#(is what I wish I could say to my mental functioning when I stay up too late-)

[likesdoodling]

Was listening to music after studying today, so I figured I'd draw some tiny maglors to round out the day :)

[doodledrawsthings]

you. Oh my god, you. (Positive)

listen. Before I had internet access, all I had was 1 hour of allotted browser time, bing image search, and a single dantdm play through of a hat in time that never got finished. I googled fanart and got pretty much nothing, I googled fancomics and got pretty much nothing, but you know what I did end up finding?

your art.

from ages 11-14, my goal in life, in art, was your art. I can’t tell you how much I loved finding random screenshots of your posts, because I was always just so impressed by how clean and consistent your sketches are, how the characters always stay on model, the shape language, how you could somehow sketch a character in like 20 lines when it took me 50 to draw sans in my little spiral notebook— like! Holy shit! For years I have looked up to your art! There’s still a photos folder on my dads old huge-ass 12 inch work iPad labeled “holy crap” and filled with your art. Because it inspired me so much. It’s become an undeniable part of my artstyle, now — I still have fanart I drew way back in the day of Hattie and the rest, I didn’t even know anyone’s names because I couldn’t play the game, but you’re the reason I eventually did play the game. Your coffee shop au and different versions of the prince— one of those ieterations inspired the main character of my novel! Well, novel that I tried to write, I was 13 so it was eh, but I tried!!

I’m submitting this on-anon because I don’t want to out my age on the wide internet (I like my privacy) but. Your art has really meant a lot to me. It’s the reason I played hollow knight, and it’s the reason I kept trying to develop an art style I was happy with. You’re the reason I started scribbling comics in my notebooks. Being 13-14 was pretty much the worst two years of my life, but I had Bing image search and the occasional glimpse of your signature, and I’d be so happy every time I found a new (if crusty) three-times screenshotted jpg. You literally introduced me to the concept of polyamory and nonbinary-ness with the coffee shop au. I had no other access to that in my household, and. Yeah. It meant a lot to me.

Anyway. I’m so glad I’ve finally tracked you down (in the most non-ominous way possible) and I’m so glad you’re still active— Please never stop making art. Your art is incredible, and amazing, and also you never know who’s out there on Bing image search. Thank you for creating for as long as you have. You’re pretty much the reason I’m shooting for an art degree (Wish me luck!) so just…Thank you.

(Also I had no idea you were a professional storyboarder, which is insane because that’s what I want to be when I’m through college. Hey, maybe I’ll end up storyboarding a remake of something you’ve storyboarded! hehehe)

Hi anon!

So right off the bat, I gotta tell you that this message made me start bawling when I woke up and saw it. Like I had a full-on cry session while reading your message and lying in bed for almost an hour. I am crying as I am typing this response, on my phone, still in bed. It’s 11am and i woke up at 9. So I hope it turns out coherent.

The last two years have been. weird. I say that a lot because I wanna say “rough” but that still doesn’t feel quite right. I’m almost hyper-aware that there are so many people that have it worse than me rn, so it feels hard to even acknowledge when I’m going through anything, myself, sometimes- REGARDLESS, it’s been kind of an all-time low for my mental health. There was a point within in the last year where I just HATED drawing. I struggled to bring myself to work, I struggled to bring myself to even draw for fun. It felt like I was posting just to post, trying to keep people aware of my existence and it almost felt physically painful to force myself to sit down and do it, sometimes.

I’m getting better now, I think, but. Yknow.

It’s so easy to get caught up in the “oh I can make money off this,” “oh I can get attention off this,” “oh I can prove myself a functional person in society with this,” of it all. I forget why I actually do this, sometimes, or if I even enjoy it. And then I get messages like yours, about the kid with limited internet access looking for A Hat in Time fan art on Bing image search, and I get taken back to when I was a kid scrolling Google images and deviantart for the same thing.

I don’t mean to like. Foster some kind of parasocial thing with you or any one of my followers. There’s a reason I’m saying all this, I hope it ties up in the end.

We don’t know each other. I’m not some mysterious legendary artist, or whatever. I’m a person who gets burnt out, and jealous, and insecure. I need inspiration to function, just like you, and when I don’t have it, I get art block. But I also really like to draw fictional characters kissing and hanging out. I like coming up with comics and stories and playing out dramatic and funny scenarios in my head like I’m mashing Barbies together. And when other people tell me they enjoy the stuff I put out when I do this, it makes me really, really, really happy.

I think I needed to read your message, probably. With the state of… Everything… Right now, especially recently, I feel like a lot of artists are also struggling with a sense of purpose, pride, and reason as the world makes it harder and harder to even BE an artist, these days. And when I read this message it was like Anton Ego at the end of Ratatouille, I got taken back to when I was a kid looking at my favorite artists and studying their style and striving to be better and better at it over years of my life. Not just because I wanted a job for it or cuz I wanted to be a famous Disney animator or whatever, but because it was fun and I just liked doing it.

Thank you, SO much. I say this in the most genuine and earnest way I possibly can possibly express. I wish you luck on your own path in art and art school. And if you decide that animation industry is your thing, then I wish you the best in that endeavor, as well. I think I will keep making art for a long time.

Peace and love on the planet earth ✌️✌️✌️

[1-800-local-slut]

Before and After (Part 1)

The bullet that went through his brain knocked all the part of Rex that sucked clean out of him. But he still existed before that.

Rex 'Splode' Sloan x Black! Alien! Reader

Warnings: really hard pregnancy, vomit, smut mentions, Rex doubts his parenting abilities, also Rex and reader are young parents trying to figure it out, Rex being a cunt but this was before he got his brains blasted out lol, woke!Mark, I tried to make the characters talk like teenagers because I feel like we don't see enough of it in the show, Rex and Eve broke up WAY before he hooked up with reader because man stealing is never the move

Note: you're from a planet called Moraya and your parents sent you to Earth to stay with your uncle due to a disease sweeping the planet. They couldn't leave because your mother is the head of medicine, and your father is a high-ranking member of the government. By the time the crisis was dealt with you were a teenager and had adjusted to life on Earth, your parents understood your choice to stay. Your powers are mostly mental. You can control minds, have telekinesis, take over people's bodies, manipulate people's emotional states, and sometimes see the future in your dreams. Your body functions like a human, so your vulnerable to injures and human deaths but not illnesses (like car accidents, falling and breaking your neck, choking, drowning). You can fly, but not everyone on your planet can. It's more of a recessive gene since overtime your people didn't need to do it as often. That's all y'all!

༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺༻༺

If Rex finished high school, he might've remembered to use a condom that night. Nah. He still wouldn't have done it. He was twenty years old, with a three year old and his nineteen year old fiancé. You two were broke as two jokes. You were trying to get through med school, he was trying to save the world, but you two still found the time to be the best parents possible. He was stressed all the time, a few gray hairs were growing and the bags under his eyes were never leaving.

But Rex hasn't stopped smiling since the moment you agreed to marry him. Not when your baby woke up screaming in the middle of the night, not when your baby threw up on him four times in a day, not when you broke his hand during labor. Not even when he was woken up by you struggling to put on your crocs to go to get food in the middle of the night.

At first, Rex spent so much time wishing he just pulled out. Of course Plan B wasn't enough, you were an alien. But no matter how much you reassured him that it would've worked and that the Plan B just failed, he still didn't believe you. To this day he's ashamed to admit that he didn't want his baby at first.

Even suggested it wasn't his, to which he got a firm slap.

"Pregnant?!"

"I just thought I'd let you know-"

"So what, you like need a ride to the place? Because I kind of don't have my car right now."

Silence settled over the HQ and disgust filled your face.

"No, Rex, I don't need a ride. I just wanted to let you have a choice-"

"What, you wanna keep it?! Listen, you're cool but I'm not gonna have a kid. I mean how do you know its even mine?" Just then Mark came in and let out a soft 'oooo'. Even Invincible, as clueless as he was sometimes knew that was definitely the worst thing to say to you.

