#this is probably not super coherent and i dont expect anyone else to care but this is my blog and i get to choose the bullshit

[sirensorisons]

ok as your resident english major i finally got around to watching the daisy ridley ophelia movie and i have thoughts. im on mobile so no read more, sorry! spoilers ahead

the premise of the movie was obviously a big draw. like wake up babes new feminist take on hamlet just dropped. but one of my biggest complaints was that i felt they didn't push it far enough? like i could totally see what they were going for but it felt like all the #girlboss moments were given to other women. that was kind of disappointing given that this is supposed to be ophelia's story. like yes please uplift other women in the film but...

it felt like the writers or director were torn on whether to focus on ophelia or gertrude. i think they did quite a bit of work offering a more nuanced take on gertrude, but ophelia was kind of. frustrating. like, ok, the one major change they made to the play (besides ophelia being alive) was gertrude killing claudius. super fucking loved that.

but a couple minutes before, i had been wishing they would let ophelia barge into the room and either A) stop the fight between hamlet and laertes by showing them both she was alive, or B) stop it by pretending to be a ghost like she almost did with gertrude.

ophelia's ending was such a letdown. i like the intention behind her telling this story to her daughter someday, and breaking toxic cycles by getting out of it. but she had no impact on the events of hamlet's story, which was irritating. like i wouldn't want hamlet to run away with her or have the evil claudius vanquished and everyone else lives happily ever after bc that's not the point. it's a tragedy.

the hopeful twist they put on it for ophelia was interesting, and i don't totally hate it, but it's just kind of baffling. like her father dies and she doesn't get to express much genuine grief over it, just scheming from there on out to save hamlet, and she doesn't seem to spare a single thought for her brother in all of this. like i said, she could've stopped their whole feud by revealing herself or pretending to be a ghost. or at least show her on the brink of doing that, but she's unable to do so before the norwegian forces charge in.

also, i didn't care for the gertrude twin plotline. shakespeare loves his long-lost twins (comedy of errors, twelfth night) so it's not entirely out of place, but it felt unnecessary. a little too convenient as a device to introduce the different poisons and bring the norwegians to the castle. plus, this version of getrude seems to genuinely love her son enough that watching him die would drive her to kill claudius, without the added motive of him fucking over her sister.

i like how hamlet and horatio first coming upon ophelia while she's in the water turned the whole fish/fishmonger thing into even more of an inside joke. it was cute. also, the tension introduced by comparing it to the myth of diana and the hunter was interesting

i felt like, starting from that scene with the diana myth when gertrude gets upset that hamlet insulted her likeness, there was an intriguing rivalry brewing between getrude and ophelia for hamlet's affections, as his mother and wife, respectively. all the "hamlet oedipus complex" truthers make me roll my eyes, but there's gotta be some sort of reverse of that where it's the mother who has a toxic obsession with her son. you definitely see it happen often enough irl with self-proclaimed "boy moms". anyway, it seemed like that rivalry was a major dropped thread. would've been interesting to see that pursued further

idk shit about medieval clothing or costuming in general but i thought the costuming in this was gorgeous. the hairstyles, the dresses, the cloaks. the way ophelia always stood out in the frame so our eyes would be naturally drawn to her

the setup and payoff for horatio's illegal bodysnatching was also quite good but im biased bc i love horatio and him and ophelia being bros

[tiracallout]

The following is a copypasted submission from my inbox

hello. this is a year overdue and i personally doubt that anything about this blog is still active but i hadn’t really cared to write anything out until the other day. i don’t care about anonymity seeing as i’m already mentioned on another submission here so i go by tara currently and i’m an at the time 29 year old member of a system. i tend to be long winded but it’s a bit more coherent than the other system member’s was and skips straight past providing context for our living situation and is strictly edel relevant only

my memory isn’t exactly ‘good’ but if i can remember correctly i met him when he approached devon and seemed really excited to meet me because he thought i was nice. he was flat out told that i wasn’t exactly social or super openly friendly but he insisted anyways. i don’t know why i said hello after that but i guess i must’ve been lonely or bored. i don’t remember what i said but the conversation couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. this was some time during the general end of year 2015/new year 2016 i’m pretty sure in hindsight he probably thought because i was a 'fictive’ i’d have to like him. other people have agreed with me that they think he thought that because i’m a 'fictive’ who isn’t afraid of confrontation he’d get an excellent attack dog out of this. i’ll never know the truth about this either way

