#also it just makes sense this is an arc about motherhood

[casscainmainly]

These are obviously Cass' top 3 people ever but Babs being in her own panel with an exclamation point... it's so rare for her to be above Steph nowadays is the Babs Cass relationship coming back for real??? Mother-daughter Babs Cass 2025????? We're so close to perfection...

[dialecticaldimensions]

i have so many thoughts after watching per manum, this is not happening & deadalive - but you know what I keep going back to? Scully being sooooo damn certain that Mulder is the only choice to be the father of her child. 

Literally both times we see a direct question posed to Scully about becoming a mum, she turns to Mulder as the potential father. 

In home, when Mulder, addressing solely Scully’s journey into motherhood, asks her to find someone with good genetics, she looks at him and asks “what about yours?” ITS SO !!!!!!!!!! Because the implication is sooooo clear - would you have good genetics to help me have a baby. 

And then in per manum, when Dr Perrenti asks her if she has someone in mind and that he can walk her through donor catalogues etc., Scully’s immediate concern was not WHO to ask but HOW to ask him. Watching her say that made me weird levels of feral, because what do you mean you have no hesitation, no second thoughts about who deserves to be the father of your child!!!!! 

Scully is always so careful about her choices (i.e. med school, joining the fbi etc.) and has a need to have her choices validated by others, which is common arc we see her struggle through in many episodes. Then, to have her be SO certain that if anyone were to father a child with her, of course it would be Mulder. There’s no other choice, there was never any other choice (despite what later plot lines might imply). 

And honestly, even Mulder leans into this a bit. Thinking of Emily and how Mulder just slipped into taking care of Emily so easily, because this was Scully’s child. Sure, he had reservations, but once Scully decided she wanted to raise this little girl, Mulder was fully alongside her. (I still think of him lifting Emily when she was sick and my heart just feels pain). 

Genuinely makes me want to cry because I think it really shows how much they love each other (whether they know it/have admitted it to themselves or not). And my personal take, is that Mulder and Scully, by s4 (probably end of s2 tbh), already considered the other family. In the sense that, hell or highwater, they were bonded in some transcendent way, and nothing will erase/change the very permanent mark they’ve already made in each other. That whatever happens, they will always have a path (back) to each other. 

In, deadalive at the funeral Scully says, all of Mulder’s family is gone and Mulder is the last. And I just knowwwww that Scully always felt that Mulder deserved to have a family, deserved to have his name/legacy preserved, and wanted to give that to him. You see this in the ways she will always consider/defend who he is as a person (thinking of early S2 when the files were gone and also Demons and closure/sein und zeit). 

Skinner says ‘I don’t truly believe Mulder’s the last’ - I can’t fully tell what exactly skinner was implying but I want to believe (hehe) that he’s referencing Scully’s pregnancy. Scully’s face shows a whole range of emotion after that but I also want to believe she’s considering what it now truly means to be carrying his baby. 

Mulder usually has all the pretty words of declarations and long, yearning gazes (which I love love love) but omg to me, scully without hesitation, without question, choosing to have a baby that’s half mulder (esp when the usual method of getting there, i.e. being married/being in a relationship is not there) is one of the most beautiful acts of love from scully to mulder. And I don’t think mulder truly even knows it!!!!!!! 

Mulder wants a family because it was robbed from him. He also wants Scully to have her child because she was robbed of her choice to motherhood. But Scully, Scully’s choice is to have a family, a child with Mulder, because she wants to bring back that kind of love to both of them. 

[remus-poopin]

There's this underlying theme of motherhood being under-looked in Harry Potter - Voldemort underestimates Lily, Molly is seen as this frumpy housewife, etc... and JKR thinks she's blowing everyone out of the water by then making motherhood the single most important thing i the story!

Yet! Not a single working mother! In the entire series! "The struggles of motherhood" is JKR's favourite card to invalidate trans women's experiences, and yet she seems to have an (unsurprisingly) narrow mind when it comes to what motherhood can look like.

Here's an example that comes to mind: in the context of the second war, with Remus being a man persecuted by both the Ministry and Death Eaters for his condition and position in the Order, there was no reason for him to marry Tonks. I'm not talking about "building a family" or "being together", I'm talking about signing wedding papers.

Personally, I think JKR places a weird amount of value on traditional marriage, and upholds the ideal of a nuclear family above all things. She could not have Tonks giving birth a baby without being married to a man first.

YEP!

For the Tonks/Lupin issue you can’t even blame this fully on the fact it’s being written in a children’s book because JKR’s description of their relationship later on pottermore falls into the same traditional (and honestly puritanical) traps. And like you mentioned, this doesn’t even make sense for their story/relationship. (there’s an implication that they were only just friends until that confrontation in HBP and were never actually together or even hooking up. Most remadora shippers, like myself, tend to not like this version of events because it makes their whole marriage/relationship look a bit ridiculous. Tonks’ behavior in HBP comes off a lot different if they never had any romantic interactions at that point. It also seems odd that they would get married in less than a month of being together if they were strictly platonic up until that point)

And yes her view of motherhood is incredibly limiting and a bit revealing. In general it’s used as a tool which to measure her female characters by: The non maternal/improperly maternal women are clearly marked as villains (Rita Skeeter, Umbridge, Petunia, Bellatrix, Marge), the maternal ones are seen as demonstrating proper femininity and are therefore good (Lily, Molly, Tonks), women who were looked down upon previously get a redemption arc focusing around this (Narcissa) (Fleur can also fit into this category as she takes on a Molly like role in DH) and the women who don’t have kids but are still supposed to be seen positively look after kids to some capacity (McGonagall)

Her use of motherhood in the terf rhetoric she spreads is stemming from a similar idea. Gender essentialists tend to highlight female suffering as their primary justification for their exclusionary behavior, whether this suffering be biological or societal. Suffering and pain is used to define femininity itself. Suffering, female suffering, is noble, divine, inherent, and honorable. Motherhood, like you mentioned, is one of the biological sufferings they reference for their argument. The pain of giving birth and the sacrifice of your body and the rest of your life is noble, divine, inherent, and honorable.

In the books motherhood is suffering and motherhood is sacrifice. A woman who accepts this role of pain achieves righteousness. A woman who rejects it is selfish and wicked.

[meltedbrains]

Ok, so someone else had to point this out to me, and this may be the only way it makes sense.

Belinda was always Poppy's mother, the Rani used one of her wishes in Bavaria to rewrite Belinda's life so that she went from a single mother* to a single woman in a flat share. When the Doctor rewrote time so that she was Poppy's mother again, he was correcting what the Rani had done. Anything else is way too sinister to be a happy ending.

However, if this is the case (and RTD's track record of poc characters works against him here) it should have been more explicit. Belinda should have played a bigger part in the finale. She should have been the one to remember Poppy, not Ruby. She should not have been literally sidelined in favour of the previous white companion.

The finale was full of bad writing and Belinda got it in the neck. Apparently Millie Gibson left suddenly and they had to quickly replace her with Varada Sethu.

This can be backed up by Ruby fitting the Belinda story line pretty well; her character was already focused around motherhood; she had already met Poppy in space babies; Conrad's heel turn into right-wing populist conspiracy theorist would have brought back, and mirrored, the bad memories of her previous boyfriend, Alan, from the robot revolution; she was already neighbours with Mrs Flood and the Rani's comment about stalking blonde human women would have made more sense.

Ruby and the Doctor could have put Poppy in the zero box with Susan and run off to save the world, Ruby could have remembered her own daughter from an alternate reality, as she'd remembered alternate realities before. Ruby could have raised Poppy and Desidirium could have been returned to their parents before they got wished out of existence, instead of being dumped on Carla, who seems to be eternally relegated to supermum (except in alternate timelines, where they hate being a mum...).

Belinda was just, sort of there. She contributed nothing to the finale and very little to the previous episode. RTD casually throws poc characters under the bus and apparently has no awareness of doing so.

Mickey is whiny and pathetic until he moves to a parallel earth and is no longer a threat to the Doctor and Rose as a couple. He is frequently made the butt of the joke including being compared to a horse that the Doctor stole on a whim.

Martha is hopelessly lovesick and constantly overshadowed by Rose (who doesn't even know her, but does know Donna?). Her well-founded fears of historical racism are dismissed in one episode then used to hit her over the head in another without even an apology.

These characters are then revealed to have somehow met, fallen in love and got engaged off screen (Martha is also apparently no longer a doctor?) This could not be a clearer example of slapping minorities together for the sake of a 'wife and kids' happy ending. Do they have anything in common except for being black and overlooked by the Doctor?

And then we get to the 15th Doctor, the first Doctor played by an unambiguously black man. And just like Martha before him, he gets overshadowed by the white person that came before him. Ncuti Gatwa was quickly sidelined for fan favourite David Tennant. He got a 16.5 episodes to be the Doctor and then committed suicide before seemingly handing it over to another fan favourite, Billie Piper.

It could have been so good, Gatwa brought a distinct personality and charisma that separated him from the others (they're not bad, just different). There was potential for a character arc about the Doctor thinking themselves emotionally healed but realising that they still have a lot to process.

