afemalegazing

[afemalegazing]

This scene is everything...

[afemalegazing]

They’re gonna try to spin it like June had no choice. She had to let Nick go as a sacrifice for the greater good.

Fuck, no.

She had a staggering amount of time to warn him in countless ways, starting from the moment he got out of the car. She was in an inexplicably empty hangar, all the other commanders were on board the plane already, and no one was expecting Nick to show up. He almost looks directly at her. She could have breathed sharply and he would have sensed her. The plan would have absolutely stayed intact. But no.

Instead, she callously and passively - with full awareness - lets the man die…

who has literally saved the lives of many of the people she loves, some of them multiple times (Moira, Luke, Holly/Nichole, and June herself)

who was ready to leave Gilead with her a couple weeks ago

who has killed for her

who gave her her agency back

who freely offered her the only safe space in the darkest place

who has never once controlled her

who gave her a way to rebel through the power of love

who has consistently sacrificed his mental and physical wellbeing in favor of hers

who endured a forced marriage to a teenager because of her

who married again (fight me on this) to hold his position in Gilead to help June with info on Hannah (he was already married in 4x09 when he gave June the Hannah file!)

who knew he would probably never see his daughter again and still actively worked to get her and June to safety

who was made a Commander and sent to die in Chicago because he made sure June and Holly were able to escape by holding Fred Waterford hostage

who delivered that same man to June to make sure she got justice for what Fred had done to her

who stood up to Serena for her, risking being reported and put on the wall

who watched her go back to her life with another man because he loved her so selflessly that all he wanted was for her to be happy and safe, even when that could never be with him (“try and be happy” / “keep yourself safe”)

who let another government official take advantage of him and use him, just to fight what Gilead was doing to her in Canada

who punched another Commander in front of a room full of witnesses just because she had been endangered again

who asks about his daughter every single chance he gets and misses and loves her with every breath

who is consistently sickened by violence and only fantasizes about peace and safety

who is terrified and alone and grieving and lost and just needs her help and her love, even if it’s only a fraction of the limitless love he shows to her so effortlessly…

This is the man she destroyed. This is the man she let walk out of her and her daughter’s lives forever, leaving his wife a widow and his unborn son fatherless.

[afemalegazing]

— Ocean Vuong, from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous (via letsbelonelytogetherr)

[afemalegazing]

[afemalegazing]

THE HANDMAID'S TALE — 01.02 - "Birth Day" (2017)

[afemalegazing]

the best part is that these are the same people who will tell you the nihilistic ending we got is actually really perfect because of how realistic it is.

they'll say, this was never meant to be a love story (wrong—it was a love story in every way actually and always was). they'll say, this ending is how it would happen in the real world (wrong—this was a badly written soap opera from around season 3 onward and june would have been on the wall in season 2 ten times over). they'll say, this was june's story told from her perspective (wrong—we saw quite a bit of content that june had zero perspective about).

and then they'll literally say, nick only cared about june and therefore he wasn't a good man (wrong—nick cared about eden, about offred the first, about rita, about his daughter, EVEN about serena though she had sexually assaulted him and didn't deserve an iota of his compassion). and all of that from a character who had supposedly been abandoned by his mother.

it's incredible the kindness and compassion he showed after being abused and betrayed by not one but two countries he tried to believe in — regimes where he was used, discarded and left behind — and that he cared for so many women, even after the women around him had done the same thing.

It drives me nuts when Anti-Nick people say he only helped June because he loved her —like that’s a flaw or a reason to be killed off?? Be serious.

Oh selfless ones — how many of you are risking your life for strangers?

The truth is: love is the most real reason people change. Most won’t bend, adapt, or take a bullet for just anyone—but they will for someone they love.

Which is also why that plane scene may drive me insane forever. It's AU level insanity. If that’s my guy on that tarmac, I don’t care what it takes—I’m getting his ass off that plane. Whether I die or not. And that's not even factoring in the baby daddy of it all. There is just no universe where June does that.

[afemalegazing]

i’m a nick blaine apologist first and a human being second

[afemalegazing]

I never post these, but yeah….pay attention because ALL of this 👇👇👇👇👇

[afemalegazing]

On Nick Blaine, Narrative Betrayal, and the Engineered Silence of a Fandom

This essay was originally posted on the private Osblaine subreddit. I'm posting it here in advance of the upcoming (final) AbovetheGarage podcast meta episode so it's accessible for anyone who wants to read the essay in full.

