#maybe i'll write a mini meta on this one day for my own sake just to organise my thoughts

[punkascas]

aww, man, i'm hella bummed over the news of ofmd.

i wasn't even jonesing that hard for s3 — like i'd of course watch it when it came out, but s2 reiterated and reenforced for me why i'll always choose fandom and fanworks over canon — but i feel gutted for the writers and actors. i feel grieved and jaded. and i feel aggravated that it is a familiar, well-worn groove of jaded grief over how queer stories and stories centred on non-white cis characters with diverse casts don't get their chance to flourish and grow. they don't feed the capitalist beast, even though they absolutely fckin do you're just dumb media executives. those stories are not as easy to market; not the sure, quick buck. not the stories for 18 – 25 year old straight white boys you can peddle to advertisers and that look good in quarterly-projection presentations.

i'm sad because the cast really seemed to get on. really seemed to have one of those rare mixes of chemistry and off-screen friendship. and i want to see them hang out and be creative together and fall further in love with now they portray found family on screen with so much ease and sincerity and full of genuine joy.

i'll miss them. i'll miss watching them play their characters. they seem to love them as much as and for the same reasons that we love those characters.

and to a lesser extent i'm a little disappointed to never find out what the plan would've been for s3, where djenks originally had the characters end up, how and if the creative decisions in s2 would've been addressed. fandom will of course find answers to this, and i know i'll probably think those stories are better if i could compare because i always do, but there's still a part of me that wants to know what djenks and the writing team and the cast would've done.

that all said, a part of me finds it extremely awkwardly morbidly hilarious that the s2 ending is now the official end. the ending that i can only read as a fascinating-yet-distressing lovecraftian horror story waiting to happen. like, not great as a final note due to how much it upset and divided the fandom. i wish it had been an ending that sparked opportunities for community-building and excitement and creativity that comes from a place of wanting more rather than feelings of betrayal or discomfort or creativity that comes from the need to process or to fix or to ignore.

but also as someone who enjoys absurdist dark humour, it's kind of perfect to me. the ending is an amazing (accidental) representation of schrödinger's cat of a conclusion. and i love it.

like, you can read the ending as happy. the main couple is together; the crew has their freedom and found family and can continue a life of adventure without the drama ed or stede can cause. izzy… whatever, i guess. whatever people who are cool with izzy's fate wanted for him.

or you can read the ending as, like: stede, run! you just shacked up with a known mentally and emotionally unstable guy who just very traumatically (and violently) ended a longterm codependent relationship. with the fresh grave of your boyfriend's ex right out front. because both of them are dudes that literally hoard each other's corpses because the codependence and obsessive possession just runs that deep. and you made these life choices while on an isolated spit of land with no one else around but the sea and a rundown shack whose aesthetics are straight out of a horror film. and that's implied to smell like death in one of your last lines of dialogue ever. nothing good will come of this, my guy.

if you know me, you know which reading i'm taking and running with.