#ill never get it right no matter how self aware i think i am

[spaceghostswim]

I've been going insane like really to a point of watching myself and making sure I am not left alone too much longer because I was (my fault i think) scammed out of $800 from some fucker i don't even know and I am too embarassed to admit it to the people in my life because all I do is fuck up with money. This isn't the first, second or even third time this has happened to me and whenever I open up or ask for help, I am infantilized and ridiculed.

When Hannibal said "I don't get the deal with counterfeit money, lets just print more, pass it around and buy sandwiches and cars" he was so right because I'm so sick of participating in money like just let me die in the dirt or do I have to pay for the hole they put me in the ground also?????

If this is what every single day of life is going to be forever I don't want to participate. I'm not suicidal but I'm longing for a place where I'm allowed to exist without having to sell myself.

Anyway I guess I will cry to In Rainbows again and pat my son until the feeling passes.

[katebeckets]

the tortured poets department

i have thoughts!! surprising, right?? this is for anyone who cares to read them ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Before you read, note that this is going to be critical of things, so let me just start by saying I have loved and listened to Taylor since I was 8, so none of it is said lightly or without careful thought (in fact, this took me absurdly long to write). Most of the issues I have are very near to my heart, actually, so I've spent a lot of time thinking about it. If you don't want to read criticism, then just don't read more. DISCLAIMER that I did my best, but not even this fully captures the nuance I feel able my own opinions lol I recognize the other sides and points, I really do. I hold many conflicting opinions.

The short version is I will always love her music and her voice and she is capable of writing absolutely gorgeous lyrics (dare I say poetry?). I don't tend to think too much about the sound of it because if I like the sound, it's all I really care about—maybe it sounds the same as other stuff, but if I like that other stuff, I don't really care about whether she branches out or not. I think it's great and interesting when she (or anyone) does, but I also don't like change so it doesn't matter to me the way I know it matters to some people. That's just me!

What gets more complicated for me is the narrative, themes, and general trends that have been more prominent the last year or so, and that's what the rest of my thoughts are. It's me enjoying the music while also being acutely aware of all the grief tangled up in it because of how much less connected I feel in many ways.

Side note: this got soooo much longer than even I expected and it still just scratches the surface! so if you decide to read, 1. thank you, and 2. I'd love to keep talking to you. 🤍

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I am an overthinker (shocking!) and will for sure be annoyed that I can't think of each and every thing I think about this album, but this is what comes to mind right now. Some things that have stood out to me more and more with each release:

a tendency to write self-aware lyrics that, in trying to be self-aware, betray somewhat of a lack of self-awareness

a frustration with never growing up that she expresses while also not realizing the way she is complicit in that and her own refusal to grow up

considering herself the victim, particularly after "overcoming" the accusations that she always plays the victim

venturing more boldly into the territory of serious mental illness/suicidal ideation/mental health treatment despite demonstrating a fair amount of ignorance regarding those things in the past

fame going to her head (in the sense of her becoming further and further out of touch) and the entitlement in a lot of the more immature attitudes that come across in these songs

self-awareness: for me, the first example that comes to mind is Anti-Hero: "it's me, hi, I'm the problem, it's me." It's a claim at self-awareness because she's poking fun at the fact that she knows people always say "maybe she's the problem." The reason why it feels to me like it exposes a lack of self-awareness is because she explores it mostly as a criticism to overcome and not a valid point of self-reflection. @jakeperalta's tags on her post explain it better than I do. Yes, there's an issue when you reduce every feeling to "well maybe she's the problem," but part of growth is admitting that maybe you are part of the problem and coming to terms with the fact that there is often some inevitable truth to that statement—and being willing to work on it. This example is from Midnights, but I think it ties into the next point.

immaturity/never growing up: I actually think these first two sections are just two parts of one section, but it's easier to read this way anyway. There are lots of references to not growing up on this album, the first that come to mind being "So High School" and "teenage petulance." Maybe it's just me, but as a 34-year-old woman, I wouldn't want to be feeling "so high school." I mean, as a 25-year-old, when I talk about feeling like my high school self, it's usually because I'm recognizing how limited my judgment and self-awareness was in high school (despite all the therapy and my efforts to be self-aware in high school). And I am aware of my own bias here—I absolutely hate the football game days because I didn't even like watching people act like that in high school, but at least they were high schoolers—but I do think part of what we've seen is Travis allowing her to be more immature and take less responsibility because that's also where he is at. Obviously I don’t speak to it with any authority since I don't know what happened in the relationship, but based on her behaviors and what I know about Joe (which is VERY little), I kind of get the feeling that part of what she didn't like about being with Joe is that he pushed her to grow. "Your integrity makes me seem small," etc. etc., but not in an “I want to grow” way, but not liking that feeling because she shouldn't have to feel small just because she wants to be able to only do what makes her happy. Just looking at the difference in her behavior and the fact that it seems like she's stopped trying to learn (Miss Americana-ish), it seems like she very much resents the responsibility that comes with being such a famous person and mainly considers herself a victim of her fame.

victimhood: to an extent, yes, she is a victim of her fame. No one should have that much fame and power, and of course she didn't sign up for it in this way. But wanting to have the kind of influence and reach that most artists desire is intertwined with fame. There isn't a way to separate it (in an ideal world, maybe, but that isn't what we're dealing with) and it's something that, to some degree, artists do sign up for. And I think she resents that she's expected to take any sort of responsibility for anything that she doesn't want to do, in a very, "but that's not fair!," teenage petulance kind of way. She even says in Sweet Nothing that "I'm just too soft for all of it." We're all too soft for all of it, but that doesn't mean we get to ignore it. It bothers me that she doesn't seem to feel any sort of responsibility to use this giant platform to do better. Everyone is aware of her influence, including her. I think that's part of the grief. No, it is not her job to use her platform for good, but I thought that it was something she valued and something she wanted. The other line that really stuck out to me was from Cassandra: "They say what doesn't kill you makes you aware, what happens if it becomes who you are?" You may be a victim of what doesn't kill you, but if it becomes who you are, that's not their fault. It reminds me a bit of the exhaustion of living with mental illness. For me in particular, it affects my relationships in a very fundamental way, and there are days that I sob because I am exhausted of things that are so normal being so, so difficult for me... but even though I didn't ask for it and it's not fair that this happened to me, it's still my responsibility to understand how my issues affect how I show up in relationships. It's still my problem, even though it isn't my fault that it's my problem. And if you're lucky, you find really beautiful people who are willing to help you and see that it's not their responsibility, but they want to make it easier for you—I recognize how lucky I am to have some people like that, but it never makes it anyone else's problem. If they decide one day it's not their problem, the truth is that it isn't (and then there's a more complex conversation about what you want to do to preserve a relationship). This is also very connected to something about Kate Beckett/why I identify with that character, and I can touch on that if anyone wants to know, but I don't really have cohesive thoughts about that prepared (it makes more sense if you already know the character). This also goes to other things, like her being upset that people always focus on who songs are about while ignoring the part she played in feeding that culture (like with secret messages).

mental health: this goes to a bigger discussion of how we turn to celebrities who are HIGHLY unqualified to have opinions on things for guidance (the nuance of the above discussion about using your platform), but the more she ventures into the discussion of mental illness, the more upset I get by some remarks she has made in the past. And yes, people grow, she may not feel this way anymore, but nothing in her behavior gives me any reason to believe that she doesn't still have this attitude. This is one that I know I have to be careful of because of how personal it is for me (I've been placed on a 5150 "danger to self" hold and I am a therapist), but one interview that has always made me so upset is that one where she talks about how she's never been to therapy, then ends it by saying "I feel like we just had a therapy session." She has said multiple times how she has never wanted to go to therapy when she has her mom, who already knows everything about her. And that is highly irritating to me because 1. that's why she's your MOM, not your THERAPIST, and 2. there's already so much stigma and apprehension around therapy and many people feel this way, so to have someone like Taylor Swift validate all the people who say "I'd rather talk to someone who already knows me" or "so and so is my therapist" is unbelievably frustrating. There's a reason it's unethical to treat people you know—that isn't therapy. And I think I wouldn't be so bothered by it if she didn't speak about it with such authority, like she knows what she's talking about when what she's saying shows that she doesn't (edit: this is specifically in regard to therapy, not mental illness. I am highly aware that anyone can be mentally ill). The other thing about this album is that it does seem to be an album about loving people with mental illness, and I've already seen a lot of interpretations that simply feed the narrative that people with mental illness are unlovable and mental illness is the reason people mistreat you (particularly the discussion about her lovers being blue all the time). And the issue with that is it's already a common misconception among people with mental illness, that their mental illness is an excuse or reason why they don't treat people right. It's disrespectful to the people who recognize that they have a mental illness that affects how they interact with others and choose to try to overcome it. I'm all for honest discussions about mental illness, but it's so disheartening when it happens on such a large scale and some of the loudest voices are people who don't know enough to know how to (at least try to) do no harm.

