#Anyway beth is a literal angel from heaven

[betterhomesandhobbits]

Random GG OC Fic summary:This is Annabella/Veronica/Renesmee Marks the 3rd Marks sister! She’s a thousand times more daring than Beth, 300% more quippy than Annie,and a bajillion times more insightful than Ruby. She was totally apart of the Fine and Frugal robbery definitely not shoe horned in! She’s also got an amazing body that’s somehow a mix of tomboyish and womanly without having enormous knockers unlike some characters....Anyway Rio is completely transfixed/obsessed with her and everyone else is just background noise. There will be a total of 5 times she is kidnapped and no internal struggle about the criminal lifestyle. All of her plans and ideas will work and profit resulting in her and Rio having mediocre sex and they’ll most likely poop out a baby.

Me: *sighing with the weight of a hundred eldritch gods upon my shoulders* ....And you did this...for what?

[galadrieljones]

There’s a TWD article out by someone who’s previewed some of 10C that says Daryl and Leah were out in the woods for five years. (So most of the timeskip after the bridge blew.)

It’s not a biblical seven years, but it’s close. Though it’s probably been seven years since they first met, what with Leah’s actress apparently back for season 11 🤔

Oh wow. What. 👀 For anyone who’s confused, this is a reference to my Daryl/Jacob Biblical symbolism post, and I have...more to say now! SHOCK.

Wait, it’s speculated that they were together for FIVE YEARS?! I’m super curious about this. See, I don’t look at Leah as a usurper, so much as just like a major symbolic opportunity. I know a lot of people are quick to dismiss everything this show does that bothers them as “bad writing,” but I find too much of that to be a cope. I can see how having to deal with seasons 7-8 over a period of years could wear a person down, but the writing for TWD is actually...often...good! It’s weird. It takes chances. Yes, it disappoints us at times, but that’s the rub. When it’s on, it’s fucking on. Seasons 7-8 were NOT on. In general, I noticed a really obvious, periodic decline in quality post-Coda and 5b tbh, and I’m not just saying that because of Beth. (Tho I am starting to believe more and more that Beth was not initially supposed to die, that her death was pressured based on some sort of perceived, utterly cracked backlash per the age difference. The writers then had to grapple for a while, and it was the beginning of the end for Gimple, who never got his shit back on track ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )

Anyway, I know I’m far from the first person to point out that Angela Kang wrote both “Still” and “Coda.” She wrote the first and final moments of Daryl and Beth, as we know it. Her vision for The Walking Dead also feels much more genre-forward to me, ie: post-Gimple, TWD has become much more of a genre piece, and I kind of think that’s important here when talking about Biblical allegory as a genre in and of itself. The Walking Dead begins and sustains for a long time as a sort of 00s era fabulism, a la shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, which take place in a familiar world and focus on realistic relationships and situations, but the settings and scenes contain a light fabulism, or just this spare, Lynchian layer of magic, ghosts, mysticism, dream states. But in seasons 9/10, with Kang at the wheel, elements of Fantasy, Science Fiction, and even the American Western have really been ratcheted up. There are kings and queens and princes, tigers and horses and knights in shining armor and cowboys. There’s even a movie theatre. Plus the Whisperers, who are initially presented as supernatural, lead by Sycorax and Caliban creatures, and now the hard scif-fi nature of what’s going on with Jade, the helicopters, and finally the insane cliffhanger with Eugene, Yumiko, Ezekiel, and Princess. 

I’m just saying: I think we can only expect more of this. Like, rather than the very Frank-Darabont-esque “gestures” to genre in favor of realism, we can expect big, sweeping oceans of genre, in which “realism” becomes whatever the creators want it to be. When you start steering a show or a story this way, you’re opening up all sorts of possibilities, a la, anyone who’s watched Supernatural or the X-Files knows that where science fiction and fantasy are concerned, NOBODY IS EVER REALLY DEAD, NOT REALLY. We know that the show is priming us for the return of Rick. We know that Connie is not dead. No matter what, the notion of resurrection in this show is not only possible at this point, it’s inevitable. We know, too, that @twdmusicboxmystery​ and other TD sleuths have established in aces that even after five seasons, the writers have still never definitively closed the door to opportunity for Beth’s return, not in-show, not offset. In some ways, they even seem to invite it! I mean?