Instead, we get the Doctor: crying with frustration over racists; getting betrayed by someone he considered community; having to make amends to someone a forgotten past life wronged (or he has yet to wrong?); and torturing someone that has failed at killing anyone, let alone 3 trillion people.

Instead of being held together by a character arc, or plot lines it all hinges on Gatwa's performance. Now, don't get me wrong, he sells the hell out of it; but none of it leads anywhere, and now it can't. Apparently the only way to rewrite time is to kill himself, apparently the only way to write out this under-served actor is for them to kill themselves.

So here's to more poc characters in Doctor Who that have been screwed over by RTD and whatever the hell is happening in the writing/production room.

*if you're going to suddenly reveal that Belinda was a mother all along, why not reveal that she was also married? Why not introduce a black man as a committed father and husband, in a loving interracial relationship? Belinda has to get back by 7:30 because she works nights and he works mornings, breakfast is the only time they get as a family. (This is a really nothingy complaint though, it doesn't impact the rest of the story at all)

[tharizt]

the gatwa era has thematically been about lost families and how non-normative forms of it are valid. family is not biological. family is not heteronormative. family is chosen, not given. belinda's arc had to tie into that theme somehow.

it frustrates me a bit that people are just going "belinda was reduced to motherhood". she wasn't "reduced". yeah sure, davies *always* brings his companions back down to domestic life after their time in the tardis. i also prefer moffat. but it's not done so here for no reason.

belinda doesn't give up anything else? she's still a nurse, so her career is intact. she's not in a romantic relationship. she's not married off. she raises poppy as a single mother. she wasn't absorbed into some idealised nuclear family. she was just reunited with her daughter.

and more importantly, belinda's arc actually engages with the core thematic substance of the gatwa era. this entire stretch of the show is about abandoned and lost children, and the people who find them again.

ruby and carla. belinda and poppy. goddess abena. splice. even the doctor himself; trying to make sense of susan and what family means when you're queer, immortal, and childless. this era is full of people who are not biologically related but are still bound together.

having belinda be a mother is part of that larger vision. she gets to be a single mother. she gets to keep her job. she gets to be strong and competent and compassionate. nothing about that reduces her. it places her within the emotional and thematic fabric of the era.

now yeah there are valid critiques to be made about how davies often handles female companions. and yeah, it's definitely fair to say that belinda being rewritten to fit a broader theme sacrifices some of what made her unique when she first appeared.

actually i think the same thing happened with ruby. he set up very clear signs about how something about her was supernatural, but then he rewrote her to fit his thematic idea while sacrificing a lot of what made her initially compelling for other reasons.

but to say belinda was simply reduced to motherhood misses the point when it's in a story that is clearly trying to show that family can look like many different things outside the confines of heteronormative expectations.

people will go "she was just locked in a box for the finale" uhm for like 10 minutes out of a decision she did to protect the emotional anchor of the entire narrative? for most of it, she was out too. actually, the entire third act is emotionally centered around belinda.

ruby gets some action, sure, but the story isn't about her like it is about belinda. hell, it is belinda we check in on one last time. it's belinda 15 says farewell too. not ruby. doesn't that say something?

[someone-save-rogue-from-superhel]

So... Doctor Who finale thoughts:

1. RTD really didn't stick the landing uh? The episode was so underwhelming

2. I'm absolutey griving the fact we won't be seeing Ncuti as the doctor anymore. He was seriously one of my favorites, he was FANTASTIC in the role. And he wasn't even able to have a proper arc. We only saw him in basically 14 episodes and he's gone!

3. It was a joy to see Jodie again, at least we had that

4. I haven't seen anyone mention this but the Rani died such a silly death! Literally no closure or anything. It was SO WEIRD I thought the doctor was about to save her and we never see her again

5. Where's Susan? I was really hoping she would be the finale's regeneration, not Ncuti :( why did they bring her back just for that, I thought something more would happen

6. So turns out that those things we have been noticing throughout the season where Belinda just knows things she shouldn't or couldn't know yet was really bad writing all allong! Silly us for thinking it was going somewhere, I guess!

7. I agree with all the theories saying this plot was written with Ruby in mind, this plot made no sense for Belinda and they literally put her in a box for a part of the episode so that Ruby can go be the focus again. I- don't even know what to say

8. Speaking of that, I agree that so many of these choices were really badly thought out by RTD. Belinda got the Martha treatment and at this point it seems problematic. Why was motherhood forced onto the character? She never expressed any interest in children at all and suddenly her whole existence gets retconned by the doctor so that Poppy always existed. She doesn't even know what happened to her and what type of life she had before all this. I hated it

9. I know she is really smol and young but they could have tried to give some personality to Poppy's character, the stakes where too high to save a character we had no relationship with. I didn't care and I felt like Ncuti's ending deserved something better. It's the first time, I think, we see a regeneration happen for something we really didn't care about. When Ten sacrificied himself for Wilf, we cared because it was Wilf. But Poppy, we barely know her, she's just a plot prop, sadly! I would have loved for them to explore the doctor has a father more. We are pushed to care about all this after we see the doctor with Poppy for like two seconds

And all that for Poppy to become human again, what was the point of it all?

10. I reeeally don't even know how to feel about Billie Piper as the doctor. I love her and I love Rose, her and Donna are my favorite companions! But it's weird for the doctor to have a companion's face imo. I also noticed people are already talking about the character as if she's just Rose and calling her Rose, but it's the Doctor, it doesn't make any sense to act like it's not, but it seems people are already a bit confused and I can't judge them. RTD what are you doing?

11. To end this rant, I was so wishing this wouldn't be Ncuti's goodbye, but here we are :(

I never believed the Billie Piper rumours because it just sounded so silly to me. I was really hoping that, if we had to have a doctor regeneration and it was a female actress that had already been on the show, that it would be Suranne Jones. I believe she would be an absolutely amazing doctor!!!! I loved her on Gentleman Jack. I think she could be such a sarcastic doctor, a bit reminiscent of Nine, who I so miss

Rose Tyler, the woman that you are, haunting the narrative until the very end. Let's see where this goes!

[bibibbon]

something that i can’t stand when it comes to this fandom is that basically no one can wrap their head around the fact that a victim can also be an abuser.

yes, rei was physically and emotionally abused by endeavor. yes, she was literally sold to him.

but she also just completely checked out and left fuyumi to pick up the slack.

yes, it’s not her fault that the abuse caused her to shut down, but as a result of that she neglected her children.

after she left fuyumi had to raise her brothers and become the woman of the house.

again, at the end of the day the root cause of the abuse is endeavor, but rei had checked out even before dabi's death.

it’s not victim blaming to point out the fact that rei neglected her kids. victim blaming would be saying that the abuse she suffered was her fault.

sometimes this fandom can be so fucking braindead. it’s always black and white, good or bad, hero or villain.

there is not a soul on this earth who is 100% a pure and good person.

all might, knowing full well what one for all contained and the massive responsibility that came with it. including an old wrinkly guy who will stop at nothing to take it, to a child and then proceed to not tell the aforementioned child what he was getting himself into. he with held crucial information because he knew that if he told izuku everything there was a chance he wouldn’t take it.

on the flip side, no one is 100% evil.

dabi cares deeply for the league, even though he doesn’t show it. shigaraki is literally the only person he will take orders from. some people may think he showed everyone hawks killing twice just for more ammo against the hero's. but thats not true at all. he cared about twice, and he wanted the world to know who he was. he wanted the hero’s to know that twice was human.

again i’m fucking rambling but i just hate how this fandom can be allergic to nuance and critical thinking.

I do think that many people do want a simple answer because at the end of the day it's easy to root for the good guys and boo the bad guys. There's also the fact that the narrative itself does sometimes struggle in creating a proper grey space morally.

Take for example the abuse victims in MHA. A lot of them are straight up innocent perfect heroes victims like izuku (who can never feel resentment in the narrative) and shoto while the others are straight up villains like Dabi and shigaraki. There's no in between with these characters and it's annoying. I remember talking with @mikeellee she has her saying of Shigaraki being the dark deku which honestly after that chapter where izuku comes into contact with a evil version of himself makes more sense.

I do agree with you in the sense that no one is 100% good or evil and in a way almost everyone is a victim to hero society. All might did willingly give a quirk that has a big responsibility to a naive quirkless child and all might is a bad mentor. However, at the same time all might is also a victim to a society he contributed to creating which is honestly so ironic and I wish horikoshi would explore these aspects of all mights character yet he doesn't and just gave us iron might (I dont like iron might tbh).

Also I love the fact that you brought up Rei himura and honestly Iam a big advocate for giving rei a redemption arc since it would of been more interesting and it would actually make sense to give her one than giving enji todoroki one. Rei was a victim and yes motherhood is difficult especially with the fact that she was abused and stripped of autonomy or agency but she also wasn't the best mother and that's something she does recognise in the narrative. My main problem however, is that the narrative doesn't allow her to fully engage with the family and she doesn't do much about it. Yes she apologises to both shoto and touya but what about her other children?!?! What about fuyumi who had to take on the role of a mother and shoulder a huge family burden? What about natsou who was also neglected?!?!. I say by giving rei himura a redemption arc the series can do so much that being actually involving the entire todoroki family into this, having more introduction to the hospital arc that may connect both touya and Rei and you can also have Rei make a connection with genten as @nyc3 suggested.