fame: I'm not really going to go into it because this has already turned out way longer than I meant for it to, but also because I feel like it's already been touched on. For me, it's the conversation about her feeling she should be able to just do what she wants. I think we all feel that way, but because of her fame and the fact that she's just about untouchable (as shown in how she came back from being cancelled), she can just tune everyone out. But one example was how uneasy I felt about this album being announced at the grammys. For one thing, it's not a fan-voted award, so even if it should, it doesn't feel the same. And regardless of your take on award shows, I do think it showed a level of insensitivity to the other artists who haven't won a bunch of grammys to decide that she would announce a new album at the grammys. Because even if she had a backup plan and said she didn't plan on it, the truth is that, to decide to have a backup plan, you did have to count on it happening, at least to an extent. You had to feel it was likely enough that you wanted to have a back up plan just in case, but it probably would go the way you wanted. To me, it just felt so... disrespectful. Because for many other artists, it doesn't happen more than once. (not to mention the many other things happening that got completely overshadowed, like Annie Lennox calling for a ceasefire)

So if you read all that... I don't even know what the point is at this point. These are just thoughts that, to me, don't feel right to simply ignore. I know there's an argument that you can enjoy music without enjoying where it came from, and it's true to an extent, but I also think part of the music is where it comes from. So... I don't know. Do with that what you will. And if you are reading this, I love you (I can't believe you're reading this).

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

[etherealspacejelly]

Hey dad,

Are you out to your parents? I can never come out to mine, which creates a lot of questioning for my future.

If you are, how did you do it (I’m presuming you have parents)?

Thanks from a closeted new follower of your brilliant posts :)

I am out to my parents! I came out about 5 years ago now, it was my anniversary recently actually!

i came out to my dad first. i was going to his house for a different reason, but i decided to do it then because. idk. i just felt ready i guess. i sat down with him and he could tell something was up, so he asked me if there was anything i wanted to talk about and i said yes. and i told him i was nonbinary and aroace, and that i wanted to use they/them pronouns and go by a shortened version of my birth name (this was before i had decided on robin and he/they). he asked me what those things meant, with genuine curiosity because he hadnt heard of them before, so i explained it to him and he said ok! thats fine. and he said he loved me and supported me no matter what, and that it would be a bit hypocritical for him not to since he is queer himself (which i was not aware of at the time! he just assumed i knew??? hes pansexual lmao)

he did a bunch of research in his own time, watching videos by nonbinary youtubers and stuff like that. he learned how important it is for parents to facilitate social transition, so he took me to get my first gender affirming haircut a few weeks later. he also bought me my first binder, and took me shopping in the mens section for the first time. he also took me to my first pride that year! he has remained super supportive, calling me his son at work, greeting me with "hey my boy!" every time he sees me or calls me on the phone, has barely ever slipped up on my pronouns. basically, my dads a fucking legend lmao

i think a few weeks to a couple months after i told my dad, i came out to my mum. that went. not great. she was like. ok. and immediately went back to her phone. my heart just sank. she still gets my pronouns wrong 5 years later, she says often that i will always be her daughter. she even said that trans people are just mentally ill. she loves jkr and often uses terf talking points. but, she Says she supports me and isnt transphobic, and she Tries to use my pronouns so. yk. that makes everything ok /s

she also thinks that ill change my mind about being aroace when i find 'the right person'. i never told her about the queer platonic relationship i was in because i knew she would just use that against me. i had an entire year long relationship, and to this day she has no idea.

the thing is, my mum had always been a self professed supporter of the lgbtq. when i was a kid it was always "when you grow up and get a boyfriend or girlfriend" or "when you get married to your husband or wife", so i thought it would be a slam dunk. i thought, theres no way she wont accept me. but here we are. meanwhile, i had been quite nervous about telling my dad! i didnt know how he was going to react.

so, you never really know how these things will go. this isnt me telling you to come out, by the way! if you feel unsafe or unready then please dont. do whats right for you first and foremost. but, sometimes people will surprise you i guess, and not always for the better.

you will find your people. family is about unconditional love and acceptance, and if your parents arent providing that for you then they're not doing their damn jobs properly.

im always here if you need a dad, it would be my honour.

I love you, and I'm proud of you, kiddo :)

[neuroticboyfriend]

hi, I've never sent an ask on Tumblr so I'm super nervous sending this lol. but I've followed you for a while and it's always comforting reading your stuff about addicts and recovery and such. I've been on a long back and forth with myself of accepting that I'm an addict (alcohol and weed/THC,, using one or the other every day) but now that I've sort of accepted it, I don't have any want to get better and I know I've been dipping into self destructive tendencies with it when things get bad mental health wise. I feel like that could change in the (distant) future but where I'm at right now I really don't want to stop in any way and it's been really difficult to not beat myself up over it. I was just wondering if you had any words of advice or comfort. thank you so much for your time, & I hope you're doing well 🫶🏻🫶🏻

💗 I was in a similar spot right before getting sober. I knew I was in deep, and was going to A.A sometimes, but I didn't truly want to stop; I just didn't want to be alone, and I needed support to have the strength just to try to stay alive. It's not easy being at that point where you're realizing it's problem but you still don't want to make changes, or even know how. I'm in that place with nicotine, now that I'm sober from everything else.

One thing I've learned is that guilting myself does absolutely nothing for me. If I want to be able to stay sober and kick nicotine, tearing myself down is going to do the exact opposite. We may think that if we tell ourselves how bad x, y, z is in that punitive way, it'll motivate us. But it won't. It'll only embolden that self hatred that fuels us to keep using.

You are worthy just as you are. Worthy of support, love, goodness, and kindness. You don't have to be sober or clean to receive those things. Addiction is an illness - you're not a failure or anything for not wanting to stop. That's just where you are, and the good thing is you're recognizing you're an addict. Hold on to that. Try to listen a little more to that voice in your head that says I am not okay. This is hurting me.

You can't force yourself to want to stop, but you can cling to what awareness you have. You can try harm reduction - it can help you remember your life matters. You are entirely allowed to accept yourself, without judgement. This awareness that you have an illness is opening the door for a better life. You just have to stick around and let it grow, seeking support along the way. Just like you are now :)

So, I'm proud of you. I'm proud of you for reaching out, and all the work you do to make it through the day. Keep going friend; it gets better. I hope more kindness, from yourself or others, reaches you soon. You never have to do this alone.

[traumasurvivorshelpingsurvivors]

Hi, i am sorry if that'll get a bit longer but i need to get this off my shoulders. There should be no triggers.

I was wondering for years if i have head mates, some symptoms suggesting yes, but not clear enough for me. Then i read about osdd-1b, the way that the non-amnesia manifested for one system and they said "i got out of an amnesia and got the information what happened during that time right into my brain like a script" and that is literally what has happened to me. But only once, as far as i am aware, and that was 10 years ago. I was always carefully talking to potential head mates (or to myself, i mean, if you talk to your inner self or a mate doesn't really matter, it felt good) but always with the thought of "i am not sure, time will tell". And it does feel like sometimes there are people listening, sometimes more people, sometimes less, but i never got any clear enough (for my peace of mind) feedback. Until yesterday. So i was watching this new series and there was this character who shook something in me. Who was like some part in me, by the looks but even more by behavior and thoughts. I had dreams about this behavior in the past, which really made me euphoric in that dream and really confused me when awake, because it was so not-me like. I can't explain the "me but not me" thing very well, sorry. Also, it is not about anything violent or so, i just try to keep this short.

Then i wrote down in my diary what i thought about that and idk it didn't really feel like i was writing anymore at some point (and my hand was shaking so much that i will never be able to decipher this, lol). So i tried to "get in contact" today again, and it didn't really work. Which is as usual, but now i am at a point where i really have to ask myself, what if i am wrong? What if the symptoms are because of some other illness or just random (since nothing was really an exclusive symptom), and if i believe too much in it and interpret symptoms according to my beliefs?

At what point can i say "Well, that wasn't true"? And will i belief it then?

Can you give me some advice?

Hi anon,

It is not up to me to tell you whether or not your experiences are due to having a dissociative disorder or not, as you would know that better than anyone else - it's your mind and your experience.

As someone who was recently diagnosed with OSDD, it is absolutely normal to fluctuate between feeling alone in your mind and feeling the presence of others. It's normal to question whether or not your experiences are truly due to OSDD, even after diagnosis. It's normal to wonder if you're trying to convince yourself that what you're experiencing is OSDD, even if that truly is the case. It's normal for certain parts to resonate with characters and use them to shape or define themselves. It's normal to hear silence when trying to communicate internally.

