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Cake day: August 15th, 2023

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  • They also care about ruining trans people’s lives in any way possible. I’m sure there are plenty of transphobes who simply haven’t thought the bathroom thing through, but don’t forget the other reason they’d be happy to put passing trans men in women’s bathrooms: it forces them into an impossible decision. When an angry mob drags a trans man out of the women’s toilet, you think they’re going to listen to protestations of being AFAB? If anything, that’d just rile them up further. So a when someone is faced with the decision of choosing either the room they’re least likely to be noticed in, or the one the law technically assigned to them, they may instead choose to stay home. They may even start considering detransitioning. This is a feature, not a bug.




  • Ehh. The broad strokes had the potential to be interesting, but the presentation and details are awful. Actually watching the prequels is such a chore, with 75% of the time spent thinking “why,” 24% “ooh pretty” (though a lot of the CGI hasn’t aged well), and maybe 1% is an actual “hmm yes interesting.”

    Palpatine and populism had a chance to be interesting, but it’s mostly done completely off screen, with lots of assumptions needing to be made by a viewer who needs to already have an understanding that this is the future Emperor. The closest we ever get to seeing the true corruption of the Senate is Palpatine’s speech denouncing the Jedi, and even that winds up being carried hard solely by Palpatine’s actor.

    They completely ignore the moral, logistical, and spiritual questions raised by usage of a clone army. Coverage in EU and Disney doesn’t count in a discussion of the prequels, but even there it’s rarely explored. You’d think the whole point of clones vs robots would be to raise interesting questions by way of contrasting the two, but no, it’s just so you don’t have to feel bad watching the armies blow each other up.

    Anakin and Padme. Good God.

    There’s so much more but honestly I don’t want to write more of an essay. Apologies for the YouTube link, but this is a video I really like about what made the Jedi so special in the originals. I think most of the problems in the prequels parallel their mishandling of the Jedi–a superficial understanding that Thing Is Cool, but then missing the point thanks to a formulaic, blunt, needs-to-be-marketable approach to making the movies.

    I dunno, they’re more bearable than the sequels. I can even enjoy watching them; I grew up on them and can put on the nostalgia goggles to get through them, but under any examination they completely fall apart.