#it literally just popped into my head a matter of minutes ago and the cogs started turning at the speed of fucking lightning

[thepunkmuppet]

so I was thinking about the Key plotline as I often do, and the line “the monks made her out of me” is suddenly really interesting to me.

obviously what this means is that they made dawn’s body to have the DNA of joyce and hank, hence her being buffy’s sister and having the same DNA as buffy (“summers blood”). but like imagine taking that line literally.

“the monks made her out of me.” buffy has an identical twin.

obviously they didn’t do this because 1, they wanted a younger character to be in peril and provide variety in the cast, 2, having your lead actor play two characters would probably be much too much for them, and 3, the cost of having sarah play two characters and having to use split screen and doubles and stuff with the limited cgi of the time would just be too much. (dopplegangland was great but they probably couldn’t feasibly do that every episode for three whole seasons)

but just the concept of it is so interesting to me. this twin literally has buffy’s face, buffy’s voice, buffy’s body. but she’s not the slayer. dawn has to deal with being in the shadow of her slayer sister all the time, but the added strain of looking exactly like her and being the same age as her would just be so heartbreaking and interesting to explore.

I also think the impact of the reveal would just slap more. oh my god there’s two buffy’s!?!?!! oh my god buffy has a twin all of a sudden?!?!!!? there would also just be another level of angst, with buffy feeling violated that the monks just made another version of her and essentially used her body, and with the twin feeling like an afterthought, a duplicate, an impostor, etc.

plus them being twins would emphasise their bond more, as twins are supposed to have a really close and special relationship for obvious reasons. the monks made dawn so that buffy would protect her - the two of them having a strong twin bond and remembering a life of growing up doing everything together would really help with that!

also also I just love the idea that if the buffybot still got made, then at one point there would be three buffy’s but only one of them would actually be buffy. absolutely hilarious to me, smg would be working some serious overtime!!

I just love this concept and I might write it as a fic if I can come up with an actual plot. can any of you think of any names for this twin? or would she still be called dawn (what with the whole symbolism of the sun coming up in the gift, the foreshadowing, etc.) if you come up with any more ideas or discussion points about this au please lmk in comments/reblogs/asks etc, I’m obsessed with this idea and I need to talk about it!!!!

[rebelwith0utacause]

re: triggers. I don’t think most people expect to live in a bubble but instead to curate a space on here. If people do tag triggers, they know it’s at least a bit safer for them to follow that blog. For me, it’s really dependent on the day, some days it’s an uncomfortable thing to look at triggers but other days it’s the difference between a panic attack. I’ve always viewed them as a courtesy, regardless of effectivity, the time used to tag is negligible to me but invaluable for someone else

I’m adding everything below the line because I think some people aren’t ready to read this but also don’t want to add tws because there are others who need to have the option to see it.

So I read your ask and decided to take a shower and get my thoughts somewhat together in order to get the best response out. Instead, my mind went a mile a minute in all directions, but that’s nothing new.

Let me preface this by saying I understand that not every trauma is the same, same as how not every person reacts or copes with trauma the same. This isn’t me trying to say that not everyone’s struggle isn’t valid, it’s just my way of reaching out, giving a helping hand and a bit of food for thought for coping.

I keep saying I was raised differently because it’s the truth, might be European but I definitely don’t share the same values as most Europeans (or the image the world has about Europe, which is basically the UK and France). Here things are done differently, tws are almost nonexistent, to an extent you’re considered a lesser human being if you have (so many) triggers, and I’m not saying that this is good. Compassion is rare and understanding even rarer, more often than not, we’re left to our own devices and we can either sink or swim.

But then you have western civilization that comes labeled and prepackaged, where everything is written in fine print, everything is valid, everything is marketed so well that you have no other choice but to believe the seller. I’ve also had the opportunity to experience this, so I know a fair share of how this machinery works too.

I’m always trying to find a balance between the two, because it’s not the Dark Ages, but life also isn’t meant to be so sterile (or portrayed as sterile but I’ll get to that later). And this is where trigger warnings come into play.

We’ve all experienced trauma, either small or big. I won’t bore you with mine, but I can tell you that I’m not immune to triggers. It’s true that I seemingly don’t have them, and if you asked me a couple of hours ago I would’ve said that I don’t have them at all, but upon reflection, mine are just emotional and circumstantial. I don’t get a panic attack from words or images, but I might spiral down from a feeling that a situation might cause (like, say, a sudden right turn in a vehicle or as was the case a few days ago, feeling like my support system is being dismantled, I like my balance, alright?). These are all things I can’t help but fear, but I can learn to cope with them and lessen my reaction to them over time.

