#also idk there's so much more room for circumstance and interaction and Romance when u guys play the same sport

[sergeifyodorov]

oh this is so funny 2 me as a yuzuru fucker they won the same award and have pictures with each other and have the same endorser and iirc yuzuru expressed his admiration for shohei... and also for his body (respectfully) or smth? that last bit might be fake news but still i woke up one day in the men's skating rpf ao3 tag like. why am i getting baseball rpf crosstagged.

OKAY skjfhskjhdks it makes a little more sense now lmao,,, the winter japanese goat/summer japanese goat dynamic. That being said there is NOTHING compared to being, alongside your teammate, the Designated Saviour when there exists nothing to save

[lesbianrobin]

have u done an analysis on endgame st ships? a penny for ur thoughts

i have not!! i would like two pennies please. my thoughts are not actually worth that much but i think i deserve them anyway. i’m gonna talk about some stuff that may seem unrelated or only loosely related to the question but i prommy it’s relevant <3 warning this ended up being like a thousand words somehow idk how that happened but i’m putting it under a cut bc i’m nice like that.

so! something that’s kinda unique/interesting to me about stranger things is how all of their ships are so clearly telegraphed and quickly developed. there’s a sense of... impatience, for lack of a better word. on the surface, it appears to be largely an effect of the cinematic style of the show; there’s very little room for questioning who someone’s gonna end up with or for slowly developing a relationship over time when you only get eight episodes every like. twoish years. AND you have about a dozen main characters AND evil government forces AND monsters from another dimension. it’s a lot to juggle!

stranger things has a lot to accomplish in a pretty short amount of time. the timeline of a single season usually spans no more than a week (excluding flashbacks/end-of-season timeskips), and well... nobody wants the important stuff to happen offscreen! i’ll use the stoncy love triangle as an example: jancy was originally intended to get together at the end of s1 after steve’s death, but since they decided to let steve redeem himself and survive, there was just no time to separate stancy and get jancy together without it seeming wayyy too abrupt. since jancy was always their plan, they didn’t want to leave nancy with steve, but they knew they couldn’t just have that boyfriend swap occur offscreen... which is why s2 Had to have a stancy breakup plot in order for the writers to accomplish their goal of getting jancy together.

the main characters in stranger things tend to maintain homeostasis between seasons, their circumstances and relationships rarely changing any more than the audience might have just assumed they would anyway (like lucas and max dancing together + sharing a kiss at the end of s2 and officially dating by the start of s3). steve and nancy are dating at the end of s1, so they must still be dating at the start of s2, and thus we must break them up DURING s2. joyce and hopper are friends with some deeply buried feelings in s2, so they’re friends with Less Buried feelings that must become apparent during s3. excluding the stancy situation (for reasons which i think are obvious but i will talk more about later), momentum is always forwards. mileven, lumax, and jancy argue, but they come back together, presumably more mature and stronger than before. 

all of this is to say that stranger things has thus far been rather dedicated to their starting ships. there isn’t much misdirection; mike’s crush on el is obvious from the start, nancy and jonathan share charged moments even while she is with steve in the beginning, lucas shows interest in max immediately and shares more significant interactions with her than the other boys from early on in s2, and the deep loyalty and care between joyce and hop is always apparent. steve and robin (initially intended to be together romantically) hold hands quite early in s3 and dustin asks steve about whether he likes her. 

the point? stranger things doesn’t dick around when it comes to love! they handle their ships with remarkable efficiency. in each season, it tends to be pretty obvious from the start who’s going to end up with who, and heading into the show’s fourth season, almost everybody is paired off: mike and el, max and lucas, joyce and hop, nancy and jonathan. which leaves us asking... are all of them going to last until the end?

we’ve only had one true breakup on the show so far, and as i’ve said before, the stancy breakup is an anomaly as it was essentially “righting a wrong,” allowing jonathan and nancy to get together as they were intended to do from the start. the only other romantic relationship to end on the show was between joyce and bob, and well... we all know why that ended, and it started/ended within the confines of a single season. 

stranger things tends to treat each season as an extended film, right? they draw inspiration from classic 80′s films, and each subsequent season after s1 is treated as a sequel (they are Literally referred to as stranger things 2 and stranger things 3). when they introduce tension in a season, they’re inclined to resolve that tension by the season’s end so that people leave satisfied, while also providing a plot hook for the next “sequel” for audiences to theorize about. this hook is always part of the grander plot, not a will-they-won’t-they tease or something else of the sort. remember, they could have broken up steve and nancy in s2 and waited to get jancy together in s3, but they didn’t! they wanted to go ahead and resolve the tension! 

