The latest roundup with mothwrites
These links feel like they should have been sent out three days ago but I didn't keep up with the kardashians, I was busy thinking about Cruella.
This is so late, it’s early. I appreciate that. But I’m still doing it. Here’s your Wednesday link roundup on this beautiful Saturday.
You are welcome.
The long read
1. What’s left to keep up with?
I don’t often link to articles like this but I found this weirdly interesting and I really enjoyed the chronological run through of the Kardashian empire. It reminds me of that too-long article I wrote about Jack Easterby. Was it necessary? no. Was it fun? yes.
Is this the decline and fall of the Kardashian empire?
But even with the waning ratings, KUWTK continued attracting media attention, fueling the Kardashian promotional machine and further entrenching them in the gossip industrial complex. Entertainment websites, including BuzzFeed, still reported on the standout moments from each episode, important clips were edited into viral videos attracting millions of views, and the family’s live tweets discussing the most dramatic scenes were reposted into timelines. It remained impossible for the public to avoid indirectly consuming KUWTK’s narrative. However, in allowing ratings to decline at such a rate, the family risked their show being canceled. And without a vehicle by which to chronicle their drama and package it neatly as a narrative that they could control for media consumption, the family were endangering their cultural prominence and influence.
Another long read
2. I’m Cruella
I think I was sold on this great essay about Cruella from the moment I read the subtitle: The Cowardice of Cruella: The new Disney film could have embraced villainy, in all its complications. Instead, it opts for a cheaper sort of sympathy. But the next part that I had to stop and comment to other people out loud about was when they pointed out how clunky it is that Cruella has to tell the other characters in the movie whether she’s Cruella or Estella. It’s a weird dispossession of Cruella or Estella’s actual agency. Estella can’t be mean, that’s Cruella. Cruella can’t be loving or nuturing, that’s Estella. EITHER WAY this was a fun movie. I just also appreciate how people have pointed out the issues with it.
Cruella is the latest entry in the thriving genre of villain revisionism…The genre is not new, but it is flourishing in an age shaped by the internet and fluent in the language of postmodernism: It tells the story about the story. It is deeply concerned with the totalizing power of authorship. It understands that villainy, as a category, is imposed—and that, in a culture that tends to prioritize reductive myths over complicated truths, the label can be its own kind of injustice.
Disney’s latest film is both an apotheosis and a nadir of the form. It goes out of its way to complicate, to relate, to correct. It takes a character so evil—so delightfully depraved—that she is named after the devil himself, and promises that she, too, can be rehabilitated. Its impulse toward retrospective empathy, however, strains credulity. The Cruella you might know from earlier iterations is all but unrecognizable. Her defining cruelty has been switched out for the demands of glossy, girlboss feminism. Cruella is often fun to watch—it features some fantastic performances, some excellent lines, and some dazzling clothes—but its cavalier reversal of its core character cheapens the very idea of a corrective narrative. It takes a quintessential villain and nuances her character into oblivion.
meme time
you know usually i don’t bring up once upon a time as a positive comparison to something but remember how they had an episode of cruella backstory and we thought for the entire runtime they were trying to redeem and explain her actions and then at the end they pulled the carpet out from under us and said “PSYCH, ALL OF THIS WAS A LIE FROM AN UNRELIABLE NARRATOR, SHE’S JUST A BITCH WHO DOES WHAT SHE WANTS” because they somehow understood that some villains don’t need tragic pasts sometimes they’re just rich people?
cruella 2021: she’s just a repressed girlboss we swear :(
once upon a time in like. idr 2014?:
[x]
Cruella does not exist in a grey area of morality. She’s literally designed in black and white. She’s a straight up villain and I think that’s just neat.
A medium read
A while ago I linked to a video of a woman making what looked like tacos on her kitchen bench. Now I realise I been had. Which is weird. I’m all for making fun things to make people smile. I’m just confused when I don’t immediately pick up on the satire.
Your Least Favorite Gross Viral Food Videos Are All Connected to This Guy
There is something innately compelling about watching someone execute a recipe, no matter how deranged it is.
Though Lax’s network of creators make content on their own, they also brainstorm ideas together. He said he’d noticed that videos of food stalls and street food vendors were doing well on Facebook, and he figured the reason may have been the visual impact of seeing lots of food spread out in front of a camera. He said, “Whenever we see a video trend doing well on Facebook I try and ask, ‘what is our version of this popular trend?’”
In February, shortly after the Spaghetti-O pie video ripped through the internet, a new video surfaced on Twitter, this time shared by a now-suspended user named @PettiBetti. The video, retweeted 30,000 times, features a woman dumping cheese and ground beef and other various types of taco fixings onto a counter. She precedes to mash it all up into a paste with her hands, and then uses an ice cream scoop to put them in a hardened taco shell that’s been bent to look like an ice cream cone.