So now, with genre on display, and resurrection on the table, when I think about them bringing in LEAH, magically, like, I KNOW it’s on purpose. The writers could have named her anything. But they named her...Leah. Leah?? They also mysteriously removed one of the wings from Daryl’s vest during the 6yr time jump, something that has still never been overtly explained (which is on purpose, it’s a symbol, but of what?). In reading Daryl as a Jacob character, I see his lost wing as a symbol that he has fallen from his ascent to heaven, re: Jacob’s Ladder:

He had a dream in which he saw a stairway resting on the earth, with its top reaching to heaven, and the angels of God were ascending and descending on it. - Genesis 28:12

Jacob’s Ladder is a unique symbol in Judaism and Christianity because it not only communicates the traditional spiritual story of ascent (mainly: to heaven, or a to a heaven place, Elysium, spirit realm, etc), but also DESCENT. Angels are going up, but they’re also falling down. We cannot ascend in life without periods of descent, or backsliding, etc. Nobody is perfect. Season 10 (and honestly, seasons 5-10 but that’s another post) shows a period of obvious “descent” for Daryl. He is a fallen angel, but at the end of season 10, Judith (with her Beth braid and her Sheriff’s hat and her many resounding Beth themes), gives Daryl a new wing. Season 10 then ends on an upswing for Daryl. He defeats Beta, atones with Negan, and saves his people. He is heading up again. 

It’s worth remembering, too, that Daryl’s relationship with Leah is not new, or present. It is past-tense. It took place during a major descent for him. It is not Leah who lifts Daryl up out of this descent. In a purposeful choice by the writers, it is Judith--a clear symbol of his past, of Rick, and of Beth--who returns his wing to him. Judith is also an important symbol of the future. She survived against all odds, the firstborn of the apocalypse, a shepherd of her father’s people. 

SO, YEAH. It IS interesting. I am SUPER interested. In the wake of seasons 9/10, crazy genre-heavy seasons that introduce resurrection as a distinct, inevitable theme, Daryl’s weird, overt angel imagery, Jacob-parallels, and now: LEAH. Why would Kang toss in some random LI for Daryl, knowing full well what the reaction will be, only to then NAME HER LEAH? Jacob worked for seven years to marry Rachel, but he was deceived into marrying Leah instead. The notable caveat to this story is that, ofc, Jacob also gets to marry Rachel! but not until after his wedding period with Leah, and he has to work SEVEN MORE YEARS, too. Jacob gets kicked down a lot! His name literally means “heeled.” But in the end, he is the wrestler of angels, contender with God, father of Joseph, etc. etc. He ascends.

So I honestly have no idea what any of this means! But it makes me type a lot. And I DO know it means something, because it is true that, in The Walking Dead, everything means something, especially now, with Angela Kang, Bethyl writer and genre/symbol lover in charge, and with every bit of genre and every symbol ratcheted up to like, 11, and LEAH. No matter what, we can’t take it for granted!!

[twdmusicboxmystery]

Famous Poems and Memoirs

So, Emily posted these in her IG story…um, I’m not even sure exactly when. More than a week ago. They’ve just been sitting on my phone because I’ve been too busy to write new theories the past week.

Anyway, this one caught my eyes especially. First, there’s the picture. 

As always, yes I know this is a musical group, but look at all the Beth-ish symbols in this pic she decided to post: alcohol, apple, matches, cat figurine (or is that a frog?) cross, apple, license plate with an X in it.

