#he already has Issues with his ''boyfriends'' treating him in a way he perceives as Parent/Child

[skunkes]

micro comic with no real point or punchline i just have conversations i wanna draw out sometimes

[yinwaryuri]

I cannot begin to summarize how Monster Next Door finally portrayed a flawed parent getting a good ending in a way that satisfied me. I have such beef with Thai BLs constantly giving our mains difficult parents, terrible asshole parents even, and then just justifying the way they treated their child like shit as being parental love and their kid accepts an apology (not you Bed Friend, the holy grail of giving shitty parents their due).

The tension between Diew and his mother, Kade, is obvious, and I was really afraid that the issue would be brushed off as casually as all the rest, due to my past viewing experiences. For a good portion of the show, she seemed overly concerned and harsh toward Diew and it really bothered me.

It was this visual that made things really click for me:

(also I'm sorry for the quality of photos of the show, Gaga now seems to turn the screen black when I try to take a screenshot on my laptop, so I took them with my phone)

Loss of a loved one is hard to talk about with strangers, but it's often more difficult to discuss it with other loved ones who knew them. Diew's father meant everything to him in his childhood because their personalities and dispositions made it easier to enjoy spending time together. I cannot speak as a parent, but I can only imagine the loneliness generated by the loss of a partner (losing a main emotional support you now desperately need) and then watching your child deal with grief by withdrawing from you (a child you have, up until now, not established a relationship as close as your late partner had).

God had the fortune of meeting Diew in the present, and that allowed him to get to know him without any preconceived notions of who he was to influence that development. Kade didn't have that luxury; being a parent means seeing your child through every stage of life and adapting to the changes that come with them. I can only imagine how much harder that had to be when she became a single mother and the clash of personalities made it significantly harder to connect. At some point, she clearly clung to a version of Diew that at least made her feel relevant by presenting her love as wanting to remove all possible worries.

Grieving separately being the main wedge between them runs with some of the themes of the show, I believe. We've watched God and Diew grow together and sort out their differences because ultimately they wanted the same thing - to show they are interested and care for each other - but their challenges presented mostly in how they went about it. Diew and his mother also care about each other. The strain is part of that love and how it has also been weighed down by years of misunderstanding and uncertainty.

Kade recognizing her failure to meet Diew in the middle and letting him know how she felt about it was HUGE to me. So many people will refuse to recognize the failure, and if they do recognize it they do not want to admit it for what it is, much less voice how they feel about it. Also disappointment in one's self as a mother, I believe, is incredibly relatable. It doesn't absolve all wrongs, but it's an incredibly important factor in being willing to do better.

She isn't blaming him here. She isn't using his feelings against him. She apologized without trying to erase what happened. She is simply letting him know that all she wanted was to be closer.

And then Diew seizes the moment. He's grown up and become someone less recognizable to the person she already didn't know very well. That doesn't mean they can't work things out.

Of course this is the solution. This is the green flag communication boyfriends show. But moreover, it's about realizing that life and people come with differences and changes and that doesn't mean that things have to go wrong or end badly. Often the fears that get built up in our heads - the monsters we first perceive them as - are not as scary as they seem, if they are at all. If growth is going to happen, we have to face them.

Excuse me while I sob in the corner, but this response makes Diew such an exceptional character to me. It demonstrates how he has changed from the beginning of the narrative but also remained true to himself. He has always needed someone patient and kind enough to listen to him as attentively as God does. Being heard for what he needs has done him wonders. His struggle to reveal the things that deeply hurt him and seeing how not sharing them can hurt the people he loves in return was an important lesson. Now that his mom has finally shared her pain, the pain that started years ago by no fault of either of them, he can extend that love toward her in a way he knows will reach her.

Diew and his mother are equal in how they can move forward. The relationship isn't treated like a hole in the wall to putty over, but truly something that can be built upon a newer and stronger foundation. I greatly enjoyed the finale as a whole, but this aspect of it tugged at my heart strings personally. I adore this show. Forever and ever.

[marigoldbaker]

Bestie, I need to know why Xander/Willow cheating made sense because I cannot send my brain to the dimension you live and love from but I WANT to.

love this energy! <3

so first of all this meta by @petpluto covers a lot of the points that i think make this beat so compelling (willow and xander's history as neglected/abused kids who have been each other's Person since childhood) but for me i am also really fascinated by how gorgeously it highlights some key issues that willow and xander both struggle with -- issues that manifest really neatly in this specific beat for both of them.

while willow has absolutely grown to love oz, there's a moment in "innocence" that i think is really key to understanding how oz and xander occupy a similar space: willow asking if oz wants to make out with her pretty much directly after finding out about xander and cordelia. oz himself points out within the text: this offer has literally nothing to do with oz as a person and EVERYTHING to do with willow's desire to Flip Xander Off, so we already have this pre-existing situation where willow's romantic decisions are not at all linked to her romantic feelings! even if willow is 100 percent absolutely in love with oz, and i do think that the show plays it like that, there's a lot of psychological stuff that goes into her decision to want to be with xander. the show has established that she's attracted to him, obvs, AND i think that willow and her critically low self-esteem would be really interested in What It Represents to be the kind of girl who has two boys interested in her, particularly after having spent SO LONG waiting for xander in particular to be interested in her! there's also this really special allure in knowing that xander is dating cordelia chase, hottest girl in school, but literally Cannot Resist his Magnetic Pull to willow! like that has to be such an ego boost for her. i can definitely see that playing a part.

xander, meanwhile, is very deliberately making this choice because he does not see cordelia as a safe bet. we see this all through the way that he treats her in season three: he convinces himself in "anne" that she's been cheating on him over the summer with a Hotter Guy (with literally no evidence!), and CRUCIALLY, he is visibly thrown by the notion of being "locker door material" in "lover's walk," suggesting not just that he's guilty about willow but that he just genuinely cannot picture a situation where cordelia is actually proud about being his girlfriend. i think the way that their relationship sprung up did a lot of damage to both of them, because it was born out of shame! both of them were constantly trying to hide this because they didn't want their friends to see them with someone who they knew their friends fucking hated. xander and cordelia share this desire to be perceived as Cool, usually by a specific group of people, and it's this shared desire that has them unified in their decision to keep their relationship a secret in season two. thing is, though, we are shown so many moments where BOTH xander and cordelia express their deeper insecurities and have their partner essentially laugh in their face! fandom has dissected the moments where xander is a shitty boyfriend, but cordelia is also a DEEPLY shitty girlfriend in season two right up until they "go public." (see: xander asking cordelia to go as his date to buffy's birthday party & her saying sharply that she won't because she's ashamed of him/cordelia expressing jealousy and hurt re: xander favoring buffy and willow over her and him making fun of her for it.) her love for him is apparent to us as viewers as soon as the valentine's day fiasco, but xander himself does not trust that love, and in some ways does not actually believe himself capable of hurting cordelia. he does not know that she loves him, and on some level feels that this thing is going to blow up in his face anyway, so it could be argued that starting up a clandestine affair with willow would be a neat and effective way to take control of the inevitable horrible end. (it is also an excellent precursor to his decision to leave anya at the altar -- he wants to be the reason that things fall apart, because he cannot stand the thought of these incredible women who he does not feel worthy of leaving him of their own volition! he has to drive them away himself!)

and as a little footnote, we get the foreshadowing for xander's changing feelings re: willow in becoming pt. 2! xander confesses his love to willow by her bedside, and willow, half-conscious, asks for oz. one could argue that this is a "best friend" love confession, and i do think that it is, but i also think that best friends + teenage hormones can be a really tricky business, and it is very understandable that wires might get crossed there (especially with xander, who has these really rigid expectations about what he as a guy is Supposed To Do, Be, And Feel, and in large part feels as though he's failing at all of them, so of course he overcompensates with fucked up toxic masculinity.) xander is very obviously thrown by willow wanting oz there instead of him, and expresses his deep displeasure with willow/oz being cute and couple-y consistently throughout the latter half of season two. he is just as jealous of oz as willow is jealous of cordelia. again, imo, WAY more complicated than "he has romantic feelings for willow," and a lot of this i think can be much more compelling if seen through the lens of "my best friend is slipping away and becoming someone else's person and i cannot fucking take that. i have to grab them before they're gone, and i know i can, because i know them."

[catiuapavel]

for the ask meme: tactics ogre & final fantasy tactics lol

Tactics Ogre

the character i least understand

I will say if I were Vernotta, I'd simply push my ugly husband the king down the stairs and forgive the handmaiden he had great power and influence over but I guess you can't make much out of a royal with 5 lines and a half who is only ever seen treating a servant cruelly.

interactions i enjoyed the most

I love Catiua's interactions with and about the Dark Knights but more so with Lanselot's. The understanding she shows of him and the genuine admiration she has for his methods, even after he abandons her... It holds something over me. He also understands her and uses this to further his goals but I also thinks he underestimates how much she gets him in return.

I always have this praise she has for him on Princess route when she meets Barbas and martym in the Hanging Gardens in mind and the respect she has for what he accomplished in Lodis and for how he intended to put her on the throne. She parallels him in a few aspects and she proves this with this dialogue.

I also appreciate Catiua and Denam's exhanges a great deal. A lot of care was put into writing a convincing yet trouble adoptive sibling dynamic.

the character who scares me the most

Oz? In a morbid "I would still let him remove my fingernails one by one" way. I'm enthralled yet also terrified.

Otherwise... Barbas.

the character who is mostly like me

(looks endearingly at Chaos Vyce) He's just like me......

In truth 90% of Vyce's character couldn't be less like me but he has this one line in his duel on Chaos route that has made me feel seen and understood in a rare way and echoed my own complicated feelings on a shared trauma so as a result, he's the character who is mostly like me.

hottest looks character

dating me is crazy like you really have to be at peace with the fact that you're a placeholder until I meet ozma moh glacius

one thing i dislike about my fave character

I once read that Matsuno would have liked to add 3 entire routes to chapter 4 for Vyce, Denam and Catiua and ever since I read this I cry myself to sleep at how interesting a hypothetical entire Princess route could have been. Alas, games do not have eternal budgets and eternal time for development.

one thing i like about my hated character

I do not know if I have a most hated character but at the bottom of the "people I do not care about" list is Bayin.

Bayin always hates me, no matter the playthrough. I have to respect him for that. Seethe more, old man.

a quote or scene that haunts me

Imagine you have been playing this game for years and jumping back through anchor points over and over and you look at your timeline one day in the Warren report to see the sidequests you've completed and you see a lost character icon somewhere and the scene description does not sound remotely familiar. It's a scene that's somehow appeared because you never properly completed a sidequest in one of your many re-plays.

You watch it. You feel hollow. You understand why this was so far hidden in the report. You lay awake thinking about it at night every week.

That's the scene.

a death that left me indifferent

Xapan on chaos route. I mean, good for you Vyce for passing your nerves on him!

a character i wish died but didn’t

Wait, you mean there are characters who make it out unscathed? The thing about Tactics Ogre is that you may just get your character death wish in another route- or you can kill them yourselves if they're recruitable.

That being daid I would like nothing more than to see Balxephon dead in an upcoming sequel, in the way you want to see a character you adore die the miserable death they deserve.

my ship that never sailed

Most of my Tactics Ogre ships didn't sail but I usually like them one-sided, dead, miserable or downright toxic so I don't usually care to see them sail.

I will however say I desperately wanted Canopus/Andoras to sail (clenches fist)

----

Final Fantasy Tactics

the character i least understand

I think maybe... Argath? I can't understand being this much of a little bitch sorry.

interactions i enjoyed the most

Naturally I enjoyed Ovelia and Delita's interactions the most, I think theirs may be the most interesting ones in the game, I especially loved to see how it spiraled down in the end and he became gradually less aware to how miserable he was making her yet how you could read some genuine care toward her which she could no longer perceive herself.

Also the way she misunderstands him in the end and thinks him to be more callous than he actually is, like in this scene where she spies on him and interprets him to murder Valmafra in cold blood simply because she lacks a clear view on the event, is so good. It's a tragedy how they both can't read the other in the end and harm each other as a result (And I eat this up).

the character who scares me the most

I mean anyone should be rightfully terrified of any of the Lucavi for a start but I have to say, were I to dine with Dycedarg, I'd be terrified to touch my plate.

the character who is mostly like me

I asked my boyfriend this question and he replied "Tietra, because she is cute... and has brown hair... and probably reads books" which I find hilarious so I will roll with it. I guess she looks most like me at the very least?

Generally there is often something about the way Matsuno explores family issue, especially between siblings, that's just relatable in a way not many other games are. And for this reason I always relate to Rapha in how she feels about Marach.

hottest looks character

Zalbaag Beoulve (fans self). He isn't my usual type but he has something of an aura.

one thing i dislike about my fave character

My favourite character is Delita and what I truly hate about Delita is that I cannot make a joke about Delita's wrongdoings without the most annoying Delita haters and Delita lovers showing up in my mentions to fight because they have no humour.

They're coming for me already, I have to go.

one thing i like about my hated character

I absolutely love how Barrington gets thrown off the building. There he goes!

a quote or scene that haunts me

Did you get your end in all of this, Ramza? I... I got this.

😶😶😶😶😶😶😶😶

a death that left me indifferent

Sadly I feel nothing when the Templars die (at the exception of Isilud and Wiegraf). I just kill the rest and move on.

a character i wish died but didn’t

Must we ask for more casualties......

Oh Ovelia apparently? Maybe ? Sometimes I recall how you sent me this article about how Matsuno intended for her to survive the epilogue and I simply prefer my miserable interpretation so that is what I will stick to.

my ship that never sailed

Alma/Ovelia sometimes you just want girls to find love together in their lonely convent

[life-rewritten]

SKAM ESPANA- The characterisation/villainization of Kasim

The choices of episode 4 of Skam Espana has caused another polarising reaction, some people feel frustrated and annoyed at some of the actions of some characters, whilst others feel insulted and upset about the lost potential of the show with Kasim and others. I've seen many comments insulting the writing of the shows villainising some of the characters and just overall dropping the show for the decision to make Kasim's storyline replace the Even/Mikael storyline. These reactions are the reason I've decided to break down the choice the writers made when going with this storyline and why it shows excellent understanding and writing of the message of Season 4. Also you can check out my previous post on the choices of these writers and why it’s brilliant to make Dani Yousef here: 

THE MESSAGE OF SKAM

When people choose to watch the Skam universe, it still confuses me about the reactions of surprise or anger when the show tells the story. So before I break down the character dynamics of Isak and Kasim and how they're mirror characters/shadow characters. I want to focus on the meaning of Skam.

 Skam in Noweirgian is shame. Basically, the insecurities that surround this generation's teens as they grow up with perspectives embedded by societal norms. The topics discussed usually revolve around self-discovery and how these insecurities/fear affect the chosen character in a world that disagrees with how they want to express themselves. We've had alienation, depression and self actualisation with stigma from cheating, we've had topics of feminism vs sexualisation, violence and prejudice and stigma of being a  sexual harassment victim, we've had conversations on LGBT, internalised homophobia vs the stigma of having a mental disorder, and lastly, we've had religion, culture and race vs the stigma of feeling cultural dissociation on some of the rules/agreements within these aspects. 

