I love the lowkey implication in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (especially in the Gene Wilder movie) that Willy Wonka was minding his own business one day and he just saw this skinny looking kid staring up at his factory, licking his lips, and he was just like, “Shit, that kid needs some chocolate, but he’s clearly too poor to afford any and there’s no way I can run outside right now and reveal my existence to the world, right? Damn. Okay. I can send an Oompa Loompa. No, that’ll scare the kid. What candy does he even like anyway? What if I give him the wrong one? All right, we need to get this kid into the factory so that he can pick his favorite treat. But what happens when he leaves? Shit, shit, shit, okay, we’ll just give him the factory. Give him the whole factory. That’s the only way. But how? Come on, Wonka, be inconspicuous here. I’ve got it. A nationwide contest inviting multiple kids into the factory where I’ll reveal that the winner gets the factory. Crap, no, then there will be four other kids in the factory. Okay, no problem, we’ll just kill them all until he’s the only one left. Yeeeah, that’s a good plan. Okay, everyone, places. We’ve got literally one shot at this.”
You don’t think Willy Wonka had connections with what seems to be the only candy store in the entire town?
And what, we’re supposed to believe that after years of starving with no money, all of a sudden, Charlie conveniently finds some money right in front of said candy store?
And remember, in the movie (which is honestly one of the few movie adaptations that’s better than the books), the worker picks the chocolate bars that he hands to Charlie.
Wonka and the workers knew exactly what they were doing.
Chaotic good at its best.
this was an interesting read and all but i just read the second last line as “wonka and the wonkers” and now i feel…… strange
all i’m saying is if an all-girls school crashed on the island in lord of the flies then they would’ve been off the island in a week
lord of the flies doesnt show the base human condition, it shows the base privileged straight white male condition, incredibly when i point this out people get kind of annoyed
Might I direct you to Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, a YA novel in which a plane full of teen beauty pageant contestants crashes on a deserted island. Instead of descending into violent savagery, the girls are able to work together and become more truly themselves than they could in the patriarchal world outside. They repurpose the tools of beauty into tools of survival (and some of them work to keep up their appearances too, because that’s what makes them feel happy, while others decide they’re done with all the pressure to be a certain sort of beautiful.) They fight against evil corporations. Beauty Queens is enthusiastically feminist. (Never fear, the feminism is intersectional, exploring issues of race and sexuality as well as gender.) Also, this book is HILARIOUS, not to mention surprisingly exciting!
Oh, look at this thing I’m going to add to my reading list.
srsly read Beauty Queens, one of the girls is trans!!!
Oh man I AM EXCITE for Beauty Queens!
When I was a kid I imprinted really hard on Baby Island, by Carol Ryrie Brink–about two girls, age 10 and 12, who rescue four babies/toddlers and are shipwrecked with them, and care for them as well as a (male) hermit living on the island. It definitely meant that when reading Lord of the Flies in high school I was acutely aware of the “ugh this is just a book about how boys are assholes, girls would do this so much better” angle.
Baby Island, published in 1937, was, though, probably loosely a part of the very specific genre that Golding was responding to–one in which English schoolchildren, and particularly English schoolboys, were portrayed as resourceful and brave and the pinnacle of human civilization in all circumstances (the Pevensie children becoming kings and queens of Narnia just by showing up being a particularly extreme example). Golding was pushing back against that stereotype with a look at what English schoolboys on their own were really apt to be like; the fact that the book was widely understood (by… white dudes, mostly) as a parable for all of humanity says more about the people reading it than the book itself, I think.
Guys who complain about the friendzone often don’t care about their female friends’ personal boundaries, forcing their female friends build more walls up. A good cartoon.
– submitted by Gene
why is he tearing down a wall with an axe
i hate it when your put in the friendzone and made to tear down a wall
Mr. Gorbachev…tear down this friendzone
how you gonna draw some shit that makes you look like Jack Nicholson in The Shining and still feel like you’re the victim
I DON’T *CHOP* UNDERSTAND *CHOP* WHY *CHOP* YOU CAN’T *CHOP* JUST *CHOP* LET ME *CHOP* BONE YOU *CHOP* ON AN INDEFINITE *CHOP* EXCLUSIVE *CHOP* BASIS *CHOP* WHEN *CHOP* I’M *CHOP* SO *CHOP* NIIIIIIIIIIIICE *CHOP*
“I’m going to wall you up now, Fortunato.”
“Ha ha, and then what? 😉 ”
“For the love of God, Montresor!” -Cask of Amontifriendzone, Edgar Allan Poe
Incessantly, I heard a smacking, as of some entitled dipshit whacking, whacking on my chamber door.
Resignedly, I placed another layer, voicing a quiet, repeated prayer, “This dude thinks he’s a player, but I am not a point to score, he should fuck off and bother me no more.”
Quoth the friendzoned, “Fucking whore.”
– The Craven, by Edward Allen Bro
edgar allen bro
The wall looks like it’s only one brick in width why doesn’t he just walk around it
mary poppins fits the mythological role of a trickster god, discuss
She….she shows up in a time of dullness, creates chaos and drives on the story, but always is sure that everything is fixed, though changed, often for the better. Lessons were learned. Holy crap, she fits the archetype very well.
This continues to be my favorite conversation-starter post on this site.
Willy Wonka sent out his chocolate bars worldwide, and 5 white kids (4 with first-world problems) still won.
To be fair, his goal was apparently to send a stern warning about the evils of entitlement by murdering them in ironic ways.