And then there’s the name: Annabel Lee, which is the title of Edgar Allen Poe’s most famous poem. Again, yes, I know it’s the name of the group. But they obviously named their group after the poem.

I’ll put the text below, but just know that the poem is from the point of view of a man reminiscing about his long lost love. Which took place in a “kingdom by the sea,” no less. The poem talks about how they loved one another as children. So, they were one another’s first love, in other words. And that’s not literally true of Bethyl, but I think it plays into the theme of the fact that it happened years ago, when both characters, especially Daryl, were more emotionally immature.

In the poem, she seems to have died from a fever or something. (It speaks of a “chill.”) Which could correspond with the fever brought on by walker bites. And then it talks about putting her in a sepulcher, which just reminds me of the White Church theory.

Very interesting that Emily is posting this now, not long before we get the finale. (Okay, still a few months, but you know what I mean.)

Annabel Lee by Edgar Allen Poe:

It was many and many a year ago,

   In a kingdom by the sea,

That a maiden there lived whom you may know

   By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought

   Than to love and be loved by me.

 I was a child and she was a child,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

But we loved with a love that was more than love—

   I and my Annabel Lee—

With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

   Coveted her and me.

 And this was the reason that, long ago,

   In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

   My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsmen came

   And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

   In this kingdom by the sea.

 The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

   Went envying her and me—

Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

   In this kingdom by the sea)

That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

   Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

 But our love it was stronger by far than the love

   Of those who were older than we—

   Of many far wiser than we—

And neither the angels in Heaven above

   Nor the demons down under the sea

Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

 For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

   Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

   Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

   In her sepulchre there by the sea—

   In her tomb by the sounding sea.

 This second thing, by comparison, is gonna feel like small potatoes, but she posted the cover and a page of the book she was reading. Stray, by Stephanie Danler. In this case, it’s a memoir about a woman whose childhood was riddled with abuse and discord due to alcoholism.

I feel like that could go for Beth (Hershel’s alcoholism) or Daryl (cuz obviously). And the page Emily specifically took a screen shot of was about a little cabin in the woods. And it mentions ashes. Just saying. ;D

So yeah. That’s what I have for you today. Not a smoking gun or anything, but just some social media intrigue. Thoughts?

[placetobenation]

So far I have been talking about more recent discoveries of mine, but today I am going back to one of my very first and most long standing wrestling loves.

I have been enamoured with Michelle McCool since I first saw her all the way back on the 2004 Diva Search. Was it the Southern accent? The dominant Diva Dodgeball performance? Who knows. But I fell instantly, so it’s clear that there was never really any hope for me.

Lucky for me she turned into a bomb ass wrestler.

The strangest thing about this is that more people don’t seem to think that is the case. The Internet Wrestling Community, to invoke such a thing, was decidedly not enamoured with her at the time, which is weird because she was basically one of us. She was pretty much a lowkey indy workrate geek in WWE, years before being an indy workrate geek in WWE was cool.

I mean, if you like workrate for workrate’s sake (and people do claim to when they praise Cesaro or whoever to high heaven), then Michelle is your dude. She wasn’t much of a promo, she kind of came off like a beautiful blonde robot a lot of the time, but damn, that was a beautiful blonde robot that could wrestle. From when she started wrestling regularly in 2008 until she retired in 2011 I’d say she accumulated more good matches than any of the other women at the time. She was a machine.

In more ways than one. My absolute favourite thing about Michelle McCool is that she wrestles like The Terminator.

Michelle, on offense, is relentless. REE. LENT. LESS. As soon as the bell rang she would just swarm. She was always attacking, always moving forward, always smothering you with her offense. It was overwhelming. It’s a random connection to make, but it’s something that drew me to Stan Hansen when I first started watching his matches (and I think Stan Hansen is the second greatest wrestler I’ve ever seen) and it’s something I’m just realizing now that I see in Michelle as well. They both come at you like the God Dang Terminator.

