sapphcblues

[sapphcblues]

[sapphcblues]

okay now that we’ve a had couple lesbian blockbusters and milfs are having a romance moment, we need to bring back the manic pixie dream girl. she was never fuckin suited to fixing all the problems of some boring twenty year old everyman, but you know who could actually benefit from a quirky free-spirited blue haired girl with pronouns (she/they)? a newly divorced forty-something mom who’s trying to learn how to be herself for the first time in her life

[sapphcblues]

[sapphcblues]

mutuals can always dm me but be warned i talk like your coworker who is trying too hard to get to know you and my response times are akin to the response times you might get if we were communicating by letter

[sapphcblues]

i remember when i was a millennial and was destroying the world, and then people actually decided on what years millennials were born and that i wasn't one anymore so now i'm gen z and somehow still destroying the world.

people don't really get mad about millennials anymore. we have become the new gen x. people don't care about us anymore. like at most they feel a bit sorry for us. this is wild because ten years ago we were destroying the world

[sapphcblues]

Happy 10th birthday to the best tweet of all time.

[sapphcblues]

if you're writing and find yourself thinking 'this is too weird/gross/offputting/esoteric/ambitious/catered to my specific interests + sure to push away a broader audience' that is the devil speaking and it is a lie. you are already firmly on the right path and you need to double down

[sapphcblues]

[sapphcblues]

“You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

[sapphcblues]

for the past four days of watching my dog cling to life, i feel like someone has been tightening all the strings inside me. my dearly beloved mother is just constantly at 10/10 anxiety and this stress all just lives in my body now.

[sapphcblues]

because what else am i going to do, honestly.

at what point am i saying "poem" because it's better than "emotional breakdown with artfully-chosen line breaks"

[sapphcblues]

yes, love is work. but love must be two-sided. we are raised to give ourselves until we are drained. if they do not reciprocate, it isn’t love. love isn’t pouring gasoline down the drain in the hope the sparks you felt might light a fire that keeps you warm. love is coming in out of the cold, knowing they’ll already have made you a cup of cocoa.

[sapphcblues]

I have been prey to deplorable, undignified, and above all uncalled-for emotions for some time now

[sapphcblues]

That whole subplot broke my heart, and tbh it’s a sign of how good this show is. A lesser show would have made Ruby a bad person or obviously not good enough for Ava in some way, and not someone who would have been a genuinely good match for her — and at one point clearly was — if not for the electricity of this other connection she has that just overshadows everything else. It’s so, so easy to empathize, and they don’t give the viewer an easy way out of that empathy. I love that.

I watched Hacks with my roommate, and we kept pausing to talk about how genuinely devastating it would be for Ruby. Because who among us hasn’t been the placeholder gf for someone who is excruciatingly obviously not over someone else? Who among us hasn’t been as good and kind and patient and loving as they can, while this person you love fades out of view? It’s so well done, and it takes its audience seriously enough to know we can handle that complexity.

To do a small tangent on a tangent of my own — this show is connected in a lot of ways to Frasier, which has been my special interest/comfort show since I was like 12. Paul Downs apparently loves Frasier, it’s Jean Smart’s favourite comedy show of all time (and her guest role won her two Emmys), and you can see the influence in more than just their choices of guest stars (Nina Daniels, Weed, and Susan Essig are all former Frasier actors). But how they handled the Ava/Ruby thing is such a clear parallel to how Frasier handled Niles and Daphne, the show’s ultimate will-they-or-won’t-they couple, that I can’t not talk about it. (Truly. If you think waiting a year for Hacks is bad …)

Spoiler alert for the most emotionally insane couple journey in the history of sitcoms.

When Niles and Daphne finally get together, seven fucking seasons later, both of them are involved with someone else. Niles just eloped with his wife, Mel (Jane Adams, actually! Ava’s mom!) and Daphne is about to marry Donny (Saul Rubinek). Mel and Donny aren’t perfect people, especially Mel (who has some Maris tendencies and doesn’t … handle the divorce super well), but ultimately they’re both deeply sympathetic characters who were an undeniably good match for their respective partners and don’t remotely deserve what happens to them.

And the show clearly knows this. So yeah, the couple we’ve all been invested in for seven years gets to ride off into the sunset in an RV. But in return, these two other people are deeply, catastrophically hurt, and for a 20 minutes per week sitcom they really force you to sit with the reality of that wound. Mel drags Niles through this whole charade to avoid the embarrassment of her husband immediately running off with [insert wildly classist insult] and Donny fucking sues them, because the show needs a plot and some obstacles for their relationship, but it’s very very clear that both of these choices come from a place of pain. Because good people can still hurt people, and Daphne and Niles definitely hurt people.

My favourite thing that Hacks has in common with Frasier, despite the surface level differences, is that. It doesn’t think that just because a show is funny, it has to be stupid, and it knows its characters can be flawed and do bad things without us all flipping out and running away. It’ll lean into those difficult, painful moments, because it fleshes out the characters into real people (people are complicated and suck sometimes!) and makes all the laughs feel earned.

I still can't get over the fact that it's canon that Ava went to couples therapy with Ruby because she couldn't shut up about Deb, Ruby calling her out on considering Deborah more important than their life together, and Ava ACTUALLY choosing to go with D instead of Ruby.

the show slips it in so quietly, but it’s one of the most revealing tidbits of information we get: ava in therapy, unable to stop talking about deborah. and even more revealing is that ruby sees it for what it is. there’s something haunting in that. ava’s heart is already elsewhere, already spoken for. not in some grand declaration of love, like deb in 4.09, but in the slow erosion of everything that came after deborah. ava just continues to be pulled into deb's orbit. it's insane.

and it's so canonically gay lmao.

[sapphcblues]

[sapphcblues]

really underrated sibling dynamic is eldest freak loser sister no friends no bitches strange and offputting. and her really normal younger sister who loves her and hangs out with her.

[sapphcblues]

"tumblr humor is only funny to tumblr users" NOT true. those bitches on pinterest love us.