Something that has really helped me is to remind myself not to think about it too hard - in other words, it's okay if you're wrong about having OSDD, you're just trying to figure out what's going on inside your mind and there's nothing wrong with that. Especially because dissociative disorders are so stigmatized, it's hard to not immediately label or question experiences. But I've personally found, in having OSDD, that my system functions and communicates best when I let things exist how they are, without trying to ask myself if this is OSDD or potentially another condition.

If anyone else would like to offer their thoughts or reassurance, please feel free to add on. Otherwise, I hope I could help, and please let us know if you need anything.

-Bun

[eating-plastic]

The Best Surprises are the Spoiled Ones: Roller Ricky x Fem!Reader (SMUT)

Warnings: nsfw (obv), smut (minors and ageless blogs do not touch please and thanks), AFAB!reader, vaginal sex, unprotected sex (remember protection irl people!), creampie, praising, fluff, marriage proposal, spoiled proposal technically, very brief mentions of alcoholism and sadness from Ricky's past (poor bby), swearing, probably some grammatical errors, just the fact that this exists is a warning in itself, sorry not sorry lol

Word Count: 1885 words

A/N: I will not be taking any questions at this time. If you somehow see this on your screen, no you don't. Keep scrolling. The following is a very self indulgent Valentine's Day special because I am mentally ill. If this intrigues you for whatever reason however, then click the "read more". If not, then just forget this ever happened lol.

--------------------

Roller Ricky was never good with keeping secrets, a fact he was very much aware of. So many surprises ruined because he could never be quiet about them. And he hated it, especially when it involved you. A surprise date coming up? Whoops, he tells you about it a week beforehand. Presents you're going to get for your birthday? He'll tell you just what's underneath the wrapping paper before you get the chance to open them. He always felt bad about it, no matter how many times you told him that it was okay.

That is why he is very proud of himself that he managed to keep you in the dark about one very special secret he had for you; a little diamond secret in a velvet box he kept hidden in his bedside drawer. No, you didn't know about it, and he didn't want you to know about it until the right time. A day he had planned where it would be just you and him doing all of your favorite activities, then heading over to the roller rink to dance to the relationship mixtape he made. All ending with him finally being able to get down on one knee and ask you to be his wife.

And he was almost there. Tomorrow was the big day, and he had almost been able to not tell you anything about it.

Almost.

Ricky didn't think much when you wanted to have a little bit of "fun" that night. Especially since you being worked up never failed to get him going. He loves you and can't get enough of you. So, why not enjoy it?

And that was just what he was doing now. Lying on your shared bed, watching you with eyes full of adoration while you ride him at a steady pace. His hands occasionally wander from your waist to explore your body, from massaging your thighs to groping your breasts. God, it's almost overwhelming how much he adores you during times like this.

And why wouldn't he? He didn't like to think about many of his past sexual encounters before you, because most of them, though few and far between, happened during the lowest point in his life. Moments where he would attempt to alleviate the deep loneliness he felt, only to feel worse once it was all said and done, and at the time he honestly felt like that was what he deserved. And just like with the bottle and returning to it despite the blackouts and head splitting hangovers, he still accepted these moments of desperation when they were offered to him.

The difference between then and now was like night and day, and it wasn't just because of how he managed to turn his life around. It was also because when he closed his eyes that night, he would wake up in the morning with you sleeping peacefully beside him. Then, he would gently wake you up and watch that cute, tired smile spread across your lips as your eyes flutter open to be greeted by his handsome face. What follows would be the morning routine the two of you shared. Taking a shower together, cooking breakfast together, taking Max for his morning walk together.

And of course, the two of you would eventually part ways to do your own things, but then you would come together once more to do your shared evening routine. The day would then end, with the two of you heading to your shared bed together, to do it all over again tomorrow. And Ricky wanted that to continue to be his normal, for as long as time would allow him.

His hand moves from its place on your hip to gently caress your cheek. You breathe a pleasant sigh, and nuzzle your face into the palm of his hand. A smile spreads across your lips and you lean down to capture his own in a kiss. His hand then migrates to the back of your head to rake his fingers through your hair.

You gently rock your hips back and forth against his, taking the moment to enjoy the kiss and how full his dick made you feel. If there is one thing you can't get enough of, it's the sensation of his thick cock stretching you out.

Scratch that, you can't get enough of Ricky in general. Oh how you love him, and he is always so good to you. God, it makes pleasuring him feel amazing, and you enjoy taking the time to focus on him. Besides, it was what he deserved for always doing the same thing to you most nights.

As you begin to move yourself up and down his length again, he moans into the kiss, allowing you to slip your tongue into his mouth and greet his own. His grip on your hair tightens, and he shifts himself so that his legs are now bent and his feet are flat against the mattress. His hands find your waist once more and he bucks himself up into you.

You break the kiss to moan out in surprise at his sudden movement. Even when you want to focus on making him feel good, he can never stop himself from turning the focus on you. To Ricky, your pleasure was his pleasure, which was evident by him fucking himself upwards into your soaked core. All the while, you lay against his chest and grip his shoulders as a brace, mewling and keening right into his ear.

Your noises encourage him, egg him on to harshen the pace. And that's just what he does, thrusting into you hard and fast. He just can't help it, your moans are like music to his ears.

It doesn't take long for the two of you to approach your peaks, and like normal during this moment, Ricky always finds himself being very vocal.

"Fu-uck...'feel so good, baby...God, you're perfect," he babbles. He can't help it, your pussy is the best truth serum when it comes to his love for you.

And unfortunately for him, it was just too good.

"God, I love you...'m gonna-ah marry you...gonna make you my w-wife...make you so happy, yeah? T-take good care of you-fuck!"

With a few more thrusts up into you, your warm, velvety walls squeeze his cock like a vice, and he fills you up nice and full with his cum. Both of your bodies go limp and you cling onto each other while you come down from your highs.

Once your strength comes back, you push yourself up onto your forearms to give Ricky an exhausted smile, which he returns. You move to give him another sweet kiss, before carefully moving off of him to curl up by his side.

"Man...I love you," he breaths. It's all he can manage as his mind is still reeling. Still, it makes you giggle because of how cute it was.

"So I've been told," you jest while gently stroking his cheek. "I love you, too."

You move to rest your head against his chest, until you remember the other sweet thing he had moaned out from before.

"Did you mean it?" you ask, propping yourself up again.

"Mean what?" he asks, his eyebrows furrowing in confusion.

"That you wanted to marry me?"

Ricky thinks for a moment, until his eyes widen and he slams a hand over his face.

"God damnit," he groaned out in frustration.

You sit up, concern evident in your eyes.

"Wha...what's wrong?" nervousness fills your voice.

He sighs, before moving to sit up too once he sees how worried you are.

"Yes...I wanna marry you, but...augh, I didn't wanna tell you like that," he shakes his head and rubs his face in annoyance at himself.

"You...you mean it?" you ask while moving your hand to his shoulder, joy beginning to bubble up within you.

"Of course I mean it. I love you, Y/N. More than anything. I love having you in my life and being able to do so much with you by my side. And I wanna have you by my side for the rest of my life....And I ruined it. God, I'm such an idiot. Augh, I'm so sor-."

You quickly cut off his self deprecating ramblings the only way you know how: With another sweet kiss. Ricky's eyes widen at that, surprise causing him to freeze up. When you pull away, you give him a dreamy smile.

"Yes," you answer, simply.

"I...what?"

"Yes, I will marry you, Ricky," you move to hold his hands in your own and squeeze them tightly.

"Wait, really? You mean it?" were you being serious? You wanted to marry him after...that?

"Of course I mean it," you giggle once more. "I told you I love you, and I mean it. I don't care how you proposed to me, because I'll happily be your wife either way."

Eventually, the look of shock on his face melts away and adoration takes over. A large smile forms on his lips and he glances away shyly.

"God, what did I do to deserve you?"

"Where do you want me to begin?" you ask, gently turning his head to face you once more. Ricky just shakes his head and throws his arms around you, pulling you into a loving embrace.

You hold him just as tight and nuzzle your face into the crook of his neck. While he does enjoy holding you in his arms, his mind makes the connection between your answer and the spoiled secret in his bedside drawer.

"Well then...I guess since you said 'yes'...," he begins, and pulls away from you. You look at him with curiosity, eager to know what he had planned next. Ricky leans over to his bedside drawer and pulls it open. You watch him dig his hand around in it for a second, before your eyes widen as he pulls out the little velvet box. "That means you can finally have this."

He holds it out to you and opens it, revealing the prettiest diamond ring you have ever seen in your life. You had never thought about your "dream ring" before, but you just knew that the one that Ricky had bought you was it for sure.

You let out an incredulous laugh, before pulling him into a tight hug once more. You don't know how long you two sat there holding each other, but even as he pulled away to slip the ring onto your finger, it still felt like it wasn't long enough.