You let out an offended gasp before anger replaced disgust.

"Are you calling me a slut?!" The slap that followed honestly left him reeling. To this day he could still feel your handprint on his face sometimes and it's almost been four years since you slapped the taste out of his mouth.

"I was OFFERING you a chance to know it. I have family on my home planet. Seeing as it's your child too I thought you might've wanted a chance to raise it but you've answered the question before I asked. I will be taking it home with me when it's old enough to make the journey with me."

"Oh. Okay, cool. So you aren't asking me for money?"

"I wouldn't wipe my ass with the crumpled two dollars you have in your pocket. Me and MY CHILD will be good without you, trust." Then you were gone, and only Rexsplode and Invincible remained in the room. But Invincible decided to be Mark for a second and talk to his friend.

"Dude...she's having your baby." It was the first thing he said when Rex sat down on his bed as the two teenagers sat down in his room in the Gaurdian's HQ.

"Yeah, I'm doing okay after that slap." He scoffed while he grabbed a shirt that smelt clean off his bed and removed his costume.

"Did you want me to be on your side here...?"

"Okay yeah, maybe I wasn't the most sensitive but what did I really say wrong?"

"Are we being deadass???" Now in his own regular clothes (where he got them from Rex still doesn't know), Mark made a face of disgust. The type of face you make when you're truly questioning your homie.

Rex gave an indignant shrug. He knew but his pride hurt more than his face at that point.

"We'll do a play by play, maybe it'll help you. Okay, she comes in, tells you she's pregnant. This is the same girl who had to leave her home and adjust to living in a strange place and only has one other person on Earth who understands her. She's going through something emotionally heavy, away from her own people who probably have customs that she can't partake in, because she's probably unable to fly back while pregnant.

Also we're teenagers, she's a year younger than us so there's also the fact that she has to kiss young adulthood and the rest of her life goodbye because she's choosing to keep YOUR BABY, and she didn't even just take the kid and dip. I don't know man, maybe you shouldn't have accused her of sleeping around and then instead of being any type of understanding you told her you couldn't even give her a ride to Planned Parenthood."

Awkward silence settled through the room.

"Also why did you call her 'cool' like you haven't known her for years?"

"Don't make me sound like a loser."

"Hey man I hate to break it to you but you're doing that on your own."

"I don't even know it's mine!" Arms thrown out to the side, he grunted in exhaustion. It felt like you knocked a tooth lose, damn.

"We know she isn't sleeping around because she hasn't been in my bed." With a dramatic rub of his hands Mark lifted both of his eyebrows and made a dumbass face. Rex's own face crinkled in disgust and he looked at Mark while he leaned back on his palms.

"What if you're not her type?"

And Mark had the audacity to snort, and motion towards himself.

"Have you SEEN me? I would sleep with me too."

"...Would that count as masturbation or selfcest? Or twincest?"

"No because it's me not a twin."

"What if the other you becomes sentient and wants its own life."

"Yeah but...no...wait."

And as time went by, you went through pregnancy. Alone. You went through four months of what from a distance looked like a horrible experience, and while it tugged at his heart strings you told Eve who told Mark, who told Rex that you would die before you spoke to Rex again. Especially about your baby. It got to the point where you struggled to control your powers and had to fess up to Cecil. Who even expressed his disgust with Rex's behavior in a subtle way.

"You're the first reason I've ever had to figure out maternity leave for a pregnant alien teenager." Was all he said after Rex denied paternity leave.

It took one night for Rex to actually start growing a pair. They fully grew in after he caught a bullet to the cranium.

It was one night after a mission, two weeks before you had to start maternity leave, and the Guardians just returned from a pretty mid battle while Mark was on a little vacation according to Cecil.

While everyone celebrated, Rex left to use the bathroom when he heard it. You cried alone, in your spare bedroom that you sometimes crashed in. You were laying in your bed, attempting to muffle your cries, clutching your stomach and head. A sliver of light from the door widened until you realized Rex was standing in your door way.

You turned, looking over at him and scowled.

"You-" A gag cut you off. Were you trying not to vomit? Boxes of some of your things, you were clearing out for your maternity leave but it looked like you were getting ready to never come back. Then he remembered what you said. When it was old enough, you'd be flying back home with the rugrat.

"You are the last person I want to see. Piss off." And it would've worked better if you didn't immediately throw up in your hand and make a mad dash to the toilet before the rest of your vomit got all over you. He was a dick, not a monster so he followed.

While you threw up the contents of your stomach into the toilet, he couldn't just let the team hear. You'd clearly gone out of your way to avoid them seeing you crying and suffering already. He slid into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

When you finally did stop, you slumped against the bathtub. You sat, staring blankly at the floor before your face crumpled and you buried your face into your hands. You began to sob, with vomit on your shirt and your shoulders shook violently.

After a moment of Rex drowning in guilt you let out a shaky breath and hugged yourself.

"I miss my mom."

You staggered to your feet before you shoved him roughly out of your way into the sink, then left the bathroom. He heard wind from your room, realizing you were flying home and for the first time in a long time Rex began to think. He began to think real long and real hard.

It took the two of you to make it. You chose to keep it. You didn't even try to force him into fatherhood. The least he could do was loan you a hand until it was time for you to go. Without realizing it, he was cleaning the toilet. Everyone else was downstairs partying, celebrating their newfound strength as a team and winning the fight. And Rex was cleaning your vomit off the toilet, because without him you wouldn't be throwing up in the first place.

It wasn't a total 180 from there. He was still Rex, you still didn't even want to talk to him, but he tried. He left little treats he remembered you like only for them to be left untouched completely where he left them. Except for the time you stormed down the metal steps of HQ and threw the box of strawberry waffers at his face.

"Fuck, ow!"

"We didn't need shit from you then. We don't need a fucking thing from you now."

As you turned to storm back up the steps he grabbed your arm and narrowly avoided a swift slap.

"Listen, listen. You're right. You're right to be mad at me. I was being a dick."

"You still are."

Wrestling your arm free, he remembered that fire that attracted him to you in the first place. He caught you by your shoulders before he realized you could just kick him in the balls and settled for just grabbing one of your arms. Your back turned to him, he wasn't even sure if you were listening, but he had to speak now.

"You're uncomfortable, I know you are. And I know it's partially my fault. At least tell me what I can do to ease your discomfort just a little. You hate me, it's my fault. But let me help. Just a little." The tension in your shoulders dropped just a bit.

"...I'm having really strong cravings for hot chocolate."

He didn't start falling in love with you for a while afterwards. You were on maternity leave now, but he climbed through your bedroom window with the bacon wrapped shrimp you had requested when he texted you, he was out if you were hungry. He spun around on your desk chair when he realized. You've been pregnant for a while now. While you devoured the shrimp he noticed.

At six months you didn't look three months from giving birth. You seemed to be enjoying his presence just a bit now. Sure, there where changes but those were more so personality wise. You no longer snatched the food from his hands anymore and sent him away, you even let him sit less than ten feet away from you sometimes. Infact, you had the bump of a three-month pregnancy. Did you just have a small baby growing in there?

"It'll be a big one." You said, wiping your fingers as you watched Annie on your laptop.

"Really? It doesn't look like it."

"I'm not far along yet. But-"

"You're six months pregnant."

"Oh. Because my planet is so far away from my own solar systems Sun, my planet rotates slow. Time is different. Years are longer. I did some math; I'll be pregnant for about a year and a half.

"A YEAR AND A HALF?!"

"Shut the fuck up! Yes Rex, on my planet it wouldn't be so long. But the time is weird here, everything moves so fast." You stifled a yawn as you sipped your milkshake.

"...Do you think it's gonna tear you in two?"

You giggled. And his diversion worked. You spoke about home before, but since you got pregnant it seemed like you were plauged with constant home sickness. It had to be hard for you to be away from home this way. When you were going through something so momentous, and your planet was a weeklong flight. That was if you flew without sleeping and pee breaks.