However, this also applies to the flip side. Characters like twice, shigaraki and Dabi aren't completely evil. Yes they have done bad things, yes they are bad people but they are also victims of the hero system and hero society. I do think that the leauge is a bit underdeveloped and I did definitely want more development between Dabi and shigaraki's while frenemies fiasco going on.

In the end I do think that almost every fandom may be allergic to nuance in one way or another. I do actually mean this because I remember seeing people try and say that Eren Yeager is completely good while some tried saying that he is completely evil but in reality he is complex and layered. You really can't put a definitive label on the aot characters because they all did their fair share of good and bad things and that's what makes them well written and enjoyable.

[lunar-years]

The horrifying fandom takes and theories it's generated aside, one of things I really love about Ted Lasso is the way it handles motherhood/babies/the future for its two main female characters. Like, on the one hand is Rebecca who so obviously and vocally has always wanted to be a mother, but married someone who didn't feel the same way and put her own desires aside for his, then had that fact thrown back in her face years later after he's abused and divorced her and gotten another woman pregnant.

A big part of Rebecca's arc is the constant frustration of having to accept the hand life's dealt her even when it's the opposite of everything she'd always wanted for herself. She's someone who wanted to be a wife and wanted to be mother and then finds herself in middle age as neither of those things. Then she makes the decision to pursue it on her own (which was awesome, I love that they showed her going to the fertility clinic and inquiring about whether pregnancy was a possibility for her! there's not way to become a mother!) and then she has to face her inability to get pregnant. And it sucks! but as sad as that is, it's also very...real? And the show doesn't miraculously let her have a miracle pregnancy anyway (like stupider shows would do, tbh), but instead has Rebecca come to terms with herself and her life under its new circumstances. She finds purpose outside of the things she once thought she would be and the roles her younger self assumed she would play as an adult. By the final episode, she's calling Richmond her family! She's realized what she wants most is the stay at the Club. She's come into her own. And then, yeah, there's the little ambiguous opening of Matthijs and his daughter and her possible future there with them--but importantly it isn't the end all to her happiness, anymore. It's a sign that she still has opportunities, just maybe not in the way she first envisioned, that no doors have closed forever and that what she's been looking for might come from unexpected places. there's no timeline!

And then you have Keeley, who's in her 30s and focused on her career and still figuring out how she wants that to look and who she wants to be. And yeah she's dating, and she has a serious onscreen relationship, but the topic of children (or marriage for that matter) never even once comes up! It's not made some big arc about how she doesn't want those things, and it's not some big fight with Roy or a goofy "really, you've never thought about babies?' conversation with Rebecca, it's just never something that's made relevant to her character nor her growth! She's a whole person without those things and she's clearly not actively pursuing them. And these two women with very different goals and wants are completely supportive of one another--it's never even a question :)

I thought both of their storylines in that sense were very refreshing to see on TV and like, comforting? If anything, the discourse it's spawned has been very...eye-opening...about how conditioned people have become to expect traditional marriage and babies storylines from every single female character. But the show doesn't give in to that mentality and instead shows that there's not one way a family has to look and not one way to be a mother and there isn't a set timeline for any of this stuff even if later you change your mind. And then if things don't turn out how you think, it doesn't mean you aren't going to end up with a good life! that was such a good message.

[aihoshiino]

chapter 154 thoughts

Chapters Since The 143 Kiss Happened And Went Entirely Unacknowledged And Unaddressed Count: 11

Aqua Hoshigan Status: (Still) white

man

This is one of those chapters where, technically speaking, I should probably be tearing it to bits (AND I DEFINITELY WILL) - it represents a pretty substantial break in or retcon to the series continuity as it's been presented to us thus far and the actions of certain characters in the lead up to this event don't quite make sense if they've had access to some of the information that's seemingly been in their hands for a while but… would you guys forgive me if I said I didn't really care LOL. As I've said before, I'm the sort of reader who can excuse a lot of raw Plot Bullshit so long as I feel like the hearts of the characters are intact and for all its fumbles, this is a chapter I think is unerringly dedicated to the hearts of its characters. I've made no secret of the fact that Ai is and always has been my main avenue of investment in Oshi no Ko as a series and in this chapter, we uncover the final secret in her heart in particular after having the entire series thus far dedicated to laying it bare to us.

We pick up exactly where we left off last chapter with the reveal that the HKAI breakup was indeed founded on Ai's pregnancy, as a lot of us had predicted.

This, uh, does not quite line up with previous events!

From what we'd previously been told, in terms of placement in the timeline, the death of Airi and her husband happened after the twins were born and sometime in the leadup to the Dome concert, which would put it in the ballpark of Ai's 18th to 20th birthday depending on how long it was in the works for. But based on how this flashback section is structured, it seems to place their deaths before Ai even knew she was pregnant, let alone giving birth. If it was just clashing with 15YL's retelling then I could dismiss that as an element of the movie's fictionalization that we've seen and Kamiki alludes to but this also clashes with where this event was placed temporally by Ichigo, when remembering a real life event. So… What gives!!!!

Like, at the end of the day, the exact placement of Uehara's death only matters inasmuch as it needs to be before Ai gets her new apartment, since the point Ichigo is really making is that Aqua is pinning his hopes on a dead man who was dead before he could have ever contributed to Ai's murder. But placing it that far back in the timeline - before the twins were even born! - just makes Aqua's willful ignorance in relation to it come off as a lot sillier and more difficult to swallow than if it happened closer to Ai's actual date of death.

I'm also a little disappointed that we really quickly breeze past Ai revealing she's pregnant - it's not the point of the scene overall and it would be weird to go really deep into her POV in the middle of a Kamiki flashback but one of my big issues with the Movie Arc was that it ripped past anything and everything to do with Ai's pregnancy, including how she herself felt about being pregnant. Like I said in my 145 review, skipping over the parts of it we've seen makes sense but I think there's still a bunch of really fascinating potential in exploring how Ai felt when she realized she was pregnant - how did she hide it for long enough that she was almost halfway through her pregnancy and getting fucking enormous before her first checkup? How did Ichigo and Miyako react when they first got the news? There's so much juicy character and relationship work you could mine out of that but the story fails to do so. We sort of get a crumb of this in the DVD but her feelings there are all centered on the pregnancy in relation to Hikaru and even then she breezes past it so fast it's clearly not meant to be the focus of any of what she's saying and idk. For a character whose entire hook is her struggles with motherhood, familial love and all the rest of it, that's a little disappointing.

THAT SAID!!! All that makes me sound like I didn't like what went on with Ai this chapter but I actually loved it. It's so painfully in line with everything we've been told and shown about her thus far in the manga and in this chapter, we see all her strengths, weaknesses and human contradictions laid bare in a way I find incredibly rewarding and compelling.

The HKAI breakup especially is just soooooo deliciously cringe inducing. It's an echo of the argument with Nino that 15YL portrays, where Ai's good intentions, avoidant tendencies and absolute absence of tact all snowball and end up ruining one of her most important relationships. Like… I can't believe I'm about to say this about a conversation in which Ai is one of the people talking, but she really is the reasonable one here! She's right to identify that their relationship is not working, that adding babies and marriage to the mix will only make things worse - her intentions, as they always are, are good and she's making her decisions with Kamiki in mind… her delivery is just absolutely dogshit!!! GIRL, PLEASE, YOUR WORDS!!!! USE YOUR WORDS!!!!!

For all my issues with Akasaka's writing lately, I think he portrays these kinds of two sided failures of communication so well, where you can see exactly where both characters are coming from and why they are failing to get their feelings across to each other. From an outsider's POV it's clear as day that Ai views herself and her children as the burden, one she doesn't want to put on Kamiki for the sake of a girl who doesn't even know if she can love him… but is it any wonder why Kamiki took it the way he did and why his guts were so utterly wrenched out as a result?

Kamiki's attempted proposal and Ai's immediate rejection of it are really interesting with the context of 45510 in particular. Extrapolating from her talk of marriage there, she brushed him off so quickly because she simply didn't believe he was serious… and yeah, he's pretty clearly not fully cognizant of the weight of what he's trying to propose, never mind that he's meeting "let's break up" with "LET'S GET MARRIED" lol.

Also interesting to extrapolate from both 45510 and other material surrounding Ai is that, at that point in her life, she simply didn't understand what the point of marriage was. On top of her being Literally Sixteen And A Child right now, Ai is said to have come from a deeply dysfunctional home where her mother engaged in a number of equally dysfunctional relationships, at least one of whom was with a man who was creeping on Ai even as he was working up to marry her mom. It's no wonder she doesn't really take the idea of marriage seriously, but it still hurts so see her reject Kamiki so bluntly - even more bluntly in the Japanese text somehow, simply chirping 無理! (Muri!) in response, i.e, not just "no way" but telling Kamiki to his face it's impossible.