Each character in Skam goes through the arc where they make mistakes due to their perceived skam; they hurt, use, or judge because of their own opinions and perspectives on the issue and they realise that they are hypocritical or also wrong when they fall in love with someone who represents a foil to their own insecurity. The need to be with their romantic interests is what catalyses them to make drastic decisions and finally gain self actualisation, but it also ends up having a hopeful outcome, that with love and treating people equally and right,  that these insecurities can be overcome and everyone can be who they want to be. It's what made this show so relatable, reliable and also crucial for our generation youths. It's what made this incredibly written; humans who make mistakes and learn and grow from it whilst also causing the audience to think introspectively about their own skam and their own journey to self actualisation and self-love. 

It makes no sense why people go into this show expecting perfect characters who make no flaws or see things wrongly and make decisions on those wrong perspectives. It makes no sense why people feel so triggered when they know what the skam of the character is. They know that at first, it won't be represented correctly because the show is in our main character's perspective, they need to learn about their flawed views on their skam and overcome it. It's only until the ending; the issues of the show are resolved. So why are people so triggered when scenes show the reality of the world and these characters ? Especially when we're just in episode 4? It makes no sense to me.

So  this is why I want to talk about the Villanisation of Kasim and what the writers want to achieve with this character.

SKAM SEASON 4: DISCUSSING THE EFFECTS OF RELIGION AND INTERNALISED HOMOPHOBIA ON THE YOUTH

In Season 4 of OG Skam (Based on Amira's counterpart Sana), one of the main storylines interweaving with her questioning how people view her religion is connected with her brother, his friends and her new friendship with Isak. (the main character of season 3). The mystery surrounding how the relationship of Isak's boyfriend was damaged with Sana's brother's friendship group and her and her love interests perspectives on how religion played a part of it, culminates into a fight between the two worlds when Sana's brother punches Isak. This leads to Islamaphobic comments from people who like Sana judged her brother on his religion, and it's the stereotypical link to homophobia. As the story unveils the truth is that due to fear and perspective of religion plus internalised homophobia, Even (Isak's boyfriend) was hurt when he kissed Mikael. He ran away after that leaving both his friends confused and also some (Yousef) having a new perspective on the rules of religion. At the end of the season Even reunites with the group, and Sana realises that she also had adopted the mindset of the world when it comes to her religion and learns to communicate and trust that people aren't against her faith and beliefs.  Her skam mostly throughout the season is her guilt for her religion and conviction's perceived laws/opinions.  So how does this link to Skam Espana and its own message towards this topic?

SKAM ESPANA: KASIM BECOMES ISAK

This storyline is explored in Skam Espana by putting its Sana, Amira even more affected and connected to the source of the message. Amira's best friend brother Kasim going through his own internalised homophobia and flawed perspectives of religion (Just like Mikael and Even in OG), uses Amira as a way to run away from his skam. However Amira's own beliefs on the truth and the fact that she has a different love interest ends up causing her best friend to misunderstand her as someone who is using her brother and is going against her true beliefs/faith (Basically going against her culture and religion for a white guy) - From this already you can see the topics of Skam S4 already showing up here, the same flawed perspectives/ guilt of religion is placed on Kasim, the outcomes of religion and internalised homophobia actually affects Amira more because it's affecting her own reputation as an excellent Muslim friend, and the questions of being torn between two worlds stem from the fact that Amira is in love with her other best friend's brother who represents the non-religious aspect in her life, vs the world wanting her and Kasim  (another brother of her best friend) to be together which connects the religious part of her life.  Stay with me.

In a way Kasim's storyline connects to other characters as well; He represents Isak's internalised homophobia journey in OG S3 when he met Even (Kasim is in love with Lucas), he represents Elias (Sana's brother) dissociation from his culture and his pressure to be a good Muslim older brother, he presents Yousef as well because of his perspectives on religion and LGBT, he also represents even Sana for his own skam, which is his religion and feeling torn between two worlds/ideologies as he falls for someone who is not of his race and beliefs.

But this is what's so brilliant about this choice, he's POC character who is a representation of a POC Muslim Gay character, with his own skam, and is written with depth, and characterisation and is also given a leading role in this season. This decision to write him this way does not villanise him but actually makes the audience pay attention to him and learn from him like any other skam main characters. He's important and human, and he's a well-written character. That's why it makes no sense to me why people think Skam Espana is villainising and not representing this message well. But let's continue breaking down this character:

Kasim as Isak: The journey of a LGBT’s self actualisation whilst dealing with internalised homophobia

In season 3 of OG Skam, and also towards the end of the first season, we see a story of Isak as he deals with coming out to his peers and accepting his sexuality. Isak makes many mistakes from the first season because of his internalised homophobia. He breaks up the relationship of his best friend and girlfriend (due to jealousy and feelings for the guy), he ends up running away from his problems and enters fake relationships with girls using them as beards. He also later forms a relationship with Emma as he falls in love with Even. See the similarities with Kasim, when we watch Isak's season? We feel for him because we understand the choices he makes whilst wrong is a human thing to do, especially dealing with his skam, and we cheer for him as we watch him overcome all this to choose Even. By the end of his journey Isak is proudly gay, in love and happy. And he has become one of the most loved characters in Skam due to his relatability and message he represents.

Kasim is the same, he makes mistakes hurts the ones he loves because of his internalised homophobia, he lies and hides behind other people especially Amira who's been dragged into it as his beard (even though she hates lying and is in love with someone else) and he manipulates situations to keep on avoiding his skam. He's doing precisely what Isak did; he's being a normal teenage LGBT boy going through coming out and dealing with internalised homophobia. For him, the pressure is the same as Isak. Isak also deals with religion as a barrier in his season (he perceives his mum and Sana at first as homophobic, he also feels pressure in coming out to his friends and he lies to his loved ones about Even for a bit as well.)

Kasim's own issues stem from the fact that he's also religious, even more, pressured to follow his traditions and culture figureheads the 'figure head' of his household now his father is dead, and so has a lot expected from him by many people in his family. It makes sense why he's going through what he's going through and even though it's not right since we see the outcomes of his skam on others like Amira, we understand why he does what he does. In the end, you guys are watching an Isak season told from the perspective of an Emma/Sarah (his beards) in this season. Emma being Amira in this case despite not actually having feelings for Kasim. In the end of the day, Isak was not a villain,  just a teenage boy who makes mistakes, Skam Espana has done the same for Kasim.

Kasim as Elias: The journey of a POC's self-acceptance whilst dealing with the pressure of Cultural expectations and tradition

In  Season 4 of Skam OG, we look at Elias Sana's brother. At first, he seems to get away from the constraints of religious expectations because Sana thinks he does, (she thinks he gets away with more stuff because he's a man) and yes this might seem so. Still, we do see that Elias is also going through pressure, it causes him to drink and act out, and when he speaks to Sana, later on, he admits he also feels in the middle of religion and what he wants to do as a teenage boy. This is also explored more in Skam France Season 4, Elias's mirror character is shown to be seen as a failure due to not meeting the expectations of his parents and also is quite secretive about what he does outside of the household like date a racist for example. (yes that was a snide remark but it had to be made.)  

But what I'm trying to say is Kasim is also based on this character, first from Amira's perspective we see how he can get away with following religious and cultural expectations by hiding who he really is, and by acting out secretly still keeping his reputation intact. But also from his own admittance and Dounia's (his sister and Amira's best friend) perspective on the character. We can see that he's under a lot of pressure to be perfect for people. Dounia especially looks up to him and is so grateful for his presence in her life when their dad died, she replaces him as the father figure in her life who can do no wrong, and he's expected to uphold religious and traditional beliefs of his household because he's the main figurehead. It's incredibly stressful, so he acts out, he lies about Lucas which Lucas hates, and he uses ways to manipulate situations like using Amira (a perfect beard to make him look macho and 'right')

Kasim becomes the Elias representative but with more depth, more focus and more characterisation. Skam Espana has actually given a new POC more priority than his counter representatives, he's actually more than just a brother to one of the characters, he's just like a main character with his own self-acceptance journey, and that's incredible for this writing team.

Kasim as Yousef: The journey of a Muslim POC's  self discovery whilst dealing with stereotypical perspectives of religion

Yousef is the love interest in OG Skam. He is the reason for why Sana has to overcome her own prejudices, and skam and learn to love her self. He's also the connection to her torn between two worlds dilemma that she goes through with her arc. Kasim starts off as a perceived Yousef by the audience; he's perceived as a perfect POC, Muslim and love interest. But like Yousef, Kasim has his own flaws, his overall close-minded perspective on religion is similar to how Yousef's own opinion to the religion is, instead of actually still wanting to embrace his self as a Muslim, Yousef removes himself from everything to do with it (we could argue this since he does always follow the values of behaviour and morals), but he does seem negatively biased against religion even though he falls in love with someone who is very religious.

I'm not saying Yousef is wrong in his opinions, I see him like every other character human with his views and his own beliefs, and that's great. But Kasim is an exploration of that close-minded perspective on how religion divides people, how religion is discriminatory and closeminded. Kasim chooses to do what he does because of his own opinions on religion; he never really thinks there's a hope that religion doesn't have to be an issue in his life. It makes sense, but as we see from other characters in the show, religious perspectives do not mean entirely close-minded, homophobic or discriminatory opinions, in fact, Amira is the accurate representation of what religious people are like nowadays, a love for the traditions, and rules which every Sana has a speech about this opinion on religion and homophobia in Isak's season, religion should not be an excuse for treating someone awfully etc., Amira and Sana show that you can be openminded, can agree with love is love despite customary laws from ages ago saying it's wrong. It's about the person's own character, not the religion its self. But this is why I love this addition of this character mostly because he causes conversations like this, about the message of the show, the flawed perspectives of society on religion and the moral dilemma it faces with how people treat this topic.

It's not making religion a problem. Actually the opposite it's only Kasim's point of view that there is no other option if he comes out as Muslim LGBT, but no one else on the show has agreed or shown evidence that his perspective is correct. Like Isak, he will learn that with love and hope there are parts of the world that are religious that will love him for him, and that part will include his sister. So again Kasim isn't being used a device to villanise or stereotype religious perspectives, its the opposite it's to teach about that issue. So also this show is brilliantly smart with how they used this character despite it seeming like it's not the right choice.

Kasim as Sana: The journey of a teenager towards self love  whilst dealing with insecurities and romantic idealisation vs reality

Lastly, because I think I've tried to make my point clear in this essay. But Kasim is also representing Sana, as I said before in Skam falling in love with a foil of their insecurities makes the main character typically to act out, make mistakes and then learn about their hypocrisy and flawed perspectives and grow. They realise that they are loved and appreciated for who they are. And they come to love themselves fully by the end of the show. Kasim has fallen in love with Lucas, and like Sana, he goes through the angst and questioning of what this means to fall for someone who represents the opposite of what she believes, he acts out by lying and manipulating (miscommunication is also a device used in Skam especially by Sana). He messes up and learns from his mistakes.

Sana's choices in season 4 of OG makes her hurt people, she hurts her friends, her love interest and also Isak as well because of her skam, but she learns that her perspectives on the issue are wrong. Kasim will learn that lesson because Amira is the person he's hurt and is affecting, he might get punched before that (still think Dani or someone will do this because it causes that message of being torn between two worlds to be genuinely explored) but he will learn and grow.

And that's why his character, making him a brown POC who does what he does, is not to villainise race, or culture or religion, but actually to make him just as crucial as Sana in her season. He's just like the main character in Skam. So this season actually has two POC Muslim prominent roles that really delves deeply into the question of religion, love, homosexuality, culture and race both stories just as in-depth as the other, both lessons just as essential and truly relatable and needed in our society.

And for that I can't help but commend these writers, Skam  Espana truly is an excellent remake of Skam it takes all of the messages and just goes more in-depth, it brings those questions to the surface in a right way, whilst teaching its own audience about their own insecurities and flawed perspectives. And to be honest, that is just incredible.

[shifuaang]

How do you feel about the aang was possessive of katara in season three arguement?

I think it’s a really silly argument, honestly. 

I don’t really see any signs of possessiveness unless you count a couple of moments in The Ember Island Players - him nodding in agreement with ‘I thought you were the Avatar’s girl’ and kissing Katara. But at this point they’ve already kissed twice, in The Cave of Two Lovers and The Day of the Black Sun, and they’ve been flirtatious and touchy-feely with one another during the entirety of Book Three. Aang is trying to figure out the terms of their relationship and is desperate for clarification because he’s about to go up against one of the most deadly firebenders in the world on the hundredth year anniversary of the genocide of his people. It’s not unusual for him to desire some sort of resolution before facing a potentially lethal situation. 

Is kissing Katara the correct approach to take? Obviously not, but it’s important to note that Aang realizes this, backs off, and immediately berates himself for making this mistake. He respects Katara and her boundaries and ultimately lets her decide what she wants. (@thethiefandtheairbender​ wrote an absolutely fantastic meta on Katara’s POV that I would suggest for more insight on this moment)

If there are any other instances of Aang’s perceived possessiveness in Book Three, then I’d love for people to point them out to me. Some have claimed that him trying to persuade Katara not to kill Yon Rha is ‘controlling’, but not once does he tell her what to do. I’ve already addressed this argument here, but, in short, he concedes even though he doesn’t agree with her and knows that she needs to find closure. I mean, how is this controlling in any way?

Katara: Don’t try to stop us. Aang:  I wasn't planning to. This is a journey you need to take. You need to face this man. Katara: Thanks for understanding, Aang.

If Aang is possessive then the counter argument from Zutara shippers is that Zuko would treat Katara differently. But if anyone has exhibited ‘possessive’ or jealous traits, then it is Zuko towards his girlfriend, Mai. This isn’t me saying that Zuko is a bad person or even boyfriend just because he has some emotional issues that he needs to work through. What I am saying is that it’s incredibly insincere to paint Aang as some kind of abusive monster for a mistake that he instantly regrets while in the same breath completely absolving Zuko of any blunders he’s made during moments of weakness. 

[trikruheart]

Bellamy Is The Abusive One, Not Octavia: A Rant/Meta

There’s two main “reasons” that people give when they claim that Octavia is abusive. That she beats up Bellamy after Lincoln’s murder, and that she has him put in The Fighting Pits.

Let’s start with the old discourse; Bellamy did get Lincoln killed, not Octavia. Bellamy is the person who got Pike into power, the person who stood by him even after seeing + being told multiple times by people he supposedly cares about that Pike was instituting facism and going to get everyone killed. Bellamy knowingly decided to be a Nazi even though he had other options and was aware of them. And, no, Nazi is not an exaggeration, Bellamy was 100% willing to wipe out an entire race just for being that race including putting them in concentration camp-like conditions to die.

Octavia is not at fault just because she didn’t accept Bellamy’s last minute “help”, he had given her absolutely no reason to trust him so it’s not her fault she didn’t. If my brother was fhe right-hand man of a fascist leader then I wouldn’t have trusted him that after he belittled my concerns several times and stopped me from escaping, he’ll get my boyfriend out of the camp he put him in to begin with. Octavia had no obligation to trust Bellamy after he did everything in his power to destroy her trust.

So, yes, Octavia beats up Bellamy. If I had just saw and heard the love of my life be murdered at the hands of the man that my own brother knowingly put in power then I probably would beat him up to. Especially if my brother had already been abusing me my whole life.

Side note: Let me also just point out that Bellamy was never adequately redeemed for that whole being a Nazi thing, everyone just pretended it never happened. Octavia herself even calls him out “You didn’t turn on Pike because you thought what he was doing to the grounders was wrong.” and he AGREES. Bellamy 👏 never 👏 earned 👏 redemption, because men in this show don’t need to be held accountable for their actions while women (mainly Octavia and Clarke) have to supplicate themselves to men and be dragged through the dirt mercilessly for every wrong breath they take.