"I don't want to think about that. I already know the birth is gonna hurt."

As you laughed, the light shifted around you. He noticed things on your face he never noticed before. The way your mouth curved when you smiled, the way you covered your mouth when you laughed, the small crinkles around your eyes. You were hot before, he knew that. It's why he fucked you. But he never noticed that you were more than that. You were beautiful. Genuinely beautiful.

And after that night he tried to fight it. He didn't want to be a parent. But he couldn't date you without being a part of his own kid's life. That would be low even for him. As your stomach grew so did his feelings for you. Infact, when the Lizard League put a hole in his skull, he woke up to keep fighting because he pictured you.

He was being dragged down into death, seeing his life flash before his eyes, and then finally he saw you. But it wasn't a memory. It was a prophecy.

His head laid on your lap, you smiled down at him while you squished his face in your hands. Next to him, a small bundle wrapped in a blanket slept soundly. He heard birds singing sweet songs, the Sun casted warm light on his skin and gave you a radiant glow, and you were brighter than all of it. You leaned down and planted a kiss on his forehead, telling him he had to get up and go. There was an emergency. He had to go, he had to fight, had to blow shit up.

He did and from there, the rest was history.

[azulsluver]

considering the fact the main rule or the only rule when it comes to bullying MC in the twst bully AU is “don’t kill them” I have a feeling that at least one of their limbs has been or is extremely fucked up (like their tendons being ripped or something)

-that one anon that probably has too many questions

Yes, yes, I agree with you anon. Lol, at least make yourself permanent if you’re coming and asking so many questions.

I only got these four in mind atm.

tw/cw: amputation of limbs, pet play fetish.

Jade

Your fingers aren’t safe. I’m sure I mention in one post how Jade loves to experiment on you for the hell of it. Times where he gets carried away, you have cute little stumps on your hands now.

Where did your fingers go? His stomach. And in some jars. If you upset him enough he’ll take your hand as well. Jade actually has a little game where if you fail to entertain him (whatever that means) he’ll take a limb. One at a time, from fingers, toes, foot, then to your arm, aaaall the way until it’s just your torso, shoulders and thighs. He makes it known to you he imagines you flopping around like a fish.

Often times he threatened if he ever go that far with his plan, he’ll push you into moving water to see if you could ever swim.

Jamil

He wants you to depend on him. Used to doing everything to take care of someone, he reminds you plenty of times how much of a burden you are yet caters to your needs to stay healthy in his care.

Jamil has definitely played with the whole dog fetish thing. There’s a chance he was driven to the point of having your femur broken. Either under anesthesia or done by yours truly. If you’re good, he’ll put you on meds so it won’t hurt as much, but he isn’t against having you crawl and wail for it as well. You wont be able to stand. Ever. The purpose is that you should crawl only, drag your knees against the floor and bent in that position forever.

Vil

He’s not against taking care of you. But he makes it known that you’re a chore. Paranoia plays a huge role on his mental health, this varies to him ruining your face for all over jealously of their attention towards you or amputating your legs so you couldn’t escape him.

Vil keeps you locked up in his place, if you’ve read my work for him he’s complex with his feelings that leads to unruly decisions. He keeps you alive, but there are times he wishes to disfigure you out of anger or need. He truly believes you are still beautiful (he’ll never say it out loud) after everything he’s done to make you ugly for society.

Rook

In any way or form, Rook would take you in. There’s a thin line between bully!Rook and slasher!Rook, one wants to kill you and the other is not so sure. Sickly, he is not offended that you were left to pick up the pieces of a life changing incident regarding your limbs, your body was made to function like everyone else but now you’re so different in physical terms.

Rook makes his wants subtle. Beaten into submission or your defiance is strong, his hands would graze your skin to give you a hint. Nails scratch gently across your wrist, pressing a index finger down to feel your pulse, watching you squirm or turn your head the other way. Do you see what he’s implying? He thinks you’d look funny walking with no arms, your legs are very beautiful and he loves to chase. So those will stay.

[love-and-war-on-cybertron]

Hi! Can I request a First Aid x sick (like the flu) human reader please? Thank you :D

I wish I had First Aid when I was sick. Have some light fluff~

Coughing, sneezing, groaning. None of it bothered the medic. First Aid had seen many things, fascinating and disgusting from his own kind. Many Cybertronians were disgusted by human bodily functions. Not him. He took every blow of your nose with grace, ensuring you had plenty of tissues near by. And a puke bucket. After that last little incident, he wanted to be sure.

"How is my patient today?" First Aid brings in your breakfast. Plain foods, like Ratchet recommended. The older Mech had been to earth and thus had some information.

You take one look at the food and turn over with a groan. First Aid vents.

"Come on, I need you to eat. You couldn't keep it down last night and need to stay fueled to get better." He sets the tray beside your human sized berth and leans close, nudging you. "Come on. I'll adjust the bed." The shifts it carefully to put you in a sitting position. He wouldn't lie to himself, you looked awful. Tired and exhausted. A little pale. He would have the drones help you with your hair later.

"Y/n," A digit presses to your forehead, taking your temp. Still pretty high, but better than yesterday, "Please eat, you can't take your medicine on an empty stomach.

"I'm cold." you mumble, shifting as he put an extra pillow behind you.

"I can adjust the heat of the berth for you. We don't have many blankets on board." He made a mental note to request a few things next time the ship stops planet-side.

"Thanks." You start eating, tiny little bites. First Aid stays near by, writing into his data pad. Leaned against the main berth yours is placed on. Like a Doll on a bed. "I'm bored."

The red and white Bot glances down, "Yeah, healing can be pretty boring." You give him the most pathetic expression he had ever seen. Poor thing, "Tell you what-" Metal digit scoots the bowl you pushed away a bit closer to you, "-finish up, take your meds, and I'll set up a data pad with some holo-vids. Deal?"

You groan and sigh, giving him another look. He taps the top of your head, "And drink your water too. You REALLY need that." Ratchet had made it very clear how much humans needed water, especially when sick.

A sigh, and you pick up your utensils. First Aid's mask shifts as he smiles, sending a request to rewind for something to entertain you.

"I'll be back to check on you. The drone will bring your meds when you're done." He pats your head and heads off to disinfect before checking his other patients. He had to seal with a broken digit, a missing arm, and Whirl barreling in with a pipe through his socket. How the frag he got to the med bay without a guide, he couldn't say, but First Aid would bet they could follow a trail of chaos to the origin.

Half a cycle passes before the Medic can check on you. It's calm, so he figures he can sit and talk with you for the rest of his shift. Ease some of the boredom. He grabs your chart, looking it over while he heads your way. Drones had checked your vitals through the day and he compared them to Ratchet's list of acceptable numbers.

"Well Y/n, it looks like-" He stops at the sight of you. On your tiny berth, was a pile of blankets. He almost panics before realizing the rhythmic, barely perceptible movement. First Aid steps closer, carefully, nudging and moving the blankets until he can see your face. Sleeping peacefully. His spark pulses at the sight. You still looked drained and sick, but peaceful. A murmur and you grab blinding for the blanket to recover yourself. Instead your hand lands on his digit and stays put.

Ambulon comes in to relieve his fellow Medic a mega cycle later, but First Aid remains where he is a little while longer, with you holding onto him.

[mayearies]

✩ ABC’S

sfw alphabet with miles g. genre: fluffy hcs

—‘A’ IS FOR AFFECTION (how affectionate are they?) pretty affectionate with his s/o even if he can be awkward sometimes, takes some time getting close to someone again. if you’re in public, he would mainly hold your hand. maybe sneak in a hug or kiss once in a while if he’s feelin’ handsy. when recieving affection, he’s always open towards it. even if it makes him a little embarassed at moments (mainly in public).