But enough about me, the whole reason I started questioning the tws in the first place was because of the overwhelming reaction people on the internet had of the prospect of Ashton’s video/song coming out. I’m talking people literally screaming ‘NO’ but also not wanting to be left out. And this makes me so sad, not because of Ashton or because his work might flop, but because they are missing the whole point of his song. Yes, it’s definitely his way of coping (I don’t buy that bs that it’s only about Harry, like... entering the industry at the fragile age of 18 can cause all sorts of trauma), but it’s also his way of helping other people cope, telling them that their struggle is valid but it can get better if you only allow yourself to get better. By putting a tw on it, it’s not reaching the people it’s supposed to reach, but also, the prospect of knowing that there’s a song about BD but not really hearing it is only leading your brain into thinking about BD, but without the educational guidance the song would provide. I hope I’m making sense here, like you’ll just overthink and reopen old wounds, which will lead you to feel worse about yourself. You can’t unlearn this information, same as how you can’t put a tw on the news that Ashton is releasing a new song.  

I made the parallel between the civilizations because my brain went on a different tangent that may or may not be related to coping mechanisms. Whenever I’m made aware of the difference between both worlds I can’t help but think of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. Definitely a good read (if you haven’t read it already), but my focus was on the Eloi as a concept. It’s alarming how it translates to modern-day society. For reference, the Eloi were descendants of humans, a species that evolved from (what I gathered as) first-world society, and to fit my narrative, I’m gonna say Western civilization. They had access to everything because of their wealth, from education to food to leisure activities, but they always chose the shorter path or should I say the easier path. They chose to be sheltered from the growingly disproportionate world around them, to the point where they were living under the illusion that everything is alright and they could roam free as long as the sun was shining. They were also scared shitless of the dark because that’s when the Morlocks came out of their tunnels and preyed upon them. Morlocks were another descendant of humans, evolving from the working class and the poor which were pushed to live in the tunnels to cater to the needs of the Eloi.

Now take my short recap as the Eloi being people with trauma and the Morlocks being the trauma itself. Is living in constant fear of the dark really what you want? Or is that something society tells you is okay because there’s nothing you can do about it, so you should stay that way? And what exactly does society get out of telling you that trauma is irreparable? 

This is what I meant by the world being portrayed as too sterile. It just can’t be, we’re not the ones who decide what’s gonna happen, so we shouldn’t be disillusioned that it’s up to us. Tws are there to help you in the moment, but they aren’t a coping mechanism. They’re just a veil we put over things to make them look blurry and to give them a less scary filter so that we can forget they exist. 

And this is what I meant when I said that not every trauma is the same. It comes in different degrees, but it also comes from different irritants. Not everything is because the world was mean to us, sometimes we were mean to ourselves, and we need to learn to love ourselves in order to cope. This is where, in my opinion, tws are counterproductive. Turning a blind eye on what we do to ourselves and romanticizing trauma and martyrdom is only gonna make it worse. 

Before people say I’ve gone crazy in saying this, let me just remind you that I lived through emo szn (I only caught the ends of it, it was mostly the era of ppl born in the late 80s) where self-harm was the norm and trendy and as a person with too many issues with the image of me in my head, I found it appalling that people thought that having scars was helping them. Like... reading fanfics back then, they were FILLED with mentions of self-harm. Say what you will but pop-punk/emo as a genre helped kids feel more understood, but it also popularised physical pain as a way of dealing with trauma, no matter the degree or the outcome.

There’s a prevalent theme in every generation, I think there might be a science behind it all, but it’s almost like there’s depression lurking in the background, but there’s a trend every 5-10 years or so in how we choose to manifest it; self-harm, EDs, drugs, alcohol, adrenaline, violence. Understanding this might help us understand that there’s a root to our trauma, and if we manage to kill it off, we might defeat it. But by adding tws, we’ll never get to this conclusion. We’ll just let society run us over and let us feel like shit.

Did any of this make any sense? Probably not. I’ve been writing this for a few hours now. 