while there are narrative and practical incentives that i’ve covered for this impatience/efficiency/[insert better word i can’t think of here], i also think it kinda reveals something about the writers of the show. to some degree, they genuinely care about and want their ships to be together! we’ve watched them introduce new characters just to kill them off a couple of times now, and i think it’s fair to say that the writers might be a bit too attached to the mains to consider killing any of them off (at least prior to the series finale). maybe... this reluctance to kill their darlings extends to ships.

romance isn’t the primary draw of the show, but an indulgence, something that there may not always be time for but that the writers continue to prioritize as much as they can because they enjoy it, or feel that it is important to the overall product. if we accept this idea, that the inclusion of and focus on so many romantic relationships in stranger things is (to some degree) indicative of the writers’ own desires, then it might inform our speculation regarding endgame ships.

i’m not here to like... really actually assert that i know what’ll be endgame, because i don’t really know jack shit. however, i do think that the writers are pretty invested in all of the current canon st ships (and yes, i am including jopper in that, as their romantic development was explicit in s3). i also think that the writers like catering to fans, leaning into popular jokes (steve “the hair” harrington) and devoting more and more time to the ships fans obsess over (particularly mileven). 

with this all in mind... i really think that most if not all of the current canon ships will be endgame. 

i think that barring any extreme circumstances (i.e. a character Actually dying instead of just fake dying) jopper will be endgame. they’re the only ones that the writers have had the restraint to actually do a slow burn with, and i really can’t see them devoting so much to developing their dynamic just to say it was all for nothing in the end. 

i’m less confident on the others. there are some signs in canon that the remaining couples have some serious problems and may not last, but these issues are often dismissed, played for comedy or brushed over within the text itself, and many of the details within the text contradicting this dismissal are often so small that it’s unclear whether they’re intentional or not. while breaking up mileven might make perfect sense for a fan who reads into subtext and pays attention to unusual acting choices and subtle parallels, it would be a pretty risky move on the surface level. allowing these ships to remain canon for awhile and garner large fanbases only to break them up later would require both a willingness to actively contradict the desires of their audience as well as a certain degree of restraint in their romantic storytelling, which runs counter to the impression i personally have of the st writers (this is, of course, my own personal opinion).

there’s a good chance that at least one of the current canon ships will break up by the end, if only because i think that it would be a little boring if every relationship stayed the same for almost the entirety of the show’s run, and the stranger writers like to keep things new and exciting. perhaps long distance will kill jancy or mileven, or lucas and max will go off again and never come back on, but either way i wouldn’t be surprised if we got a breakup in s4. even with that, though, i think it’s somewhat likely that a current couple may break up in s4 and get back together for the series finale, just for the sake of a little suspense. overall, though, i feel like our current canon ships are going to be more or less the same at the end of the show.

that’s about it. i suppose i didn’t really... answer the question you asked skdndsdkjc i feel like you probably just wanted to know like if i’m a byler endgame truther (which i am not but i could happily be proven wrong). thank you for asking, though! i hope this made at least a little bit of sense.

[butterflydm]

Why R U? episode 10 (plus speculation)

Starting with Saifah and Zon this time!

Last episode was, like, this perfect rom-com vacation episode with Fighter and Tutor, but I am glad to see Saifah and Zon again. And, after their kiss, they went to Saifah’s room and (rather more chastely than Tutor and Fighter) slept together. Very cute soft cuddles. Zon waking up and not panicking when he sees Saifah’s face so close to his; very nice.

A flashback to Saifah making Zon’s guitar pick bracelet! This is so cute! Oh, I really like this sequence; we’re getting to see what feels like Saifah’s PoV on falling for Zon.

Then we go to Tutor and Fighter, and Tutor is already out of bed, mostly dressed, and having some variety of second thoughts -- or at least, somewhat confused thoughts. Which tracks with some stuff he’s said from the beginning. He’s been the one who asked Fighter if he was abnormal, who said men kissing and hugging other men isn’t normal, who asked his sister what it meant to kiss someone of the same gender. He’s also worried more about what other people would think if they saw Fighter so close to him, has worried about society’s reaction. It feels very realistic of him to have those concerns and doubts; I’m just noting them.