—‘B’ IS FOR BESTFRIEND (what are they like as a bestie?) once he get comfy with you, he the type to play with you but also have serious talks to. he would like to stay close to you and hang out with you a lot. he’s also really good at rps (rock paper scissors) and shadow boxing, you gettin’ bodied fo sho ‼️

—‘C’ IS FOR CUDDLES (what is their cuddling schedule?) he likes contact with you, preferably skin to skin so expect his hands up your back or your stomach. he can be both a big spoon or a little spoon, he just wants to hold you (he will be a little spoon most times which you will tease him about). one cuddle sesh a day is required for him to function.

“baby? where’s my hugs n’ kisses? you aint mad at me, right?”

—‘D’ IS FOR DOMESTIC (settling down? how will they be helping out around?) he would wait to get a fiancée, let alone a wife. but of course he would want to settle down with you. he loves you. a pretty decent home cook, nothing special. he would watch his ma make pasteles so it’s one of the dishes he can perfect. he tolerates cleaning. doesnt like it but doesn’t fully hate it.

—‘E’ IS FOR ENDING (how does breaking up go?) would absolutely try to avoid arguments all he can. depends on the reason why you two are splitting, but he will spill his feelings about the relationship out to you. in his head. he doesn’t enjoy speaking his thoughts very much and just feels it’ll escalate shit. though, he would wish you well.

—‘F’ IS FOR FIANCÉE (how committed are they to you?) puts his commitment to you over anything else. though he claims he is not in a rush to marry you and that it could wait, but at the same time he be talkin’ about baby names and what a dream it would be to marry someone like you.

—‘G’ IS FOR GENTLE (how gentle are they?) he’s gentle on most occasions. his rbf and cold aura can be misleading. the craves your touch and your kisses. however, he can be a little on the rough side. for example, his mental state. it isn’t the best with his dad being dead and being the prowler, but you make it more bearable with just your presence. he can also be on the rougher side by squeezing places he knows only belong to him (neck, thighs, waist, etc.)

—‘H’ IS FOR HUGS (how does their hugging schedule work?) he dont mind them. he just dont like the long ones. makes him uncomfortable in some way. he doesn’t do them that often, but when he does they’re really memorable and soft.

—‘I’ IS FOR I LOVE YOU (how quick do they say i love you?) waits a little long before pulling the big ‘l word’. i wouldnt describe him as head over heels for you, but he’s in love.

—‘J’ IS FOR JEALOUSY (what are they like when they’re jealous?) oh boy, can this man get jealous. like, hella jealous. if someone so much as stare too long at you, he’ll glare at them while bringing you closer towards him. touching you? a line nobody can cross. that shit is a death wish. his mami, not yours.

—‘K’ IS FOR KISSES (how does their kiss schedule work?) hold me back i finna go wild on this one. though you’re probably his first relationship like ever, he didnt know how to kiss at first. as time went on though, his kisses got really passionate and filled with longing. everytime he kisses you, he misses you just a little bit less cause he knows you’re here. you’re here to stay. you’re his. he would kiss you anywhere. your least favorite part? kissed. your favorite part? consider it done, bae. he likes cheek kisses a lot. he doesn’t know why, though. he also really likes looking at your eyes when he’s done kissing you, he likes eye contact in general. if you are avoiding it or simply looking away from him, he’ll snap his fingers in your face and hold your chin as you turn towards him.

“ma. look at me. i won’t ask twice.”

—‘L’ IS FOR LITTLE ONES (how are they around kids?) not a fan of kids, they’re too noisy. he’s really awkward with them because he internally just thinks they’re little brats, but he also knows they’re stupid. his kid though? he will adore them so fucking much you might have to separate him.

—‘M’ IS FOR MORNINGS (how do your morning routines go?) he wakes up whenever you wake up. your morning routine is basically his, only that he adds a few more steps to it. those ‘few more steps’ being holding you for a solid five or so minutes before you carry on with your early rising.

—‘N’ IS FOR NIGHTS (how does your night routine go?) much like the mornings, his night routine is similar to yours. except, sometimes you dont even finish the whole thing because he wants your time and attention to himself before he drifts off to sleep.

—‘O’ IS FOR OPEN (when will they become more personal?) probably on the third or fourth date. the first two he would want to know more about you. but, he would drop little things he was interested in too.

—‘P’ IS FOR PATIENCE (how patient are they?) he doesn’t get upset that easily, with you atleast. don’t push him too far with your smart mouth, though. that’s what can really piss him off sometimes.

“the fuck you think you talkin’ to? tone down that attitude fo’ me.”

—‘Q’ IS FOR QUIZZES (how much would they remember about you?) he would remember the things that intrugied him about you, but he wouldnt remember every single thing. that’s how he knew what to buy you if he wanted to surprise you.

—‘R’ IS FOR REMEMBER (whats their favorite moment?) he loves them all equally, frankly if he had to choose he couldn’t.

—‘S’ IS FOR SECURITY (how protective are they?) pretty fuckin’ protective of you. and you love it. sometimes, he would stalk you just to see how you were doing or if you were okay. he just doesn’t want to lose someone again, he hopes you understand.

—‘T’ IS FOR TRY (how much effort do they put into your relationship?) he tries to make an effort into planning dates but those plans often get spoiled by his alter. he will always make it up to you, though. no matter what.

—‘U’ IS FOR UGLY (whats one of their flaws?) lying. he doesnt like to lie to you, but it keeps you safe. it got to the point where he would lie about little things on accident, like taking out the trash.

—‘V’ IS FOR VANITY (how insecure are they about their looks?) not a lot. if you think he looks good, then he looks good. sometimes he wonders how he even managed to pull someone like you.

“whatever, amor. if you think i look good, then i look good. whatever you say goes.”

—‘W’ IS FOR WHOLE (would they feel incomplete without you?) yes. nothing more.

—‘X’ IS FOR XTRA (random hc about them?) he behaves like a cat sometimes without even knowing it.

—‘Y’ IS FOR YUCK (whats something they dont like in a partner?) he probably doesnt like loud noises. yes, he does ride a motorcycle but he probably wears earplugs to help with the noise.

—‘Z’ IS FOR ZZZ (what are their sleeping habits?) he’s naturally a light sleeper, so anything faint could wake him up. something he does when you sleep with him is that he would hold you so close and tight that you once had a dream you fell and broke your back. and a actually felt that pain in real life. yikes. another habit he has is playing with your hair subconciously and muttering things about you in his sleep. you both have woken up to it multiple times.

© mayeluvsu 1610 version

[mellosdrawings]

ooh, just saw you’re also doing the twst ask game!! how about 5, 23 and 27, if it hasn’t been asked already? :]

5. If you could have any unique magic / signature spell in the game, which would you choose and why?

23. Which dorm would you be sorted into?

27. What drew you into TWST? What made you stay?

5. I WANT CATER'S MAGIC SO BAD YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!! Do you know how many projects I have? I wish I could do them all but I gotta prioritize (/pejorative). If I could just make clones I'd be able to work on my webcomic and my Twst fanarts and my writings and my Sci-fi visual novel and-

23. Once upon a time in my teenagehood, I would've been sorted into Heartslabyul because I had the "obey to every single rule" type of autism. Now? I guess it'd be Octavinelle or Scarabia. It's hard to say.

27. Ok so, the thing is I actually was into this game before it even went out. I heard about a Japanese game soon coming and there was the countdown art series and I was IN LOVE with it from a purely aesthetic aspect. Plus I liked the pitch/summary/whatever you call it in English when you resume something to its bare minimum. I loved Descendants so having more content about Disney villains or their descendants was great.

What makes me stay is two things:

1. The characters and their relationships.

I'm the kind of person who can handle most stories as long as the characters are very interesting. And boy, they are.

They all feel very well rounded and believable, not one tone characters who are only interested in one thing. All of them have full personalities and several things they're into and several things they dislike and random info about them that are just there, it feels compelling. Plus I'm the kind of creator that loves diving into my characters' flaws to enhance my plots, so the fact that the game is about the characters' flaws is right into my alley.

Also they all have relationships with one another in some way, where other medias might have just given them a handful of characters to get along with and wouldn't have bothered to find how to make them interact with the other characters.

