#i have so much empathy for her

[ed3lsgard]

tell me why you love helena so much!!! and what you hope for her arc in season three or like specific tropes / scenes incl. romance!!!

such a simple yet complex question, like i can literally talk about her for hours. oh boy this is probably gonna be long af sorry beforehand, hope yall gaf 😭

ugh god she’s just so. fascinating and tragic. a character that has been introduced to us as an antagonist, shrouded in so much mystery. but as we find out more of about her in s2, you just see how tragic of a character she is. born and raised in a cult revolving around her own ancestor, raised to be the perfect off-spring, always expected to be obedient and willing. but she is never enough, especially to her father who doesn’t even love her and probably never did. like, helena’s entire life is a performance, and act. everything is dictated by lumon and “kier”, she barely has any agency or power in her family’s company, let alone her own life (and both of those things are very enmeshed). the pressure of everything, how she is expected to act and say, you can feel the physical weight of it on her shoulders imo.

which is why it’s not surprising that she got so fixated on mark, the only person in her life who has shown her (and another version of her, aka helly) genuine love and affection. she would naturally want to chase that feeling, to see what it’s like firsthand.

and then there is her relationship with helly. helly, her innie who she deemed as subhuman and not a real person (though imo it’s arguable if this is her actual genuine belief or just something that has been drilled into her / something she is expected to believe). only to then find out helly is perhaps the most human and real part of her. because helly is helena, she came from helena. helly is everything helena lacks and suppresses. helly has the fire, the confidence, the kindness that comes easily. people that she can call her family, people that she loves. helena doesn’t have any of that, she is all alone. helly is who helena used to be before the fight and spark in her got snuffed out. who helena might have turned out to be, if she had a different upbringing. helly is the physical manifestation of helena’s desire to escape, of how trapped she really feels. i said this before but it’s really not a coincidence that it’s helena’s innie that ended up being so inherently rebellious and defiant.

helly ironically has more freedom and agency down at the severed floor than helena does in her entire life. helly does and says whatever she wants, and faces the consequences (punishment) head on if she has to. it doesn’t break her will. and they won’t actually do anything to her, because she is helena and that fact alone grants her some power down there. bearing the eagan name doesn’t actually grant helena much, not within the company anyway. like when helena said she didn’t want to back down after woe’s hollow, she wasn’t even granted a choice and was sent down regardless. i doubt helena is actually in on the testing floor / dark stuff lumon does. i think she knows about it but she is not in a position to actually have a say or do anything. she has an illusion of power within the company. but it’s fake, just enough to keep her sated.

a detail i wanna add. when helena was posing as helly, she learned about their plans and gemma. mark later on claimed that lumon knows what they’re doing because helena told them everything, but when mark eventually got to the testing floor they were surprised to see him. there was no backup, no one expecting such a plan etc. if helena had told lumon everything, surely it wouldn’t have been so easy for mark to sneak in? like this small fact alone adds a whole new layer to helena’s character imo. because it implies that she didn’t actually rat them out, that she cares.

as for my hopes and predictions for her in s3, i do genuinely think she will have a much bigger role. we’ll see much more of her, she may even be one of the main characters. i think it’s pretty obvious that helena is being set up for a redemption arc, since her and helly are starting to align with each other. helena doesn’t have the will to actually break away from lumon yet, but if she got the push she needed i think she will (a betrayal?). that push of course, being mark and probably also helly. there is some sort of natural reintegration happening / will happen, as alluded to by britt lower. so i think this is gonna be a significant event for her character (and helly too) in s3.

also regarding romance, i think we all know something is gonna happen between her and mark scout lol. zufu laid the groundwork, now it’s a matter of time until they meet each other again.

[astearisms]

catalysts, protectors

[dollypopup]

the absolute unbearable cruelty that the writers foisted upon Cressida

a woman taught from the beginning in her home, by her own mother, that she cannot trust any other women, who finally, FINALLY felt she had a friend- who didn't care for her much at all. a woman who grew up in a house that is more akin to a mausoleum, a woman dressed up as a doll and made to masquerade and sing and dance for the attention of a half decent man, never to be considered seriously. a woman who is foisted onto a man old enough to be her grandfather, who wants 4 children from her, and intends to keep her locked up in his estate with at most 1 social outing a month, who didn't believe in listening to music, or art.

a woman who goes to the only person she ever considered a friend, saying 'I need to save myself. Run with me. Write with me. Help me.' only for that friend to turn her back on her, and talked ill of her for the rest of her time in her society. a woman who tried to claw her way out of a horrible circumstance, only to be told she's too stupid to do so. a woman who's mother wrote the article that insulted her friend's family, an article she still regretted. a woman who tried to save herself and was then sent off to an aunt even less warm than the circumstances she'd grown up in.

what was Cressida meant to do? she had no one to turn to, and when she tried, she was turned away. she had no options left to her, she exhausted all of them. yes, blackmailing Penelope was harsh, but I would have done almost anything to save myself from sexual assault at the hands of a husband old enough to be my father twice over who was clearly intending on mistreating me, especially if I was dropped by the only person I ever considered a friend.

