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yeah yes i would love a Choctaw demon hunting spinoff or a Mary Stack spinoff or a civil rights era spinoff etc. etc. but when we're real talk talking real for real let's agree what we all actually want after Sinners is a million more original Black stories whose Black creators will own the rights

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Susan fills her story with the vivid, sensory details and aspirations to a grand significance of a historical novel

Sadie constructs her life based on sets of goals and lists of interactable objects like a video game

Beckett tells his story with the urgency, claustrophobia, and paranoia of a horror movie

until coda, Susan's removed from the present, Sadie's removed from her body, Beckett's removed from the world

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sometimes i feel like im climing up this incline again alone but thankully sisypus and the itsy bitsy spider and here with me

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Good time to post my Severance painting. "HELLY" oil on canvas. 2024

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birch trees is such a sweet song, and the innocent, youthful tone makes me think susan’s romanticism—her need to experience life as a story—comes from a much younger, more vulnerable part of her. rolling up birch tree bark like a cigar and using it to whistle a birdsong isn’t just poetic flourish; it’s play, like something a grandparent might teach a young child. susan, distant from her grandmama growing up, perhaps never got to have that kind of childhood experience. now, she is free to provide that joy and magic of play to herself. even common annoyances, like getting gravel in your shoe, are rewritten as moments of magic and whimsy, personifying the gravel as “nibbling on your toes.” in happy/crazy, she expresses how much she loves the freedom to “laugh and play and sing and swing,” now that “the world is away”,—not just an embrace of joy, but a reclamation of something lost.

i think that her need to be part of a grand, whimsical story (real af btw) probably comes from childhood. her ability to effortlessly access this childlike wonder, to see magic in the everyday, to shape her life into a storybook fable—this has probably always been how she protects herself from uncertainty, both moral and existential (“nonfiction is harder than fiction”). narrativizing isn’t just how she makes sense of things; it’s how she holds onto that younger self who still feels safest in the immersive, magical embrace of a good story, shielding her from being swallowed by grief and uncertainty. it’s also probably why she became a novelist, drawn as she was to the allure of storytelling. the tragedy is that in doing so, she also walls herself off from real connection. because to let life happen outside the boundaries of a controlled story is to risk pain, to risk being a character instead of the author—reacting instead of deciding, swept along instead of shaping. but stories are meant to be shared; they are fundamentally about connection. for susan, they often become a fortress (a clochán?) rather than a bridge.

this part of her is terrified of losing control of her own story, which is why she chooses to divorce julian rather than follow him, even though she has no real reason for staying in new york. if she moves for julian, she’s neither the author nor the main character of the story anymore; she’s a secondary character in his. for someone whose sense of self is so deeply tied to authorship, this isn’t just a practical or emotional dilemma—it’s a fundamental threat to her identity. for this part of her, co-creating a story with julian—one of their move, rather than his move—is not even an option; there must be a singular, undisputed truth.

but this part of her isn’t inherently wrong, or regressive, or unhealthy. we can see that this part isn’t just about protection; it’s deeply creative and generative. it’s what allows her to find joy and pleasure, even in the middle of the trauma of a global pandemic, to feel connected to her grandmama in a way she was never able to before. the cause of her pain and tormented rumination isn’t this part of her—it’s the way she pushes it away, pathologizes it (“trying to trace the tumor,” “the demon inside of me”), demands justification for it (“why am i like this?”), shames it (“i know that i shouldn’t be happy”).

maybe if susan can “dance” with this part of herself (her ‘wolf’), she can help it to become “unstuck” from its rigid habits, to recognize that now, as an adult, she has other strategies she can rely on, and to invite it to take on a new role. maybe then it can stop carrying the burden of hypervigilance, of being a ‘firefighter’ tasked with extinguishing “the bubble of panic inside” whenever uncertainty rears its head. perhaps it could trust that it’s safe to let go a bit and do what it really longs to: to honor the wonder and magic in the everyday, to help susan tell her story on her own terms, to fuel her creativity rather than control her life.

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jury-rigged. even keel. by the board. three sheets to the wind. loose cannon. son of a gun. pipe down. taken aback.

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“she should be at the club” ms huang should be at the. School

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just got the call. fired. i was the DEI coordinator at Lumon in charge of making all the old men on the severed floor gay

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maybe you and some strangers should converge into a lazy triangle amidst the perfunctory din of a sunlit café and you’ll calm down

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have been thinking about susan’s line in the library: “plays? not that many plays”. it’s interesting how offhanded it feels; the way it begins with a question, “plays?”, like someone just asked her about them and she’s caught off guard—an afterthought, as they are in zelma’s library—and then is immediately followed by enthusiastically jumping into the nonfiction. on one level, it could be read as a semi-self-deprecating joke from malloy about how most people don’t really read theatre. but i think it also hints at susan’s discomfort with her own subjectivity—and how she actually is more like her grandmama than she realizes.