2. The teen traumas

Ok, they might not always be handled best, but it is compelling to have this stuff, that is usually shrugged at because those are teens and it "shouldn't be called trauma it's just part of life". Here it is given weight.

Riddle's trauma about having an helicopter mom, Vil's trauma about being a child star that has always been typecast as a villain, Azul's bullying, Idia's terrible handling of grief, Leona's trauma about the double standard of people considering him and his brother, Malleus’s refusal to deal with his own grief. It's very compelling stuff and it's powerful. Some of those seem more traumatic than others (*cough* Jamil’s struggle with slavery *cough*) but, well, for a teen all of those are equally as traumatic, and it's normal for them all to have mental breakdowns when they have been given no support whatsoever.

I'm an angst enjoyer who loves to see how much you can hurt a character before they break down, and then what it takes to build them back up into a functioning person. This story is about that, so I dig it really hard.

Plus it's easy to relate to at least one of those characters. The game had me by the scruff with Riddle's storyline because I held myself to a level of perfectionism that also made me break down, so when it happened to Riddle I instantly fell in love. It took me a while to understand Leona's storyline, and then it held me hostage again with Azul's. Idia's own monologue is so powerful that it makes me cry every single time.

So yeah, despite the flaws, I can see gold in there and I doubt I'll get tired of it easily.

[balkanradfem]

Health news!

So, I've been having neck pain, that turned into head pain, for a year and a half now, and while I've had some more comfort since the center of pain was switched to my head, I've still been unable to walk, run, dance, jump, or use any tools like a hammer or a hoe. My right arm became functional again, but my left arm hurts from even holding a cup of tea. I had a neck MRI, and then a brain MRI, and there was no visible cause of pain, so I had a talk with my doctor, and she decided to test my blood for low vitamin D and low B12, and to check my thyroid function.

It turned out my thyroid is fine, but I had low b12, and critically low Vitamin D. She explained to me I need to get b12 shots every month, and that this could be the cause of the pain. When I came in, the doctor seemed overjoyed we finally found something concrete that is wrong with me, that we could treat, while I was wildly skeptical because I've been looking up symptoms of the deficiencies. While I had every symptom for vitamin D deficiency, I had none for b12, and only one article suggested there could be muscle pain as a result of it. Seems like feeble proof.

I have not been ignorant of my poor diet and living habits, I knew I had low vitamin D, and had supplemented it over the winter months, but apparently the store-bought dose I was taking was not enough. I did suspect a b12 deficiency as well, and was starting to take some B vitamins recently, but then read somewhere that they're dangerous to randomly take so I stopped. So what I'm saying is I knew I was sorta deficient, didn't think it was a big deal, I thought I was fixing it, I wasn't, my supplements didn't affect my pain or health. I got prescribed some powerful Vitamin D supplement, and got a b12 shot.

I have to say though, the nurse who was giving me the shot was acting ridiculous, first she was saying it to me like I'm a child, and I'm an adult, so I said 'I like shots, this won't be a problem'. She was not impressed. When she put the needle in me, I commented on how I can barely feel it, because I love acting cool in front of women with my high pain tolerance, but then she said 'When people tense their muscles it can get real bad and the needle can get stuck inside of them'. She said that while the needle was in me! I said 'I don't think I should be hearing this right now' and struggled to stay relaxed, and then she quickly pulled it out and it was fine. Maybe she just hated my positive attitude about getting the shot and needed me to be more apprehensive and afraid, which I don't feel is an attitude a medical professional should have?? Anyway. The shot was free for me so I love that.

The doctor told me 'you're going to feel much better next few months', super confidently, but I am still skeptical, I mean I wish I did feel better, and I'm relieved that something at least is getting attempted, and maybe a healthy dose of vitamin D will help with mental health, so okay, that would be an improvement. I doubt it will cure my head hurting while I walk though. Maybe I just don't understand deficiencies.

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept�� as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

[madsworld15]

Letter to Gavin Creel

Dear Gavin,

I was in the middle of a major website project at work on Monday when I heard that you had passed away. For the first time in my life, I actually sobbed hysterically at the death of someone famous. When I say sobbed hysterically, I mean unable to focus on anything because my eyes were too wet and my chest was too tight. I hadn’t cried like this since the day my grandmother died four years ago.

You see, I don't usually get this visibly upset when people in the public sphere pass away. Sure, I was sad when people like Sondheim, Betty White, and Robin Williams died. But I've never been so upset that I couldn't function. That is just your impact on the world, for me and so many others.

The last time I saw you in person was in 2017 at the stage door of She Loves Me. Despite it having been years since then, I believe that if we’d met at a stage door or other event today, you’d still recognize me. Because that is the type of person you are. I guess were, now that you’ve passed, but I can’t find it in myself to talk of you in the past tense. It just doesn’t seem real that someone so full of life and immortal is no longer here with us, dancing through this thing called life.

You don’t know this, but I got to see you perform in my favorite musical, Into the Woods, when the tour came to Philadelphia in April of last year. It was a last-minute decision that fell on a weeknight, so I couldn’t stay late afterward to stage door. Of course, I thought to myself that I’d have plenty more opportunities to see you work your craft. Now that you’ve passed, I wish I had said “fuck it” to having to be at work the next day and stayed to chat with you.

Like so many of those who looked up to and admired you, I first discovered you when I was in HS watching Eloise at the Plaza. As a child, I had adored the Eloise books, so naturally, I was excited to see a film made about the precocious girl. Back then I had no idea who you were, just that your name was attached to the character of Bill. I adored Bill and his silly, over-the-top theatrics and became obsessed with watching the movie just for him – though Eloise was great, too.

Then, as a freshman in college, I started talking to this person from New York City through a mutual fan group on Facebook. She encouraged my very limited knowledge of musical theatre and introduced me to so many new things. One of them was a bootleg recording of Hair from 2009. The energy you exuded on stage was palpable, even from the grainy 2000s video.

At that point in my life, I was sure I would never get out of Kansas. I knew I was different and didn't fit in with the other people in my small-town Kansas community. By the time I left and moved to NY in 2013, I still wasn't sure what my identity was, but I was certain I belonged to the queer community. Upon arriving in New York, I quickly found myself immersed in the musical theatre community there.

One of the first shows I saw was The Book of Mormon. I would visit the theatre at least once a week, sometimes even twice. I didn't really have the finances to do that, but my mental health demanded comfort, and that show was where I found it. So, once or twice a week, I would play the lottery or do standing room.

By the time you moved from The Book of Mormon on the West End to Broadway, I was ready for you but also hesitant to love you because your predecessor, Nic Rouleau, had had such a profound impact on my mental health and self-worth. From the moment I met you, though, I knew I could never have any feelings other than love for you.

Sure, I already knew I loved you as a performer from the years of watching bootlegs of your performances, listening to your EPs, and loving you in Eloise. However, my connection and attachment to The Book of Mormon was so great that each time the leads switched, I had a hard time adjusting.

It was different with you, though. You immediately took me under your wing and made me know I was important to you. That first night, you forced me to hand over my phone for our photo, and you scrolled through filters until you found the one you wanted. Then you insisted we do silly faces, that serious faces weren't needed. It was as if you knew I needed comfort more than a professional stage door selfie.

Over the course of the year you were part of the Broadway company, we interacted many times. Every time you saw me, your face would light up, you'd insist on a silly photo, and then you'd ask me if I was doing okay and how work was going. You genuinely wanted to know. It was something that got me through those extremely dark days of working a job I hated but not knowing any other path I could go on.

I didn't ever tell you this, but those moments kept my suicidal thoughts during that time at bay. Knowing I could swing by the stage door at any time, whether I'd seen the show or not, and talk to you was what got me through. We never talked about anything profound or world-changing, but you asking me about my day and encouraging me to find my passion changed my whole life.

