clumsybookworm18
clumsybookworm18
How Very
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Melanie. She/her. Virgo ♍️. INTJ. Latina y orgullosa 🇵🇷 Biology grad student 🔬Clueless 29 year old. #humandisaster
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clumsybookworm18 · 2 months ago
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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litany in which certain things are crossed out, richard siken
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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*emerges from the other room covered in blood* you should see the word document
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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I was meant to be a character in a low budget horror movie in 2005 wearing a short sleeved shirt over a long sleeved shirt to signify to the audience that I am an enjoyer of music
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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gotta love Suzanne Collins' dedication to dropping a banger every few years, re-traumatizing a whole generation and disappearing back into the abyss without a single word
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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i hope i am not only a mutual to you but also someone you can point at a fictional character and go "oh shit that guy on tumblr is super fucking mentally unwell about that one" about
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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Hi! I read your take on Five and Lila and I’m going to have to respectfully disagree. I’d like to offer a different perspective on Five and Lila’s dynamic, one that sees their relationship not as a sudden detour or narrative blunder, but a slow-burn that makes sense emotionally, thematically, and character-wise.
Let’s address the elephant in the subway: yes, Lila and Five spent seven years stuck together, and while, yes, trauma bonding is real, this wasn’t Stockholm Syndrome or whatever. These two already had tension, banter, mutual annoyance, reluctant respect. That subway didn't create chemistry; it marinated it until it was too strong to ignore.
The idea that Lila and Diego worked and talked through their issues feels… overly generous. They got together because of an accidental pregnancy, glossed over their problems because of the urgency of the kugelblitz, and never actually worked through the foundational cracks in their relationship. They had an idealized version of each other in their heads and went straight into playing house. And *shocker*: it didn’t work. Not because Lila didn’t care. But because she wanted more. Adventure. Freedom. Herself back. Lila did try to be what Diego needed. But in doing so, she lost pieces of herself. And when she voiced that he judges her, condemns her for needing space, for not wanting to be stuck in the carousel hell of suburban life and diaper changes, while he also longed for his vigilante days. Diego wanted the fantasy, wanted Lila to stay in the box labeled “wife and mother.” Lila was still trying to survive reality. Lila and Diego’s relationship didn’t fall apart because the writers stopped caring or wanted to throw an affair for the fun of it. It fell apart because they stayed true to who the characters are when the masks slip, when they’re forced to settle into a reality that doesn’t include their power, when they’re forced to be normal.
Lila’s return to her family is not a rejection of her relationship with Five but a reflection of her complexity. It is very clear that in Lila is a character that’s torn into who she is and who she believes she should be. When she decides to return to the greenhouse, she very clearly states she has children that need her, at no time does she mention Diego. In fact it's Five that brings up her broken marriage. Claiming that Lila realized she made a mistake is an interpretation, not a fact. What we saw was a woman torn, not regretful. She missed her children, chose her children, But choosing to return to them doesn’t mean what she shared with Five wasn’t real. These aren’t mutually exclusive truths. She can miss the life she built and still ache for the happiness she had with Five. This doesn’t make their relationship unrealistic, on the contrary, it is painfully realistic because of it. And this is not about depicting Lila’s choices as morally pristine because TUA isn’t a moralistic show. It’s a show about a group of dysfunctional characters trying to survive apocalypses, trauma, and themselves.
As for the alleged lack of resolution surrounding Lila’s feelings about Five murdering her birth parents- while the show doesn't focus on this plotline in Season 3, let alone discuss it in Season 4, that doesn’t mean it was swept under the rug. I’d argue Lila is an expert at emotional compartmentalization. She doesn’t confront things head-on, she lies, she masks, she redirects. Her initial rage in Season 2 against Five was visceral, but it’s clear she was struggling against more than just revenge. What’s fascinating is how her dynamic with Five changes after that! Yes, her grief, her rage, her need for vengeance was real. But so was the part of her that grew to see Five as more than the man who pulled the trigger. She didn’t fall in love with her parents’ killer– she fell in love with someone just as broken as her, who knew what it meant to carry the weight of working at the Commision, and who knew what it was like to have blood on their hands. That doesn’t erase the past, it complicates it. What could have been a simple revenge arc evolved into a wary truce, then grudging respect, and, dare I say mutual fascination. It’s the kind of storytelling that relies on playing the long game, and it’s intentionally messy. The type of messy that comes with loving the wrong person and realizing too late who the right one was. The type of messy TUA is.
That’s not bad writing, it’s brutally, beautifully human.