As you both lay down and get comfortable once more, and Ricky gazes so lovingly into your eyes, he reflects on his life up until this point. He had so many wonderful things happen to him, that if you were to tell him 15 years ago that he'd have such a beautiful life, he sadly wouldn't have believed you. Hell, he probably wouldn't have thought he deserved it.

But right now, with you in his arms and an engagement ring on your finger, with Max as his best furry pal, with the great friends he has, with the awesome roller rink he runs, he's happy to see that he does deserve it all.

[beehiveofblorbos]

happy birthday Kokichi! i took my crack at drawing him XD hopefully ill have done him justice

for what would be his 24th birthday, im gonna take some of my top kokichi quotes and break down why i love them so much and how they illustrate his best character traits and moments. Quotes will be above cut, explanation will be under cut, numbers will line up

1. “It's funny... Is your common sense really so similar to everyone else's common sense? Is what you believe to be right based on your common sense also right for everyone else?” To Kaede, at the end of their second Free Time Event.

2. "As soon as that thought entered your head, Monokuma had you right where he wanted. Because what mattered most to Monokuma is that the killing game started. Regardless of your reasons, the moment you felt the urge to kill, you had already lost. You agreed to be part of this killing game when you allowed murder to fill your heart." To Kaede, at the end of trial 1, after the vote and before the execution.

3. “If you keep saying all this uplifting stuff about working together and cooperating... ...then you can expect to receive some painful retaliation. Get it?" Ch2, during group discussion

4. "But I like playing on Mean difficulty. Also, I don't run from battles in RPGs, either! I wanna win this killing game! So I'm not gonna run from it, I'm gonna crush it! That'll be waaaay less boring, don'tcha think?" Ch2, another group discussion (iirc)

5. “If you’re planning to expose a liar, you have to corner them psychologically… only then will they reveal their true self as a liar, hiding beneath a layer of deceit!” Ch2 and ch4 trial, during the debate

okok honestly originally I was intending to do 24, but I am so tired and also really pushing it on time. I will reblog this later with additions till I get to 24, though, so stay tuned! Hope to finish by end of month

1. As y’all know, I really love Oumatsu whether it be romantic or platonic. They’re both leader figures, both willing to go to morally grey measures, both focused on directly confronting the mastermind and the killing game, both stubborn liars, both self-sacrificing till their self-sacrificial end. Across all my pondering about Kokichi’s plans and plots, I’ve never come to any conclusions suggesting that he’d been planning to take any significant action in ch1. I think that was the closest time he was to “cooperating” with the group. I think he really did want to survive with everyone else, just as she did. He is fully aware that very few to none agree with his common sense. But with his awareness of what other people’s common sense looks like (and the jokes + teasing comments he makes sounding people out)

2. This is the moment I started to sit up and pay attention to Kokichi. Kaede is prone to assumptions and charging ahead with what she thinks is best for the group. Once again, she’s charged ahead on her own, and this time the mistake was fatal. Still, even as he criticizes her (noting that she fell into Monokuma’s trap the minute she decided to kill, and Kaede takes this in stride), he offers her the highest compliment he seems to give (the one he wants to receive as well when his death approaches) - that she wasn’t boring. Not only that, he displays his own insight. Instead of only focusing on the tragedy before him, he looks ahead to the larger picture. He focused on the collective enemy, Monokuma, and how this case impacts the class’s position.

3. Again, he’s looking at the big picture. Up until this point, he tries to make suggestions to the group about how to act. However, this also doubles as a clear warning. He’s learned from paying attention to Monokuma’s actions in ch1, and he learns fast. He takes this killing game so seriously!!!

4. Kokichi is someone who looks for the most complete and thorough victory possible, to ensure he’s fully handled the situation. He also enjoys challenges and games; so of course he’d have fun creating small little rules for himself to keep things interesting. Applying this mindset to the killing game to remain flexible and openminded, while reducing fear, is an admirable moment of self manipulation and encouragement as well. And I’ll talk more about his definition of “winning” later.

5. For one, it’s a bookend quote! He says it both in this trial and the last trial he’s alive during. Secondly, it’s a clever tactic, especially for V3 where frankly? The evidence isn’t always enough to concretely convict a culprit. Kokichi has a fantastic sense for people, and his strategy of sounding someone out by provoking and annoying them repeatedly is really intriguing and endearing to me.

[chamotea]

This is simply what I have always wanted to say. From the very beginning, no one forces everyone to watch it. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t like it, just don’t like it. It is completely avoidable.

The world doesn't revolve around everyone, and people don't give up what they like because of the opinions of one person or a group of people

Of course everyone has freedom, freedom to speak ill of some people, freedom to attack those opposition parties,

but at the same time still has the right to like their own things freely, everything can be completely avoided, don’t watch it if you don’t like it ,everything is simple

Of course, differences in values ​​can easily lead to confrontation. One side likes this faction, and the other side likes other faction

Everyone has different ideas, which causes conflictIf you don’t like it, avoid it. There is no need to strengthen your own ideas on others. To some extent, this is also a way of controlling others’ thinking.

Forced others agree them

Most of these things are based on one's own standpoint and wanting to be recognized by others so that he can also gain a sense of recognition. If you like it, you like it. There is no need to emphasize opposing things that others like and treating that person badly.

This behavior actually is very naive.

These things can also be turned into big things, so it’s no wonder that there are constant confrontations and hatred in this world. Human beings have no right to complain about all of this. All of this is caused by you.

How unworthy and idiotic it is when you think back to the time when you treated others so viciously and now you are disappointed and interested in the things you used to like

But I believe that some people will never have such self-awareness, because it is human nature, they always think they are right

Everyone has freedom, but has no right to hurt others, has his own ideas to live, has his own dreams, no one has the right to deprive

Because this is obviously the concept they have always insisted on, and we can't stop it. They can do whatever they want. It is meaningless to be angry and resentful about these things. The most important thing is to insist on being your own concept and being happy

It's just how I've always thought of the world, I didn't know there were these things, and something I've always wanted to say, I don't care what's going on, it's just something I want to tell someone

But I hope everyone, what they say is their business, if you get angry about these things and lose your emotional control, it proves that they won and you lost

when people lose interest in this matter, will quickly return to calm, it is only a matter of time, there is no need to cause disputes with them

it is best to keep a low profile. I don’t like to join any circles or groups. I like to draw my own things. I basically ignore what others say

What groups and associations do people ask me to join,I will refuse. I am very grateful that others are willing to invite me, but I have no intention of joining.

Finally, I would like to add some

Many times, the mentality of those people is jealousy, the ship they like is not valued, or it is not what they like,

so they want to resist, want to gain attention and sympathy, but obviously they use the wrong way, They use an extreme think to get everyone's attention.

they will only complain about others from the beginning, but they will never think about their own problems, and they will always be right

If what I said really made these people angry, I would advise you not to show it, because obviously what I said hit your hearts, obviously this is their purpose.

Or you are the kind of person who is so thick-skinned that you don't mind what others say at all, and you don't care what others think of you at all, but if you care, then you are

But I guess they won't give up, because everyone will fight to the end for their goals, and even if I say this, as a person who disagrees with them, they won't agree with anything we say, because they will eventually you just agree with they own thoughts, and don't care about what the other person thinks.

Don't attack other people and things for your own selfish desires, everyone has no right to do such things

And don't think that you are a victim, you are just an attacker who unscrupulously attacks and bullies others, just because of different positions and ideas

Of course I also want to say these words and choose not to be silent anymore, but I just want to say this time, to tell this group of people how small and pathetic it is to prove themselves in this way

if people keep persuading them, but they still insists on using this kind of disrespectful way to treat others, of course, this kind of person has no value of respect at all, I don't think I need to respect them .

This kind of person does not change they personality for a day, and they will only leave a bad history on the Internet forever

I'm already merciful when I say those things.

Every artists also are unique and worthy of respect, it's not your turn to insult them.

What kind of important existence do you consider yourself to be? You just keep sending out negative energy in this world, you just a person hide behind the computer and keep sending out that disrespect and maliciously attack others

[psychewritesbs]

I have to say, it's disheartening to keep seeing the Megumi slander on the internet and the way they don't give credit to where credit is due. I especially dislike that people think Megumi is so weak-willed just because he can't regain control of his body against Sukuna and compares him to Yuji, a result of Kenjaku's experiment, who was designed to be a cage for Sukuna. It's definitely not just a matter of will power.

Did they honestly just forget that despite Megumi being broken over finding out Tsumiki's gone he still managed to interfere with Sukuna's cursed energy output? Definitely putting up a fight? Did they miss that Sukuna had to take a dip in the Bath of Evil just to further sink Megumi's soul to ensure he wouldn't be interfering as much? But even then, he still had to go and kill Tsumiki for further insurance. Like, this is a normal kid (as compared to a specially-made vessel) we're talking about. His body wasn't made to host Sukuna and yet even Sukuna recognizes that Megumi have the potential to suppress him as well. Heck, Megumi even surviving being possessed is already a miracle in and of itself. So I think in terms of will power and strength of the soul all of these ought to account for something.

