#while still being sympathetic to the black characters and allowing them agency and full storylines

[dismembered-narrator]

i'm white so take this with a grain of salt but i'm so much more interested in stories that place marginalized people in a historical context with sympathy to their struggles than stories that completely ignore or remove any of the historical bigotry that would have been present at the time. like for queer characters i'm more interested in seeing the way they would have thought about their identities given the context of their time period than just using modern language and understandings of themselves. it feels like getting to learn about a world that i'm unfamiliar with. i don't enjoy stories that have excessive and uncomfortable bigotry in them but i do like seeing characters in the context and mindset that would have existed in that time period

[bartsugsy]

Have you recovered from Thursday's episodes yet? I have mentally binned the one from Friday from my memory as best I can. I wish Sharon hadn't included the scene where Robert pulled Rebecca up off her chair, what the hell was that. Surely there was another way for her to trigger a reaction so that Chrissie could blurt out Rebecca was still pregnant ugh. Maxine is subtle in her script writing and then it feels like these other writers come along and bulldozer over everything

Hey anon!

I honestly didn’t mind Friday’s episode. Ok…

this became…. obscenely long…….

The pub reveal felt sort of clunky in a ‘suddenly everyone relevant is here at the pub to learn of this news!’ sort of way, but it’s a soap, so…. you know. It was like… CAR CRASH HORRIFYING AND AWKWARD TO WATCH AND I GET LIKE… SECOND HAND HORROR IS THAT A THING i just fuckdigndnf scream like it hits A LOT OF MY WEIRD SECOND HAND EMBARRASSMENT BUTTONS AND I CANT i’m literally rewatching now and cringing at robert and aaron having to both suddenly deal with this realisation in full view of a packed pub i’m !!!!!!!!!!

It feels like the point was to sort of… make Robert extra terrible to Rebecca (not hard, he’s usually pretty terrible to her these days lmao) and have Aaron find out about the baby all at once, so that it hits him like a slap in the face, that this isn’t going to be as easy as he thought it was when it was just him and Robert alone in a room together. It’s so often been so much easier for the two of them, when it’s just them in a room. 

The one thing that I wasn’t a fan of was Victoria’s non-reaction. Because. Really? idk why are these reveals never as juicy as I want them to be smh. Also I still don’t get Chrissie being so gung ho about the baby given it’s Robert’s and given her relationship with Rebecca and so I’m assuming it must be for a specific plotty reason (bc the state of the white sisters’ relationship is always reliant on what the plot needs) and I’m really wondering what that is??? i’m 100% suspicious. 

lawrence on the other hand was 110% #relateable

ALSO aaron’s reaction to finding out about the baby was as relateable as chas’ reaction to finding out about the Incident - i.e. i felt my soul laid bare on screen that day

Ryan and Danny were both amazing and that bathroom scene was a work of art and I will cherish it til I die like THEIR PERFORMANCES IN THAT SCENE??????? LITERALLY STUNNING?????????????????? OH MY GOD?????????????? WHEN YOU THINK RYAN AND DANNY CAN’T DO ANY BETTER THAN THURSDAY AND THEN THEY DO THAT??????? bye. also i’m literally both of them. it’s like me talking to myself about this storyline. we are all one.

anyway that scene was perfect and NEEDED for this episode and so i really can’t trash it all that much because damn

The Aaron and Rebecca scene is…. the funniest most absurd thing I’ve ever laid my own two eyes upon………. she just…. how…. does anyone think she has a leg to stand on?????

Ok. Here’s my thing. It is 1000% Rebecca’s right to have this baby if she wants. That’s fine. She’s gotta do what’s right for her. However, awful as Robert treats her and much as she now rightfully seems to hate him, she has to understand that this decision to have this baby affects Aaron’s life as well. She shouldn’t let her choice be influenced by that at all but, given that this is someone she professes to “like”, she… she slept with his husband and she’s having his baby. She took an active part in helping to destroy his marraige. Unintended consequence or not, that’s still the absolute reality of what happened and as much as, again, I don’t think she should change her mind or her stance on anything Robert related, I still think she should at least be able to recognise her part in Aaron’s pain? I just…. you would think she would be even slightly sympathetic to that? But that last scene sort of came off as her trying to make him see the light - “look how similar we are, we’re in the same boat, it’s us against him”. The show literally couldn’t make it clearer that Aaron and Rebecca don’t have the same relationships with Robert if they had Rob make a flipping shrine to Aaron in his basement next to a burning effegy of Rebecca at this point (….just look at this entire episode), but Rebecca thinks it’s the same thing. And yes, she seems to think she’s doing right by Aaron but.. idk, how fucking patronising can you be? How unsympathetic can you be? 

Again - I really do think the point was to really have Aaron question whether he can really forgive Robert and put that seed of doubt in his mind but

sigh

Rebecca.

Also idk if it’s because we know what Aaron’s agression looks like and it wasn’t that heartbroken yell at Rebecca, and Rebecca does not know what it looks like, but her cowering and making him feel bad about yelling at her…. like….

she slept with his husband??????????????????????????????????????