Honestly this whole breakup scene is so darkly hilarious just in terms of how bad Ai is completely beefing it. Congrats babygirl that's the worst anyone's ever done it!!!

And we finally get the "I can't love you" drop after just shy of 25 chapters of buildup…….. And honestly, it feels a little hollow.

I talked about this a little before so forgive me for repeating myself but that line - or rather, Aqua and Ruby's implied misunderstanding of it - from Ai to Hikaru was given a huge amount of weight in the story when it was first introduced. It was implied to be the lynchpin in which everything else about the HKAI romance rested only for the story to go UH WELL ACTUALLY IT'S ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT AI FORGIVES HER KILLER which is like… fine, it just feels very jarring on a reread or when trying to sew together a plot thread like this. It especially feels strange because the emphasis is placed on them not getting it right or at least that Gotanda disagrees with their interpretation, only for the manga to whip back around and not only return this line to its previous heightened importantance but also to largely not line up with what was established about this line and its place in the narrative when it was first introduced. It's just more evidence that Akasaka's plans for the Movie Arc and its resolution changed in some way during serialisation because these inconsistencies are pretty glaring.

Not just that, but like… it's hard to feel impacted by this line when we didn't even see it in the Movie Arc. In general, it's so fucking weird that so much about the main emotional resolutions going on right now revolve around Ruby's performance in the movie when most of the big emotional moments people are reacting to are happening entirely offscreen. This would already be bad even if it wasn't taking place in a manga like OnK with its increasingly frustrating habit of offscreening more and more bits of the story that are extremely important for the characters. Before this chapter I would've said that maybe we'd see some of it after the movie released but given that Kamiki's arc and the revenge play as a whole is pretty clearly wrapping here, what would even be the point of it?

Idk. It's just increasingly obvious (and just as frustrating) to me just how much of the Movie Arc was wasted time and how much of the setup that needed to happen to make what follows really land just… didn't. This chapter's resolution for Ai and Hikaru, both separately and as a couple, is still excellent, but it could have been a lot better if its foundations weren't so meager.

We also finally get concrete proof from the horse's mouth that Kamiki was the one who deliberately leaked Ai's address and……. honestly this is kind of a wet fart too lol. OnK has previously very strongly implied that "Kamiki is Ai's killer" was a red herring or that we should at least be slightly skeptical of Aqua's assertions and conclusions but… nope, he was right all along, I guess?? Alright………………………… I certainly don't believe his insistence that gosh he totes didn't think Ryosuke would go THAT far and I'm still wondering wtf the two of them were doing at the hospital the night the twins were born but like. Honestly at this point, I don't really think it matters and I care much more about emotional resolutions than I do granular plot details - and boy do we get one hell of an emotional resolution.

I haven't shouted her out yet because I was saving it for this section but fuck, man, Mengo's expression work told chapter is killer as usual but this final stretch of pages is just gutwrenching. Ai's gentle, rueful smile on the DVD contrasted with the look of shocked, dawning understanding on Kamiki's….. Jesus Christ.

And at last, we uncover the final secret hidden at the bottom of Ai's heart. The entire manga thus far has been a process of stripping away the viewer's willful ignorance with regards to Ai's humanity but the DVDs had been an oddly ominous mystery box floating around, containing some implied dark secret that would change the entire trajectory of Ai's character as we knew it… but of course, the person who tells us that is Ai herself, a girl who hates herself, thinks of herself as dirty and impure, irresponsible and incapable of love.

So is it really any surprise that her darkest secret, the thing she can only confess with her eyes shining with black stars is simply that she's a fallible human? That she was a lonely young girl, confused and hurt in her own ways and that she hurt someone she dearly cared for and wanted to take it back?

Is it a little convenient that she put all this in the DVD? Yes, absolutely, and I'll be the first to say that the DVDs existing at all are a pretty clear retcon in service of getting info onto Aqua's hands. But it's also perfectly in line with Ai's timid, avoidant methods of reaching out. It parallels both Viewpoint B and 45510 (moreso the latter) where she pours her heart out in words, waiting for others to read and understand her. In 45510 in particular, her leaving the blog post is an extremely clear and strong parallel to the DVD - love letters put into bottles and thrown to the ocean in desperate hope the person they're addressed to might find and understand them.

As Akane says, Ai is torn between secrecy and a desire to have her true self exposed, so she attempts to craft scenarios in which this must happen, even if her avoidance can only allow her to do so with indirect methods. With the blog and moreso the DVDs & their method of delivery, Ai attempts to create situations where the initiation confrontation and disclosure is out of her hands and she has no choice but to tell the truth.

Ai's entire speech here is just heartbreaking. If the start of the chapter didn't make it explicit enough, we see her here put her good intentions into words to better understand how they were misinterpreted.

This adds SUCH a fascinating additional layer to her death that has me gnashing my fucking teeth. One of the things I've talked about a lot in my Ai meta is that Ryosuke is essentially an agent or even an embodiment of the entertainment industry and the way it has exploited her - the misogyny, entitlement, purity culture and abuse that ruled her life went on to end it. With this additional detail, though, Ryosuke becomes an agent not just of the things that plagued Ai of B-Komachi, but Ai as a human, too. All her life, Ai is willfully misunderstood and mischaracterized by the people around her, assigned narratives and roles without her consent and punished for both living up to and failing to live up to them. Ai's death is the end result of a lifelong cascade of failure on the part of every system and individual that has had the opportunity and responsibility to care for her - and, as Aqua throws in his father's face, that includes Hikaru.

Hikaru's supposed understanding of Ai is not one based in empathy or love but projection and possessiveness - understanding in this context is ownership, exclusivity and frankly, arrogance. A claim to a piece of Ai that no one else knows. But as Aqua forces him to realize… Hikaru never understood Ai, even as she did her best to make herself understood. For all his arrogance of understanding Ai and the nature of their relationship, Kamiki is ultimately just the same as every other person who idolized and objectified her then discarded her when the image they'd created in their mind didn't match reality. Ai wasn't his pure and perfect soulbonded saviour - she was a lonely, broken kid like him, still struggling to understand love after a lifetime spent starved of it.

Once, Kamiki begged Ai to save him. And here, the bitter truth is laid out for all of us: the salvation Kamiki had wished for was waiting for him, reaching out with open arms and he not only desecrated it but irrevocably destroyed any path back towards it. In killing Ai, Hikaru Kamiki killed himself.

The imagery of this moment is so fucking gorgeous. The visual of Kamiki and Ai reaching out to each other, in mutual understanding at last but separated by time and death… the "what if" happy Hoshino family… Ai's words being framed as a 'love letter' that transcended time to reach Kamiki and Aqua's eyes blazing with white as tears pour down his face… Jesus fucking Christ Mengo I'm already dead!!!!!

Like I said up top, I make zero secret of the fact that I am primarily invested in Ai above everything else in the manga and the way her importance has been seemingly downplayed since the late 130s mark chapter wise has really bugged me. As such, this chapter was INSANELY cathartic for me. Not only do we get a really beautiful cap to Ai's post death arc (hopefully finally killing those dumbfuck Secretly Evil Ai theories for good) but it's done in a way that once again recenters her love and her wishes as the heart of everything. Even Aqua's revenge play is completely redefined in this context - no longer the childish, selfish and self destructive lashing out we've seen before but as a quest to both honor Ai and to punish the person arrogantly assuming ownership of her heart even as he so catastrophically misunderstands her.

This is a really fantastic end to Aqua's arc too… on paper, that is. I know for a fact that a certain genre of OnK readers are going to bitch and moan that Aqua didn't run his dad over with a 2003 Honda Civic but I really can't imagine Aqua's revenge quest going any other way unless OnK was intended to be a pure tragedy. Over and over, we have seen that Aqua's revenge is at odds with not just his happiness but with Ai's wish for him to live a full life with a bright future. It is self destructive, hurtful to the people around him and antithetical to any of them moving on and reclaiming what their futures. With the emphasis the story places on moving towards a happy future, in selfishly reclaiming your happiness even in the face of systems that seek to crush you and on honouring Ai's wishes and legacy, it would be flatly thematically incoherent for Aqua to choose killing.

The issue is not with this as Aqua's end point but with the path we've taken to get here. As was the issue with Ruby during the Movie Arc, we don't actually see any of the internal work that happened in service of this arc, just the big emotional end points of offscreen development. But it stings especially bad with Aqua when such a huge chunk of the last few arcs locked us out of his head, sharply contrasting the start of the story that lived and breathed his interiority - AND when this is more or less the capstone to his series long struggle to choose love or revenge. It's not that I dislike this as an emotional payoff for Aqua's revenge - this is more or less beat for beat what I'd expected - but that it lacks proper support from the rest of the story. In general, this chapter falls flatter than it should because all this heightened, dramatic emotion rests on arcs and setup that simply have not been shown to the reader, save for Ai.

Speaking of Ai, the info in the DVD here potentially represents a pretty major break in the continuity of Aqua's behaviour based on when we're told he had access to it but I'm willing to bite my tongue and see if that gets filled in, if only because this chapter review is already so fucking long. Let's just say that I Noticed and I sure hope Aka or his editors did too.

