#outing lila

[leoktzchen]

I think I’ve seen some similar takes on this already but the whole lila and five get stuck in the time line subway subplot had a lot of potential actually but they just BUTCHERED it with the whole romance thing

imo the could have just done this:

- show them bickering and arguing, fighting over wich station/line to chose next in a sibling like manner

- show lila falling asleep on fives shoulder as she keeps mumbling about some stupid thing Diego has done while five tops that story with an even more stupid anecdote from their childhood

- show five trying to shave himself without a mirror and failing miserably until lila rolls her eyes and goes “give it here you absolute imbecile” and then helping him out BUT STAYING AT A REASONABLE DISTANCE AND NOT BREATHING ALL OVER HIS FACE

- show them freezing on the subway floor, five mentioning how they could save body heat by staying close to each other, visibly uncomfortable, and lila pulls a face but they end up falling asleep shoulder to shoulder NOT CUDDLING

- show them at the greenhouse timeline, covering the walls with self-drawn maps and complicated calculations, brooding night after day after night, trying to figure this out with lila drawing little hearts on the paper with her kids initials in it

- show five finding the map on the subway, immediately rushing to tell lila whose face lights up like a supernova and as she exclaims “fuck, we’re going home!” she tries to high five him (it doesn’t really work, because five does NOT do high fives) and then pulls him in for a hug. five just about lets that happen, but he smiles a tiny smile and they arrive just in time for Christmas

basically instead of the romance that gave everyone the ick, they could have just gone for the whole sibling like dynamic between the two of them that I adored a lot in the previous season(s)!!!!

[may12324]

💙Dimension 20: Burrow's End 💙

It was such a joy to be able to work on this show, I'm so excited for everyone to be able to watch it for the first time! It's such a sweet and heartfelt story, but also jam packed with action and amazingly detailed minis 👀

[acourtoffeyandfables]

PEAK MOM ENERGY

[froggydraws]

Ballad of the fox

[beetlegh0st]

Just the fact that they never mentioned in the show that Diego and Lila’s daughter’s full name is Grace Stanley Hargreeves shows you how much they just couldn’t give a shit on that storyline

[thehargreevesfam]

is it just me but it feels like five got dumbed down and nerfed the most in terms of his powers? Five didn’t see Ben steal the marigold, he didn’t figure out the CIA was part of the keepers but Luther did? What? No hate to Luther at all, I love that oaf but it doesn’t feel like FIVE!

Not to mention he was the ONLY one whose powers weren’t working or he couldn’t use to his advantage? Like what? Five? FIVE??? He should’ve figured out the teleporting thing. He should’ve figured out the subway. One opportunity I think the writers didn’t use is as the seasons progress five gains a deeper understanding of time travel and he’s able to figure it out more and more, so it comes full circle from s1 when he got stuck in the apocalypse because he didn’t understand time travel, but they don’t do that!! Like is this the same five who figured out what the sigil was in the s3 finale?

One reason I loved five was his intelligence but it doesn’t feel like it in s4

[nataliescatorccio]

THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY Season 4 Episode 2, Jean and Gene

[pepperf]

I'm a little puzzled by a few takes I've seen along the lines of, Lila was such a great wife and mother and Diego took her for granted! Because I don't think the show gave us that at all, and I think it relied heavily and lazily on societal norms to get the audience to make that leap. It also ignored previous characterisation, which is why I plan to disregard the season as a whole - because if the characters had been like this from the start, I wouldn't have fallen in love with them.

So, what I mean is: the whole time we see her as a parent, Lila is basically phoning it in. She seems to view her kids as one monolithic, sticky entity sent purely to ruin her day (distinct shades of the Handler there). They're just a list of chores - diapers, dentist, ballet, cake, piñata... And I'm not underestimating how much parenting really is a list of chores to be done - but that's all we see, no love, no fun. She's eager to get away from them, and she's only - finally - desperate to be with them when it's convenient for the plot, at which point we're supposed to buy the idea that her kids are her sole focus (not the relationship that they spent the past two seasons building up). And even then, the focus is not on the reunion with the kids, it's on all the awkwardness of the surprise love triangle. Hell, one of the kids doesn't even get a name.

Their intent might have been to have Lila be the better parent, but like much of this season, it's all tell and no show. We're working off a couple of brief conversations from the points of view of two frustrated, tired, biased individuals who are already at odds with one another, plus the evidence of what they actually do. They show that they’re not communicating well, but they don’t show how that happened, how long this has been growing, if one of them really is more at fault. All we know is that he complains a lot, and she’s sneaking out at night to play secret agent. They tell us that she loves her children (eventually, after seven years apart), but they show her being annoyed and/or bored in every normal, non-apocalyptic interaction. They have her (and Five) tell us that Diego is a bad husband, but they show Lila sniping at his weight, his way of running a birthday party, rolling her eyes at his efforts to impress her and regain her attention - and they show him dadding at everyone (he will turn this van around, so help him), the comfortable love and affection between him and his kids, the Punjabi he learned to speak fluently to his in-laws, him looking for ways to fix his marriage...

Take the bracelet thing, for example. "You hate bracelets," says Diego. "I gave you one for Valentines and you traded it for a Dyson vacuum." I think what we're supposed to take from that is a) Lila stopped wearing the wooden bracelet (uh oh, signs the honeymoon period has worn off!), b) Diego gives thoughtless, stereotypical gifts, and c) he doesn't understand what she really wants.

