#also fwiw i'm mooching off my sister's d+ account lol; i'm not gonna pay disney to watch the Singular show i was interested in

[maliro-t]

this is maybe a weird ip combination, but i was talking to a friend yesterday about grief in tms5 compared  to w*nd*v*sion bc the most recent ep got me thinking (this is a pretty long post about the former, sorry).

So Vision says “What is grief, if not love persevering?”, which is such a great line, and really resonated with a lot of people, including myself, and it’s really maybe the crux of this series that has been imo a really great exploration of grief. The whole ep was so impactful for me, and I had a moment after where I just went. Huh. In an entire season, tm never said that once. I think there are moments where they come close- Alice and Hamish’s conversation about his wife maybe, or that one fleeting genuine moment between Eliot and Fen in 5.11, or we could rope in the mountain of ghosts if you really stretch, but I think all of those still miss that mark.

So like, they frame the whole season around grief, but they don’t really say anything about it, or tell a valuable story about it. It feels honestly like they spend most of their time treating it like an obstacle that needs to be overcome and like, what are they trying to say with that? That it sucks? Because I would say that in general, people know that! Or was it that people who DON’T get over it have some sort of pity-worthy-but-ultimately-condemnable character defect? Like I’m sure they were aiming more to show how different people process things in different ways, and that wallowing forever can destroy you, which is...true, and maybe half executed well, but it also doesn’t feel valuable (especially when their queer characters are disproportionately targeted by it), and seems like it tries to put an acceptable timeline on Getting Over It Completely which just kinda Sucks. It probably wouldn’t harp on it this much if they hadn’t been so up their own asses at sdcc trying to explain how important and worthwhile this kind of story was. 

It’s also part of why where Eliot ends up at the end of the season feels so heinous, because he really is in pretty much the same place he started; he’s the only character who really ISN’T given the opportunity to ‘overcome’ grief. Again I don’t even feel like that’s a valuable story, but he just feel so singled out and it fucking Sucks that even within their shitty framework he ends up kind of damned. I think the stuff with Charlton was supposed to counteract it a little- I maintain that he says some good things that sort of recognize why tdk stuff was maybe not great, and as much as I Hate this I do actually think those little mosaic parallels were Intentional as part of that. The way Eliot actually reacts though is so not indicative of growth or any actual healing- it feels more regressive, like s1 Eliot just kind of taking what’s being offered to him to cope, and it’s Weird and Sad, besides the whole thing just being laughable.

And like, for the record, I’ve said this a few times, but I am someone who is really glad they watched s5, and really didn’t agree with a lot of the issues people on here took with it. But that also doesn’t mean that it was actually good on the whole, and one of it’s main failures was...kind of the exact thing they apparently felt so strongly about they had to make a whole season for which just. ugh.

My main reaction after 5.03 aired (which I love, and am grateful for) was just. AGONY. I could not fathom why this story about so much pain (and specifically queer pain) was the one that they wanted to tell, and unfortunately by the end there just isn’t really enough pay off for it to be worth it. 

Anyways idk if any of this makes sense lol, I’m kind of rambling at this point and I don’t know if anyone who follows me even Watched season 5 besides like One (1) person lmao. I have more to say Always, even like a year after the fact.