#i have to go and see what the merch situation is w S3

[yourheartinyourmouth]

just finished S3 of Mockery Manor from @longcatmedia and i am SCREAMING i was so so wrong!!!! but also NOT?!?!??

THAT MID-CREDITS BUMP!!!

will the soundtrack for S3 go up on bandcamp? i need to own Four Spurs at the very least.

Lindsay Sharman and Laurence Owen really outdid themselves this season. Hayley Evenett and the rest of the cast was excellent as always. <33

i can’t wait for S4, and whatever else this creative dream team has up their collective sleeve. <3

[ourflagmeansgayrights]

so part of me wants to blame this entirely on wbd, right? bloys said he was cool with the show getting shopped around, so assuming he was telling the truth (not that im abt to start blindly trusting anything a CEO says lol), that means it’s not an hbo problem. and we already know wbd has an awful track record with refusing to sell their properties—altho unlike coyote v acme, s3 of ofmd isn’t a completed work and therefore there isn’t the same tax writeoff incentive to bury the thing. i just can’t see any reason to hold on to ofmd except for worrying about image, bc it would be embarrassing if they let this show go with such a devoted fanbase and recognizable celebrities and it went somewhere else and did really well (which it would undoubtedly do really well, we’ve long since proven that). it feels kinda tinfoil hat of me to making assumptions abt what’s going on in wbd behind the scenes, but i also feel like there are hints that i’m onto something w my suspicions: suddenly cracking down on fan merch on etsy doesn’t seem like something a studio looking to sell their property would bother with, and we know someone was paying to track the viewing stats on ofmd’s bbc airing, which isn’t finished yet, so i’d expect whoever is monitoring that to not make a decision abt buying ofmd until the s2 finale dropped.

but also i think part of me just wants there to be a clear villain in the situation. it’s kinda comforting to have a face to blame, a clear target to shake my fist at. but the truth is that the entire streaming industry is in the shitter. streaming is not pulling in the kind of profit that investors were promised, and we’re seeing the bubble that was propped up w investor money finally start to pop. studios aren’t leaving much room in their budgets for acquiring new properties, and they’re whittling down what they already have. especially w the strikes last year, they’re all penny pinching like hell. and that’s much a much harder thing to rage against than just one studio or one CEO being shitty. that’s disheartening in a way that’s much bigger and more frightening than if there was just one guy to blame.

my guess is that the truth of the situation is probably somewhere in the middle. wbd is following the same shitty pattern they’ve been following since the merger, and it’s just a hard time for anyone trying to get their story picked up by any studio. ofmd is just one of many shows that are unlucky enough to exist at this very unstable time for the tv/streaming industry.

when i think abt it that way, tho, i’m struck by how lucky we are that ofmd even got to exist at all. if the wbd merger had happened a year earlier, or if djenks and tw tried to pitch this show a year later, there’s no way this show would’ve been made. s1 was given the runtime and the creative freedom needed to tell the story the way the showrunners wanted to, and the final product benefited from it so much that it became a huge hit from sheer gay word of mouth. and for all the imperfections with s2—the shorter episode order, the hard 30 minute per episode limit, the last-minute script changes, the finale a butchered mess of the intended creative vision—the team behind ofmd managed to tell a beautiful story despite the uphill battle they undoubtedly were up against. they ended the season with the main characters in a happy place. ed and stede are together, and our last shot of ed isn’t of him sobbing uncontrollably (like i rlly can’t stress enough how much i would have never been able to acknowledge the existence of this show again if s1 was all we got)

like. y’all. we were this close to a world where ofmd never got to exist. for me, at least, the pain of an undue cancellation is worth getting to have this story at all. so rather than taking my comfort in the form of righteous anger at david zaslav or at wbd or at the entire streaming industry as a whole, i’m trying to focus on how lucky i am to get to have the show in the first place.

bc really, even as i’m reeling in grief to know this is the end of the road for ofmd, a part of me still can’t quite wrap my head around that this show is real. a queer romcom about middle-aged men, a rejection of washboard abs and facetuned beauty standards, a masterful deconstruction and criticism of toxic masculinity, well-written female characters who get to shine despite being in a show that is primarily about manhood and masculinity, diverse characters whose stories never center around oppression and bigotry, a casually nonbinary character, violent revenge fantasies against oppressors that are cathartic but at the same time are not what brings the characters healing and joy, a queer found family, a strong theme of anti colonialism throughout the entire show. a diverse writers room that got to use their perspectives and experiences to inform the story. the fact that above all else, this show is about the love story between ed and stede, which means the character arcs, the thoughts, the feelings, the motivations, the backstories, and everything else that make up the characters of ed and stede are given the most focus and the most care.

bc there rlly aren’t a lot of shows where a character like stede—a flamboyant and overtly gay middle-aged man who abandoned his family to live his life authentically—gets to be the main character of a romcom, gets to be the hero who the show is rooting for.

and god, there definitely aren’t a lot of shows where a character like ed—a queer indigenous man who is famous, successful, hyper-competent, who feels trapped by rigid standards of toxic hypermasculinity, who yearns for softness and gentleness and genuine interpersonal connection and vulnerability, whose mental health struggles and suicidal intentions are given such a huge degree of attention and delicate care in their depiction, who messes up and hurts people when he’s in pain but who the show is still endlessly sympathetic towards—gets to exist at all, much less as the romantic lead and the second protagonist of the show.

so fuck the studios, fuck capitalism, fuck everything that brought the show to an end before the story was told all the way through. because the forces that are keeping s3 from being made are the same forces that would’ve seen the entire show canceled before it even began. s3 is canceled, and s2 suffered from studio meddling, but we still won. we got to have this show. we got to have these characters. there’s been so much working against this show from the very beginning but here we are, two years later, lives changed bc despite all odds, ofmd exists. they can’t take that away from us. they can’t make us stop talking abt or stop caring abt this show. i’m gonna be a fan of this show til the day i die, and the studios hate that. they hate that we care about things that don’t fit into their business strategy, they hate that not everyone will blindly consume endless IP reboots and spin-offs and cheap reality tv.

anyway i dont rlly have a neat way to end this post. sorta just rambling abt my feelings. idk, i know this sucks but im not rlly feeling like wallowing in it. i think my gratitude for the show is outweighing my grief and anger, at least for right now. most important thing tho is im not going anywhere. and my love for this show is certainly not fucking going anywhere.