The interesting thing about Glados/HAL 9000 parallels is that
Hal was conceived at a time when artificial intelligence was more of a fictional construct than a practical possibility. Hal is introduced as humanlike because the audience is familiar with and comfortable with humans, but they aren’t familiar with or comfortable with living computers. It’s when he starts acting robotic and calculated that the audience realizes “oh no, he’s a computer” and he becomes threatening.
By the time Glados was conceived, we had become used to computer automated systems. Synthetic voices offering us information is something we encounter in daily life. Glados is introduced as a computerized preprogrammed voice because that’s what the audience is familiar and comfortable with. It’s when she starts acting human and emotional that the audience realizes “oh no, she’s alive” and she becomes threatening.
you really gotta be a fool to say tchaikovsky wasn’t gay. the man literally fired cannons in his 1812 overture, do you really think a straight man could achieve that drama? that panache? that power? grow up
Protip for men: if marriage is a horrifying concept for you and you think it is an evil trap, do not buy a ring and ask a woman to marry you
I’m way over seeing radical feminist bullshit on my dash. This isn’t even social justice or a real issue.
sorry that not marrying someone you dont loathe is radical feminism i guess?
women: don’t propose or get married if u don’t like the thought of marriage
men: what kind of sjw fuckery
the other bit that this implies is:
If you like your wife, act like it. Even around your friends. Be open and honest about liking your wife, liking spending time with her, and not being resentful of the shared work of building a household. Let your buddies know you can’t hang out with them because you’d rather be home with your wife, whom you like, because she is your legit bff, even though you know your buddies are gonna mock you for it.
Stand up to your buddies. Tell them mocking isn’t cool and you don’t want them to do it anymore. Challenge the other men in your life to be better men.
That is what “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” implies to men who are married. And while it’s all completely reasonable I imagine that it’s scary as fuck when it’s just so much easier to har de har har the little woman’s such a nag, ain’t she, don’t we all hate being married so much? with other men.
In that context, “don’t get married if you think marriage is an evil trap” is kindof a radical statement.
The number of guys I work with who are engaged who started pulling the “uh oh, life over soon, har har” shit that I have completely shut down with a simple “well if you don’t want to get married, then don’t”…*sigh* And they’re just like, hem, haw, welllll if I don’t then she might not stay with meee, which I respond to with “well, sounds like you need to have a pretty serious and honest conversation with your fiancee about your feelings then” and then the *panic!* look…When you remove that easy “hah hah ball-and-chain” narrative, watch the reaction. Some of them (to a female friend) will mumblingly admit that they love their fiancee and are excited to be married. Others…all you get is fear.
That’s the disservice we do men by refusing to teach boys how to explore their emotional needs. It hurts everyone. I watched three male friends walk into marriages I can tell they weren’t ready for and didn’t want, just because it was expected and they had no tools for emotional self-examination. Two of those marriages are (shockingly) in crisis, a couple years later. One has kids involved now. It’s more than a little heartbreaking. The marriages I see that are working? Are the guys with the emotional maturity to talk to their wives and who don’t care if everyone knows they’re in love with them.
SERIOUSLY.
My friend is getting married this summer and when I congratulated her fiance on their engagement he said to me “Yeah well you know, women. This is what they want so you have to bite the bullet.” and my other friend’s husband who was sitting next to him laughed and agreed. If this is how you feel, don’t get married. Don’t propose. Just…. Don’t. Do it. Any of it.
Straight people think that doing things you really don’t want to do – like marriage and having kids – is normal cos they’re still stuck in a fucking 19th century mindset.
It’s why I know my best friend got a good one, he’s open about how much he loves her and he’s excited to be getting married and regularly contributes ideas and has his own input, it’s nice to see
It filters through as well. Even being gay, a lot of my straight friends don’t understand why I spend so much time with my husband. Because I love him? Because I enjoy his company? Because he’s my best friend? I can’t count the amount of straight people that have told me that they think it’s “weird” that my husband and I spend so much quality time together. The only person who understood was my mom, whose response was: “If you love someone and genuinely enjoy their company, why WOULDN’T you want to spend your free time with them?!”
