so i saw some people discussing how loki in ragnarok shouldn’t have been at all phased or subverted by dr. strange – which i agree with, but also, hey, it’s comedic and you can argue that he was taken off-guard, but upon re-watch, something stuck out to me –
there’s this moment when they appear at the bottom of the stairs and thor rolls down the last couple and stands up and he says
we could’ve just walked.
and it made me think of how magic works in terry pratchett’s novels, how (to paraphrase) the hard part wasn’t turning someone into a frog, it was not turning someone into a frog when you knew how easy it was.
like, the whole scene with dr. strange is just. all magic. all pointless magic. unnecessary magic, when, well. they could have just walked.
whereas loki doesn’t really rely on magic overmuch in the movie – he uses it as a tool, when he needs it, but if the job can be done with plain old non-magical trickery or a knife, he just uses those. he resorts to magic when he’s cornered by valkyrie, he uses it when his goals are most directly accomplished by using magic rather than by other means.
whereas dr. strange is using magic all over his scene, just to use it. just because he can. magic was unnecessary for ninety percent of what he did in that scene, the only time he needed magic was to whisk them away to norway. but he teleported all over the place even when he only needed to move a few feet, gave thor an ever-refilling beer that just spilled everywhere, floated around to make a show of how ~magical~ he was, when…
he could have just walked.
i mean, i’m very sure that the filmmakers intended it for comedic effect, but there’s also a layer there of dr. strange being much less comfortable with magic than loki is – loki doesn’t need to bust out the magic at every opportunity, it’s simply a skill, a tool that is completely under his control and at his disposal. whereas dr. strange (at least in his scene in ragnarok) is showing off, which reeks of insecurity.
i guess i’m thinking… if you take the magic away, loki is still a deadly, formidable opponent with many tricks up his sleeve, but dr. strange is just a guy in a cape.
this is good and true because in the comics loki and dr strange got in a fight in a parking lot and then both of them had their magic taken away so loki just punched stephen through a wall and called it a gay ass day
my favorite part of hamlet is at the beginning when they see the ghost of hamlet sr for the first time
and the guards are like “Horatio, you go talk to it! You went to college!”
and Horatio is like “Yeah! I did go to college! I will go talk to the ghost!”
like. where did horatio go to college. did he go to ghost college
YES, ACTUALLYYES HE FUCKING DIDBC
(a) EVERY COLLEGE THEN WAS GHOST COLLEGE bc ghosts were widely believed to be Real™ n thus scholars learnt abt them. moreover, as everybody knows, ghosts only communicate in Latin; Latin, which also happens to be the scholastic language. Horatio is a scholar; he both knows about ghosts and knows Latin; as such his university education patently DOES make him best suited to ask this one what’s up (as obviously sth must be up for it 2b wandering around, why else wld it b here, i mean gawd)
(B) WITTENBERG WHERE HORATIO STUDIES WAS LIKE. THE MOST SPOOPYOF GHOST COLLEGES bc they were alllllll about theology n the supernatural n shit so SUPPOSING HORATIO WILL KNO HIS SHIT ABT GHOSTS IS IN FACT A THOROUGHLY SENSIBLE ASSUMPTION
this has been said before but i am fucking adding it again bc it HACKS ME TF OFF when ppl reblog the post w/o commentary as if OP jsut fucking checkmated Shakespeare when in fact all they managed to do was fail at the most basic historical contextualisation lmao
I’m forever haunted by the knowledge that Dracula is a public domain work and I could literally just write Dracula AU (No listen, but hear me out, The Batchelor), and every second I’m not doing it feels like an affront to whatever god thought it would be a good idea to keep me alive.
creepiest thing you’ve ever found in an attic, go!
My house doesn’t have an attic but since you said AN attic I assume other people’s attics are fair game so…
I found a body… Well, more like a skeleton… I’m not sure what it was but it wasn’t small. I could be one of those medical skeletons but i don’t think those colour brown like that and the guy who ownes the house isn’t exactly crafty. He’s a weird dude i wouldn’t put murder past him.
