The most hilarious thing about the fact Buckbeak had a trial and lost is that later on JKR resolves the issue by having Hagrid take him in again and renaming him Witherwings. That’s literally all it took. What if in POA, Hagrid simply said, “Sorry, Buckbeak flew away.”
“There’s a hippogriff right there, Hagrid.”
“A different hipprogriff.”
“I’m… pretty sure that’s the same hipprogriff.”
“Prove it.”
no dna tests we die like scientifically underdeveloped societies
Prisoner of Azkaban continues to be the most frustrating book
Someone should have just adopted Sirius and started calling him Gerald.
Remus: Erm… this is our new order member, my… cousin Gerald. Gerald White.
“Mr. Lupin that is Sirius Black with glasses!” “Oh come now Minister, Sirius Black doesn’t wear glasses. That wouldn’t make sense.” “Well have Mr. White take off his glasses then!” “He can’t he needs them to see.”
it got better
It’s honestly a miracle to me that wizarding society doesn’t collapse every other week because like
You’ve got this world full of people who can destroy whole buildings or turn people into beetles or make vehicles fly just by waving a stick at them
And there is literally no common sense
Anywhere to be found
Voldemort would never have had anyone find out he was back if he just went around calling himself Steve
Okay, see, I thought I saved this post to comment on it but I’d like to bring up
The Minister would NEVER EVER disbelieve in Gerald White. He’d buy it hook line and sinker. The wizarding world would buy it hook line and sinker. The GOBLINS wouldn’t but wizards have been shown to be pretty blindingly clueless. Still, Gringotts would grudgingly give Sirius access to the Black fortune.
But, but, but, you know the one person
the one person
who Gerald White would drive AB-SO-LUTELY FUCKING BATSHIT?
Severus Snape.
Snape would do everything, EVERYTHING, to get people to believe that it’s Sirius. But the Order would ignore it (they accepted Sirius as Sirius before anyway) and Remus would just be so… so affronted.
‘Severus, he is my cousin.’
And Sirius would love it. He’d love the fact that Snape just hated it. He’d be the BEST DAMN GERALD WHITE EVER b/c Snape is doing everything from dropping veritaserum into his firewhisky to capturing a dementor in a box and releasing it on Sirius when he least expects it
That one causes problems for a bare minute because SHIT A DEMENTOR ATTEMPTED TO GIVE GERALD THE KISS MAYBE SNAPE IS RIGHT except Harry comes forward and is like ‘excuse me, I’ve never committed a crime and dementors are ALWAYS attacking me, I think they’re attracted to glasses’
and the magical community is like ‘shit, yeah, you’re right’
and just
Spare. Snape goes spare.
Picturing Snape as Mr. Crocker from the Fairly Oddparents now.
Gerald White eventually becomes a fully registered animagus. When he turns into his animagus form right in front of Snape, Snape’s bursting at the seams, just pointing at him and spluttering:
‘HE’S A BIG BLACK DOG! A DOG – THAT IS BLACK. SIRIUS BLACK. BLACK DOG DOG BLACK.’
And Remus calmly says: “That’s absurd, Severus. Sirius Black was never an animagus and besides which, people’s names don’t have any influence over their animagus forms or anything like that. That’s ridiculous.”
And Snape yells: “Shut it WEREWOLF MCWEREWOLF!”
Everyone looks at Remus, who blinks and sighs as Gerald White turns back into his human form.
“Pure coincidence,” Gerald says. “My aunt was into Roman mythology. Has to happen sometimes.” Then he pauses to give Snape an overly concerned look. “Are you alright, Severus? You’re looking a little red.”
Okay I know we always go on about Marvel’s uncanny casting ability.
But if you thought they were the only ones, let me draw your attention to this man:
Viggo Mortensen, aka Aragorn son of Arathorn, aka Sexiest Ranger in Middle Earth
would hike, often for more than a day, to remote filming locations, in costume, for the sake of authenticity
was the best swordsman Bob Anderson (swordsmaster/instructor for LotR, Pirates of the Caribbean, etc) says he has ever trained
occasionally writes poetry (more book!canon than film!canon but um hello)
does all his own stunts
lived all over and speaks about 23940209384 languages
you know that scene at the end of Fellowship when he’s fighting the Uruk-hai? And one throws a dagger at him and he hits it away with his sword? Yeah, the guy who threw it was supposed to miss, but accidentally threw it directly at Viggo. Who just casually Aragorned and hit it away.
