Throwback Thursdays: Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark

(image via IMDb)

For this installment of Throwback Thursdays, I decided to revisit Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)—the first installment in the Indiana Jones trilogy—since I didn’t realize how long rewatching the whole trilogy would take. The movie trilogy and the character of Indiana Jones were some of my formative influences as a child. I dreamed of unlocking the world’s mysteries and these movies showed an academic leading a glamorous life of adventure, hunting mysterious artifacts and overcoming difficulties using his knowledge and reasoning powers. However, watching Raiders of the Lost Ark as an adult rather requires that I turn my brain off if I want to actually enjoy it because of the number of glaring issues regarding racial and cultural representation, as well as gendered character tropes.

Spoilers for the movie below, obviously.

Sexualized Saturdays: The Dead Lesbian Trope Needs To Die

Here is a picture of a couple who lived happily ever after in canon to raise our spirits before delving into the depressing fates of many other queer female characters. (art by Bryan Konietzko)

I spent a lot of time trying to decide on a topic for today’s post. But I could really think only of one topic, although I tried to resist it for a while because it’s too sad and frustrating. In the end, I decided to go with it. And so today I want to join the conversation discussing the queer women that have died on our TV screens this year, the Dead Lesbian trope, and the implications of this continuing trend.

Spoilers for Lost Girl, Person of Interest and The 100 below (and of course, don’t look at any of the links if you don’t want to be spoiled about any character deaths anywhere).

The Devil’s Intern: Mediocre White Boy Hell

Today I want to tell you about a book called The Devil’s Intern by Donna Hosie. It’s the first book in The Devil’s series. Everything I heard about it was positive and my friends loved it. The premise sounds really cool too—a teen boy who died a tragic random death and went to Hell decides to travel back in time and prevent it. Don’t let the apparent morbidity of this fool you, though; it’s actually a very humorous book. With everything sounding so great, I started this book expecting to love it. But while the premise delivers and the dark humor works well, it’s so full of casual misogynistic tropes and so lacking in diversity that I couldn’t really enjoy it.

Spoilers after the jump!