#(many many MANY things about his character immediately make sense with that reading whether the writers thought it through that far or not)

[angorwhosebabyisthis]

[cws: drugging, SA and SA apologia, fantasy racism/ableism, forced institutionalization.]

-

i know i never shut up about it but god i am still just. So Salty about how the show handles the dynamic between mayor jones and pericles for many reasons, and one of the biggest is that there are really strong overtones here of sexual assault.

a character who already brings to mind the Slimy, Shady Cis White Guy with Buried Allegations archetype:

takes advantage of the trust of someone who's doing something with him in secret--

(which will get that person in a disproportionate amount of trouble compared to him, if they're discovered)

--to catch him off guard so he can grab him, drug him, and do violent things to his body while he's unconscious; scars him for life in a way that is disabling and should cause a lot of ongoing suffering, which, like many other things that should have a strong negative impact on him physically or psychologically, the writers ignore; and dumps him there alone to discover what's been done to him when he wakes up.

specifically, he does this to someone from a marginalized group that's highly unlikely to be believed if they tell anyone what he did--and going by the fact that mayor jones never got in any trouble until present day, he wasn't.

goes out of the way to ruin the life of the victim and discredit him as thoroughly as possible, because he's a loose end and he needs to shut him up.

flees the scene and gets away scot free with this for twenty years, has a successful privileged career and is considered a pillar of the community in the meantime.

when his dirty secret, which he's been paranoid about finally facing consequences for after the victim has recently become a risk again, is discovered, it's a huge career-ending scandal.

is redeemed by the end, while his victim goes on to be the Monstrous Irredeemable Pure Evil Main Villain and also sexually abuse someone himself, which is played as horrific and traumatizing (as it should be).

more specifically, is portrayed as showing redeeming, heroic anti-villain qualities by backhanding the victim into a wall as hard as he can in present day.

me: hm. yeah fuck this

[wardenparker]

Alright, I have come out of the woodwork and I will now be A Nuisance. For your microfic celebration, please give me whoever you think will be the funniest with the prompt "I'm not getting you coffee, your order is ridiculous". You are my queen and I would die for you immediately upon request thank you for existing 😘

I know this prompt is very, very old, but let's have some fun with it! Co-written with the lovely and talented @absurdthirst.

Dieter Bravo. 1,173 words. "I'm not getting you coffee, your order is ridiculous." (Warnings: cursing, flirting, mention of drugs)

"There are a couple of things where I draw the line." Just because you had been assigned to be Dieter Bravo's assistant on set for this film did not mean you were going to make yourself a laughing stock for the Oscar winner. You're a professional and you have your dignity, dammit. That's why you're standing in his trailer having this conversation right now.

Dieter narrows his eyes in confusion and looks around. "It's a drink order, right?" He asks. "I didn't ask you to pick up my blow or order a hooker." He pauses, "unless you know some?" He waits for to you huff at him and shakes his head. "Never mind." He pouts. "It's just a coffee. A coffee I need." He groans. "I'm fucking hungover."

"I'm not getting you coffee, your order is ridiculous." Looking down at the sheet of allegedly useful facts about the star, you read off the insane, often contradictory order listed there. "Venti, half-caf, triple-shot, soy, no foam, extra whip, extra hot, upside-down, caramel drizzle, with seven pumps of caramel syrup and seven pumps of mocha syrup, double-blended Frappuccino." You heave a heavy sigh and look back up at him. "It's literally impossible, that order. You know that, right?"

Dieter gives you a skeptical look. "I order it all the time, what do you mean impossible?" He snorts, pushing up off the small sofa that is provided in his trailer and moves over to the trash can. "Where the fuck is it?"

"You can't order an extra-hot Frappuccino. Frappuccinos are frozen." Still, you are obligated to try to help this man, and you purse your lips watching him root around. "What are you looking for?"

"My cup." He looks behind him, shooting you a glare and then pulls out a wet wad of paper towel and tosses it on the floor. "From yesterday. Before the studio sent me a defective assistant."

"It was down to melted ice, so I threw it out." It's flat out annoying to find him hot when he growling at you like a pestered puppy, but facts are facts. "Make this order make sense, and I'll get you one four times a day with no complaint."

"It was on the cuuuuuuup." He whines, throwing out a paper bag that probably held the sushi he had ordered yesterday when he suddenly had a craving and insisted his character loved tuna rolls. "Where is it?"

"I have the order right here." Again, you hold up your clipboard to show him the sheet of neatly organized information about himself that his regular assistant had sent over to the production company. Why she wasn't here, you don't know. "But you can't have a drink that's both frozen and hot, so it makes no sense."

"Can you just order my drink?" He huffs, whirling back around when he reaches the bottom of the can and there isn't that cup in there. You must have thrown it away somewhere else, which irritates him.

"Do you want it hot or frozen?" This absolute nonsense needs to be taken care of right now, otherwise this entire shoot is going to be as ridiculous as this moment.

"I want an extra hot Frappacino." He throws his hands up. "What is so hard about this?" He demands, looking at you like you are a complete idiot. This movie is a piece of shit, so it's fitting they hired the same caliber of people to work on it that they did to write it.

You're starting to actually question whether or not you know anything about Starbucks coffees in the first place or if you've just gone around on this so many times that you're actually starting to go a little mad. "You're getting a frozen drink." You decide, putting a stop to all of this craziness before your head starts to spin.

"Extra hot." Dieter nods, looking almost happy that you have decided to get his drink. He turns back to the table to grab his script. "Now I can learn these shitty lines once I have my coffee." He flips open the page and squints so he can try to read the small font. He needs glasses, but his vanity wouldn't allow that.

Groaning to yourself, you turn on your heel and open the trailer door again, cursing your stupid ass decision to ever become an on set assistant in the first place. "No," you mumble once you're out of earshot. "A Frappuccino is frozen, not hot."

Why do the hot ones always have to be completely off their rockers?

There is a certain routine that Dieter goes through when preparing for a role. He loves to find the character's voice. Repeating the lines in different cadences and tones, throwing his pitch until he feels that it reflects the character's personality. "How do you do it?" He warbles, sounding a little like Christopher Walken as he runs through the lines and huffs as he finds it too pitchy and waves his hand around again. "How do you do it?" He growls slightly, dropping his tone and making his voice more gravelly.

When you come back twenty minutes later from the Starbucks on the lot, it is after a world of conferencing with the very sweet barista who apparently made his convoluted as fuck order yesterday before the other on set assistant refused to work with him anymore. The girl had laughed, told you she steamed the milk for the drink to aerate it before putting everything in the blender, and just shrugged. 'Movie stars' she had intoned like it excused everything at all. "Coffee is here." You announce in your most neutral tone possible, while Dieter is prancing around his trailer talking to himself in as many different voices as he can muster.

"Oh thank God." The script is practically tossed over his shoulder as Dieter rushes forward to take the drink, straw already in it and immediately taking a large sip. Groaning as he swallows several mouthfuls before he sighs. "Perfect." He praises, eyeing you with a new found respect since you had gotten his order right. Coffee was life and now you are the bringer of life to him. Dieter tilts his head, finding it rather sexy when you roll your eyes. "Do you want to have sex with me?"

There needs to be a girl version of the saying 'Never stick your dick in crazy', because for just a split second, you actually consider it. Instead, shaking off the haze, you swallow down the impulse answer and pierce him with your most withering expression. "If you behave yourself, I'll think about it," you bargain, wondering if what you've heard about him being completely submissive is true.

"Amazing." Dieter practically beams at you, his cock twitching in his baggy sweats and he takes another sip of his venti, half-caf, triple-shot, soy, no foam, extra whip, extra hot, upside-down, caramel drizzle, with seven pumps of caramel syrup and seven pumps of mocha syrup, double-blended Frappuccino. "I'll be a good boy." He promises, content with his coffee and now daydreaming of having sex with you.

______

Master Tags: @pixiedurango @chattychell @winter-fox-queen @lady-himbo @artsymaddie @princess76179 @paintballkid711 @missminkylove @pedrosbrat @ew-erin @sarahjkl82-blog @sharkbait77 @justanotherblonde23 @lv7867 @recklesswit @mylittlesenaar @f0rever15elf @gallowsjoker @steeevienicks @athalien @sherala007 @skvatnavle @thatpinkshirt @jaime1110 @girlimjusttryingtoreadfanfics @goodgriefitsawildworld @greeneyedblondie44 @littlemousedroid @harriedandharassed @churchill356 @ajathegreats-blog @haylzcyon   @beardsanddetectives @kirsteng42 @ladykatakuri @adancedivasmom @madiebear @tanzthompson @emilianamason @bigsdinger @xocalliexo @pedr0swh0r3 @avaleineandafryingpan @charlyrmv @avidreader73 @iceclaw101 @loveslide @elegantduckturtle @becsworld @julesonrecord @its-nebuleuse @itsrubberbisquit @mikeyswifie @guelyury @lizzie-cakes @for-a-longlongtime @vabeachazn @purplerain04 @weho2kcmo @madnessofadaydreamer

My Masterlist!

[borninwinter81]

Queer horror from my teens

I periodically wonder whether these books are still known and read by young goths and horror fans as they were all extremely important to me in my teenage years, so I thought I'd share them.

Though I'm cishet, during the mid 90s two of my favourite authors wrote primarily queer fiction: they were Anne Rice and another author from New Orleans who is now known as Billy Martin.

He came out as a trans man in 2011, however these books were published prior to that so unfortunately you have to search for them under his deadname. This is why I've used that name in the tags on this post. I don't believe the books were ever reprinted with his current name.