And finally… Oh, hey there, Ruby! Aren't you an interesting little snarl to this chapter. Or maybe "snarl" isn't quite right, but her presence here is potentially interesting either way. I'm not quite sure how to read both her expression and her presence - the expression on her face looks VERY displeased and it looks to me like she's outside the room, so is she maybe eavesdropping and not happy with what she hears? Or is she in on Aqua's talk with Kamiki here and just struggling with her emotions with regards to it all? I'm quiety hoping it's the latter, because it would confirm that Ruby DID recognize her dad in 147 and Akasaka wasn't expecting me to believe he was hitting her with the stupid stick quite that hard lol.

In either case, I'm actually excited to see what Ruby takes away from this. In the ways that AQRB has echoed the HKAI dynamic, Ruby has always been in Kamiki's shoes - the one desperate to be saved, clinging to her oshi and relying on him as her sole bastion of light in the world. So what will she think now after being faced with the logical endpoint of this wished-for codependence? When she sees how destructive and self destructive it can potentially be? Just as she saw Ai reflected in herself, will Ruby see her father in her own reflection - and if so, what will she do about it?

Break next week! So we'll be sitting pretty for two weeks to find out. Not that I actually mind this time because with a chapter like this on top of season 2 of the anime coming back today, a week without a break might have actually killed me… please, akamengo, i'm just a little guy!!!!

[psicheanima]

Do you have any thoughts on leviathan

I luv her :) I was very confused when I was talking to people about the manga recently, and apparently it was a popular opinion that her arc wasn’t as good as the other ones. Not that it was bad it just seemed like people weren’t really invested? I was really shocked about this because what Aruma does with the sense of envy is just so multi layered and really interesting to me!

We have the jealousy of Imuri of Leah and the Priest, initially framed as romantic territorialism, but later making itself more clear as Imuri upset that she does not have any human connections in the same way Priest does. This is a fun plot line because later in the series she’ll become so close to Priest that everybody is afraid to even separate them from one another in fear of what Priest will do.

Then we have my favorite: the envy of the weak with both Levi and Priest. Isn’t that fun to just say? I’m so used to envy characters being poorly understood versions of lust or greed, this was really awesome to read ….. yup, that’s pure envy. You can feel her gnawing desperation. Contrasted with Priest, who self-villanizes this aspect (Levi: I hate this dangerous body I was given vs Priest: My body is dangerous)

Her jealousy of small things also plays into her role of forced motherhood. Levi is a breeding stock— she doesn’t have negative feelings about this aspect of her life, but it is the truth. Her desire to be on the same level as everyone else was just as much born from loneliness, as it was a specific desire to be able to be the child for once 

[iridescentscarecrow]

I saw on twitter that you caught up with mtefil and i'm so glad since so few people know about it. What do you like about it? Personally I love it's rendition of the fallen angels, so vile and pathetic yet human.

hello!!! i kind of regret keeping the small liveblog thread i did on my priv and not posting on main, since i ended up having a lot more things to say than i expected. i'm still sorting out my thoughts right now, and i want to go back and reread some stuff with context, but here's a quick summary of what i felt:

i like the fallen angels a lot too, but my favourite aspect of mtefil is probably the depiction of the sins, it's wonderfully clever. i think the order of my interest goes lust (aria arc specifically ) > sloth > gluttony > greed > envy.

for lust, i feel like i might appreciate it more than other people because i was very interested in the "agelessness" associated with "sexiness" vis a vis idolhood and the creation of aria as someone "bottomless", as these are themes consistent with some of my favourite things in fiction. asmodeus is one of the characters i ended up liking the most because of this. her inflicting violence onto priest as a expression of her love for sarah, and the propertyship there was very good. asmodeus is constantly seeking worth & dignity! her connecting with priest through like a shared sameness really got to me. i liked how imuri was the audience proxy for our knowledge that aria was actually priest's assaulter, it made for some really horrifying moments of tension, i was kind of shaking through it, also, i think it contributes to my idea that imuri is the protagonist (the first page of the manga is literally her painting) and priest is the "love interest" - also a fun concept because of how bel frames him as a romcom protagonist later on? but that's just extended thoughts. the ending scene of the arc with him fantasizing about imuri and then throwing up was very powerful to me, because i think the gendering of priest is essential to the series. him being disgusted with himself because he feels like a predator, and immediately giving up the caregiving role (of gendered labour) that he assumed over imuri earlier stuck to me.

i like how gender entwines with every aspect of MTEFIL, tbh. its very well planned, even if it does end up beating you over the head with its themes at time lol! the sins are one thing - most of the male ones are dimensions of patriarchal abuse, and the two female ones we've seen are leviathan with her ill fitting motherhood, and asmodeus, who like i said, is focused on Worth through sexual conquest. the church refers to the "father, the son" & the witches to "evil" feminine figures. a lot of the manga discusses how the witches are alienated & considered inhuman, and their struggle is a tussle over humanity. verge literally brought up "storytelling" !! and this makes sense because imuri's Role is the "femme fatale", that she constantly refers back to and describes herself with, and that's essentially story trope.

sloth was the depiction i was most impressed by when it came to inventiveness. i was reading through the files intently before he was revealed since they're all written very well, so when he showed up, i assumed he was writing the child's room ones almost immediately. the scapegoating of women, paired with the eternal childhood of it all and priest's own exhaustion is all very fun.

gluttony being a grooming allegory is honestly insane. i often feel like depictions of gluttony end up imagining it as a kind of Greed Lite - but with a focus on food, which is boring TBH. the manner in which the sin of taste is presented as experienced/practiced by the abused & the way this connected to leah's "forbidden love" as described by the files... i really liked leah in this arc. beelzebub talking with her and saying,, this is just human nature,, centering her shame... it made me feel very ill if i'm being honest.

greed is a typical depiction but the way it's fleshed out connects really well to the manga's themes, although im more interested in tachibana than the actual character of greed. i feel she represents it in a more nuanced way than him, although that's probably whats intended. the file about her with the line referring to "the womb" and the one file conversation she has with verge really sticks to me. she's obviously portrayed as the sole woman in a room full of men and the way she revels in her success when it comes to The Meritocracy fascinates me. i hope we get more of her

envy is probably the one i have the least thoughts on: leviathan as the state & the sea monster connect to motherhood is kind of apparent but i wish i had more to chew on with respect to how that ties to the sin of envy. but that's a minor nitpick, and i'll probably understand more later.

overall, i'm kind of happy with how these themes are being tackled in a shounen manga, and i had tons of fun with it. i wish it had more attention! i like priest a lot, i think he's incredibly well written but my particular tastes in characters mean that my favourites right now are imuri, asmodeus, leah, and verge. the latter is probably biased by the fact that i'm deeply invested in the weird yaoi he and dante have going on, it's so fun?

this is everything that i could think of for now, but i'm considering talking about newer chapters when they drop on my main, perhaps? thank you for the ask, it gave me the opportunity to go on about it a little :D i liked it very much!!

[semi-imaginary-place]

Dragon Age: returning characters

If Cullen is the fan favorite (he is so unqualified to be leading an international army) then morrigan is the dev favorite. She's such a special girl. She's alao the one designed to be sexy in origins, love that for her when she's middle aged but in origins just like the lust demons, it's barely disguised dev gooning. I keep telling people who play the series backwards (don't do this), just wait until you see cullen raving about demons and mages. again.

Dragon Age characters are notoriously inconsistent between games. Either the writers change or the dev vision for a character changes between games. Merill and Isabella are basically different people between games that just happen to share a name, and to a degree harding and cullen. Recurring characters are a mixed bag in dragon age. Morrigan and solas get the best of it because they're dev favorites. They actually stay in character and morrigan's cross game character arc actually makes sense. Can't quite say the same for cullen's

Because of dao's extremely open plot, to continue telling stories in thedas the devs had to trim the story trees so beyond dao the "canon" isnt so much canon one possibility out of hundreds. dai morrigan and leiliana are very specific story paths, specifically Leliana and Alistair are hardened and Morrigan becomes the equivalent of softened. And so much of dao is about how every choice and it's conclusion is equal and how all these story branches are real that it leaves a real sour taste when the devs give preferential treatment to certain branches. While at the same time I do understand that the alternative would just be for characters to not have major roles at all. 90% of the origins cast is optional and like all of them can die (which caused hell of a lot of continuity problens because origins was designed as a stand alone). Like Alistair and Morrigan are the only mandatory. I'm not mad that the writers made a choice I'm mad that they made a choice matter and then retconned it into meaning less.

So much of Morrigan's charcter arc in Inquisition and Veilguard is about how motherhood has changed her for the better. She's gained a better understanding of life and the world through nurturing and learning to be a mother. This comes to a thematic head as she story enterwines with Mythal's, drinking from the Well of Sorrow potentially, and embracing the aspect of Mythal to embody her power in Veilguard. Morrigan from an antisocial lover comes to embody motherhood. And if you don't want her to get pregnant in Origins? Too bad you miss a major development in her character arc. Which is why I have such complicated feeling about this writing choice. Because Kieran being from the Dark Ritual is so much more poignant than the other options like the devs are very much playing narrative favorites. Non-Old God old Kieran is barely an afterthought in Inquisition his lines aren't nearly as interesting and it's clear which option the devs prefer. But on the other hand the writing is good...