My main advice is to get to know ourselves, to learn what really makes us tick. Introspection can help in finding out which trauma we can deal with, and which one needs to be left on the back burner for a bit. The lesser ones we can cope with one step at a time, until we’re out of the prangs of fear, and we can look back and say “I used to be scared of you, but I no longer am. You hurt me, but you no longer do.” 

Please think twice before relying on a tw. 

As for my blog, I don’t think I’ll tag too many tws, not because I don’t care about your wellbeing, but because I am not an organized person no matter how much I try to be. I also try to steer clear from things that might generally be considered triggering, but you’ll have to believe in my judgment of what’s acceptable or not. If that’s not something you can do, I totally understand if you unfollow me. 

Last piece of advice coming from a person that was just another cog in the marketing industry: Don’t fall for everything that’s been sold to you. You don’t have to do anything online. Something you saw on a blog makes you feel bad? Unfollow it. An event you read about in the news is triggering? Shut your computer down. A social media platform is making you feel like shit because the users are shit? Deactivate asap. Remember that information comes to you in binary code, and at the end of the day, that’s how you should treat everything that you consume online, even tho I might be a person on my side of the screen. Life is much more spicier and colorful when you’re out there in the real world, don’t let the overload of information coming from the virtual world stop you from feeling alive. 

[its-just-like-the-movies]

A Cure For Wellness (2017) B-/C+

At eight films into the year, who’s to say if Gore Verbiski’s A Cure For Wellness will still be the strangest film I’ve seen from 2017? Get Out, Raw, and American Fable have rolled on by, with Personal Shopper waiting right around the immediate corner, in all of their own distinct flavors of horrifying, strange, and discomfiting, and that’s nothing to say of films like The Beguiled off in the distance. But with a budget at least nine times higher than Shopper’s and eight times higher than Get Out’s (Fable and The Beguiled don’t have a reported budget, as far as I can tell), Wellness’s weirdness has been its primary selling point, both within itself and as a child of the studio system with tens of millions and a name-brand director of popular money-makers behind it. Its reputation for being absolutely batshit has superseded most conversation about it, even acknowledging lapses in plot, theme, length, and characterization. And Wellness lapses in all of these areas, regularly. The obviousness of where it will go is so heavily thudded in its first half that it keeps working against itself in moments that should be wonderfully odd. But once everything officially goes to shit for our hero, and the film finally stops pretending to hide what it’s doing and starts luxuriating in its own insanity, all that foreshadowing is recuperated in the service of executing these story beats in even stranger ways than I could have possibly expected.

Let’s start from the beginning, or maybe the prologue, where an initially nameless CEO dies of a heart attack working late in his company’s office space. The dead man’s body bathed in the light of - and dwarfed by - a seemingly infinite number of desktop computers is both the first in a multitude of striking imagery and a red herring, implying the film will have a long-reaching thesis about how American business-people are literally working themselves to death. From there we see the ascension of corporate cog Lockhart, only to be sent to off a mysterious resort in Sweden by the partners of his corporation, blackmailing him to retrieve their missing partner so that they can bring him home and lock him up as a patsy for their own shady dealings. The casting of Dane DeHaan, already so gaunt, is enough to reinforce the idea of death by overworking as Lockhart heads off on his assignment, seemingly peeved at the tremendous effort he’s undertaking simply to go and pick up this rogue suit. Not until he lands in the limousine taking him to that gothic wellness center do we see or hear anything of real value to the plot, establishing not just the truly bizarre story of how the hospital came to be but the contentious relationship between the hospital and the village leading up to it, rooted in said bizarre goings-on. This only really matters for a single detour into town, though, as Lockhart spends the rest of the film trapped in the wellness center as a patient and a test subject.