Though I loved Rice, I always felt a more immediate connection with Martin due to his vivid portrayal of subcultures like goth and punk, and how it felt to be a teenager who was part of them. I could see myself in many of his characters as I had the same interests, listened to the same music, and shared the same sense of social alienation. Remember in the 90s the Internet was still a reasonably new thing, and many of us didn't have a home Internet connection at all. There was certainly no social media, no YouTube, and no real way to meet and interact with like-minded teens unless you were lucky enough to have another "weird kid" at your school. If you were a weird kid, you likely had very few friends and were bullied.

That as much as anything else led me to seek solace in books written by an author who I felt understood me, and characters who became my friends.

Lost Souls is about vampires in a kind of Lost Boys/Near Dark way. Fans of the YouTuber OfHerbsAndAltars might be interested to know that this book is where the name of his channel comes from - it's a description of the taste of Chartreuse liqueur.

Drawing Blood is about ghosts, a "murder house", computer hacking, comic art and a very beautiful (if rather messed up) romance. This one is probably my favourite of the three.

Exquisite Corpse is about serial killers, set against the AIDS crisis of the 90s. If you like the Hannibal TV series you'll probably enjoy this one - imagine if Dennis Nilsen and Jeffrey Dahmer had somehow met.

Martin doesn't pull any punches when it comes to descriptions of blood and gore, violence, abusive parents or his portrayal of toxic romantic relationships (of which there are many in his books), but if you can deal with those things there is also a great deal of beauty, phenomenally good writing, and a somewhat unique perspective on the supernatural.

Maybe I'm biased, looking at these through the lens of my teenage self. Maybe they'd seem horribly dated to today's young audience. But I still wanted to make this post in case there's someone out there who will end up loving them as much as I did.

[acotarfrustrations]

An ongoing list of ACOWAR grievances I'm keeping track of while I read (because there's too many to make a post about all of them) pt. 2

I'm on chapter 15 now and feeling the urge to complain again so here we go

1) the writing is way too overdramaticized. Like every other paragraph is some remixed version of feyre going "I wondered whether it would be eggs or bacon for breakfast. But when I looked at Rhys I realized that he was giving me my own choice. My mate, my high lord. In our home. With our family. Every thing was always my choice" and its CONSTANT, LIKE OH MY GOD GIRL SHUT UP

2) every thing about Lucien's plotlineand the elain mating thing. I HATE this subplot with a PASSION

3) feyre immediately fucking rhys when she got back instead of going to see her sisters

4) feyre and rhysand acting like they've ben separated for forty centuries instead of a month

5) the contradictions about how the high lord thing works. Like it was established that its a government position given to you through basically fate and being chosen by the cauldron or whatever which is why siblings kill each other for a chance for the throne and yet they just went to a priestess and swore feyre in as high lady?? It makes her title not feel real like it's purely ceremonial. It doesn't even make sense that she would be able to be HL of the night court as she has no more ties to that court than she does any other court. Is it because she's mated to Rhys? I don't understand the HL lord at all, it just keeps changing

6) the fact that Feyre, Rhys, and Cassian tell Lucien about their tragic backstories and everything that's happened to feyre at the NC and he just immediately does a Feyre™️. Like he's suddenly "Oh yeah you had a horrible childhood and took feyre into your found family without letting her explore relationships outside of the IC, that totally makes up for all the evil shit THAT IVE SEEN YOU DO WITH MY OWN 2 EYES. wow i cant believe youre not evil even though you killed 50 winter court children and sexually assaulted your mate and mind raped her constantly to get her to like you"

7) the way they're treating Nesta. It has been a MONTH since she was stolen from her home, brought amongst a race that she is terrified of and THAT ENSLAVED HER PEOPLE, and was forcefully turned into ONE OF THEM and the IC is acting like she's being unreasonable for not wanting to talk to them or to mate with Cassian. WHY THE HELL WOULD SHE EVEN BE THINKING ABOUT CASSIAN RIGHT NOW?? WHY THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO FEEL BAD FOR HIM? Instead of him worrying about how his mate is doing regardless of his own comfort he's like WOE IS ME, SHE DOESNT WANT TO FUCK ME?????? GET OVER IT ASSHOLE?? WHY IS FEYRE EVEN LETTING CASSIAN COME NEAR HER AND ANTAGONIZE HER?? DOESNT SHE LOVE TO FLAUNT HER HL STATUS AROUND?? THIS IS THE TIME TO USE IT, PROTECT YOUR GODDAMN SISTER FROM HIM? ITS SO OBVIOUS THAT SHE DOESNT GIVE NEARLY AS MUCH OF A SHIT ABOUT NESTA AS SHE DOES ELAIN!!

8) the fact that sjm didn't keep cassian's wings shredded. Him learning to live with that would have been a badass character development but now sjm doesn't want me to have good things

9) the mating bond in general. I think it could be a potentially good plot device but no one ever employs it well and sjm is definitely the most egregious with it

10) the fact that the ic never gave consequences for their fucking actions. Feyre dies in acotar? Turn her into a fey and give her ALL of their powers. Stealing a precious artifact that they didn't even end up needing and getting a bounty on their head in the summer court and then getting that court invaded? That's fine because feyre is SOOO brave and says things that are common fucking sense which makes her SOOOO smart so we obviously need her as an ally so we'll just rescind the blood rubies. Getting the spring court sacked? That's fine we didn't like them anyway. Rhys and feyre's bond gets snapped? Well they didn't know about our super secret mating bond that is actually the only thing that gives our characters chemistry so we still like each other. Rhys causes irreparable damage to every court for 50 years and kills 50 kids? Well that's fine he was being held hostage and hey! We don't know he actually killed those kids 😡 Feyre, a 20 year old girl who's been fae for like 6 months and training for even less goes up against thousands of years old beings? She beats them effortlesslessly! Rhys gets sexually assaulted for 50 years! Well he planned all of it so it has no negative consequences on him. Cassian gets his wings shredded? Well he worked really hard and they're fixed now 🥰. Rhys FUCKING DIES?? Well that's no problem, tamlin can just resurrect him, nvm the fact that there's no reason why he WOULD. like no harrowing situation is ever interesting cause we all know sjm isn't actually going to do anything to the ic

11) "my mate" STOP SAYING IT PLS IM BEGGING

12) "males and females" STOP SAYING IT PLS IM BEGGING pt. 2

[fushiglow]

Who the hell is Gojō Satoru?

Some thoughts on his character in 236

Seeing everyone arguing about Gojō’s characterisation in 236 over the last week makes me realise just how good the chapter is, no matter how dissatisfied I am with Gojō's death.

When you're upset about something, it's hard to judge accurately whether something is 'bad' or whether you simply don't like it — and they are different things. Interestingly, 236 presented me with a conflict I've never experienced when following a story before. I'm really disappointed with the way Gege Akutami chose to end Gojō's story, but I think 236 will go down as one of the most beautiful chapters of Jujutsu Kaisen. In that sense, my feelings about the chapter after a week of sitting with it aren't too unrecognisable from my initial feelings — just with all of the big emotions that were colouring my judgment stripped away.

I think there *is* value in immediate reactions, and I think much of the initial outrage about the chapter was simply people grieving what was an intentionally shocking end to a beloved character. I hate that people tried to police social media reactions to the chapter, because I think everyone should be allowed to process their feelings in their own online space (as long as they don't bring harm to others, of course).

Aside from the outpouring of emotion, there have been countless arguments about 'who' Gojō was as a person in the end, and that doesn't sit right with me either. I think many artists would be disappointed to hear fans of their work insist that there is one 'proper' interpretation — because the value of sharing your art with the world is in how different people receive it based on their own experiences.

To me, that's Gojō Satoru as a character.

I know lots of people have already shared some variation of the post below (and everyone has moved on to 237 now anyway) but this was sitting in my drafts so I thought I may as well hit post before 237 is officially released!

In my analysis of Gojō's character after 235, I talked about how Gege Akutami keeps Gojō at a distance from both the readers and the characters around him, making it deliberately difficult to know who he is as a person. Despite that, everyone in-universe and out has something to say about Gojō's character, but we've never really known how Gojō views himself until this chapter.

For maybe the first time in Jujutsu Kaisen, we get to deep dive into Gojō's interior world and hear his innermost thoughts when he's at his lowest and most vulnerable. As a result, something fascinating happened across the fandom.

Even when Gojō literally tells Getō that the 'wretchedness of isolation' is something he shares with Sukuna, that he gave everything he had so that Sukuna might understand him and be understood in turn, and that he knows not everyone will get it, some people called Gojō 'out of character' in 236.

And isn't that just so damn meta?!

Akutami loves challenging readers' assumptions through his characters, so while the chapter is shocking, it isn't really surprising. I'd even go as far as suggesting that the journey of emotions the reader experiences while reading 236 is the exact same journey Gojō is going on in-story.

The thing is, I've seen tons of people arguing about whether Gojō was selfless or selfish, whether he fought for the love of his students or for the love of the fight, whether he took strong young sorcerers under his wing from a place of care or simply as a means to an ends — but I think the point is that it's always been all of those things at once.

Because he's human, and humans contain multitudes.

I think we were meant to have our view of Gojō shaken by 236 — the same way Gojō's view of himself is challenged in this chapter. However, just because we can find some truth in Nanami's criticism of Gojō, doesn't mean that his interpretation of Gojō's character is the correct one — especially when it's entirely possible that what happens in the airport isn't even real.

