The biggest moment that starts the love of these soulmates is a moment where Xena and Gabs are not around each other. Xena has saved Gabrielle and Gabrielle has saved Xena. And instead of going home to her own village, Xena, having said goodbye to the beautiful young woman forever,
drops by Draco’s camp to ask one favor. Spare the village. Spare that girl I can’t get out of my head. Spare her family and her friends. Let her live a long life protected from invasion. I cannot know her. But l can keep her safe.
Xena, having walked away from being a warrior, immediately picks up her sword and chakram once more to defend Gabrielle. And, at first, she thinks that’s their dynamic. But then Gabs flips the script and saves herself, leading Xena to the place where she has hidden more weapons. Leading her to her destiny as she was always meant to. Gabrielle can’t let it go and her village stays protected from Draco. But she can’t get Xena out of her head either. And thus their story begins. Everything stands and falls on Xena protecting Gabrielle in her village and Gabrielle coming to Xena and protecting Xena in her village. Their dynamic is always one of equality, even when they disagree or Gabrielle feels like she’s being treated as a child. They take care of each other instantly, whether the other knows it or not.
Honestly, I think that Klaus probably had the hardest time walking away from Vanya when she was trapped in the box. I can only imagine how much it reminded him of the mausoleum, and how distressed and heartbroken that probably made him. Like, there was nothing he could do but watch her suffer the same way he had.
Random silly hc of mine that when Klaus is too tired to manifest Ben, Dave just pretends he understands the conversation from Klaus’ responses alone
Klaus and Ben will be in a serious debate about serial killers or something and Dave will randomly chime in like ‘I dont really like cereal to be honest, so killing a few brands off wouldnt be so bad…’
Abigail Thorn (aka Philosophy Tube) just came out as trans, and this is a friendly reminder to keep the same energy for her as you did for Elliot Page!
Also the form of estrogen they prescribed trans women in the 90s, Premarin, looked like this.
And lest there be any remaining doubt.. remember the blue pill? The pill Neo could have taken to forget the truth, bury his troubles and go back to living a normal life, without fearing a system that wanted to destroy him? The pill that was easy, perhaps cowardly according to some, but comfortable?
Here’s Prozac.
For a trans woman in the 90s, where the choice was be safe, suppress, cope, and pretend everything is still how it was, or embrace the danger, accept the truth, realize your full potential, and transition into a world that still thinks you’re a joke and would rather have you dead…. well. The metaphor is pretty fucking clear.
Y’all
Lana came out as a woman after Speed Racer in 2008, and Lily eight years later after the release of Jupiter Ascending (2016), so if you see original home copies of the Matrix (pre-2008), they are referred to as the WachowskiBrothers on it. It was a branding thing, like the Coen Brothers. That’s how they were called, because they were still presenting as male to the industry and the industry sold them as a creative unit.
I remember after Lana came out, the boxes switched to calling them just The Wachowskis, so I imagine now it’s the Wachowski Sisters.
So, yes, they’ve always been sisters, but if you didn’t know that, it’s not your fault. It’s been a long process and I’m glad they did it on their terms in their time.
Before Lily came out but after Lana did they were often credited as
The Wachowskis siblings. So some places may still refer to them as such.
I was actually unaware that Lily was also trans so thank you for that info!
if Chidi wasn’t a genuinely caring and ethical person, if he wasn’t empathetic and wise enough to see Eleanor’s potential, nothing in The Good Place would have ever happened.
Eleanor would never find love and family for the first time (soul squad!!),
Michael would never have become a reformed demon daddy,
Janet would have never evolved into…whatever demi-godlike figure she is now,
Tahani and Jason would have never grown beyond their human selves either!!
in every single reboot and alternate universe, Chidi agrees to help Eleanor. and she’s a piece of work early on!! she is stubborn and selfish and lazy! she constantly mocks and bullies him, and relentlessly questions the value of his life’s work. but he sees the potential for good in her (which she has an abundance of, as we come to learn) and is willing to help her every single time, regardless of how many obstacles are put between them.
and his biggest hallmark as a character is his struggle to make choices! yet every single time, he manages to see past Eleanor’s many spiky layers to her affectionate and kind core, and he makes the choice to help her!
and if all of that hadn’t happened, the broken system of the afterlife would have never been questioned or challenged!
basically Chidi’s capacity to see the good in people saves not only the soul squad, but also manages to sway a demon to goodness, create a demigod, and challenge the entire system of the afterlife for the first time maybe ever!!
Fun fact, this may actually account for many of the “imaginings” we have of extinct animals.
I had a molecular biology professor who referred it to “vacuum packing” where many extinct animals are rendered slimmer or muscular than they may have been, since things like body fat and fur are not preserved during fossilization. So our view of animals like dinosaurs may be entirely inaccurate.
There’s actually a book, All Yesterdays, in which the artist, CM Koseman, draws modern animals as we might have interpreted them to look if we found them extinct the same way do dinosaurs.
Fun examples include:
The manatee
An elephant
Swans
And literally the picture of the hippo
Another funny thing to add to this…because of how fossils are formed, it’s possible we don’t know what type of dinosaurs were different species or the same species. If we compare the skeletons to modern animals, snake skeletons often look pretty much the same so if all snakes were extinct we may believe they were all one species of animal instead of hundreds. Meanwhile, all dog breeds are considered the same species Canis lupus familiaris (technically domestic dogs are a subspecies of Canus lupus, the Grey Wolf, but you get what I mean) despite their skeletons being drastically different from each other (compare a pug skull to a great dane and to a poodle…they’ll look different).
So, if all snakes were mistaken for being only a small handful of species and modern dogs could be mistaken for a BUNCH of unique different species…think about how that knowledge can reflect onto our current understanding of extinct animals.
It goes deeper than that. A colleague of mine who’s a paleontologist was commenting on how for some extant species of birds, we can only tell species apart through behavior traits like song. You could have two perfectly preserved dead specimens of bird, but you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart because you need to hear their songs to tell their species apart. She said that she is sometimes kept awake by thoughts of the implications of this for species classifications in paleontology, and whether we collapse huge swaths of species in the fossil record into just one species because we can’t tell them apart just with the information we havd
Oh and what about sexual dimorphism! There are species where the sexes are so vastly different they don’t appear to be related at all. I wonder how that affects paleontology.
Let me tell you about when I was having a rough day with auditory processing at work (retail) and a regular customer sneered and called me, an autistic adult, stupid while having her (no joke) five year old autistic son in the shopping cart, also while wearing her “autism mom” t-shirt.