I'm glad we agree that this wasn’t out of character for Five. If anyone was bound to end up in a love story-and one that felt like a ticking time bomb at that-it was him. Five’s entire life has been about control, precision, and isolation. Lila blows all of that up. She challenges him, infuriates him, keeps him on his toes, and most importantly, she understands him. Not many people do. Dolores? That wasn’t a joke (as much as it is treated like it is). That was a boy, a man so starved of connection he built one out of fantasy. Lila? She’s the reality of what it means to actually feel something, of bringing that need for connection to life.
Your concern about the real-world age gap between actors is valid but here we’re talking about Five and Lila, who are fictional and are equals. In-universe, these are two adults who’ve been through hell, back, and several apocalypses. Five might look young, but emotionally? He’s older than his siblings, he’s lived a lifetime and then some. 45 years of isolation, war, and survival have shaped him into someone far more guarded and emotionally complex than his appearance depicts. He is not someone who connects with others easily, let alone romantically. That’s why his bond with Lila is so significant.
Lila, with her own history of manipulation, betrayal, and survival, meets him on that same emotional minefield. Mentally and emotionally, he matches Lila’s cunning, her exhaustion, her survival instinct. They’re two chessmasters circling each other, with a chemistry more akin to wildfire than sparks. Uncontrollable, reckless, but somehow inevitable. Their connection is built on mutual understanding, moral ambiguity, unspoken trust, and the rare relief of not having to explain the weight they carry.
Reducing their connection to just “cheating” ignores the deeper, more human truth the show wanted to convey, that love doesn’t always arrive at the “right” time or in a socially acceptable manner. It was meant to be complicated. Because that’s what real love is sometimes. It doesn’t wait for the perfect moment. It sneaks up on you when you least expect it, when it's inconvenient, when you’re tired and angry and vulnerable and stuck in a subway with someone who sees you, or in Five’s case it resurfaces under layers of concrete.
I also want to point out a bit of a contradiction in your argument. You mention that Five and Lila’s romance “came entirely out of left field” and felt forced, but earlier, you also acknowledge that the tension between them has been building since season 2. If that’s the case (and I’d agree that it is) then their connection didn’t just appear in season 4 out of thin air. It was the culmination of seasons of buildup: the banter, the rivalry, the reluctant partnership, the mutual understanding born from shared trauma, then having each other’s back, trusting with eachothers lives in the subway. Season 4 didn’t conjure up their chemistry…it simply provided something that was already there very limited room for it to unfold. Although it might have seemed abrupt, the story was actually revealing something that had been building across two and a half seasons. So maybe they’re messy, but to dismiss their connection as convenient is to overlook just how much groundwork the show laid for these two- from their rivalry in Season 2 to their partnership in Season 3 to their undeniable bond in Season 4. Five and Lila aren’t an accident.
So no, I don’t think Five was just “a thrill” for Lila. I think she saw someone who understood her. Someone who didn’t flinch at the blood on her hands. And Five? He finally let himself want something that wasn’t survival. That wasn’t duty or responsibility to his family. That was just her.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
I finished that essay I was telling you guys about!
TLDR for those of you that haven't seen my blog, I had to write a paper in the form of an open letter. This means that I had to write in response to someone that has a different view than me. I chose to respond to someone's blog on here! Thank you to @dontspoilthis for sending me the post that I ended up using in the paper! For privacy purposes I will not be including the blog name however. Here it is for those who want to read it :)))
Exploring Lila's Decision: An Open Letter to a Tumblr User
Hello [insert blog name here].
I have read your tumblr blog post about how you believe Five Hargreeves and Lila Pitts make a good romantic pairing. While I disagree with your statement, I do think that it used solid evidence from the show and was well thought out. With the last season of The Umbrella Academy having come out a little under nine months ago, people are still very much talking about season four and voicing their opinions on it. This show has been well loved for over six years by many of us, and has fans all around the world. Five and Lila are both exponentially strong characters, therefore when we saw them get together on screen there were some mixed reactions from all parties; everyone had something to say about Five and Lila’s relationship. 
Based on what I read in your post, you believe that Lila decided to marry Diego, Five’s brother, out of convenience. Additionally, you say that Lila wanted to create the family that she never got to experience as a child. Both the Hargreeves siblings as well as Lila had very callous upbringings, many days filled with training and mastering their powers. This made it so none of them experienced a real parental figure or family. At the end of season three, we see the Hargreeves and Lila go their separate ways, all powerless, and at the beginning of season four we see a time jump of five years and where they all end up. This shows that life for all of the Hargreeves sucked after they lost their powers and they had to be real and functioning members of society. This made it so, according to you, Five and Lila’s normally explosive personalities made them be a good pair throughout this season. They had the most chemistry, as well as they realized how similar they both were when they got stuck in the subway together for seven years. 