Getō listens with empathy as Gojō confesses his self-doubt and regrets, the solitude of his strength, and the dehumanisation he experienced as the 'Strongest'. He even expresses jealousy when Gojō admits he had fun fighting someone strong enough to understand him. Then, only two pages after Gojō says, 'You can cherish a flower and help it bloom, but you don't ask it to understand you', Nanami appears and calls him a pervert for his approach to sorcery.

It's actually really funny.

Importantly, Nanami isn't exactly wrong for saying the enjoyment Gojō gets from fighting is a little disturbing (and, to be clear, I *adore* this about him) — it's just not the whole picture of Gojō Satoru.

Akutami actually gives us some lovely imagery to visually represent the gulf between those who understand the solitude of strength and those who don't — Gojō and Getō sit on one side of the bench while Nanami and Haibara sit on the other, with each duo facing in opposite directions.

I don't think Akutami is implying that either side is wrong or right — it's just two different perspectives. Nevertheless, Gojō is pictured side by side with someone who understands him, and back to back with someone who doesn't understand him but who cares for him all the same.

Recognising this, he pivots to asking Nanami about something they can both relate to and receives an important lesson in return. What Nanami means and what Gojō takes from it is deliberately ambiguous, like everything that's discussed inside the airport:

Could Sukuna have won without the Ten Shadows?

Who does the 'flower' represent: Gojō, the people around him, or both?

Did Gojō reach Sukuna like he hoped?

Why exactly is Getō jealous?

Does Gojō feel satisfied?

Is Nanami's assessment of Gojō's character correct?

What is the relevance of north and south?

Which direction did Gojō choose?

Is it all in Gojō's imagination or is it real?

Whether we'll receive answers to those questions remains to be seen, but I highly suspect that most of them don't even have a definitive answer.

Once again, it's just a matter of perspective, and I think that's Gojō's character in a nutshell. Whichever side of the bench you're sitting on, whatever you see in Gojō says more about you than it does about him — and that's exactly why it's so fascinating to see the fandom erupt into arguments about who's interpreting the character correctly.

I can honestly say I think the chapter is really beautiful even though I hate what happened to Gojō, and that's an entirely new experience for me. For that alone, Akutami has my praise. Whatever happens in the rest of the story will determine whether 236 becomes my favourite chapter in the whole of Jujutsu Kaisen — isn't that bizarre?

By the way, I found a really thoughtful post about some of the word choices in 236. The poster shared some really interesting insights across a series of posts and they convey the tone of the chapter really well. Well worth checking out!

[highonincense]

One thing I absolutely despise in drarry fics —and by this I mean a specific subset, not like in general cause there are many amazing fics— is the characterization of harry (and draco), the way he's an absolute fucking doormat!!!! I get it y'all are tryna portray him as a social dimwit, it can be done in a normal way without making him seem like a piece of cardboard! Are we talking about the same dude here?? You don't actually have to completely demolish a character, take away their key traits just to make the other half of the ship look better.

Let me give a pointwise description:

1. Dude stutters after every bloody sentence, like he's so overwhelmed talking to draco "smirking, smooth as butter, sardonic, sleek, godly" Malfoy who keeps insulting him every fucking second. Do you really think that harry would entertain that bullshit, especially in post-war fics!!! Like he'd just take it and not put him in his place?

2. I read this fic long ago and I don't remember the name, but good god it was unbearable. Basically the golden trio apologizes to draco for his tragic life that they were responsible for after the war? Like wtf? Why is there even a need to do that? 😭 That was too much and I stopped midway

3. Again, draco "3 OWLs" Malfoy, some supersmart / second coming of tom riddle, keeps patronizing every action of harry, the amount of times harry's intelligence is insulted? Immediate no from me, like are we still doing the whole "harry dumb mf potter is unobservant, slow, stupid, can't function without some rat hissing in his ear that he's an idiot 24/7"? Don't you think it's lame?

4. Harry has to always put up with his shitty attitude, I am all for character development, I know characters are multi dimensional and complex, and showing draco having a difficult personality is well and good, but it starts to get annoying when there's no real growth in him. I've read fics where he's absolutely despicable until the end which is covered up as him being a dickhead in general and harry "fondly" keeps up with his shit. *gag* canon harry would NEVER

5. I think it genuinely wouldn't make a difference if harry was there or not, I am not kidding or being dramatic, those fics might as well be character × y/n fics

All of this leads me to hate draco's character more! You portray him as this insufferable bastard who has a heart of gold apparently (where?) who has no real growth, shows no humility or regret or even pretends to and you think harry will put up with that?

It would be interesting if he starts out that way, works on himself and grows and changes, that would be more tolerable and interesting!

But no, he's always this annoying guy who hurls insults, keeps mocking harry or his friends every other line, you might argue it's in his character, but aren't those the traits which make him unlikeable? like those aren't cute or quirky? wouldn't it make more sense to show him grow out of it? It's really annoying

And harry, let's not go there, he's a completely new character, might as well be an oc atp, you can't even compare him to canon harry, that's how bad it is! I still haven't completely discussed it cause it's already getting long, but he's this wet bloody blanket and I can't stand it, the gryffs (except Hermione) in general are shown as some bumbling buffoons who can't differentiate between their hand and foot!! And the slytherins are all savvy, masterminds, geniuses... I really don't know whether it's admirable cause it's weird seeing them pushed into these moulds where they can only behave a certain way!

I'm so tired this is still going on like?? Why are their characters such caricatures? All of this sounds like it may have been a thing of past, but I am appalled it's still happening!!!

This is not directed at all drarry fics out there, cause there are some gorgeous fics written by amazing authors who fucking get these characters and make it about them, about their relationship and explore it in a depth and nail their characterizations without making either one of them boring. There are a good number of fics that I actually enjoy cause of the way they write drarry's characters, which makes or breaks the fic imho

[sleeplesslionheart]

The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:  

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?  

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

[desceros]

Re: ableism w/Symphony Donnie: Definitely some internalized ableism but I think that’s unfortunately due to not many people knowing what exactly neurodivergence looks like and how people with it processes things differently.

Like, honestly, my biggest gripe was the recording and even that, for the SPECIFIC context of this story and Donnie as a character, it makes sense. Does it make it right? No, but if Donnie never had to think about these things before, for him it’s the same as recording everything to protect his family. Just something he does.

Also, even though my heart broke with Reader’s at her realization, MULTIPLE times reader has said Donnie says what he means and even at the beginning with the “I like you” thing I was like, “Girl, I’m going to need you to define the relationship with him.”

And I think, with Leo, even when writer’s do write him as neurodivergent, what I’ve read always has him as the he better masker whether it’s explicitly said or not. Idk if Symphony Leo is neurodivergent or not but STILL, reader has picked up that he’s good with masking which usually comes off as charming or “easy breezy beautiful cover girl”.

Idk, maybe because I know a lot of people like Donnie irl but if anything I was more frustrated at the obvious miscommunication between both of them than him directly, because as reader said, she projected her feelings on to him when he’s been super direct with his intentions.

Basically, there are sometimes where I wish people would just realize that processing the same thing between two people doesn’t always look the same and that one isn’t necessarily bad.

well-said, anon-chan!

edit: this got SPOILER!! HEAVY!! for chap. 22 and also soooo long so i'm going to tuck it under a cut. but here's some meta on symphony to explore this a bit since it's something that's very important to me and also... pretty critical to the fic itself! i don't typically like explaining myself outside of the text and letting the fic itself speak but. hm. i suppose i shall let it slide for today!

as you all have hopefully noticed by now, as an author, i like to be. hm. more subtle with things. i prefer to tuck things away versus having things be blatant in the text. and this is kind of coming back to bite me a little with donnie and his neurodivergence, i suspect.

i've tried pretty hard to make it contextually obvious that donnie's autistic. i've all but used the word. the way he behaves and communicates is heavily autism-coded.

meanwhile, the story is from viola-chan's pov, and she's neurotypical-coded (well. as much as i, an adhd-riddled autistic cat in a trenchcoat can manage).

as a result, she doesn't... pick up on donnie's problems with communication. not right away. but here, in this chapter, we see where she finally figures out what their issue has been the entire time:

…Oh. Oh god.  He really doesn’t get it. You’d known, of course, that Donnie wasn’t great with people. That he doesn’t communicate well. He doesn’t pick up on cues, or use them himself. No wonder he’s always so frank in his language, you realize. No wonder he’s so comforted by the firm rigidities of science. No wonder he looked so lost. No wonder he was so perplexed.

then, she puts that into practice by being specific and precise with how she talks. and we see that she now knows how to communicate with him in a way that works for both of them. and it works for them:

God; it’s like—a breath of fresh air, you think, staring at him in a little bit of awe. It’s so easy to talk to him, now that you’re just… letting it all out. Being honest. Frank. Infuriating that you hadn’t done this earlier. Feeling your irritation deflate, you nod. “…Okay. You just—need an explanation. Clarification.” “Yes, please,” Donnie gushes, fretting a little.

it's going to take some work. she still takes things he says personally and extrapolates past them (the whole "leo being an important person" thing). but she immediately nips it in the bud and is like. no. we're not doing that anymore. so, going forward, her relationship with donnie is one that's built on learning how to develop this open communication.

of course, it's not perfect, because they're human. donnie twisting her arm into still talking to him by calling in the favor is shitty behavior. a desperate bid to keep someone close that, for some reason, he can't imagine being without. not cool. the recordings of them having sex were shitty behavior to us, people who Know Better. but when violist-chan said 'hey, that's not cool, don't do that' and donnie was given a reason why not to, he just says ok. he might not understand ("but i record everything"). but he acknowledges that there's a concern there, and he agrees to be more conscientious in the future (having a consent sheet).