honestly i barely remember talking to the guy. one thing i remembered was asking him what was wrong only to find out he was having a breakdown over some 14 year old posting ship art or something and making fun of them for jokingly calling themselves trash. i didn’t want to get involved so i mentioned that the kid was 14 and being twice this kid’s age but that i didn’t quite get it and moved on with my day. maybe a comment or two in passing. i keep to myself he still has this odd insistence that i’m actually a super nice and friendly person. even if i’m the one who says otherwise. as if he knows me better than i do. he also tells devon, who is 17 and pretends that he’s not, that he finds it admirable that i’m not afraid to call people on bullshit and can be blunt if i have to be i make a twitter at some point. according to the records it says that it’s february 2016 he asks to follow it so i let him. it’s a small thing with 20-30 followers. i have that i might softblock at any time in the bio. at some point i softblock him, along with a small handful of other people, because i don’t care about idol games and this was the one thing that i knew i could have as mine and mine alone. i go out of my way to message him about it and say that it was nothing personal because i saw that was what he had asked his reaction was a little… disproportionate. he went on to threaten suicide and forced everyone into comforting him even when he admitted that he was being manipulative. i was shittalked for this in plain sight and everything that he said happened just wasn’t true. which is fine i guess, personally i have better things to do and i couldn’t give half a shit about it. what did bother me is that it wasn’t just me that saw it but devon, because we were cofronting more often at the time. he had seen the context of everything and had a breakdown over watching edel’s breakdown i give edel a 24 hour cooldown period before messaging him asking for an apology for the 17 year old he set off. i said that i didn’t care for one and wasn’t going to say anything else. or i guess i phrased it as 'withholding my comments’ which might’ve sounded harsh i guess but i was on edge for an unrelated reason and that’s just kind of how i talk. other people said that i deserved an apology but it’s in the past either way i got to watch him specifically @ someone begging them to kill him because he had made them promise to at some point. i got front row seats for this whole shitshow and was lead to believe it was my fault. this went on for several hours. this had all started over a softblock. talk about asinine when he eventually calms down, and this whole thing takes forever. i get this nice little message “oK now that i’m calm, I will apologize for upsetting Devon but its unbelievably distasteful asking me to apologize for having a breakdown over something that someone left me for a few days before. How am I supposed to react when I feel like people only care about my interests, not me as a person? I don’t hate either one of you. Not even you. I don’t hate anyone. I was upset but I got it out of my system and calmed down. I’m very sorry for upsetting anyone. I really am. But I really dont appreciate this wording, or the implication you have something nasty to say to me.” firstly i had had no clue that someone had softblocked him recently and i apparently had pushed him over his weekly unfollower limit or whatever. even if it weren’t my space to do what i want with how the hell was i expected to know that. secondly i never expected him to apologize for having a breakdown, it was that he did it where devon and i could watch it when he had to have had other accounts. i wasn’t super thrilled about having my personal business thrown around to begin with but there was nothing to do about it at this point. lastly that “i don’t hate anyone line is full of shit” and i didn’t really need to be chastised for telling him to own up to hurting someone or be treated like i was being given some sort of pass and i hadn’t earned it. regardless i was tired and didn’t care to try and argue so i apologized for being 'rude’ and explained that i was tense about something else entirely and that there were no hard feelings and moved the fuck on with my day

according to the archived dms this was around april 2016 i’m fairly sure

this is where devon starts seeing everyone talking about being treated like shit on top of personally witnessing it happening to me before he loudly cuts edel off

at some point i find out that edel is dating a minor under wraps and there’s a set up with bunch of middlemen to talk about things. that was all him. we’re both reassured that things will be broken off and he 'didn’t know better’

i have no way to keep an eye on the situation devon has been effectively given a gag order after a mutual friend did something of their own volition and he assumed that it’s because devon has been talking. devon hasn’t even been around and people have told edel that. having no point of contact with anything on that end on top of having things offline be in a crisis of sorts i take everyone at their word and expect that it’ll be done. something that i’m not proud of to this day

this was around may-june 2016 months down the line and 3000 miles later i find out completely on accident that that’s not the case. i have no way to get in contact with anyone and i’m absolutely fucking horrified. if i try and talk about any of this i’m risking someone who was manipulated by edel at that point being hospitalized due to the stress of it all. i try and do what i can to keep the kid anonymous, hoping that it’ll keep him at least a little safer than they would be otherwise. including finding out devon found out he knew a systemhop mod and personally sending a message asking them to take posts with identifying info about them down because i had heard they hadn’t consented to being outted like that and that edel was checking the blog. i really wish i could’ve done more and had known exactly how the hell to handle that situation. edel had still been discrediting devon and i both months later and i had no way to even keep an eye on anything without spying on a teenager, which i wasn’t willing to do

estimated around september-october 2016 apparently we were always referred to as a package deal. even in the 'apology’. it was pretty heavily implied by how he treated other 'fictives’ that i didn’t have my own free will and opinions in this. that was even more obvious when devon was the one listed on the 'do not follow if you follow’ list next to outted abusers and pedophiles and i wasn’t even mentioned despite having separate accounts and him knowing the username. i had to message him personally to get that removed anyways once he was called out so some fucking apology that was. two lines for the both of us despite getting massively different treatment. devon, the younger and less 'fictional’ of the two of us, was cornered into apologies and i was talked down to and shamed, not taken seriously from the beginning

after i saw the apology i messaged him and other than telling him to remove the username i told him i didn’t want an apology or even a direct response and that he wouldn’t hear from me again. as far as i’m aware we haven’t had any sort of contact since. i don’t know why i’m submitting this really but it gives a semi solid timeline/backup for other people’s submissions so why the hell not

this was october 2016