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Whale Store XOXO E08: "oh huh, closeted people do know what they're doing, oops"

i'm miserable. no notes

I have my share of problems with Whale Store XOXO — the story is just NOW getting to an interesting tension with WanMaewnam that I wanted to spend way more time in [let our poor hyper-competent greenflag have a burnout arc!!], and I worry that the relatively nuanced realism about the limits of small town economies and the prejudicial downside of close-knit communities is gonna go out the window to give us a crowd pleasing triumph over the EEEEVIL big box store, but goddamn do I appreciate Chompoo being vindicated!!

I was always on her "side" [which, even saying that I feel stupid! there were no sides!! they were both doing everything they could without being superhumanly perfect about a situation that intractably sucks, that's what made it compelling!!!] because the whole thing with coming out is the worst case scenario is SO FUCKING DANGEROUS. If someone thinks they should play it safe, they're probably right, and even if it turns out fine you cannot go wrong with an abundance of caution!! Of course Tonnam didn't have to stay, a breakup at any point would have been a tragic but reasonable course of action, but she was making the hard choice to keep going because even if she was hopeful that Chompoo's anxiety was unfounded, she still understood that this is literally safety first. And Chompoo's biggest mistake was ultimately second guessing herself and trying to push too hard to prove Tonnam's optimism right; under no circumstances should they have ever given up the apartment of their own, and now they're trapped in the nightmare she always saw coming.

the casual removal of her space and privacy...such a terrifying abusive flex of parental power [and more evidence for my Everything is Housing unified theory of GLs, but that's another post] And I LOVE the direction they went in with Chompoo's mother — you genuinely didn't know which way it was going to go anymore than Chompoo did, because she's in many ways a sweet, charismatic, likable woman! She's a homophobe in a painfully realistic way where her flaws seem at first like charming personality quirks disguising something more insidious. The abusive way she treats her kid is hauntingly subtle, easy to mistake as motherly banter in a single moment and visible for what it is only in the long run. And her avoidant strategies this episode to maintain plausible deniability as she hurts her daughter and acts like the victim were so fucking chilling; let it not go unsaid that it's been an excellent performance by Chompu Thansita from the very beginning.

an absolute tour de force of passive aggression and hostile hospitality, she nails every single layer of how people like this can ruthlessly dismantle your confidence with a smile on their face Do I think she'll immediately get redeemed? Absolutely lmfao, if the dad from fuckin Pluto got his switch flipped to Good in the last episode there's no shot they'll withhold it from a character who has exhibited kindness onscreen at literally any point. But still!! Even if they don't give me a satisfying ending, I appreciate that they took things in a more realistic, more heartbreaking, more thematically incisive direction, at least for a little while. Whale Store XOXO has always been at its best depicting the down to earth textures of how working class society actually functions without condescending OR sugarcoating, and this was the best example of that yet.

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five stray thoughts after a Friendly Rivalry rewatch [new era, it's a long story lmao]:

1) there is SO much more Ye-ri x Gyeong than I remembered and it all rules; never mind class rank the real competition between them and Jae-yi x Seul-gi is who can be more obviously down bad at all times and they play to WIN

2) I know the lesbian love story is the main draw, and for my money its one of the GOATs, but I'll also never stop being emotional at the very subtle but very impactful background arc where Seul-gi, convinced all her life she'll always be despised and abandoned, slowly realizes her stepmother loves her - the "my daughter won't give an interview...you people have no manners" scene makes me cry every time

3) when the kids go Super-Sleuth mode and they needle drop the BloodStain instrumental I get amped up to run through a brick wall, and it happens again when the already legendary Final Shot transitions into Burn It Down one more time - truly an all time great soundtrack on top of everything else

4) the number of times Jae-yi absolutely books it up or down way too many flights of stairs [and somehow always for the urgent purpose of holding Seul-gi's hand for a few seconds] gives me vicarious knee pain

5) Hye-ri has the fame and the accolades and the flashier role getting to play the Enigmatic Antihero and she deserves every bit of it, absolute perfection from start to finish, but my god Chung Su-bin might be giving my favorite performance in. anything?? ever??? the way she swings Seul-gi between bottomless suffering, teenage euphoria, beaten down cynicism, and every emotion in between, all while keeping the performance bolted firmly to the ground to allow the show's hyperreal stylism and Hye-ri's magnetic inscrutability to dance around her [and ultimately be molded by her!] is so breathtaking to watch, I'll never get over it

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dr seuss yaoi

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I learned about the murder of Kitty Genovese in two separate psychology classes, at two separate universities. It was studied as an example of the “bystander effect”, which is a phenomenon that occurs when witnesses do not offer help to a victim when there are other people present.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

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it’s Sunday and I’m bored so have some Galaxy Lesbian Brain One Direction Lyrical Interpretations:  -Steal My Girl is a self love empowerment anthem for trans girls with unsupportive dads  -the he in “Does He Know” is actually He, and the song is in the thematic tradition of Only the Good Die Young -all the song titles in Better Than Words are 1D trying to remember which song the Best Song Ever actually was (it was Irreplaceable by Beyonce)  -the wolves aren’t a metaphor  -”that” doesn’t refer to the fact that she doesn’t know she’s beautiful, Harry’s just pointing demonstratively at her whole vibe as she does pull-ups on a salmon ladder 

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Everyday I log into this site and people force me to think about Star Wars

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Eeveelution Planters made by LV99DOGE

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as funny as “those are his hooves you bitch” I’m mad that it overshadows that lil wayne really did have socks on in a jacuzzi 

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to all the people who may be coming back here from twitter in light of elon’s purchase:

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Pirate jokes

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need a girlfriend so i can deactivate for good

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If anybody needs me,

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why am I trapped here?????

Hotel California of websites

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Hey! Are you still going to write And Your Bird Can Sing? I miss Rachel and Quinn.

Hey! Thank you so much for reading and asking after us. It's an incredible honor to think that our disappearance into the Great Unfinished Fanfic Library in the Sky would be worth anyone following up on, and I'm sorry I didn't update you guys sooner - but you know how it is; things are always in flux, and sometimes it's hard to see where you are from the middle of it all. As some of you may have surmised, Glee, But It's Good is on indefinite hiatus, in much the same way that One Direction is. Will we ever return? Is this the last work we'll do in the Glee fandom? Will we ever get an OT5 reunion tour? Sorry, I got distracted - the point is that there's nothing to say that we can't ever come back in some form, but if you're not anticipating it you'll never be able to be disappointed, only pleasantly surprised. I do apologize, not so much for failing to deliver on our original goal of a full six season rewrite (which we were always pretty honest about being a ridiculous moon shot), but for giving you guys the false hope of starting Season 2 when I knew deep down I was unlikely to be able to follow through, instead of ending things on a high note with Season 1. Because even if we did come back, it would probably be with new material rather than a direct continuation - we're just in a different creative place than we used to be, and we would want any return we make to reflect the best of what we can offer. But regardless of whether or not you ever see us again around these parts, thank you to every single person who read our deeply silly project - you guys tided me over through some tough times, and I'll always be proud of Once More From the Top for what it is, irrespective of the first of its five (!!) theoretical sequels' failure to get off the ground. And since we stopped short of actually starting the Dalton arc, I hope the 5 chapters of And Your Bird Can Sing can serve not as a bitter reminder of what might have been, but as standalone outtakes and historical curiosities left over from what was once ludicrous ambition. And most of all, if anything we wrote over the past couple of years made even a single person a little bit happier, then I consider the first iteration of GBIG to have been an unqualified success. It well may be that we will never meet again, but...ah, you know how it goes. Goodbye my friends, hopefully only for now.