Cressida's story is so fucking tragic. My heart cracked clean in half for her

[cringefailvox]

charlie's low empathy/high sympathy desperation to help people without ever really understanding WHY they feel the way they do + vaggie's complex about needing to be useful to the people she loves or else she's worthless = charlie completely mistaking vaggie's self-sacrifical behavior for an expression of love and not the trauma response that it is, because all she's grasping are the literal words out of vaggie's mouth and not the alarming nuances of terrified self-hatred lurking underneath

[wistfulwatcher]

emily prentiss + her waning tolerance of getting close to killers

[funsizedshark]

this point has been made before but santos and langdon are 100% written as mirrors to each other and if santos had been a man there would have been 15000000 meta posts about his snark and impulsivity being a cover for deep-seated emotional issues and his childhood but since santos is a woman she's a huge bitch who needs to get humbled. which by the way has already happened multiple times over the course of the past 10 episodes but i guess to appease the masses foaming at the mouth to see a woman crucified we need a full scene of idk robby yelling at her that shes a fuckup in front of the entire ER

[royalarchivist]

Jaiden: Cucurucho, you have a lot of power, right?

Cucurucho: ...I don't know. Maybe.

Roier: Ah... Yes, you know, don't act like a dumbass, you have it. You have it, man. Eh?

Jaiden: Is there a way for us to protect all the Eggs? Do you know? I don't want anything to happen to the Eggs that happened to Bobby.

Cucurucho: Ha ha ha

Roier: WHAT? [Smacks Cucurucho]

Jaiden: [Bops him] Headpats.

Cucurucho: Maybe.

Jaiden: [Continues to bop him] Headpats. C'mon, I can get it out of you! Headpats! Chin scratches! Belly rubs!

Roier: [Joins Jaiden in bopping Cucurucho, chuckling and laughs]

Jaiden: Yeah? He's comin' around!

[Jaiden and Roier both laugh]

[oldtestleper]

also when I say that the pitt is deeply invested in the theme of adults w baggage struggling to nurture the skills & potential of other adults w baggage. let us not forget about javadi, perhaps the most potent and excruciating example of this phenomenon. she’s an adult but everyone treats her like a kid except for her parents who seem to have always treated her like a future adult first and a naive young person when it’s convenient to impress upon her how little she really knows. her parents’ anxiety about her future resulting in a young woman with an outrageous amount of technical knowledge for her age and almost no life experience or understanding of herself to give context or meaning to that knowledge. Robby’s comcern about her age and inexperience leading him to bench her immediately and treat her with kid gloves all day. (I mean she did faint but also it was a degloved foot, no one liked seeing that.) the traits her parents pushed for and saw as desirable to cultivate were the very traits that got her sat out in five minutes flat—book smarts, youth. yeah she’s tenacious she’s smart she fought like hell to get to where she is. but for what. she doesn’t know. she’s 20. she maybe doesn’t have what it takes because what it takes (personal motivation, broadly adapted coping mechanisms, life experience, resiliency) was never allowed or encouraged to develop in her. failmentorship at its finest.

[volivolition]

DAY 4: DRAMA - Put on your prettiest face for the masses!

gonna start adding silly captions actually. [POINTS ACCUSINGLY] MELTY FUCK (AFFECTIONATE)!!

[watcherintheweyr]

desperately need people to understand that alicent is a victim but she’s also an abuser and a perpetrator

that she actively makes choices to harm other women because of jealousy and envy and the greed deep in her bones because submitting to suffering didn’t get her what those women fight to grasp for themselves.

she is absolutely a victim, in show.

that doesn’t change that she abused rhaenyra and her children, her own son, most likely helaena given how she flinches every time her mother touches her, and is actively weaponizing the patriarchy of westeros against other women- rhaenyra primarily, but also mysaria and dyana.

she isn’t the moral, righteous force of good that even she thinks she is, she’s a wounded woman directing all of the rot, pain, and fury inside her at the wrong people and forces.

