#i'm basing this off of my reactions sometimes when a car comes at a certain angle (granted i was affected to a LOT lesser extent but-)

[gay-ghosts-committing-crimes]

Willie doesn’t have anxiety, doesn’t really get anxious. Not really. 

Not like Alex does; Shaking hands and rapid unsteady breath, a constant drip of tenseness down his spine and a niggling worry about anything that crosses his brain. The hatred of change, of the unknown.

Not like Reggie does sometimes; the worry that sprouts in his chest when he thinks his band members are having a fight, the way he shuts down and glances between them, looking for anything wrong in their expressions, ready to make a joke to diffuse the situation, breathing shallow and shoulders brought in to make him smaller.

Not even like Luke; hands fidgeting and him bouncing slightly, anxious to prove himself, to be good enough, to have someone think he’s done good for once. Desperate for the approval he’s always deserved and never got, waiting for their final judgement.

Willie doesn’t have anxiety like that, but sometimes...

Sometimes he’s skating and a car comes at a certain angle, or hits on the breaks and it sounds like that night-

And then his heart is racing and he’s flinching away and there’s no reason, no reason for him to feel so affected, but his body’s tense and suddenly he wants to curl up, wants to cover his ears to block out the phantom screeching of tires, a thud that never comes, a pain that never hits him, sometimes he’s skating and then he’s not. He’s back on that road, that night, that broken body, that piercing ringing in his ears that never quite leaves after the initial impact, and he can’t breathe except for gasps, and he knows it’s not real anymore but that doesn’t stop the adrenaline and panic spiking in his heart.

Willie doesn’t get anxious.

But then... why does he feel so scared?

[chaotichedonist]

Tharunka (Kensington, NSW : 1953 - 2010)

Wednesday 9 June 1976, page 14

   Some funny moments to tease you into reading:

Press: Roger, you're noted for your amazing screams.

Freddie: It's a controlled scream. I'd rather call it art.

/

Freddie: You're joking dear. I'm just a singer, dear.

/

It’s been a struggle, because in the beginning nobody knew what we were doing. We were the only people who believed in ourselves.

  back at the hotel sleazy

  For all those fans who were misled by the media, Queen did not spend a couple of days-relaxing on sunny Perth beaches - it rained the whole bloody time they were there. (In Melbourne the hotel was 'besiged' by fans, who to quote Pete Brown — Queen's personal manager — seemed to be emerging from the wood work). Not to be put off however, by the Australian conditions Freddie Mercury (lead vocals and keyboards) attended the press conference in white pants and a simply sumptuous summer synthetic top with delicate butterfly sleeves curling gently over his shoulders. He was even more beautiful than Sophia Loren.

  They were all quite chatty only Roger (Meadows-Taylor, the drummer) would keep interjecting, usually over John Deacon (bass) who said not an audible word.

Press: Would you describe your music as mock opera? 

Freddie: They call it cock-opera back home. 

Roger: I suppose because the vocals are in the 'grand style'. 

Press: When is your next album coming out? 

Freddie: We'll have a rest and think about it.. 

Roger: We just don't bung'em together. 

Brian: We don't sort of write sitting in hotel rooms you know. 

Freddie: We gather influences. 

Press: Your music has been described as snob rock. What do you think? 

Freddie: I couldn't describe our music as anything. We certainly don't put across that this it intelligent music that is on a completely differenrt level to the people who come to it. 

Roger: It's written for the people. That's what it's all about. 

Press: The theme of death recurs on your albums. Why this preoccupation?

Roger: Freddie's morbid mind.

Press to Freddie: Do you consider yourself a sex-symbol?

Freddie: You're joking dear. I'm just a singer, dear.

Press to Roger: Do you consider yourself a superstar? 

Roger: As meaningless, (blows kisses).

Roger on the media - absurd for a magazine combine rock and politics. 

Press: Roger, you're noted for your amazing screams. 

Freddie: It's a controlled scream. I'd rather call it art. 

