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Lana Parrilla | costume appreciation: 23/∞

costume design by Eduardo Castro

ONCE UPON A TIME  | costume appreciation: 23/∞

S6.E7 ∙ Heartless

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i’m ngl, hannah, i get it. if a woman that was a colleague of mine was this touchy-feely with me, i’d be obsessed with her too.

honestly though me and whose mom????

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Deborah doesn’t do funerals but she went to one for Ava

Deborah never forgave anyone who betrayed her but she forgave Ava

Deborah wouldn’t give up the chance to host a late night show but she did it for Ava

AND IM SUPPOSED TO BE NORMAL ABOUT THEM

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Lesbian relationships really do move fast, one minute, you’re being ‘redeemed’ as a Mandalorian, the next she’s got you alone in her forge, telling you to remove your helmet.

Then she’s literally making you armor???

And then, not even a week later, you’re getting gay married in front of your entire people while relighting the great forge together.

Wild

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jean and hannah in an interview with collider

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Apparently I’m not done rambling about Hacks s4 despite posting a bunch of thoughts earlier. I’ve been seeing the sentiment that Deborah was treating Ava badly in 4x10 and being disappointing or gross for abusing substances (I’m obviously paraphrasing here, and trying not to vaguepost too egregiously) and that 4x10 was anticlimactic and a backslide and disappointing after the incredible finale-esque intensity of 4x9, and I feel so differently about it that I think I’m gonna try to write out my thoughts as to why that is!

I think Deborah is really scared.

She has always looked out for herself. She said herself, early in her relationship with Ava, that “there is no line.” But she found the line, and did not cross it. After achieving her dream and surpassing all hopes for how well the show would do (except, of course, her own hopes, and Ava’s hopes), she made a decision that was both perfectly in-character and a massive departure from all the other times when she’s made progress or taken great strides in her work or overcame challenges precisely because she was looking out for herself. And all along, Ava’s been causing her to question whether she was always respecting herself while looking out for Number One, and those little critiques and questions are in the mix as she’s exhibited great character growth but is now spiraling in ways that are very disrespectful to her brain and body.

It makes so much sense to me that Deborah would stall on working on new material despite suggesting to Ava that they’ll be finding their next thing together in 4x9. (She’s just given up what she thought would be the ultimate culmination of what she’d worked for, and while she’s put a lot of work into finding an exploitable loophole so she can perform again, it doesn’t really feel like she’s let herself mourn.) It also makes sense to me that she’d escape into alcohol; she’s always liked to drink quite a bit, but this feels like desperate escapism rather than debauchery (even if she’s very careful to make it look debaucherous and fun when she’s in front of Ava). I think she’s terrified to feel anything deep or dark for longer than a few seconds right now, hence all the cookies in bed and airplane bottles poured into Diet Coke and giggling about how many cocktails she’s had.

And for all that she is critical of Ava (in ways she ought to turn around on herself) and for all that she’s procrastinating all her feelings and really putting the “non-linear” into non-linear progress, I think it’s really exceptionally notable that she never once articulates REGRET. She knows she made the right choice in quitting Late Night. She knows she wouldn’t have been able to forgive herself if she hadn’t. She knows she prioritized the right person. She’s making mistakes left and right and she’s deeply depressed and she’s falling back into the “conniving” that was always more fun when it was in cahoots with other people and she’s struggling. But she doesn’t betray Ava or herself by letting her sadness turn into wishing she hadn’t done the right thing. That feels huge to me.

A lot of movies end directly after the climax; the main character takes their big stand, and it’s exciting and intense and powerful, and we leave the theater still full of adrenaline. I think it’s really important that 4x10 was 4x10 and not 5x1. The aftermath of Deborah’s decision is a part of this story. And I found it interesting and touching to watch Deborah and Ava kinda suck at navigating the aimless misery of being in a mutually-beneficial partnership that prioritizes comedy over literally everything else here in a stretch of months in which nothing’s really that funny.

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HACKS 4x07 | 'D'Christening'

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listen i’m an avorah girlie too but reading some people’s posts about the finale makes me feel like we’ve been watching a different show. that finale was emotionally devastating but so, so good.

ava and deborah are ride or die for each other at this point, the writers have said so, but the finale always sets up the emotional atom bomb we’ll spend several episodes of the next season unpacking and BOY did 4x10 deliver on that. because even though deborah can do these big scary gestures when emotions are running high and she needs someone to understand how much she loves them, she is still a deeply, deeply traumatized person, and that doesn’t just go away by magic.

like, deborah wasn’t just an ice queen bitch in earlier seasons for fun. it’s a defence mechanism covering her very fragile sense of self. these massive emotional wounds that she feels she can’t let anyone see, and would not know how to process even if she wanted to. of course she isn’t going to ride off into the sunset with ava and have an idyllic honeymoon in singapore, because accidentally barring herself from doing the one thing that keeps her devastatingly low self-esteem afloat (and let her take some degree of control back after frank betrayed her) is going to be terrifying and traumatic. yes, instead of a betrayal causing the show to be taken from her it was a choice she made, but that doesn’t make the sudden loss of control any less scary. that contract thing showed her that she’s still vulnerable in a lot of the same ways she was when she was younger. so she regressed into her worst coping mechanisms, because of course she did.

the question is what ava does with it. she’ll go with deborah to write new material eventually, i’m sure, but we never get a view of ava’s face after deborah says they’ve gotta go back and start writing and i think that’s deliberate. she’s still hurt and upset, she said so, and i think the whole singapore thing was a pretty big wake-up call for her. the problem was never “deborah doesn’t love me”, the problem was “deborah protects herself from emotional damage in ways that hurt the people she loves”, and ava being terrified that she was dead didn’t stop that from being true. ava loving her doesn’t stop that from being true. and i think ava has matured enough that she knows how to (gently, lovingly) hold her accountable for it.

so i don’t think the finale is supposed to be a comment on whether or not ava and deborah are endgame or whatever, it’s a comment on what deborah still has to do — not just to maintain her relationship with ava, but with everyone. it was such a good character study episode and i will be thinking and talking about it for the next 3-5 business decades.

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head empty just deborah calling ava "honey" and ava calling deborah "babe"

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I'm so glad I live in a world where there's Archive of Our Own

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Deborah on her way to work in a sheer top and black lace bra to ruin Ava's day...

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where is that cat with the kind and reassuring face

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Tshirt idea I had

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Was talking with one of my very lesbian friends about body dysmorphia and how you can look at a fucking gorgeous woman who has a lot of the same qualities as yourself and not realize that the complement also applies to yourself. I asked her if she'd been watching Dancing With The Stars this season and she said no.

So i showed her a picture of Ilona Maher from this week's episode.

Her response:

"Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh. Thigh."

So anyway, the takeaway here is that one person's 'too masculine' is another person's 'thigh.'

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I had to do something that I did not want to do, even though it was my job. And it hurt them.

AGATHA ALL ALONG 1.01 | 1.04