[yourgamemasterthewhiterabbit]

Both my parents actually suffer from HORRID emotional dysregulation and are prone to snapping and going into rages. My sister is the same way tbh. I am now realizing this is why they are constantly baffled by the question of whether or not I am mad at them.

I don't have external meltdowns.

I could. I don't let it happen.

I keep my rage on the inside and stay pretty quiet about it. It's just as strong as theirs [physically shaking nose bleed from high blood pressure kind of bad], but like as a kid I saw how terrifying it was to be around [dad breaking dishes, mom putting our lawn chairs into walls] and I just internalized that I wasn't going to wear that anger on the outside.

So my mother genuinely cannot tell if I am just being quiet or if I am silently hearing the dial-up noises of pure rage. This has lead her to both making strong and confident statements like "You are a pacifist who would never hurt a fly U.U" but also acting like I am secretly dangerous maybe... It's because she has never seen me snap.

She knows what her temper is like [throwing chairs through walls], she knows what my father's temper is like [pick up child and toss out door], and she can tell I am being tested, but she doesn't know what happens when I snap or where that breaking point is.

Her -perhaps unhinged- solution to this, my whole life, has been to do things that should obviously enrage me or shut me down completely, like ignoring important boundaries, repeatedly, punishing me for expressing emotions or needs at all, etc... And then to constantly ask me if I am angry with her when I get too quiet [right after near directly telling me to shut up].

It has occurred to me now, they have never once seen me lose my temper, so they literally just can't tell if I am angry at them. My sister is easy, my mother fights and screams with my sister constantly, my mother understands this. My mother doesn't have any grasp of feelings or boundaries that are not screamed at her [apparently, and I fear my sister is the same way]. Her and my sister are close despite constant fucking fighting because they understand each other.

They are trying to get me to engage the same way and it is not working. I realize now that this has been hard for them.

I was so successfully taught to suppress my emotions, by being punished for any outburst, that rage quiet looks the same as any other kind of quiet from the outside. To them anyway.

I did tell her. For the record. I used my words. I did tell her very calmly that my response to rage, in order to avoid doing the things that terrified me as a child, was to simply leave [the autistic urge to GTFO]. When a situation or person causes too much of the dial-up rage noise, I simply extract myself from that situation, up to and including never speaking to a person again. I explained this calmly. I explained it calmly 100 times and I explained that I explain myself calmly as my rage response 1-5 [also pretty much every other negative emotion tbh], and I told her that what came next was me simply opting out and fucking off. I told her this. I couldn't understand why she never took me seriously, or why she never fucking understood.

I couldn't understand what made her like this.

But it's the same problem I have with everyone else multiplied by a factor of 10.

If I am explaining myself calmly, they can't understand that it's actually serious or that I am actually upset. ESPECIALLY because they read me as "female" and women "aren't that rational" so if I am not screaming and crying about something, which I never do, people assume I can't be upset and it isn't serious.

And then after having my boundaries ignored too many times despite having calmly explained how and why it's a problem [shaking inside or not]... I leave. I leave and everyone gets upset like this is unexpected behaviour, even though I told them 50 times that is how I would respond if they kept doing *the thing.*

And for neurotypical people especially, they are expecting there to be a disconnect between what someone says they need or feel and what their actually boundaries and feelings are, and they expect the latter to be demonstrated with emotions. Telling them bluntly you do not function that way somehow never helps?

My mother isn't just looking for normal yelling or a few tears to know I am serious, whether or not I do those either [I don't], she's looking for an explosion to know there's a problem at all.

Fucked if I know how she proceeds through life this way in general or if this is just her expectation of her own kids???

And I couldn't get why my mother couldn't read my emotions and didn't seem to think I have any. It's because she's testing for the rage limit to see where my 'actual' limit is instead of taking my word for it. Never the fuck mind that she could simply *not* test at my boundaries instead of letting me have them. Separate issue.

I couldn't figure out what made her *like this*

She's expecting me to throw a giant meltdown violent tantrum at people when I have 'actually' had enough. Maybe she got away with those being like 5'4" in another time, but I am the size of the average man, I do not get to have giant screaming rages, whether or not people perceive me consciously as a woman, and least of all because a lot of people -at least unconsciously- read me as 'masculine' or at least always "they guy" of the situation compared to all other women and some men [bigger stronger and more rational, more able to just absorb the damage and let it go so the less rational screaming/crying one doesn't have to be dealt with]. Even if it was in me to be willing to terrify people [usually never], there are such limited instances where it wouldn't just blow back on me. Potentially very dangerously.

