#also ANDY

[sophieseals]

At this point I’m starting to wonder what alien fans actually want out of an alien film because NOTHING seems to make you happy

[reidingandallthat]

house md is the only fandom by far that i like because I hate all of them but I also love them. like chase, i fucking hate your guts, but I also love you. you're so pathetic. cameron, get a grip, you're falling apart girl. you also scare me. foreman, you're just a dick. i fucking love that. wilson, you're also falling apart, like real bad. also, you're gay as hell, stop getting married. lisa cuddy.....you're the only i like. but you're also a pushover sometimes, but I'll forgive you. and oh. do we even have to talk about house. no. no we don't.

[plesiosaurys]

getting emotional over footage of an amateur scuba diver interacting with a coelacanth. they are hunted by large deepwater predators, and here comes a large creature bearing the brightest lights it's ever seen, making strange noises, but it does not shy away. it hovers, calmly, as the diver reaches out and trails a hand down its back. im strongly against the anthropomorphizing of real life animals but the stupid emotional part of me loudly insists this is because it recognizes us, the alternating movements of its four paired limbs matching the diver's four paired limbs, & it is thinking, "hello, cousins, we missed you these 66 million years, it's so good to see you again. welcome back, welcome home."

[quarkfancam]

the autism spectrum

[graveyard-galaxy]

The way physical violence was focused on and upped in episode 3 really got me thinking specifically about how Ashley actually responds to it. Because, like…

When we start in the flashback at the start of the episode, we get given a clear picture of Renee’s stance on using it as disciplinary action, and for all that she is shitty and cruel and neglectful and spitefully manipulative in every scene that she’s in, one line that she won’t cross with the kids that she’s barely parenting is hitting them, and she tells Andrew as much.

Albeit aggressively, but what she’s saying here is obviously that she doesn’t believe it will make a difference, and that she won’t allow that to be how Andrew is forced to parent Ashley for her. To be fair, it is quite in line with her general methods of getting what she wants usually through manipulation, but it is, perhaps, a single redeeming factor about her parenting style, and represents a line that shouldn’t be crossed.

(It’s also possible indicative of her own childhood, which is interesting considering what her mother had to say about Douglas’s father in the Renee and Douglas vision, but I digress. This isn’t a Renee analysis or apologist post.)

But another piece of backstory that these flashbacks give us is that, perhaps unsurprisingly, Andrew and Ashley lived with their grandparents for a few years, before their actual parents. Renee was kicked out and had no money, so of course Douglas’s parents were left with Andrew and Ashley for an unknown amount of years. And their parenting style was… different. Seemingly not as neglectful as Renee’s, and I do think we get the sense that even if Douglas’s mother is just as much of a doormat as he is, and refuses to stand up to her husband (and given the wife beating mentions, is possibly not in the position to) she does genuinely care about her grandkids. So at their grandparents there’s… parenting. Maybe not good parenting, but still some parenting.

Interacting with the swing in the yard, Andrew recounts a short memory of how exactly his grandfather tended to respond to him (or presumably Ashley) doing anything wrong.

Woohoo, the kids aren’t abandoned, but they’re still blamed for things that aren’t their fault, and they’re beat for their troubles too!

But seriously, this obviously goes to show that before Andrew and Ashley moved in with their parents, physical violence was on the table against them as punishment. Andrew certainly remembers it, and we can speculate to what degree that informs his response to Renee about hitting Ashley later, but in particular, it’s Ashley I’d like to actually focus on here.

I don’t think it’s too big of a logical leap to assume that if Andrew was beaten by his grandfather, so was Ashley, given said grandfather’s horribly misogynistic views and obvious tendency towards beating his wife. And as unfortunate as it would be, I have to wonder… Did Ashley actually respond to this? In some way did she, or perhaps more likely Andrew, ever figure out how to behave to avoid it?

Looking forward to the present day, physical violence hasn’t been properly levelled against her in a while. Andrew supposedly attempts to choke her out in episode 1, but she notes that he wasn’t squeezing hard enough to actually choke her. And they get up in each other’s faces, and they yell, and she has a vision about him straight up killing her, but to some extent all of this is just not quite that far, or a true ultimatum. Never is Ashley actually faced with physical violence as any kind of punishment despite it being noted all the way back in episode 1 that Andrew has physical strength beyond her, as he is able to keep trying to kick the door down where she notes she doesn’t at all have the energy.