The Fighting Pit issue is an even weaker example because Octavia didn’t put Bellamy in there because she was angry or wanted to (although she had every right to be) she did it because Bellamy publicly broke several laws and she would have completely undermined her own authority (and given special treatment, making her a poor leader) if she let him get away with treason, child endangerment, murder, and attempted assassination. Bellamy getting put in the fighting pit was a consequence of his own actions, one that he was well aware of. Octavia wasn’t being abusive, she was being a fair leader.

Now that that BS is out of the way, here’s a list of why Bellamy is abusive to Octavia:

1.) Bellamy has had all of the power in their relationship from day one. Octavia was literally trapped in a room and only able to interact with two people for sixteen years, Bellamy came and went as he pleased. Octavia was essentially a captive, she couldn’t have possibly been more powerless during the entire time their relationship was developing. Then when they get on the ground, Bellamy is almost instantly put in a position of power which he uses to isolate and control Octavia. There’s also the age difference, I think a lot of people forget that Bellamy is way older than all the other Skaikru. Bellamy is 23 at the start of the show and everyone else is under 18 (except Raven is 18). So, we’re talking about a barely 17-year-old girl, one who grew up extremely isolated so is even more immature than most kids her age, and a 23-year-old man who lived most of his life relatively normally.

The power difference entirely favors Bellamy. Octavia has no power over him at all pre-Blodreina (which we’ll get to that) so the idea that she could possibly abuse Bellamy is pretty absurd. Abuse is a habitual pattern of controlling and belittling behavior by someone with more (actual or perceived) power over another, Octavia had no power over Bellamy at all; Bellamy had an insane amount of power over her that he constantly abuses to isolate and control her.

2.) Bellamy supposedly goes to the ground to “protect” Octavia but his means of doing so are abusive and controlling. In season 1 alone; Bellamy uses physical intimidation and manhandling against Octavia several times, he terrorizes a harmless teenager (remember how he’s a grown ass adult? Yikes...) to keep him away from Octavia who was enjoying his company, then he tortures a man in front of her while she begs him to stop because he doesn’t care about her opinions (more in 4) and he’s the leader of The 100 so he can.

3.) The whole “my sister, my responsibility” thing that everyone thinks is so cute? Yeah, that’s emotional abuse. A figure of authority repeating to a child that they are a burden for existing is disgusting and so, so harmful. That phrase is a reinforcement of the more vicious things Bellamy has said “Mom was floated for having you, she’s dead because you’re alive!” and “My life ended the day you were born!”

4.) Bellamy is constantly belittling, dismissing, and patronizing all of Octavia’s opinions and identity.

“You turned this place into a story from your childhood. I mean, the red queen? It’s a joke.”

I’m not saying that Blodreina was a positive identity for Octavia, but it was something she was forced (remember, she didn’t seek power like Bellamy and Clarke did) to become to survive. Octavia was a mentally ill teenage girl with very limited exposure to the world who has never had any power in her entire life, and suddenly she was responsible for saving the human race. How fucking dare Bellamy mock her for basing her leadership off of stories WHAT THE HELL ELSE WOULD SHE BASE IT OF OFF???

Bellamy had a job and a life on The Arc, Octavia never left her room and had no way of seeing the outside world except through stories. She has literally no reference for ruling, or anything else, except those stories and her brief time with the Grounders. Fuck you and your privilege, Bellamy.

On top of that, Octavia actually did save the human race. That “joke” kept humanity alive.

“It is time to stop playing Grounder before you get yourself hurt.”

Yes, how dare she identify with the only people who have ever accepted her and treated her like a human being. How about you stop “playing” Nazi before you get us everyone killed. Seriously, Octavia is not allowed to disagree with Bellamy without him grabbing her arm and talking down to her like she’s a toddler throwing a tantrum.

5.) As soon as Octavia is in a position of power, one she didn’t even ask for, Bellamy’s abuse gets progressively crueler because he’s trying to regain control. He starts actively using Octavia’s mental illness against her and literally suicide baits her several times.

There is NO excuse. None at all. To tell someone who is severely mentally ill, traumatized, and an active suicide risk that “I wish you were dead” and “you’re already dead”. Trying to push someone to suicide and using someone’s mental illness to hurt them, let alone your own sister, is one of the most evil things you can do. The fact that so much of the fandom ignores this genuinely makes me sick.

Bellamy chooses those words because he knows that is what will hurt Octavia the most and he wants to hurt her. Bellamy has heard Octavia say that she’s already dead when she’s at her lowest points, he knows that those are the words that haunt her and drive her to want to kill herself, and that’s why he uses them as a weapon. Notice that he says them multiple times and at very purposeful times, this is not something he yelled once when he was angry; we see him calmly make the choice to say these things to her several times when he is losing control and wants to break her back down to the helpless little girl who was always happy to see him because of her Stockholm Syndrome.

6.) I think trying to MURDER Octavia THREE FUCKING TIMES deserves its own point. Bellamy poisons Octavia, he suicide baits her and let’s her go through with it (someone else stops her, Bellamy makes no move to), and then he leaves her to die with a lovely extra “My sister is dead” for the road.

7.) Octavia spends most of season 6 groveling and trying to “earn” back Bellamy’s love and we see clearly that “earning” Bellamy’s love means being utterly powerless and subservient. Bellamy loved Octavia when she was a captive little girl but suddenly he can’t produce an ounce of human decency towards her? And don’t give me some “but she’s Blodreina” like Mr. Nazi has any room to judge Octavia for becoming a dictator out of desperation when she didn’t know what else to do and she was forced in a very, very difficult leadership position that she never wanted and all of humanity relied on.

My point is basically that Bellamy’s love is conditional, he holds it over Octavia’s head like a fucking dog treat. He wants “his sister” back but what does that mean? He wants back the scared little girl who couldn’t leave one room and was entirely dependent on him. It’s Octavia having autonomy that Bellamy hates, not her being “evil” because Bellamy is 500x as evil as Octavia and I will die on that hill. You’re telling me that Bellamy of all people is soooo upset that his sister was forced to kill some people in the context of war and keeping humanity alive? As if Bellamy isn’t a mass murderer who has killed way more people for way less. Give me a fucking break. “Octavia is dead” because Bellamy’s victim is dead and he can’t handle that.

But, please, do tell me again how two isolated incidents over six years apart from each other that are both the direct consequences of Bellamy’s autonomous choices make Octavia “eMoTiOnAllY AbUsIvE tO pOoR WitTlE BeLl”.

[salvadoerena]

Who are your favourite OCs?

Listen. I have so many OCs it’s not even funny so I’m going to have to narrow it down to top 9 because that’s the smallest unit I can make in some vague but non-representative order.

Seraetia

James Nigel Kirkland

Pirate Captain, navy admiral defectee

Trauma re: identity and autonomy.

Out for revenge but unsure if it’s for himself or others, or if it will make him feel better

Just wants to feel normal again

Loves lots, but relationships are complicated for obvious reasons

Twunk

“Unfortunately, I have a conscience.”

James is one of those characters that I have SO much to say about that I absolutely blank out anytime someone asks. I’ve got a side blog dedicated to seraetia tho.

Misses Abel Dearly

Robert Jones (note: the image is a winged AU)

“I want that twunk obliterated”

Outwardly Sophisticated gay man in a het marriage for the power and job security, but he absolutely hates it. Having an affair with his son’s tutor.

He legitimately despises where he is in life, never wanted a wife (obviously) and never wanted a son, but he’s too afraid of change to do anything about it

Humble beginnings that don’t excuse current actions

Basically one of James’ foils; he’s the one who helped train him when James became admiral.

Yes I took a lot of inspiration from Flint and Silver Black Sails except instead of being in love these two hate each other

He would be a cubs fan irl

Inside he’s a messy disaster with dead siblings

Abel Calder Jones 

Robert’s son. So obviously he’s already doomed.

Family trauma. Robert ignores his existence and his mother, Beatrice, treats him like a doll or a prop

Obsessed with his image (thanks parents)

Was engaged to James, but James ended up breaking it off with him when Abel refused to leave the Navy. Then James stabbed him because he was going to force James to stay.

Anger issues that he never addresses

Current Navy admiral--not as good as James not for lack of skill, but because his entire admiralty is based off of spite and contempt for James, and also some heartbreak. Thinks if he ones up James then maybe he’ll come back.

Still very much in love with James but it’s irreversibly tarnished and intertwined with his bitterness and contempt for everything James has done and come to represent (i.e: his failures)

William Byrne

i love him

he’s a repressed bisexual whose first relationship did not leave him with a healthy understanding of boundaries which makes navigating his relationship with emmanuel so much more difficult

cares a lot about what his family thinks (for now)

would have a pet pig 100% without a doubt

house husband who craves domesticity

whenever i listen to “Teir Abhaile Riu” by celtic woman I always daydream about how he ends up meeting Emmanuel at a bar, they hit it off, he runs away from his home (stealing a horse to do so) and joins the crew and like takes the first steps to embracing himself

he still holds onto a coin/necklace from his first boyfriend, mirek, due to guilt and unresolved feelings, but eventually he’ll just drop it somewhere once he finally comes to term with things

quartermaster of the ellina and james’ best friend and confidant 

Jean “Rasstrelnikov” Utkin

he knits

boatswain

transguy who thought one way of being perceived as a man would be to pick a ridiculously hypermasculine nick name (rasstrelnikov AKA “the executioner”) but only he calls himself that. most other pirates know him by Caladian Tiger (top scars looking like stripes. he’s a furry though so he’s like. secretly pleased by it)

his main priority is his brother, Pasha, and by extension their step-sister, Katherine, who he holds a grudge against because he hates her mother (his step-mom) and because Kathy is....stubborn in her ways (don’t worry she gets better)

best friend is Beni. they had a mutual crush on each other that ended up going no where because neither acted on it and then they moved on. he’s now in love with a member of a rival ship, Thomas, who is basically a socks-n-sandals bard man

he loved economics and business but hates capitalism. don’t ask him how that’s possible he’ll just call you mean names and say “i just think they’re interesting”

he’s a jerk and i love him

D&D

Dolores Vryakina

i love her

love love love love love love lover her

she’s got a chicken named Nahreena and they’re best friends

she’s a dragonborn bard with a southern accent who plays the balalaika.

she’s got a fairly good moral compass, but has some anger issues. she’s basically a bardbarian because this was my first dnd character and i didn’t know how to balance stats lol a legitimate herbo if i do say so myself

she loves lots and has a habit of making little hats for people. one time she cast speak with animals and managed to get out of a fight with a pit of snakes by asking politely. helped avoid a fight with two stone dragons by asking politely. gave a child scoliosis trying to help him escape from a magic fight club. froze a man and used his decapitated head to hit his fellow bandit, then cast shatter on the frozen body. 

she was a chicken farmer/tavern bartender before everything started out!! now she’s an adventurer who’s gotten roped into saving a kingdom.

she cares deeply about her party members, Ilian, Charthos, and Rilzir, even though she (thinks) knows they don’t care as deeply about her. it makes her feel a bit inadequate at times.

the chicken controls her (no she doesn’t) (yes she does) (no) (but yes) (who knows!)

Welcome to Irth

Cyril Gonzalez

vampire-witch. in irth all witches have a specific magical medium (like paint or music or some such thing). cyril’s is tea leaves. essentially, what they do is “divine” an outcome based off the tea leaves, and their divination casts a spell. ex: cyril tosses some leaves in their cup and goes “hmm. tea leaves say i’ll get a refill” and their cup refills with whatever they were drinking

they’re a small business owner. they’ve got a tea shop called TragiTea that also doubles as their house. they run the night shift, and their best friend (possibly 👀 more  👀 👀) lonelletha+her sister thelma run the day shift. cyril has not hired anyone else because quite frankly their standards are stupid high and they don’t trust others. this leads to some, uh, varying hours in their shop.

when lonnie is kidnapped, they end up travelling with dominick in order to get her back

very mean, very sarcastic, very huge jerk. to put it in layman’s terms: the epitome of a tsundere

spoiler: they fall in love with dominick

Dominick Salazar

peryton-cervitaur

catholic

he is MEGA shy and stutters a lot because of it. he’s got some uh, self-worth issues going on in there, which cyril does not help with in the beginning

in love with lonnie

cyril absolutely hates him (at first  👀 👀). but that’s fine because he hates them too, at the very least he’s not fond of them. cyril’s mean to him (JEALOUSYYYYY TAKIN OOOOVER MEEEE) until he ends up saving them one time.

his arc is basically realizing he has to advocate for himself even if no one else does, and that just because people tell him he’s one thing doesn’t mean he is (similar to lonnie’s arc)

he’s a gym rat but in a polite way

i feel like he’d run a flower shop. he doesn’t, but he has that energy.

gets mind controlled at one point because i cannot behave and i love the trope (ends up fighting cyril before cyril can break him out of it)

spoiler: he falls in love with cyril

Lonelletha Rainsford

the cutest lil faun you ever did she

flowers in her hair that keep her in good health and good company. faun hair does not grow back, so if she cuts it, she loses those flowers. they’re VERY useful magical items though ( 👀 👀 👀 )

i love pulling her out of irth and using her as a therapist for all my seraetia aus just because she’s got therapist energy even though she, herself, desperately needs one

her arc is essentially coming to view herself as someone worthy of love and respect, and that her maturity isn’t something that defines her

she is TINY

i love her she dresses like an 80s jazzercise instructor

has a boyfriend named Estaban (Estafan? i kept forgetting his name and ended up writing both in my scripts lol)

catholic

double spoiler: she ends up with cyril and dominick (polyam rights am i right?)

[wanderinglotus7]

I’M SICK

On wednesday I discovered it was National Eating Disorders Awareness Month. For someone who struggles with an ED and body image it almost slipped right past me. It doesn’t surprise me because my mind has been in an anxious and hazy fog lately. Other than that I had a breaking realization with the state of my bulimia. I’ve been feeling very disgusted with myself, I found myself immediately purging this week to feel “empty” or maybe the need to purge is more of a distraction from what’s really going on in my life. I know for sure this whole internship process is adding more stress in my life to the stress that is already present. At times I feel like I am losing control over my life. It’s sad that I have to schedule time in my days to do basic stuff like take a shower, nap, do something I love, or even take a moment (5 minutes) to be present (breathe).

What’s really bugging me is the narrative surrounding eating disorders. I’m tired of only seeing and hearing white images and voices. Its like the world is blind to the fact that EDs aren’t just a White female illness. Hello! Males and color folk can suffer from these issues. Granted, I am inspired by Demi Lovato for being so open with her struggles, but where are those individuals who look like me speaking their truth in the public. I rarely hear conversations of Black females being open with their struggles. If I do it’s associated with Body Positivity which isn’t bad. However, for some of us, we cannot reach Body Positivity until we learn to accept of ourselves and our bodies. Sometimes I feel like a fake because I am open with my body image and ED, I don’t really address the hatred and guilt I have towards myself. It’s a constant battle. And when I do express my experiences with bulimia and body image it gets treated like I am frustrated with dieting or making lifestyle changes. This is the type of message I felt like I was receiving when this topic came up in my therapy session. I felt like I was being misunderstood. Granted my therapist is a white woman, so talking about ED, body image, and being sexually objectified as a young Black woman she wont understand. Again...BODY IMAGE AND EATING DISORDERS DON’T ONLY EFFECT WHITE FEMALES! BLACK FEMALES STRUGGLE WITH THESE ISSUES TOO!

