starrylayle

[starrylayle]

marauders ship discourse generator

Have fun!!!!!

[starrylayle]

Um so why is this hp reboot still happening. what the fuck

[starrylayle]

MORE LDRD BC I LOVE U GUYS OMG. ENJOY !?!?!??!

FEEL FREE TO SEND ASKS ALSO i greatly enjoy lightningdash, appledash, raritwi but really will draw ANYTHING LESBIAN! REQUEST WHATEVER U WANT

[starrylayle]

there needs to be more adrinino. More what, you ask? idk. just more

[starrylayle]

Young Sirius.

[starrylayle]

“Believe me,” croaked Black. “Believe me. I never betrayed James

and Lily. I would have died before I betrayed them.”

(Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

[starrylayle]

ok so um why the FUCK is the ex muslim tag filled with terfs and zionists 🫠🫠

[starrylayle]

what if we fell in love in MacroData Refinement department but we were lesbians

[starrylayle]

i was drawing dadfoot stuff and it was fun fun funny and then i got emotional

[starrylayle]

[starrylayle]

ok so we got a Gemma episode (yay!). now hoping that my girl Alexa comes back. And Reghabi too, because i refuse to believe she is being discarded,, she's much too interesting and important to be cut out. (also more Natalie and Gabby pls!) Please please please writerssss

women (of colour) in severance

an incoherent rambling about the female characters in severance, specifically focusing on Gemma and Helly. Mostly Gemma. A bit of Alexa too. Spoilers under the cut.

Ok so to start off, I absolutely adore all the women characters in severance they're all soo spectacularly written.

I remember when I first started the show, I thought that Helly was going to be the stereotypical, fiery and the only female protagonist whose story started off interesting but in the end her only character purpose was to be Mark's love interest. Boy, was I wrong. First the elevator suicide scene and then the Helena reveal, I knew this show knew how to write women.

Similarly, when Ms. Casey was first revealed, I remember rolling my eyes, thinking, oh look another stereotypical robot-like Asian lady who has no greater character purpose. Then, it was revealed that Ms Casey was (partially?) severed and not a part of the staff like I'd initially assumed. Of course, then the Ms Casey = Gemma reveal happened and I was SHOOK. Like,, you mean to tell me that she is actually an important character with narrative purpose? And Mark's wife -- I had assumed she was a -- white woman -- who would never actually have a character arc and would only be shown in dead-wife-john-wick-style flashbacks to further the plot.

I became so hyped. Two characters, the 'dead' wife and wellness lady, were actually one which meant they (she) would actually have character arcs!! And she's a woman of color!! Woohoo!!

But now that season 2 is progressing, as much as i absolutely adore it, I'm just worried that Gemma/Ms Casey will not have the caharcter arcs I wanted. Especially the theory that Casey is secretly a clone and not actually Gemma,,, or that she's brain dead,, or that she'll die again,, or whatever else. I know that it narratively works, but I just wish there was some way that Gemma/Ms Casey could have a proper character/character arc, even if it resulted in death at the end. I hear a lot of Mark/Gemma and Orpheus/Eurydice parallels which gives me hope because Eurydice is still a fully formed character (at least in the musical Hadestown llolol). I've seen some people theorise that Mark may have romantacised his marriage with Gemma and maybe they weren't as happy as they seemed?? Which I highly doubt, considering the info we were given in 'The You You Are'. Or maybe she secretly worked for Lumon beforehand?? I dunno how I feel about these theories but they would definitely make for an interesting plotline and character arc.

I guess what I've realised is that the show writes white women very well (Helly/helena, Ms Cobelvig and Devon) and their woc counterparts,,, not so much. Still holding out hope for Miss Huang, Reghabi (what is her deal btw?? I must know!!), Natalie and Gemma/Ms Casey, and that they will have fleshed out characters by the end, but who knows.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but Alexa, the woman mark went on a date with, was actually a favourite of mine. I was convinced she was gonna be relevant to the plot lmao. but eh she feels more of the 'disposable Black gf trope' :( tbh I'm still delusional enough to believe she will come back. Maybe if Ricken beomes a sell-out Devon will leave him date Alexa?? Yes I sound like a delusional lesbian but cmon Devon clearly liked her enough to recommend her to Mark?? maybee?/ Anyways this was a tangent. Maybe if they decide to go the Helly got pregnant route (which I hope they don't unless it ends in miscarriage) Alexa will be there coz she's a midwife (or doula?? I hear different ppl say different things??)

Anyways, I know this is all very far from the main narrative so I don't mind too much, I'm just hoping that they fully flesh out Gemma because she, along with Mark and Helly, are at the core of the story.

[starrylayle]

It’s tempting to think that innies are just the outies at their core, right? That they’re what you get when you take a person and peel away all their past trauma until you get to their very soul. The true essence. The self free from expectations. “The you you are.”

But we have to remember: innies can’t be the “true” outies without the environmental influence to “mess them up,” because the severed floor is NOT a non-environment. This world that the innies are born into forms their every character trait and idiosyncrasy that isn’t already BURIED in the outie’s subconscious. So though it’s fun (and not completely wrong!) to say innies are outies without the baggage… they aren’t the outies in their “purest forms” either.

Take Mark, for example. On the surface, the Mark S we see at the beginning of season one is a hard-working, kind, and seemingly content yes-man. Mark Scout, meanwhile, is a depressed and sarcastic alcoholic who gets drunk at night and sobs in his car the next morning.