But then they gave each other gifts and it was very soft and cute. 💖

Ah, the scene out on the pier was playful and sweet. Fighter telling Tutor he’s good at everything, including kissing. Ha! 💖

Little face time with Tutor’s mom! Who Tongta has told everything to, so she’s super supportive from the get-go. Good sister & good mom. 💖

Fighter is also concerned about pushing too hard and getting overwhelmed with his feelings and going too far. Maybe because he repressed things for so long and when he did break, he forced a kiss on Tutor that got an immediately negative reaction? A lot of early episode tension came out of that kiss. Fighter likely doesn’t want a repeat. Their early pattern had a lot of Fighter trying to push Tutor to react to him, but then when they had their romantic breakthrough moment, much of that dynamic has flipped.

...so, given the way ‘panning to an object’ has been structured in these shows, I get the impression that something happened in the sauna and then also again next to the pool, yeah?

Underwater kisses! Playing Final Fantasy X when I was younger has given such a fondness for underwater kisses (...actually, FFX may be relevant in other ways, but I’ll hold that thought until the end).

Tutor mentioning again about telling Hwa... I hope it goes well (there aren’t subs in the ‘next week’ on, so idk what her initial reaction is) but I just get a vague feeling of dread from the idea, because of Fighter’s dad. I hope it’s unfounded!

So... now I want to talk for a bit about the elephant in the room with this show -- is it ‘real’? There are no spoilers below, but there is speculation that’s based on some stuff cast & crew have said.

One of the things that people on twitter have been worrying about the last couple of weeks is that there might be a sad ending, one that wipes away essentially the whole series. This is actually something the director, too, I believe, brought up in an instagram live that he did recently -- he asked fans if they would rather the series be one season long but with a happy ending, or have two seasons but this season would have a sad ending where it was revealed that what we’d been watching was actually Zol’s novel. Because of COVID-19, they weren’t able to complete filming yet, I believe, and they added two extra episodes to the end of the season, which... may or may not be related?

I’m still new to Thai dramas, so I don’t know how likely a ‘gotcha’ plot twist like this might be as a trope, so I’m going to process through some thoughts on how I would feel if it happened, without getting too much into the likelihood.

It would absolutely depend on how it was handled and if it actually did invalidate the entire series or not. If we’re just watching ‘Zol’s novel’ (a meta novel where her brother gets mad at her a lot and people talk about being in her novel) and the romances are actually non-existent in ‘real life’, that would be a disappointing plot twist because it would mean nothing we watched actually ‘mattered’ and there wouldn’t be any point to the series continuing (all imo, of course). I’m not sure how the writers adding an extra two episodes to the end of the series could apply in this case, though? Like, once you’ve revealed that nothing actually happened, will anyone care to watch any more of the series? Or maybe the assumption is that the big reveal would get moved to the end of episode 14?

Of course, a reveal that we’re watching a ‘fantasy’ could mean a couple of other things. Not just that nothing was real. Yes, if we’re watching Zol’s novel, then the ‘real’ Zon, Saifah, Tutor, and Fighter are potentially completely unaffected by what happened in everything we’ve seen.

If, on the other hand, we’re maybe watching Zon’s imagination based on Zol’s novel, then it becomes a storyline potentially about Zon’s queer awakening. Or if it’s a shared dream between Zon and Tutor based on Zol’s novel, then it’s a storyline potentially about Zon AND Tutor’s queer awakenings. In both of the latter cases, then it’s something that could lead to Zon and Tutor pursuing things IRL with Saifah and Fighter. On the other hand, it would mean Fighter’s incredible character revelations and development would vanish or need to be rebuilt which would be disappointing for me personally (Saifah was a sweetie from the start tbh). Also, if the backstories for the characters are ‘accurate’, then Zol becomes kinda of a stalker into the lives of her brother and his friend circle.

Another other option that involves novel-related shenanigans happening, but in a way that doesn’t invalidate the characters’ choices and feelings, is that Zon & Zol’s deal manipulated circumstances but not the characters’ feelings. That would still mean everything that happened really happened for all the characters but might still lead to them questioning things, thus, drama. And those last three options are kind of what remind me of FFX -- Tidus was a dream and not technically a ‘real person’ in some senses... except that he affected the people around him enough that he essentially created himself as a real person, and was able to (in the happy ever after endings of FFX2) transcend the dream and become a reality again, based on Yuna choosing the dream over reality and bringing him back. Tutor has made a couple of comments, in particular, that reminded me of that -- saying that if he and Zon really did fall into a novel, it’s better than his real life is.

Or, it’s Zon having an overactive imagination and the vow didn’t do anything at all except make him get anxious (we didn’t see TeeFuse & TharnType actually interact with any characters except Zon, I think) and the drama will come from the characters as established in the storyline so far. We’ll find out!