But an alternative reading is this: a) Lila stopped wearing the wooden bracelet (could not be a clearer or more loaded 'fuck you' to Diego), b) Diego tried to find another way to win her affection (on his pay as a delivery driver, with a wife and three kids to support, he managed to buy a bracelet that was expensive enough to trade for a Dyson?), and c) she rejected that gift as well, without any deeper explanation than 'I hate bracelets'. She's shut down all communication between them and is not telling him what's wrong. She has shut him out so comprehensively that she's got a whole undercover life - for which she apparently has the time and energy! - and yet we're supposed to think that oh it's all on Diego. Why? Lila is not a shy and retiring flower, and she and Diego have been shown before to have some very sincere heart-to-hearts about their relationship. Something changed, okay, fine - but why would we assume it was Diego that caused that?

I think our expectations about What Women Are Like are doing a LOT of the heavy lifting in how the show wants Lila to be perceived. She's a woman, and therefore she's automatically a good wife and mother - that she's emotionally intelligent, the organiser, she'll love her children and would do anything for them, she'll tried the hardest to make her marriage work, just...because boobies, I guess. This is not how you write good parents, or good female characters, TUA! A truly astonishing amount of people actually ARE women, and they know that it doesn't automatically confer any kind of maternal or wifely abilities! These things have to be worked on!

(In real life, women are often socialised to be better at these things, this is sadly true. But an awful lot of us do not have an innate talent for it, and there's no shame in that. And, more relevantly to this post, this is not real life, and Lila is not your average person. She's not normal, and I love that about her. She was raised to be a weapon. Do we really think the Handler installed the 'homemaker' module? Lila herself said that she was scared that she wouldn't know how to be a mother, because she had no good example to base it on.)

I also think the show assumes that, when you get married and have kids, you're automatically granted a house in the suburbs, a bunch of in-laws, and enough money from just the husband's job to get by. And I think that is an incredibly privileged and blinkered assumption. Frankly, unless her parents are financing them, they should be struggling a lot more. None of that is explained, and for me it was a real gap, because these are the arguments that Lila and Diego should be having. Lila caring for the kids versus getting a job. Living with family versus striking out on their own. Diego sticking at a job that makes him miserable and difficult to live with, or taking the huge financial risk of trying to find something better. These are the real life issues they should be facing.

Listen, I think the characterisation of Lila as a parent and spouse in this season is horseshit. I think she would be so much better than they showed - of course she's going to have some low times, she's going to struggle with her own upbringing, but I think she would try her damndest to get it right, and I don't think she'd be defeated so easily. But if we're dealing with what canon actually shows us, she's, uh, kind of mediocre as a mother, and really not that great as a partner.

And yes, I'm sure Diego is no angel, either, he's obviously wrapped up in his problems, and he's probably not much fun to be around when he's fixating on, uh, *checks notes* wanting a more fulfilling job (the fiend). But honestly, he's not that far removed from the Diego we've seen all along, the one she fell in love with. It takes one conversation for him to realise how incredibly fortunate he is, and to convince him to try to work harder on his relationship and stop focusing on the unobtainable. The idea that he's the only one who is failing at this whole gig - the chief culprit in the failure of their marriage, the only one who needs to make an effort to fix things - is bizarre. And it's pretty obvious why they've done it: to justify her thing with Five later and make it all seem more palatable. But there's no real substance behind it.

tl;dr: this season was badly-written, takes some incredibly antiquated attitudes towards the role of women that are inconsistent with the characters they themselves established, and some incredibly classist attitudes towards manual labour, and just hopes that you'll either take it at face value or read the fuck into it, to better sell you a shitty romance that added nothing to the plot.

[momokodaisy]

Extremely Late Umbrella Academy Textposts That Have Definitely Been Done Before (10/?) prev|next

[kurbiismind]

Oh hey,

Don't dragons sound beautiful?

[ for @pigedoodles ]

[feralnumberfive]

Another thing to add to Five's character assassination is during the fight scene with The Cleanse. Diego, rightfully angry and upset, tells Five to stay away from Lila. Instead of trying to apologize or explain himself or voice his anger at Diego, Five just immediately starts fighting him. He doesn't try to help his family or save Ben, he fights his little brother over his own wife (though Diego also didn't stop fighting either). Five even blatantly states that he wants to kill Diego. Lila tells him it's over and he just goes "Damn ✌️😕" and blinks away, again leaving his family to try to save Ben and stop The Cleanse

[brittlebutch]

little Tula sculpture because this season immediately put me in a chokehold in the best way possible <3

[nionom-art]

Lemme just… make another au? Aha- this time it’s Miraculous + Danganronpa

Next: here

[saturnrin]

Consider:

Tikki and her miraculous giving Marinette freakishly good luck and Marinette absolutely hating it.

Plagg and his miraculous giving Adrien absolute shit luck and Adrien loving it.

⋆⁺｡˚⋆˙‧₊☽ ◯ ☾₊‧˙⋆˚｡⁺⋆

Everything always works out for Marinette. It's honestly ridiculous. And while it was nice at first, she sorta hates it now. (See examples here)

And Adrien, oh, everything goes wrong for him in the best ways possible.

Adrien has a photoshoot with Lila? He's stuck in traffic and can't make it in time, or it starts raining on them, and they have to pack up early.

Unwanted Stuffy Gala that Gabriel insists Adrien must go to? He has to leave early because someone spills wine over his bland all-white outfit his father picked out.

Gabriel wants Adrien home early? What a shame, his phone got thrown off the Couffaines House-Boat, not even 30 minutes ago.

Adrien favorite part of his bad luck, though, is when it spreads to the people he doesn't like. He'll never forget the look on Lilas face when she tried to dump an entire platter of food on Marinette, only to slip and dump it over herself instead.

[the-spooky-children]

Skid to his dad in episode 10

[sissytobitch10seconds]

I don't think that the majority of people being mad on the internet actually hate s4. I think that they're grieving something that they held very close to their hearts and are in the anger stage of the process. It'll be interesting to see in the next few months what the attitude around the season comes to be.