“The mad woman has been used as a trope for centuries by writers, but more often as a walk-on part: we are allowed short, horrifying glimpses of the mad Ophelia and the hallucinating Lady Macbeth, before they are hurried to their deaths; Bertha Rochester escapes her attic prison to cause fires and havoc, and is then put back before she, too, is sent to death. What ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ does is give the mad woman pen and paper, and ultimately a voice of her own. We hear from her, directly and in detail.”
— Introduction by Maggie O’Farrell to The Yellow Wallpaper (via blxckberrying)
Okay, but give me a Hermione Granger who cannot cook for the life of her. She’s done research, she’s taken classes, she’s tried everything and goddamit why can’t she make this work?!
Give me a Ron Weasley who watched his mother cook for years and somehow inherited her uncanny ability to just throw things in a pot and make it taste amazing. Give me a Ron Weasley who tries to teach his wife to cook because she asks him to and rubs her shoulders and fixes the light fixtures when she fails again. Give me a Ron Weasley who wears a “Kiss the cook” apron and makes all the meals for the family. Give me a Ron Weasley who fondly tells Hermione “for Merlin’s sake, you’re the bloody minister of magic, babe, you don’t have to be good at everything.” Give me a Ron Weasley who adores his wife and loves working part-time at the shop with Fred and George (there was a rumour going around that Fred died- this is poppycock. Please ignore it) and decides he loves being a househusband and defying gender roles but in a quieter way than his hurricane of a wife, who’s amazing and in-your-face and gods, he loves her. Give me a Ron who decides that he’s not so fond of the fame and glory that he gained in the war as he thought he would be, and who finally understands why Harry hated it so much in school. Give me a Ronald Weasley who learns to do laundry and mend clothes and keep house and makes lunch for his kids before they go off to muggle primary school and his wife before she goes to work and decides that being his family’s number one favourite person is more than enough. Give me a Ron who has a secret fondness for daytime soap operas when everyone’s out of the house and he’s not at the shop. Give me a Ron who is happy and healthy and realises that he’s so much more than just the sixth child or the leftover, that he’s loved, that he’s enough.
I think the most beautiful part of this is that Ron spent so much of his life being embarrassed by his mum, and finally realizing she’s been the true role model all along.
Tony Stark’s skepticism is born out of his life experiences.
Tony ‘isn’t a team player’ and ‘doesn’t stick to plans’ not because of his ego or ‘narcissism’; rather because his hero (Yinsen) abandoned the plan & sacrificed himself thereby ensuring the safety of Tony’s own life. Tony is just following in Yinsen’s footsteps. He is trying to emulate his hero, and he is justifiably wary of people (even well-intentioned heroes) who emulate his antagonists.
In Tony’s personal experience, words have no weight. Promises change. There are already people who made promises of trust & being a team, only to misuse that trust and back-stab him. Ideals and ideas (even that of Avengers itself) can be corrupted. Hence, he doesn’t blindly accept slogans and platitudes offered.
Because Tony knows the reality: An assertion does not a truth make.
The thing about emo (as a musical genre and a cultural phenomenon) is, I think, that it was a response to the September 11, 2001 terror attacks and the Bush administration’s painful mishandling thereof.
No, I’m serious. My Chemical Romance was formed as a direct result of Gerard Way witnessing the towers fall. Green Day’s ‘American Idiot’ (an album that, at least as far as I can tell from having been a teenager in Canada at the time, was seminal in influencing the look and sound of emo) is all about the Bush administration – all the lyrics are about life under a democratic dystopia and many reference current events from the time – and it came out in 2004, halfway through the Bush presidency. A bunch of Linkin Park’s stuff makes reference to it also, especially their album ‘Minutes to Midnight’, where they first started moving out of the nu-metal/rap sound they’d been working with before and into a more mainstream emo-rock sound. That album came out in 2007. All of the really big bands with that kind of sound – and most of the smaller ones with more of a punk/hardcore sound but similar themes – were active in the mainstream from around 2001-2010. Many of them didn’t survive past 2009, and those that did either totally reinvented themselves (Fall Out Boy, Panic! At The Disco, MCR for the five minutes it took to produce Danger Days, Linkin Park) or became near-totally irrelevant (Paramore dropped an album sometime in the last two years; did any of you know that? And Green Day haven’t mattered since 21st Century Breakdown, which was released in 2009).