After you left Mormon, I didn't see you again until the final days of She Loves Me. I fully expected you to not remember who I was, but you did. Once again, your smile grew at the sight of me, and you made a joke while wiggling your face to emphasize the mustache on your face. I wish I'd taken more time to tell you about my life that day. To connect more with you, but I didn't.

I had no way of knowing that would be the last time I would see you perform for many years. Not long after that, my finances took a major hit, and I moved to NJ, making trips to Broadway a bit harder to accomplish. So, I wasn't able to see you in Waitress or Hello, Dolly. But, man, did I want to. I did have the chance to watch clips of you in these shows and bask in the glory of your singing voice and stage presence, even if it was from afar.

I started to understand myself more clearly and made friends who helped me find an identity that made sense to me. Then, 2020 hit, and I suffered quite a few losses in my family. I struggled to keep my head above water, but my queer friends reminded me that there were things worth living for. Through these friendships, I started to find my way out of the mess I was in and found joy in musical theatre again. I started to listening to your personal music and the cast albums of your shows. It wasn't the only music I listened to, but it helped me get through the most.

Then, Into the Woods happened. By this time, I had started to be a co-leader in a local Tri-State Queer group. We would all get together and talk about TV, Broadway, Music, and Movies. It was so rejuvenating. A group of us got tickets to see Into the Woods on Broadway, but I couldn't be part of that due to finances. However, my best friend works for Ticket Philadelphia, so he promised that I could go with him when it came to Philadelphia on tour.

And that brings us to the close of this letter. I got to see you exude that joy all over the stage one last time in Into the Woods on Tour. It was one of the best nights of my life. Your performance of Agony will live on in my memories forever. As will your performance of I Believe in The Book of Mormon.

I never got around to telling you this in person, so I will say it now: Thank you so much for all the moments in my life that your presence or your voice got me through. Your passion for life and love was always awe-inspiring, and it's what I will carry with me through the years. We all deserved to see you do so much more in the world of Broadway, musical theatre, and beyond. Life truly is unfair, but I'm grateful for what I was able to experience with you.

Rest easy, dance often, and spread your sunshine from the beyond.

Mads

[soradayone]

It’s agonizing how quickly my emotions and thoughts have changed this last week alone. I know it’s not my fault, I know these thoughts are passing through and that they are, in fact, just temporary. 

I’ve thought a lot about whether these types of thoughts should be shared but they are, unfortunately, apart of my creative process. I think deeply, I feel deeply, and I don’t want to feel alone in that notion so it is why I force myself to share. I’ve spent the last 3 years alone in my mind, not writing, barely even drawing, and keeping everything at the right levels of suppression so that I could still function.

I am resilient. I don’t doubt myself and the work I’ve done to wear that title proudly but I am on auto pilot most of the time. Which I don’t inherently hate but I do know because of it I tend to ignore any meaningful signs of struggling. I’ve been given a life that I do not have the privilege to grieve at length. I have to be struck by the reality, acknowledge the blow, wince, and then immediately move on. And although I love to move forward because I crave ever changing growth with every fiber of my being—to feel something and then never stay there too long—in my weaker moments, I wish I could actually stay here a little longer.

I have been forced to grow and change at a rate that I feel I can never keep up with. I have been pushed by no one but myself to keep my mind at bay while my body just navigates everything else. The change both emotionally and professionally in the last 3 years alone has me clawing at my chest, desperate for air.

I’ve told myself multiple times that I don’t deserve to complain, I don’t deserve to allow myself to feel like this and I objectively and logically know the dangers of said statement. Especially because if someone else reached out to me with that same thought, I would vehemently tell them to not entertain it.

I dismiss myself quite frequently by saying tomorrow will come and that whatever I am feeling in the moment will pass. And it is true. This heaviness I feel now will dissipate and I will look back wondering how on Earth I felt it in the first place. Especially in this moment and in this horrendous time, I still love life so dearly. It happens every time and so because I have developed that self preserving habit, I rarely allow myself to document these moments at all. I believe I am a personification of strength most days, I believe it wholeheartedly but right now, I feel weak. I am allowing myself to sit in this weakness. Because I want to. There’s no excuse, there’s no extravagant explanation, I just want to be weak. Even if it’s for a little bit, even if it’s just this moment, this day or this week, I just want to be weak. 

I want the mental blocks I’ve placed on myself for years to weaken briefly enough to where I am allowed the chance to cry and grieve over whatever life I had before this new one or even the life I thought I wanted. As much as I look towards the future with an open mind and immense gratitude, please let me be weak for just a moment. 

I will move forward, I will glow and smile into the person I am most proud of but please for right now just let me cry. I have gone months without shedding tears and felt so afraid of losing that part of my humanity. To be so terrified of the possibility of being broken.

I won’t stay here, I know I won’t, I never do but if I have been given this strength please also give me this weakness. I know what comes from this pain, I know the kind of art that can be made when you embrace this, I want to illustrate the very art that is born from it, I want to write the genuine and crass words that follows. I want to matter, inspire, to love and be powerful but I want to be weak. To cry, to ask why, even when I know why, to fail, to fall and not get up immediately. Please let me be weak, more than just this once and I promise I’ll get back up but please be kind, let me catch my breath, if only for a moment. 

[bunnidid-reviews]

is it frowned upon to wish that one could dissociate or have an alter take over in moments that are awful and stressful? genuine question

Hmmm, this blog is really more intended on reviewing and sharing media about complex dissociative disorders, or could easily be related to CDDs. Certainly not an advice blog for this or anything else > < I think any more general questions about DID can be forwarded to @sundropglass (main blog) if at all, just to stay on topic here.

But since you asked, I may as well share my perspective a little bit. I urge you to read it all.

Of course it's something anyone would want. Shut off and let the stress be taken care of for someone else? go off to fairyland a bit? It's actually an extremely sophisticated way of functioning in the midst of trauma; tuck it away, get through the thing that you might otherwise feel like you're dying from.

But where does that stress go?

Say that you had a very stressful day. Maybe one thing after another kept going wrong. And all day, there was absolutely nothing you could do because you had to carry on with a smile on your face and act like everything's fine, while more dismays pile on top of you. Maybe on top of that, you end up having an argument with a loved one and now you have social anxiety and no sense of safety or relief.

This is not out of the norm. People live very stressful lives all the time. It builds up though, all that stress is piled into your immune system if you don't have any release.(Expressing emotions in a healthy manner) It comes out in the ways that maybe you get ill, or spend all day in the bathroom, or get a migraine. This is what we call the body keeping the score (a book I should read tbh). What the mind doesnt handle(dissociates from), the body will.

This is what people with CDDs regularly go through. Trauma = stress that's beyond your range of coping. Chronic trauma means chronic stress, just stored away in pockets upon pockets where its never dealt with until much later in life. This is why I don't think I know a single system who doesn't have some sort of chronic health issues. The initial trauma may not have killed them, but maybe the health issues that come from all this chronic stress might just finish the job.

This isn't even addressing what the disorder implies mentally.

Look up the symptoms of PTSD, look into personality disorders, attachment disorders, anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation. Any trauma-based symptoms could come with a CDD, because there's nearly nothing special at all about DID or OSDD. They're not sectioned off 'incredible' disorders as much as media or people on the internet will imply. We are normal people who have been hurt. A lot.

We have this disorder because no one came to save us, so we had to turn to ourselves, sometimes at an extremely young age. There's no measuring the amount of hurt it takes for a young child to feel this alone.

Going off this ask alone, but because you wish you could dissociate to such the intensity as you're suggesting, tells me that you haven't actually. Daydreaming or spacing out is a very minor case of dissociation, but the level at which you're having alters would imply that you're hoping to dissociate much further than you actually think you want. Do you not want to recognize your own spouse, or be completely unable to be present in the best moments of your life? This doesn't shut off when you're happy again.

Say fine fine fine, yes yes yes to all of this, you could deal, because at least you'd be another person who would bear the responsibility for you.