now then, let's look at leo's behavior in comparison.

donnie's biggest fault was that he didn't know to check in and make sure they were on the same page with everything. leo's fault, on the other hand, is purposeful, manipulative, and cruel. his open admission that he's been manipulating her from the beginning. manipulating donnie. lying to her.

to me, this is much, much worse than what donnie did. even knowing that at some point he starts developing friendly feelings towards her—and some of their interactions were indeed genuine!—i'm with violist-chan here. i'm not going to be digging through every one trying to parse out which ones were real and which ones were him being a dickhead. they're all tainted by the stain of betrayal.

also. because it has come up in a different ask that i will be publishing probably tomorrow bc of spoiler reasons: someone said something to the effect of 'why didn't he just not say anything? he could have taken that to his grave. how selfish'. i will remind you of a conversation between violist-chan and leo that happened in the previous chapter:

“Most of all, he’s honest,” you keep going, tangling your fingers together, staring down at the way they knot at your waist. “If he says something, I can take it at face value. There’s no hidden meaning. Nothing deeper. If he says something feels good, I know it feels good. If he says he likes something, he likes it. If he doesn’t like it, he doesn’t like it. If he asks for something, I don’t need to ask if he’s sure. He asks, so he’s sure. It—It’s a breath of fresh air. If I want to know what he’s thinking, really thinking, all I have to do is ask. And...”  [...] Leo’s still as stone for a few moments longer, looking at you like he’s trying to decide if he wants to say something; but finally he relaxes and comes back to you himself. Reaching out, he flicks your forehead, causing you to wince and rub at it.

i think... leo maybe wouldn't have ever said anything about it. but then you said this. how donnie matters to you because he's honest. there's nothing deeper with him. it's all at face value. you never have to worry about what he's doing, what he's thinking. and that i think... really messed with leo. because he knows he hasn't been honest with you. you can't trust what he says at face value. you do have to worry about what he's doing. and for you to say that that's the main thing you love about donnie—it messed with him. so, even though he knew it would jeapordize the relationship with you, even knowing he wanted to put this off for as long as he could, even though, even though, he decides he has to tell you. he has to come clean.

so even though it feels like shitty, selfish behavior... it's actually him trying to do right by her for a change. to conform to what she looks for in a relationship (both romantic and platonic). it just... didn't go over so well, predictably. most people don't like hearing that not one, but two of their most precious relationships were built on a foundation of misunderstandings or lies.

side note. i do headcanon leo as having adhd that primarily manifests itself as an inattentive form. i don't suspect it has much to do with his behavior here... save perhaps for some possible rsd being triggered when violist-chan is like 'ok actually go fuck yourself i'm out of here.' i don't find it particularly relevant to the discussion of ableism, in this context.

so anyway. long post aside. it's... interesting to me. to see people saying 'actually fuck both donnie and leo equally!!! bleh bleh bleh!!!!' i don't know that it's. hm. active ableism. i'm certainly not accusing anyone of the sort. but it is, at the very least, indicative to me that there are a lot of people who don't read into the text as deeply as perhaps i would like on certain character traits, if i had a magic wand to wave.

....and also perhaps just ableism, haha.

[zoeykallus]

Hey! This is a bit much, so there is a trigger warning for the rest of this.

I had someone that I thought was a friend 'out' me in front of a bunch of guys. We had been on the topic of sex and my 'friend', knowing I have a history with SA and r*pe, made an offhand comment about:

'Well, you started early in your childhood. I personally think 5 years old is a little young, but what do I know?'

I guess she was trying to look cool in front of the guys? Or make herself look better? I've cut off the friend, but the looks I got from the guys in that group make me sick.

Regardless, I was wondering how you think the Batch (+Gregor and Fives, if you think it would fit?) would react to someone saying something like this to their friends or partner when the Batcher didn't know about it. Or, at least someone making fun of their friend or partners SA/r*pe trauma in a public setting like this.

I know that this is a lot, so please don't feel pressured to do this at all! If you need to delete this, it is 1000% fine. I do want to say that I'm good, and things are okay now, just so you don't worry about that. I love you, I love your work, and thank you for all that you do! Good luck, best wishes, and much love!

- 🪼

Aloha!

First off, I'm sorry you made this experience, not only the violation, this breach of your physical (as well as mental) integrity, but also this thoughtless and unreflective, rude behavior of your former friend.

Ooof. I thought about this one for a very long time, keeping it in my drafts for even longer. Opening the file, thinking for a moment, and closing it again. I have long thought about whether I can and want to write something about it. But these are the wrong questions. This is more about whether I should. Finally, I have decided to go into the subject, hoping to be able to provide some comfort.

The HCs are relatively short and to the point, at least that was my goal. I didn't want to go into too much depth, especially since I wanted to include all the characters you asked for and leave out too many triggers.

The focus is mostly, almost only, on the guys' reaction to mentioned friend.

I'm glad to read that you are in a good/safe place now! Thanks for letting me know 💜

The Bad Batch/Fives HCs x Reader - Outrageous And Thoughtless

Trigger Warnings: Mention Of Abuse/ SA/Hurt/Mention Of Traumatic Events/Strong Language/(18+)

Situation:

In the presence of your partner, a friend makes a remark regarding your past and reveals sexual abuse you were subjected to in the past. Something that your batcher does not know yet.

Hunter

At first, he can't quite grasp what he has just heard. Immediately afterward, his keen senses perceive how the situation overtakes you, panics you and makes you feel insecure. He frowns in annoyance and turns to your friend who has been talking so thoughtlessly. "Will you please back off!!! That was very inappropriate!" Your heart races, plagued by memories and above all the fear that Hunter now sees you in a different light, you stand there rooted to the spot, all muscles tense. Adrenaline is produced in your body, as in a fight or flight situation. Hunter approaches you, taking your hand carefully, tenderly. "Take a deep breath," he says softly, "And exhale again." As your acquaintance is about to speak up again, Hunter interrupts with a sharp look. His expression clearly says that silence is the best option now. Your hand trembles in his, and Hunter pulls back with you, away from everyone else present. He looks at you, quietly, gently. He smiles tentatively.

"It's all good. You're safe with me. You know that, right?" You nod, of course you know you are safe with him, and you are very grateful for that. "Good," he says contentedly, "You don't have to explain anything to me. Everything is okay. Take a breath first. You can talk to me anytime you want, but you don't have to." You take a shaky breath and nod again. "Thank you," you say softly. Hunter kisses your temple tenderly. "There's no need to thank me. That you are safe and secure with me is a given."

Echo

His eyes widen. Echo stares at your friend and grits his teeth. His gaze wanders to you and he sees the anger and panic bubbling under your surface. His hand clenches into a fist. He would like to break your friend's nose, but he pulls himself together as best he can. "How dare you say something so insensitive, so thoughtless?" Your friend looks at him in surprise. As they are about to answer, however, Echo raises his hand to interrupt your friend. "Don't bother. I don't expect a meaningful answer from someone with so little subtlety," he says, growling. Your friend looks at you, smiling, trying to salvage the situation more poorly than good, but Echo puts himself between the two of you, his anger almost palpable. "I think the evening is over, you should leave now," he says harshly.

His tone doesn't tolerate any backtalk, and no one dares to contradict him. His shoulders are tense, you can see it in his posture. When you are alone, a part of you does not dare to look him in the eye. You have the uneasy feeling that everything is different now, that Echo perceives you differently. But Echo's feelings for you don't shrink in any way, he has the same sincere respect as before, and you won't lose his affection anytime soon. "Look at me," he says softly. As your eyes meet, he smiles and says, "I hope you'll forgive my outburst, my interfering. What came out of your friend's mouth was incredibly tactless." You swallow, nod, finally daring to take a breath. Echo spreads his arms wide, and you automatically lean into his embrace, grateful for his closeness, protection and understanding.

Wrecker

He has just turned over the grill when he hears the words. His brothers are also all sitting at the table, with you and a friend you brought along. It has suddenly become very quiet, only the sizzle of the grill can be heard. Wrecker spins around the huge tongs in his hand. He blinks, within seconds he is torn between worry, anger and confusion. Worry and anger prevail and the handle of the tongs creaks under his hardening grip. He looks directly at your friend and says, "Why do you expose her like that in public? That's not something you do with a friend." Your friend, who doesn't really think much and just wanted to stand out among the men, realizes that the attempt is about to backfire. "That's a good question," growls Crosshair, who moves the toothpick back and forth between his lips with a piercing look. That's the first sentence he says tonight. You sit silently in between. For a moment, you toy with the idea of forcing a laugh or running away, doing something to take away this feeling of exposure. But you feel heavy as lead, as if you were stuck on the camping chair.

Hunter says quietly but clearly to your guest, "It's best if you leave now." Wrecker has put the barbecue tongs in Echo's hand and comes over to you, somberly eyeing your friend as they nervously make their way out of the way, hastily avoiding his gaze. Wrecker sits down in the chair next to you, grasping your hand tenderly. "What would you like to do now, dear?" he asks gently. You look at him questioningly. "What?" "Do you want to talk? Do you want to be alone? Should we just keep enjoying the evening?" he asks. You take a deep breath. "Can we pretend that didn't happen just now?" you ask quietly. As if on cue, movement comes into the round. Tech gets up and starts setting the table, Echo continues to tend to the grill, Hunter hands out drinks, Crosshair gets a deck of cards from the Marauder, and Wrecker stays with you. He acts normal, he doesn't press you, he doesn't ask questions, but he stays close to you just in case you still need a hug or a listening ear. Neither he nor his brothers will ever bring up the subject again, but if you want to talk, you can count on Wrecker.