One thing I do appreciate when it comes to compliments from my boyfriend is that he doesn’t focus on my body first. The first thing he always states is how much he loves my smile which can really brighten my day especially when I am having a bad body image day. But on some occasions he has made some comments like saying “squishy” and “soft” that have made me feel even worse about myself. I do give him credit for trying to understand my issues. I appreciate his effort. But I do recognize the frustration he experiences sometimes when I begin to bash myself or deny/not accept his compliments. Once the ED voice begins to speak, I shut everyone out including myself. My illness can become crippling. For examples, I missed my sister’s birthday dinner because I didn’t like the idea of having to wear “real” clothes and the idea of eating around people freaked me out, I isolated myself in my room after looking at myself in the mirror for at least five minutes, I’ve cried and wanted to throw a brick at my mirror because I hated the way I looked in a t-shirt and shorts ( I was just going to Wal-Mart) and I deny myself of wearing clothes that I would like to wear because I am afraid of attracting attention to myself ( I don’t want people to notice that I am fat). My problem areas are my stomach and stretch marks. Uggg! How I despise my stomach! I wish it can disappear and never come back. And I wish it can be flatter. I would love to loose between 20 to 40 pounds.

My relationship with food is all fucked up, and I feel like people don’t understand this. Telling me I need to be more committed to exercising or making smarter food choices doesn’t register with my ED brain. To me it sounds like bullshit. Then I become frustrated and that’s when I shutdown all the outside noise and recede from life. Do you know how tiring it is to constantly be fixated on food? IT FREAKING SUCKS! I am soooo concerned about what types of food I’m going to eat, how much I’m going to eat, when I am going to eat, and how I am going to get rid of the food that I did eat for the day. Depending on my state of mind, I’m contemplating on ways to purge or restrict myself for the rest of the day or for the next day. I CAN’T NEVER WIN! And I am trying hard to overcome my poor body image and bulimia. Having a therapist is good, but when it comes to these issues group therapy is a better route for me. I feel less alone if that makes sense. I really hope I don’t pass these issues to any of my future children if I ever have a child or children in the future ( I don’t want them to suffer).

I’m still receiving treatment for my problems. And know this isn’t gonna be resolved within a year or two. It’s going to be a rough and long process. I hope whoever reads this finds some allyship from my story. We are good enough! Above everything else, we are good enough for ourselves, and we are worthy of love, but we have to work on loving ourselves which is easier said than done, but we have time to learn because I am still learning this lesson. It’s 2021 and I began to learn how to accept, respect, and love myself back in 2018. Sad to say, “We live in a world where we value the scale over our souls” (CeCe Olisa).

Here are some things to think about I received from a TEDTalk presented by CeCe Olisa on How to Build Self Confdence: Step 1- Identify your perceived obstacle Step 2- Imagine what your life would look like if your perceived obstacle disappeared Step 3- Address your perceived obstacle Step 4- Choose to live the life you imagined today. From Olisa, “Don’t wait on your weight to live the life you want”! My first step is purchasing a dress that I like and wear it out in public without shame or regret. Seems simple, yet, it will be a major step on my ED journey.

[toycarousel]

Hello Wren, I'm here because I need your help (in a way). So I'm a perfectly "normal" cis girl, I live in a great family and my parents never judge me. But I have a boyfriend, he's wonderful, very kind and good looking. He really likes to dress up as a woman (on a daily basis) but he's not transgender. And he has a lot of problems: his parents are really religious, he's often told he's just gay and he should stop being with me (that part uspets him a lot), and he gets insulted just because [1/2]

Of his apperance. I get really angry about that and often yell at whoever upsetted him. I wondered if you could provide us some advices concerning this. My boyfriend and I are very much in love and it kills me seeing him sad because of some random assholes. Thank you And I Hope you'll anwser. [2/2]

Hello, Anon! My apologies for the late response (I’ve been even more scattered than usual these days!)

I can offer peer advice, but I’m definitely not a professional, so if anything I say feels off to you or your boyfriend, just know that you don’t have to take my word as law or anything~!!! You can absolutely write off anything that doesn’t feel right to you! : O

Anyway, I’m totally with you two wrt how ppl are treating your boyfriend.  I’m not trans either, but I like to dress up as a girl fairly often (for me, it’s because women’s clothing/makeup is just typically a lot more aesthetically appealing than men’s -- mens’ clothes and such can be very, very dull, unfortunately).  Your boyfriend doesn’t need to have a reason for dressing the way he likes to dress (no one does!)

It sounds like you’re both confident in your relationship, and I wish that the ppl around you two understood that him wearing a certain type of clothing doesn’t say anything about his sexuality, gender, or relationships -- because it doesn’t! I actually suspect a lot of men, of all sexualities -- even the most intensely straight, cisgender man possible -- would wear women’s clothing and makeup and such, if it were considered socially acceptable.  A lot of straight, cisgender women prefer men’s clothing, because it’s just to their taste.  The reverse is true too, it’s just stigmatized so much more, and I wish your boyfriend didn’t have to deal with all that judgment from other ppl.  It sounds like he’s experiencing a lot of misdirected bigotry.

My casual advice to him would be to just stay true to himself, and continue to do what makes him happy! He can also try to let ppl know that no, he’s not dressing this way because he’s gay, that he doesn’t have to leave you, that he is attracted to you and wants to be with you, and that, ultimately, clothing is just clothing.  Though I’m guessing he’s already said things like this to some of the assholes who are picking him apart, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t listen.  Despite that, it’s still good to confidently tell them that he knows who he is, and that they’re wrong.  If some of these ppl do listen and internalize the message he’s trying to get across, that’s great! 

As for the ppl who don’t -- it’s not his job to make them understand.  They’ve got their own biases.  They’ve decided (his family, and everyone who doesn’t listen), that their own prejudices are the truth, and they likely don’t want to listen.  This probably scares them -- a lot of ppl are terrified when they’re forced to confront the truth that clothing + presentation doesn’t determine gender and/or sexuality.  I suspect that a lot of cisgender and/or straight ppl like feeling as though, as long as they wear the clothes they’re “supposed” to wear, and do the things they’re “supposed” to do, that it means their gender is the “right” gender, and is unquestionable and solidified.

So, when they’re then faced with someone like your boyfriend, who is attracted to women, and who isn’t transgender, but still likes to wear traditionally feminine clothing -- it just shakes those ppl to their core.  They’re used to believing things like “men are biologically wired to like blue, and trucks, and Man Things,” and “women are biologically wired to like pink, and dolls, and Woman Things,” but none of that stuff is true.  It’s all socially constructed.  (That, of course, doesn’t mean that it’s not okay for girls to be into girly things and guys to be into masculine things, but it’s not the rule, and it’s certainly not rooted in biology).

And when people are faced with their own internalized biases, and the silly gender beliefs they’ve held for a very long time are challenged like that (whether the person they perceive to be challenging these norms means to or not), they get scared, and feel insecure.  Your boyfriend is on the receiving end of them acting out on their own insecurities.  And that, ultimately, is their problem -- not his.  He’s done nothing wrong.  

And he doesn’t owe his family members anything, either.  Just because they’d be more “comfortable” being able to slot him into the cliche of “effeminate gay man”, in order to avoid facing their insecurities about clothing and appearance wrt gender/sexuality, doesn’t mean that he has to do anything about it.  If you want to be together, then you should be together.  And you should both be able to dress and behave however you want, regardless!

The only thing I’d warn for is taking safety precautions! Some ppl will just assume he’s transgender or gay, and will try to harm him based on the assumption.  If he’s in a physically safe space, then this shouldn’t be an issue, but if he feels like he’s going to be somewhere there could be violent ppl, or ppl he doesn’t know very well, he should be very careful as to how he presents himself -- again, not because he’s doing anything wrong, but because some ppl won’t just be assholes, they’ll be violent.  And neither of you should ever have to be subjected to that violence.

Otherwise, I’d honestly just reassure him that he’s gorgeous, and kind, and wonderful -- that he looks great the way he likes to dress, and that it’s not his responsibility (nor possible, in many cases) to change the minds of ppl who’ve decided to be bigoted, insecure, and shallow.  I know it can be difficult to write off the cruel things that ppl say, and that it has been getting to him, so I’ve linked a few resources below that can help with techniques as to how to ignore and/or cope with the things that bigots and bullies say.  I think that self-care and being reminded of how awesome it is that he expresses himself despite society’s terrible, arbitrary “rules”, is healthy too!

Here are some of those resources (and I included a couple crisis chatlines at the very bottom, in case he’s ever in a situation where he just rly wants to talk to someone supportive right away, you know?)

https://medium.com/@duncanr/how-to-respond-to-bullies-4db037629510 (this one is focused on how to respond to bullies, and in many cases I think this has a good message for you and your boyfriend, but again, be careful when applying this advice to a potentially dangerous situation -- avoiding danger and calling for help is the most effective way to go, imo).

https://www.vice.com/en_in/article/59nz5z/how-to-deal-with-friends-family-who-are-racist-sexist-or-bigoted 

https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-mysteries-love/201612/the-most-effective-way-put-end-verbal-abuse

https://www.verywellmind.com/identify-and-cope-with-emotional-abuse-4156673 (how to identify and cope with emotional abuse -- this can be applied to any relationship, including how your boyfriend’s family treats him, and how strangers treat him! Similar to the prior link!)

https://self-care-club.tumblr.com/post/139740925552/giant-self-help-masterpost (self care masterpost, full of nice things + sites and coping tactics for both you and your boyfriend’s general mental health -- for when you both need to take a step back and simply be kind to yourselves~!)

https://codedredalert.tumblr.com/post/109005732295/helpline-masterlist (crisis hotline masterpost)

https://www.7cups.com/ (free counselling, both phone and text chatlines available!)

Oof~! So, I know that was a long, long response (my apologies for being so wordy), but I hope some of what was said and linked here is helpful to both you and your boyfriend, and that your situations improve soon~

[ghosts-are-obsessed-with-me]

[Crazy Ex-Girlfriend theorizing that contains spoilers for, of all things, Fight Club]

I’ve been thinking about the song The Darkness, and the choice to personify depression and self-loathing as a crappy yet persistent boyfriend named Tyler. At first it seemed like a humorous and surprising way to defang the darkness -- this force of despair that has been tormenting Rebecca all these years? Oh yeah, that’s Tyler, Tyler Darkness. Dude’s a douchebag. An anticlimactic name because mental illness, it turns out, isn’t all that romantic and mysterious. 

But with the show’s knowledge of pop culture and incisive focus on gender roles, mental health, and narrative tropes (and how these interrelate), I’d be surprised if no one in the writing room pointed out parallels with another Tyler D., who’s not only also dark, edgy, and a shitty boyfriend, but himself a personification of mental illness. 

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend loves turning narrative tropes on their heads. The idea of Rebecca as an antihero has come up several times, with season 3 posters that spoofed Breaking Bad and Mad Men, as well as villains like those in Fatal Attraction (sidenote: interesting that self-destructive, manipulative men get to be antiheroes while women are villains). If the writers decided to throw Fight Club into the mix, I wouldn’t be surprised. But even if it wasn’t a deliberate choice, Fight Club’s tropes about gender and mental illness are so thoroughly engrained in the pop culture group mind that they’re already part of the general culture that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend works to critique.

In Fight Club, Tyler Durden is a hypermasculine expression of repressed mental illness -- he’s violent, merciless, confident, and exploitative. And although it arguably isn’t how Chuck Palahniuk intended this character to be perceived, he’s been wildly idealized. Men want to be bad boys, and women want to be with bad boys, the mindset claims.

The female love interest (and really, only female role) in Fight Club is Marla Singer, who personifies what might be termed the “borderline pixie dream girl.” While a manic pixie dream girl exists to reawaken the male protagonist to the joy of life through her quirky passion and boundless enthusiasm (all of which orbits around him, of course), the borderline pixie is all that excitement, allure, impulsiveness, and sexiness, but with a bent towards self-destruction which only makes her more mysterious and alluring to her man -- and more dependent on him. 

Like Rebecca, Marla struggles with suicidal ideation, low self-esteem, and a draw towards dysfunctional relationships. Unlike Rebecca, Marla is a supporting character whose issues are never explored in depth; her problems mainly add to the excitement of the relationship.

Again, although Palahniuk didn’t necessarily intend this with the character, this is how she’s been received. Marla often shows up on listicles of “Characters People With BPD Relate To.” A Google search also brings up a slew of “dark, romantic” fan content pairing her with Tyler. 

In Rebecca’s relationship with Robert, and later in her attempt to torment Josh, we see her idealizing the darkness of, in the first case, power imbalances in relationships, and in the second case, being the sexy unstable woman. But in both cases, her life doesn’t turn out like a movie. She suffers deeply and uncinematically. Her depression isn’t drinking red wine in the bath as a tear runs wistfully down her cheek. It’s subpar treatment in a hospital where the nurses talk about as as though she’s not there. It’s melting down because she believes all her friends hate her. It’s Googling suicide methods and refusing to get out of bed.

As Rebecca names the darkness Tyler, she personifies him without romanticizing him. Sure, he’s been there for her for years, but he doesn’t treat her well -- and that doesn’t make him a charming bad boy. In fact, he’s kind of a loser. Like a Fight Club fanboy, he thinks he’s a badass when he’s actually just an asshole. He plays drums and wears guyliner. His pet name for her is “slut.” 

Like mental illness, guys like Tyler are all around, banal and unmysterious even as they can make life hell. But we don’t have to idealize them or pick up for their nightly drunk dial. We don’t have to cut ourselves down to fit the tropes for the one available female role in the movie. We can find better ways of relating to others, to relationships, and to ourselves. We can be the protagonists of our own stories. 

[poisener]

ELLE    &     GWEN  :  TWO FRIENDS TORN APART ONLY TO BE BUILT BACK UP AGAIN  :  a mini essay on friendship    &    more . 

       this is gonna be a semi - long ass post    &     hopefully one that is articulate    &    not some garbled mess but here we go .   i have a theory /  inkling about elle & gwen and it’s that they were ACTUAL FRIENDS at one point but had a vague falling out , i.e.  exhibited in the way that gwen’s circle of friends   ( god i don’t really know the girls names except erica & madison so forgive me but you know which girls that are always over at her house  .  ) treat /  regard elle .          elle is perceived as quiet  (     she herself has said she is sensitive /  doesn’t like change     )  ,         i personally write her as having some form of anxiety (    most likely a sort of social anxiety   )      &      people      (     especially girls who run in packs     )     don’t like things they don’t understand /   other girls they can’t control or ‘ figure out ‘ .        elle is one of those girls .  she’s pretty enough to be perceived as a threat by the girls who have hunky    &     potentially stupid boyfriends that would cheat on them  (   clark, jason , etc  ) .  she’s talented enough to be envied  .   she’s determined    &    strong enough to hold her own against people who would speak ill of her   ( though she always seconds guesses herself     &    probably doesn’t think of a comeback until after a situation  ) .  