I do hope that calling him a test subject isn’t considered a spoiler, but it’s hard to call that overarching narrative all that shocking. From the moment we arrive the wellness center has a sterile, menacing aura that’s only enhanced once we get inside the institution and meet director Dr. Volmer and his ward Hannah, played respectively by a slimy Jason Isaacs and young Mia Goth, looking like Shelley DuVall as a Tim Burton ingenue. Like a lot in Wellness, the exact nature of their relationship is one you’ll likely realize long before you’re told about it; the first eighty minutes of the film are torn between trying to maintain some impression the hospice is normal enough and DeHaan is just imaging things or either going full bore up its own ass. And since the entire plot is built on how goddamn bizarre everything actually is, there’s not much going on for the first half outside of the few moments Verbinski goes “fuck it” and lets everything happen all at once. I spent those eighty minutes longing for the sheer, sporadic insanity of moments like the deer limping its shattered body off the road and away from the car wreck, the missing CEO slinking into a pool and spending too much time getting his head wet, Lockhart’s first treatment in the tank that may or may not have been infested with dozens of eels. A trip into town wherein Lockhart takes Hannah with him as he tries to establish contact with his employers is perhaps the first scene that manages to genuinely build its own kind of tension as we watch Hannah float around the bar, orbited by intrigued and skeevy punks, unaware of the dangers these kids are to her as she wanders into the bathroom and steals an abandoned tube of lipstick before dancing to the jukebox with the other kids. Meanwhile, Lockhart meets a farmer who becomes the thirty-eighth person to dish out something about the legend of the mad baron who opened the institution before comparing Lockhart to an injured cow the farmer has to slaughter.

From here we have about two more labyrinthine explorations, each more unraveled than the last one, before Lockhart confronts Dr. Volmer at a dinner table sequence that finally lays bare what he’s doing to the patients bare- involving even more eels and the suspiciously ineffective water that isn’t stopping teeth from popping out due to dehydration. And once we learn this, A Cure for Wellness at last stops trying to resist its strangest impulses and doesn’t just jump full bore up its own ass, but starts actually driving forward in the narrative after spending so much time trying to obfuscate its mysteries. Scenes start landing punches, stakes really matter, and the reveals land with such potency that it doesn’t even matter you already figured out this mad tale of incest and genetic experimentation over an hour ago. The real surprises in the institution are not the horrific farming of its patients, but the sheer gusto and fright with which these moments are finally visualized instead of whispered at us by a doomed woman cutting up newspaper scraps (Celia Imre, not given enough screen time to contribute her own brand of spookiness).

But what’s most striking is how assured and confidently the film reveals its layers of madness and human experimentation once it gets there. Never have I seen a man rip off what’s left of his face with such vigor, or the burning of a ballroom be shot with the same sweeping gorgeousness, if not more, as it had been when it was a party celebrating a truly awful success. Its set pieces had always been effective and well-shot, but the vigor in those moments has spread to the rest of the film, now that it’s given itself over to its own strangeness. The ending is, if anything, bigger than I had expected in its rampaging through the institution and its characters as Dr. Volmer sets his final plans in motion, and as Lockhart raced to find him I genuinely wondered how on earth he could pull this off. Wellness’ weirdness is not just potent but utterly grandiose, going full-scale melodrama in its last half hour in order to fulfill a story with fewer layers to it than Raw or Get Out, in realizing a plot it was too happy to telegraph from its earliest moments, and I’ll be damned if the sheer spectacle didn’t bowl me over better than any “event” blockbuster I’ve grumbled my way to a ticket for with my boyfriend.

Looking it up, I can’t say I’m shocked about the critical mixed reception, perhaps even the poor returns financially, but I wish things had gone a little better for this odd little fucker. If you’re hoping for more out of a film than strangeness, perhaps check out the talents of Eve Stewart, shuttled off from the greater horror of Tom Hooper’s sets, striking a fine balance in her realization of the institution that can flip from perfectly normal, uncomfortably sterile, and truly haunted, and that’s before we even get to the underground lair or some crazy aboveground shit. Bojan Bazelli’s cinematography, operating within the spa’s blues, the cast’s whites, and whatever flourished of color are called upon amongst all this pale, does similarly skilled work realizing set pieces like Hannah wading through a pool or the ballroom escapades horrific to watch and visually stunning. Bazelli and the makeup department must get credit for accenting DeHaan’s sickliest features, and making Goth look so much like she’d never touched sunlight, like every Victorian heroine meant to symbolize The Hopes And Dreams Of The Oppressed or something like that. I can’t say you’ve really missed much if you missed this film while it was in its theatrical run, but I know seeing that crazy shit on the big screen was enough of an amplifier to keep it in my head for a while. Then again, maybe it’ll feel even more at home on the Syfy channel when it isn’t showing one of its delicious, homemade fish-beast movies. If it’s ever there, I encourage you to give it a shot, even if you hop in an hour late. You probably haven’t missed the good stuff, you can easily catch up, and it’s better than you’d give it credit for just by looking at it.