Spoilers for THT & lots of fan rage below the cut.

Sorry for the essay, but I feel so beside myself and gaslit by the whiplash of this experience that I needed to unload somewhere, and while it feels futile to even try to explain all of my thoughts at this stage, I feel compelled to share where I've landed. I'm so unbelievably down over this, guys. Gutted, as I know all of you are.

Nick Blaine wasn’t just killed, he was sacrificed on the altar of The Lesson™. An out-of-nowhere, contextually empty erasure of characterization, meaning, motivation, and continuity, all to teach the audience The Lesson™ we never asked for or needed to hear.

Nick wasn’t given a resolution. He wasn’t honored. He wasn’t even mourned! Not by the showrunners, writers, cast members, or other characters—and most painfully, not by the woman who we know loved him so deeply. Instead he was reduced to a message delivery device about evil MAGA Nazi incels or whatever buzzword is currently very popular on Twitter, in the most contrived and unearned narrative fashion possible. Once this utility was fulfilled for the whims of sycophants like Chang/Tuchman/Miller/Moss/Fagbenle et al these people just threw Nick in the trash where they claim he apparently always belonged.

And the worst part is that the show expects us to applaud. It expects us to look at Joseph "Pick three women June the rest die of radiation poisoning" Lawrence, and Serena Joy "But I never thought they'd take MY finger or MY child" Waterford with enormous pride and empathy and understanding. Don't even get me started on Lydia...I have PhD dissertations about that fascinating and deluded narcissist in my comment history, too.

To be clear, I love all these characters flaws and all, they engross me, and it's intriguing watching their dynamics unfold in this often hideous, violent sandbox. But in the end their arguably unnecessary redemptive arcs are heaped with praise and encouragement and the writers bait us with how terribly complicated and brave they are, while substantially less problematic Nick isn't offered the same consideration or forgiveness or grace (and now perhaps never will be) according to that very same moral framework. June herself generally gets a pass as the protagonist, even though she has long been a flagrant thematic and ethical mirror for all the considerable deficiencies we see in the antagonists. So who decides a character's worthiness for redemption or value then, and how? It is simply all SO INCONSISTENT. The framework gives everyone else the space to breathe, err and exist. Whereas for Nick, the framework is solely punitive. Why? Why is this?

Nick's actual unforgivable crimes: folding under Wharton's wall threats three episodes from the finale after YEARS of repeatedly saving June + Nichole's lives and helping them escape, being a lifeline for finding out Hannah's whereabouts, gathering intel for the American intelligence agencies, smuggling contraband to the Jezebels and also to Luke over the border, delivering Fred on a platter so June and the other handmaids could rip him apart, executing other wicked Commanders for their violence against vulnerable women....just a sample of his awful deeds. Keeping in mind that all of thirteen and a half minutes ago in the show's timeline he risked it all and was forced to murder two teenaged boys in broad daylight during a highly scrutinized diplomatic event, to save June's fucking idiot husband.

I'm so utterly baffled that I don't even know how to unpack the stupidity of the choices these writers have made. We are all such brain-dead slop consumers that a recent magazine interview had Chang confirming Nick's many atrocities, none of which are ever shown on screen or even alluded to in the dialog but which she assures us DEFINITELY happened, A LOT (trust me bro). This little blurb is apparently sufficient evidence for the narrative to unceremoniously dispose of Nick, his legacy, and all he meant to us. Have you ever heard of a TV show whose narrative coherence literally requires supplemental reading materials? It's fine. Just eat the slop you fucking morons. Eat it and like it.

This isn’t tragedy, this is didacticism. This is when a writer's room decides that making a point is more important than telling a good story. When characters stop being human and start being metaphors. When you trade nuance for shock, ambiguity for ideology, and call it brave.

Nick Blaine meant something to me. I saw myself in him. I saw my own passivity in him—I also saw my capacity for great bravery and connection in him. He was kind, vulnerable, morally gray, emotionally grounded, deeply tethered to June and thus to me, the viewer, experiencing her world. He was human. His gentleness, his love for June and Nichole was such a vital counterpoint to the monstrous cruelty of Gilead. But rather than explore that complexity and offer him the obvious arc his character had earned, the show retconned him literally at the finish line, flattened him, eliminated all of his human dimensions. At the end I actually laughed—horribly, in grotesque & amazed outrage—like these writers were saying to me, Hey idiot, he was the real baddie all along, believe us that he deserved this, we're the experts. And thought I would just gleefully swallow this and lap it the fuck up. I'm not exaggerating: I legitimately don't think any of them watched the show in its entirety before they sat down to write this season.

