#if its still showing in cinemas were you are and ur willing to go do then like i wld recomend that

[caruliaa]

listen to me please dear followers and mutuals. if you havent watched puss in boots the last wish yet you gotta ik everyone whos seen it is like. almost annoyingly obsessed with it but thatss becuase its. really fucking good like just trust me. or if you think my taste is bad trust everyone else but pls babes. its really fucking good like the animationn the characters the story trust me. even if u dont otherwise like animtion its rly fucking good u goota see it you gotta

[angieschiffahoi]

congrats on finishing? lol. personally still on depressionville over them. rebecca? deserved to live and be a lawyer(?). hannah? deserved to lived. in france with owen helping with a batter place and rolling her eyes at the name. dani? i cant even. dani and jamie lol i can't even. peter deserves to go somewhere worse than hell. so yea, what're ur thoughts?

I am broken. I honestly haven’t stopped thinking about it all since I finished it last night. 

“Dani would never”. HOW DARE YOU.  I didn’t even have nightmares with ghosts! I was just really, really sad. I feel like, in the end, this was a happy ending. Just not for everyone, and that’s the strenght of the Haunting series. Not everyone can live happily ever after, but they contribute to the other’s happily ever after. No death is cheap or played for shock, even though they are shocking and are revealed through twists. The journey to one’s death is the character’s and, even if it does serve the plot and functions a self-sacrificing catalyst to set the happy endings of the other characters in motion, it never serves just to further the story of a single other character and it’s never just for shock value. Death, even when violent, sudden, unburied, is always respectful and somewhat “sacred”. 

At first I thought it was weaker than Hill House, because I felt the Crains’ dynamic was compelling and kind of made the narrative (in the first five episodes, it litterally did). Then I realized that while this started as a “strangers happen to live together in a haunted house” it soon turned into a found family story and it was beautiful.

I still think The Bent Neck Lady twist, even though predictable, was executed in such a beautiful way, and that episode remains the most emotional, tied with Two Storms, which remains my favorite of the series. But DAMN. The Altar of the Dead was so, so good! I knew Hannah was going to be my favorite from the moment she showed up and I had a feeling there was something wrong with her (the fact that she could dream up new clothes was clever, because I was checking those from the start to see if she was a ghost), but how it all tied with the beginning of the story? Wow.

I’m not sure I liked the twist at the end, using completely different actors, but I did love Carla slipping into a bit of cockney while she’s talking to Bride!Flora, as if to try and test if she was going to remember. The kids deserved that ending, honestly, and it’s coherent with what we’ve seen on Hill House (those kids left their demons in the mansion and so they were haunted forever, these kids were able to destroy them and live happily ever after), but I kind of wished they’d remember something. 

Rebecca Jessel coming through in the end was beautiful How she understood Peter was asking too much of the children. How she was willing to live through drowning again for Flora. I wish she had bonded more with Dani, over their love for the children. Also the scene by the lake, with Rebecca’s body, her ghost, Flora and Hannah watching had me sobbing. As for Peter, I hope he’s still in that memory with his mom. He was probably abused as a child and that is terrible, but he killed two people out of selfishness and was willing to kill three more, to have his happily ever after. He was controlling, abusive and manipulative and I wished the show had tried to make him a bit more relatable, to show us his anguish better (Oliver did an amazing job, though), so that by the end I would be torn between him getting peace or justice. But they didn’t and he should burn. 

Anyway, I could talk about this all day. Overall, I loved it. In a world where it came before Hill House, I feel like I would’ve loved it more (even though I’m not sure I would’ve loved Dani as much, hadn’t she played Nell Crain in HH). The ghosts weren’t as scary, and I missed some of that suspance (even though I am glad I will be able to maybe sleep this time); they explained a little bit too much, while HH left some things to the viewer to figure out, and some of the twists were very predictable; the nods to HH were placed well, but I wish they stopped referencing it after the first two or three episodes - it seems to live in reference to the success of its precedessor in a way (also in the way they use the soundtrack); the ending was bittersweet (like HH’s) but borderline cheesy, which kind of killed the vibe a bit (I love romance, especially wlw romance, but it has to be subtle, and the “it’s not a ghost story, it’s a love story” felt a bit too... yeah, cheesy. But that’s just my preference). 

Small structure-complaints under the cut:

I only have two complaints:

- I feel like they wasted an entire episode on Viola, Perdita & Arthur, because all those explanations could’ve easily been shown in another way and the scenes spoke for themselves. Later I started to think the narration had been necessary, because when Dani became the lady in the lake, older Jamie would start reciting “and then she slept, she woke, she walked, she forgot, she faded away”. But there was no parallel and so, I feel, like that story could’ve been told without voiceovers, leaving something to the imagination, and in flashbacks during the finale, making it a two part. I felt a bit cheated into binging the last two episodes, because of that same cliffhanger. I actually wanted to give it more time and watch it today. I also did NOT like the B&W. It was probably shot in color and then colored in post and the coloring was terrible. It felt like a pre-made filter in Premiere. I think the could’ve easily used the HH flashback coloring, which is colorful, warm, bright and eerie. I loved Kate as Theo, but in this one she did nothing for me. Viola felt like a caricature and, in the end, I never ‘felt’ for her.  

- I didn’t completely feel the epicness of Jamie & Dani. While I feel they were a beautiful, beautiful couple and very refreshing to see on TV, I didn’t actually feel them love each other until Jamie dove into the lake. But maybe that’s just me. I was so focused on all the storylines, I might’ve missed something about them. In some ways, they developed Hannah & Owen more, even though we never saw them together (and maybe that’s why Owen caring for Hannah’s body and how she disappeard so suddenly without even finishing ‘the rest is just...’ hit worse than the second part of the finale). 

There’s also I couple of things I didn’t understand (why did Viola never hurt Dominic & Charlotte? They must’ve walked at night! And they were sleeping in the bed she went to! How did Henry’s doppleganger work? Why was he haunted so vividly by himself? This ‘ghost’ felt a lot like Eddie’s - born of guilt - but at least there was a dead person in the Dani/Edmund haunting dynamic; was he haunted by evil!Henry because Dominic wished it so before he died?; also, why is no one freaking out about the inevitable incest of Peter/Rebecca in the kids bodies?! I love you Becks, but yikes!). 

I need to rewatch both Hill House and Bly Manor. I wish I had done a PhD in cinema, just so I could do a dissertation on these two, honestly.