forgot to say that, without Howl chasing girls and Sophie resenting him for it, the film completely erases part of the point of Sophie being old. Wynne Jones is using an idea that Beauvoir talked about – that being an old woman is both tragic (as we lose male attention/attractiveness) and freeing (as we are freed from the male gaze). the idea is that with being old comes liberation, and the true meaning of what it is to be a woman, as society no longer forces gender norms on us.
Sophie is free from Howl’s attentions and therefore safe from harm (a big part of the book is the fact that Sophie believes he eats women’s hearts, and him chasing girls proves this to her). she takes solace in the fact that she’s old, and finds it freeing. when she learns more about Howl (notably: that he doesn’t eat hearts and that he’s not evil), she starts to curse her age and resent him chasing girls. BUT she remains old OF HER OWN VOLITION – Howl notes that she’s perpetuating the spell by wishing to remain “in disguise”. there are SO many layers to this, and lots to do with gender politics – if she’s still old Sophie can’t get hurt, she likes the freedom, etc. but of course on a personal level being old is her denying her feelings for Howl, and also a representation of her low self esteem – being old is a defence mechanism and protection, both on a gender level and a personal one.
and the film kinda… loses this? the only thing that remains is being old = low self esteem. which really sucks. because there’s SO MUCH MORE to Sophie being old in the book (perspective I already mentioned), and a HUGE amount of this is gender politics. that the film just erases.
Also there’s the subversion of that in the book. Sophie’s belief that she’s safe from Howl, isn’t quite true because he fell in love with her while she was under the spell (and in the book, there’s no switching between looking young and old. Sophie is looking ninety the entire time, and Howl falls in love anyway.)
Also, her belief that being old means she can’t go to her stepmother or her sisters, that they’d fail to recognize her or reject her, is also unfounded. Fanny almost immediately recognizes her at the end of the book, and hugs her and cries over her and asks why Sophie disappeared. Sophie’s belief that the love of her family, friends and even her romantic interests is somehow conditional on her appearance is shown to be completely false at the end, which I think is absolutely beautiful.
Like, there’s definitely gender politics and commentary going on about beauty and youth and age and the male gaze and male violence going on, but there’s also this message about how love, real love, transcends all of that.
I actually adore the movie on its own merits, but I think it absolutely did a disservice to Sophie as a character. When I was doing a reread last month, what hit me was that Sophie is every bit as much of a volatile emotional disaster as Howl is, and that’s pretty heckin’ great.
Howl is a pissy, dramatic asshole even when he’s at his best. He dissolves into green slime when his hair looks wrong. He deals with his problems by getting falling-over drunk and makes the walls shake every time he sneezes just so everyone will take pity on him. He’s a self-proclaimed coward who has to trick himself into taking responsibility for anything.
Movie Sophie deals with this as well as she can. She learns to look past his drama and sees his tender heart and noble intentions. She becomes the mature one in the castle, fixing everyone’s problems, essentially taking up a motherly role to all the other characters.
Book Sophie does the same… but she does it while dealing out as good as she takes. Howl is chasing after every woman except Sophie? Sophie meticulously cuts up his suit into triangles. Howl floods the room with green slime? Sophie hate-magics weed killer strong enough to melt concrete, and chucks it at Howl’s head. Howl can’t stop avoiding his problems? Meet the queen of avoidance, who clung to her curse to avoid confronting her feelings for Howl. Howl has to basically trick himself into taking action? I would like you to meet Sophie, who was too scared to leave her home her whole life, but the moment she’s under a curse is like “WELP, GUESS I’D BETTER LEAVE HOME RIGHT THIS MOMENT AND NEVER COME BACK.”
The moment of Howl and Sophie getting together in the book isn’t “Sophie fixes everything through her inherent goodness.” It’s “Sophie realizes that Howl has been secretly scheming to fix all her problems exactly the same way that she has been secretly scheming to fix all his problems because neither of them is a normal functioning adult, and they both look forward to yelling at each other for the rest of their wonderful lives.” And losing that, losing all of Sophie’s flaws and ridiculous moments as well as Howl’s efforts to fix her life as much as she’s trying to fix his, means that we’re left with a typical romance trope of a woman having to fix all of a man’s problems and be the perfect, mature one in the relationship, while he can coast purely on charm. The revelation that half of Howl’s antics were actually schemes to break Sophie’s curse or even just make her happy is important because for once it goes both ways. Not just “woman fixes man with her love,” but “people fix each other with their love, sort of, except for all the parts that will never change and that’s okay because flaws can be just as attractive as virtues, and if he laughs when you throw weed killer at him then he might be the one.”