It’s a possibility in spirit. Andrew has the physical advantage and he could so easily use that against her, but it’s all presented as a game to Ashley in the first few episodes – one that she thinks Andrew isn’t actually trying at. She’s not even especially afraid of the prospect until the episode 2 Decay vision shows that he’s fully willing to kill her, and at some point in the near future too. That’s still an ultimatum more than it is a direct punishment, but it presents the idea to her that for all she thought he was playing around, no, Andrew would be willing to go there.

And then, this is followed through on in any Decay playthrough where Andrew is willing to grow a spine. He crosses the line that Renee set up, and that gives the moment a lot of narrative weight.

He slaps her, and her expression tells us a lot here. She wasn’t expecting something like this from him either, because of some combination of to not being a punishment she’s actually faced since childhood, Andrew never having gotten like this with her properly before, and how quick and sudden it is. This isn’t just a death threat or potentially far-off vision of him killing her; he’s actually done it now.

Their subsequent conversation is quite interesting too:

"What's with that look? You're the one who put violence on the table."

"...I-!! I didn't mean to............."

"Honestly it's all the same at this point."

Given the characters, we definitely shouldn’t necessarily take their words at face value, but even with that, I do think some part of Ashley is sincere here. When she held the cleaver to his neck, and when she offered a death threat, she still thought that she was just playing. This isn’t any different to Andrew taking his hands to her neck but not pressing hard enough to choke her, to her. She’s back-pedalling quite so hard to try and keep him, of course, this is Ashley we’re talking about… But I also don’t doubt that her sentiment is genuine. She didn’t exactly mean to.

And Andrew’s response tells us exactly why he’s so willing to cross that line. He just doesn’t care! Renee’s dead, so he doesn’t have to care about her rules and policies, and given how cynical he feels towards his life at this point, perhaps he wouldn’t care anyway. If this is a genuine way to get a response from Ashley, then he’ll try it, because for all that his mask of trying for normalcy is still up at this point, this is just between the two of them, where it!s always mattered the least, and as it is, that mask is quickly slipping.

I’d like to note this part of Ashley’s reaction as well, because, well… First we see that same shock as immediately after, but I’ve thought the exact same thing about that second frame, ever time I’ve seen it. With the background and the tears, isn’t this such a Leyley reaction? Such a Leyley expression?

Decay, especially Shots and Such which can follow on from this, is all about Ashley clinging to the Andy and Leyley dynamic to both of their detriments. It changes form as she feels she needs to adapt and find new ways to keep her Andy, but she’s constantly affirming whether or not she has Andy or Andrew because the violence and the hate all comes from Andrew to her, so when she’s continually trying to play Leyley, it keeps coming as a shock.

Andrew slaps her in the car, and she can only react as Leyley would. She never wants to be Ashley, because Ashley never fits into their games, and because Ashley has always been subconsciously rejected by Andrew. Being Ashley would mean facing what Andrew has done here rather than just making petty jokes about it for the rest of the episode and crying like I imagine she would have if her grandfather hit her.

But the cycle of violence only gets worse once Andrew continues to stew in apathy, and as perhaps he realises, that it does get a desired reaction from her. Ashley doesn’t respond in the long term to any threat that he throws, but she’s genuinely scared by the prospect of what him actually killing her means to her, and getting violent against her is a piece of that.

Part of what Shots and Such emphasises is that, even if it never works in the long run, Ashley does respond respond to violence, and that through out all of the ending, it remains Andrew’s way of fighting her.

This doesn’t exactly paint a happy picture of how Andrew regularly treats her. Er… Not that just about anything in Shots and Such is especially happy…

But it once again perpetuates the cycle of violence. Ashley gets actually violent now too, when she can. She makes sex painful for Andrew when she can, because that’s the degree of control she still has as someone who can’t a fight back when Andrew gets physical with her. She’s physically weaker, and with the bathroom lock torn down behind her, she has nowhere to hide. He beats her to short term avail to make himself feel better, and to keep her in line for tiny amount of time, and she gives that right back when she has her own opportunities.

And that’s all without actually talking about the scene of her getting beat.