In hindsight i could peobably tell if it was an animal or human by how the joints in the limbs were but the 8yo me just got the fuck outta there before the spirit of sherlock took over
My sentences are too long. I apologise
My grandparents bought a house from their neighbor. (Now they all live in the middle of fucking nowhere.) The neighbor was a 40 something single man who claimed he didn’t have siblings nor children.
When they bought the house the dude only took as much as he could fit in a UHAUL. So the bed, couch, other furniture, nicknacks, whatever. The attic however. Had a lock on it. No big deal the door looked broken anyway.
We unlock it and there’s a lot of barbies, ponies, girly shit. But the worse is there was a collection of doll houses in the attice. Some big enough he would have had to assemble inside the attic.
So two weeks later the guy comes back for something and my grandfather asks about them and the guys just like “idk what your talking about” and changes. The. Subject.
kids have no concept of anything. i walked into my kindergarten class and one kid asked me what my name was. when i said miss jones, he said “i like that name. did you know i’m in love with you”
i asked my four year old cousin how old he thought i was going to be at my next birthday and he said 8. im 23
once i told a 6 year old that i had finished school and was doing “more school” [university] and she asked “why haven’t you found anyone to marry then”
We were at a museum and I was asking for the student discount and my nine year old cousin looks up at me with his eyes wide and says “wait you’re a STUDENT??”
I used to babysit these three kids and the eldest who was around 11 at the time was talking about how adults are boring and when I told him I was an adult he said, “That’s not true, you’re my age”
our aunt teaches and she has this story about a little girl who really was always pretty quiet in class and then on the final day of kindergarten she just up and stated ‘i’m all teached now. i don’t need to be teached anymore. i’m done of being teached.’
once when i was 19, I told my little cousin that i was 19 and she looked up at me with huge eyes and went, “Does that mean you don’t have to bring an adult with you to the pool?”
My 6 year old cousin saw me driving for the first time, looked up at him mom and said “does that mean she is married now?”
I watched my dad and my niece (3 at the time) arguing over a pair of pants and whether or not they were also a dress. My neice’s argument was that they were, in fact, also a dress because they were blue.
I asked the kids in my daycare class what they thought I should be for Halloween and this little boy goes, “ooh I know! A pickle! You’d be such a good pickle”
On the first day of class with my favorite student of all time, I said, “Are you okay? You look like you have a question.” And she looked me right in the eyes and said, tremulously,
“Can a piranha eat a stapler?”
One time I was working with a kid and he looked up at me and asked “Do you have a boy?” I had no idea what he was talking about, but I told him that I did not have any boys. He looked shocked and then deeply concerned and said “Well, you better hurry up and shave your arms so you can get married; August is next month!”
I was sitting on the floor with my 3yo niece and we were playing with her younger brother’s alphabet blocks and the O had an octopus on it. So I picked it up and asked her what it was.
“Octopus,” she said, all curls and smiles.
“And what kind of animal is an octopus?” I asked. I was looking for “fish” or “sea creature” but I would have accepted almost anything–”weird,” “gross,” even “slimy.” “Underwater” or “it lives in the ocean” would have also been acceptable.
She looks me right in the eye and says, happy as a clam, “It’s a cephalopod.”
I haven’t been the same since.
last week a child of maybe four at the genius bar saw me running a product by, planted his hands on his hips and yelled at his mother, accusingly, “you never told me hair could be GREEN!”
the thing that’s so great about kids is that they’re very good at making connections and recognizing patterns, but they’re working off of extremely limited data sets.
For example, when I was a toddler, I assumed that every marriage had a) one mom and one dad, and b) at least one Jewish person in it. I also thought that every kid was either Jewish or Christian, and which one you were depended on whether the omnipresent Jewish parent was your mother or father (because Judaism is matrilineal).
I only knew Jewish or half-Jewish/half-Christian m/f couples. It sounds ridiculous now, but it was an entirely reasonable assumption at the time.
¯_( ಠ_ಠ)_/¯ 