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ON PURPOSE, I'M GOING TO LOVE YOU ON PURPOSE

Jenny Slate // Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue // Pleiades, Anne Carson // Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo // @oriley42 and @earth167 (and a half) on Tumblr // Jodi Picoult from The Book Of Two Ways // The Night Vale, Episode 100, The Toast // Adam Melchor, I Choose You // Kierston White, The Chaos of Stars

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Female characters who are the sole voice of reason <<<<<<< Female characters who think of themselves as the sole voice of reason but who are actually just as insane as those around them

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i have a runny nose so im gonna stop by the pharmacy and pick up a curved greatsword to behead myself with

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Gonna start NOT saying dumb shit out loud and replacing it with "no... I shan't say." unfortunately that doesn't apply to tumblr because it's MY blog and I get to choose the one note flop posts.

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popular fanon will kill patient. he needs source material to live.

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you should be able to skip work if you had a dream about a spectral lover and need the day to let it all sink in

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So sick of dog motif what about cat motif.

I love you but we don't love the same. I can't be near you when you want me to be. Your love is smothering and your need to keep me safe is trapping me. I'm my own person but I don't know how to show you that. I lash out and hurt you even though I don't mean to. I need you to move slowly around me or I'll bolt. I love you, even though I don't say it. If you stay still I'll sit next to you, and even though we don't understand each other we can be together like that.

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my trademark Type of character writing that i can never resist i think has got to be what i call "the time bomb". which is a character who appears to have no likable or sympathetic traits or redeeming qualities, or lacks the charisma or depth or nuance to pull them off, and works hard to convince you of this, before brutally challenging your assumptions with The Chapter/Episode/Scene which recontextualises everything you thought you knew about them and shakes up your entire understanding of them and the story itself, as you realise that the author was laying the groundwork for this the entire time while convincing you to look elsewhere, like a magician performing a sleight of hand trick. i have something of a sixth sense for sniffing out these types of guys too, which makes it very funny when i'm the only one batting for their team while everyone else calls for their head on a spike around me. just you wait.

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*pulls up to the fanfic drive-thru window* uh yeah, i’ll take a fake relationship with a side of mutual pining and thinking the other isn’t interested, thanks

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None of that worked. What my mind needed to know was that someone was there to make it all better. That summer, through gritted teeth, I’d decided that person was me, not a man or a family, and it would only ever be me. I had to stop hoping for someone to come along and love me. I had to do it myself, ducking my head and barreling through anything life brought.

- Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

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I think the continued point they make about class is interesting and a little uncomfortable but in a good way. Makes you really sit with how class privilege applies to and affects everyone regardless of political affiliation, race, gender, or sexuality. Regina has a lot of struggles as a black woman, as a soon to be single mother, as someone with fertility issues, but it still takes her so long, too long, to see Alex as a person and from what Yolanda says, it’s the first time this has ever happened. Yolanda talks about how often she’s called the wrong (racist ass) name by so many clients and we know plenty of those clients are other people of color - shit maybe even assimilated ass Latinos.

And it shows very well in the episode where Alex is trying to rent. That lesbian couple - who volunteer at a homeless shelter doncha know - are perfectly happy to help Alex until it inconveniences them. They witness her ex break into her house, pass out drunk on a couch in his underwear, and get inappropriately sexually explicit with her, going so far as to blame her in front of near strangers for his inability to get an erection - and then callously kick her out on the street, knowing they could very well be driving her right back into that man’s arms. Bc all their liberalism doesn’t stop them from seeing her as less than a person because she’s poor.

Even with Nate - as sweet as he is, so many of their scenes are just dripping with patronizing behavior. Maybe it could change one day, but he looks at her like a project, someone precious he can save from her big bad ex. He’s painting her as a damsel in his head completely against her will even as he seems to be genuinely trying to help her. She’s like a half person, the manic pixie dream girl here to help him feel love again, instead of a deeply struggling young woman with a lot of problems and a desperate yearning for love.

None of them ever have bad intentions but it’s the same end result - people like Alex, like Yolanda and Danielle and Kate are all side characters in their story and therefore they can project what they want onto them. And the interesting thing is that Alex affords them so much more humanity than they afford her. When she’s writing as she gets to know them, she looks for the good and bad in them. She doesn’t like to assume the worst in them, wanting to be Regina’s friend even when Regina is short with her, developing feelings for Nate despite his hero complex because she sees that he means well more or less.

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I was starved for kindness. I was hungry for people to notice me, to start conversations with me, to accept me. I was hungry in a way I’d never been in my entire life.

- Stephanie Land, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother's Will to Survive

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When I think about the house that I want for my daughter and me, it’s not big and full of stuff. There’s a bed for each of us, a surface for me to write on. Maybe a yard for a big, dumb dog someday. But our space is a home because we love each other in it.

MAID (2021)

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“Writing is where I go to be honest about how I feel. Sometimes it’s really the only way for me to know what it is that I’m feeling. Like, I have to write in order to see what I’m going to write. If that makes any sense at all. But…I find that it’s a lot easier to write the truth than it is to say it out loud.”

MAID (2021)

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“When you get better - there’s so much light waiting for you, mom.”

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There's just so many things i adore about the show Maid:

It's insistence that you don't need to have been physically hurt to leave. The second time she leaves that bowl doesn't hit her. Doesn't matter. It could have. And so she leaves.

DV victims can go back to their abusers and still be deserving of leaving them again. This show is so agressive in the way of doing this, showing us and telling us of multiple characters who go back to their abusers, and some who eventually leave. The show also explicitly tells you that it's okay to try again and again through Denise.

The clear outline of how difficult it often is to get housing or figure stuff out when you don't have a job or housing.

How the show shows abusers as people. Sean is a complicated person. He's sometimes sober. He's helped Alex deal with her mother. Doesn't make her not a victim. He's an alcoholic. He's thrown stuff at her. He's treated her with aggression. He's still an abuser.

I'll edit more as i remember

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“I’m going to tell her that the M stands for Maddy. That this whole new world is for her.”

I am not okay