GWEN’S GROUP OF FRIENDS  .  

     in episode 2  “ our to.wn “  we see elle getting ready for something,  she’s putting on makeup  ,   picking out what one might consider a nice dress, wearing accessories , case    &     point she’s making an effort.  she’s making an effort to distract herself from the dissolving world around her.  she comes up to the house   &    is turned away by one of gwen’s friends told to “ go”  after elle urges that she just wants some company.  the girl then says  “  why don’t you try one of your friend’s houses ??? “  .     at first glance, this is just an obvious reference that she’s a loner .      she has no friends . she has secluded herself from groups . but i think here , beyond her trying to make an effort in this new world , this might have been her old group of friends.       though she’s never been considered the most popular or running with the likes of harry /  kelly ,    she might have been friends of their friends,  mid level acquaintances / tolerated if you will because one of the people in this friend group genuinely liked her    &     i think that person might have been gwen .  

one thing that i did notice    &    that might be deemed insignificant by others or seem as far fetched is how they decorate their rooms .  gwen is in gymnastics /  possibly cheerleading     &     elle is in ballet  / other forms of dance .  they both hang their gymnastic accessories / cheerleading bows    &    ballet point shoes up on the wall straight in a row , as close as possibly to their bed or on an adjacent wall .  now, you may be saying ?  well , a lot of people display their competitive sports / trophies like that but i say ,   like minds think alike    &    i believe either gwen    &    elle were civil and knew each other from shared classes or shared sports / dance centers OR their parents were friends and thus they decided to decorate their rooms the same .  i think there’s some sort of shared /  history and bond between them .   another possibility is that gwen tried to integrate elle into the friend group    &    no one else really liked her so what did gwen do ? she badmouthed her ,  she possibly talked shit about her to her boyfriend who then told jason    &     luke who then told helena who then called her a thot in the hallway.  and yes,  that does seem like a silly / trivial thing in a show such as this to bring up but i think it was significant enough point to be made be elle    &    helena to bring up the past . words hurt especially when you don’t deserve them    &     they come from someone you respect or someone that doesn’t even honestly know you.  helena probably said it in the heat of the moment, there were probably rumors about elle floating around ,  vicious hurtful rumors or “ locker room talk  “ by clark    &     the other guys .  guys who would be influenced by their girlfriends perception of another female . 

now onto how gwen’s friends treat elle (  EP 2  thru finale )  .       they treat her as someone to be ignored . someone to scoff at . someone to pick on so they won’t get picked on by the god tier high school rich kids .      it’s a those who are bullied bully others mentality .     or those who don’t understand someone /  won’t take the time to get to know someone end up making fun of them mentality .      ex.   at prom when elle’s dancing mostly by herself but in their vicinity , the one girl with the wavy hair sort of rolls her eyes /  gives her friend a “ wth she’s fucking weird” look that normally would hurt elle but the girl in the red dress encourages her to dance / grabs her hand    &     twirls her around , this is also the scene where seconds later she bows in front of campbell    &     then they dance to a slow song later on.   it’s pretty sad to realize she probably got ready in her house alone while gwen ,  helena    &     the other girls all got ready together .  

this brings me to the other major theme in this essay that i think     ELLE    &     GWEN ARE BOTH CLOSETED BI’S OR QUESTIONING    &     SOMETHING HAPPENED BETWEEN THEM.   from like episode 4/5 or whatever on  ,  gwen is seen distancing herself from clark     &     she is seen QUESTIONING OTHERS RELATIONSHIPS    &    HER OWN RELATIONSHIP IN THIS NEW WORLD.  

elle    &    reaching out to gwen /  gwen’s friend group  :  

in the church in ep 1 she can be seen sitting close to kelly    &    gwen .  

ep 2 ,  she goes to gwen’s house only to get turned away . 

ep 3,   she gets excluded from the church all girls meeting .  

ep  3.  in the cafeteria, before campbell gives her the prom dress,  she is seen hesitating when seeing gwen, lexie    &    the other girl on those risers in the cafeteria.  gwens looks over for a split second ( so does lexie i think  )    &    elle ultimately chooses to sit by herself for fear of being turned away once more . 

ep 4 , after elle proposes movie night to kelly   &    elle attends movie night by herself ,   clarke    &    gwen walk her back to campbell’s house .  elle even mirrors her own words in ep 2 saying “thanks for the company guys. “ the company she so wanted in ep 2 but was denied .  gwen also lowkey picks up on the off vibe between elle   &    campbell ,  not only because she probs thinks campbell is a creep but because she knows elle personally . there’s a brief flicker of concern right after c kisses elle   &    starts petting her head . yeah, anyone could be weirded out by this but i think she showed genuine concern that a friend would have seeing another friend in this situation . 

ep 9 after the pie poisoning  ,   helena takes elle in     &     elle ultimately leaves helena’s home because she doesn’t want to put her or their other friends in danger. 

  ELLE    &    GRIZZ TALKING  (EP 2 )  /   GWEN    &    GRIZZ TALKING ( EP 1 thru THE FINALE  )      yes,  i don’t think it’s a coincidence that both girls are seen opening up   /  talking about intimate issues with grizz, the other half of a gay m/m couple who are completely the softest in all of new ham  .  grizz approaches elle unprompted in episode 2  “ our town  “  (  cause he’s a nice guy and he could see she was uncomfy  )  when she’s seen on the fringes of the fugitive game .  grizz tells her that everyone is scared    &     sometimes a silly game makes things better, she says that she doesn’t think it’ll help her much    &     she admits that she thinks GOD IS PUNISHING HER .      when i first rewatched  / heard this i was like “ oh she’s talking about campbell “  but i realized we don’t really seem them  together until later on in that episode where campbell  solidifies his choice with her /  they go to prom in the later episodes .   i think that elle thinks god is punishing her for SOMETHING SHE DID RELATED TO GWEN’S FRIEND GROUP OR FRIENDS  .   

quotes from gwen or instances where it seemed to be coded towards her questioning not only the world around her but her own sexuality /  curiosities . 

“  we might have to marry them one day, i mean ,  who else is there ?”   ---- gwen  in ep 2 after the fmk game where they talk about the boys.  

idk what ep but when she just randomly brings up that seth guy.  idk it reeked of “  lol boys like me . i like boys.  i met one once that i’m totes gonna get with later energy “   when everyone knows that’s a damn lie.  i think she overcompensates a lot when talking about guys  / making inappropriate jokes or playing fmk  , etc. 

when helena    &    gwen are getting ready for prom , gwen tells her that she wasn’t even going to go to prom with clarke. their relationship was already over in her mind    &     she was moving on .  she also asks helena about luke    &     them staying together saying ,  “how can you be so certain?” , ALSO , when she mentions stan/ford    &    says there are so many people  “ hot people. hot surfer people . you don’t think you’d be curious?”  got my bi antennas going WAY UP cause she totally could have said “ hot guys / dudes, etc. “   

she also says “  luke wasn’t just the best you could do for now?”  which is how i think gwen views her relationship with clarke    &    the small town that they are in    &    now the current situation they’re in . 

okay but grizz    &    gwen’s whole interactions in the finale screamed questioning / curious to me because g reading thoreau really fucked up gwen i think espc the whole  “ and not when i came to die, discover that i had not lived . “  i.e.  gwen not discovering / exploring her sexuality / her place in the world. 

gwen cuddling g  /  trying to lowkey put the moves on him    &    then grizz admits he’s gay to her.  

“ are you gay through    &    through or mostly gay?”  yeah, that’s insensitive wording    &    ignorant ,  but to her ,  it’s an honest question cause she’s curious about grizz . i wholly believe this was also a hopeful asking for her in terms of “ wow i guess that could be me too eventually?”  like i think she has so much respect for grizz so to see him out here living the best life he can and accepting who he is and telling her about that like  idk i just read that scene of it really opening up her world views /  the possibilities of life as someone who is questioning things. 

TLDR   ;    ELLE & GWEN USED TO BE GOOD FRIENDS . THEY   ARE BOTH QUESTIONING THEIR SEXUAL IDENTITIES  & PLACE IN THE NEW WORLD . THERE WAS SOME SORT OF FALLING OUT THERE I JUST  KNOW IT. GWEN & HER FRIENDS WEREN’T JUST BEING MEAN GIRLS, THEY WERE BEING MEAN EX FRIENDS  .   

[profound-boning]

Holding Back From You

prompt: thrisha’s post pairings: destiel word count: 2k tags: no warnings apply, implied sexual content, dean’s appallingly low self-esteem, perceived infidelity, friends with benefits to boyfriends only on tumblr | dwlts

When Dean woke up in Cas’s bed with a naked Cas lying next to him and a familiar ache, he’d known right away that the night before had ended with some very athletic drunk sex.

When Cas woke up and treated him to round two, he hadn’t bothered to ask questions. Why would he when he could finally have Cas exactly like he’d always wanted?

Finally, when Cas rolled off of him and stumbled to the bathroom, Dean’s upstairs brain tuned back in.

Hey, dumbass, it said, don’t you think it’s actually a really terrible idea to have sex with your roommate and your best friend?

Why yes, brain, that does sound like a bad idea. Except that that was the best sex he’s ever had in addition to Cas being the best person Dean has ever known. Okay, so Cas is a bit of a slob and he’s so quirky sometimes and he’s a runner, which is just weird, but he’s a good guy. Would climb a tree to save a cat or drop his own bags to help an elderly lady carry hers. And Dean really wants to keep having sex with him.

So Dean doesn’t question their new arrangement. They haven’t really discussed it since that first day when a freshly-showered Cas flopped down on the couch next to Dean and asked him how he felt about spanking.

This led to an in-depth discussion of boundaries and what exactly they wanted from each other in the bedroom. Which is all well and good, except that it makes their sexy time a bedroom-only activity and now Dean is having some serious feelings-related issues outside of the aforementioned bedroom.

Granted, these issues aren’t precisely new. Dean has been wrestling internally with telling Cas that he’s halfway in love with him for a solid two years now, but when Dean fucks it up is he going to lose his roommate and his best friend, too? On the other hand, is he going to spend the rest of his life pining over Castiel Novak? That’s a firm maybe at this point. So, no, feelings-related issues aren’t new.

There is something that is new, however, and that is the dark hickey Dean has just spotted on Cas’s hip bone and the fact that Dean is currently losing his goddamn mind over it.

It’s just a hickey, right? Nothing too horrible. The problem is that Dean knows for a fact he didn’t put it there—not that Dean doesn’t love Cas’s hips, but it’s not exactly a spot he’s inclined to leave a hickey—so that means that someone else put it there and Dean’s going to be sick.

He ends up going to the bathroom, actually, but he doesn’t throw up. Instead, he leans his arms against the counter and takes deep breaths. Then, he flushes the toilet and splashes a little water on his face. He looks at himself in the mirror.

This is fine, he lies, you’re fine. It’s not a big deal that Cas is getting some on the side. It’s not like he made you some vow of fidelity. Why would he? A good roll in the hay and a half-decent roommate and that’s all. You’re not good for anything else and Cas would be certifiably crazy to think otherwise.

After that rousing pep talk, Dean goes back to the kitchen and avoids looking at Cas as much as he can.

He’s not very successful, mind you, but he tries.

He does insist that Cas puts a shirt on if he wants to cook, which is a small victory. Cas is craving scrambled eggs but he’s not so good at watching the pan so Dean takes over after a little while and they both end up with a nice plate of egg. Cas likes ketchup with his while Dean just uses a bit of salt and pepper. Cas talks at length about his stupid thesis and his stupid undergrads and he hooks his ankle around Dean’s under the table, and Dean tries to remember to breathe.

After suffering through breakfast, Dean plops himself down on the couch with the intent to spend the entire day on Netflix. Maybe he’ll take a break to hit the grocery store and grab some more junk food. And whiskey. Maybe tequila, too.

But Cas ends up deciding to stay home rather than hole up in the library, which means nature documentaries and talking about the universe. It’s the sort of thing that Dean loves to do with Cas on a normal day, but today is not a normal day.

Today, Cas is wearing a physical reminder that Dean is not anyone special, that Cas is bright and handsome and so damn good in bed it’s a small wonder there haven’t been any indicators before this. Seriously, Cas has probably been hooking up with some other friends of his this whole time.

Maybe they’re not even his other friends, Dean thinks with growing horror. What if Cas is dating someone? What if there’s someone that Cas takes out to restaurants and the movies, someone whose hand he holds when they talk together in little cafes, when they go to art museums and concerts together? What if Dean is Cas’s dirty little secret?

Frankly, he wouldn’t be surprised. But it still fucking hurts to consider the possibility.

Maybe he shouldn’t be so upset about it. Really, if they’re not doing enough to keep Cas satisfied, then what else can Dean do but reap the benefits? Surely, if Cas had a problem, he wouldn’t have turned to Dean that morning with a devilish smirk and wrapped a hand around his morning wood. He’d been so comfortable and into it. So, if Cas wants Dean, even just on the side, then why would Dean fight that? He should be grateful to get anything from Cas, not questioning it.

He’s so distracted by his internal crisis that he doesn’t notice Cas has stopped watching the movie to watch him. Then, Cas leaves over and presses pause on Raiders of the Lost Ark.

“Dean?”

“Yeah, Cas?”

Cas huffs a small laugh. “What’s up with you?” Dean shifts uncomfortably.

“Nothing, man. Why, what’s up with you?” He turns to look at Cas, who squints at him.

“Don’t pull that with me,” he says. “I know when something’s wrong with you. You’re easy to figure out.”

Or just easy, Dean thinks miserably, his mind still conjuring images of Cas’s picture perfect partner and how confused and devastated they would feel to find out that Cas sleeps with him sometimes. Fairly often, actually, he thinks with a sort of smugness mixed with guilt. Jesus, he needs to get a grip.

“Cas, I’m fine,” he insists. “Can we just get back to the movie already?” Cas looks deeply unimpressed with his avoidance, lips pursed and brow furrowed as if he can glare hard enough to see inside Dean’s head. Dean really hopes that that isn’t possible otherwise he’d be fucked, and not in the fun way.

But he relents and clicks play, allowing them both to settle into silence once more. It’s not a comfortable one, though, it’s tense with nervous energy and a sort of inexplicable sadness.

Dean thinks he’s going to die when Cas needs to stretch, raising his arms up over his head and arching his back with a little groan. The action pulls up his t-shirt to reveal his belly button and hips, that fucking hickey staring Dean right in the face. He swallows harshly.

Eventually, the movie ends, and they transition to watching bad television. Cas gets out his phone to play games while Dean flips through the channels. It’s comfortable, except that Dean cannot keep his mind off of whoever had their mouth on Cas’s body.

It shouldn’t hurt this much, but it does. Their arrangement wasn’t meant to last, Dean knows that logically, but he’s nevertheless hoped that maybe one of those orgasms would open Cas’s eyes to the possibility of something else, something with more romance than he’d ever admit to desiring.

Things come to a head at dinnertime, with Cas standing by the fridge and holding a jar of tomato sauce in his hand and frowning at it like it’s withholding the secrets of the universe. And Dean loves him. Oh God, how he loves him.

“I love—. Wait, shit. Uh,” he stammers. “It’s just—Cas, I can’t do this anymore.”

Cas looks at him with wide eyes. “What?”

“I can’t—” He gestures uselessly between them. “This doesn’t work for me. I thought I could do it but I can’t anymore, I’m not strong enough. You’re great, Cas, you’re so great and that’s the whole problem really. You’re perfect and I can’t stand only being yours when we’re horny and—and I can’t be your side piece, Cas. I saw the hickey, okay?” He points to Cas’s hip and Cas opens his mouth but Dean cuts him off, he has to get this all off of his chest right now before he chickens out. “And I tried to convince myself it would be okay, that just having any of you would be enough, but it ain’t. I—I want all of you, y’know? But I know you would never want that, and it’s just—just tearing me up inside thinking about it, thinking about never having you again, but I had to—I dunno, I felt like I had to say something, I guess. Can’t do this anymore.” Dean’s breathing hard by the end of his little rant as if he’d run a full marathon, his face and his body hot with shame. He’s tense and ready to flee, wondering if Cas will be so uncomfortable he’ll want to leave right away or if he’ll ask Dean to pack his bags. Either way, this is going to end badly.