Alistair would basically be the main character of Origins in the Warden wasn't there except that he is allergic to making decisions I mean he is the senior warden (barely) but just defers to everything the player says. He can end up doing what he cares about (being a warden), being turned into a political pawn and actually doing an ok job, or falling through the cracks and ending up a useless drunk. But the novels choose the King path and it seems to be the default for Inquisition. And I'm also pretty mad because the Wardens and Duncan meant so much to Alistair it was the only connection he felt wouldn't be ripped away from him and the writers did it anyways regardless of my choice in Origins.

I have less of a problem with Leliana's pigeonholing. Her story branching is far less drastic in Origins. Given how by Inquisition she's gotten right back into the heart of the Orlesian cloak and dagger it's not suprising she's hardened now no matter if she was or wasn't Origins.

The more I think about the option death revivals/spirit/whatever excuse Bioware gave this time, the more of a stretch it seems so I try to just not not. It's understandable why they did it, Origins was never meant to have a sequel and this is the best way to both respect player choice and keep the project to a feasible scale.

[dichenlachmandaily]

The actor chats with Glamour about portraying miscarriage on screen, how her own motherhood journey informed her character, and how she thinks Gemma really ended up at Lumon.

There were many revelations in the Severance finale, but one packed a particular punch. Gemma Scout, the imprisoned wife of the show’s protagonist Mark, finally faced her biggest emotional challenge in the mysterious “Cold Harbor” room, and it was an empty crib.

While viewers still don’t know how Gemma (Dichen Lachman) ended up in the basement of Lumon as a captive, the season two finale did answer some burning questions. (Spoilers, detailed plot threads, and very specific Severance speak obviously ahead.)

While her husband believes Gemma died in a car accident two years ago, she has actually been forced to undergo the “severance” procedure multiple times, creating a new “innie” every time she enters a new testing room. Once she’s in the room, her innie is forced to engage in an activity which coincides with things she fears (going to the dentist, airplane turbulence) or dreads (writing thank you cards). In each room and with each innie, Lumon seems to be testing if engaging in these activities she dislikes breaks the “severance barrier,” or allows her real “outie” personality to bleed through to her innie.

The last room waiting for her was Cold Harbor, which offers the biggest emotional test of all. As we learned in episode seven, titled “Chikhai Bardo,” Gemma and Mark (Adam Scott) had struggled for years to have a baby, undergoing rounds of IVF and miscarriage without success. One of their worst moments was when Mark angrily took apart a crib he had optimistically assembled in a spare room. As he tore it to pieces, the couple’s anguish was clear on both their faces. In Cold Harbor, Gemma is forced to disassemble the same crib, as a test to see if being forced to relive one of the worst moments of her life would break the severance barrier.

The couple’s arc throughout the season depicted how infertility can strain a marriage in a way that was both poignant and realistic, and getting it right was something Lichman tells Glamour she took incredibly seriously, speaking to friends who had suffered pregnancy loss and drawing on her own experiences as a woman.

This research and Lichman’s innate sense of the character led to one of “Chikhai Bardo’s” most heartbreaking moments, when Gemma apologizes to Mark after they arrive at the fertility clinic for the first time. The line was something Lachman improvised, when she realized Gemma would feel guilty that she couldn’t get pregnant even though, of course, she had no reason to.

“It just sort of came out,” she says. “A lot of women, even though it is not our fault and we have no control over it when something like that happens, we feel this need to apologize. We tend to do that. Generally, we tend to be quite apologetic about things that we can't control.”

Lachman chatted with Glamour about how her own experience as a mother informed her character, how she thinks Gemma ended up at Lumon, and that crazy Severance finale cliffhanger.

Glamour: Gemma is absent for much of season two, but then stars in “Chikhai Bardo,” which revealed a great deal about both her current situation at Lumon and her relationship with Mark. What was your first impression of the script?

Dichen Lachman: I was excited to have more to do and to be able to participate in the show more, obviously, but I was so very nervous. I wanted to make sure the infertility issues were handled the right way. That was also really important to Jessica [Lee Gagné], the director. She wanted to try and make that as authentic as possible, and so it was a mixture of excitement and fear.

It was such a lovely opportunity to really deal with something that women go through like that every day, but isn't often dealt with on television. I think it's important that it's represented, especially because women now, we're burdened with so many roles.

I think modern women are constantly being pulled in this direction and that direction. And sometimes we feel, I know I do, I feel like I'm failing at all of it. I try to be there for my daughter and my husband and our little family, but work pulls me away…It's really difficult. There's a lot to balance.

It’s so difficult! Being a working mom is so hard.

Patricia Arquette [who plays Harmony Cobel on the show] said something to me because I asked her, how did you cope? You know, with being both a mom and the powerhouse that she is. She told me… it's important for them to see mommy go to work.

The infertility scenes were incredibly realistic, in a way I had never seen before on TV. How did you and Adam approach telling this story?

Adam's as extraordinary a person as he is an actor. In terms of developing the relationship, I think his generosity and kindness helped create that sense of familiarity. In terms of the miscarriage scene, I spoke to a lot of women and it's more common than people admit or talk about. It’s one of those things that just isn't in the conversation. It's something that a lot of women feel like they go through alone, and it's very difficult, I think, for a male partner to understand what it feels like.

…It was so important for Jessica to make it feel authentic. I think both our desires to really deal with it that way, hopefully landed really well with the audience and the writers and Ben [Stiller, who executive produces the show] and everyone. Obviously they’re men who haven't been through something like this, but they were really encouraging in terms of just saying, whatever you guys want to do with this, however you want to approach it to me and Jessica. They were great that way.

You mentioned speaking to women who had experience with miscarriage, who were they?

I have a couple of girlfriends, I'll let them be nameless, but people who've had multiple miscarriages and also people who had multiple miscarriages in the IVF process. I've personally had my own experiences with things too, but I didn't want it to only be my point of view. I wanted it to not just make it like, oh, well, because everyone's experience is different.

In some instances where there's that real desire and you've tried multiple times, it's really heartbreaking and you feel like you are failing, you feel like the one thing that should come so naturally is so difficult. It's a real thing that women go through regularly. Often they feel like they're going through it by themselves,

There is a scene where Gemma has a miscarriage that I thought portrayed the experience so beautifully, without explicitly stating what happened. Afterwards, I was reading some of the show chatter on Reddit and there were multiple (male) posters being like, “Wait, what’s wrong with her? What happened?” When to me, and assume most women, it was pretty obvious.

I think the men who really understand what women have to go through, even on a regular basis on any given day, they're few and far between. We're constantly going through a transformation every month, and then as we age, it changes, and then we have to deal with a whole host of things…I actually wondered, when I watched it, I was like, I wonder if the male audience is actually going to understand what's going on.

There’s a lot of fan theories about Dr. Mauer (Robby Benson), the Lumon employee running the experiments on Gemma who seems to be a little obsessed with her. He was also lurking in the background when Mark and Gemma were at the fertility clinic, leading people to wonder if they somehow recruited Gemma from her treatment. What do you think?

I see the theories and I'm like, oh, wow, I didn't even think of that. It's incredibly fun to see the level of investment that people are putting into it and the level of thought into what situations could have got her in this whole thing. But I try to just tell myself, you know what? Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong. But at the end of the day, I'm just going to trust the process and enjoy what it is for now. And [show creator] Dan Erickson is such an incredible talent. I'm just looking forward to seeing what he comes up with. Although I know he's admitted to reading the Reddit thread. I don't know, maybe he'll find inspiration.

My main question on Gemma’s captivity is what’s with all the weird outfits for each different room?

I feel like it was Dr. Mauer's infatuation with her. He’s enjoyed living out this fantasy. I mean, this is me speculating—disclaimer—but I think the clothing would maybe inform her innie when she was in that space, and it would just change the whole environment and it was part of the experiment. That's how I justified it. He's left up to his own devices and then even [Lumon executive] Drummond says to him in an earlier episode, why are you wearing that ridiculous sweater? It seems like it's just part of his little experiment down there, and which makes it even more creepy.

There’s a lot of speculation as to how Gemma ended up trapped at Lumon, with Mark thinking she died in a car crash. Some think she was kidnapped, while others are speculating she went willingly, possibly because she was lured by a promise of an infertility treatment that could work. What do you think?

When my character says goodbye to Mark that day [of the alleged car crash], I really believe she was going to her friend's house. To be honest, I didn’t even ask Dan that question. But now that I've seen it, it does make me think, oh, maybe she knew that he would never want to go, and she did sign up. It's possible. The thing is that the possibilities are so endless, and I'm with the fans, I'm like, when are we going to see what happens?

You have a 9-year-old daughter. How did your own motherhood journey inform your portrayal of Gemma?