A lot of the time Divas matches get tagged with being too choreographed. You can see the strings, see a certain level of co operation between them. Let me tell you, once she turned heel, Michelle McCool never looked like she was cooperating with anyone in the ring. Almost to the point where she looks UN-cooperative. There are times where the babyface she’s wrestling will try to get some space or hit a move and Michelle will just swat them away and keep beating them down, as if to say “No no, you gotta do better than that.” And it forces them to really wrestle control back from her, in the purest sense of the word. She makes a babyface EARN every single piece of offense they get. Again, just like Hansen did.

They are also tied for the best, most vicious knee drops of any wrestlers I’ve ever seen, so yes Michelle McCool is the female Stan Hansen. I WILL die on this hill, do not at me. (Actually please do at me, hit me up, I love feedback.)

A lot of Michelle’s offense was pretty tight actually. She’d take people’s heads off with that Big Boot of hers. Or knee people’s heads into oblivion up against the barricade wall. She bent Melina into all sorts of shapes. She straight up murdered Eve Torres on some random Smackdown. And she once gave Mickie James a Knee Trembler that was so sick it made Mickie’s head spin around like she was in the fucking Exorcist.

The thing that cracks me up about Michelle’s Hansenesqe style is that (just like Stan!) she’d use it no matter who she was wrestling. She’d boss around girls like Kelly Kelly or Eve Torres, sure. Maria Kanellis is whom Michelle had turned heel on in the first place in a never ending Triple H-style beatdown (somewhere, right now, today, Triple H is still beating up Ric Flair on Raw and Michelle is still beating up Maria on Smackdown), and for the next six months or so Maria was Michelle’s personal bitch, just getting pummeled by her every time. But Michelle would also work the same way with bigger and more experienced opponents too like Natalya or Beth Phoenix. She was the Terminator and anyone was fair game. Just try to stop her.

(With one exception, which is so absurd that I have to mention the fact that Tiffany, of all the people on earth, always had the jump on Michelle and would dominate her in a way that nobody else was able to. This is so absurd I brought it up to Taryn Terrell when I met her in New Orleans and she couldn’t even disagree. I have no explanation as to why this should be, but believe me, it be.)

Anyway, this relentless style of offense lead her so beautifully in the direction of a little lady known as Melina. As I went into last week, Melina was the scariest person in the universe, and this held true even as a babyface in 2009 when she got traded to Smackdown. The first time they face off Michelle goes into her usual Beast Mode and starts beating the shit out of her – but Melina turns around and BEATS THE SHIT OUT OF HER RIGHT BACK. And Michelle freaks out and retreats, and that simple moment was SO HUGE to me because of how dominant she had been up until that point. If Michelle the God Dang Terminator is taking bumps in fear when Melina LOOKS at her funny, this shit is well and truly the fuck on.

When you talk about Michelle and Melina, you have to talk about the match they had at Night of Champions 2009. This match was too good. Literally, “too good”. That’s what Michelle and Melina were told by agents when they got to the back afterwards, that they can’t be wrestling like that because it looked too good, they were hitting each other too hard and they were showing up the boys. (THE DIVAS GOT IN ACTUAL TROUBLE IF THEY DARED TO HAVE GOOD MATCHES OR PUNCH EACH OTHER REALLY HARD. FUCK THIS COMPANY.)

The thing about that particular PPV match is that it’s basically a bomb-throwing indy spotfest style match squeezed into a six minute Divas match. I don’t know how more obvious it could be that Michelle McCool was a student of wrestling, but the evidence is abundant. Dudes, she used AJ Styles’ Styles Clash as a finisher when he was World Champion of TNA, their “competition”. Before that, it was Christopher Daniels’ Angels Wings, which she called the Wings of Love. She even used the heel hook as a finisher as well, and using a move as realistic and visually… small as that shows that she must have been a bit of an MMA geek as well. Michelle even regularly used Daniel Bryan’s signature heel refrain from the indies, telling referees, “I’ve got ’til five!” and popping me every time.

