bethanyactually:

rashaka:

ayalaatreides:

misspider:

gayjamesmcgraw:

The Shape of Water (2017) dir. Guillermo del Toro

The literally silent women protagonist leaves a super bad taste in my mouth.

She’s deaf and speaks with sign language, she’s not a silent woman. Like, can we agree that deaf representation in media is important? Can we agree that ASL representation in media is important? This is an adult-oriented romance/sci-fi movie where the female lead is a deaf woman. How can you act like this isn’t significant? The last gif has a deaf woman in the 60s standing up to an aggressive man and telling him to go fuck himself. 

This movie is doing something that has probably never been done before. But hey, she can’t talk “normally” like a hearing woman and that’s bad, so go off I guess.

From the trailer it looks like she’s mute, not deaf. So I’m gonna add that on an artistic level, the mute protagonist is also probably a direct homage to the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid.

I saw a quote somewhere from Octavia Spencer, saying that she thinks one of the best things about this movie is that, since the two romantic leads are mute, much of the dialogue in the movie is spoken by a black woman and a closeted gay man, two people whose voices would have been silenced in real life by 1960s society.