Tech

He's very direct himself sometimes, but what he just heard is way off the mark. Tech is sitting next to you and your friend is sitting across from you. He lifts his eyes from the cup he was looking into earlier, lost in thought, and looks at the person sitting across from you. "That was very inappropriate," he says, frowning critically. He can't for the life of him imagine what could tempt a person, a friend at that, to abuse your trust like this. He is sure that you told this person these things in confidence, because he himself knew nothing about it until now. Since you neither deny that the statement is true nor do anything else in this way, he assumes that there must be some form of truth in it. "Why? It's not a lie. I thought you knew about it," the friend says promptly. Tech can feel you tensing up next to him, he can guess how uncomfortable you are with all of this, even though no words are crossing your lips at the moment. "No, I didn't. And even if I had known, that's not a subject you just bring up casually. It's a traumatic subject, and the way you deal with it is very inconsiderate."

You finally say quietly, "Maybe we should postpone this meeting and back off." Tech looks at you, his expression softening. He nods at you and takes your hand as you both stand up. Your friend tries to persuade you to stay, but Tech says, "I don't think we'll be doing this again," and gently but firmly pulls you with him. On the way home, he says, "I have to say I'm surprised. I thought you were good friends." "I thought so too." Tech says, "You need to pick your friends better." His hand gently squeezes yours as he asks, "Are you okay?" "I'm confused" you admit, "And I'm scared". He stops and looks at you. "Of what?" "Of you seeing me differently now," you admit. He shakes his head, softly stroking your face, "You're still the same person, the person I love. Nothing about that has changed. What I've come to know and love about you is still there, no one can just take that away from you."

Crosshair

He's so perplexed, the toothpick he was chewing on before falls out of his mouth. Crosshair stares at your friend, who thinks they're being particularly funny or whatever. Then his gaze moves to you, and he sees how you seem to be getting smaller and smaller, because your colleague keeps talking. "Shut up," he finally snaps, giving the blabbermouth a sharp look. All is quiet, Crosshair's somber expression seems to unnerve your friend. "'Say, are you shitting me?' How do you come to talk such private things entrusted to you like that, as if you were telling a joke? Did they drop you on your head too many times when you were a kid? Or bathed you too hot?" Your friend just stares dumbly at Crosshair, wide-eyed. This reaction is probably unexpected. The Sniper growls as he pulls a fresh toothpick from his belt and puts it between his lips, "You better get out of here before I get the idea of hurting you."

Everything about this situation has surprised you so much and thrown you off course, that you simply remain silent and observe the situation as if you didn't even belong to it. Only when your friend is gone and Crosshair addresses you do you awaken from your rigidity. He says, "We're not inviting that person again. Only over my dead body." You nod and say quietly, "Okay." He frowns worriedly as he sees your strange expression. "I have to say a few things I understand better now, though. Like your reticence when we first met, your jumpiness at every touch" You absolutely don't want to talk about it, you just want to forget that Crosshair knows about it now. As if he reads your mind, he says, "We don't invite that person anymore and this never happened". You nod and breathe such a sigh of relief that he notices it too. "Hey Kitten, but just so you know if you want to talk, we can do that, okay?" Again you nod, grateful for his understanding, grateful that he has once again acted as your shield as he so often does.

Fives

His gaze jumps back and forth between you and your friend. His muscles tense and he almost feels a bit sick, from anger, but above all from concern for you. He can see from your reaction that unfortunately it wasn't just a very tasteless joke. There are a few of his brothers present, and he can roughly imagine how exposed you must feel right now. So his first reaction is to remove you from the crowd. Fives grabs your hand and pulls you with him. "We have to go now," he says with a grin to the crowd and says goodbye. He gives your friend a very sharp, admonishing look as they attempt to follow you, though. "Just stay away," he hisses at them, on the verge of lashing out, he just barely holds back. "Fives... I," you start, but break off again. You don't know what to say to him at all. "It's okay, you don't have to explain anything to me," he says softly and walks with you out of the bar into the open. He takes one last look to make sure you weren't followed, especially by your so-called friend, then calls a cab for you.

"Fives?" you ask him as you sit together in the back of the cab. "Yeah?" You gulp and ask, "Now that you know about it....," but break off again. "What's up with that? Do you want to talk about it?" he gently prods. You shake your head, "Not really. Not now anyway." Fives nods and says, "Then we don't have to talk about it either, sweetie. Relax, you'll talk to me when you feel ready. And if that's never the case, for whatever reason, then I have no problem with that either" "You're the best," you say with relief, leaning into the arm he puts around you. "I know"

Ko-Fi (If you feel like giving me some coffee)

I decided to not tag anyone, just in case.

[clairedaring]

The Storyboard: Interview with the Dee Hup House director Tee Bundit - On IFYLITA's budget and his passion for IFYLITA

So P'Tum has invited director Tee Bundit for the second episode of The Storyboard where they talked in length about a variety of Tee Bundit's works. There were a lot of interesting tidbits about I Feel You Linger In The Air so I've compiled them here for all the IFYLITA enthusiasts. 

All translations below done by my dear friend saltymarbles on Twitter, please give her a follow if you're interested in IFYLITA and Bright Rapheephong-related content.

On his filming schedule in 2023

Last year, P’Tee was working everyday up till about the ending second half of the year. There was Hidden Agenda, Step by Step & IFYLITA. If he wasn’t on set, he’d be working on post-production. So he had little rest & sleep. To him, although just letting go of the matter doesn’t always improve the situation, sometimes he has to lower his expectations to move on. So last year (2023) he was in quite a bit of a ‘screw it’ kind of era. Regarding his series for 2024 (I Saw You in My Dream, Jack & Joker), he feels really anxious because they (YinWar) already have many fans. Honestly, for him, it’s always hard when it comes to expectations. When working on projects based on novels with many fans, it’s more stressful and tiring than usual because there’s people already awaiting the series and keeping an eye on it.

I had compiled the filming queues of Dee Hup House last year in this table and as you can see Tee was working at full speed and filming multiple series at the same time..

On the differences of being on set for IFYLITA vs Hidden Agenda

P’Tee said that he had to adjust himself while on set for these two series because JoongDunk are very playful kids. On set for IFYLITA, it’s very work centric and go-go-go which works for the actors. But for Hidden Agenda, he needed to adjust himself to play along with the actors to make them feel less stressed so they can work better.

On Bright-Nonkul & IFYLITA

Tee: They’re a pair that I’ve wanted to work with, with each person, for a year. For Bright, when he knew that he needed to act with Non and needed to act in a period drama, he did his homework very seriously. Because this was his first time playing a main character and he also felt a lot of passion for portraying this role. Both of them actually, this pair felt that they wanted to act in something like this and I too felt that this was good so I got them to come for casting because both of them needed to cast together, in the sense that we needed to see their chemistry together. They’re already really talented. One person is talented and the other is too. Even though Bright has never had a project in which he was the lead actor before, he has already learnt acting. Yeah and he did his own homework too. Meaning that they both read the novel properly and they actually also discussed with us about numerous things too with regards to whether we were on the same page about the characters.

On BrightNon & Boardgames

Tee: When Bright-Non are together, at first they were a little shy. They started to click after the first half was over. Both of them like playing games. We were like why didn’t you say this at the start so that we could let them play games from the first day. Because at first they were just there to work and work and work. At first, it was really tense until we started playing games together. When we were done playing, we were really enjoying it a lot. It almost became like immediately after finishing acting in scene, they continued playing immediately because Non also brought cards to play. MC: Brought boardgames and whatsoever Tee: They continued playing games. Non also has his own ‘band’ when it comes to boardgames like ‘Come on! It’s noon already let’s play together’ MC: But it still looks balanced because the storyline is quite serious, meaning that it’s quite stressful so (it’s good) to enjoy a little. Tee: It came in the period of the later half of filming. It went to the extent of meeting after finishing filming to play games together. It’s like ‘Is there a games party today? But there’s filming tomorrow’ MC: But it was like ‘let’s just do it first, it’s alright’ Tee: We would finish filming at 11pm, 12am. MC: But they would still play right? Tee: Yes it was like ‘let’s go play. who’s room tonight?’ Because that day, we were filming in another province. We played until 2-3am and woke up at 5am because everyone liked playing games so much. When we woke up in the morning, everyone had bloodshot eyes. We didn’t sleep enough but in the end, everyone fights till the death because it’s still a matter of work and our jobs. I really like the moments where everyone is enjoying together as opposed to being tense. When we’re tense, we’ll be overly stressed because the series is already a stressful one like filming taking longer than expected because IFYLITA took nearly 40 queues.

On what made director Tee choose to do IFYLITA

Tee: There were some people which had reviewed this novel on social media which I follow. And I went to read about 2-3 lines to use as an example. Sh*t… the way they speak, the language used, was so sweet. It was a dialogue like 2470 in an era then, it made me feel shy again. It made me feel it was so cute from the courting stage. In the present day, it had another kind of cuteness too. But when I went to look at that era, the cuteness arose again. And I had never seen any BL series which were period dramas. I felt like ‘I need to do it’. It was a project that if I talked about it, people would likely want to watch. So I thought about it but didn’t speak about it yet because if I spoke about it but didn’t follow through, it would be like…(no words)… So I contacted Khun Violet Rain first, to reserve it first, not to sell it to anyone else, let me find money to invest first. It was until a year passed.