Undauted by the fearless Australians they continued talking about their lyrics and the esoteric implication.

Roger: Freddie just loves the word 'Beelzebub'. 

Freddie: Yes, well, Brian's got a taste for unusual words. 

Roger: You talking about dandling on your knee and things? 

All four of them write songs and each has at least one song on 'A Night At The Opera'. 

Brian: It's very difficult to talk about our songs as a group because we all have different ideas of what the songs are about. 

Roger: No we don't. 

Freddie: Roger's the sensitive one. 'I'm in love with my car' is the most sensitive song on the album (Night At The Opera). 

Roger did tend to sit there pouting at the bows on his pink lame gym-boots. One hardly noticed the dark roots in this gold angelic hair. We did ask, but unfortunately Roger didn't have a pic of himself in the gymboots. Roger was later accosted by David Essex fans in the foyer of the hotel, who wished to know if he was a popstar, girls now have Roger's autograph. Back to the lyrics..

Freddie: Every song is written by one of us and means something special to each one of us. Certain songs have a very literal meaning and can be understood straight away. Then there are some songs that can be taken on a lot of different levels.

He describes a lot of his songs as fantasies. 'We want to consciously lose ourselves. There are certain things we want to escape from in our lives or whatever.' He feels that people should create their own private fantasies from the images in his songs and so doesn't like to talk about what they mean to him. 'I'd hate to shatter someone's illusion. If I listen to somebody's songs I conjure up a fantasy of what its about and I like to keep it that way.'

He elaborated further.. 'Lyrically it is helpful to use certain words. You see it depends.. sometimes I want to use words that are phonetically useful. In the beginning they're surface words but you entwine them into the meaning of a song. That's what I mean about different levels.' 

Brian May has a different approach to his songs, 'There's usually something serious behind them, but I feel a big responsibility not to over-indulge in idealogies. In 'White Queen' I was very interested in the significance of Queens and White Ladies in English folk lore. The song started off as a personal experience, the frustration of not being able to communicate, I was thinking about Robert Graves' ' White Goddess' and that became involved in the song.' 

Roger: Romantic slush.

Brian: Our 'Now I'm Here' song is really about our first American tour. A big experience for anybody. It's a conglomeration of all the experiences we had on that tour. We had a great time with Mott the Hoople. I suppose they taught us to be a touring band.

We're very critical about each other and very cynical. We don't get deeply into meanings because you're living with it all the time. You have to be a bit light-hearted about it.

With four individual writers the albums were not done with a specific concept in mind. The 'White Queen' was written four years before the 'Black Queen'.

Brian: I don’t think that Freddie’s 'Black Queen' was a reaction to the 'White Queen'. We just discovered that we had these songs and the rest of the album seemed to fit around it.

Freddie: It probably subconsciously coheres.

Similarly ‘A night At The Opera’ has no overall concept though the name of the album is related to Freddie’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’.

As Brian puts it ‘We are four very different people with four very different directions, but there is a musical development that does make some kind of sense. Queen is very much an independent thing. We are always bouncing ideas off each other. We are very aware that we need each other.’

The rapport between them onstage bears out this statement. They work off each other in a carefully intergrated show thatt creates an atmosphere of spontaneity for the audience.

At the opening of their set there is a flash of fire and smoke as Queen emerge on stage. While music winds up they launch into ‘Orge Battle’. Like a Greek God or a simister Mephistopheles Freddie's powerful vocals cut through the smoke and flames. 

With the stage show the band is doing something different to stimulating their records. Brian: "You don't get up there and behave like you do in the street. You go up there to entertain people and give them some kind of excitement". They have rearranged some of their songs especially for stage performance, including a medley of 'Bohemian Rhapsody', 'Killer Queen', 'Black Queen' and 'Leyroy Brown', which grinds down into 'March of the Black Queen' and then skips out on a lighter note which features Brian on genuine Japanese ukalele. 