They actually cast Aragorn to play Aragorn
Can I just add a few things?
Would randomly give chocolates to the hobbits
According to John Rhys-Davis (aka Gimli), whenever you have a large cast, one or two actors will naturally become the leaders. Guess who ended up in that role.
Single-handedly convinced cast and crew to camp out to shoot a scene in the sunrise
Once hit a wild rabbit with his car by accident. Promptly stopped his car and went to see if the rabbit was dead, needed a vet or if the only merciful thing to do was to finish killing him. The rabbit was dead. Viggo realized he was hungry. So he took the rabbit, made a fire by the roadside and ate it.
According to cast and crew, sometimes you’d just see him disappear in the middle of the night and suddenly he’d come back with fish he’d caught
Had his sword with him at all times. Slept with once.
The best horse rider of the cast, hands down. Rides better than lots of pros, according to a horse trainer. Couldn’t bear to part with his horse at the end of the shooting, so he bough him. The next movie of his also involved horses, and he bought his horse in that one, too.
Knows how to survive in the wild. I’m not kidding.
Hand-stitched a few things in his costume for an authentic “I live away from civilization” Ranger feel. Also told the weapons department to make him a small bow because “Aragorn lives in the wild, he needs a hunting bow, or he’ll starve to death” – literally nobody else had thought about that. Also requested a small stone to sharpen his sword. Suggested that Aragorn would take Boromir’s arm guards after his death.
Speaking of hand-stitching, once he was touring Japan with a reporter for an article. Walked into a store, took a tshirt, bought it, cut off the print and hand-stitched it into the hat he was wearing. The reporter was going “?????????” the entire time.
Peter Jackson literally sometimes called him Aragorn by accident
Remember in 1993 when Jurassic Park was like…the end all, be all of special effects?
not gonna lie that still looks intimately real
I’m still somewhat convinced that someone sold their soul to create the special effects in Jurassic Park because that shit is over 20 years old and it still really, really holds up, better than the stuff in a lot of current movies, even.
Fucking witchcraft, man.
fucking look at this shit though
Literally see this post flying around with a few different responses added to the bottom each time so I’ll say it for this one myself:
THEY ACTUALLY BUILT A GIANT MASSIVELY DETAILED FUCKING ANIMATRONIC T-REX FOR ALL OF THIS THAT’S WHY THE EFFECTS ARE SO GOOD. CAUSE IT AIN’T CGI. AND IT AIN’T GUY IN A COSTUME. IT’S A BIG FUCKING ROBOT DINOSAUR. AND EVERY PART IS DESIGNED TO MOVE. IT COST LIKE HALF THE BUDGET OF THE FILM.
amazing
And they had the film it in small increments, especially in the outdoor scenes, because the rain fall kept soaking into the ‘skin’ of the rex and would slow down and mess up its movements. So they would stop filming and have a crew out there drying off this massive, fake dinosaur, and then they’d start filming again until it was too wet. Repeat until the end of the scene.
They used animatronics and detailed costumes for most if not all of the dinosaurs in the first movie.
The triceratops for instance, was also animatronic.
One of my favorite anecdotes I’ve read on tumblr is how the t-rex robot from Jurassic park would malfunction while it was drying out. How did it malfunction, you might wonder?
Motherfucker randomly started moving.
So apparently if you were on the jp set you would sometimes hear people screaming bloody murder even though they were all well aware that it was a giant animatronic puppet and wouldn’t actually, you know, eat them.
Did not know this, had to reblog for awesome movie history insights.
So, I knew about the animatronics bit but I did not know the raptors were guys in suits and the malfunctioning t-rex sounds terrifying.
And i just googled malfunctioning t-rexand was not disappointed. Apparently in order to put the skin on over the steel frame a guy had to crawl inside thet-rex while it was turned on and glue the skin down. And if somebody turned the t-rex off or the power went out the guy in the t-rex stood a very real chance of getting mangled and killed by the hydraulics.
So of course, the power goes out.
And this guy is still in there gluing the skin down.
Apparently the way to survive getting sheered to death by huge sheets of metal while you’re inside a giant t-rex robot is to curl into a ball and hope for the best.
And this guy hoped for the best and got it.
Some other people on stage pried open the t-rex jaws and glue guy crawled out of its mouth and was totally okay.
This is getting better and better.
I think they only had like 6 minutes of CGI
I’m just waiting for the T-Rex to come to life and leave its stand.
The thing about this that gets my special effects nerd going is the fact that EVERY single dinosaur was sculpted by artists based on the current existent archeological evidence of the time.