I hate to tell you this, but that's not how alters work. They are, at the end of the day, still part of you. They don't magically whisk away all this stress they face, they'd still hold onto it, be strongly effected by it, and you're a lot more likely to have the same stress come back over and over again and go unprocessed because of the fragmentation involved.

If it's to ease off some of the responsibility of being yourself, then.. Well that's not what happens with DID either. Those of us with a CDD tend to feel overly responsible for everything around us, actually. It's not the escape you're hoping for.

In a short answer: Yes it is very believable to want this disorder, to want alters. That's understandable even!

But I'm also going to say this is frowned upon. There is a LOT more to these disorders than some spacing out and some cool characters. I hope you can understand a little more why this mentality is frowned upon; no one who has it actually wants it when it comes down to it

BUT i HAVE GOOD NEWS FOR YOU ANON!! Please listen

It's okay to want to be someone else to get through the stress. It's even okay to turn off your brain and space out. These are natural human things. Just.. They don't have to be a disorder. There are some recommendations for coping that aren't hoping to have a CDD, but might suit you if you struggle with this:

Try to analyze your life and see what it is that's causing you so much stress that it makes you want to not exist in such a way. If you're in a bad environment that you can't change, there are still little things you can do to make it better for yourself

Are there things you CAN change? Maybe you can look into getting professional help or finding a new job, or even so much as regularly tidying up the space you're in

Look up coping mechinisms and grounding techniques

Take breaks and let yourself really unwind. Read a book or go outside and look at clouds or something until you feel calm. I promise this feels way better than dissociation

Fun Coping Tools That Feel Like What You Want Out Of Dee Eye Dee:

create a story in your head. If you come up with a world all your own to explore, it feels like having an inner world

Create original characters you can "be". By this I mean be imaginative like when we were all kids. >>Here's a really cool version of what adults can do if 'playing pretend' seems too childish for you<<

Have some staring out a window time. Just let your mind go for a bit

None of this has to be disordered to be helpful, and have nearly the same effect that you're hoping for.

If you are at a point where you want to not exist for suicidal reasons, I really urge you to get some help. There's always someone who wants you to be around, even if thats some time in the future.

[herr-innocence]

On "getting" art.

This is going to start with a clearly overused sentence, but sadly i cannot put it any other way. Bojack Horseman changed my life. Completely. I used to never understand when people would say that about a piece of art.

When I was an angsty, wannabe edgy fourteen years old I would say to anyone that would listen that twenty one pilots' music changed my life. Except it hadn't. I had wished that it had, I had wished to feel as understood and represented by their music as so many others seemed to. But it never really clicked. I simply saw people my age, sad, with struggles that felt similar to mine and thought that, well, of course it is going to feel like an enlightenment for me too. And then it did not and I concluded that I just could not connect properly with a work of art.

Since then, I have always felt this frustration, this annoyance at feeling like I was not understanding art properly, feeling like I could never truly resonate with it on a deeper level. Every now and then something would struck me, whether that be The Virgin Suicides, Fleabag, Mitski's music, The Bell Jar or Disco Elysium. These made me feel seen, heard and less alone, but I could never pinpoint a piece of art that caused a before and after in me. Then one day I finally forced myself to sit through the first couple episodes of Bojack that had bore me in my previous attempts. I was in my first year of University after having changed courses, barely getting out of what I now think of as the hardest part of my life so far. On this first watch, it made me feel what I usually feel, it struck, became a favorite, but that was it. Yet it always lingered in the back of my mind. I had seen so much of myself in Bojack, and watching Diane felt like watching myself. At first it made me spiral, as I felt like I was doomed. I thought I was destined to stay in the self-loathing cycle, become addicted to hard drugs and die a tragic death in a couple years, Sarah Lynn style.

Time passed, life went on, and i got my girlfriend to watch it for the first time with me. And this is when it happened. This was the before. Having grown up, having gone through situations that I never thought would happen to someone like me my whole life, I had a completely different outlook on the series. Diane's character struck me even more. In the time between my first watch and my second, all that I became, all the issues I had with my mental health, with my family, in my relationships whether that be romantic or platonic, and all the feelings I had harboured during these events could be found in her, in how she was written, in how she reacts and handles things. Understanding that, understanding the show in a more mature way, the subtext, the symbolism, the motivations and having experienced adult relationships myself, it felt like I had cracked the code. I had truly, genuinely "gotten" Bojack Horseman. Projecting onto the character, understanding her and forgiving her when she messed up taught me how to forgive myself. I had always thought that therapy could not fix my problems entirely because I was overly self aware and already understood how i functioned and why, but I did not realise that I still had no clue how to treat myself with kindness. I did not know how to forgive, to let go, regarding the things that I had done as well as the things that were done to me. Seeing the story of someone who felt like a depiction of myself, at a time when I was heavily struggling and lost put me back on track. If she can figure her shit out, if she can be happy, then so could I. I have never been happier in my life than today. Bad things keep happening, of course, but they don't outweigh the good anymore, because simply being alive is good enough (thanks zoloft for the background help).

I finally understood that not becoming a totally brand new person after resonating with a work of art did not mean I could not click with it. Because it was never about changing completely, it was about acceptance. And looking for myself, for the thing that would change me and make me better simply made me too egocentric to truly find this artistic connection I was desperate for. Art is not about yourself, it's about forgetting yourself in what someone else has created, you cannot force the connection, you have to wait for it to come to you. You can not "get" art, art has to get you.

[karizard-ao3]

My reactions to Evangelion episode 25: Do you love me?

Just the title of this episode alone is making me feel emotional. What is going to happen to these babies?

I'm going to try to fit these last two episodes in before I finish cleaning up for my friends who are visiting this weekend. I want to be an emptionally destroyed zombie for the whole time they're here.

Jk. I'm hoping I can withstand this and at least fake that I'm still functional after. I might have to take a break between episodes to run to Target, but fingers crossed I will have this finished tonight and then be able to watch End of Evangelion on Sunday!

Enough about me. Let's begin!

Shinji is either having a mental breakdown or he's got some Angel in his head. This reminds me of the Dirac (?) Sea and what he was going through then.

Is he being interrogated?

Asuka is the blunt voice in his subconscious lol

I do find it interesting how similar Asuka and Shinji's motives for piloting the Evas are.

It's interesting because it seems Rei is connected to all the different versions of herself that exist in other people's perceptions. And, it seems like that is entirely what she has based her current sense of herself on.

Her similarities to Kaworu (is that right?) are really interesting. They both were really disconnected from themselves and the world. Very different from humans, who cling to life. Instead, they are eager to die.

"You existed for today, Rei." And Kaworu said he believes he was born just to meet Shinji and was happy to die having done that. How to put this? All the Angels thus far have seemed to be created for one purpose. They always appear, do one thing, and then are killed. There's an essence of the mayfly about them. The fights don't even last long in the show, and sometimes we even miss them. They've never really felt like a real enemy because of that. They're just so unrecognizable, if that makes sense.

Shinji is maybe remembering when he disappeared into the quantum plane?

The instrumentality begins. Oh no.

Misato was shot?

They're gonna glomp everyone altogether into an amorphous blob of heart?

I heard the author was depressed. I get it.

Misato is tired of being clean and pretty for everyone else, and her apartment before the kids moved in was a pig sty. It was like her one little concession to herself. She has to put on the mask outside but at home she could be dirty and ugly.

Hmmmm Misato. Using sex to hide from the pain and disappoint your dead father, huh? I am uneasy. I've been trying to ignore certain vibes I was getting and I'm still trying to. I dont want to talk about it.

Why would they talk about Asuka like that right in front of her?

This is really something. Can't quite articulate it right now, but you know when you're just walking along and suddenly you become hyper aware of the fact that you are you and other people are in their own heads being themselves and having thoughts and sensations just like you but you will never know what it is like in their heads or how it feels to be them? That's what this is like.

"You wished for a closed off world that was comfortable for you and only you." Damn.