The brilliant solo Brian performs in 'Brighton Rock', with sweet high Paginini frills and harmonies, stimulating two or three guitars on stage, is in a style he has evolved himself. He got the idea the first time he was in a recording studio. Says Brian: "It was my first experience of doing multi-tracking. It happened to be in the cannon-things which repeat themselves. You play one, then you play the same over the top of it after a time interval. Later we started to do those things on stage but there was the problem of how to do it. We started having a single delay and then another one over the top of it. Then afterwards you do another repeat on the second. You can then do three part harmonies with yourself. We started to base it all on ten second solos and it grew and grew. There's a lot of other people doing it now and I'm glad because it’s a thing you can play around with.' 

In the stage arrangement of "Prophet's Song' Freddie uses a similar echo feedback system which multiplies his voice into a celestial choir. His voice floats as a vision - "Listen to the madman' - while Brian plays some beautiful guitar.

encore amore

Brian describes their encore performance as the time when the band really unwinds. "It's nice at the encore to just completely unbend and make a fool of yourself. It gets rid of the tension between the band and the audience. I used to get a kick out of going to concerts to see rock groups like the 'Who' and feeling involved, like the group knew you were there. WE go by the kinds of things we think people would like at an encore. It's at a very basic level really, an energy level, a physical level. Rock and Roll is kind of a body music. I get as much satisfaction out of basic rock'n'roll like Status Quo as the most sophisticated music I know.' 

The audience certainly enjoyed it and really let loose their energy. Roger (who claimed the most female screams) in rainbow mop-wig opened the encore with slow heavy rock-beat as Freddie did a dramatic entrance in a silk kimino. As he eased into 'Big Spender', he peeled off to striped hot pants for an outrageous version of 'Jailhouse Rock' - simple hard-driving rock'n'roll that had everybody out of their sets.

gettin' feelin' thru th' transistors

Brian was rather upset that the Australian Press should braiid them as a manufactured band. If 'Bohmeian ,hapsody' can be seen as incorporating the spectrum of s talent - mood changes, heavy stuff, the soft ballad - it is not because they (men of letters from universities) have developed a magic 'X' formula. Rather the song can be seen as a musical progression, a reworking of motifs off their other albums. 

Brian can only say that, 'They obviously didn't see us in the earlier days. I can understand why they'd say that over here. Big impact. Overnight success. It must have been all calculated. If you’d seen the way it happened in England, you wouldn’t think that. I’ve had years playing pubs in England where people were drinking beer and discussing what other people were doing and not listening to the music. I want to build up this thing where people do want to go to a concert. While it begins to look like the commercial side, it;s what it’s all about. I want knock it because I want people to come and hear what we do. 

It’s been a struggle, because in the beginning nobody knew what we were doing. We were the only people who believed in ourselves. We started playing because we had some kind of vision that we thought was worthwhile. For over a year and a half we were playing to ourselves. Gradually you gather people around who believe and that’s the way it happened.

Nobody is going to tell us to play what is commercial. What we play comes from us. We’re very lucky really in that we have a kind of audience who are attentive to whatever direction we choose to follow. One of us will come up with a song and we'll say, 'Yeah, it needs that kind of treatment and maybe that turns out to be something you call heavy and sometimes something which is light.' 

To get back to the charge that they are a manufactured band, while he doesn't like it, he can only take it as a compliment that they think the band is so good. He doesn't consider himself a technician "technically I've stayed the same for the last six or seven years. Progress is what you feel and what you are putting across. That's what playing is about for us.' 

Freddie: There's a lot of music there too.

Roger: A bit of music, yeah.

low key queen

By Anne Finnegan

Wednesday 9 June 1976

If you save, do not forget to leave a link to this, coz i kinda found it by myself and made and transcipt. Thanks :)

[mystery-deer]

Hi I hope you are fine! I've read most of your b99 fics and I love them so much!!!

I have to say I really like how you write Kevin and Holt it's just so interesting and well written I'm speechless!

