I wanna write about the special kind of love I feel for war movies and what that means for me, about gender and patriarchy and all of that being bound up inextricably in the way war movies are just a microcosm of everything interesting about life

Plenty of interesting conflict happens in other movies, for sure. But a war movie is - it’s moral, and it’s romantic, and it’s life or death, and it’s man vs. self. It’s all of them at once.

And for me, it’s also about a masculinity I’ll never be able to access, because my very presence there changes the quality of it, it morphs into something similar but distinct at best.

No matter how my gender and my sexuality sometimes involve skewing masculine, no matter how much space there is to play in that grey area, it’s not the same kind of masculinity hagiographied on film in war movies.

This thread comes to you via me watching Band of Brothers recently and also talking to @ahrhi_169 about it, but also I have loved war movies since I was far too young to be watching them, and I’d love to know what switch got flipped in my tiny brain