Why? Well, many of you are probably too young to remember this, but the 2001 terror attacks were what really made ‘Islamic terrorism’ a real threat in the minds of most Westerners. We’d never experienced an attack of that scale on American soil, and it was just as the internet was really becoming a mainstay in every house and my generation was getting online. As a result, it was not only a major political event, but it was hugely personal – the coverage was everywhere, in everybody’s home, all the time, and there were a lot of kids being exposed to the coverage in such a way that they often had no good way to process it. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed the way we live. I’m Canadian and I felt this shit. Before, we could fly to America domestic, without a passport. Now? Half the draconian, ridiculous rules that hold you up at the TSA today were initiated in September and October of 2001. It was the only thing anyone could think of to do – lock down, protect your own. People were scared, on a continental scale.
And to make matters worse, George W. Bush’s government, which had to somehow respond to and take point in the response to this unprecedented event, didn’t seem to have the first foggiest clue what they were doing. This was a government that not only didn’t seem to listen to its people, not only lied blatantly to its people, but did it badly. They made hugely unpopular decisions, including starting a war in the Middle East that dragged in multiple countries and completely failed to achieve its stated goal of catching Osama bin Laden or proving that he had in his control weapons of mass destruction (the whole war was predicated on the fact that these so-called weapons of mass destruction existed, that the Bush administration had good reason to believe that they existed, were under the control of the Taliban, and were going to be used against Western targets, none of which was ever proven to be true).
So, from 2001-2009, the two (TWO) full terms of the Bush presidency, there were a whole lot of people who couldn’t vote (be they under the age of majority, like most of the emo kids I knew, or Canadians unhappily dragged along with the US’ boneheaded foreign policy decisions because we’re allies, also like most of the emo kids I knew) and therefore felt, not only scared of basically the impending end of their world in a way that they hadn’t previously had to feel, and not only angry about being clearly lied to and clumsily manipulated when the truth was obvious to anyone with eyes, but also powerless to do anything to change anything about that. And meanwhile, people kept dying in this pointless war and the president kept trying to hold together the illusion that everything was hunky-dory.
And what was popular with teenagers from about 2001-2009? Yep. Emo.
Emo as a genre was very personal, very focused on the individual (with the exception of the albums I noted above), but lyrically and musically, it fit right with the cultural atmosphere of the time. People were scared of the impending end of their world/their lives? Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge and The Black Parade. People were angry about things they felt powerless to change? From Under The Cork Tree and Decemberunderground. Emo captured what kids were feeling about trying to fit into a world that was so clearly fucked up and broken and pretending to be okay, putting on a strong face to Show The Terrorists They Didn’t Win. Emo was about stripping away the mask, exposing the messy, angry, frightened, sad, true underbelly of American society at the time, and exposing hypocrisy – in individuals as much as in politicians. The hatred of ‘preps’ and ‘posers’? Totally not just a My Immortal thing. Emo was about wearing your heart on your sleeve, about it being okay to mourn, to rage, to be afraid for your life beyond this – and to keep moving forward regardless, step by slow step.
So what changed in 2009 that made the phenomenon fade without so much as a whimper? Simple. Hope. The Audacity of Hope, to be exact.
Barack Obama won his presidency largely because young people supported him. Those were the young people who suffered through feeling helpless and powerless under Bush, who wanted things to change but felt they had no chance of making it so. Barack Obama was a chance. One of his first campaign promises was to end the Iraq war, a promise he followed through on. And even if his presidency hasn’t been perfect, it has never been the Bush administration, with the feeling that the will of the people was being entirely and quietly ignored by those in power to further their own agendas.
What I am saying, then, I guess, is that it’s time to buy stocks in Hot Topic, because whatever happens in the upcoming US presidential election, there are a lot of young people who may soon be needing black, white, and red graphic band tees and Manic Panic hair dye.
From someone who was in American high school in 2001, we were also incredibly terrified for at least the early Bush years. We were all pretty sure that the draft could possibly be reinstated and we could get sucked into the war. Some of my friends and I had plans on how best to get Don’t Ask, Don’t Telled out of the draft. We were all absolutely terrified of the prospect.
tbh I feel like a lot of us in our early/mid 20s who had an “emo” phase are going back (or just listening to more of) music from that part of our lives. and for the life of me I can’t figure out if it’s because we’re just at that age where we can be nostalgic for early teenager angst or if it’s because of the crushing global angst we’re all now very much aware of.
Huh. This is interesting
Yeah, I started listening to American Idiot again. At first I was like nostalgia. Then I blinked , listened, and was like no actually relevance.
I think there is a little bit of nostalgia though, but it’s not for teen angst. It’s because I know I was able to put these albums away before. I remember that things got better. So if we fight, things will get better again.