In Conclusion

When they say Shinji wished for the end of his world, is that because he wanted to connect with other people and end his loneliness or is it just because he hates himself and wants to die? Or, something else?

My head is doing contortions trying to figure all this out. But I was warned it was confusing, so I don't have high expectations from myself.

Dear Shinji, please stay safe. I love you.

[theboytatu]

I know 3 people who started smoking when they were teenagers and nowadays they're STILL straight-up addicts. Dependent on it, can't function right if they don't smoke weed every day, and it's like their personalities changed. It's frustrating to see since I looked up to them. They're older than me and I watched this happen while growing up, and I genuinely have 0 interest in trying weed (despite almost being done with college atp) just cause I have that negative association now, which I feel is valid, but a lot of my peers think it's wrong to feel so apprehensive about weed. It's not an inherently evil thing, but there's gotta be more discussion about how it can affect you long-term especially if you started using as a teen/during a mental health episode.

honestly dude more power to you for staying away from it.... i don't think it's bad to feel so strongly about a literal psychoactive and if you decide to try it and like it it's fine but if you don't feel the need to try it at all i think it's even better. like in the long run i think both your mental and physical health will be better off. sometimes i wish i had never tried it - not because it's "wrong" or because you should be scared of it... i just don't really see what real value it adds to my life personally. and that's the case for a lot of people i know

i wouldn't ever judge someone for having a substance abuse problem but the rhetoric re: weed is so weird people genuinely believe you can't get addicted to it/it has no serious damaging effects on your body which is super detrimental to the culture around it. like you say if people had more conversations about the very real risks it poses people could make a better informed decision about whether it's something they wanna try

[americanphancakes]

I wanna talk about my mind for a little bit

I was gonna save this until after I posted the last Wingless Angel chapter but I can’t post it yet. Pretty sure my mind wants me to get this out of my system first.

So hi everyone, how are you? How have you been? Honestly if you’re still following at all I’m delighted.

I don’t want this to come across as some excuse for all the unfinished fanfic I left behind 3+ years ago, which is why I wanted to publish WA first, so I hope you don’t take it that way. But I ended up stumbling upon an aspect of my mental health that I’m still trying to address and since I never really saw anyone post or talk about my particular issue before very recently, I wanted to share it in case it resonates with anyone.

(Clearly stuff has changed, this is where I'd normally put a "read more" but.... I guess that's not a thing anymore?? Hopefully this isn't a huge annoying wall of text on everyone's dash, oof.)

I’ve posted before about my ADHD. I’ve been getting treatment for it for 10 years now, and for all that time, medication & other coping mechanisms have been helpful to a point, but only to a point. There was still something left that was keeping me from functioning, and I couldn’t tell what it was. All I knew was that I had no will of my own, and I’d spent the last 10 years trying to create situations where the people in charge were asking (or implying that i should do) things I considered good to do. “People in charge” meant anyone besides myself. If someone was not me, they automatically had authority, simply by virtue of being someone external to me.

I did a lot of research trying to find something that matched up with my experiences & feelings, even partially, and I looked into things like PDA autism and even just the people-pleasing habits common with other ADHD folks.

At some point, with therapy, I did learn how to say “no” to other people’s demands of me. I learned to set boundaries. But I was still profoundly uncomfortable with dictating what I was going to do, especially if anyone else was ever going to be aware of it.

When I was a little kid, i was told “no” constantly, and that’s not hyperbole. I’ve cited the story many times of falling in love with the violin when I was 9 but immediately being told “No, you’re going to play the flute.” So I played the flute, but without any passion for it I couldn’t figure it out and I quit, and my mom never stopped making me feel guilty about it. But that wasn’t the only example of that kind of thing. I wanted to play soccer; mom said play basketball, so I played basketball. I wanted to play piano; mom bought me a guitar and my sister got the electronic keyboard. (We eventually switched, but I never felt like I could fully commit to playing the thing). I wanted to learn Spanish or Japanese in high school; mom told me to learn French, so I took four fucking years of French.

My feelings and wishes were effectively not a factor in what I was allowed to do, what goals I was allowed to pursue, unless I was staying in my room and out of everyone’s way (and even then I had to make sure I jumped up to do what was asked of me if I got called from another room). Eventually I learned, as a survival mechanism, to just obey. It wasn’t worth fighting anymore because I was systematically robbed of my individuality at every turn. Something happened when I was 13 that I will never talk about publicly and she played "good parent who has her kid's back" for about 5 minutes before siding with the bad guy. I brought it up years later and she was mad I'd never gotten over it. And all that is on top of being raised to be a "good little capitalist drone" who needs to be perfect and efficient at all times. I was never supported. I was never given grace. So I never gave grace to myself, because if your own parents don't give you grace & time to learn and be flawed, then clearly you don't deserve any, right?

I finally cut my mother out of my life not long after the pandemic began, a few months after having gone no-contact from my father (mostly due to his casual racism & transphobia, which cost me at least one very close friendship when I was a kid, and was unkind to my child in a way I could not abide). My immediate family - spouse and kid - are the only family I have left now. And it sounds tragic on paper, because it is, but until I finally got away from my mother's voice in real life I couldn't filter through the recordings of her voice in my mind so I could finally throw them away. And that knot is still being untied. Honestly this is 10 years into a very long mental health journey, when you think about it, but I wish I'd cut my mom out of my life a very very long time ago. I wasn't angry about lost time when I got my ADHD diagnosis. I was angry about it when I realized that yes, this had been abuse, and I hadn't been courageous enough to get away from it sooner.

Because that dehumanization resulted in me having no will power of my own, and that extended as far as simply not wanting anything anymore. I like things, sure, but anything I WANTED for myself was out of the question, especially if it involved other people in any way, but honestly even solo pursuits became impossible for me to will myself to do. For right now, when I have something I want to do, I'm telling my friends & husband to order me to do it. Because I won't do it otherwise. And it's a potentially dangerous workaround, but it's all I have for now. I and my therapist are hoping that once my brain registers that what other people are telling me to do is aligned with what I want to do, maybe it won't depend on other people's commands anymore and I'll just take control of my own life for once. But that may not work. I'll have to wait and see.

So what does this have to do with my abandoned fics? Well, it had started to become more difficult to write because the adhd "shinyness" was wearing off anyway, but I'd been doing a good job of pushing past it because people liked what I was writing. I could see my skill getting better, and engagement was going up, and that was really motivating. But then... I stopped writing fic all of a sudden because someone made a post about finding it shitty when writers wrote about COVID in their fics, and.... that was sort of a last straw that broke me, because I do exactly that in the last WA chapter. So I just turned tail and ran away. I tried to push through and write & publish the chapter anyway, because it was the LAST chapter and I knew people were waiting on it, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Even having OSBB obligations didn't get me writing again, and given that obligation, the shame I felt about not having finished those stories weighed on me so badly that I couldn't even interact with you guys on Instagram, despite you having been so kind to me in the past. Let's face it, that goes WAY beyond adhd rejection sensitivity, that's a trauma response. I saw one bit of honestly well-reasoned critique of work that wasn't even mine, and I just ran. Immediately I felt like I was no longer allowed to take up space here. I felt unwelcome here in this corner of the internet world, just as I have always felt like I wasn't allowed to take up space in the physical world for almost my ENTIRE life. And the shame I already feel about myself normally was compounded by what I felt was a cowardly thing to do, which prevented me from returning. Now that I've accepted that, yes, I am an abuse victim whose life has been MASSIVELY and MAJORLY affected by that childhood trauma, I'm finally able to address it properly. Over the last few weeks I've been changing the direction of my therapy and my self-talk (reparenting yourself is HARD) and I'm feeling some improvement, but progress isn't linear so my burst of motivation the other night fizzled out, and I'm genuinely sorry for that.

So... yeah, I'm trying to come back and get those fics finished. I'm grateful for any of you willing to be patient with me. Consciously I KNOW I deserve any support willingly given to me by any of you, but I FEEL like I don't. So yeah. Thanks. <3