Even better than that, this movie ADVANCED our best understanding of dinosaurs at the time. They were blowing out a budget bigger than anything Hollywood had ever seen, and along with employing almost the last hurrah of incredible physical FX, they had a bank of those newfangled digital SFX computers. Nobody’d ever really created convincing dinosaurs in a movie before. It’d all been stop-motion animation, and even when the models were exquisitely crafted, you could just tell there was something OFF about them. Spielberg wanted THE BEST DINOSAURS EVER, and he figured on using the cutting edge of digital modeling and animation technology to build them for him.
So they got hold of some of the best paleontologists they could find and said, “We want you guys to take this tech that your labs could pretty much never afford and use it to build us the most realistic, accurate dinosaur models the world has ever seen.”
The paleontologists knew an opportunity when it bit them in the ass. They plugged in everything they knew about dinosaurs, all the skeletons and their best guesses about soft tissue and all that. And when they’d created those dinosaur models, they had the computer start moving them as they realistically would with anatomy like that. One guy took a look at those walking t-rexes and velociraptors (really utahraptors, but whatevs, fam), and he said, “Wait a minute, I’ve seen movement like that before.”
He called up film of a chicken walking. Everyone in the room said, “Holy shit.”
Prior to 1989, the idea that birds were descended from dinosaurs existed–we knew about archaeopteryx, we knew there was some minor connection there–but the idea that DINOSAURS LIVE IN THE MODERN WORLD AND THEY ARE CALLED BIRDS was not pre-eminent. Jurassic Park changed our scientific understanding of dinosaurs.
That paleontologists’d be Kevin Padian. Who is awesome.
“The confederacy of planets and moons that formed the Independent Faction was doomed from the start.”
“While leaders among the scattered outer worlds expressed concern over the formation of the Union of Allied Planets, most folk didn’t much care, figuring it wouldn’t affect them.”
Note the use of the terms ‘confederacy’ and ‘union.’
.
“A CIVIL WAR NOVEL INSPIRED THE FIREFLY UNIVERSE. The Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Killer Angels from author Michael Shaara was Joss Whedon’s inspiration for creating Firefly. It follows Union and Confederate soldiers during four days at the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War. Whedon modeled the series and world on the Reconstruction Era, but set in the future.”
~ Rudie Obias, “23 Fun Facts About Firefly” [source]
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Note similarities between Malcolm Reynolds’ character biography and the biography of actual confederate general Jubal Anderson Early.
When the Army of Northern Virginia surrendered on April 9, 1865, Early escaped to Texas by horseback, where he hoped to find a Confederate force still holding out. He proceeded to Mexico, and from there, sailed to Cuba and Canada. Living in Toronto, he wrote his memoir, A Memoir of the Last Year of the War for Independence, in the Confederate States of America, which focused on his Valley Campaign. The book was published in 1867.
Early was pardoned in 1868 by President Andrew Johnson, but still remained an “unreconstructed rebel”. In 1869, he returned to Virginia and resumed the practice of law. He was among the most vocal of those who promoted the Lost Cause movement.
From the Malcolm Reynolds entry on the Firefly Wiki [link]:
His contempt for the Alliance never completely disappeared (although he once said that he “wouldn’t mind makin’ a buck off ‘em”, and was shown in multiple episodes willing to steal Alliance supplies for a job, as long as it doesn’t affect the people), and, although he was on the losing side of the Unification War, years later he still wasn’t convinced it was the wrong one. Mal expressed what seemed to be his manifesto—"[The Alliance] will swing back to the belief that they can make people… better. And I do not hold to that. So no more running. I aim to misbehave.“[1] His anti-government attitude was reflected in his choice to live on a spaceship, drifting from world to world, as far away from Alliance interference as possible.
Yes, that’s right. Joss Whedon asked a black actor to play a lunatic rapist bounty hunter named after a real life confederate general. Joss Whedon has even stated in an interview that he “loves that character.”
.
Now I mentioned “cowboys vs injuns reavers” earlier:
In the unaired pilot Simon Tam explicity refers to the reavers as “savages” – one of the more popular Native American slurs used by settlers in the North American “Old West.” In the same episode we see Mal and Zoe riding through an open plain on horseback wearing chaps and carrying shotguns. Right from the get go we have protagonists dressed like cowboys in a spaghetti western, shit-talking an entire culture of supposedly “mindless savages” (yet not so mindless they can’t still practice guerrilla warfare in a fairly organized fashion).
