I didn’t realise this until adulthood but handmade birthday piñatas are the apex of parental devotion. I spent the week cooking for my ravenous teenage cousins and felt a bit crestfallen at times that I was spending so long making something that was going to disappear within minutes—but with piñatas it’s so much worse, they exist to be savagely maimed. Year after year my father asked his kids what shape they wanted this year’s piñatas to be and he spent weeks painstakingly making them in the basement after work, only to watch a bunch of oversugared bat-wielding kids gleefully destroy them in less than 10 minutes.
I mentioned this to him and he said he remembered researching tarantula anatomy for the giant spider piñata I asked for when I was 4, trying to make the fangs the right shape and to cut the crepe paper into very thin ribbons so the thing would look appropriately fuzzy, and I was like “and I don’t even remember it because I was four!! spending so long building a beautiful object only so your kids will have fun destroying it, knowing they won’t even remember it, is such a selfless endeavour” and he said “my other motivation was that you said you wanted the spider to look real & scary so the kids at your birthday party would be terrified of it and you’d get to scoop up all the candy and I wanted to support your slyness & ambition”
[image description: A person wearing a wrinkled white sheet tied with a hank of rope and an idiotic-looking pointy white hood stands in front of a grove of trees. The only thing that isn’t white is the red circle around the white snowflake on the breast. They’re speaking “But… whaddaya mean? I always wear white after Labor Day.” Text reads, “38, Klueless K. Klamdip, The Small God of Precious White Snowflakes”]
He isn’t an old god, and he resents that, resents the old gods who get respect where he does not, especially the old gods who get respect who are, he feels, genuinely beneath him. Why should anyone listen to Tesla Jefferson or Queen Qatar? Bad enough that any goddess should have a following, but they don’t even have the decency to be offended by their own complexions, as any right-thinking woman would be!
He isn’t an old god, and most of his supposed peers hope he never will be. Hope he’ll fade as so many gods of misinformed supremacy and obstinate pride have faded before him, hope he’ll be nothing more than a footnote in the long and storied mythology of the small gods. Or perhaps an asterisk leading into nothing, like the snowflake symbol he so proudly carries on his breast. They hope.
But too few of them are able to stir their followers into rising up against him.
Klueless is a new god, a new manifestation of an old and toxic way of thinking, a poison that humanity carries with it everywhere it goes; the idea that any one can be superior to any other for reasons other than their own hard work, their own ceaseless toil. He is a reflection of the horrific inner selves too many carry with them, a secret shouted from a mountaintop, and his vey buffoonery is what makes him powerful.
“Surely I can’t belong to that god,” say the women with their teased-up hair, before they remind a darker-skinned stranger to move along, their sidewalks aren’t for vagrants and vagabonds.
“I have dignity; I’m not like that,” say the men with their own symbols on their breasts, and their handguns at their hips, before they go out to patrol neighborhoods they keep safe for their own kind, not any others—and sometimes not even for that.
Comedy’s mask can hide all the horrors in the world.
spoiler-free review of Barbie (2023): I want to compress this movie into a stake and drive it through Joss Whedon’s heart and watch the life leave his eyes before comprehension can dawn in them.
Vegas is terrified of Pete getting kidnapped and not for just the normal reasons. He’s terrified because:
a) What if kidnapper falls in love with Pete (very high chance because it’s Pete and he’s amazing and his eyes shine like the stars and if he shows even an iota of sympathy then obviously anyone would cry and fall at his feet)
b) What if Pete falls in love with kidnapper (big danger of this happening if the kidnapper is getting beaten by their father)
Vegas needs to protect his status ‘The ONLY kidnapper that Pete loves’ okay?!
*After Pete has been rescued from the kidnapping*
Vegas: Sooo, did you like him???
Pete: Who? The kidnapper?
Vegas:…
Pete: He kidnapped and tortured me?!
Vegas: So you did like him? *almost crying*
Pete: no, no, no. He was such a bad torturerer, so unskilled and he didn’t even look hot covered in blood.
Vegas: *sniffing* You mean it?
Macau on the other side of the table: I’m moving out
Just how long was I supposed to think this was about the city of Las Vegas as a whole taking an unbelievably personal interest in this guy Pete?