I am going to be the quiet calm one. You are going to have to let me use my words, bitch.

So she kept ignoring my boundaries until I had to cut her out of my life, and she probably doesn't understand and probably thinks it feels sudden -after 36 long years of bullshit- abrupt and unfair.

But I told her hundreds of times.

I probably should have just screamed at her.

[thegurlwhoisntthere]

Currently thinking about the end of the Vengeance saga (if you know you know), but it’s Charlie Morningstar and her Trident from the last episode stabbing Adam

[daily-hanamura]

[langdonmels]

"Colin should have grovelled more!" "Penelope folded too easily” I see this a lot and don’t agree I loved she got to tell him how hearing that made her feel and receive a true apology not just a bunch of excuses.

That being said the one thing I hated was him telling her she entrapped him. Ugh I know he was hurt but that just enraged me and broke my heart for her. Because he used her mother’s words to hurt him and she had been venerable telling him how long she had loved him. I know it was bad writing but it made me sad to see her just take it.

gonna be real with you anon - that line was actually one instance of GOOD writing, actually acknowledging colin's perspective and journey, and frankly, i wouldn't have minded if he had gone harder (and she in return!)

my biggest gripe of the season is that most of colin's inner revelations in part 2 - a very internal, emotional journey - were never shown to us but told to us after the fact. i wish we had more of his journals or conversations with characters that weren't cressida in the middle of a blackmail scheme (violet! or even penelope herself!) because him verbalizing that emotional journey would have worked better than just seeing him post-realization.

but i'm gonna be real, everything colin said or did in part 2 makes absolute sense TO ME (especially when you pull internal dialogue from RMB) so yeah... idgaf abou the entrapment line.

[free-luigi-mangione]

I have a lot of older conservative relatives, most of them are surprisingly sympathetic towards Luigi (though a lot of it has to do with him being a handsome white man, rather than any appreciation for his supposed bravery.)

They’ve suffered decades of denied claims, and have lived long enough to realise that there is no peaceful way to fight back at the system. Regular people have no legal recourse to seek justice when we’re screwed over. Most of us are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy. The American healthcare system is so skewed, so evil, I don’t quite know how to express it to someone who hasn’t experienced it first-hand.

And yet, “murder is bad” is so deeply ingrained in them that they think he deserves some sort of punishment. They don’t want him to go away for life, but they’re also too stupid to realise that the chance to “reasonably” punish him ended back in December. He needs us Americans to disregard the evidence shown to us in court, to display some collective moral intelligence for once, to do the right thing even when it’s the antithesis of the law. We have to vote Not Guilty even if they show is a goddamn Livestream of Luigi doing it.

Unfortunately Americans as a collective voted for this disaster. And the disaster is much bigger than what’s happening to Luigi. Look at the state of the country. I’ve been asking every older conservative I know, and they genuinely want him to “do a few years” not realising that few years is not an option. They simply cannot justify letting a killer walk free, no matter how justified the crime. These idiots don’t understand how it works. They don’t know that it’s all or nothing. If we don’t save him, he’s going to meet a fate much darker than Brian Thompson did.

I will tell you this, the hardcore MAGAs want him to fry. There are people who vote red because they’re genuinely conservative, and there he has some chance, but the ones who vote conservative out of malice? They want him tortured and executed in public. I am scared of those people making it on to his jury. I am counting on Karen’s ability to spot these rotten pigs and get them kicked off…it’s my only hope.

- 💚

i hope americans (and brainwashed white people in general) learn a few things very soon –

non-violence does not work, and sometimes violence is the only answer and it is absolutely right, and

privileged people like them have forgotten this lesson because people of colour have suffered at their hands and have ingrained that lesson in their blood while they looked away and this included people losing their life to the death penalty too.

(click on the underlined portions, they're linked to posts that are relevant to what i mentioned)

also I know you said it is very hard to make those people sympathise with Luigi and they're really very idiotic but maybe trying to make them understand would help?? by telling them exactly what is at stake?? surely they're not rooting for a person like Luigi to be killed by the death penalty or to be deprived of every shred of life in LWOP?? maybe reasoning with them would help?? i don't know if it would but i genuinely hope it does.

i've had basically this exact conversation a few times and there are more asks currently waiting in my inbox talking about this, and i think Luigi's only hope of walking lies in KFA's capability of enforcing voir dire to make sure that he gets a female majority jury, with most people being people of colour. i cannot frankly see any hope otherwise.

[sol-consort]

it's a crime that V isn't allowed to go down on Rogue