Omg YES
DIANA WYNNE JONES WAS A FUCKING GIFT AND WE DID NOT DESERVE HER
A perfect balance of extremely impressive and completely ridiculous.
Apple trees are DETERMINED. My parents planted a twig of an apple tree, and that first year it grew one apple. And the whole thing was bent over from the weight of it. It had one job and by God it was gonna do it.
Reblog to spread this. This isn’t something to keep silent on.
I would never want somethin like that to happen! Hell, i condemn it. But … I try to at least keep myself informed a little bit. Are there any good sources for this?
Sources above are accurate and working. I have listed the above sources in chronological order, as well as adding sources I have found. The sources found by fandoms-of-a-tired-ravenclaw are marked with an asterisk (*)
This article links to many, many other articles and pieces about the camps, some of which are governmental sources. All the links work. One wants you to make an account to access it, but I have it saved. PM me if you want to see it.
Internet Sleuths Hunting for China’s Secret Internment Camps, The Atlantic.com- (Sept. 15, 2018) – This article talks about the treatment the Uighurs get in the camp and talks about the risks some Chinese people are taking to find out the truth. It also goes over some of the solid evidence debunking Chinese claims that the camps do not exist, eyewitness accounts aside.
I literally don’t get people who complain that other people are just projecting onto characters like “you’re just using that character to explore and actualise yourself” well done james that’s what stories have been for for centuries what the fuck is your point
I find that if I’m wearing Real Adult Business Clothes my worksona can do things like call people and check my inbox, whereas pajamas hellen mostly wants to shovel hamburgers into her face and set things on fire.
For those of you not up to date on the Kavanaugh madness. THIS is why GOP is trying to rush the vote on Kavanaugh: On next month’s SCOTUS docket is Gamble vs US. No 17-646. This is what the rush is about.
Yes, they want him to overturn Roe, yes they want him to drag us all back, but they need him seated for October to rule on that specific case. At stake is the “separate sovereigns” exception to double jeopardy. If Kavanaugh (and the other 4 conservative judges) vote to overrule it, people given presidential pardons for federal crimes cannot be tried for that crime at the state level.
Then the president can pardon anyone and they have nothing to fear from state’s attorneys. No matter what side of the aisle you stand, this is a dangerous dismantling of the separation of power and checks and balances that protect democracy.
We’re all looking at the shiny coin and not seeing the bigger picture.
ON HIS first night as a trainee paediatrician in Sylhet, Bangladesh, Mohamad Chisti (pictured above) watched three children die of pneumonia. Oxygen was being delivered to them, through a face mask or via tubes placed near their nostrils, using what is called a basic “low-flow” technique which followed World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines for low-income countries. But it was clearly failing. He decided to find a better way.
His invention was inspired by something he saw while visiting Australia. On this trip he was introduced to a type of ventilator called a bubble-CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure), which is employed to help premature babies breathe. It channels the infant’s exhaled breath through a tube that has its far end immersed in water. The exhaled breath emerges from the tube as bubbles, and the process of bubble formation causes oscillations of pressure in the air in the tube. These feed back into the child’s lungs. That improves the exchange of gases in the alveoli and also increases the lungs’ volume. Both make breathing easier.
At about $6,000, standard bubble-CPAPs are cheaper than conventional ventilators. But that is still too much for many poor-country hospitals. However, after a second piece of serendipitous inspiration, when he picked up a discarded shampoo bottle that contained leftover bubbles, Dr Chisti realised he could probably lash together something that did the same job. Which he did, using an oxygen supply (which is, in any case, needed for the low-flow oxygen delivery method), some tubing and a plastic bottle filled with water. And it worked.
In 2015 he and his colleagues published the results of a trial that they had conducted in the institution where he practises, the Dhaka Hospital of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research. This showed that the method had potential. The hospital now deploys it routinely and the number of children who die there from pneumonia has fallen by three-quarters. That means the survival rate in the Dhaka Hospital is today almost on a par with that of children treated in rich-world facilities, using conventional ventilators.
Artisan Scribbles 