I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND WHY NO ONE IS ALLOWED TO TREAT THIS AS A SHITTY THING TO DO BC IF MY MATE DID THAT TO ME I WOULD SURE AS HELL SHOUT AT THEM, PREGNANT OR NOT WHAT THE FUCK but as im a lesbian i doubt they’d be pregnant tbh but still WHY CAN’T HE YELL AT HER? SHE STILL ULTIMATELY CHOSE HER FEELINGS FOR ROBERT OVER WHATEVER VERY MINIMAL REGARD SHE MIGHT HAVE HAD FOR AARON’S (AARON HER FRIEND AARON WHO SHE LIKES) MARRIAGE and it’s….. it’s really annoying 

and rebecca acting like that shout is…. robert’s fault….. when….. even if aaron was acting agressive…. aaron’s agression issues go back far far before robert even came into the picture….. and robert isn’t responsible for the way aaron reacts to things much in the way aaron isn’t responsible for robert’s reactions we literally just had a massive double bill discussing these exact faults. like, it just hammers home how much she really doesn’t know him. 

and like. robert and rebecca were both there. they were both responsible and they both had relationships with aaron. robert has more to apologise for but that doesn’t mean rebecca should be treated like an innocent god damn petal (regardless of whether she genuinely belived rob and aaron had broken up four hours before they did it or whatever… i mean…….. honestly…………)

and potentially all just a way to make sure aaron doesn’t shout at her again? or just to foreshadow whatever the fuck is happening next week. who knows. 

Anyway.

What I’m saying is, I think the whole point of this episode was to show that Aaron and Robert’s problems aren’t magically fixed because they spent a day finally talking about their problems. Growing and changing has never been that easy - they’ve taken the first step and admitted to it, recognised their issues but… I think this is just a signal that they still have a lot of work to do and they aren’t going to be in a good place for a while. They’re both going to be trying to work through it for some time. Which is good. 

Like. That whole first scene, with them being cheerful but kind of awkward and stilted was just them trying to move past things a little - but this episode was a big neon sign that it’s never gonna be that easy. Long standing problems like theirs don’t just disappear.

ALSO ALSO final note on Maxine (and Sharon I guess, who wrote this ep - and I really wasn’t a massive fan of the writing because it did feel like a mess and it took me a few watches to sort of understand what was happening, but whatever) - because I just… I don’t think every episode that Maxine doesn’t write is doomed to be bad lmao. And I don’t think Friday trampled over them either. 

Personally, the reason I love Maxine like she was my own daughter is because she is the exact opposite of subtle. She doesn’t do subtle at all, she spells out everything in black and white and you don’t have to work for it - which I appreciate a lot, to be honest, because who wants to work this hard for a soap???? LOOK AT HOW LONG THIS POST IS???? WHY??? lmaoooo, maybe that’s just me. idk, i just appreciate her blunt approach to writing dialogue and her big love of parallels and callbacks bc it satisfies my inner theorist. plenty of other writers have their strengths when they write robron and plenty of other writers have written beautiful stuff for them, but i like that they give maxine the big stuff if only because i know that she’s gonna try and cram as much shit into there as possible lmaooooo. she makes the most of it.

and by that i mean…. i’m never really left thinking “am i reading too much into this or is this just an accident of the writing that i’m picking up on?” with maxine, like i do for a lot of other writers. like friday’s episode - am i meant to see the rebecca/aaron conversation as firm proof that rebecca doesn’t know aaron but has made a lot of judgements on him and assumes he has as little agency as she does when it comes to robert, based on her terrible terrible relationship with and treatment by robert? or is that just something that i can see from the episode, knowing the characters like i do, that was never intended to be there and won’t be a plot point. with rebecca, especially, it’s hard to know what we should be purposefully pick up on and what is just bad and sloppy writing by literally every single person involved. 

I just never feel like I have to write mountains of essays about character motivation and storytelling when Maxine is at the helm of an episode. 

i do think she’s one of the most consistent at writing them (though idk whether that’s because she gets the good episodes or it’s just her clear love for them as a couple that leads her to being extra careful with them, it might be very chicken and egg haha) and she handles episodes that could fall apart in some writers hands very very well (my main example for that is always the lachlan trial episode, which i just think should have been an utter trainwreck but ended up being one of my favourites. it’s just incredible to me that she made it work that well, during a time when robert is actively lying and the show itself was SO BAD ON ALL COUNTS???? her ep was like the turning point into ‘not horribleness’ again and i don’t know how she did it. the entire plot was ABSURD. she just made it work.)

(plus it seems like she writes loads of casual affection into episodes and that makes me happy)

idk. I guess I’m saying that there’s a reason I genuinely look forward to Maxine’s episodes, but also… all is not lost and i don’t think she’s the only one who is gonna save us here. we’ve got other people who will help us along the way lmao. 

(i’m getting serious de ja vu with this whole sentiment did i write this back in november as well or is that my brain playing tricks on me?)