one of the weirdest ways that language is evolving in response to the internet is that “bad words” just. do not have the same impact anymore. i constantly forget that some people think ‘fuck you’ is a terrible insult
so threats and insults have to start getting really out there if the person wants to even mean anything. if a person told me to die i’d shrug it off but if i opened a post’s tags and saw “op i will sneak into your house and replace all your shoelaces with cooked pasta” do you know how shaken i’d be? do you know how upset i’d be if i saw “op is the personification of the look you share w other people in the grocery store when some dude is causing A Scene™
for no reason”
So you are saying English curses on the Internet are becoming more like Yiddish curses?
I sincerely hope so but I can’t say I’m familiar with yiddish curses and i am begging you to tell me a few
yiddish curses:
may you go to hell and bake bagels there
may all your teeth fall out except one, and in that one you should get a tooth ache
One misfortune is too few for you
you should drink too much castor oil (and have explosive diarrhea);
you should have a hundred houses in every house a hundred rooms and in every room twenty beds, and a delirious fever should drive you from bed to bed
you should be transformed into a chandelier, to hang by day and to burn by night
Hang yourself with a sugar rope and you’ll have a sweet death.
The thing about how women in comics used to be drawn and sometimes are still drawn, you can only really understand the difference between an action girl being forced into unrealistic sexual, sensual positions, and an actual strong and well posed, empowering but still sexy female character, when you see what it looks like to have male characters depicted in overtly sensual poses
And I’m not talking about the Hawkeye Initiative or any given parody
I actually want to draw a comparison using art by Kevin Wada
Kevin Wada is a proud part of the LGBTQ+ community and he has this unique ability to sexualize mainstream male heroes without it looking like a parody. He draws covers for multiple big comic companies and his style reminiscent of old fashion magazines, drawn largely in traditional watercolor, has made him a stalwart of the industry.
He also draws a lot of naked Bucky Barnes.
Anyway, I want to talk about how interesting his art is, the difference between his power poses and his sexy poses for male and female characters.
A typical power pose for a male comics character would look like this
Whereas every so often with female heroes you get something like this
Not all the time, of course, but it happens and it happens in the wrong places. You wouldn’t be posing like a cover model in the middle of a battle, you really wouldn’t.
But when it comes to Wada and male and female characters, the difference is pretty clear.
When he draws male characters, they more often look like this
Sensual, in a pose you wouldn’t usually see a big, muscular hero doing. If not that, then playful, sexy, for looking at, but nothing about their anatomy overly exaggerated
How he draws women is also very clearly different from many other artists, from sexy pose to power pose.
Still posing for the camera, still to be looked at, but very, very different from how we’ve seen female characters portrayed in mainstream comics in the past.
And I guess it’s really just a matter of variety? Objectification in art is a long time debate and appears everywhere always, but for all that we can argue about its impact on popular media, there are a few things I know for sure:
1) having a female character pose like a playboy cover girl in the middle of a battle scene is just Bad Art and y'all need to find better references
2) female power poses will never look quite as right as when they’re drawn by people who know the value of expressing personality through pose (it’s basic animation principles and some artists still need to learn it) and who actually know what a female character’s personality beyond “sexy”
3) Iron Man or Batman posing like they’re about to beat somebody up is 100% not the same as a fashion drawing by Kevin Wada where a Typical Beefy Action Guy gets to pose like a flirty pretty boy
4) the MCU films have figured out the value of pandering to female audiences by sexually objectifying all their male action heroes while simultaneously appealing to the male demographic’s action movie power fantasy. Quoting Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi: “I’m not a piece of meat” “Uh, yes you are.”
They definitely struck some kind of balance there.
Also, more important than this entire post: y'all should follow @kevinwada on Tumblr and give him love because his art is divine and his talent beyond words