I hope you'll post new fics with them!

Have a nice day!

(I hope my English isn't too bad, tbh I'm a French native speaker and always feel nervous when I have to write in English haha)

I’m fine, I’m just in school and all my classes are writing based due to my major which leaves little time for recreational writing at the moment~!! Please don’t worry!!  What a lovely ask, it makes me so happy whenever people compliment my writing! Sometimes I think ‘You’re making this way too deep Arthur’ but then I think....hey....I love to swim. I definitely have a few wips and to show you I’m good for it here’s an excerpt from one!;

“Would you like for me to make a run to the store?” Kevin asked.

“No thank you, Deborah’s already…” She trailed off, distracted. Everything was distracted. She wondered who had more of a right to be upset, her or Kevin? Kevin she guessed. “...It’s being taken care of.”

“Of course, would you like to sit down? I can make coffee for all of us.”

“Including me?” Marcus asked, poking his head out from the hall with a grin.

“Excluding you.” 

“I don’t wanna be ex-cluded.” Marcus said, pronouncing it slowly as he went to the front door and rummaged through his bag. “Uncle Ray said he’d help me with my homework but only history because I’m great at everything else!”

“Yes, I heard you got straight A’s this semester.” Marcus took out a glossy notebook and hesitated, looking at the ground and flipping through the pages idly.

“I got a C in history though. No one else did.” He said, suddenly moping. He had the tone of someone bringing up an old grievance and Laverne could picture Debbie trying to cheer him up in the car on the drive home from school as he frowned at the single C. 

“I’m sure that’s an exaggeration. When I was younger I often struggled in math.” Kevin offered.

Marcus perked up. “Really? But math is easy!”

“Perhaps to you because you’re quite gifted in that sphere. However, I had trouble keeping the numbers straight and one day I got a D.” Marcus gasped softly and shook his head. Laverne smiled and looked out the window. Debbie’s car was coming down the street so she rose to greet her.

“Indeed,” Kevin remarked at Marcus’ shock. “I told all my friends that I had gotten a B and threw the report card out the window of the boy’s bathroom.”

“Did your mom get mad?”

“Oh yes.” Kevin said, tone aggressively neutral.

“My mom didn’t get mad at me, she said- she said that’s okay and I can try again!” Marcus exclaimed, proud.

Kevin’s eyes drifted to Laverne’s, then to the door. “She’s a very kind woman. And she’s right.”

The door opened at that moment and Laverne was glad she’d unlocked it in preparation as her daughter was nearly invisible underneath all the bags she was carrying. 

“Little help?” She called and Kevin rushed over to take a few of the heavier ones. Marcus tugged a bag out of her hands and dragged it to the kitchen, refusing anyone else’s help. Laverne reached for a bag but Debbie angled herself away, stumbling to the kitchen and telling her to rest. 

“I don’t need to rest.” Laverne said, slightly annoyed at being treated as so fragile. She remembered when Debbie had fit on her hip, bah. 

“I don’t mean it like that ma, I just...we’re all kinda weird right now.” Kevin and Laverne both flinched at the acknowledgment as to why they were all here. Marcus rooted through the plastic bags in search of snacks. The coffee machine beeped and Kevin poured the liquid into four mugs.

“Mom, can I have coffee?” Marcus asked again, popping up from the floor to grab her leg. Debbie scratched lightly as his hair. 

“You wouldn’t like it, here, I got you some apple juice instead.” She handed the small container of juice to the boy and he grinned, running off down the hall where he’d come from. “Ah ah ah, Marcus!”

There was a pause and then a reversal as he ran back, out of breath. “Yeah?”

“What do we say?” His mother prompted.

“...Thank you!” He ran to give her a hug before bouncing back down the hall. Debbie rolled her eyes good-naturedly as Kevin let out a soft exhale of laughter.

“He’s a handful that one.” Debbie said.

Laverne hummed. “I believe all children are handfuls, be thankful you only have one.” 