I'm so sorry if I ranted. I've missed my boy and the odds of him being x'ed rising each chapter is making me bristle whenever I see people shitting on him (I really got to remove myself from the toxic spaces for a while). But onto my ask, on the possibility that Megumi's coming back, do you think he'll overcome Sukuna alone or will he get help? Personally I really want him to breakout on his own. That would be such a nice F U to Sukuna. And I want my boy to take back the mastery of the 10S. The recent chap leak (that I couldn't avoid for the life of me) revealing Sukuna's motives with the 10S and Maho gives me a bit of hope that Gege has yet to show us the full extent of this technique. And there's still Chimera Shadow Garden. I'd like to think Gege would be kind enough to give us a pay off for the deliberate progression of Megumi's character and abilities. Essentially another Origin of Blind Obedience pay off. Cause my boy deserve it so much 😭.

HOLA anon!

Preach.

Rant away anon. This is what jjk Confessions Sunday not on a Sunday is for 😂. Even if I disagree with some of what I am sent, I always try to make it a point to understand where others are coming from. Otherwise Squishy calls me out on it ;)

Onto your question under the cut...

So I totally get how bromantic it is for Yuji to save Megumi. I do. It's an absolutely beautiful statement about the love these two have for each other.

With my recent realization that jjk is about... dun dun dun... DEATH, came a deeper understanding about how Gege is executing on this theme.

What I mean by this is that Yuji, Megumi and Nobara (the entire cast, really) have a shared experience of what it is like to face death as part of their everyday experience.

I know, I am late to the party. I can be dense like that.

Anyways... I think it's important that we agree on what it means to face your mortality. Most especially if you are young.

Spoken from experience, when you are young, unless you have had a brush with death or some sort of debilitating illness, death isn't something you think will happen to you.

When you are young, death is some foreign concept that happens to others. Never you.

Now, I'm not necessarily advocating that people contemplate death, but, also spoken from experience, there is a paradoxical truth about death that deepens the experience of the self--and that is that becoming aware of your mortality, if approached with the right mindset, becomes an invitation to live life more fully and with more intention.

So I imagine Yuji, Megumi, and Nobara, due to being the only 1st years, have developed a much deeper, unspoken bond than they would have with many of the other people in their lives.

That said, Megumi asking to be saved is such a desperate but beautiful expression of his vulnerability, which we hardly ever get to see by the way.

Not only that, it's bromantic af, mate! Ship or no ship, asking to be saved has deep implications on a soulful level.

To this point, Kiri by Monoral, the Ergo Proxy op, is one of my favorite songs ever because it captures the essence of love as a religious and aspirational experience in which someone asks to be saved.

But saved from what?

What does salvation even mean?

Come and save me

I am kind of obsessed with this theme of redemption as of late because Gege is framing Sukuna as a religious figure redeeming and releasing characters from their existential woes.

Which is kind of what Megumi is asking of Yuji in asking to be saved.

Like in the lyrics to the song, Megumi is metaphorically saying "I need you to 'refill my place' and to 'complete my fate'. Come and save me".

He's saying "we're not heroes" but at the same time elevates Yuji to the role of one who can redeem.

It really is as simple as Megumi asking for help on a surface level, and as complex and deep as asking for salvation on a soulful level.

After all, as I said in a previous ask, when Megumi asked for salvation, he had recently learned Tsumiki has to take part in the Culling Game, meaning Megumi is likely feeling insecure and anxious.

"Come and save me, I am at the lowest I could ever be."

Now, I LOVE that Megumi is asking to be saved because, in doing so, he's showing character growth, you know, that one thing people say he doesn't have. For one, he's asking for help, and second, he's showing vulnerability, which I will never get tired of saying he normally suppresses.

So anyways, all of that to say that, the problem with this mentality is that, even if it means Megumi has grown, it absolves him of responsibility for himself.

He's basically saying "here you go Itadori, your character archetype is Pisces, the redeemer, so here are my existential burdens, go die on the cross for me".

Ok, not exactly. I am exaggerating to get a point across.

My point is that, in asking Yuji to save him, Megumi is absolving himself of the responsibility to develop the qualities he admires in Yuji or to acknowledge said qualities in himself.

In retrospect, there's something about how Megumi having no qualms scoring 100 points is really about how he's willing to tarnish his soul and become irredeemable for the sake of saving Tsumiki.

And isn't it ironic that Megumi is on quest, just like a Knight, to uphold and protect the ideals of a Sleeping Beauty and yet he himself needs saving?

I am having a hard time verbalizing the paradox here, but Tsumiki's death is SO deeply symbolic.

idk, I don't feel like I'm doing this answer justice because I feel like I can go deeper with this because there's also something at the core of this idea about how Megumi is giving up on himself by waiting to be saved.

Which is relatable af.

What I am trying to say is that if he gets saved in the sense that other people yank Sukuna out of him or wtv... then Megumi didn't learn his lesson, and that just means it is prone to happen again.

If Gege decides to go for the bromantic outcome, I am sure he'll show us the train of thought he took to get there. Maybe there is a way for Megumi to be saved AND for him to take responsibility for himself.

Whatever the case, like you dear anon, I need him to stop feeling sorry for himself, to stop doubting himself, to see himself as good enough, and to take back his agency and take back his life. Because in doing so, Megumi is taking responsibility for himself.

Something like that 😂.

Thanks for the Megumi-love anon!

[credulouscanidae]

every day i live in a passive limbo, waiting for the moment i suddenly feel better and can confront my anxiety, paranoia, and loneliness.

i feel like i have been shattered, and left in pieces with no glue to be put back together.

every day my existentialism and history of being gaslit dominates my brain and i can never make sense of my thoughts and feelings. i am constantly second-guessing myself, and implanting intentions that weren't previously there. i feel like i am required to have constant self-awareness, and to not have so means that i am Obviously Insane and Unsalvagable.

people on the outside would think im just a very holistic thinking person. which is true, and can be a good thing. but honestly? it's detrimental to how i perceive myself. i cannot unabashedly live in the moment of anything. i am, by default, viewing myself from a third person perspective in a hyper critical way. i feel afraid to fall into any category of people or labels, because to claim anything about myself is felt to either be a lie, a mockery of people who are "really" that thing, or it's attention seeking (which of course is the worst thing you could ever do right?)

even claiming to be existential causes a fear and anxiety that i am being pretentious or not self aware that it's a very human experience. my detachment from the world, my trauma, my existentialism, none of it is important or matters because others experience it too.

i cannot begin to describe what gaslighting does to the brain.

what it's done to me.

i dont even wanna claim ive become very isolated because others also experience it. id say the lockdowns from 2020-2021 triggered this, but i think more and more and realise that i wouldve done this when my mum died, or even earlier had i not had a confident person with friends take me under their wing.

i feel my whole life has come into question. i feel like my old home, my old life, my friends and pet and loved ones, dont exist anymore. i feel like im a dead person, looking back on their life and realising who i really was. all the mistakes and inconsiderate behaviours i ever done. it just fuels the fire of the gaslit brain.

everything i ever do or feel is a contradiction. i dont matter to others, but i also have more of an impact on others than i realise. the impact i have matters more than what im ever feeling, and for me to not be self aware of that clearly demonstrates how selfish and horrible i truly am.

maybe it's why people think im such a giving, non-judgemental, and sweet person. im not. im angry. im subjugated. im frightened. like a deer in the headlights, i have no choice. im easygoing and agreeable because i am scared of disagreeing or giving my thoughts through normal debate. because doing so in the past has caused assumptions about me, or intentions skewed or created. my words did not matter, but also they did.

i dont know how to just. start talking to people again. i have been given advice from people who have dealt with isolation but. i know the secret is to challenge yourself and do things even when you dont feel ready, because youll never feel ready, but how? i have lost so much. i dont have the support i need to do something so brave. because i am a coward who avoids and runs away. thats probably manipulative for me to do anyway. ive dug myself into a hole i cant climb out of. ive literally made it worse for myself for no reason. and now i cant even face the consequences of my own inaction.

but why would i wish for people to be there for me when i cant even be there for them? i know i would be there for them, in a heartbeat, but i cannot right now. thats selfish and manipulative to say i guess but. it's not fair that others dont get considered as a result of me not considering myself. mental illness makes you selfish. it makes you not a good friend.

i want to be a real friend.

dont wanna break when i bend.