He dares to glance up at Cas, wanting to search his expression for clues, when he notices something is off.

Cas is smiling, wide and gummy. This is Dean’s favorite smile and it’s so rare; why is Cas smiling like that and why right now?

Still holding the fucking tomato sauce, Cas takes two careful steps toward Dean, close enough to touch.

“This bruise is from when I walked into the table last night but, yes, I like you, too.”

The little gears in Dean’s brain refuse to turn and process this information. “Huh?”

“I want the same things you do, Dean,” Cas says. He takes another step forward, his smile becoming a bit shy. “I want all of you, too.” The way his eyelashes are fluttering gently makes Dean’s heart trip over itself. “I…sort of thought we were in a good place? I mean, I really didn’t want to push you into a relationship you didn’t want. I just thought we would talk about it eventually.” Cas laughs. “I guess we’re doing that now.”

Dean has yet to form any words. He’s feeling a bit shocked and off-kilter at the moment. He does, however, take a half step toward Cas and reach out to grab the hem of his shirt. He squints at Cas’s hip and thinks, yeah, that’s definitely a bruise and not the sexy kind. Huh.

“Dean?” He looks up at Cas, who’s biting his lip. “Say something?”

What could he possibly say at this moment? How could he respond to being offered everything he’s ever wanted in the form of his gorgeous roommate and best friend? He takes another step, bringing them chest to chest in their cramped kitchen. Then, he raises both hands in order to cup Cas’s cheek, to nudge his bitten lower lip with his thumb, and to push his fingers into that dark, messy hair.

“I’m the luckiest son of a gun alive,” he finally says, drawing Cas even closer. “Not sure what I did to deserve this, but I ain’t gonna question it.”

Cas rolls his eyes before he leans forward to kiss Dean’s jaw. “You’re pretty dense for an honors student, did you know that?”

“Dense and blind, apparently.”

“I’ll forgive you,” Cas says, taking Dean’s hands in his own and stepping back. “I’ll forgive you if you come back to bed with me right now and don’t get up for a while.”

“Oh, I’m thinking we’re both gonna get up.” Dean smirks, following Cas to his bedroom with bare feet and an open heart, too.

[gwynne-fics]

wei50-blog replied to your post “Gangs of Seoul words Ye-Rim takes Soo-Ah shopping with her during the...”

Ack! Soo-Ah thinks she’s figured out something about Ji-Hyuk that was puzzling her, but she hasn’t! And he has not given her any other reason why he is treating her like he cares, but not acting on it in any other way. Ji-Hyuk needs to be careful or he is going to lose Soo-Ah before he even knows he has! He’s going to have to either really step up and match his words to his actions and feelings, or let her go, and step back.

She has assumed the wrong thing--that because Ji-Hyuk has been with prostitutes, he doesn’t want to have a sexual relationship with her, because his actions when they were dating didn’t tell her that they were headed in that direction. 

She also has some bias of her own--you only have sex with someone if you’re in love with them. She believes it should be treated as something special you do with someone who is special. For her, it isn’t so much that he’s not a virgin, it’s that he’s had unloving emotionless sex, and that he does it repeatedly with the same girl. So >.>

Will have to see how she is going to change how she interacts with Ji-Hyuk with what she perceives as insight into him. Don’t see her outright being upset and calling him out? Maybe, because he has never declared himself, she doesn’t think she has a reason to be jealous? So maybe all she can do is object to his actions as being inappropriate for what she imagines their relationship to be, and tell him he needs to back off.

She probably won’t say anything and just retreat >.> we’ll see. I haven’t written it yet.

Ji-Hyuk just doesn’t seem to have a clue what he is doing, or how to get what he really wants? This is the first time he has treated a girl this way, because this is the first girl he has had deeper feelings for? Soo-Ah, since she has not been part of the gang for that long, and does not understand gang culture, does not see how he is afraid to show emotions because doing so can put him and her in danger?

That is a good read on the situation. Soo-Ah really is an outsider to all of this and part of Ji-Hyuk wants to protect her from that, just like she wants to save him from the gang >.>

Ye-Rim (is well meaning!) doesn’t really understand either? Because she is part of this culture, so no wonder hard for her to understand Soo-Ah and to be able to explain it to her in a way that is clear and in her understanding of the world. What is bother Soo-Ah is not that Ji-Hyuk is experienced, nor is she worried about birth control at this point

They do really have different standards because they are a part of different worlds. It doesn’t make sense to Ye-Rim that virginity (or purity in a way) is even an issue. She’s more concerned about disease and pregnancy affecting her life. Ye-Rim enjoys sex and doing that with her boyfriends but she’s also very respectful of the fact her current boyfriend made a deliberate choice not to have sex whenever the fancy struck him, even though he has easy access to it. 

Trying to show all sorts of points of view with these ladies ^^;;

Soo-Ah feels in limbo a bit? Not fair to her to keep this up, it’s been 8 months already. Ji-Hyuk will have to speak up? Ooo, look forward to what is next for this couple! Will he notice a change in her attitude towards him? She might be more closed off, less willing to go along with his ‘protection’ measures.

She does feel in limbo, but she isn’t relying on Ji-Hyuk too much now that she has a job and a plan for how to use her money. He’s just been given that order to get close to her and watch her project. They haven’t spoken since that happened.

The eight months is in reference to how long they’ve known each other total. This breakup/living in the same building situation has only been going on for about two months.

[eclisseacontextforfilm]

why should we be here talking, arguing? Believe me Anna, words are becoming less and less necessary; they create misunderstandings

eclisse inspirations, vol. IV Michelangelo Antonioni’s Trilogy of incommunicability  part. 1 - L’avventura, 1960

When Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura arrived in 1960 – amidst a tumultuous reception in Cannes that saw some disturbed audience members wanting to throw something at the screen – cinema was already changing in fundamental ways. The makers of individual, handmade films that had been institutionally kept out on the fringes (Stan Brakhage, Shirley Clarke, Norman McLaren, to name but three) were starting to draw more viewers and critical attention. The narrative feature film underwent a revision, from inside the nouvelle vague (Godard’s Breathless) and out (Agnès Varda’s first films, Alain Resnais’s Last Year in Marienbad). Meanwhile the Italian film world had already seen the old codes of neorealism swept away – much of it Antonioni’s own doing – and had moved towards a post-neorealist cinema liberated from melodrama and political ideologies, perhaps best exemplified in 1959 by Ermanno Olmi’s first feature Time Stood Still.

A new, maturing modernity became widespread in cinema. The years 1959 to 1960 can be identified as a world-historical moment for film. In line with the development of lenses, film stocks and new and smaller cameras (including a more ubiquitous use of 16mm), the modernism that took hold showed yet again the time lag after which cinema typically comes to embrace changes that have occurred first in other artforms: for instance, the radical overhaul of jazz by bebop; the transformation of the sound world of music by such figures as Edgard Varèse and Harry Partch; the abstract-expressionist movement in painting from Pollock to Rothko; the ‘new novel’ invading literature (on which Marienbaddrew, courtesy of a script by novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet).

In this exceptional moment, some of cinema’s old props were being kicked away, including Hollywood’s genre formulae, the three-act narrative structure, the privileging of psychology, the insistence on happy and ‘closed’ endings. But what did it mean to free oneself of the securing laws and traditions of genre, its capacity for creating worlds and codes? What did it mean to reject a storytelling architecture that had served dramatists well since Aeschylus? What kind of moving-image experience with actors could exist beyond psychology – which, after all, was still on the 20th century’s new frontier of science and society? What if endings were less conclusive, or less ‘satisfying’? These are the questions Antonioni confronted and responded to with L’avventura, the film that – more than any other at that moment – redefined the landscape of the artform, and mapped a new path that still influences today’s most venturesome and radical young filmmakers.

For some that film would instead be Breathless. Godard’s accidental discovery of the jump cut (courtesy of his editor) helped him rejig a more conventional yet sly imagining of the crime movie into a piece of radical art, a way of fracturing time as important as Picasso’s and Braque’s Cubist fracturing of space and perception. It’s also arguable that Godard had the more immediate impact, especially through the 1960s, since his taste for pop-culture iconography, graphic wordplay and politics positioned him a bit closer to the centre of the period’s cultural zeitgeist than Antonioni (despite the Italian’s subsequent ability to capture swinging London and The Yardbirds in 1966’s Blowup, and Los Angeles counterculture in 1970’s Zabriskie Point). Even a movie with huge pop figures and crossover attraction like Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night (1964) would have been unthinkable without the example of Godard.

Yet I’d argue that L’avventura and Antonioni’s subsequent films – perhaps most importantly L’eclisse (The Eclipse, 1962) – have exerted a greater long-term impact (his effect on the generations after the 1960s is something I’ll consider later). One of L’avventura’s many remarkable qualities to note now is its staying power – its ability to astonish anew after repeated viewings. Many great films are of their moment, yet lessen over time. Here, the entrance of Monica Vitti, with her classically hip black dress and sexily tousled blonde mane, amounts to an announcement that the 60s have arrived; a lesser work with her in it would be no more than a key identifier of that moment.

It’s the film’s subtle straddling of an older world and a new one still in the process of defining itself – reflected immediately and perfectly in composer Giovanni Fusco’s opening title theme, alternating between nostalgic Sicilian strummings and nervous, creeping percussive beats – that establishes its rich, unending landscapes of physical reality and the mind. This is part of the film’s timelessness, within an absolutely contemporary / modern setting. The early images of L’avventura trace a parting of the generations, as Anna (Lea Massari) – seemingly the film’s central character – tells her wealthy Roman father that she’s going away on a holiday to Sicily with girlfriend Claudia (Vitti), then seen very much on the periphery of the action, tagging along. But after Anna inexplicably disappears during a boat trip to an uninhabited island, it is Claudia who moves to the centre of the narrative – and into the affections of Anna’s architect boyfriend Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) – as attempts to find Anna gradually peter out.

What makes L’avventura the greatest of all films, however, is its assertion, exploration and expansion of the concept of the ‘open film’. This had been Antonioni’s great project ever since he started out as a filmmaker after an extremely interesting career as a critic (like Godard). His early documentaries, such as The People of the Po (Gente del Po, 1947), and his earliest narrative films, such as the astonishing Story of a Love Affair (Cronaca di un amore, 1950), suggest an artist pulling against what he perceived as the constraints of neorealism towards an openness based on a heightened perception of constant change – a dynamic that was for him the fundamental quality of the post-war world.

A NEW QUESTION

For Antonioni, the issues of neorealism were essential, in that they gave him an aesthetic base from which to launch. The People of the Po is an early neorealist work, both in its submersion in unvarnished realism and its interest in the lives of working people, but it also works against the predominant tendency in neorealism to project sympathy and sentimentality. By the time of Story of a Love Affair, teeming with characters from the upper and middle classes, his was not a class-based cinema; it offered instead a broader perspective – observant, distanced, occasionally unsympathetic. It reached into a more modern realm than neo-realism, a realm that had no name for it – and in fact still doesn’t.

Antonioni was never a leader – nor even part – of a movement. That’s partly because with each successive film he constantly redefined his approach. Roland Barthes, in his profoundly perceptive and concise 1980 speech honouring Antonioni, identified the process this way: “It is because you are an artist that your work is open to the Modern. Many people take the Modern to be a standard to be raised in battle against the old world and its compromised values; but for you the Modern is not the static term of a facile opposition; the Modern is on the contrary an active difficulty in following the changes of Time, not just at the level of grand History but at that of the little History of which each of us is individually the measure. Beginning in the aftermath of the last war, your work has thus proceeded, from moment to moment, in a movement of double vigilance, towards the contemporary world and towards yourself. Each of your films has been, at your personal level, a historical experience, that is to say the abandonment of an old problem and the formulation of a new question; this means that you have lived through and treated the history of the last 30 years with subtlety, not as the matter of an artistic reflection or an ideological mission, but as a substance whose magnetism it was your task to capture from work to work.”

L’avventura builds on the work and experiences of Antonioni’s previous decade, which saw him working through his doubts about genre (film noir in Story of a Love Affair, backstage drama in La signora senza camelie, 1953); about narrative form (the counter-intuitive three-part structure of I vinti, 1952); his love of writer Cesare Pavese (author of the source novel for 1955’s Le amiche) – as important a literary voice to Antonioni as Cesare Zavattini was to the hardcore neorealists. And add to this his growing interest in temporality, the emptied-out frame, the composition that maintains both precision and an expansive gaze that treats bodies, buildings and landscapes with equal importance.

With only a few filmmakers (Mizoguchi, Renoir, Dreyer, von Sternberg, Resnais, Olmi, Kubrick, and more recently Costa, Alonso and Apichatpong) is there such a visible, constant seeking of artistic purpose through the process of each successive film – a striving, a refinement. Antonioni’s 1950s work represents one of the most fruitful directorial decades to watch of any filmmaker. Already in some ways a master in 1950, he proceeded to question his own positions with each film, as if the doubts he had about the state of the post-war world resided, originally, in himself, and then fanned out to the making of the work itself, so that the expression of mortality (most explicitly conveyed in a Pavese adaptation such as Le amiche) inside the film was part and parcel of the director’s own tentative stance. (Tentato suicido/Tentative Suicide is the title of Antonioni’s segment in the 1953 omnibus film L’amore in città.)

These were not only cerebral matters – though the intellectual currents running underneath these films and under the neorealist movement preceding them were crucial to their fecundity – but real concerns rooted in the hard factors that faced any Italian filmmaker trying to get a project off the ground. Antonioni’s tentativeness – a constant fascination to his supporters in the French critical community, and an irritation to many of his Italian contemporaries – was partly based on the tentativeness of Italian film production itself. In almost no case during the 1950s did he encounter a smooth pre-production, firm financial backing or drama-free production periods. The typically poor performance of his films at the box office did little to enamour him to distributors and producers, though in the then nascent world of the auteur film business, it helped enormously that his films did well – even smashingly well – in Paris.

After the commercial failure of Il grido (1957) and an initially limp critical response, Antonioni seriously considered abandoning the cinema altogether, and returned to the theatre, where he had worked in the early years of his career. Even when he did come back to film, to shoot L’avventura, all of his worst concerns came back to haunt him. Already shaky producers bailed out mid-shoot as their company, Imeria, went bankrupt, leaving the crew literally high and dry on the desert island of Lisca Bianca, without sufficient food and water, in a hair-raising episode that makes Coppola’s misadventures filming Apocalypse Now in the Filipino jungle sound like a stroll on the beach.

SURPASSING MYSTERIES

This context, in all its intellectual and practical dimensions, is crucial to comprehending the massive achievement that L’avventura represents. How a film of such constant perfection could even be made under such dreadful conditions is, for me, one of the surpassing mysteries of film history. Viewed in isolation (and aren’t almost all films, even more now in our isolated viewing environments?), L’avventura can superficially be seen as magnificently beautiful in its constant chain of stunning black-and-white images from cinematographer Aldo Scavarda (with whom Antonioni had never previously worked, and never would again).