In terms of my daughter, I feel like she was coming whether I was planning it or not. I can't imagine my life without her, as hard as it is sometimes. I think that intense love and understanding of what that love is now, which I couldn't quite understand before, thinking about not having experienced it, especially when you're really wanting and yearning for it, helped me have more empathy, more understanding of how heartbreaking it was for her.

I have a feeling fans are going to have a lot of thoughts about Mark’s innie, Mark S., ditching Gemma in a stairwell to stay on the severed floor with his love interest, Helly R. (Britt Lower), rather than help outie Mark and Gemma flee to safety at the end of the finale. How do you feel about the cliffhanger?

Even though I'm on the show, I'm a fan of the show, and you're so torn. Britt's done such a wonderful job of giving this Helly character life and with Mark S. and their dynamic. Then episode seven does kind of throw a spinner in the works because finally you are introduced to what Mark had on the outside world, which feels meaningful too. So it's a real conundrum. Sometimes. I joke that they have to find a new, modern way of a timeshare relationship.

I was rooting for Gemma and Mark to escape, but I think I’m in the minority. A lot of the audience seems to be more pro-innie.

It's really interesting to see how connected the audience has become to the innies. But I mean, it makes sense. That's who they've been spending time with the most. So I don't know what's going to happen. I have no idea. I mean, the best emoji to describe it is just the brain exploding.

Well Ben Stiller has promised we won’t have to wait another three years for season three, which is good, because we can’t just leave Gemma in the stairwell!

I know, and it's so complicated too. She has so many different innies. I wonder if she'll do the backyard brain surgery. Who knows? It's like, what do you do when you have so many innies? I can't wait. But yeah, I have no idea what's going to happen, but I just hope the fans are really invigorated by episode 10 and they enjoy the ride.

[calliecopper]

Unpopular Shameless (U.S) opinions because I can't get them out of my head

Karen is one of the most overhated characters in the show. Hating Karen for Daddyzgirl but not hating Sheila for her sexual assult of Frank in s1e2 is hypocritical. Especially since that's likely where Karen learned that type of behavior from. Also, many of the other reasons people hate Karen can be pretty easily explained or understood, just like most flaws or bad decisions made by every other character in the show can be explained; for some reason people do not want to extend the same grace to Karen as they do other characters. I think a large part of this is due to the fact that characters used for comedic relief seem to generally be better liked by the fandom, and Karen is not often used as such.

On that note, Sheila had no right to take Hymie at the end of s2. Karen decided to give Hymie up for adoption specifically after the event wherein Sheila got drunk and crashed her babyshower, which ended in literal gunshots being fired. In s3 it's established that Karen called the Wong family because she believes Sheila to be unfit to care for him. While her motivations were likely also selfish, I have no doubt that Karen's personal experiences dealing with Sheila and her lackluster parenting led to her trying to keep Hymie away from Sheila. It's no coincidence in my mind that Karen's personality and her approach to motherhood changed drastically after the babyshower. So, Sheila's decision to take Hymie for herself was not only disrespectful to Karen, but it also pushed Karen to leave home underage and get herself into dangerous situations (which is kinda similar to Ian from s4, huh?)

Debbie is also severely overhated by fandom. I won't argue much for later seasons because I think all the characters suffered a large decline in their writing quality, but regardless, people hate Debbie in seasons 4-6 for reasons that I, again, don't really think are completely valid. I actually think Debbie's most interesting storylines occur in seasons 4-8/9, and I think that her poor decisions earn her a disproportionate amount of hate. I've seen some calling her the worst character on Shameless, and while she can be kinda annoying, I think her storyline honestly makes sense, and her journey into motherhood with Franny is really interesting to look at when you look at her own relationship with Monica.

Speaking of Monica; this is less of an opinion and more of an idea I've had before, but I think it would've been really interesting if we had seen a lot more of Monica. Specifically, I think it would've been cool to see Frank actually die in s4, and then spend s5-7 with Monica instead. Maybe see her popping in and leaving at more frequent intervals and explore more of her relationships with each of the individual kids, as well as seeing more of her antics and schemes instead of Frank's. I wanna know what she gets up to when she's away from home, just like we get to see what Frank gets up to. I think it would've been cool to primarily explore Frank's relationship and impact on the kids in the first part of the series, then Monica's, then after her death really explore the kids on their own without the active influences of their parents. Like Fiona said at the end of s4, the whole idea of "It's not Frank, not Monica, it's me."

Really really unpopular opinion here. Kev and V should've gotten a divorce. I really love them in the early seasons, but seeing them in s5 kinda made me think they weren't good together. I think having an arc of martial struggles and showing them working through it would've been really cool, but I don't really feel like they ever worked through their issues? It feels like the conversations V should've been having with Kev about how she's having trouble connecting with the kids were conversations she was actually having with Svetlana. I think they were shown to always have communication issues, and s5 could've shown growth there in their relationship, but all that happened was that they included a third into their relationship, whom they both eventually started treating very badly, and they fucked their feelings out. I don't feel like they ever reached a good space together. I honestly think an arc of divorce and learning to co-parent would've been best for them. Especially since showing the love in a relationship before and even during a divorce, and how much it really does hurt, would've been very realistic. Sometimes you really do love somebody and sometimes it just doesn't work.

Frank was a worse parent than Monica. People get this idea that Monica ruined Frank, and that he could've been a good father had he not met Monica. I'll say that the logic there isn't logic-ing when Sammy and Queenie are right there. Frank was fucked up before Monica. Even so, Frank was an infinitely worse parent than Monica. There's the mentality of "well at least he was here" but he really wasn't there. When he was he was actively mooching off of his children and bringing danger back into the home. He canonically goes on months long benders. He only returns home when his alternative living situations end up crashing and burning. He uses physical force against his children. Monica ran out on them. She took the squirrel fund money (which Frank did too) and spent it all. In her attempt to be a fun mother she made life actively harder for the kids. She was by no means a perfect mother, but never do I believe that she had malicious intent or a desire to actively harm her children. She's not a good parent, but the idea that she was the worse one pisses me off so bad. This idea that "Frank could've been a good parent" actually applies more to Monica. If she hadn't met Frank and had gotten the help she needed, she could've been a good mother.

I like Sammi in s4 and think she's is a good and interesting character. I don't really like what they did with her in s5, but I do think her calling the MPs on Ian was an interesting plot point. If they'd made an effort to make Sammi likeable in s5 instead of painting her as a psychotic bitch, I think it would've provided more nuance to the end of s5. Especially since, similar to the "Mandy hitting Karen with a car" incident is praised, Mickey almost killing Sammi is seen as a "deserved" moment simply because Sammi was an annoying character. The punishment absolutely does not fit the crime, and while it was accidental, Mickey did fully intend on torturing Sammi and he deserved to go to prison for it. The women of this show really are hated more than they deserve to be, but I blame the decline in writing quality for some of that. Not all of it though.

Ian and Mickey breaking up in s5 was the healthiest thing for them at that point in time. There's mixed opinions on why Ian broke up with Mickey, but I've always been under the impression that Ian didn't want to burden Mickey. Based off his s10 hesitancy to get married, the whole idea of "how do you know you want to be with me, I'm bipolar" suggests to me that Ian was struggling with those feelings immediately post diagnosis, and thus went about a slightly self-destructive route of leaving Mickey before he either got left or ruined them both. I don't think Ian was really correct in that thinking, but I do think that he needed to do some growing outside of a relationship for awhile. I think Mickey also needed to grow a bit. I don't really like how their relationship is handled s7-11, but I think them breaking up and coming back together in a healthier way was the best move for them to avoid ruining each other.

That's all for now maybe I'll add more later but yeah. I love pretty much every character on this show; the whole point is that they're morally gray.

[syrena-del-mar]

Blind Spots of Motherhood: Last Twilight, Episode 10

We're coming off of the emotional rollercoaster of last week's episode and seeing the consequences of Day and Mhok's getaway. And the consequences are big, which not even Night can assuage.

I love scouring the tags as I watch Last Twilight, and I've been seeing many call Day's mom evil or a narcissist. In my opinion, she does not fit the bill (if you're looking for one that is, go watch Twins, now that's a narcissist). There's a tendency of wanting to villainize mothers, and BLs do a great job of giving us mothers that do fill that role, but I sincerely don't think that's the story P'Aof is trying to tell us here. Rather than evil, I think her arc is more about being a flawed mother that does more harm than good through overparenting, her perceiving Day to be more vulnerable than he really is, and sidelining of Night.

Stages of Adjustment to Vision Loss

Just like the seven stages of grief, similarly there's a theory about the seven phases of adjusting to vision loss. The Stages of Adjustment applies not only to the one suffering the vision loss, but even their friends and family.

Phase 1: Trauma, where personal attitudes and generalization form one's personal view of a person who is blind takes over.

Phase 2: Shock and Denial. Self-explanatory.

Phase 3: Mourning and Withdrawal, it's where the loss of regular activities and routines occur.