The episode “Bushwhacked” features a character – the lone survivor of a reaver ambush – who’s “gone native” and become a reaver himself. He completes his transformation from sane pilgrim into savage reaver by “cuttin’ on himself’ to making himself “look like one of them” – which he accomplishes by giving himself facial piercings which I, for one, found oddly reminiscent of those warn by certain Native American and Pacific Islander cultures.
He proceeds to attack the Firefly crew using guerrilla style tactics.
.
People want to believe that they can weed out the Orientalism, shovel off the bastardization of the Chinese language, and jackhammer their way through the thick crust of cultural appropriation to reveal a better, purer show buried underneath.
But they can’t.
Firefly’s bedrock is racist.
Firefly is racist all the way down to its molten core.
Just go watch Killjoys already.
Fuck’s sake.
None of this registered with me, maybe because I’m not from the US so my knowledge of Civil War stuff is limited (I only found out what ‘Manifest Destiny’ was after you know which movie brought up a discussion) I obviously thought the lack of Chinese characters in a future where everyone speaks Chinese was…fucked up? But this??
How the fuck.
I want a reboot of Firefly that has nothing to do with Whedon, and which corrects his bigotry, racism, and misogyny.
Hi. OP here. I wrote this post because I saw people on my dash saying exactly what you’re saying – “We want a non-racist, non-sexist Firefly reboot.” I wanted them, and you, to realize that racism and sexism is so intrinsic to every single aspect of Firefly’s composition that by the time you take out all the bigotry, racism and misogyny, there’s nothing left to reboot.
Look at the show’s core team dynamic, for example:
Mal is a reboot of Rhett Butler.
Zoe is nouveau!Rhett’s loyal hand (notice she doesn’t call him by his name as one would a friend, but instead always refers to him as Sir – and then consider what it means for a black woman to be constantly referring to her white confederate superior by a title that signifies dominance).
Wash, Zoe’s husband, is the nerdy self-insert though which Joss racially fetishizes Gina Torres and projects his sexual/romantic insecurities (remember how Firefly devoted an entire episode to Zoe reassuring Wash that her relationship with Mal wasn’t a threat to their marriage?) (remember how Wash spent a scene sexually objectifying his wife’s body parts to an audience of Alliance interrogators).
River Tam is a whitewashed anime archetype.
Inara is a whorephobic westernized caricature of a geisha. I’m not going to go into that here but there are plenty of essays that describe the problematic Asian elements of Firefly in greater depth
And that’s just the main protagonists. That doesn’t even take into account the minor characters, villain archetypes, politics, narrative tropes, worldbuilding, etc. of the Firefly universe, all of which are also racist and misogynist.
Also, consider that Joss Whedon thought “rebooting” colonialism as men vs. zombie freaks was less racist than honestly representing the exploitation and genocide of Natives by colonizers.
Racist history needs to be told. Erasing the racist truth of a historical situation doesn’t “take out the racism.” That’s whitewashing. Whitewashing is in and of itself a form of racism. Firefly is racist because it tries to whitewash a racist history. Any Firefly reboot that attempts to whitewash Firefly’s racist premise will only be perpetuating the cycle of whitewashing and erasure.
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I think what people really want is another show about a quirky band of leather wearing gun slinging rebel merchants with snappy dialogue going on adventures in outer space. You don’t need to reboot Firefly for that. Killjoys fits that description, and it’s not a Firefly reboot. Cowboy Bebop and Farscape both fit that description, and they both pre-date Firefly.
Fandom doesn’t need a Firefly reboot.
Fandom needs to give Firefly the boot.
It makes me sad to realize everything you say, @lierdumoa, is true. You have a brilliant analytical mind for sniffing out this sort of thing.
All the conversation lately about Confederate statues and Civil War history made me go back to find this series of posts.
It also led me to read this interesting piece that really gets one to re-examine the narrative of American history that even those who grew up in the North were fed.
Turns out that General Sherman’s often-criticized “total war” campaign in the final weeks of the war – which finally put down the rebellion and saved the nation – might not have been the atrocity it’s depicted as in movies, and was far from the brutality exhibited by the famous American generals of the 20th Century who waged campaigns of true total war.
Yet Sherman’s still considered a villain by many modern Southerners, while our much-worse recent generals are considered heroes.
And this Confederate propaganda has been so successful in shaping our view of the Civil War that douche-canoes like Joss Whedon can get away with creating much-loved shows based on glorifying the villains of US history, and few notice until later.