Also, the rich, spoiled, first world white kids aren’t presented in the story as having gotten the tickets by chance, the story is very clear that they and their families used their privilege and power to game the system – taking what was initially presented as a random selection and cheating by leveraging their disproportionate resources – wasting mountains of chocolate in pursuit of gold…
so I read the entirety of Peter Pan in one sitting today and it is SO GREAT and unintentionally hilarious and really really enjoyable and I wanna gush so here’s some stuff
someone once told Captain Hook that he looks like a Stuart so he started dressing like Charles II complete with long black ringlets
ringlets… which he combs using his hook
he also uses his hook for “other homely uses.” I have no idea what, J. M. chose not to extrapolate
Hook’s great master plan to kill the Lost Boys is to BAKE THEM A CAKE and put dodgy stuff in it so they eat it and die
Wendy is like “you ain’t eating shit you found on the floor” and makes them use the cake as a missile, which Hook later falls over in the dark
speaking of Wendy, the Lost Boys are All About Wendy when she first arrives. Peter is like never touch Wendy. build a house around her. we are her servants. she is a lady.
John is literally like “are you fucking kidding me"
Tinker Bell is super not here for Peter’s flight of fancy shit and yells YOU SILLY ASS at him literally about ten times
Peter is kinda dumb actually
at one point he falls asleep on Wendy Guard Duty "and some unsteady fairies had to climb over him on their way home from an orgy”
????????????????
there are non-binary fairies! girls glow white, boys glow mauve and the blue ones are “little sillies who are not sure what they are” which is… really really cute!!!
there’s a whole section where Peter and this bird are yelling at each other but Peter doesn’t speak bird and the bird doesn’t speak human and they’re mad about it
J. M. makes sure to point out that Hook “was not wholly evil; he loved flowers”
when the pirates kidnap Wendy and the Lost Boys, Hook bows to Wendy and sweeps his hat off and gives her his arm and she’s so starry-eyed about it she forgets she’s being kidnapped
the thirst is real, Wendy
Hook is scared of Smee. all the kids love Smee cos he’s little with funny glasses and thinks he’s really fearsome but. Hook is. actually. scared of Smee
at one point Peter is helping Hook up onto a rock because a) good form and b) he wants to have a proper nemesis fight, and Hook BITES PETER and Peter is fucking beside himself about it
in fact 100% of their interaction reads like Kate Beaton’s nemesis comic
Tiger Lily is a stone cold badass. all the men in her tribe want to lock that down and she’s like “fuck no”
when Peter rescues her from Hook and Smee, rather than carrying her bridal-style back to her camp (no thx Disney) she’s just like TIGER LILY OUT and swims home, abandoning Peter to his dumb pirate fight
Peter may be slightly unhinged actually. like one paragraph early on basically says that sometimes he’d go for walks on his own and not talk about it when he came back, then the others would go out AND FIND THE BODY
like the book pretty much insinuates that when the Lost Boys start getting too old Peter takes ‘em out back and puts ‘em down
and before the big boss fight he’s picking pirates off one by one and a Lost Boy is just calmly keeping an out-loud count of how many throats Peter’s slit
and after the boss fight he literally kicks Hook overboard to where he knows the crocodile’s waiting
that kid is fucked up, I’m just saying
the narrator loses his shit towards the end. I’m serious. one minute he’s like “I HATE MRS. DARLING SO MUCH” and the next he’s all “I love Mrs. Darling, those kids are some selfish brats though”
Mr. Darling blames himself for the childrens’ disappearance because he locked Nana outside, so he starts… living in her kennel. a taxi picks him and the kennel up every morning and takes him to work in it. he becomes famous because he lives in the kennel
?????????????????
in conclusion, this book was great and J. M. Barrie was possibly on crack and, also, Disney what were you thinking
I would guess that the “homely uses” of the hook was crochet or some other similar craft
The true irony of English language pedagogy’s obsession with Shakespeare is that we’ve got absolutely the perfect source material to capture a bunch of bored teenagers’ interest, but we teach it all wrong.
Most of Shakespeare’s comedies – and a surpising number of the tragedies, to boot – are wanky, high-concept genre deconstructions packed full of memes, puns, pop culture references, and complicated dick jokes. If you approached it right, I promise you’d be able to turn your average fourteen-year-old into an expert on 16th Century English popular culture inside a week.
Instead, we typically make them spend that week laborously memorising taxonomies of metrical feet.
if you ever feel bad about not being politically informed just know that king priam of troy in the book 3 of the iliad asked helen who are agamemnon, odysseus and ajax who have been leading a war against him for over 9 years
Books that people read romantically but shouldn’t because they’re missing the point:
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
That’s your opinion.
there’s nothing romantic about a pedophile rapist, the senseless murder-suicide of teenagers because families can’t get their shit together or the hypocrisy of the roaring 20s
i dunno why people are confused about why cask of amontillado is catching on, it’s easily poe’s funniest damn story
dude says at the beginning “man. i hate this fucking guy. i’m the pettiest bitch of all time. i’m gonna get him”
and then his friend is so drunk that he’s like sure man! i’ll go into your weird Hell Cellar for some dope ass amontillado
and then he just gets fuckin walled in there with no twist at all. the twist is that the protag ended up doing what he intended to do while being completely suspicious and not at all hiding his animosity. and the clown guy is a fucking rube and had every chance to NOT die and didn’t take them. it’s fucking funny
Protagonist: i’m gonna fuckin wall u up alive
Victim: hahahahaha you absolute madman you ledge of banter
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