Phase 4: Succumbing and Depression occurs when an individual is unable to come to terms with the sudden low vision/blindness and they stop caring for themselves. Feelings of inadequacy becomes prevalent.

Phase 5: Reassessment and Reaffirmation occurs when individuals regain and maintain control of their life. Loved ones play a significant role in assisting them to reach this independence at this stage.

Phase 6: Coping and Mobilization happens when individuals develop coping techniques to live with the vision loss and acknowledge their abilities and accept when the need assistance.

Phase 7: Self-Acceptance and Self-Esteem occurs when the individual realizes that they have value and their loss of vision is just one of the many attributes.

When the Last Twilight first started, we met Day as he was dealing with Phase 3 and 4. With the help of Mhok, we've seen Day grow in his independence, but also come to terms that his vision loss may be forever. He no longer was thinking and hoping for that transplant surgery, he wasn't even counting on it anymore. Instead, with the help of Mhok (and Night), Day was able to reach Phase 6 and was transitioning into Phase 7.

But just as Day was moving on with his, his mother wasn't. She's still struggling with his disability and has gotten stuck in Phase 3 and 4, just as Day had been. She's so blinded by Day's disability, that she's drowning in the fears of what could happen to Day rather than seeing the strides of improvement that he has made.

Overprotective Parenting fails in Harm Reduction: Day

"Expecting him to be independent at one time and overprotecting him at another will only result in a frustrated youngster. It is important to judge and treat the blind child fairly; not indulging him, yet not setting goals and expectations so high that he is discouraged." -The Blind Child: Becoming an Independent Adult

Day's mother is frustrating, to say the least. She is so incredibly misguided in how she treats both of her sons, it's no surprise that Day locks himself away into the cavern of his bedroom.

She only sees Day for his disability. Acknowledging and accepting that Day is blind is important, and that does signify life adjustments, but that doesn't mean making Day's blindness the only thing about him. She forgets that Day was a full-functioning adult that had his own lifestyle before he lost his sight. She's only come to known Day for his blindness. She's the one that puts his blindness at the forefront.

She wants him to get out of his bedroom, to stop locking people out, but once he has some sense of independence, apart from his family, now she's afraid? Her son, vision loss or no vision loss, is an adult, but instead of giving him such dignity, she regresses and infantilizes him. She pushes him back into that suffocatingly big bedroom. She takes away his phone, his internet, every tool that connects him to the outside world. She takes away what little independence he had started to build up again.

Any good parent would be worried about their child who has undergone a traumatic event, but over-protecting does more harm than good. In her anxieties, she ends up resorting to using unintentionally abusive tactics. Yes, Day would be physically fine, but in her overprotectiveness, she fails to realize that it could lead to dependency inducement, learned helplessness, and bouts of depression. Day's mother fails to realize that taking away any autonomy that Day has only started rebuilding, would only result in Day's emotional state worsening.

Blindness doesn't have to mean debilitating, but locking your son up in his room without any way to interact with the world around him that he is trying to relearn? That's more crippling than any vision loss could ever be.

Readjusting as the Glass Child: Night

"The most egregious form of rejection that anyone can ever experience is parental rejection" -Is Rejection, Parental Abandonment or Neglect a Trigger for Higher Perceived Guilt in Adolescents

Oh man, the pain I felt for Night this whole episode was next level. The idea of a glass child is not one's delicateness but rather as a sibling of a individual with disabilities, the sibling becomes invisible to the parents, only seen when the parents need them. If it wasn't obvious before, it's clear that this was the role that their mother was forcing Night into.

There's nothing that hurts worse than the sharp words of a mother directed to her child. His mother explicitly blaming Night for Day's disability was a new low-blow. Night had already been beating himself up for the accident, his father (who doesn't even live with them) knew that, but seemingly their mother was oblivious. The only one that Night could rely on was an outsider, a father that they hadn't been in contact with for years. Their mother created that environment by not paying attention to her other son, who was also in that accident.

Nothing fuels sibling rivalry like preferential treatment from parents. Even worse when one has to be the caretaker of the other when they already have a fractured relationship. Instead of easing the tension between the two brothers, their mother is too busy worrying solely for Day without accounting for Night. Caretaker burnout is already incredibly exhausting when you're caring for a loved one, but Night has personal guilt and Day's resentment to deal with as well. Not once does their mother ask him how he's doing, if Night is alright.

Night is the forgotten child, the child that's expected to take care of his brother no matter what, no matter how independent Day has become. She has parentified Night without any consideration of how he was doing or what was going on in his life. This was probably already a running theme as they grew up, assuming from their positioning in the family portrait. In doing so, she unknowingly worsens the strife with the brothers, making Day believe that Night had only been "behaving well" in order to win some preferential treatment from her.

Even on Christmas, their mother only cares for Day, feeding him first and putting food on his spoon, body fully turned against Night. In that scene, visually Night seems like he's intruding and he feels it as well! It's why he excuses himself, saying that he's going to meet up with some friends. Even after being forgiven by Day, his mother doesn't make any effort to include Night other than just having him at the table. It's as if he wasn't part of their nuclear family, just a convenient body that is there to help out as Day adjusts to his new life. If it hadn't been for Day, Night would have left that table that night and would have believed that nobody cared for him. I'm hoping this makes her confront and reassess how she's treated Night, now and in the past.

It's ironic, even though Day is blind and held a lot of contempt for his brother, he was still saw Night and all his struggles. Meanwhile, their mother was seeing right through him, blaming him for what happened to Day. Driving a dagger, that Night had already stabbed himself with, even deeper.

Final Thoughts

I'm not quite ready to jump on the 'Mother Gothel' train for Day and Night's mom. I think she is juggling being a career woman and being a mother at the same time, while failing to adjust to Day's blindness and making mistakes in her parenting as a result.

I also don't think it's out of maliciousness or self-importance, either. When I see their mother, it's as if she's trying to save a sinking boat that is already pierced by numerous holes. There's no going back to their lives before Day's blindness. She needs to adjust her priorities, because disregarding Night and locking up Day is not the answer.

This episode was frustrating, not because I found her to be outright abusive, but because of her worries she ends up hurting her sons even more. No parent is perfect, and they can hurt you while thinking they're acting in your best interest, but they have to be willing to love and let their kids learn on their own.

[evesaintyves]

I just love the way you write Tonks, she's so much bolshy and dirty and crass, she feels like a real auror and an actual badass that people wouldn't want to mees with! I liked Tonks in books but I admit I was a bit bored by her 'cutesy sweetheart' personality..

thank you so much, that's such a kind thing to say! ❤️ i'm gonna ramble about this a bit if you don't mind!

obviously i extrapolate a lot, but i think there are seeds of that bolshiness etc in canon. from her very first scene we see Tonks kind of talking shit about Harry's house (and her parents!) and giving her mentor, a pretty intimidating dude, guff in front of everyone. she stands up to Remus when he deadnames her (though i agree with the common fanon interpretation that they're flirting a bit in that exchange). she's introduced as a character who speaks her mind and doesn't take any shit*. all of that is on a mission and in front of a kid, so i imagine she's probably even a little more outspoken under other circumstances. it's also clear to me that she's got to be strong-willed, a little singleminded, incredibly talented, and probably a little arrogant to make it as an auror so young: she talks about how difficult it is to qualify and not many do. she's also canonically kind of reactionary and impulsive - i mean, that's how she dies.

some of my characterization of tonks is just personal - so much of her plotline is pretty sad, and her personality disappears entirely toward the end as she becomes a fulcrum for lupin's character arc. and her death, honestly, is kind of stupid. so i feel this urge to give her some justice and a little bit of a fuller personhood in the way i write her.

to me, tonks is (on top of being obviously interpretable as queer) clearly punk/alternative coded, withe the hair and the way she speaks to her elders and her sense of humor. i'm old and i was a tween/young teen in the mid/late nineties when tonks would have been around, and i remember how discovering riot grrl and queer punk bands of that era completely changed the way i thought about myself and the standards i was being held to and just the possibilities for what girls could do and how they could exist in the world and in their own bodies. being gross and crude, rejecting and subverting and playing with the power of the male gaze, talking openly about fucking and bleeding and being gay and being angry: it all seemed like a superpower to me.

tonks is clearly, from the start, in a state of experimentation with her own identity - the way she changes her hair from violet to pink in front of harry - and she's uniquely positioned as a metamorphmagus to create herself from scratch whenever she likes. it reminds me so much of being a kid and discovering that there were all of these new possibilities for who i could be, if i could be brave enough to try them. and we know that Tonks is brave 😉. so like, why not write a Tonks who is liberated, doesn't give a fuck, insists that the world make room for her? i think the contrast with people-pleaser overthinker self-hater lupin is really irresistible, too.

my vision of tonks is as a person i would have looked up to as a kid at that time, but who is still from her pov very much figuring her shit out and trying to construct a self that gives her peace and fulfillment. she dies in that state of flux - having also just undergone the enormous identity-changes of marriage and motherhood. she's fascinating! i insist on it!

so thank you again, such a sweet ask!

* i bet she put up with a ton of bullshit trying to be in a relationship with lupin tho smh girl i mean like