On director Tee's passion for IFYLITA

MC: Omg! So your passion back then was like ‘whatever it is, it must happen’. Tee: I had maximum passion like ‘whatever I need to do, I’ll do it’ it was like, I’ll fork out first. In my heart, I was thinking ‘It must become popular’ and thinking that ‘there will probably be someone to sponsor me’. It was to the point I didn’t think of the problems in the future that it’s possible that it might not become popular in the future. At that time I was just thinking ‘let’s do it let’s do it let’s do it’ and that we could sell merchandise, do fan meetings. At that time everything was surely possible and get the invested amount back. It was like I was hypnotised.

On the budget of IFYLITA

Tee: At first I thought that it would be fast (to get the budget for IFYLITA), that I would be able to do it, it was already a year but in the end, I still couldn’t. There were some problems preventing things from happening. With regards to budget and other things so it changed production company. This was something that stressed the people working on this series. It felt like a loss and it was like ‘shit what should we do’. This project is so freaking expensive. MC: It can be seen from the setting, from the period genre Tee: There’s no more capital. We bought it, we bought it for ourselves first and kept it first. We wanted to do it and still wanted to do it then. We needed to find investors who wanted to do this with us and could support us. I couldn’t come up with 100% (of the capital). Then, I had thoughts of just loaning, salvaging what I could.

On the objective of the Special EP of IFYLITA

!!! SPOILERS AHEAD !!! SKIP THIS IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED Tee: Following the title of the series, the problem that we encountered was that we knew we would have to make the Special Episode in a way that says “thank you” for the people who still miss IFYLITA so that gave rise to the special EP. I thought with the writing team that it cannot clash with the original story in a way that would cause problems. We thought about numerous ways to do it but we felt that those ways clashed and created problems with the original story. Being unable to go back (to 1927) is also not possible because we’ve already made it such that Jom has returned to the present time. To save the feelings of the people who read or watched IFYLITA, we let Khun Yai come back in a special way, like what if Khun Yai were to have to live in present day, how would he live his life? What would he be excited about? What fun things would happen? And thus, it became the special EP. In the end, there’s still a need to insert the feelings of the novel a little bit, in the sense of not allowing him (Khun Yai) to be here forever. He experiences happiness but we felt that in the end, we wanted it to follow the plot in which is still a little sad. In the way that there isn’t a happy ending. We wanted everyone to have some feelings of happiness but in the end, needing for these feelings to come to an end. MC: that the truth is indeed the truth Tee: Yes, something to that extent — following the feelings of the story. This is so that if there’s a future or something like that, it would be possible to continue the story. A future in which we would be able to see the real ending of the novel. But regarding that, we don’t have any plans yet. MC: Okay, so to viewers, Tee has said that there isn’t plans yet. Let’s see what the future holds. Tee: Let’s wait like Jom. Many of the fans have asked and to that I’d say, please wait like Jom. MC: Ohhh that’s too much. When watching the special EP, at the end, I’d ask for something to heal my heart at least like for example, that there was the doll that Khun Yai left behind. But there was nothing at all. Not a hint. So I felt really sad.

On IFYLITA: Expected Results vs Reality

Tee: If you had asked me then, if I had came up with 100% of the capital and currently experience a business loss, it would be a great loss. If there wasn’t any investors to support then, we would definitely need to close down Deehup. MC: It would definitely hurt. Tee: We would’ve needed to work and used this to the max. MC: Because you devoted yourself to it. Tee: Because it did get reception. I feel that it was good but in the end, it didn’t follow according to what I had expected in numerous ways. It’s not just about the series having a lot of viewers or it becoming popular or becoming no.1 trending on X every Friday. I don’t mean it as in it 100% or having increasing viewership or other countries buying the rights. There’s no guarantee. Tee: There are many ways to look at it. It is the entire after-sale process in this period of two years that could happen. About this, if you ask me now it has been a year but actually if you ask me about getting back the money, it takes about two years. Tee: We need to find more money in a year after the series has aired. (t/n: Tee most likely alluding to the fact that they have another year after the series end to make a return on the investment, and to gauge whether it's worth it doing SS2) MC: It’s about maintaining and whether after this, it can be developed further or added to. Tee: This is the feeling of someone who does not have the support of a very big company to invest. There’s always a sense of riskiness whenever we have to come up with money or investment. At that time, I was feeling bold, I was a kid with the strength and passion. So I invested money to make the pilot to see how it’d be before we had the opportunity to talk with YYDS, our partner which worked with us.

Some people may not know that IFYLITA has been in the works around the time Dee Hup made Lovely Writer so when Tee said he had reserved this work he was referring to his ambitious self of a few years ago. This might be more well known fact to KaoUp or Lovely Writer fans because Tee hinted about KaoUp playing in a BL period series, specifically this one a while after LW ended but it never came to fruition. And as we now know from Tee's sharing, IFYLITA was definitely in pre-production limbo for a while due to a lack of investors and budget, with Tee spending out of his own pocket to make the pilot.

I really appreciated Director Tee Bundit sharing his insights into the pre-production of IFYLITA. I think IFYLITA is a very underrated series due to this niche genre and I completely understand Tee being traumatized from his being too ambitious and overconfident to take on such a challenging project without actual financial backing. This does kind of mean that IFYLITA S2 is nowhere near soon but I still have hope that eventually more folks will discover this hidden gem of a series because there's just so much dedication and love being put into this series and you will feel it as you watch the series.

[aceredshirt13]

So as I was looking through Madame Eulalie’s Jeeves and Ukridge story transcriptions, I thought it was interesting that so many of the magazine advertisements mentioned the character of “Archie” being popular. Thus, I had to investigate, and by now I’ve read a little under a third of Indiscretions of Archie, the novel that rewrites and compiles all the short stories about Archie Moffam (pronounced “Moom” because of course it is). And I… wow, well, let’s just say I was not quite expecting it to be the way it is.

You know how there’s a subset of Jeeves fandom who believes Bertie and Jeeves were in World War One together, and that Bertie’s cheery narration is hiding the fact that he was traumatized from it? What if I told you that there is a cheery, ditzy Drones Club-esque Wodehouse protagonist who is actually, canonically, a former officer and veteran of the war? Who gets into absurd shenanigans involving colorful swimsuits and stealing adorable, amiable reptiles, and doesn’t even realize a robbery is occurring when it’s blatantly obvious, but also recognizes an automatic pistol on sight (a weapon that was, by the way, invented by the German military during WWI), immediately looks for cover whenever he panics as if he’s going to be bombed, and has an old friend who has literally become an alcoholic because of his military service?

Now, the story is still Wodehouse’s characteristic brand of wacky comedy, and I will certainly not deny that it is very funny in many ways. (So far Peter, the friendly, optimistic, stolen pet snake, has got to be my favorite Wodehouse character of all time.) It is ultimately about a silly guy who loves his wife and whose father-in-law thinks he’s an idiot who needs to get a job - and all the pitfalls that come with him attempting to get said jobs to please him when he’s never worked in his life. And yet - whether intentionally as unexpected contrast, or just as a result of humor in rather “too soon” poor taste given that it was written barely two years after the war ended - it has this visible and unmistakable undercurrent of tragedy. The fact that the war’s indelible effect on the characters is present without being fully delved into, but hovers starkly in the background, makes it genuinely more upsetting than if it was addressed directly. You get the sense that the Wodehousian world is trying to be its regular goofy self, but fundamentally it cannot - that Archie himself is the archetypal silly little guy, but that his chatty, slightly nervous optimism cannot fully overtake these horrors that he’s experienced - like he, and the narrative at large, are suppressing this collective darkness.

Or maybe I’m just overthinking it. But regardless, I think a certain genre of Jeeves fan might take some interest in this book. Seems like the sort of thing fandom would run with - and run very far.

[cursedvibes]

omg I finally found someone who cares about Kenjaku and interested in them as much as I do. I always felt like most of the annoying fans (cough Geto/stsg fans cough) see them as an extension of Geto and not their own character with a unique personality, also they’re not really popular with Japanese fandom so there’s that…

Sooo idk if someone has already asked you that question but I just wanted to know what do you think of the existing paradox within Kenjaku’s behaviour? I’m talking about the fact that they seem to behave differently depending if they’re being observed or not, in such cases as: Kenny generally treating Yuji like a tool for their plan but saying “thank you for getting along with my son”, while they were walking with Yuji’s friend inside the “cursed space”, in complete darkness, not observed by a single soul — I’m still not sure whether it was just a way for Gege to emphasize that Kenjaku is, in fact, Yuji’s parent (if some readers didn’t catch it in ch.143) OR it should be interpreted as Kenny saying “oh yeah thanks for helping me to fulfill my plan by befriending Yuji —> resulting in him finding a finger”… but I also wonder could it be their real, genuine feelings? The fact that they actually care about Yuji in a sense would probably feel weird a lil bit but on the other hand there are also cases where they act contradictory, for example looking down on Tengen in general when fighting Yuki & Choso, mocking Tengen in that scene where they sit in front of TV, but the moment they’re not observed directly - the moment Tengen dies - they say their goodbyes to her and call her their “friend”. You see what I’m trying to imply? I might be completely wrong on this but it kinda feels like Kenjaku has an issue with the whole true feelings/emotions shtick. It probably makes sense since they should stick to their plan and any kind of attachment might ruin everything, it’s high risk on their part — Kenjaku shutting down their excitement immediately after they start feeling something real for the first time in hundreds of years, pressing Takaba to the ground — once again, understandable, but I do wonder if it results in something more in the end. There is also a theme of loneliness/intellectual loneliness specifically that is associated with Kenny so I’m honestly sooo fascinated by their character and I’m looking forward to see how it all unfolds.