Narrative cohesion and character continuity was clearly not their focus, why? Because message-driven media no longer trusts its audience to feel anything honestly. It has to teach us. To scold us. And if a character has to die in an embarrassingly hamfisted way so we can 'learn' something about the cost of love, or the futility of hope, or that there's actually NO GOOD MEN ANYWHERE unless they are played by Bradley Whitford, or the strength of a woman alone and any romance be damned, then so be it. Our fault. We watched it wrong. Silly females with our silly hopes and love stories and delusions.

This is not storytelling. This is narrative punishment, and poorly disguised moral performance art. I half expected the episode to be dedicated to All The Antifascists Out There On The Right Side of History Like Us when the end credits rolled. Story? Nah. Preachy lesson for dumbass audience who can't think for themselves? Hell yeah. Nick exits stage left as a convenient device for the showrunners to serve up as a pawn in their thematic chess game, designed wholly to teach the audience The Lesson™. He was the sacrificial lamb for their bizarre in-script anti-Nazi rhetoric (so overt it was cringe-inducing, and included for whom? all those Nazis gleefully tuning in to THT every week?) This conclusion is the final heart monitor flatlining after a long meandering decline of the show's earlier great writing.

It's not edgy or profound to gut a character’s arc for shock value. You’re not feminist or radical for flattening moral complexity into black-and-white symbols. It's an absolute mess of lazy, trite metaphors for THE CURRENT TIMES, this story is IMPORTANT and RELEVANT! And Hi, writers? We also live in the world???? God, it's so patronizing. It's so condescending. I'm so exhausted from this cheap process of demoralization.

And I looked around for the outrage and confusion and anger that should have echoed across the fandom and instead I saw silence. Sanitized comment sections. Applause from brand-friendly fan accounts with lots of emojis and lots of "OMG LAWRENCE PUTTING HIS HAND TO HIS CHEST 😭 !!!!!" The algorithm drowning dissent like it’s inconvenient noise. Entire social media posts being deleted out of nowhere.

This isn’t fandom, and hasn't been an organic one since streaming took over the market, or even before. It’s narrative control via PR management and we are all witnessing manufactured consent in real time. I'm not trying to be dramatic or cynical, it's just the truth. This is how it works now. Delivering twisty shock content drives up engagement on platforms, and tracking that engagement data is an enormous factor when OTT platforms are considering each season-to-season renewal. But man is it still disheartening and mundane to see it happening after so many years of stupidly giving a shit.

The emotional response to this episode should have been explosive fury and instead we get this eerie illusion of consensus, because anything that challenges The Lesson™ and inversely How Good They The Holy Virtuous Writers Are As People For Teaching It To Us Deluded Plebs gets buried or deleted. They want you and I to feel alone in our bewilderment, and to doubt our own perceptions of the show we've been watching and analyzing for an eon straight—it makes them feel better about the god-awful job they have done in the hopes they win some meaningless self-congratulatory accolades at the Emmys. And if you dare to feel betrayed or express that, you’re told you’re missing the point and somehow have been for an entire decade along with the majority of the fanbase with two eyes and a functioning brain in their skulls. It's so absurd it's almost satire. Someday it will be satire I think. But this is how it is right now, and I'm telling you, it's entirely on purpose.

To the writers, showrunners, social media managers + Hulu press interns:

I see exactly what you did, and what you are currently doing to manage the fallout.

You killed a beloved character not for plot or for truth or to honestly serve the story's natural conclusion, but for theater and for social media engagement. For a moral takeaway. For prestige TV applause. And worse—for the proud, smug, holier-than-thou sniffles of liberal feminists who require all media to pander to the current political 'thing' rather than just telling a good goddamn story. Congrats, the whole IP has been permanently ruined by this type of short-sighted shallow garbage and will never recover its early reputation. This could have been a timeless piece of television with some hiccups; now it will forever remain a preachy manipulative product of one particular era. An ode to our fragile cultural psyche and its associated political catchphrases and ego interference. It's limp and it's finished, like GOT was at the end. No one will care or remember or rewatch this trauma-porn soap opera when all its nuance and ambiguity and soft edges have been snuffed out in the most incomprehensible way. THT will be forgotten, like every other show before it that has gone on too long only to totally blow it in the last inning. The Testaments is probably dead in the water too, and will be canceled lightning fast without a doubt if this tripe is any indication of this team's ability to go meaningfully off-book. It gets proven over and over and over again with zero room for doubt that audiences don't like to be lectured and morally grandstanded to, but here we are yet again.