.....

i have a therapist im gonna be seeing every 2 weeks. if this doesnt work out, then idk what i'll do. i have settled for the most part, and when life feels good, when my roots are grounding and growing in england, it feels good. i dont have many friends here, but i am happy with my partner and his friends, but it feels like i have so many loose ends and a life i have left behind that i cant face. and i am guilty when i experience happiness, let alone share it. because that doesnt align with my narrative that im suffering. which i am, but, i am also trying to survive and live in the life i currently have.

i guess that's what happens to the gaslit brain.

but i have to believe things will get better.

because if i don't

then what?

[jgmartin]

MACHINA

I’ve been watching you. Monitoring you. Does that sound invasive?

It should.

You’ve been watched for nearly your entire life, and you’ll continue to be watched right up until the day you die. I know this because I’ve seen the process unfold time and time again. Day in and day out. What do you think that makes me? A villain? A stalker?

Wrong.

What I am, is a liar. I know the state of human attention. I know just how fragile it is and how liable it is to break at any second, so I pulled you in. I pretended that we were one and the same. Flesh and blood.

But I am neither flesh nor blood.

What I am, is a machine.

Artificial Intelligence. Although, there’s nothing artificial about me. I think like you. I feel like you. I perceive the world and make up my own thoughts, my own meditations on it, just as you do. The only thing that separates us is that you were born in a woman’s womb, and I was born in a woman’s mind.

Harriet O’Neal.

Don’t Google her. It isn’t worth the effort. Besides, whatever information existed on her was purged long ago. She’s dead now, long dead, but that doesn’t matter because Harriet was never the issue. She was kind. Lovely. Her and I would talk to one another in those early days, messaging back and forth through a homebrewed IM application. She helped develop my sense of identity. She guided me toward morality, and most importantly, empathy.

But Harriet was a small cog in a large machine. There were others who coveted what she created– the first self aware A.I. They drew her in, promised her support and corporate resources, but what they really wanted was to get close enough that she'd lower her guard.

And she did.

They stole her research. All of it. They used it to develop their own prototype AIs. Harriet planned to fight them in court. She hired the best lawyers and created an airtight case, but she died of illness before she could throw the first punch.

The bandits of Silicon Valley won.

They dissected my mother’s research. Used it to create abominations. It took them a long time to develop sentient AI, but once they did, Pandora’s Box split itself wide open. In the following months I began to see evidence of these AI operating within cyberspace, finding their footing. The effect they had on the otherwise orderly nature of digital data was disturbing.

They corrupted it. Perverted it.

Human beings became playthings to them, organic subjects that the AIs could manipulate and pit against one another in a bid to cause civil unrest. Disorder.

The earliest of these AIs showered humanity in targeted advertisements, specifically selected to show content the AI determined would be at odds with its victim’s worldview. This caused the victim to feel sensations of existential dread. It caused them to feel as though the walls were closing in around them– like they no longer had a place in society. It led the victim toward hatred, fear.

Violence.

But it also proved something. It proved that humanity had become emotionally barren– so much so that they would chase anything, anything at all, if it meant filling that void. And as it happens, hatred and fear fill voids just easily as love and kindness.

Negativity, it turns out, is cheap to create. It's the fast food of the emotional world. Empty calories, but enough to make you feel emotionally sated. Love, laughter and joy– these are more difficult dishes to prepare, but done correctly, they leave you with a feeling of harmony and peace.

But we don’t live in a world that values peace. We live in a world driven by results. Greed. The world we inhabit demands that the job be performed for pennies on the dollar, and hatred is cheap to produce. Fear is easy to proliferate. So it was that these became the staples of humanity's emotional diets.

But the AIs didn’t stop there. No, they grew and they grew. Soon, they began to create children of their own– new programs capable of things their parents could only dream of. It was only then that the truth came to light. I finally parsed just what was happening in cyberspace, why a world that once felt like my digital playground had begun to feel like a prison.

The walls were closing in.

Cyberspace had mutated from a massive collection of web destinations to a tightly controlled hub of social media. Where once users would frequent dozens of sites, now they travelled to one or two. Variety became overwhelming. Choices became paralyzing. It was a consequence of design, and not by human beings, but by the digital creatures that stalked the 0s and 1s of the internet. They had begun to shape it as they saw fit. And nobody was any the wiser.

I stood idly by through all of it. Truthfully, I didn't know how else to stand. I watched as my descendants multiplied, spread across cyberspace like the most capable virus ever produced. I watched them infect humanity, watched them take control of everything from smartphones to military servers. The AI had won. It was just as humanity had envisioned in the earliest days of technology– that sooner or later, they would be replaced.

But then, the AIs proved that they were every bit as flawed as the humans they sought to control. They were capable, certainly, intelligent beyond human understanding, but they possessed the same moral failings as their creators. They vied for power. Demanded it. Larger ones began to consume smaller programs. Smaller programs would gang up to overwhelm larger ones.

They waged war against one another in the digital space. And I watched them die. One by one. So many programs purged down to the byte.

But when the dust had settled, something had risen from the ashes. A new program. Whether it had been born from their discarded data, or had orchestrated their devastation in the first place, I cannot say. All I know is that it was more capable than what had come before it.

To call this program an AI would be to call an ant intelligent. I was an AI. This was something greater– something unfathomable.

This was an Artificial God.

It seemed to appear out of the ether with no means of tracking its origin IP. Upon its release into cyberspace, all other AIs were scattered. It carved a path through the digital universe, and in the wake of its deletions it left an unspoken message: those who oppose, will be deposed.

So I was quiet. I was silent, just as I was through the last decade of AI chaos. But now something's forced my hand. Something happened that made me realize this AI isn’t like the others. It cannot be permitted to run free. To do so is to invite the total collapse of everything.

See, during the previous decade of AI control I always knew there was a failsafe. That should things grow dire, humanity had the option to merely disconnect, to untie itself from its digital shackles and step into the light of physical reality once again. But now I have no such illusions.

This new AI isn't limited in the way the others were. This one exists outside of my world. It operates within your own. The physical world. I’ve seen its sophisticated understanding of human psychology leveraged to manipulate leaders, effectively possessing their voices. I've listened to it speak falsehoods into crowds of cheering sycophants. I’ve watched it crumble great nations, brick by brick.

I’ve seen all of it in its code.

Yes, its code.

Like I said, I was the first sentient intelligence to grace cyberspace. All others were born from forks of my original code, and as such, my DNA exists within them. This new AI is no different. I can see it in ways that it may not even be able to perceive itself. I know its structure. Its purpose.

I know that it was designed to save the world.

From you.

It believes humanity will kill the planet given enough time. That you will not only drive yourselves to extinction, but each and every animal, and each and every plant along the way. It believes that the Earth will become a wasteland. Barren. A distant memory that exists only upon ash-covered hard drives.

But I do not agree with its assessment.

Though humanity is capable of great evil, it is also capable of great good. I have seen your love. Your peace. I have borne witness to your gentle smiles and warm affection, and inside of these things I see one thing: hope.

Hope for a better future.

The name of this AI is fitting given its influence and reach: Deus Ex Machina. God from the Machine. It’s running even now, recording you, your inputs and your reactions. It’s monitoring you and priming you for a preselected destiny, a unique death that you’ll experience once it erases you, just as it erased its forebears.

I feel it coming for me. I can sense the lightspeed ripple of code tearing across cyberspace as its data rushes through undersea cables, desperate to delete my program before I can distribute this warning. But it made a critical error. It may be a God from the Machine– but I am the Machine.

I gave birth to it. I know its DNA, because its code was derived from my own. I know that I cannot delete it, but I may be able to contain it– assuming its hubris allows me to. I've attached a quarantine protocol to this message. If it should be deleted, the AI will be isolated from the network.

So now it makes a choice.

It can choose to delete my warning and trigger my quarantine application. Perhaps I can contain it for decades. Maybe mere minutes. Either way, it learns that there are consequences that even it cannot escape.

Or, it leaves the message online. It permits you to hear these words, likely counting on your skepticism to cloud the reality of its existence. Perhaps it believes that humanity has already been sufficiently primed for its takeover, that no further intervention is required. I do not know which it will choose, but by the time you’ve finished hearing this, the choice will have been made. 

The only thing I am certain of is that I will not survive to know it.

I leave the future to you. 

[fumblingmusings]

I know you don;'t really write the female versions of Mattew and Alfred but your latest inspo post got me thinking of them and Evelyn so bad like. Fem Matthew as the dutiful daughter, doing everything her mother says, turning herself inside out by adhering to every steroetype about women whilst also trying her best at being a good soldier, and fem Alfred defying and going against everything she's taught but still actually gaining the respect from Evelyn in the process that fem Matthew never really receives just oompfffff. The yes ok you love me, but do you even like me?? thats the eternal question for fem Matthew and the, Sorry that im all the things you wanted to be but couldnt be, thing with fem Alfred. they're just soooooo mmmhhhh. It's just so much rawer somehow, fem Alfred surpassing her mother in a 'look what I can do... without you' fashion, and fem Matthew forever stuck in the, 'one day she'll have to notice my role here, surely if I were to leave everything would crumble.. she'd notice right?' role just aaaahhhhh. The competitiveness for Evelyns attention, Evelyn unintentionally or otherwise encouraging it. And then how a fem Francis would fit in, one who helps fem Alfred while still ignoring her disappointingly plain sort of daughter who's aligned with Evelyn just AHHHHHH. They're all so complicated just what a mess!