L’avventura is populated by good-looking actors oozing sex appeal. Monica Vitti, for one, had never had a starring film role before, but with her smouldering presence it was she – as much as Sophia Loren or Ingmar Bergman’s ensemble of intelligent and worldly actresses – who set the standard and the look for the new, sexualised European movie star that was key to the successful foreign-film invasion that hit English-language shores (and was perceived as such a threat by LBJ and his White House crony Jack Valenti that they set up the American Film Institute as a nationalist bulwark against the foreigners supposedly taking over US cinemas). For New York downtown hipsters, London cosmopolitans and Paris cinephiles alike, the combination of serious cinema and sexual beauty was simply too much to pass up.

All that may be why L’avventura had its immediate impact. (A special jury prize from Cannes, after all that booing and hissing, also didn’t hurt.) But the endurance of the film, residing crucially in its conceptual openness, describes a pathway that cinema has been exploring and testing ever since. Much as Flaubert’s novels and Beethoven’s symphonies, concertos and string quartets are continually regenerated by way of the new directions they paved, and the new generations of work following such directions, so Antonioni’s work – and L’avventura in particular – is regenerated by the subsequent cinema that came in its wake.

As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith observes in his essential study of the film, the periphery in Antonioni is of absolute importance, for this is where the sense of drift in his mise-en-scène and narratives resides – a de-centred centrality. No filmmaker before Antonioni, not even the most radical visionaries like Vigo, had established this before as a part of their aesthetic project. In the early scenes when Anna visits Sandro, or when they join their holiday boating group, Vitti’s Claudia remains for a long time on the outside looking in, marginalised, seemingly unimportant. And yet there is something in her nervous gaze, her subtle physical gestures, that makes her impossible not to notice, especially in contrast to Anna’s inner tension and outward unhappiness – an unhappiness she can’t identify, even in private to Claudia.

These are most certainly not Bergman women, forever examining themselves, forever able to articulate the exact words in whole spoken paragraphs about their state of mind, their relationship with God. For one thing, in Antonioni, God doesn’t exist. The state of the world is one of humans searching for some kind of connection amidst a disinterested nature; the island on which the floating party lands is both exotically remote and barren, like a volcano frozen during eruption. The landscapes in L’avventura have been interpreted in a number of different ways that testify to the film’s Joycean levels of readings: from Seymour Chatman’s insistence on metonyms for his reading of what he calls Antonioni’s “surface of the world”, to Gilberto Perez’s more valuable view of the work in his extraordinary film study The Material Ghost, across a whole range of possible interpretations, from the literary to the visual. For me, however, it’s always tempting to see these people – on this island, at that moment – as the last humans on earth.

In L’avventura, more than any film before it had ever dared, the centre will not hold. The open film is a fluid thing, pulsating, forever changing, shifting from one centre to another, not quite beginning and not quite ending (or at least beginning something new in its ‘ending’). Anna, the centre, vanishes, with no visual or verbal clues to trace her by, except rumours of sightings. She was in effect the glue that held the party together, having helped bring Claudia in closer to her circle of friends – and to Sandro. But with Anna’s disappearance, the film alters shape in front of us; a sudden absence actually expands the film’s eye. Individual shots become more extended and prolonged, the sky and land grow larger, the elements become more tangible (clouds, rain, harsher sun).

HERE AND NOW

What’s even more disturbing is that nothing happens – no discovery, no evidence, no detective work and, finally, no memory. L’avventura is, in part, the story of how a woman is forgotten, to the extent that long before the film is done, Anna is less than a trace on a page, a ghost or a photo in an album. A more sentimental filmmaker or a Hollywood studio would have ensured that Anna lived on through Claudia and Sandro’s love affair and possible union. But here, after a while, they don’t speak of Anna anymore. She gradually fades, which is what happens to the dead as regarded by the living (not that Anna is necessarily dead; the film neither encourages nor discourages the suggestion). Although their joint actions ostensibly trace an effort to collect any information on Anna’s whereabouts, Antonioni suggests that the activity of Claudia and Sandro isn’t nearly as important as their time together in this moment, in this or that place.

About those places. The greatness of L’avventura is multivalent, situated in many realms at once: cinematic, aural, existential, literary, architectural, sexual, philosophical – all of them of equal importance. The open film, beyond its fluidity, is amoral in the best sense, or at least unconcerned with a hierarchy of values. Almost all films of any kind privilege certain artistic values above others, and the great ones do it for several: Singin’ in the Rainhonours the body, the sounds of showbiz, the fresh memories of Hollywood at its height; Vampyr celebrates the psychological effect that optical dislocations have on the viewer’s psyche, the spiritual possibilities of the horror film, the blurry line between genres and those alive and dead.

But L’avventura marks a new kind of film, not made before, in which the story that launched the film dissolves and gives way to something else – a journey? a wandering? – that points to a host of possible readings beyond what mere narrative allows, and yet at the same time is too specifically rooted in a form of acting – in situations, episodes and events – to ever become purely abstract. (Though this was an area Antonioni did address in various ways, including the semi-apocalyptic ending of L’eclisse, the visualisations of madness in 1964’s Red Desert and the slow-motion explosion near the end of Zabriskie Point.)

For Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, “L’avventura is a film about consciousness and its objects, the consciousness that people have of other people and of the environment that surrounds them.” It is a film that’s also about a change of consciousness – what that looks and feels like: for instance Claudia’s move from the edges to the centre and, in the final passages, back to the edges. This change of consciousness is realised in terms that encompass Antonioni’s grasp of a vast range of materials: Sandro’s relationship with architecture is framed with the couple’s bodies, both above buildings and nearly swallowed up by them, their shared sexuality first shared in open space and then further and further contained within smaller rooms; the sense of new possibilities (new towns, new relationships) seen in the curve of a highway, a train hurtling down the tracks and through tunnels; the insistence on the Old World in the hulking presence of churches, formal dinner parties, rigid bodies against Claudia’s free and easy one, always in motion; the sounds of creaky nostalgic ‘Italian’ music against Fusco’s disturbing atonalities and unnerving syncopations (in one of the greatest film scores ever written).

Antonioni, as Perez often notes, infuses his cinema with doubt – a doubt that extends to his questioning of psychology as a basis for cinematic drama (let alone his doubt in the value of cinematic drama). But doubt is not an end point in this or his other films; instead it represents the beginning of new possibilities. Thus the open film’s mapping of changes of consciousness – through the tools of mise-en-scène, temporality, elliptical editing, a matching of sound to image combined with a de-emphasis on actors’ faces presiding over scenes (close-ups are fewer by far in L’avventura than any of his previous films) – is a picture of a post-psychological topography of the human condition, a radical effort to find a cinema grammar to express inner thought with photographic means.

This is a map that did (as Perez has noted) go out of style for a time, perhaps during the period of postmodernism, and definitely during the period when Fassbinder ruled the arthouse. But the map has been opened again by a new generation. Its influence can now be seen in films from every continent – to such an extent that the Antonioni open film can be said to be in its golden age. Here are some examples: the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, from Blissfully Yours to Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives; Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad through to Liverpool; Uruphong Raksasad’s Agrarian Utopia; C.W. Winter and Anders Edström’s The Anchorage; Ulrich Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness; the entire so-called Berlin School, of which Köhler is a part; Albert Serra’s Honour of the Knights and Birdsong; James Benning; Kelly Reichardt; Kore-eda Hirokazu; Ho Yuhang’s Rain Dogs; Jia Zhangke’s Platform and Still Life; Li Hongqi’s Winter Vacation. The list goes on…

Some of these filmmakers may disavow any Antonioni influence – but we know that what directors (including Antonioni) say about their films can’t always be trusted. Besides, the ways in which L’avventura works on the viewer’s consciousness are furtive and often below a conscious level. In Apichatpong’s fascination with characters being transformed by the landscape around them; in Raksasad’s interest in dissolving the borders between ‘documentary’ and ‘fiction’, or the recorded and the staged; in Alonso’s precision and absolute commitment to purely cinematic resources and disgust with the sentimental; in Köhler’s continual refinement of his visualisation of his characters’ uncertain existences; in Reichardt’s concern for what happens to human beings in nature – especially when they get lost: in all these and more, the open film is stretched, remoulded, reconsidered, questioned, embraced. A kind of film that was first named L’avventura.

[by Robert Koehler, from BFI. November 2016]

[him-e]

Ships and “Endgame” in the ST

I’m curious about are how the narrative treats Rey and Kylo’s interactions in TLJ and how Rey interacts with Finn: I just wanted to hear a counter-argument on why F/innRey wouldn’t be endgame and/or Rey/Kylo would be endgame. They’re not connected necessarily: both can’t be endgame at the same time because I don’t expect Lucasfilm to depict a poly relationship any time soon, but arguing against Reylo being endgame doesn’t mean f/nnrey must be canon or vice versa. Please don’t think I’m writing this in bad faith, I’m genuinely curious about these points and I don’t mean to disrespect anyone who ships Reylo. 

Rey and Finn’s interactions in TFA and TLJ are framed very positively. The lines of dialogue between them like “Cute boyfriend?” and “You looked at me like no one ever had,” definitely point to romantic interest to me: I don’t see why the creators would include lines like that without indicating some romantic interest was there. Finn is the first person to ever “come back” for Rey, and their experiences with each other are “firsts” that are incredibly important. They care deeply about each other.

In TLJ, they are separated for the majority of it, but you could say that separation is always part of the romantic arc, and Rey is constantly thinking about him, while Finn is constantly thinking about her. Before she heads off to save Kylo, she gives Chewie an important message to Finn. (Which could have been something like “I love you” but I don’t want to assume.) When they see each other and embrace at the end of the movie, it’s the first time Rey looks *happy* in TLJ. She looks so happy when they hug, and there’s a long hold both on their embrace and at Rey’s heartbroken expression as Finn tucks  in Rose.

In contrast, the Rey and Kylo scenes could be interpreted as Rey learning her lesson about how important Kylo is to saving the galaxy: not a “Don’t Trust Your Sexuality” lesson, which I do find a misogynistic angle to take on this particular issue, but a lesson about thinking she needs Ben Solo to save the galaxy, a lesson that she doesn’t need him. Additionally, although most of their Force bonds are weighed with attraction, she never seems to be very happy with him, and at the end, he says deeply cruel things to her (The Throne Room scene) and attempts to have her killed on Crait. 

The last Force bond tells me Rey is not budging, and, per the novelization, has no compassion for him: it would be a long, long road to have her forgive him at all, let alone build some sort of romantic dynamic even though they will probably be enemies for a significant portion of IX. (Noting here that yes, they were enemies in TLJ too, but IX can’t spend a large portion of its running time devoted to intimate conversations like TLJ did: it’s the final act of this Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga, things need to start wrapping up.)

I do think that Kylo Ren’s redemption is somewhat necessary to keep the story of the Skywalker family from seeming like a complete tragedy: it would be a pessimistic ending, in my view, if the takeaway from the ST was “Sometimes, your loved one can’t be saved, and so other people must rise to the occasion,” for the Skywalker family. But, even if I think redemption is incoming, I’m still not convinced that Kylo could be with Rey. There’s audience reaction to consider (cue the cries of people asking just how this villain is worthy of the hero), but also the narrative beforehand: although Rey seemed willing to forgive Kylo completely for a part of TLJ, the audience still remembers scenes like the interrogation (a violation of Rey and something that robs her of agency, even though she does defeat Kylo), the Snow Fight, the Throne Room, and Crait. They did tone down some of his actions in the interrogation, like touching her, supposedly, but I still feel like Kylo is an unambiguous villain in those scenes, his treatment of Rey is awful (and this is just about his behavior, not whether Rey fights him off) and then, after showing us some of his humanity in TLJ, he snaps back to being a villain, and hurting Rey, intentional or not.

In TFA, Kylo is very much an aggressor/pursuer of Rey and her triumph is in fighting him off; in TLJ, he seems like more of a tempter figure, and Rey’s triumph is not giving into his offer and finding value in herself. She doesn’t ever seem happy with him, and the narrative never shows us a scene of complete fulfillment when she’s with Kylo: he never gives her anything she didn’t have, where Finn does in TFA by going back for her. (The scene where they touch hands, especially considering the music and the fact that Luke Skywalker is the one walking in on them, could also be read as an ominous one where Rey is getting too close to the dark.)

I don’t deny that Reylo was extremely “shippy” in TLJ. But Rian Johnson, in the same interview when he said that Kylo’s perspective in the throne room was a “naked, emotional appeal” also said: “It was important to me that it wasn’t a chess game, it wasn’t just a manipulation. It’s unhealthy, and there’s much that is awful about the way that he is manipulative. From his point of view, it’s a very naked, open, emotional appeal.” So he does acknowledge that Kylo is being unhealthy and manipulative, and that’s the writer’s intent. Rey’s arc in TLJ is very much fit to a naive hero’s arc, where she trusts the wrong person and sees the error of her ways. It doesn’t mean that Kylo is irredeemable and can never be trusted again, but TLJ also doesn’t mean that Kylo and Rey should be together, and includes quite a few scenes that could be read as red flags on his end, signals to the audience that this is a bad man who doesn’t have Rey’s best interests at heart.

And then there’s the next film, which is more opinion/conjecture on my part, but I don’t think JJ Abrams is the kind of storyteller who’s interested in depicting a big epic romance as the finale of the Skywalker Trilogy, or interested in involving Rey in the Skywalker Redemption question. Han and Leia care about Ben in TFA, Rey only views him as an enemy; and when she does try redeeming him in TLJ, the answer to her attempt is a solid “No.” JJ is a Better Trevorrow to me, in some ways, where he’s good at spectacle and big, bombastic movies, and although he isn’t openly misogynistic, his movies do have some sexist pitfalls. The “Reylo” arc is on a knife’s edge as it is, and already perceived as abusive and glorifying of a villain who hurts the heroine by many people: how would he be able to execute it in such a way that the audience wouldn’t be outraged at the injustice of Kylo Ren not only getting redeemed, but “getting the girl” so to speak? (I totally think the idea of Rey as a prize is repulsive, but unfortunately the majority of people do still perceive heroines or love interests who are female this way.)

Rey not needing Kylo, and being able to ascend to heroism without him, was the end point of TLJ, and I think it would undermine that ending if in IX she did turn out to need him after all and they had to work together or she had to forgive him. The movies so far have explicitly showed that while they’re attracted to each other, he’s a toxic person who isn’t good for her. And if it is going to be romantic going forward, why would it have an “endgame” type ending? And then there’s the option of Rey being alone romantically, but still surrounded by friends, allies, and people who care about her.

And on a separate note, I just feel like there are far too many “romance” cues for F/innRey for that to not have been planned from the beginning. In TFA, those “boyfriend” lines weren’t essential, they could have been taken out without affecting the friendly-rapport feeling in their relationship. In TLJ, they didn’t have to juxtapose Rey being in tears facing Kylo to happily embracing Finn upon being reunited with him. And while there is the factor of Rose kissing Finn, they never entered into a deliberate romantic relationship or showed that the feelings were mutual: I feel like FinnRose isn’t essential to the next movie if they dismissed it, since so much of Finn and Rose’s arc could be read as them being friends or compatriots. There’s really no cues of romance until she kisses him.

I’m sorry this is much longer than I anticipated, but these are the things that have been nagging me for the past few months. I did really enjoy TLJ, and I do like Reylo and apologize if my comments came off like I was trashing the ship for no reason, but this is my honest reading of the text. I have a lot of respect for your meta and wanted to bring up these points: if you don’t want to respond to this, I’m sorry for depicting a negative opinion and wasting your time.