In conclusion, this absolute swill is what happens when writers try to write at the audience rather than for the characters.

Nick Blaine somehow became the worst villain amongst these brutal, sadistic people, all the social architects, economists, rapists, abusers, traffickers, slave-owners, murderers. Not because he was actually always that way 'off-screen' of course, but because the people who were compelled time and again to watch his complex character evolve and grow had to be taught The Lesson™. Nick Nazi, Nick Complicit, Nick Evil Forever, Nick Dies A Coward, durrrrr. Just stop. Stop caring! Just eat our slop. They turned a living, breathing character (who we loved and puzzled over for years and paid their bills to spend time with) into a morality lecture to tell you how goddamn dumb you are, they replaced his arc with a sermon and then expected us to clap.

But I’m not clapping. I’m grieving. Because it's all just such an awful, incredible waste.

I'm grieving the time and energy I've wasted on a product that the creators stopped caring about and lost interest in understanding. I’m grieving a character who mattered more than this, and a profoundly loving relationship that moved my heart amidst all of that darkness, and a story that once knew how to hold pain with complexity instead of turning it into hollow, curated shock.

They didn’t write an ending, they wrote a manipulative virtue signal to make fools out of all of us who actually dared to give a shit. I won't pretend that it's important art with something to say, and I will never again give them the benefit of my dollars, attention or engagement.

[afemalegazing]

THE HANDMAID'S TALE 1.08 Jezebels

[afemalegazing]

I wanted to say goodbye.

[afemalegazing]

ATONEMENT (2007) | dir. Joe Wright

[afemalegazing]

I call an Uber because I'm running late for my shift at the bar where I serve several nights a week, an industry I've been in for over 10 years now. (Funny how it was temporary, just making ends meet until the next thing, and then you blink.) I check the rating of my driver, the license plate, the car model so carefully before I get in the backseat. As I say hello and confirm my name and his, my voice sounds softer, more foreign. He glances at me frequently in the rearview mirror, tries to make small talk as I track his route. I place my hands between my knees and squeeze, shoulders folding inward like I am willing my body to shrink. I wonder if I should have sent the car to an apartment a few doors down the street. I wonder what it would be like to not have to be afraid.

I deflect his questions about my destination (I've heard of that place. Do you work there?) but am still overly polite when he drops me off, and when I walk into work I feel a little bit like I have failed myself in some private, dark way. In the bar, my male coworkers shake cocktails, huddled together, smirking. They say hello but it always feels like I'm being excluded from an inside joke. In many ways I suppose I am. A drunk regular whistles suggestively as I pass—familiarly—because it is not shocking or rare and he knows this. As usual I don't react. No one else does either.

Throughout the night I find myself turning on the the charisma, all self-doubt tucked away and hidden. It has no purpose here. This is emotional labor and it is something I'm expected to give away; at least here I will be rewarded for it. In this place I will smile and charm and schmooze. I will say nothing when that man or this man stares a little too long at my breasts, or loudly whispers to his buddy about my ass in my jeans. My responses are an intricate tightrope and if I am insulting I could lose my job.

I am the only woman on shift tonight, everyone else is male. Bartenders, servers, chef, manager, kitchen staff. Friends who are not really friends, who would rather just fuck me if I'd only let them. The expectation for me to be one of the guys on these nights even though I never will be is overwhelming. It often seems like they turn up the dial just to see how far they can go, how far they can make me go with them. It is part of the deal. It is the oil that makes this machine run. I don't know how I know that. No one ever told me. I just know, have always known. The Boy's Club does not accept new members. This is a temporary agreement. No matter what, I am always on the outside looking in. Sometimes I hate myself for caring. But I am also so tired of fighting it.