“Every day!” Debbie exclaimed, preparing to cook something. “Every day, I am!”

“I’m going to go check on them.” Kevin said, walking down the hall. Laverne and Debbie exchanged a look.

“Do you think he’s going to be ok?” 

“Why wouldn’t he be? I hardly think anything will happen to him between here and Raymond’s room” Debbie shook her head, ignoring her mother’s joke.

“I mean will Ray be ok.”

She didn’t know. She wished she knew. She wished she knew how to deal with this. “I’m certain he’ll be fine.” She said, standing to help her daughter prepare the sandwiches.

Raymond had always been a bit shy around his father. Laverne didn’t know why but whenever he was around he froze up. Raymond would talk endlessly about what he was doing for school, his friends, his campaign for class president and how he was debating whether or not to ask for help with the speech.

“Why not ask your dad? He’s a very skilled orator.” She’d suggested and Raymond had hesitated before nodding the same way he did when he was offered anything he really wanted. He always paused before accepting, as if he expected the other person to snatch it away. 

That night Raymond was quiet at the dinner table. Debbie was happily babbling in her own toddler language about imaginary adventures she’d been on that day and Clifton was humoring her beautifully, giving Laverne a chance to relax. Though she wasn’t relaxing, she was looking at her son who was playing with his dinner nervously. The hour dragged on until finally as she was clearing the plates she said mildly; “Clifton, Raymond would like to ask you something.” Raymond startled as if a spotlight had suddenly been shined on him and avoided eye contact with his father, who turned to him as he wiped Debbie’s face with a napkin.

“Hm? What is it?”

“I- um…it’s nothing. I can do it myself.”

“Are you sure? I’d be glad to help if you-”

“No thank you, I can do it myself.” 

Raymond had rushed to leave the table after that, running to his room and shutting the door. She and Clifton had exchanged a look and her husband had shrugged good-naturedly. 

“He’ll come when he’s ready.” He’d said but Laverne had the strong sense he wouldn’t, that he wanted to be chased and cajoled and coddled.

“Did Kevin tell you how much?” Debbie asked, slicing cucumbers into perfect, thin slices. She was always skilled at chopping and dicing and Laverne would always let her cut the onions and garlic because she liked the smell and she liked carrying on about how it hurt her eyes.

“Not yet.”

“Twenty thousand dollars.” The number shook her. So many zeroes. So much wasted. Debbie seemed to feel the same way, repeating it under her breath. Laverne pictured her son throwing twenty thousand dollars up into the air, watching it scatter on the wind. Throwing it into a fireplace, shredding it in front of her. 

No, don’t blame him.

She wanted to.

Her gut reaction was to shake him when she’d first gotten the call. To drive to his apartment and shake him and scream and ask him why the hell he would do this, how could he so stupid?

She composed herself. That would get her nowhere. 

[dxringred]

I don't know what parts exactly you & the anons are talking about, I'm not asking to agree or disagree I just like reading different POVs over writing and execution. That being said what parts of Ed's writing/execution (recent examples or not) you find weak, repetitive, unimaginative (that's your main complains I guess)? & that Maxine writer, I'm not qualified & informed enough to judge her as an overall writer, so what's her weakness as a writer iyo? In general I enjoy reading critiques.

Under the cut because asking me about this kind of thing almost always guarantees an essay. Also, big spoiler warning! 

My main complaint actually tends to be the writing overall as opposed to a lack of creativity - you can use the same idea multiple times, but you need to make sure that it’s different in its own way as well. Emmerdale thinks that this can be achieved simply by swapping out characters (usually for ones that are similar) which obviously couldn’t be further from the truth.

Like I’ve mentioned before, I find their only strength when it comes to writing is drama, and it’s a) not much of a strength considering how they execute things, and b) what you’d already expect of a soap opera in the first place. So it’s no surprise that whenever they try to write for another sub-genre, it always goes terribly wrong. Just take a look at the “Whodunnit” we’ve been forced to endure for the past three months.