If you take everything else out of the equation, I too would fall in love with somebody if I had to spend seven years trying to survive with that person. That part is not unrealistic. Also, I think that over the years we all have grown attached to these characters and genuinely want them all to be happy in the world they find themselves in. Especially Five, who spent forty five years alone and then had to awkwardly transition back into society in the body of a child. Some argue that Five falling in love with Lila was out of character. However, you and I agree that Five would absolutely act in his own self interest after fighting for so long. He is old, tired, and lonely. He craved love and affection (which was shown when he fell in love with a mannequin in the apocalypse). I do see where you are coming from when you say real world love is unpredictable and messy, and that these two characters acting this way made them feel more real. In different media we often wish to see characters feel the things we want to feel, therefore watching Five and Lila fall in love despite societal norms was liberating in a way. 
While I do understand and respect your view, I would like to bring in points that might not have been considered previously. When filming the fourth season, Aidan Gallagher, who plays Five, was nineteen years old. However, there has been tension building between Five and Lila since season two of the show, this was well before Aidan was of legal age. This, combined with nineteen year old Aidan and thirty four year old Ritu (who plays Lila) having a non-rehearsed kiss, makes me reasonably uncomfortable. I totally understand being an actor and intimate moments being part of the job. However, I do believe that this is a bigger problem in all of Hollywood with actors having huge age gaps and being forced to be intimate. Additionally, the writing of this romance feels a bit like trying to get us as an audience on board with a condemnable act: cheating. Sure, Lila was miserable in her marriage. However, she should have broken off the marriage way sooner instead of cheating on Diego with Five. The way the show panned out, it seemed like we were supposed to focus on this new found love between Five and Lila and just ignore the heinous act being done to Diego. The writing for Five and Lila’s affair came entirely out of left field and had nothing to do with what was set in previous seasons for Five’s character arc. The main writer for the show, Steve Blackman, said himself in an interview that, “[He] felt that Five had to have a love story” (Blackman). From this interview, it seemed that the writers didn’t have an exact plan for who would be Five’s love interest, therefore making this affair feel forced. The way that this was executed showed that the writers had little care for what was already written for Five, Lila and Diego. The whole point of Lila and Diego’s relationship was that they worked and talked through issues they had. When Five and Lila return to the family after escaping the subway, we do see the realization set into Lila that her relationship with Five was strictly situational, and she did miss both her children and Diego. While it is on brand for her to be hard headed and stubborn, as well as putting her own needs first, she does realize that she made a mistake. Finally, Five and Lila’s relationship is the most unrealistic due to the fact that for an entire season, Lila was trying to kill Five after she found out that Five killed her birth parents. This was never expanded upon or resolved for the entirety of the show. Therefore, it seems a bit odd that Lila would essentially disregard this to be with her parents' murderer.
Moving forward, I think that while we may not agree on Five and Lila as a pair, I think we both can agree that them getting together was important for the storyline. Diego realizes he hasn’t been putting enough effort into the marriage, and Lila puts her needs first. However, I don’t think that Lila is in love with Five. He was a convenience and an accessory to her going back to the thrill of the hunt. She loved the sensation and the situation, she did not love him. Lila having an affair with Five acted as a hurdle in order to further the character development of all parties involved.
If you made it to the end, let me know what you guys think!
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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clumsybookworm18 · 3 months ago
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(crawls on all fours with blood drenched on me) I have to do arts and crafts
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clumsybookworm18 · 5 months ago
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“bring back men who yearn”
ok but they did and some of y’all weren’t ready for that conversation…
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clumsybookworm18 · 7 months ago
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Happy New Year!
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clumsybookworm18 · 8 months ago
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Kidnapper: I have your sibling.
Five: Which one?
Kidnapper: The quiet one.
Five: Wrong. *hangs up*
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clumsybookworm18 · 8 months ago
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THE FIVE STAGES OF GRIEF FALLING IN LOVE ↳ requested by @lettersiarrange 🐝
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clumsybookworm18 · 8 months ago
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there are so many scenes where chris is talking and it'll pan to ashley and she's. staring at his hands. ok girl compose urself
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clumsybookworm18 · 8 months ago
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hold on I think my frontal lobe just developed
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clumsybookworm18 · 8 months ago
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DO NOT MATCH MY FREAK. I AM MENTALLY ILL. SAVE YOURSELF.
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