I feel ashamed now that I once adored this show so much. I blame my lack of knowledge of US history at the time, and I was far from alone among ignorant Northerners who loved it.
A positive conclusion: Gonna have to find Killjoys!
This stuff really does fly right over your head if you’re not from the South. I learned most of what I know about the confederate imagery/storylines/politics of Firefly because I was researching to make a fannish songvid for Firefly, back when I was still a fan, and I fell down a wikipedia hole.
We’ve definitely hit a turning point in politics where Americans living in the North and on the coasts can no longer afford to remain ignorant of confederate history, or remain oblivious to confederate iconography/ideology/propaganda in the media.
What pisses me off the most is that Firefly has such cult status in fan communities – Whedon essentially made it acceptable for racists to cosplay as confederates in fan spaces.
Nick Spencer (what is up with dudes named Spencer being nazi apologists?) has control of the Captain America comic. Now HBO is making an alternate reality genre show where the confederates won and I can only imagine it will get worse. It’s getting to the point where I don’t know if POC will be able to feel safe at Comicon anymore.
Even as a Black Firefly fan aware of most of the deep problems with the show, I’ve always been beyond incensed that Joss Whedon named a Black man Jubal Early, after a real life, virulently white supremacist, pro-slavery Confederate general who had a major role in structuring the ridiculous Lost Cause narrative. And then he made the Black man a sexual predator of White women. Like.
Like real Jubal Early believed Black people to be barbarians and a threat to the safety of White people. And then Joss Whedon basically made Black Jubal a barbarian that’s a threat to a White woman. 😒
Firefly is deceptive because if you don’t look close enough, it seems like a cool diverse show. A few years ago when this blog was just starting out, one of my first asks was wondering what shows/movies I thought had good representation for Black women. I put together a list with a note that people could suggest shows I missed. Almost immediately, people wanted to add Firefly. It has a badass Black woman! And she also has love! And it’s interracial!
People were surprised at the oversight, but I was not happy about the suggestion. Like many people, I couldn’t put all of my aversion to Firefly into words, but, despite the fact that I’d just made a long post about intersectionality in media and how Black women having love stories in media is feminist and progressive, I could not stand ZoeWash.
It seemed amazing at first glance, but it became clear that Zoe was Wash’s ultimate Black Amazon fantasy, and that the pairing was meant to be weird. Worse, it became clear that Wash pretty much existed as her husband to make sure no one got the wrong idea that she might become romantically involved with great white Mal. Zoe was supposedly Mal’s equal, but she never got her own story arc.
So yeah. I wish I’d had this thread to link to at the time, because there was a lot of confusion about why my diversity in genre media blog didn’t support Firefly.
its kind of disappointing how everyone turns rey into some soft, clean aesthetic queen with glitter and pale pink fabrics when in canon rey is a greasy girl icon
fanon rey: soft, smells like roses, always wearing glitter, no bad angles, pale smooth fabric queen canon rey: doesnt know what a hairbrush or makeup is, steals fries off your plate, will fight you in a parking lot
If I hung out with Rey we would have fart contests
that is the best addition to any post, sw-related or not
please consider that poe thinks hygiene is wiping down with the least greasy rag and rey just kind of scrubs off with some sand when she gets too crusty and finn is used to an absolutely scrupulous twice-daily hygiene regimen with water and sonic and specially formulated deodorants because you don’t want Army Stonk building up in a spaceship, or, god forbid, your armor. so he like, he loves poe and rey to death. he loves them. but he just watched poe try to explain the Sniff Test to rey, unsuccessfully, and he is kind of screaming internally now.
both rey and poe are in awe of how soft and sweet-smelling finn is and he’s like “listen it’s an ancient stormtrooper secret called WASH YOUR SOCKS WITH SOAP.”
danny fenton:
-wears a shirt to the water park
-accidentally uses the womens restroom
-“i would tell you to use the mens room but i dont think you qualify”
-chest occasionally bulges in his ghost suit
-is a trans boy
reblog this make cis people mad that im “ruining their childhood”
stable clone of him was a younger girl named danni
the series is literally about him keeping his identity a secret from his parents,believing that if they found out they’d stop loving him as their child and even kill him.
said identity is only known by his closest friends and others in the “community”.
After his college-age sister accidentally walks in on him altering his appearance and thereby learns his identity, she becomes clumsily obsessed with protecting him and being an ally.
Sam was able to disguise herself as him effortlessly.
myblog 