The apparent difference between them? Mark Scout remembers his wife dying in a car crash and Mark S… doesn’t. Therefore, Mark S must be basically like Mark Scout was before Gemma died. … Right???

Not exactly. Because Mark S still has a past. A short one, sure, and closed-off too — but still a past, and it highly affects his personality today.

It’s heavily implied that he didn’t start off as the corporate tool we see in early episodes. In fact, based on his account of threatening to kill Petey and extensive references to past torture (“bad soap,” “Milchick can’t always be nice like that,” and “It’s easier for you both if he knows which end to start from”), he could’ve been almost as rebellious as Helly. The difference is that where Mark Scout remembers being formed by a drunk father, screeching tires, and policemen at the door, Mark S remembers days on end in the Break Room, saying he was a blight on humanity until he believed it was true.

That’s a decent portion of why he comes across as a “sweet” yet timid bootlicker! Because he is built on trauma! Just new trauma! Different trauma! Trauma he remembers, but Mark Scout doesn’t! (His outie’s past still impacts his character, sure, but it’s not at the forefront of his mind the way his conscious memories are.) The fact that his bad experiences are novel, weird, and surface-level innocuous don’t make them any less potent or formative to the kind of person he is now.

In the same way, I don’t think it’s exactly right to call Helly “what Helena would’ve been like if she was free from Lumon and the pressure of being an Eagan.”

Yeah — in some ways, it’s true. Helly doesn’t have to worry about public opinion, the weight of her name, or what her father thinks. She can have friends and a surrogate dad and, well, baby goats. But the difference between Helly and Helena is more than just one remembering her Eagan upbringing and the other not. The severed floor is in NO way some controlled, pressure-free, unable-to-change-its-inhabitants environment.

Helly remembers cutting her arm in a smashed-open window under red glow, apologizing in the Break Room over a thousand times, and learning just how much she isn’t considered a person. But she also remembers three other people being her only allies, friends (and lover), and entire world — literally. Less than ten people, and always under horrific circumstances, are the only people she ever sees. This kind of life could NOT happen to anyone on the outside, including Helena — even if she wasn’t born an Eagan.

So what would Helena be like if she wasn’t an Eagan? The truth is… we don’t know. But the question isn’t what she would be like. It’s if, stripped of her heritage, it would even still be her in the first place.

Your brain is split in half. Is that still you? You are awakened, memories gone, born again into a whole different kind of world, and grow to fill it like water in cupped hands. Is it still you now? Are you the same “you” you were ten years ago? Ten months ago? This morning? Who ARE you? And what IS “you,” anyway?

That’s what Severance wants us to ponder. And whatever the relationship between innies and outies is (the same person, completely different people, Cain and Abel, you in another lifetime) (can you even call that “you”?), one thing’s for certain: innies aren’t just outies with the bad stuff wiped off. If anything, that’s what Lumon would like them to think.

[starrylayle]

oof man I've been loving severance in general but I think that last episode is the first one I have like lots of Thoughts about that I feel like I can at least kind of string together lol. Like I was moderately worried about what direction the Dead Wife thing was going to go in. Because it would have been so easy (and kind of disappointing) for her to just ultimately be an object that exists as a goal/motivator for other characters and not a person (as is common with Dead Wife characters, both literal and not so literal); that's sort of what she's been so far, with just the tease that she could be more. And unless they drop the ball big time (which god I hope they don't), this episode already made it clear: she IS more. Like revealing her to be both physically AND mentally alive at this point in the story is such a good writing choice and feels SO crucial to escaping from some of the really cliché permutations that these kind of basic story arcs/character archetypes can fall into.

I know everyone's been doing the orpheus/eurydice comparisons and now I know people are talking about how mark and gemma are now both actually the orpheus to each other's eurydice, but it's also this: gemma has been split into who knows how many people. She's his eurydice. She's his orpheus. And she's her own orpheus, too. Because she gets herself out of the underworld and then, not remembering she has, she's sent right back down again. And she hesitates and turns around one more time. But she doesn't know. She doesn't even know what she's really looked back at. She doesn't know the world she's sent away. Not until she's back in the underworld, and she's eurydice again.

Also! To interplay him remembering her, give us a classic Dead Wife Sequence- complete even with some of the classic images! The beautiful woman smiling in nature, lying in bed, looking at you, the light warm for the very first time- with the cold, stark reminder that she isn't actually dead, and more than that is still conscious and trying to get out and find him- is SUCH a cool move. Like it totally flips the idea of the Dead Wife Sequence on its head. It's not just grief anymore. It's not just using a lost person as a prop that our hero fights on in memory of. It's the Dead Wife Sequence as horror.

Because she's still the Dead Wife and yet at the same time it dramatically shifts her role in the story, right? Because it turns out everything she is to Mark, he is to her. This unreachable person who you now know isn't dead but who you cannot get to and you cannot know the true present reality of you can only take the word of people you don't totally trust or know. And so, they are dead. But now you know it's only to you. Because we've seen them both now, and we know they're both not just alive, they're fighting.

("she's not dead, she's just not here")

She's not your Dead Wife but you can't help the fact that in your memory, in your mind, she is. So you're the one, in a way, that's killing her. And you're her Dead Husband. "He's moved on" and you know that's a lie but does it really matter until you see him? Until he's real again? Because until then, you're both choking on ghosts.

And the ghosts aren't even really there.

[starrylayle]

my queen

[starrylayle]

my irl friend followed me on tumblr and the first post she saw was the greyheart one lmaooo

needless to say she was surprised -~-

[starrylayle]