we know zelma, like susan, is a bit of a romantic, drawn to the idea of her life being like a grand, novelistic narrative. even as she’s recounting what is likely her greatest trauma, she still takes a moment to be like “ok but this would make a great book” (“oh, what a romān it would make”). and i think zelma’s library suggests a deep desire to find meaning in narrative; “autobiographies by people who tried to take their lives and biographies of people who did,” trying to understand the darkness that consumed erik; “jungian psychology, drugs and disease, mental health” plunging into her own psyche in search of healing.

compared to fiction and nonfiction, plays demand a more active engagement from the reader. where novels and memoirs can offer lush sensory description, lengthy explanation, and elaborate exposition, plays give us some dialogue and a set of skeletal instructions. the actual meaning of a play only emerges in performance, shaped by directors, actors, staging, and the audience’s own histories. plays resist being a single, permanent text.

for susan, a novelist who longs for a morally unambiguous, mythic narrative—something bigger than herself to define herself against—this kind of interpretive fluidity is deeply discomforting. and maybe zelma’s library, light on plays, reflects a lineage of that same discomfort with ambiguity.

but all texts are open to interpretation, not just plays. dominant western thought regards the written word as permanent, authoritative, a vessel of immortal knowledge, recorded for posterity. susan engages with stories this way—especially her grandmother’s annotations, her manuscript, her memories. she’s built her entire sense of self on a fixed, linear narrative: zelma as hero, erik as traitor, herself as the survivor who carries the story forward.

novels, memoirs, biographies—these feel more finished on the page. they let susan believe that if she just finds the right book, the right framing, she can understand her family’s pain in a way that is whole and final.

but the manuscript disrupts that. zelma’s telling of “the berries and the plums” forces susan to confront that there is no singular narrative. no authoritative version of the past. her family’s story, like a play, is something that changes in every retelling. and if the story isn’t what she thought—if it doesn’t fit neatly into her inherited mythos—then what does that make her? if she’s not the hero, is she the villain? is she the wolf?

to ‘dance with the wolf’, susan must recognize that she’s not zelma, and she’s not erik. she’s not the hero, and she’s not the wolf. she is all of them, but more importantly, she is herself, a person with her own story. all these narratives are part of her, but she is bigger than them. just as an actor can inhabit many roles to tell many different stories, susan can learn to embody parts of herself that feel conflicting—including her wolf—and hold space for multiple narratives to coexist.

she has been trying to find meaning by narrativizing her life like a self-contained novel: with her as the protagonist of a grand, predestined plot. but the power of storytelling, what gives narratives life, is in the act of interpretation, something plays make unavoidable. and that act of storytelling is susan’s ‘wolf dance’.

so this little offhand line—“plays? not that many plays.”—becomes a moment of subtle irony. susan dismisses something that might actually be the key to her freedom. it’s an early hint at susan’s blind spot, and by extension at the grandparents’ ultimate wisdom.

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i feel so bad for nikola tesla like imagine spending years beefing with a guy who has conned the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and you end up dying broke and starving and alone and then 100 years later another guy cons the public into believing he's some sort of supergenius when in reality it's his overworked employees developing all of his world-changing inventions and he's doing it all IN YOUR NAME. he must be rolling in his grave like a fucking rotisserie chicken

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my special guys being normal about vegetables at dinner <3

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when zelma says she whispered to “the child inside of her” to help her pray for erik, i wonder if there’s a dual meaning; she’s whispering to her unborn child (susan’s mom) and also whispering to a younger version of herself who still clings to an innocent hope that erik will be able to save himself from the “darkness”

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so what happened is i stumbled thru a far too detailed retelling of susan’s house and my therapist was furiously taking notes the whole time . even erased stuff a couple of times. i hope they study me in a lab so i can call out of work

oh my IFS therapist is gonna be hearing about wolf dance

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Very funny that Lumon is constantly lying to people like "oh your innie got in a fight" :/, "yeah, you feel off a rope and got a little wet :(", and " whoops! You bonked your head a little bit!"

But with Burt they decided to straight up be like. "Yeah so you have a GAY LOVER and we MUST fire you"

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// Cold Harbor

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ok need to talk about the karaoke scene. “too soon”, a breakup song fundamentally about sunk cost, the wasted potential of a relationship ended before its time, ties in so cleverly with sadie’s inherited obsessive fear of wasted time. sadie spends most of the song drinking and venting to zippy, barely acknowledging grandmother’s performance—until, at the end, she joins in, then overtakes it entirely.

a perfect reflection of how she fails to recognize her own obsessions and compulsions as inherited, even as she’s enacting them. she dismisses grandma’s coin collecting as a funny quirk (“she was a little bit crazy ‘bout coins”), just as she tries to minimize her concerns about her own obsessive gaming. even as she steals the mic and belts out the same words, she doesn’t recognize that she and her grandmother are, quite literally, singing the same song.

and crucially, “too soon” isn’t grandmother’s own song; it’s karaoke. it’s something passed down, repeated, inherited. just like sadie’s patterns. just like the wolf dance.