There’s not exactly much to pinpoint, because I think virtually everything they do is weak, repetitive, poorly executed or all three. Their overall strength tends to lay with characterization and character interactions, but even that can go pear-shaped sometimes. (See: Chrissie’s personality transplant.) And usually that’s when Emmerdale are unable to think of another way to get from Point A to Point B. I, personally, thought this was the case last Thursday during the bridge scenes when they needed to go from Moira trying to convince Emma  not to jump (Point A) to Emma being pushed (Point B).

When it comes to execution, I can obviously only judge from the standpoint of a viewer. I haven’t taken a media course in my life, so I suppose you could argue that I don’t understand the difficulty of executing/producing a soap - especially with a budget. But I feel that Emmerdale’s biggest issue with execution, is that they don’t take the time to properly visualize beforehand what they’re trying to achieve. 

Visualizing goes a long way - I do it all the time for my writing, even though there will never be a visual representation of it - and it can help with planning angles, character positions, actions, zoom and panning etc. Of course, that’s only me talking about execution from a visual perspective. I take much more issue with execution in terms of writing/storyline - where a storyline’s going to go, what’s going to come of it, what the consequences will be etc.

Anyone who’s ever looked at my blog knows how much I’ve hated this Emma storyline, in spite of it having lots of potential and Emma being my favorite character. And the main reason was because it was poorly executed, especially for what it was advertised as - a mystery. Of course, I know a “Whodunnit” is never intended to be quite like a mystery. But that’s the way Emmerdale were playing it, and they failed to deliver. Massively. 

Mysteries are all about clues, and suspects, and going through the mystery at the same pace as the detectives - that’s what makes it immersive. You can feel like you’re solving the mystery alongside everyone else. The issue Emmerdale had was that they gave you everything right away. You knew who all of the suspects were, you knew their motives, and you knew roughly where they all were at the time of Emma’s murder. (Excluding Gabby, because not even the writers knew where she was apparently.)

That’s not a mystery. That’s not really even a “Whodunnit” because you’ve already got the answer - it was one of those 7. And if you wanted to take the time to go over the possibilities, it was easy to knock that number down to 3. (You remove Pete, Ross and Cain from the equation, as the likely suspects, and you remove Adam who was blatantly going to be the scapegoat.) I went a step further and removed Laurel, because I knew she was going to be alibied by Bob long before it happened, which was how I knew it would be Moira so many weeks before it was revealed.

This year’s SSW had a similar problem when it came to execution. The visual execution was stunning for once. The pacing and everything else? Sadly not  so much. Everything happened too quickly, which left far too much room for fallout and nowhere near enough for suspense. It was akin to a rollercoaster with a single drop at the beginning, and then just a flat track for the rest of the ride. The other problem it had, was lack of reason. Or, rather, one scene of lack of reason that was a set-up for a major plot point and thus left a bad taste in my mouth for the rest of the week.

I ranted about it at the time, but I had massive issues with Adam’s reaction to Emma saving Moira from the barn fire. Massive issues. Why? Because it was an unfounded reaction, and so painfully clearly the reaction he had to have in order for the episode to progress the way it did. 

Finn got shot because Emma had a shotgun. Emma had a shotgun because she was being chased through the woods by Adam, who she wrestled it off of. (Which is… something in and of itself.) Adam was chasing her through the woods with a shotgun because somehow he just knew she’d started the fire (which she didn’t so… there’s that, too) and tried to kill his mom.

Problem is… he had no reason, whatsoever, to make such a hostile assumption right off the bat. The scenario looked exactly how Emma described it to him upon being questioned - she’d just pulled them both from the burning barn and helped to deliver the baby. Like, that’s exactly how it looked and anyone else would’ve believed that story for that reason alone. Adam, as far as I’m aware, had no reason at the time to believe she would do something like that. And so you get an entire death, set of events and reaction based on lack of reason alone. 