I put in my orders and a coworker asks me if I'm okay, because they notice my frown, the anxious biting of the lip, the frozen stare. It makes me think of the time years back when I served a wealthy VIP and his wife. Him, drunk on expensive white wine and her, blank-faced, hollow, carved out, like she was on pills. I remember when he threw his wine glass and shattered it on my feet because I poured it wrong. His voice rose and his face went red and I stilled like a rabbit before a wolf. I tried to shrink that time too, willed myself to disappear. It only made him angrier. He compared waitressing to prostitution. He called me a con artist. He threatened to find out where I lived and raid my panty drawer. He claimed I would never amount to anything. He called me a 'fucking cunt' and threw money in my face. I remember being frozen. I will never forget that feeling. And I remember looking instinctively to his wife for help. Desperate. I remember her silence. She was frozen, too. (The VIP received an apology from management and a comped bill. I was sent home early because I was 'visibly upset.')

My coworker asks me again if I'm okay. I paste the smile back on my face and offer a cheeky, witty reply, because that is what he expects from me. That is the script and this is the oil. He puts a shot in front of me 'in solidarity' and his eyes sweep briefly over to the table where the men sit, still eyeing me. I wonder who he is extending his solidarity to in this moment. I think of walking into work earlier when that regular whistled at my body. I think of the leering I will endure for the tip pool. I think of the expectations placed on me and the paradigm I continue to walk in as if there is no way out from this, from the heaviness of a man's stare—the weight of it. My muscles ache. I take the shot. It burns but I refuse to make a face. The men at the table raise their eyebrows and smile and the oiled machine keeps chugging along. My coworker raises the empty glass in their direction and tells them, "Cheers."

This morning I'm on the subway going to a medical appointment. A straight couple comes in, they are wearing matching jackets: his is green, hers is pink (of course it's pink). He comes in first and immediately grabs the pole in the middle of the carriage. It's meant for at least 3 people but he leans on it with his whole body, preventing her from accessing it and blocking her way as she gets in. There are no empty sits, so I watch her look around, trying to find something to grab on to prevent her from stumbling when the train starts moving. She doesn't ask him to leave her some space. Instead she decides to hold onto his arm, but when the train starts she almost falls and has to grab one of the hand thingy hanging above her head. He's oblivious to it all. Only his comfort matters and she's not even an afterthought.

I have to get a bus next. There are two adverts displayed at the bus station. One for a medieval theme park shows a man wearing a knight armor looking all powerful, the other for a fashion brand shows a young woman who is wearing a shirt and no pants.

I get on the bus. A group of male teenagers is so loud we all have to endure their stupid conversations and yelling about sports. I look by the window at the people walking the streets. I notice one woman whose mask looks strange and I realize she's not wearing a mask. She just had cosmetic surgery. A "nose job" by the looks of it. I get off the bus at the same time as a young woman who is wearing a pair of leggings so tight she might as well be naked. I feel like a voyeur. I don't want to think about how men feel.

As I walk the streets, I see that someone has drawn a big penis on a wall. I pass by a church and see a nun going in, devoting her life to an imaginary male figure who deems her innately inferior. I also notice a lot of torn off feminist posters. Posters about femicides, sexual harassment and lesbiphobia, I can barely decipher the words.

I go to my appointment. The surgeon is male; I couldn't find a female orthopaedic surgeon, this field is almost entirely dominated by men and, not unrelatedly, it is the most profitable medical field. I can barely get a word in to explain my problem and he doesn't listen much. His secretary is, of course, a woman. She's lovely and very quick to complete my file.

I'm back on the subway when a mother comes in with her son and daughter, maybe 8 years old? Her son is loud and violently pulling at her bag, she keeps telling him to stop because her bag is already in a bad state. But he keeps pulling at it saying "no it's not". She laughs it off. Her daughter is quiet. As I leave, the mother goes out too. She holds the hands of both her children to make sure they don't get separated in the crowd, but as she passes the turnstiles her son tries to get her stuck in it and she has to fight to get through. He's smiling. We keep walking outside and he's not letting go of her hand, now trying to twist her harm to hurt her. She laughs it off again. The daughter hasn't said a word. She's non-existent.

I'm on the bus home. We drive by the statue that decorates the entrance to my town. It's a naked woman laying on a rock. She has no head. By design. She's just a big headless body.

[afemalegazing]

[afemalegazing]

you wear an ancestor's face. you look like a woman you'll never meet. in that mirror, there's thousands of you. and in the bath, when you look down, she looks back, shaking and deforming in the ripples as she lies beneath the surface.

[afemalegazing]

—kylo x rey, the rise of skywalker

[afemalegazing]

Medusa with the Head of Perseus, Luciano Garbati, 2008