Ashley’s a terrible person, but this scene is still very genuinely upsetting, because once again, something in her reaction comes across as genuine. She apologises profusely as her only way of even trying to get him to stop, and she goes back to the convenient story of being the scapegoat. She’s the problem, just like how he wants it to be. This doesn’t actually stop any of the heinous stuff she does to him after this point – if anything, it just makes her more desperate to try and exert control back when she gets the chance – but for a short while, it works. She shuts up and leaves him alone. She just makes cookies because that’s all that she can fathom that she’s good for.

Renee was right that hitting Ashley would never fix her behaviour. She was right after her grandfather had presumably done it to her as a young kid, and that was never the attention she needed, and she was right after Andrew crossed the line she set because she’s gone, and he has nothing left to lose. Hitting Ashley never teaches her any kind of actual lesson, save, of course, from how to act when people get violent with her.

All that’s learnt is how to behave in the short term to get the immediate beating to stop, and that’s enough for Andrew. Their push and pull has turned into violent fits against each other for control for just a short while, but he genuinely can’t care for it to be another way. After beating Ashley, he just once again reiterates that “I don’t care either way at this point” and that’s that.

It never fixes her behaviour, but it reinforces his. Just like his grandfather, Andrew becomes a wife beater, and he crosses Renee’s line for just a short moment of power and control. His spine is now like a gummy worm because he’s stuck in the easy cycle.

[nicosbighead]

Paper Daisies 🌼

INSPIRED BY MY FAVORITE SCENE 😭😭😭🥺🥺🥺 🌼✨

🩷 Prints here! 🩷

[renderwings]

designed a charm just for me

[wowthatsextra]

I think the realest thing in Good Girl Bad Blood is that Pip is the fourth most hateable person in the poll- just after the three involved™. Because ofc a teenage girl asking questions and challenging the system and disrupting the small town bubble is the most annoying in the sea of rapists and killers

[jakeyp]

ANDY SAMBERG as David E. Scherman LEE (2023) dir. Ellen Kuras

[the-meme-monarch]

who up digitaling their circus *my entire house’s power goes out leaving me in complete darkness*

[kesopan]

"I was really hoping to see you again before I left," he said, starting to rifle through his backpack. "but even if you don't want to see me, I've brought you a gift."

fanart of shen yuan's plastic guanyin keychain from @nyoomerr's fic, you don't need poltergeists for sidekicks :D

++ sulky bingge for the soul :3c

[fanfic-can-consume-my-soul]

no guys wait you're my favourite 'what if'? you're my best I'll never know? part-time soulmate, full-time problem? it's me and my plus one at the afterlife? you're just the girl all the boys want to dance with? and I'm just the boy whose had too many chances? you are the sun and i am just the planets spinning around you? joke me something awful like kisses on the necks of best friends? I'm half doomed? you're semi sweet? i carved out a place in this world for two but it's empty without you? scar-crossed lovers, forever? in the end I'd do it all again, i think you're my best friend?

[reidingandallthat]

let me get this straight-

wilson really just wants to be friends, like genuinely, with all these women, THEY'RE the ones who initiate it, and sex with him is about THEIR pleasure. not that anything is wrong with that, but for a 'straight' man, that's usually.... not true. the closet doesn't even have glass, it's fucking broken.

[flimsy-spine]

wife :)

[daedelweiss]

i held off introducing my version of usagi for so long ckska

he met leo when they were 13 and leo was stealing toys from his family's shop. he was understandably upset but befriend him after finding out it was for his missing brothers.

he's not appearing in the canon comic because i want the comic to be family focused and to stay with the show 💖 he will only appear in side content of LM~ also i'm a taller usagi truther because leo needs his ego knocked down :P and he's a gnc king ✨️ • ( 🌿 please do NOT repost, edit, trace, use, and/or sell 🌿 )

[scrawnyghstts]

I'm on ep 39 of ouaw and I'd like to offer you Gideon holding Kremy back from feeding Frost to the shadow magic, because Frosty said that Kremy should just buy a new hat rather than get his back from the hag

AND JUST A SHOT OF THE ENTIRE PARTY TOO LMAO THIS IS PERFECT

Frosty is giggling, Gricko looking at Frost like "oh holy sht no way he said that" and Torbek's absolutely terrified (oohh frostyyy why would you sayyy thattt!!)

and this is just improv that Mace started like I'm sorry EVERYONE at that table ships coalecroux you can't tell me otherwise