Also do you have any analyses/meta posts about Kenny maybe? I’d love a link or something and I would definitely read it!!

Hi! Always lovely to meet a fellow Kenjaku fan! It's a real shame that Kenjaku so often gets overshadowed by other characters, particularly Geto, even when the story is focusing on them (as we can currently see) and when they are talked about, then often purely in the context of stsg, when they have so many more meaningful connections and ones that are also more important to their character.

The stuff you bring up about Kenjaku's contradicting behaviour is exactly what's been ghosting around my brain the past months or year even. I talked a little bit about it recently here and here. As far as other analysis posts go, what I could remember (and find again on my blog...) there's something about Kenjaku's motivations and how I think "for the lulz" is a bad way to describe it, a post about their perspective on death and a post reflecting on the power Kenjaku & Tengen have over Sukuna and Gojo, despite those being technically "The Strongest". I hope that's helpful and what you were looking for?

Regarding what you said about Kenjaku's contradicting behaviour, I think it all ties back to Tengen and their dispute because here you can see very well that Kenjaku both cares about Tengen, but also puts her as the centrepiece of their plan and is thereby ready to sacrifice her when push comes to shove. Despite going through with capturing her, Kenjaku doesn't seem very happy with how things ended with Tengen. They like her, respect her, see her as an equal, but are also very frustrated by her stubbornness and inability to change or even engage with the world. They had to force her in the end to do it and they didn't even get a good conversation with her after waiting centuries to see her again. She just kinda went along with what they did, again showing no resistance or strong will for survival. So Kenjaku doesn't really hate her, they are just frustrated with her non-actions.

You can also see that in the words they scream at her in ch 205 about having actually lived and gained new experiences, contrary to Tengen, who stuck to her old ways. It seems like they wanted to bait her into a response, a discussion, something, but they didn't get anything. At this point it was probably not surprising to them. I assume Tengen used to argue with them a lot more back in the Heian era and that is what Kenjaku is currently missing. Even if people disagree with them, Kenjaku wants to be presented with interesting perspectives by people who understand the world like they do. Tengen clearly used to have that, she build jujutsu society on it, but then she decided to distance herself from Kenjaku out of self-preservation and...maybe weariness? Hard to say at this point, but she was clearly not about allowing her body to evolve to discover new things about cursed energy and humanity.

Kenjaku tried to find something similar in Yuki, but she doesn't engage enough with them to bring any meaningful discourse (unfortunately, I wish the two had discussed their world views more during their fight). So now that Tengen is gone or controlled and can thereby not give any meaningful intellectual input, Kenjaku is looking for new people to fill that hole, new friends who are equal to them, challenge them and also give them some sort of stimulus they have been missing for centuries apparently. That's part of why they do the merger in the first place. They want something that can truly surprise them and present them with something completely new.

Besides intellectual curiosity, Kenjaku just seems lonely. Unlike Sukuna, who is fine just playing around with others, eating and having one person to rely on, Kenjaku seems to want more people around them. Not many I assume, but they need friends and currently they seem a bit desperate to find new ones, seeing how they even ask Hazenoki to hang out with them. That's also where we see that contradiction. Kenjaku wants friends, but over the last millennia their plan has taken up so much of their headspace that they are ready to kill said friends for that end and that tendency to use others for their gain is also what keeps them from finding new connections because obviously nobody wants anything to do with them when they get treated like that. They ask Hazenoki to be their friend, despite both of them knowing he has to die for the Culling Game to end and their plan to progress. So at best he could've given them company for a few days and then they would've killed him. But at this point Kenjaku is even fine with that. Hell, they are talking to dead people and the thin air (a non-listening Tengen). Not a good sign for the state of your mental health.

Takaba is interesting because he came to Kenjaku out of his own will and offered to give them something interesting/funny, basically fulfil their conditions for friendship. He doesn't even mind that much that Kenjaku is trying to kill him. Perfect candidate for friendship, but by being so open, forthcoming and generally being a weird guy, he unnerves Kenjaku. For one, they aren't used (anymore) to people being so friendly with them without any self-serving motives, listening to them and sharing their interest. Like with Sukuna & Uraume, Kenjaku is always the one who engages conversations and meetings, the two don't care about Kenjaku unless they need to further their personal goals. Similar with the reincarnated sorcerers. Kenjaku approaches them for a binding vow and the entire relationship depends on serving their own benefits. The other thing is that Kenjaku doesn't seem used to having someone they share so many common interests with and who they can indulge with, without ulterior motives playing into it. In this case it's comedy and pop culture instead of cursed energy, but that doesn't seem to matter and solving the riddle that is Takaba's cursed technique gives Kenjaku another reason to get invested in/with him.

It's like you said, Kenjaku wants connection, but when presented to them, they get uncertain and awkward on how to deal with them and don't seem to want to get too attached because they will kill them in the end anyway. With Tengen that was less of a problem because she's immortal and will always exist in some way, but not talking to her still seems to be very aggravating for them. Even with Takaba, despite having the time of their life and feeling better than they have for centuries, Kenjaku will have to kill him in the end. At least with how the Culling Game rules are now (they could change them...). Takaba is also very hard to kill... The ocean scene where Kenjaku goes from happiness to trying to drown Takaba honestly perfectly encapsulates their mental state towards close relationships, including how they treat Yuuji. Someone gets too close, they try to push them away like they're allergic to feelings. It's like a defence mechanism. If they want to follow through on the plan they have been working on for thousand years, they can't afford to dally around with some random clown, even if they like his company.

Same with Yuuji. I think Kenjaku does care about him in some way and sees him as their son, but that just doesn't keep them from hurting him. They sound proud of him in Shibuya and excited to see what he will evolve into. I think they banked on Sukuna switching vessel and Yuuji using his special body to become hopefully something interesting in the future, using Sukuna's cursed energy as a kickstarter for his development so to say. I mean, if Sukuna hadn't switched vessels, he would've been useless and unable to ever come out again after Shibuya and Kenjaku was clearly preparing for him to participate in the Culling Game. So Yuuji being a vessel/cage was only a temporary solution.

So I think Kenjaku's words to Sasaki are genuine, but they are also thanking her for starting the whole finger situation (Yuuji was the one who found it, but Sasaki was the one who wanted to play around with it). I'm also wondering if they intended for her to look into Yuuji's past and confront him with his parentage because they know Sasaki is very curious and Yuuji's parent he never mentioned turning up in her bedroom and telling her about a death game they started seems like something that she wouldn't be able to brush past. I mean, they didn't say this to Iguchi, who was also Yuuji's friend, only Sasaki. Only question is, how do they expect Sasaki to get in contact with Yuuji in the state Japan is in? And then there's of course the question of if Gege will even pick up this plot threat again.

Being interested in seeing what Yuuji will evolve into is Kenjaku's own way of showing they care, you could say. They don't give a shit about Choso's power level or potential after all, he's just a failure. Yuuji's potential is what makes them care and I think having birthed him themselves plays into their feelings as well, since Kenjaku clearly has a very close attachment to the womb, pregnancy and birth. Their interest in him is self-serving, but that doesn't mean they don't care or deny any parental feelings (at least not when in the right company, where they can open up more). Hell, despite looking down on Choso, Kenjaku does call themselves his parent. There's only a bit of blood connecting them, they didn't even birth him, but they don't deny their familial connection. So yeah, despite all that, Kenjaku always treats people bad because their own interests come first.

The current fight is interesting because Takaba could give something different to Kenjaku. He can entertain them, satisfy their curiosity and show them something new. He proofs that they don't need to go through with the merger, that there are other options they could take and might even end up happier for it, but I also think that Kenjaku will not use that opportunity to turn around. They have come too far, suffered set-back after set-back for thousand years just to get to this point, so no matter how good the alternative is, they will not give up on the merger. Tengen is already captured, she can't stay inside them forever and when she's set free, she will likely wreck chaos even if she doesn't merge with other humans. This fight shows us what Kenjaku could be or less destructive ways they could take, but at this point they are too far gone. I'm really curious to see how this will all play out and how this fight will end, what it will mean for Kenjaku, their plan, the protagonist team and how exactly they will deal with Takaba. Highly doubt it will mean anything good though. Either way, I smell some character development incoming.

[acourtofthought]

Honestly I hope Elucien is next so we can finally get the E/riel's off our backs (and hopefully out of the fandom since they're sOoOoOo against it) for good. Idk if I can do another 2+ years of discourse this intense kgjdn its making fandom and the stories straight up not fun anymore and it feels like there's no way to block it out??

I guess either way, whether it's Gwynriel or Elucien, we'd get some sort of relief from the craziness in the fandom.

But personally I do think it's time for Elucien's story. SJM has been building not only their relationship but their personal journey's since ACOMAF (2016) and it's time. It's time to decide Tamlin and Springs fate (probably happening in an Elucien book). It's time to reveal Helion as Lucien's father. It's time to free Vassa and the girls that have been trapped since ACOMAF (but we only learned about in ACOWAR). It's time for us to hear in Elain's own words how she feels about being made, the loss of her father, her mating bond, having stabbed someone, her powers, etc. It's time for Lucien to have a real home of his own. It's time for Elain to leave the Court where her sisters call her a dog and a pleasant companion. Where she's prevented from doing more by others. Where she had to remind her own sisters she's not a child to be fought over and they don't get to tell her what she can or can't do. I do realize I'm biased however I am surprised that anyone wouldn't think Elain is overdue for getting a POV.

