How to Train Your Dragon (Live Action)
i am writing this review for the live action adaptation of How To Train Your Dragon while lying on a cushion in a van with blackout curtains up. this is my first day at a family reunion centered around my cousins wedding (it happens tomorrow). i am feeling very emotional and nervous about the wedding because i am very inexperienced with formal settings, and because the nicest clothes that i own are black.
i wear all black for many reasons, i like the utility of only wearing cheap and plain clothes, as a christian and a communist i like to express humility through the way that i dress. those are very unemotional reasons, but theres something beneath it: i have to struggle to understand how to be and express myself in a way that others do not seem to have to. i feel alien and deviant compared to the rest of my family, and even as i micromanage incredibly small choices that i make to try to balance making my family comfortable and making myself comfortable, i get the sense that i am completely misunderstood. that my desperate attempts to behave courteously without destroying myself are looked past and that all that is perceived by my family is an inability to fall in line. tomorrow i will speak in a deep voice and wear clothes that are ostensibly "male coded", but i will not be able to hide the size of my chest and the style of my hair.
this has built up as a feeling for a long time and today and in this moment i feel it in an unrepressed emotional way. im happy that i have chosen to be who i am and to dress in black. im glad people notice my abnormality. I hope that any pity or confusion or judgement that wells up in reaction to the way i conduct myself can communicate even a small modicum of the immense grief that i feel about never being able to have a typical life or a family of my own, that normalcy has been taken from me and people like me. and i hope it can communicate the grief i felt listening to my well meaning father praise joe rogan for being centrist, talk about how epic tesla autopilot is, and then rent this movie for £19.99 on a whim.
in 3 years I'll be 30, maybe i will raise a child one day. i know its not too late and i know im not ready yet anyway. nevertheless i can palpably feel myself losing time when i look at my nan essentially on her walking deathbed, and my 10 year old therian sibling doing incessant gymnastics and creeping around like gollum in contortionist level freak poses. i am not afraid of dying but i long for other basic human experiences. i want to have a child, i want to build a family, i want to know my place in the world. but i just dont get to. and maybe my reasons for this are unique in the grand scheme of things, but im sure that this particular longing is a Human Experience Classic.
sometimes when i see birds i feel that the holy spirit has sent me an apparition of my dead ancestors and my potential unborn children. i hope that my passionate self centered overly analytical overly emotional internality comes through whenever anyone looks at me and i hope that i can find a home in this life and i hope you can too and i love you for reading all of this. i did not want to watch this movie. it has no reason to exist. i like the original story. fuck "the industry" forever
(08-01-2025)