How can anyone look at their impending marriage and think ‘oh no, it’s all over now’ like???? I’ve only felt so close to so many people in my life, but those small few were like?? I’d wake up in the morning excited to be awake just to look forward to SEEING them. I’d catch myself with this stupid idiot grin in broad daylight just THINKING ABOUT BEING AROUND THEM. I’d sleep easy with them in my head, shitty days became perfect once I spoke to them. THAT’s how I imagine feeling again someday. I think about feeling that way for someone again and it’s like the whole future opens up. Marriage is finding your best friend in the whole wide world and wanting to have a sleepover every single day, and to agree to it and then go around groaning like your freedom is being stolen is a HUGE disrespect. If you have the freedom to share your life with anyone you like and you throw it around like baggage you really can’t expect it to grow, can you? You gotta care about yourself a little more than that I think
All of this.
Not to mention this mentality makes it’s way TO THE DAY OF THE WEDDING. How many weddings have we seen with something like this:
Like what kind of toxic mentality do you have to have to say this as the bride is about to walk down the aisle and marry someone who it’s now suggested doesn’t even want to be there?? How is this cute? How is this supposedly charming? This is supposed to be the person you love and want to be with! And not to mention that you send this down the aisle with a small child (the ring bearer or the flower girls)…I have a special loathing for things like this.
Early on in the film, we see Rey being adorable in her X-Wing pilot helmet. I remembered seeing the numbers “733” on her helmet on my first viewing.
But then I realized it wasn’t “733”, it was Aurebesh.
The supplementary materials, specifically the TFA Visual Dictionary and Rey’s Survival Guide, shed more light on this.
She finds a crashed X-Wing, it belonged to a squadron called the Yellow Aces. She finds a pilot helmet, belonging to a Dosmit Ræh of the Tierfon Yellow Aces.
She makes a doll of an X-Wing pilot by hand,
she enjoys wearing the helmet and, at least when she was younger, liked to pretend she was Ræh, X-Wing pilot.
”You can get a clue to what happened to these fighters based on whether the
ejection seat’s inside or not.” This will be important to my next post but I figured I’d mention it while we’re here.
She runs flight simulators scavenged from downed ships and practices them during her limited free time.
”THANK YOU YELLOW-4!!!” Now I know that you’re thinking, “sure, it says Yellow, but that doesn’t mean it’s Tierfon Yellow Aces.”
On the left you’ll see: Flight computer–capacitors and memory drive salvaged, 2 portions, transponder ID says fighter was Yellow-4 (Tierfon)
At the top you’ll see: “Canopy–missing (ejected)” “Cockpit–ejector seat fired” So we know Dosmit Raeh likely survived and, if still alive, is likely still on Jakku.
”Don’t miss the repulsor lifts–I scavenged a bunch of those for my
speeder.”
Rey used primarily X-Wing parts for her personal speeder, most importantly the steering and engines, indicating familiarity with
those parts.
These are all facts from Rey’s Survival Guide and the TFA Visual Dictionary.
Rey searches probably hundreds of downed ships, and dozens of X-Wings, so why
does this book keep mentioning this one? Why does it tie everything together?
And why on earth would you give this character the name Raeh if you
weren’t going to do anything with it? Well we’ll get into more of this later but for now the important thing is Rey taking the identity of Ræh from a young age, and choosing to use that name as her own.
When Finn (who also doesn’t have an actual name) asks her for her name she replies “I’m Rey”, not “My name is Rey”. It’s a tiny detail and much too little to be theorizing from but wouldn’t it be great if both Rey and Finn at that moment were using names they adopted, not ones they were born with? And Rey instead of saying her name is Rey, responds with a simple “I’m Rey”, because that’s the identity she’s chosen, she is Ræh. Also keep in mind that this happens immediately after Rey flies the Falcon, and is even excitedly telling Finn how she’s never flown like that before. She’s never felt more like Ræh, Ace pilot, than in this moment, and so when asked who she is, she uses the identity she took as a child, which now seems more apt than ever.
(Credit and thanks to @harquinns for the beautiful gif at the start, and to @expelumos for the black and white gifs at the end, they were the only ones I could find that show that very important hesitation just before Rey says her line in the 4th gif, almost as if she’s about to say something different at first)
JainaSolo1994 