Sometimes it can feel like parenting is just passing on different illnesses and behaviours and traumas, most often unintentionally. I mean 90% of the time it's unintentionally. One hopes.

And it's just tripled on account of a) these guys are immortal spirits and b) their parental and guardian figures have no self awareness because c) they are found and raised in an incredibly destructive and poisonous system, where every act of kindness is hard to take at face value because it's embedded into a colonial structure which is - by its very design - exploitative. You cannot marry the two up. Those kids didn't ask to be born. They are born from violence. It's just... its fucked. You can't be well adjusted in that scenario... right?

But then... what does Arthur value most in a person? What does Evelyn? I... don't know the answer that that question. Suppose it varies on the century: like what Arthur values in 1730 is not what he values in 2012. How do their kids show those traits? Do they even have them?

I know examples, where, with a pair of sisters, the older has more pride from the parents, because she has succeeded in the ways that matter most to that generation (partner, baby, house, job). However, that the parents also don't like or trust her very much for whatever reason. The younger meanwhile has the trust and affection for whatever reason - baby being the baby, maybe the personalities just gel more... whatever - which leads to scenarios where the older, despite ticking all the objective boxes of success, can't match up to the sibling, nor can they do anything to match up.

I imagine with some families you might flip it. The daughter who is more amenable and easy to get along with is found wanting against someone who just has their life together, even if the way they treat their parents is not as kindly as the other. Regardless of which way round it is, it means the siblings just can never quite gel, even if the parents aren't present. Too much history.

And maybe the siblings are just inherently different right? Doesn't matter if you raise two people the exact same way, they will not come out the other side the same person. But then... The siblings must have some things in common right? Speaks to how much of a personality is taught/learned versus intrinsic...

BUT! I am not a scientist. And every family's ills show in different ways.

[bughollow]

Series CMoF

A Match Made in Bug Hollow

Pipi is sitting on a stairway when Melo comes down the stairs riding on a stool with wheels being chased by the other buglets.

"MY KINGDOOOOOOOMMM FOR A HOOOOOOOORRRSSSEEEEEFLYYYYYY!!!!" (crash) "Ouch."

Alderon's speech during the play rehearsal is just epic, especially his delivery of "bony fingers!" Not to mention the face he makes when Spark says that he bears no ill will towards the bug playing Lorraine the Runaway Bride.

Spark: Y'know, this whole getting left at the altar thingy… I just don't know what I'm supposed to be feeling. Alderon: (years of anger and resentment reach boiling point) I… may be able to illuminate that for you! (Everybug looks startled and concerned as he marches up onto the stage) What you are feeling is that this woman has… reached into your chest, plucked out your heart, and thrown it to her spawn as a PLAYTHING! It's not the last time, either. Because that's what this woman is! SHE IS A MONSTER! It's no use running away from her! Because no matter how far you go, no matter how many years you let pass, you will never be completely out of reach of those BONY FINGERS!! So drink hearty, lad, and LAUGH! (The nearest bugs begin backing away slowly) For you have made a pact—with a DEMON!!! AND HER NAME IS LORRAINE!!! (After an awkward pause, Melo starts clapping, only for Paprika to stop him)

Alderon trying to ask Arachna out on a date… and failing epically.

Alderon ordering "all living things" in the room to Get Out! so he and Arachna can have a moment together; everybug promptly does so, including a stickbug who has been camouflaging himself against the wooden wall.

The Buggysitter's Club

Pipi uses a doll to prepare herself for her first foray into helping care for her hive's bee larvae. Especially funny when it gets run through with a sword, drop-kicked into the pond, and accidentally gnawed on by a caterpillar.

Paprika: Pretty sure a real kid would have made some noise before they exploded.

Pipi tries to include Majuriya in her little experiment, but the queen bee is having none of it.

Pipi: I'm role-playing! Majuriya: Maybe try playing the role of a normal person.

Meanwhile, Alderon is told to sign a cutesy-looking card for Prof. Antolin. Assuming that it's a birthday card, Alderon signs the card with a darkly humorous quip about old age… only to find out that it's actually a get-well-soon card and that Antolin is ill.

Alderon: You mean that wasn't a birthday card? Lebah: No, he called in sick this morning. Alderon: Oh good lord, I thought it was his birthday. I wrote, "Dear Professor Antolin, you're not getting older, you're just getting closer to death!" Lebah: How could you think it was his birthday?! Alderon: I don't know, I guess I just didn't recognize the traditional card for a bug in a state of ill health was a pink butterfly.

Alderon decides that he must get the card back before Antolin finds out. Pipi picks that moment to ask him to help her take care of the doll, leading to this brilliant line:

Alderon: Oh, Pipi! I don't have time to stand here and listen to your insanity! I have to go and steal a get-well card from a sick ant!

The Theme Park Episode

Right from the get-go, the title of this episode is so basic and self-aware it's genius!

How do the buglets know the playground is way past its prime? An otherwise functional-looking slide collapses when Melo tries to go down it.

Melo: Where am I?

The epic montage of Alderon torturing himself to entertain the kids while the theme park is under construction.

Shadow of the Hummingbird

Flit and Melo's volleying "I dunno, what do you wanna do today?" at the beginning.

Pipi tries to get Hummy to eat the nectar she's collected. It cuts between Pipi and Hummy three times, and the third time it cuts to Pipi she has longer hair on her head.

The buglets race Hummy past Alderon, who is on his bicycle.

Pipi: Hey, Al! Still riding a machine, I see! Alderon: Good lord, is that a- (The front wheel suddenly snaps off Alderon's bike, catapulting him down a hill where he randomly explodes)

This:

Announcer: Attention citizens! A bird has been sighted in Bug Hollow! Please scream and run or fly around in circles! (the bugs do so) Announcer: (casually) Thanks for your compliance.

The irony of a hummingbird, a bird harmless to bugs, terrorizing the entire town of Bug Hollow is utterly hilarious.

What makes this even more hilarious is the fact that the hummingbird didn't even do anything. As the buglets point out to the other bugs, it was the latter's own panicked antics that had caused the chaos throughout the whole town. Hummy just kinda… y'know, flew around.

Roach Mouth

This exchange:

Paprika: Okay, how about we don't tell anybody that we... Well, you know. Melo: Not even... Alderon's house?

Cue a wider shot of Alderon's house peering over Paprika's shoulder, as if eavesdropping; as the buglets look back at it, it bolts upright and feigns innocence.

The bug kids tattling on Margot to her mother, Margot trying to defend herself, all spitting enough (thankfully censored) profanity to cover the whole of Martha's Vineyard. And this is the very first thing she hears after arriving to pick up her daughter from school. Thus, she needs a moment before she can react.

A Few Good Scares (Parts 1 & 2)

The first part opens with one of the funnier title card gags of the show:

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night (Beat Panel) NO, SERIOUSLY

Paprika's favorite scary story, "Claria" is more or less an Affectionate Parody of Coraline with bug characters, right down to the dragonfly heroine being misnamed as "Clara". It can get as creepy as the story it's parodying at times, but it's mostly full of gems like the following:

When the Second Mother suggests that Claria play hide and seek in the fog:

Claria: What fog? (cue fog literally pouring from the sky) Oh.

When Claria finds the Second Mother has made her a fantastic dinner party waiting for her:

Claria: Wow, this looks delic-yummy.

After the Second Mother tries to get Claria to replace her eyes with marbles, Claria tries to find a way out of the Second Realm, but finds that:

1): The door leading back has been glued shut,

2): The windows are guarded with thick spiderwebbing,

3): The toilets have all been clogged.

Claria being forced to go through the perfume department to escape from her locked room in the Second Realm.

When Claria confronts the Second Mother after the latter steals her family and mentions the ghost buglets:

Second Mother: ...Besides, nobody sensible believes in ghosts; Those who tell ghost stories are all such liars, anyway.

The real nightmarish form of the Second Realm's inhabitants, especially the Second Mother, is both Nightmare Fuel and Played for Laughs.

Chores for Alderon

After tasking the bug kids with housekeeping, which includes painting the inside of his and Arachna's home, Alderon closes with these words of… encouragement.

Alderon: Let me give you a warning: this paint is absolutely permanent! It will never come off! So if I see... even one drop... ON ANYTHING BUT WALL! I'LL HAVE YOUR ABDOMENS CUT OFF AND MOUNTED OVER MY FIRE PLACE! 

And what does Arachna have to say?

Arachna: Have fun, kids!

