him yourself then shrug and go home)

Option two: The victim was murdered to protect someone that the victim was abusing, or for vengeance, see Boscombe Valley, Devil’s Foot, Abbey Grange. Conclusion, Oops, I don’t know who the killer is, I am suddenly incompetent, oh look a pheasant.

#my favorite murder in holmes canon#is when they straight up witness a lady murder her blackmailer#do nothing except destroy his other blackmail material#and then straight up lie to lestrade about it#sherlock holmes#more of this in modern adaptations pls (via @cactusspatz )

The most faithful way to adapt Holmes in the modern day would be to put him in a minority or immigrant community, the sort of place where people don’t trust the police and need to find alternative routes to seek justice.

Made you wonder why certain modern adaptation focus on Holmes view of women that is sexist in today’s standard but pretty normal in the Victorian time but not how he treated women with way more sympathy and respect than most dudes in his time (actually listen to the woman, not treating them as crazy/hysterical when even their own husband thinks so, not judging a woman for their occupation as in The Woman case where most men will see her as a whore who wants to scam the noble man instead of a woman who only wants to protect herself from a rich powerful douche).

I liked Elementary's approach, which was a mix of the police procedural and private investigation aspects of what various fans liked.

And it was waaaaay more compassionate towards women

Text: decoupling pregnancy from femininity means accurate and more inclusive language and treatment, but it also allows cis women to refuse motherhood without refusing womanhood, which is great for feminism and terrifying for misogyny.

–THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS. As a sterile cis woman who doesn’t want to have children anyway I feel this is every ounce of my being. “Define woman” types tend to do so in a way that excludes me too, so I got to stand with my trans sisters.

Not feminist as in "women should be included in the draft" but feminist as in "being drafted is a violation of bodily autonomy for any gender".

The draft should not exist. Drafting people into the military is a violation of human rights. You should not be able to force someone to risk their life. If you can't find enough people who care about a conflict to keep it going then it simply shouldn't keep going. You can't even force someone to donate a kidney using government power, why the fuck can you force them to donate their whole body and life to a cause they don't agree with or don't care about?

On Shopping While Fat 2: Son of Fat

I feel like I want to explain to young tumblr users who weren't born yet that MulderxScully was a revolutionary ship. No, it was not queer but that is not the only way to be revolutionary.

In the 90s when The X Files was airing, media was like misogyny soup. Yes, there were exceptions. But casual sexism was so ubiquitous it was like we were all frogs simmering in it and if you dared to say, hey, uh, isn't this joke a little shitty to the wife? Or maybe this female character could do something other than pose and ask questions so the male lead can answer them? Then you were a hairy feminist outcast loser.

Scully was a lot of things but she was not that. All the "You're not going to believe this, Scully!" memes are based on the fact that Mulder, an attractive white dude, wanted nothing more in his entire life than to share his passions with this tiny redhead. Was he nuts? Yes. But on many other shows, he would have talked down to her, would've ignored her, would've mocked her. He didn't.

When you go back and watch The X Files, there's these moments where Mulder and Scully look at each other like, "wait did Jack Black really just say that" and the significance to fan history isn't just the sexual tension. It's that, yeah, and the origin of the word ship, and the 'will-they-won't-they'. But the most important thing about those looks is how they told the audience that Mulder was looking to Scully for something. A man was looking at a woman and asking with his eyes "what do you think about this?" Was he also saying "and do you want to bone about it?" Yeah, yeah he was. But the first thing was sexy as hell.

Respecting a woman's expertise and folding information she provided into his worldview was a revolutionary thing for a man to do on television at the time. Thank you for coming to my MSR ted talk.

I have commented on how we don't speak enough of the tv series genre Señoras que investigan where usually an older woman gets into detective work either as a hobby or as her real job.

Those series that go under the radar because they play on tv, they're easy going, they may have very simple plots and are not usually made by masterminds tend to have a surprisingly good representation.

There are mainly two subgenres: the idealisation of the job and the realism. The idealisation often comes with some light comedy and handsome, kind and affectionate men. The realist version tends to be more serious, while still light-hearted.

People want many things of series that often can be found in Señoras que investigan. You will find all kind of people, young and old, fat and thin, LGBT representation... Surely some of them offer more variety of characters than others, depending on the country of origin, the time period in which they were made and the style, but they are generally very open minded and not judgy, which is already a must.

And generally this is due to the fact that women write those series and participate in the creation of them, actively. They are for women too, so they have to be comforting for their audience and address the problems their audience (women) have. They may have an asshole character who is very sexist, but it is treated as such. Women get along, they help each other, they partner up with each other. They show a reality that other series don't know how to deal with and they really care for their audience.

I don't know, I love Señoras que investigan, even the average ones. You know how they will play out (they'll solve the crime, manage the situation), but can you tell what the everyday life problems of the protagonists will be? These series are full of tiny stories of everyday people and how to care about them and for them.

Probably because of all of this, they dare to show some characters or some arcs with a certain respect and taste, particularly when it comes to LGBT situations. This person they are showing could be you or your neighbor, the audience care about them.

I will now name some that I know (whether I have watched them or not) so that you can get into them too:

Advice from 4500 years ago.

I like ths translation. “it would be wise of you to remember this”

A mom helping her kids beat a hard level in Super Mario Land, 1990s.