#you really said that with your whole chest about misogyny I'm dying

[miihoshi]

Found the white feminist.

Hope he picks you, girl. Hope the internalized misogyny is worth it.

Puritanism is getting worse around the globe and conservatives and fascists will absolutely be first going harder against porn, then use that against queer people. You HAVE to realise this and oppose anti porn measures and laws, be in solidarity with sex workers, and listen to them when they call this shit out. It's going to be vitally important.

[pynkhues]

genuine question. would y'all still be looking forward to brio in s3 if rio shot beth three times in the chest and left her to bleed out? like it feels weird for y'all to be still calling their relationship a ~game and be excited about rio being "obsessed" with her, when she tried to kill him - thought she killed him and didn't particularly care once she got over her own trauma. i'm wondering if y'all picture the other way around and still feel it'd be worth being excited about.

That’s a question I’ve thought about quite a bit, anon, even before you asked it (I do try my hardest to interrogate my own behaviour and interests! Oh, gosh, that sounds nerdy, haha), and I think it’s an important one, so thank you for sending it my way! I hope I articulate my response okay!

Because it’s tricky, right? The show will always be walking a tightrope when it comes to how they portray this relationship - after all, it’s a relationship between a latinx man and a white woman (which is loaded on it’s own in many ways) set in a story world that is full of violence, manipulation and desperation/urgency on almost every narrative level (and that’s before we look at them together!). Plus said relationship heavily explores themes of power, control and a sort of base connection that exists despite all of it. 

And I think when it comes to the shooting, there’s one word in all of that that matters more than all the others, and that word is ‘power’. 

Where we were - where we have been - for two seasons now has seen Rio with all of the power and Beth with none of it. Yes, she has snatched scraps of it where she could, but with the exception of 2.06, it has consistently been wrenched back from her within a matter of scenes, not episodes - the clearest example of that being 1.10/2.01 when she got him arrested, only to come home to have him manipulate her, essentially expose the intimacy of their relationship to her husband in the way he disarmed her, before shooting said husband; and 2.04 - when she had the power in seducing him, and immediately lost it again when he took back his money and decided to pop out of a corvette at Boland Motors and strongarm a deal. Beth is, of course, not blameless in any of this - she’s routinely made destructive, impulsive choices, hell, she’s chosen this world, but the fact of it is that she has been disempowered for most of her life, as have Ruby and Annie, and arguably the whole point of this show is in exploring the ways they try to regain that power.

Rio shooting Beth right now would not only not make narrative sense, but it would also be the thematic equivalent of a lion taking down an already-limping gazelle. 

Instead, what we get is that limping gazelle somehow taking down the lion (however briefly, as I’m sure it will be). She’s seizing power from him in a game that he has been winning (and a game that has been escalating) since the very first episode. 

Were their narratives reversed - so were Beth a queenpin at the start of this story and Rio the wide-eyed, accidental ingenue, were she to have held the cards from the start, were their stories to mirror canon, and he’d shot her in the finale? Were it her laughing in the face of death? Actually, yeah, I think I’d be just as excited for the potential of S3. 

But that, of course, is not your question. So were Rio to have shot Beth in our canon, as the show exists? Where he still had all the power and Beth was still that limping gazelle? No, I wouldn’t be. She’d be even more disempowered than she was when Rio shot Dean in 2.01. Hell, she’d be more disempowered than she was when this show started, and that would ultimately rip the guts out of both of these characters and this ship.

Am I adverse to the possibility of Rio shooting her, should the circumstances/narrative call for it when she is in power, when she holds more of the cards, when she’s queenpin, somewhere down the track? I’m not, actually. Beth has now leapt into this life full-bodied (and it’s actually one of the things that excites me about her thinking Rio is gone - she has to take full ownership of her choices. She can’t blame him for creating and distributing her own counterfeit cash), and if she rises through the ranks to become ‘king’, she should be treated as such. Her gender shouldn’t - and can’t - make her invulnerable. 

And look, I’ll be the first to say that I didn’t love the choice narratively (at least not the way it was written), but I do like that it’s shifted Beth and Rio onto a slightly more equal ground (because even as partners, they were never really equal - Rio proved that the second he put a gun against her chin again despite her telling him to never do it again). 

Re: Beth not seeming to particularly care - I’ll also be the first to say - and have said before - that I hated that and that I think it’s very important that Beth have a grief arc in S3 before Rio explodes back into her life, and I actually think it’s important too that she have some PTSD, which, given how quickly they tore through the final scenes, I’m hoping we just didn’t get to see and that they’ll course correct in 3.01. 

There is, of course, a lot to be said too about how none of this behaviour is acceptable in real life, and about harmful tropes and the use of them on this show - from a latinx man being shot by a white woman, to ongoing threats of violence against women, to the flip-flopping on what the show’s trying to say about Dean’s misogyny, and the amount of time devoted to exploring a rapist (I was saying it to @lunafeather the other day, but I would LIVE for the cold-open of S3 being Boomer dying in a really dumb, embarrassing way, and the ep just cutting to Annie and Mary Pat separately watching it on YouTube and crying with laughter). But yes. That feels like a whole other post. 

I hope that answers the question!