Those things have gone on so long with no resolution that it's starting to feel weird. Seriously, how many more books can the characters talk about Elain ignoring Lucien, them leaving their mating bond in a stalemate and kind of just ignoring Elain for IC business in general. How many more books do we need to read about Tamlin being depressed and leaving Spring defenseless? How many more books does Lucien need to suffer an unaccepted bond and how wrong would it be if Az is given a HEA before him after Az had zero respect for Lucien's bond and zero respect for Lucien himself? Something about that would not feel fair 😂. Az will get his HEA but I'm not sure he deserves an immediate reward after not really caring whether he kills Lucien.

If Elucien isn't next, what would SJM even do with Elain's character? She can't have her start taking on a bigger role with the IC, then it wouldn't make sense for her to leave, it would seem like she was where she belonged. So is Sarah going to have her in the background gardening while the IC still never asks her to join in on meetings? Hiding in her room? There's no storyline for Elain until she has her own book. Elain won't heavily feature in a Gwynriel book but if she's still living in the NC, then SJM is going to have to come up with something for her because anytime Az meets with Rhys, Feyre, Nesta, Amren, Cassian, etc......Elain needs to be somewhere.

Gwynriel definitely has things to address, both together and as individuals, but really, they can wait a bit 😂

[lostcauses-noregrets]

Hi, I am suuuuuper new to Eruri and AoT but I immediately started shipping Eruri since like Female Titan arc? I love their dynamic so much and I think that ship makes perfect sense and everything isayama says about them sound like he also ships them? lol but people keep telling me it's one-sided in canon because while Erwin respects and admires Levi's skills obviously, apparently "he doesn't show any commitment to Levi and sees him as humanity's best weapon and that's why he wouldn't respect Levi's wish and let him die if the roles were reserved" people keep telling me that!! :'( like I am new lemme ship in peace sadfgdsdf sorry lol anyway I wanted to ask you that, since I am so new to Eruri, what do you think, do you honestly think they can easily be canon or do you just think "I just ship them idc"? And did you see the AoT game before? It's always like "Erwin completely trusts Levi!!" and "Levi: I will kill those titans before Erwin arrives!!" how do people expect me to not to ship them sdfsadf :( Excuse my poor English and if this ask is annoying pls ignore :( thank you <3

Don’t worry Anon, your English is just fine and there’s no such thing as an annoying ask, as long as the question is asked in good faith.  The first thing I would say is don’t listen to people who are hellbent on “disproving” your ship, and that goes for any ship, regardless of whether it’s canon or not.  There will always be assholes out there who would rather spend their time shitting on ships they dislike rather than enjoying media that they do.  The best thing to do is to block, mute, and ignore.  Don’t waste your time trying to change their mind, and don’t let them discourage you.  

I’ve had so many asks over the years about whether Erwin and Levi’s relationship is one sided, in fact I answered a very similar one just a few of weeks ago which you can read here and you can find a summary and links to previous asks on this topic here.

In answer to your question, I do firmly believe that Erwin and Levi’s relationship is canon and and this answer sums up why.

The thing I adore most about Erwin and Levi’s relationship is that it’s not a romance. It’s a mature adult relationship between two war weary veterans who have spent their entire lives fighting. Who, against the odds, have grown to trust, respect and love one another. Erwin gives Levi a purpose, a cause to fight for, and Levi gives Erwin his strength and support. Of course some of the trappings of romance are there too in the supplementary materials; the private dinners, the quiet moments watching the rain fall, the contraband tea, the gifts of fancy clothes, but it’s not the romance that matters, it’s the Deep Bond of Mutual Trust. It’s the fact that Erwin depends on Levi and trusts him enough to reveal his deepest regrets and desires. At the same time, Levi cares so deeply for Erwin that he willingly shoulders his burden and damns humanity to let him rest in peace.

Quite aside from shipping, Erwin and Levi’s canon character arcs are entwined throughout the series and their relationship and Levi’s vow play a pivotal role in the plot. 

If you’re interested, I’ve written loads of other posts on this topic, which you can find in my eruri relationship tag.  Hope this answers your question Anon and helps to set your mind at rest.

[lurkingshan]

The Eighth Sense 3&4

This show is just too much for me to handle quietly so posting my rambling thoughts here.

I was not ready to jump straight into a kiss! This show is wasting no time. Kind of a dead fish on Jae Won’s part but I’ve seen kbls (like To My Star) deploy those intentionally early on for character reasons so reserving judgment.

There was an edit when they clicked their beers together where it transitioned straight to a shot of the two logs in the fire at the same angle, and it was so seamless. Just noting what a high quality production this is.

And now Jae Won is ignoring him after he is the one who initiated. Not cool, hyung.

Yoon Won is my fav side character, I just love how open and welcoming she is.

Tequila with Guinness and pizza in the middle of the day. I don’t know, fam.

Ji Hyun walking away so slowly while Jae Won stares at him and does not follow. Just kill me.

So Ji Hyun is not out to his best friend. He seems extremely private and self-contained in general.

Ae Ri sure is pushy, and bad at reading cues.

I love that we got that discussion about how Jae Won fakes being nice, only to see him do it a couple scenes later.

10 years in therapy. I wonder whether Jae Won was able to access mental health care during his enlistment.

This music playing when they’re staring at each other on the train and then when they’re walking together reminds me of Neverending White Lights.

Innocent little beans not knowing what “let’s eat ramen together” means is one of my favorite kdrama tropes.

The way they’re staring at each other is making me blush, goodness.

Ooh now Ae Ri is covering for Ji Hyun, comforting him, and affirming that they will be friends. I have no choice but to stan.

Why does Tae Kyung keep trying to push Jae Won at Eun Ji? Like what is he getting out of this.

It’s the way Jae Won’s entire face changes as soon as he looks over and sees Ji Hyun.

“You don’t have to be loved by everyone.” Such a hard thing for so many of us to learn.

What is the sensitive matter, Ms. Therapist?

Judging Eun Ji’s friends for not stopping her from abusing a waiter, honestly.

I’m glad Ae Ri, Yoon Won, and boss lady are here to be awesome and counterbalance Eun Ji being kind of a typical toxic ex gf character.

“You look like a country mouse again.” Absolutely love that Jae Won noticed the change in him immediately.

They’re so into each other. I’m barely coping.

[ad-hawkeye]

(not the past anon/s but i made this whole analysis on artem's summer splash card + compared it to wings of exhilaration and i wanted to share hehe this got really long and i hope it makes sense 😭)

SPOILERS AHEAD‼️‼️‼️ they're pretty minor bc i won't be spoiling the overall plots of the cards but,, still spoilers 😭

when i think of fanservice in terms of artem cards, the cards that come to mind are his summer splash card and "wings of exhilaration" but i will always pick the latter over the former any day under any circumstance‼️ they both center on the theme of possessiveness but while wings acknowledges it as smth that is natural in a relationship, summer splash makes it feel like it's a requirement

artem is def a lot more comfortable relationship-wise in wings but there's clearly still some uncertainty 🥹 after not seeing each other for a week he gets super clingy and pretty much does everything he can so he can have rosa all to himself for a while. he lets her choose between having dinner in the hotel room or at the hotel restaurant but rosa sees right through him, noticing that he's hoping she'll pick the former, so she does but it was of her own accord.

at the end, he's surprised she noticed this and reveals that it was bc he knew that a lot of racers would also be dining at the restaurant and he didn't want anyone to share his or her attention but he still wanted to give her the freedom of choice, hence him still giving her the option to dine out. he also adds that he's not sure whether he's had this possessiveness from the start and it only manifested now and he didn't want rosa to "accomodate" his wants BUT rosa immediately assures him that possessiveness is normal in relationships and that even she feels toward him too!!

wings is supposed be released before summer splash so i'm pretty sure what the writers wanted to do with summer splash is show artem in his most confident and comfortable stage in the relationship as a continuation of wings but they forgot to stay true to his actual personality 😭 at the end when the two of them were lighting the sparklers, rosa was reminiscing about what her high school classmates would do with the sparklers and artem straight up tells her that he doesn't want her to remember them when she sees sparklers and think of ONLY him instead?? and imo it just doesn't seem like smth artem would say 😭

i imagine he'd be sentimental and say "while i missed out on experiencing playing with sparklers as a kid, this experience with you alone makes up for all of it" 🥲 and even if they rlly wanted to keep his original quote, there are so many other ways to reword it so artem isn't basically saying he wants to override her memories until they're all of him (i refuse to acknowledge summer splash as canon and made up my own plot for it LMFAO)

all i can say is that artem in wings of exhilaration was written with the character in mind but artem in summer splash was written for the plot‼️

YOU ARE COOKING ANON. STRAIGHT UP COOKING UP A FEAST. A FULL FIVE COURSE MEAL. AND DEAR GOD AM I EATING ALL OF IT UP!!!!

this is literally the most clear and concise explanation of these cards ever. and how each one handles a similar topic, but differently?? wow, okay yeah i can. definitely see where this card went very very wrong.

the funny thing is i have never liked possessiveness or jealousy plots in otomes/dating sims because more often than not it's treated exactly how you said it was in the summer splash card. it's. the. WOORRRST and it's even more awful here because of how ooc it is.

AND YOU KNOW WHAT?! yeah! the wings card does seem in character and handles the topic like. so normally. !!?? when this stuff is handled well it's so much better and anyways this is required reading for this blog thank you for my life anon this was utterly fantastic, well written, and concise!!!!!!!!!!