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Besties in love

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Grumpy boyfriend

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Anya is one of us

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JD, open the door.

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Book!Lucy & Lockwood vs Show!Lucy & Lockwood: A VERY LONG Deep Dive

So I finished the Netflix adaptation of Lockwood & Co.

Overall, I think it was a respectful adaptation, which, despite some plot changes, kept largely to the spirit of the books. At minimum, Joe Cornish actually seems to like L&Co, which is way more than can be said about most adaptations these days. Hooray!

But I wanted to write a bit about one of the bigger changes they made: namely the dynamic between Lucy and Lockwood.

I’ve seen people saying that the Locklyle adaptation to screen was very true to the books, just without Lucy’s close personal voice, and sped up a little in the romance department (“Stroud doesn’t mention what Lucy was doing with her hands! They could have been on Lockwood’s face in the books!” etc).

Respectfully, I disagree quite a bit with this. While some argument could be made about it having shades of their relationship from THB/TCS onwards, I actually think Show!Lucy’s attitude towards Lockwood is a 180 from the way she views him in TSS and TWS.

IDK, this might be a bit of a controversial opinion judging by what I’ve been seeing in the L&Co tag and general ways people have interpreted TSS and TWS in the years since their publication, but I’m going to try to back my argument as best as I can, focusing only on those books.

I’m using the original paperback UK editions of both the Screaming Staircase (2013) and The Whispering Skull (2014).

Spoilers for the show and VERY mild spoilers for books 3+ (literally just the name of a new character/type of ghost + stuff already shown in the show that wasn’t shown until later in the books)

Another warning: this analysis is 5500(!!!) words long, and mostly quotes from the book. If you’d like to just read the main bits, look at the intro/conclusion to each section and read the TLDR; at the end.

Keep reading

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Mute: a short comic (part 2 of 2)

(link to part 1)

Keep reading

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Girls, Emotional Constipation, and Alyssa from The End of the F***ing World

Spoilers for the end of Season 2

Right. Haven’t done this sort of thing in a while. But watching The End of the F***ing World got me thinking about character analyses, and about Alyssa, and how good the writing was for this show. 

I can’t speak for anyone else but me, so I’ll say that Alyssa, at most times, felt like me. She acts callous, uncaring, tough – not necessarily because she wants to, but because she thinks that attitude will protect her. She goes after what she wants, but when she finds out that what she wanted is a loaded pile of shit, she responds in a way that she’s used to: with anger, with force, and with a steady lip.

We meet Alyssa in Season 1 when she is angry. Her stepdad is a sexual predator, her mother stands up neither for herself or for her own daughter, her dad has walked out of her life, and she has no friends. So, because her mother is spineless and her stepdad a creep, she has to pick up the slack and have double the spine, double the attitude, because that’s what protects her. In fact, it protects her so much, it protects James by extension (who has his own emotional constipation that leads to him being placid and therefore easy to take advantage of).

The bathroom scene (with James and the old man) and afterward is a great example of Alyssa’s take-no-shit personality. She handled the old man the best way she knew how, which was to threaten everything he loved, take all his money, and tell him to fuck off. Then she had a proper sit-down with James and said that he doesn’t have to do things that people want him to do (”I know,” says James, who probably did, but is too emotionally numb from his mom’s death and too stunned by the man’s assault to act on it). 

Of course, James comes through to protect her in return. 

But maybe not in a way that either of them expected.

Point is, Alyssa is the tough one – the seemingly more emotionally mature – of the two on their adventures. She helps James get out of his shell and feel things for her, with her, and outside of her. She knows how to handle people, or at least the creeps. (The police, security, and other non-fucked adults she doesn’t, because she doesn’t have any experience with those types, which is quite sad.) 

After the murder, it’s clear that both kids start acting on instinct. James, with breaking down into shock, and Alyssa, with telling James what to do and how to hide the evidence. Through her internal monologue, we know that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, which means that she’s allowing her body to do all the work while her head (the emotional part) takes a nap. Alyssa has her defense mechanism so engrained into her that she instinctually keeps James calm, sorts out the whole hide-the-evidence business, and bottles up her emotions. Why? Because her parents have done fuck all. 

The problem is, Alyssa is not the more emotionally mature of the two. Alyssa is about to do what James has been doing for the past ten years – bottle up her emotions. It is at this point, just after the murder of the professor, that the two characters begin to switch. James breaks out of his emotional constipation, bit by bit, and we start to see a more emotional, expressive (and suitably soft British boy) James. Alyssa, by comparison, is about to enter her stage of emotional constipation, locking out the shock of the murder, as well as all the childhood trauma she had to suffer, for the sake of living in the moment and, in a way, to survive.

We don’t see the fruit of this change until Season 2, where James is much more emotional (crying often, and a willingness to look uncertain, anxious, or happy, and express these emotions to Alyssa – which, I should say, is normal, healthy, and should be more encouraged in movies and tv shows), and where Alyssa is cold, terse, and decidedly numb. 

She lost the love of her life, she’s been separated from her old home to live somewhere remote, she has few, if not no, friends, and while she’s tried to form a new life for herself, she is tortured by her past. While on the bridge, she says this:

“It’s nice not feeling things. It’s like a super power.”

She’s depressed. She’s numb. She is so overwhelmed by the trauma in her life, she can’t feel anything as a response to it, and so she gets married in hopes of feeling something again.

She doesn’t. 

She grows up in some ways – refusing to ditch a dinner before paying and getting a job – but she regresses in other ways – unable to hold conversations with people and unable to maintain a positive relationship with anyone. She’s rude and mean and harsh and she knows it. She doesn’t like that about herself (”I think there’s something wrong with me.”). But she continues on with this harsh behavior because she’s still in survival mode, still keeping her defenses up 1) because she hasn’t dealt with what happened two years ago, and 2) this still feels natural to her. She’s used to keeping her defenses up because she lived with a predator for years. But now that she’s not with one – now that she lives with good people who love her and have no intention of hurting her – she doesn’t know how to behave.

She hurts people, and she hates it. 

I understand her. She doesn’t trust people, and so she keeps her defenses up even in romantic relationships, because it’s scary, because she’s worried that the guy will take advantage of her. And she feels terrible when she hurts him as a result.

But thankfully, she heals. And she still needs time, and she insists this to James, who respects her and loves her, so of course he will wait patiently. She’s terrible at communication, but she drops the barrier, bit by bit, and lets go of her emotional constipation (which still takes time to release). And in the end, it works out. 

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“We’re friends, aren’t we?”

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Baka

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Pretty boy Mousse

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One-sided rivalry

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“I've loved you ever since that day you broke your slate over my head in school.” - Gilbert

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“I hate you!”

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It was spring

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“Wanna hold hands?”

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White Day at the Desmonds

Damian *sob*: My girl is too dumb for Valentine’s Day.