Michelle was never scared to bring in these outside elements and try new things (and remember that TNA and indy wrestling were treated VERY differently by WWE back then). And yet it’s not like you’d ever peg Michelle McCool as an indy wrestling aficionado, because she never worked indies and came in through the Diva Search. She was a Barbie doll, not a “real wrestler” and all that bullshit trash.

Perceptions are funny things, and I think in Michelle’s case perceptions of who she is have hurt her in a way that I don’t think is justified when you actually examine her work. She was a fucking wrestler. (And like, truly, if she really did supposedly have so much booking power because she was dating the Undertaker, you’d think she’d be able to book herself in a match that went longer than 90 seconds every once in a while. But I digress.)

I’ve been speaking mainly of her singles run as a heel, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that on one beautiful day in the lives of Michelle, Layla and myself, they put Michelle and Layla together as a tag team. And then kept them there. Be still my beating heart.

I really think Michelle McCool needed Layla. Here she was, the wrestling robot, having good matches but not doing a lot outside of the ring. Enter Layla, the wrestling goofball, and suddenly the magic starts happening. Layla brought all her stooging and bumping and goofiness to the act, and not only that but she brought those things out of Michelle as well. As the God Dang Terminator she rarely looked vulnerable or showed too much ass, but as part of Laycool she was bumping and stooging around with the best of them. She also developed this great expression of pure fear, where she would look up under the ropes into the ring at Beth Phoenix or whoever in abject terror, knowing her goose was cooked, which was a level of vulnerability she was never able to show before.

Laycool Michelle was a more well rounded Michelle, I feel. But at the same time, when they needed to get their heat back there was Michelle to turn around and Big Boot someone’s effing head off, and suddenly they were on top again. She was such a beast that she gave them instant credibility, no matter how preposterous they were or how much they sold.

Even her promos and skits got way better once she started doing all the ridiculous, over the top Laycool bullshit. Her and Layla almost immediately fell into their annoying Mean Girl patter, finishing each other’s sentences and overlapping and generally being awful, awful people. You can see it being emulated today when the IIconics cut promos, and it works because it’s such a wholly unlikeable, unpleasant way to act. Laycool are the furthest thing from nWo-style cool heels, and I love them for that.

So my point is, in every aspect Michelle was improved and enhanced as a result of hooking up with Layla (and vice versa), and Laycool was a great, great tag team act. For anyone participating in the Place To Be Nation Greatest WWE Tag Teams Ever project (which should be all of you, get involved!) I hope you take a good, hard look at Laycool.

I will certainly be taking a good, hard look at Laycool in a future piece because I have a LOT more to say about their run as a tag team and their eventual break up. Believe me. But I’m going to leave Michelle here for the minute. I feel like there’s so much more I could say about this woman, I have loved her for so long, she was such a beast of a wrestler and she just had a ridiculous amount of good matches. A true workrate candidate. My girl.

Now I held the next episode back a week, for reasons, but it means I’ll be going from someone I fell in love with in 2004, to someone I fell in love with a couple of months ago. And how!

Check it out: Michelle & Alicia Fox vs Melina & Gail Kim (Smackdown, June 26th 2009) Melina vs Michelle McCool �� Women’s Title (The Bash 2009) Michelle & Layla vs Melina & Eve (Smackdown, July 10th 2009) Michelle McCool vs Melina – Women’s Title (Night of Champions 2009) Michelle McCool vs Eve Torres (Smackdown, October 9th 2009) Michelle McCool vs Tiffany (Smackdown, March 12th 2010) Michelle McCool vs Mickie James (Smackdown, April 16th 2010) Michelle McCool vs Beth Phoenix – Women’s Title Extreme Makeover (Extreme Rules 2010) Laycool vs Kelly Kelly & Tiffany (Superstars, July 8th 2010) Laycool vs Beth Phoenix & Kelly Kelly (Superstars, December 23rd 2010)