Don’t worry, I don’t think you wrote this in bad faith! That’s one hell of an essay, and I want to thank you for taking the time to write it and submit it to my blog. The two main arguments you’re making are a) that reylo is real but is depicted negatively and so it’s unlikely to be endgame, and b) that f/nnrey can still happen and be endgame because the romantic hints dropped in TFA must go somewhere and it makes Rey happy (forgive me for the simplification). I’ll try to address some key points.

The movies so far have explicitly showed that while they’re attracted to each other, he’s a toxic person who isn’t good for her

I don’t think that’s what the movies showed. He’s not a toxic person to Rey (Daisy Ridley has gone on record saying Kylo “nurtured” Rey in a way that even Luke couldn’t do)—he’s someone whose political affiliation and morals and ideologies can’t be reconciled with Rey’s, and THAT’S why Rey dumps him. Because he doesn’t stop firing on the Resistance fleet and instead asks her to essentially become a villainess at his side, because he’s still hellbent on being the leader of a despotic military organization, that’s why the narrative separated them at the end of TLJ, not because he’s “toxic” or “abusive”.

even if I think redemption is incoming, I’m still not convinced that Kylo could be with Rey. There’s audience reaction to consider (cue the cries of people asking just how this villain is worthy of the hero), but also the narrative beforehand: although Rey seemed willing to forgive Kylo completely for a part of TLJ, the audience still remembers scenes like the interrogation (a violation of Rey and something that robs her of agency, even though she does defeat Kylo), the Snow Fight, the Throne Room, and Crait. They did tone down some of his actions in the interrogation, like touching her, supposedly, but I still feel like Kylo is an unambiguous villain in those scenes, his treatment of Rey is awful (and this is just about his behavior, not whether Rey fights him off) and then, after showing us some of his humanity in TLJ, he snaps back to being a villain, and hurting Rey, intentional or not. 

So it actually all boils down to the audience’s reaction, doesn’t it? He’s too much of a villain so let’s not make reylo happen or the audience won’t accept it. But what the narrative is depicting—intentionally—is a hero/villain romance. The villain being a villain and yes, doing villain things including trying to hurt the hero (and viceversa, the hero doing hero things and trying to stop, violently, the villain) is exactly what defines this sort of pairings. Part of the audience will love it, part won’t, but a narrative that is afraid of pissing off a part of the audience isn’t a strong narrative.

I’m also not sure what would be the point of redeeming Kylo but still having him portrayed as a toxic individual whom the heroine should stay the fuck away from. Does this sound like an epic closure to a trilogy of trilogies whose thematic pillars have always been hope and redemption? To me it just sounds like a moralistic tale trying to half assedly appeal to tumblr discourse.

The “Reylo” arc is on a knife’s edge as it is, and already perceived as abusive and glorifying of a villain who hurts the heroine by many people: how would he be able to execute it in such a way that the audience wouldn’t be outraged at the injustice of Kylo Ren not only getting redeemed, but “getting the girl” so to speak? (I totally think the idea of Rey as a prize is repulsive, but unfortunately the majority of people do still perceive heroines or love interests who are female this way.)

You’re talking as if the audience is a hivemind and universally agrees with the intra-fandom, white-feminist, tumblr-specific “Reylo is abusive” wank. But the majority of the audience is actually moderately fine with Reylo, and most of them will be overwhelmingly okay with it if IX has something that tops the praetorian guard fight in terms of iconic jedi/sith marriage alliance. A good 80% of the general target audience for SW is people who don’t engage with fandom the way we do, they couldn’t care less about reylo or f/nnrey or any other ships for that matter, they just want to see a good story and be entertained for three hours and pew pew space battles. The people who will be “outraged” if Kylo “gets the girl” are only a tiny niche if you consider the star wars audience as a whole.

Also, it isn’t Kylo getting the girl. It’s Rey getting the boy. TLJ made sure to put her perspective front and center—it’s she who pursues Kylo, she who catches him in a state of undress, she who gets the eye candy, she who ruminates on his backstory while also delving deep into her own. It’s her point of view, her feelings, her attraction, her choices, while Kylo remains relatively passive for most of the time, waiting for her (to show up in a force connection, to come to the Supremacy, to take his hand). 

The scene where they touch hands, especially considering the music and the fact that Luke Skywalker is the one walking in on them, could also be read as an ominous one where Rey is getting too close to the dark

oh, no. No, no, no. :)) The Force theme plays during the hand touch. (the /ominous/ music you hear before is actually some notes from Kylo’s theme, iirc). And the point of Luke’s arc in TLJ was that he was wrong about Ben, wrong about trying to murder him, and especially wrong about going into exile for years, and after this scene he finally decides to face his demons. He’s not the wise mentor whose perspective can be trusted. His perspective is as flawed as everyone else’s. And he is actually the one who is depicted in an ominous way in that scene (barging in, hand raised to destroy the hut in a gesture that reminds intentionally of what Ben did the night he destroyed the jedi academy).

And at no point Rey got too close to the dark. She only got close to Kylo. She was never tempted by power, or knowledge, or violence, or any of the traditional pitfalls of the dark side. Her only instinct was to help, and save someone from himself. If compassion and love are a path to the dark side, then we should rewrite the Sith code, lol. No, Luke was wrong, he learned his lesson, and by the end of the movie he went to face Kylo Ren fully knowing that he wouldn’t be the one who’d turn the monster back into a man this time, but that someone else could.

Rey not needing Kylo, and being able to ascend to heroism without him, was the end point of TLJ, and I think it would undermine that ending if in IX she did turn out to need him after all and they had to work together or she had to forgive him.

It’s not about “needing”, or “having to”. It’s about wanting. Rey not needing Kylo (and likewise Kylo not needing Rey) is something I’m thankful TLJ established, because it actually lays the basis for the healthiest kind of relationship, the one where you love someone without depending (materially or emotionally) on them. This puts all the emphasis on personal choice, rather than necessity, and I think fits extremely well with the main themes of this trilogy. Rey realizing that she doesn’t need Kylo was beautiful and I’m sure the narrative won’t backtrack on it, but I still think she’s going to be with him in the end, not because she “has to”, or “can’t live without him”, but because she wants to.

And I think this doesn’t undermine Rey’s agency at all, on the contrary, it elevates it.

Re: the proposal speech being manipulative but also genuine according to Rian, please refer to this and this. 

Re: Rey being “unhappy” with him, uhm. I see this argument tossed around all the time and it annoys me big time. Right, she was SO unhappy that she ditched Luke to run to Kylo and try to save him as soon as she got a Force flashforward of his being at her side. What an ugly vision she must have seen, right? Careful not to confuse “raw emotions for an enemy whose pain resonates deeply with mine, as I’m also fighting a war” with “unhappiness”. Rey wasn’t unhappy in TLJ anymore than she was in TFA—she just stopped pretending to be fine, as she met someone who made her dig under the surface of her plucky heroine facade and confront her own demons and feelings of abandonment, and who brought his own demons and feelings of abandonment to the table, which Rey felt intensely for.

Happiness, conversely, isn’t always a sign and guarantee of romantic love, and the idea that love always makes you feel happy is generalizing and shallow, especially when it’s more about looking happy than anything. “She looks so happy when they hug”. Uh. So? I have a best friend who is truly the only person in the world who can put a smile on my face when I’m feeling down and who I can be completely myself with, and I would even say she’s the MOST important person in my world aside from my own family, and YET, I’m not in love with her. Nor should I try to be in order to stop suffering or be generically “happy”. Friendship is friendship, and love is love: both are equally important but they’re not the same, and they fulfill different needs. (mind, this is not me dissing friends-to-lovers tropes, which I like a lot, or saying that friendship can never evolve into romantic love, just that the kind of comfort and happiness true friendship offers isn’t necessarily the best basis for a romance, especially when there aren’t any obvious signs of romantic/sexual attraction.)

Speaking of which, and moving to the pro-f/rey part of your submission… I think most of the confusion re: f/nnrey being “obviously” romantic in TFA comes from the assumption that an “endgame” relationship needs to be portrayed as unambiguously positive since the start. Yes, Finn and Rey’s interactions in TFA were overwhelmingly positive—almost too positive, which in mainstream fiction doesn’t bode well for romance. Central romances, especially of the “epic” kind, are generally bumpy (or downright antagonistic) at first. And by “at first” I don’t mean the first five minutes of interactions, as in f/nnrey’s case: I mean at least the first act of the story. Translated into the context of a movie trilogy—it amounts to the first movie, give or take.

I just feel like there are far too many “romance” cues for F/innRey for that to not have been planned from the beginning. In TFA, those “boyfriend” lines weren’t essential, they could have been taken out without affecting the friendly-rapport feeling in their relationship. In TLJ, they didn’t have to juxtapose Rey being in tears facing Kylo to happily embracing Finn upon being reunited with him. And while there is the factor of Rose kissing Finn, they never entered into a deliberate romantic relationship or showed that the feelings were mutual: I feel like FinnRose isn’t essential to the next movie if they dismissed it, since so much of Finn and Rose’s arc could be read as them being friends or compatriots. There’s really no cues of romance until she kisses him.

funny how you’re saying that f/nnrey had “too many” romance cues not to have been planned from the get go in the same breath as you also argue that finnrose isn’t irrevocably romantic and could be easily dismissed in IX. Finn and Rose have a complete romantic arc in TLJ. Complete with a kiss. Whereas Finn and Rey only have a “boyfriend” line (which could be very well foreshadowing of Rey getting a “boyfriend” in TLJ, which she did, lol) and everything else is about deeply caring for each other and being each other’s first real friend (she looked at him like no one ever had, he came back for her when nobody would). Friendship tropes, I’ll concede, can sometimes be confused with romantic tropes, but why do the tropes used in TFA f/nnrey speak of romance more clearly than what Finn and Rose had in TLJ?

My opinion: they don’t. And if it seems to you like they do, it’s probably because you want them to see that way. Which is okay, as long as you’re aware of your bias. What really tips the scale from “could be romantic” to “oh no it’s definitely romantic” is the usage of textual, unequivocal romantic tropes and situations like Rose kissing Finn on the lips against a beautiful beaming ray of light or, well, Rey accidentally walking on a half naked Kylo and being very confused. 

Those are facts, not hints.

And this isn’t Game of Thrones with its three hundred parallel storylines and red herrings or a 14 seasons-long CW teen drama, it’s a three-movie space opera that needs to be as closely knit and narratively solid as possible, it can’t afford doing a back and forth between romantic storylines, which at this point (following your logic) would be THREE, and two of them should be dismissed or ended badly in the last movie for the third to be endgame.

The main couples of this trilogy as established by TLJ are Finnrose and Reylo. F/nnrey having any sort of romantic development at this point would only confuse the audience and unnecessarily complicate the narrative, which is already complex enough as it is. 

In TLJ, [Finn and Rey] are separated for the majority of it, but you could say that separation is always part of the romantic arc

Not for the entire second act of a trilogy, the one where (statistically in the SW movies) the pairing makes the leap from platonic (or antagonistic) to romantic. 

and Rey is constantly thinking about him, while Finn is constantly thinking about her. 

…were they? I mean, they probably were and it’s fine to headcanon it that way, but we weren’t actually shown any of it on screen (it was just handwaved at, with Rey trying to make contact with Finn, and Finn trying to leave to find Rey in the beginning) and this is important, storywise. It means that their dynamic is already established; the narrative trusts the audience to remember that they’re friends, they care about each other, they have an unbreakable sibling-like bond à la Luke and Leia, and there’s no need to remind us that they care about each other or introduce new developments in their relationship, which was fully formed by the end of TFA already.

Before she heads off to save Kylo, she gives Chewie an important message to Finn. (Which could have been something like “I love you” but I don’t want to assume.)

Again, it’s fine if you want to headcanon it that way, but one half of the pairing having the revelation that she loves the other offscreen (and no payoff for that at the end of the movie) is a really bizarre way to establish an endgame romantic pairing, if you ask me.

Re: the residual “romantic” cues in finn/rey—I think, if there were any (which in itself is debatable, but still), it’s probably because the finnreylo dynamic was originally conceived (by JJ) as some sort of lowkey love triangle, and then scrapped (still by JJ) in favor of a completely platonic bond on the f/nnrey side. Thankfully, Rian threw any possibility of a wacky love triangle out of the window by introducing Rose and letting Finn have his OWN romantic storyline rather than being reduced to a third wheel or cannon fodder to some stupid romantic conflict for reylo (which has no shortage of conflict on its own anyway, lol).

You also make it sound it deceptively easy to dismiss Finnrose as some sort of failed experiment or brief but ultimately irrelevant digression in the path that leads to the f/rey romance. It’s not. Rose is an important character, whose feelings matter, and she’s EXPLICITLY, textually in love with Finn. There’s no way to work around this fact or pretend it didn’t happen or argue that they’ll magically turn into platonic coworkers or *compatriots* (?). Finn’s feelings might be less clear but that’s why we still have a whole movie to go. But they already kissed, which as I said is far more definitive storywise than a line about a cute boyfriend or a kiss on the forehead.

Finally,

it would be a long, long road to have [Rey] forgive [Kylo] at all, let alone build some sort of romantic dynamic even though they will probably be enemies for a significant portion of IX. 

It wouldn’t be a long, long road to have her forgive him, it would be a very short and simple road, because TLJ already did the bulk of the work in this sense, and made Rey deeply care for Kylo and, even more importantly, understand where his rage and hurt come from. The romantic dynamic is already established, it only needs to come to fruition, which is incredibly easy to make it happen since (to your admission too) they’re doing Bendeption anyway. To be frank, Kylo only needs to choose to ditch the First Order and maybe make ONE selfless act to redeem himself, even in Rey’s eyes, especially in Rey’s eyes. Nothing he did on Crait was worse than what he did on Starkiller (his body count is even shorter!), and it took Rey approximately 5 days to believe in his inherent goodness. I don’t think she’s changed her mind on that. I think she knows he isn’t in the right place to change his views yet, and is fully ready to fight him if need come, but she also doesn’t hate him, as the novelization also confirms (whereas, post tfa, she thought she did).

yes, they were enemies in TLJ too, but IX can’t spend a large portion of its running time devoted to intimate conversations like TLJ did: it’s the final act of this Trilogy and the Skywalker Saga, things need to start wrapping up.

Actually, it can. TLJ did it and managed to have TWO other full fledged storylines (including another romantic arc) running parallel to the reylo one, an identity/redemption arc for Luke AND an epic climatic battle in the end. 2 hours and 45 minutes are a LONG time to develop a dynamic to its fulfillment. And what other loose ends or main conflicts does this trilogy have to resolve yet, other than Ben’s relationship with Rey (and reconciliation with Leia, hopefully)? The only reason you think IX can’t spend time on reylo is because you don’t see it as a crucial part of this trilogy. But it is.

TL;DR; in my opinion f/rey doesn’t have enough set up to be the endgame romance (not even considering TFA alone), and with Rose’s introduction they kind of sealed the deal. Having Finn and Rey be involved in romantic threads with two other main characters only to undo those threads and put them together in the end actually requires more work (narrative-wise) than letting their respective romantic storylines evolve to their natural conclusion in IX. Pre-TLJ I said that both f/rey and reylo can be “canon”, and both are, the former as a friendship (the most important one in this trilogy) and the latter as a romance. I just don’t think they’ll be both romantic in the end. There’s potential in that to explore in fanfiction (just like there was potential in, say, Luke/Leia or Obi Wan/Padmé or even O/bikin), but it’s an extremely unlikely (and messy) direction to go for the canon story.

Hope this clarifies my opinion on the issues you raised, and that I didn’t sound too dismissive of your points. If so I apologize in advance.