But… that’s off-topic. Mostly.

When it comes down to repetitiveness and lack of creativity, it’s just staring right back at you from the second you sit down to watch an episode. You’ve got the contrived love-triangles playing on a loop, crawling out of the woodwork one right after the other even when they’re not needed or are completely out of the blue. Right now we’re preparing for a near-identical reiteration of what we just had wrapped up.

The Bartons get wiped out one-by-one, leaving two survivors - the sons, Ross and Pete. Up next, we have the Whites getting wiped out one-by-one, leaving two survivors - the sons, Sebastian and Lachlan. (Only difference is they’re not brothers.) There’s even a car-crash in both! Who’d have thunk it? 

Of course there’s a chance that Rebecca might pull through and survive the White Massacre of ‘18, but it’s not looking likely if this storyline goes in the direction it’s so obviously pointing towards. (Unless she does a Chrissie and gets a new personality; guess we’ll have to wait on more spoilers to find out.)

There’s a good difference to the stories overall - one involved murder, the other will (likely) be a tragic accident - but the core layout is the same, and I personally don’t think they should air this storyline so soon after the Emma one due to that. Also, let’s not get me started on how they’ve really been overusing the death element lately. Depending on how soon they air the White storyline, we’ve literally just watched Finn and Emma die - twice in the latter’s case. 

I’ve mentioned in the past how they tier their characters, which definitely adds to the repetitiveness as you get the same core faces showing up. Bob is finally getting something to do, but it’s long overdue - then you’ve got characters like Sam, Lydia, Megan, the Sharmas (where’s Priya been lately?) etc. who just fade into the background and then you’re like “oh!” when they suddenly show up again. 

Mostly it’s the constant love-triangles and romance storylines going on at once that make the show seem too contrived, repetitive and unoriginal. Right now, all at once, you’ve got:

Chas/Paddy/Rhona

Alex/Aaron/Robert

Vanessa/Charity

Leyla/David/Tracy

Debbie/Tom

Harriet/Cain/Moira

That’s six romance plots at once, and four of them are love triangles. (Not to mention that I’m sure I’ve missed at least one.) I’m not saying they’re all bad on their own - Aaron/Alex is good once you kick Robert out of the picture, and Charity/Vanessa has been a thrill to watch after such a lack of wlw material on the show - but you don’t need that many central romance storylines going on at once. You certainly don’t need four love triangles happening in unison, like… holy shit?

But that’s enough about me and my burning hatred for love triangles/contrived romances, so we’ll move onto Maxine. Now… I won’t claim to know all of her episodes, but the ones I have seen of hers definitely point to her being a weak link. I know, for starters, that she’s responsible for a lot of Rbrn episodes, which is enough said really. But she also wrote last Thursday’s flashback episodes which were… god awful. I doubt the storyline overall was solely her doing, but she did a terrible job of executing it.

She also wrote two of SSW’s episodes (the 5th and the 6th I believe?) at the end of that week. The writing was incredibly flat in spite of the opportunities, and that right there is what I believe to be her weakness. Now I’m not saying I’m a good writer or anything - because trust me, I’m not - but I could definitely do better than she did with the opportunities/material she had. She’s also the one, going by those four episodes alone, who seems to struggle with keeping certain characters in line with their personalities. (Seemed pretty prominent in all of the Bartons imo.)

At any rate… I know I complain a lot, but not everything about Emmerdale is necessarily bad. They write some decent stuff occasionally, such as Rhona’s rape storyline, I love a lot of the actresses, and character relationships. There is some great visual execution sometimes, and a lot of opportunity/potential even if they do fail to utilize it 95% of the time. 

It’s just that the bad outweighs the good, and it’s particularly noticeable on this show of all shows. It annoys me, quite a lot, that these people are professional writers and yet a lot of the stuff they produce is still, well... a mess to put it slightly nicer than I originally did. But hopefully that answers your question, most likely in more detail than you’d have liked asdfghjk.