Theodore Roosevelt Listed Ulysses S Grant As One Of The Greatest Americans In History (alongside Washington

I see Crowley’s ‘you idiot’ and agree it’s utterly heartbreaking...

But I raise you Aziraphale’s pleading, ‘Come with me’, is just as much.

I think perfection is ugly. I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion.

Yohji Yamamoto (via quotemadness)

Radiation and its severity was still so wildly underestimated in 1986, but all I am currently doing watching this series is screaming at the screen at the firefighters and crew to just get out of there, literally run for their lives in the opposite direction. Holy crap, this series going to be hard to watch.

Fanfic Ask Meme

Broadchurch is a story about mothers

Yes, it’s stated and shown that Alec Hardy and Ellie Miller are certainly the main characters, and Alec’s journey is certainly the most obvious storyline in the series, I won’t argue that.

But Broadchurch is a story about mothers.

The series opens up with a shot of Danny Latimer standing on the cliffs and then it cuts to Beth Latimer waking abruptly the next morning. Most of the first episode focuses on Beth and her journey finding Danny’s body, in fact, and her struggle trying to understand the loss of her son is a main focus of the first series. Several scenes in those episodes focus primarily on her:

(Realizing what “finding a body on the beach” might mean.)

(Opening of s1e2, when she’s folding Danny’s clothes.)

(S1e7. “I lay there thinking what would I go through to have him back? I’d be raped, I’d be tortured, I’d have a gang of men on me, I’d be left for dead if it meant [Danny] was safe.” This was Jodie Whittaker’s finest moment, in my opinion. She hits Beth’s desperation and agony right on the head.)

(And of course the moment when she tries to process the fact that it was Joe Miller who killed her son, and all of the fucked-up irony that comes with it.)

There are so many more moments when Beth is the prime example of the Mother Angle that Chibnall approaches but these were the moments when I think it was strongest.

Ellie is another example of mothers in this story. She’s constantly protective of Tom when Hardy pushes to speak to him and take part in the recreation. We all laugh at the moment when Ellie threatens to throw a cup of piss at her boss but the reason WHY she says it in the first place is the clue:

-”I’m his mum, I decide.”

-”Oh, so your commitment to this investigation stops outside these doors.”

Hardy tries to trump her authority over Tom. She explicitly states she doesn’t want her son to take part in the investigation in any way and Hardy keeps on pushing, even insulting her commitment as a police officer.

Don’t push the protective Mama Bear.

Favorite moment of Ellie as Protective-Mama-Bear is s1e8. It’s the moment that bothered me the most when Jocelyn Knight brings it up in s2.

Ellie does confront Joe as a wife, certainly, at the end of s1e8. But again it’s interesting to note exactly what it is that Joe asks that sets her off:

She’s in control enough to only scream at Joe from a distance in the beginning of this scene. It’s only when Joe requests to see Tom that she sets upon him uncontrollably.

Seriously, do not piss off the Protective Mama Bear.

S2 deals with Sandbrook more than it really deals with Broadchurch as a whole, I think, and it definitely focuses more on Alec as a character, but the theme of Mothers is still prevalent in the contrasting images of Cate Gillespie, a drunk and unable to cope with the loss of Pippa; Tess Henchard, Alec’s ex-wife who loves her daughter but is willing to keep her guilty actions a secret so that Daisy won’t hate her; Beth, focused so much on getting closure for Danny she almost forgets about her newborn child (until Mark’s actions shake her out of her obsessive need for ONLY Danny); and then finally Ellie again, warning Joe away from their sons with the threat of death if he dares show up around either Tom or Fred again. It will be very interesting to see what direction Chibnall will go with the Mothers theme in s3.

I didn’t think it would be possible to find any similarities between two of my favorite shows, Broadchurch and MASH. I was wrong.

Spoilers after the cut (for both shows)

Specifically, the similarity lies between Alec Hardy and Hawkeye Pierce in terms of trauma. Both suffer from varying degrees of PTSD, but their individual experiences are opposite from the other’s. 

Hardy in BC is already deeply traumatized by something in the first series, but we don’t see its cause until S2, when he reveals he was the one who discovered and carried out a murdered girl’s body out of a river. Ever since then, he suffers from nightmares and by his own admission rarely sleeps soundly anymore. It’s honesty one of the saddest scenes of the series and it adds a lot more weight to Hardy’s character seeing that moment as he’s carrying Pippa Gillespie out of the river:

Unlike Hardy, whose experience happens well before we actually meet him as a character, Hawkeye’s in MASH happens right at the end of his story arch. We’ve watched him become more and more unstable and exhausted as the series continues; his nightmares and bouts of insomnia have already been going on for quite some time, and he’s shown having the tendency of rewriting traumatic memories. Which is why we find him in a mental hospital in the beginning of the final episode, being treated for for what he thinks is absolutely nothing. Then we hear about an incident on a bus when he and the rest of the MASH unit are hiding from Chinese and North Korean soldiers. He’s adamant about the fact that a South Korean woman hiding with them killed her chicken when he ordered her to keep it quiet, until finally the truth comes out:

(Sorry for the crappy quality- I can’t screencap from itunes, so a video on youtube was the best I could do.)

Now, I’m all for stopping the usual fridged-wife causing manly pain backstory, but damn it this isn’t much better! 

These guys are brilliant and my favorite Shakespeare to watch. Definitely worth the laughs.

hey so protip if you have abusive parents and need to get around the house as quietly as possible, stay close to furniture and other heavy stuff because the floor is settled there and it’s less likely to creak

HECK yes, it's Echo!

I've loved Echo since the New Avengers comics that first introduced her years ago. Very excited to see her in the MCU!

Throughout all of my recent research into Ulysses S Grant and William T Sherman, I realized that we were never really taught in school about the Western Theatre of the Civil War; i.e., Grant’s mostly-successful campaigning around the States of Kentucky, and Tennessee, and Missouri. It’s his and others’ victories there that later helped win the Mississippi River and cut the Confederacy in two.

But what do we learn about in Social Studies/History? Gettysburg. Fort Sumter. Bull Run/Manassas. Antietam. In other words, the Eastern Theatre of the War. And those battles were dominated by incompetent Union commanders for a large majority of them: McClellan, Burnside, Hooker, McClellan again-- men who were more likely to retreat at the very cusp of victory than jump forward and seize the day. It’s bad enough learning about the Eastern Theatre that I remember saying to my parents that with such incompetent commanders the Union deserved to lose the Civil War.

I understand that History class has only so much time to teach students, and I understand that the Civil War is too big to teach in-depth, but why do we focus so much on McClellan and Lee, Hooker and Lee, Burnside and Lee, Meade and Lee, and brush over such an important part of the War as the Western Theatre? We effectively forget about Grant and Sherman until they’ve entered the Eastern campaign, let alone all of their fellow commanders and soldiers, and their years of fighting to take back and then keep the Mississippi in Union hands.