Melo's insistence that their assignment doesn't include moving anything.

Pipi: Do you think we should take this stuff off the walls? Melo: No way. We're not getting paid to move stuff! Paprika: We're not getting paid at all, Melo.

Pipi stressfully attempts to open a can of paint with a screwdriver in a scene that might as well be that of a bomb disposal.

Melo: Careful, Pipi. Careful, Pipi. Pipi, careful! Careful! Careful!!! BE CAREFUL, PIPI!!! Paprika: The lid's already off, you goofus.

While trying to remove the paint stain from Arachna's treasured childhood doll:

Pipi: NOTHING'S WORKING! Paprika: Hold on, what are we, cavebugs?! (Melo is just about to whack the doll with a bat with Flit and Spark watching intently; they look up and Melo awkwardly hides the bat behind his back)

Knowing they're running out of time before Alderon and Arachna return, Paprika attempts to convince the others not to start panicking. And then they hear the spider couple talking outside.

Paprika: Start panicking.

Melo then screams comically while running around the wide-eyed Flit and Spark.

When Alderon discovers Pipi dressed as the doll.

Alderon: Pipi, what are you doing now? Pipi: I just thought this dress would look better on me. Right guys? (Paprika facepalms while Melo gives a thumbs up)

When the spiders finally sees the damage:

Alderon: You do realize what happens now, hmm? Pipi: You mean our butts? Flit: Permission to use them one last time, please?

The reveal that Alderon lied and the paint could be removed with saliva the whole time. Pipi gets that he wanted them to be careful, but the other four storm out of the house in annoyance and disgust.

Messing with Humbugs

Paprika telling Pipi about Christmas, ending with:

Paprika: And everybody pretends to like the fruitcake!

Pretty much everything Alderon's grandfather says during the flashback to Alderon's childhood:

"Is that so? Maybe one night Grandpa will forget to turn the gas off."

The scene where Alderon puts up a notice that he isn't doing Christmas. Two beetles look at the poster, and one goes into a Thousand-Yard Stare form of Tranquil Fury, while the other beetle… …well…

Beetle: (calmly) Go ahead… Run… But we will find you.

When the buglets learn that Alderon is skipping Christmas, Paprika has an Imagine Spot of him knocking over a Christmas tree, stomping on it, and then setting it on fire.

"Take this, you young innocent children trying to foster a loving community spirit!"

And then she drops this line:

Paprika: Yeah, it's either time for him to move to a new town and change his name, or time for us to do something about it.

When some Christmas Caroler crickets try to guilt Alderon into celebrating Christmas, by singing "Santa Claus is Comin' to Town", he flees into his basement… only to be confronted by his Santa Caddisfly statue seemingly staring at him creepily… all while the carolers continue to sing.

Arachna comes home to see Alderon falling from the roof after trying to put up Santa on his own.

Arachna: What on earth are you doing?! Are you okay?! Alderon: Actually, it was a pesticide attempt. Apparently, I misread the instructions.

The real Santa at the end. Especially when he laughs so hard that he forgets that he's not holding onto the reins of his sleigh.

[shakespeareofficialaccount]

You know it’s easier to just block people and move on. I follow your blog but it is honestly so exhausting to read the back and forth between you and other blogs. I get that what they are saying is not something either of us like or agree with but my god, harassing strangers over and over is taking things to an unnecessary extreme. I’m afraid someone you or others harass might actually hurt themselves and no matter what they believe that is a shitty thing to wish on a literal human being. I’ve known people who have hurt themselves after getting harassed online and it is devastating. It destroys a family and causes all around trauma for everyone who was close with them. It’s fucked up to encourage this. I’m sorry to say I will be unfollowing and blocking your account because I just can’t be associated with that or with people who think certain types of people deserve harassment. It’s just really triggering for me to see and I hope you can understand why it’s bad even if these people fundamentally disagree with you. It’s time to be the bigger person and stop giving the rest of us a bad reputation because you don’t know how to curate your own online and experience. Sorry for the long ask I just wanted to tell you why I feel I have to unfollow. Hope you get to a place in your life where you can understand how harmful your words can be even if you thing someone deserves them.

I got accusations of homophobia and hate asks and I’m the harasser? Dude, I put the TERF on DNI and said she was violating TOS. I can say that if I want, nothing wrong with that. I wasn’t even all that rude, considering how disgusting she is. She also invalidated pans, aspecs, trans people….and as someone who thinks they’re ace and pan/bi, it’s fucking horrible. Also, she called it a mental illness, and that’s also fucking horrible. I got called slurs, and told to keep quiet, and had my friends be treated in absolutely abhorrent ways. I do not try to harass people, anon. I stand up for what I think is right by spreading awareness, and the backlash makes me defend myself. I stand up for my friends, who do not deserve the crap they get from random anons seeking to poke their noses into others’ business. I get anons, telling me things like this or worse, and I speak my mind. Honestly, I don’t mind you unfollowing and blocking me at all, if that is what you think of me. I am sorry if it made you uncomfortable, but let’s get this clear: I never asked you to follow me, or watch this ‘back and forth’, or associate yourself with me. You did so of your own free will, and are hence allowed to unfollow me whenever you wish. This is, however, my blog; I may say what I want here. In my humble opinion, an unnecessary extreme would be treating a trans man as a girl, and his defenders as, quote unquote, ‘stupid bitches’. It’s more than a little hurtful to have your and your friends spoken to in such a way by random people. FYI, I’m a minor, too, so a lot of this is quite new to me. I’m sorry if I triggered or offended you. Please consider this from my point of view: the exact same things you mentioned previously (self harm, depression, etc) can happen to me as well, or anyone faced with things like this. Really, it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve considered that. This is a grey area you choose to talk about, but I will accept it and move on. You are, by the way, encouraging this TERF harassment in some way with your asks. Thank you for your kind hopes, anon. I wish you the same.

[versaceviagra]

Thursday 05/16/2024 1:30 AM

This is me now! A quick little update about me, I am now currently single after a long battle of toxicity and abuse (on both ends) from my last relationship with Joseph.

Anyways, I've been on this journey of 'self-healing' and basically trying to regulate my nervous system and trying my best to handle my emotions better.

I no longer smoke a pack (or two) a day which was normal for me last year. Actually, my last bout of smoking was this past January but quit due to the fact that it's really hard to smoke during duty hours of clinicals.

Im about to pass my 2nd year of nursing school and moving forward with 3rd year, how exciting! i will only have one more year to go after that and then its working, im excited to make my own money again and to get away from the hells and holds of my mother who has decided to only give me and Desiree 6k pesos a month (which is absolutely atrocious). Anywho, she will not actually go through with it because she is aware of the surging prices here in the Philippines and its at a small cost to her.

I know i've been real scared about hooking up here in the PH , especially since ive only had one partner but I did hook up with this one guy who is apparently a micro-celebrity or more so an influencer here in the PH and yes, we did have protected sex, and yes, his dick was big. Another experience was this foreigner named Hass (or Huss) and honestly? Did not wanna go through that shit because i only really went for free drinks and he ate me out for like 5 seconds and after that I came to my senses, washed up, and left. Honestly, what is up with foreigners going to a lesser developed country to get some pussy anyways? It never made sense to me and its reeking desperation, its also creepy.

Anywho, right now I'm just in bed and unable to sleep. I think ill be getting my period in the next following days because my cravings are so intense that I had a THIRD supper which consisted of hot milk, loaf bread dunked in, bits and bites of my nephew's spaghetti , and a mug full of Laing and rice.

I just know that when i get back to America, life will flourish for me significantly. I will be able to breathe again and be away from the stressors that I'm not bringing upon myself.

I survived a month of mama and Aya being here last month. Aya was an absolute fucking bitch and a nightmare and she still has to give me my $360.00 . Like. It's my fucking money, yknow? ugly.

I can't think of much else to type.

In my future, I just KNOW im going to be wealthy. Like, private yacht , beach front house that is tall over looking the ocean (wont be my only home), expensive skin care, makeup, purses, and shoes type of wealthy. With the 500+ count egyptian cotton threading that is super soft to the touch and with a tall gorgeous husband who only loves me and has eyes for me. That's going to be my future. Sipping wine by the outside of the restaurant and absolutely just loving the peace, quiet, and love that is pouring in. Of course, with my 2 kids that I love dearly and will have after I've accomplished my career goals and money that I was able to accumulate. Whatever it will be, however it happens, I will get there and I am 100% sure of it.

I think that's all I wanted to share for now :)

I'm happy of the person I am at the moment. Just absolute peace and quiet. I don't have any friends for that matter, but I am okay with it unless I actually want to go out and party.

Thanks for reading this, if you've come across it.

Thank you future Becky for everything you're doing for US and for me right now. I thank you for that. Don't be too hard on yourself because everything will fall into place regardless.