I am so not immune to a Medea moment. my beloved has left me. we had a life and a love and a child. my beloved has left me for another. I have lost my life and my love. I still have my child. my beloved deserves to pay. all he has ever really loved is our child. here is a stage. here is a role. here is the chorus to sing my sins. here is my beloved with his horrified gaze, fixed on me. here is my beautiful daughter. here I am, in her countenance, her phrasing, her cruelty and her mirth, mother that I am. punishing him. letting the light in. letting my daughter burn. and here I am, in those beautiful eyes of the girl I helped raise, the very last thing she ever sees before she dies. I am her and she is me; and all that is left of us both is utter agony
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ace El continuing to love sleepovers with Max just as much and in exactly the same way as they grow up, while Max wrestles with the fact that El falling asleep on her shoulder feels more kinds of nice than it did at 13.
El being the biggest cuddlebug and not hiding it at all, because why would she, while Max notices herself wanting to stop it when others are looking. like, she loves sleeping with El wrapped in her arms, but for Hopper to walk past an open doorway and see that makes her feel weird now, even though it's the same as what everyone thought was sweet a few years ago. is it creepy of her to feel weird about it?
people, even the party, starting to react differently to El's casual mentions of "sleeping with Max" or something "Max said in bed the other night". they know it must mean the same thing it always has, because they all know El too, but Max sometimes sees them take an extra half second to process.
Max trying to figure how to explain to El that the older they get, the more people might react differently to the idea of them cuddling and sharing a bed. hesitating at the risk of scaring off the innocence of it by telling El this. knowing El will ask concrete things like at what exact age the rules change and why, and that that will open a whole can of worms that Max isn't ready to address even with herself.
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Labyrinth rant because I love it and need to vent it out
So Jim Henson's Labyrinth is my new fixation.
I kinda wish it was one of my childhood movies, I'm sure I would have loved it just like I loved The Neverending Story, but I'm also happy I discovered it now that I can decode the subtext in it.
It speaks a lot to me. I still am very keen on escaping from reality through fantasy as a coping mechanism, just like Sarah. I can't help but see her adventure not as real, but as a dream become physical. For me, what we see is just a manifestation of an internal struggle. That means her own mind is giving herself the chance to understand a lesson. She's actually fighting not to let her own tendency to escapism dominate her this much anymore, at least not to the point of discarding serious responsabilities. That's why Jareth, who embodies that, is a selfish, bullying tyrant and the Labyrinth is in decay. Reminds me of Scar's reign lol
I think it makes sense that Jareth embodies both her love for fantasy since childhood and the ghost of sexuality. Both (would) inspire her the utmost pleasure, just since two different points of her life.
I love Jareth's and Sarah's dynamic, in that sense. I love her struggle against the temptations he represents. I love how perfectly tempting he is. Yet I'm so satisfied by her final decision to let him down. About her love for fantasy, she's too mature. About sexuality, she's still too young. Both things need to be limited.
I also love how the conclusion isn't about getting rid of some part of you in order to grow up, but to balance all you parts. Your seek of happiness and pleasure and what it inspires it don't need to be erased, just not weight too much. It implies that you don't have to have shame and get rid of anything, every part of you is inherently good just because it helps to build you. It's up to you to balance the components.
It's reassuring and empowering.
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Thinkin abt The Long Halloween film, (& spoilers for it), and remembered someone once complaining they made Gilda’s character bad in the film adaptation of The Long Halloween and a whole ‘she’s just evil because she can’t have kids anymore’ trope and like??? I have to kick in a door and say HUH??? What movie did you see?? Like the character is hella different from the comic yes, but 1, not necessarily in a bad way, a 2, that’s not her motive??? At all?? Like she’s not happy about that, but she’s not ever a ‘im inhuman now I can’t bear kids…’ The woman wants revenge because she experienced an insane trauma, and a betrayal, and the justice system is so broken that even as a lawyer herself, doing everything right, it left her empty and broken and abandoned too.
If anything, she’s just a strong foil for Harvey. She is never like ‘I can’t bear kids so now I must kill’— she’s like ‘I was in love and engaged to the man of my dreams and pregnant with our child, starting my career and family and unbelievably happy, and then his mafia father said ‘no’ to the union and child, and he just…abandoned me. For the family. I fought it, and he didn’t. He didn’t stay, he didn’t protect me, he didn’t love me. He didn’t even try. He let them cut my child out and kill it in front of me while I went kicking and screaming and fighting under the blade 8 months pregnant in a gang nonconsensual abortion, and left me literally hollowed out and alone to ‘recover’ from that, and nothing changed for anyone but me. I died that day, and no one faced ANY consequence. Not even guilt. I lost my ability to do my job, I lost my future, my hope, my ambition, my kid, my plans, my personality, my desire, my emotions, my being. I walked around as a shell. And when the justice system failed me, I found a lawyer who cared and was gunning for that mafia family, and married him, gave him more reason, but even he and Batman and the whole police force weren’t enough to stop them, so I decided to do it myself. I killed them, one holiday at a time, until everyone I wanted dead was fucking dead, and I got my justice.”
That’s an incredibly understandable, well done motive. What she did to Harvey specifically is fucked as hell, but she’s not a badly written lady. I love her comment about Harvey at the end that “We were so similar. Just. What was inside him hadn’t been ripped out yet.” Because she knows (and literally says) how broken and hollow what happened to her made her, and she can tell that what’s happened to him by the end of the story has done the same thing. She’s an incredibly cold and brutal character, but the bitch is well written.
Like, she’s an excellent tragic film noir parallel for Harvey in the film. They go through almost the same trajectory. She is a hopeful young lawyer who believes in Justice who is betrayed and broken by the Roman’s people, and turns to extreme violence outside the system to get her justice when the ‘right way’ fails her. Harvey is literally the exact same thing, and scarred the exact same way, and changes to violence because of it. They both even say the very iconic ‘It had to be done’ close to the end of the film, in their last major scenes. Not echoing each other—neither hears the other. They just felt the same. The deep tragedy of the narrative is that in her search for justice, Gilda did to Harvey what was done to her—an utter betrayal and abandonment by beloved spouse. And he does not do to her what Alberto did. He takes the fall for her, even after the things she’s done, to him, because he loves her. The narrative repeats, the cycle of pain repeats, with the Roman at the heart of it, but with slight aberration because of the people involved this time. And if that ain’t film noir.
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