#also this is so disjointed and i apologise lmao

[picnic-at-dreaming-rock]

i think what's really compelling about tsh is how out of the main players (and really out of everyone) there isn't one Good Person (in the sense of moral right/good vs wrong/evil story dichotomy type Good Person). Like,,, henry vs bunny alone. I feel like there's an instinct among readers (at least those I've seen on tiktok, which, i know, im sorry) to go Henry is Good and Right and Bunny is Evil and Wrong particularly upon first reading and then when you think critically it turns to Bunny is Actually Good and Right and Henry is Evil and Wrong to make sense of the story but both are Shitty, Terrible People.

Henry is a self-important, elitist serial-killer who is completely detached from the world around him from no one's fault but his own and Bunny is a leech who considers biogtry and a guiness world record catagory and blackmails his friends over a murder not because they killed an innocent man but because they didn't include him.

I think this is what makes tsh so compelling. You're not there to take sides, no matter how hard Richard (unconsciously?) tries. You're there to watch a series of terrible events unfold and to consider the complexity of human morality. Not one person is either Good or Evil. It's impossible and destructive to look at people that way and I think that's how tsh messes with you and I love it. I don't think Donna Tartt wants you to forgive or justify anything that anyone does, but to simply perceive them and your reactions to it

[doyelikehaggis]

i’d make that ‘daily tdg rambles’ joke again but i’ve sent like 3 asks since that one so it’s not really daily huh

anyway god i fucking hate the dumblebys. like that whole season plotline is bloody stupid. it’s no surprise they didn’t really do a continuing season-long plotline again (unless you count mike and fiona? but i don’t)

currently watching the episode where chloe and candi-rose first meet and i have so many thoughts. candi-rose is so small like it’s not that long before the current season but she’s tiny w h a t

also the amount of queer energy when chloe first sees her. literally “her. i want to be her.” not straight vibes right there

and ryan’s so worried when chloe disappears?? like they weren’t even getting along but of course he’s still gonna be so damn scared for her and he gets so defensive when he gets blamed for losing her??? you can tell he’s blaming himself again and it’s so sad help

everyone in this show has such queer energy, even going back to tbr, liam’s so clearly (or should i say queerly) jealous of lizanne and frank. and don’t even get me started on johnny. it’s no wonder him and ryan got along. and s a s h a. that bitch is fruity as all hell

damn i mentioned lizanne and now i’m thinking about kitty again. she could’ve been a really interesting character if they hadn’t just removed her from the show when dennis got fired. especially since he literally says she needs specialist help but that they can’t afford it and then we don’t even get to see that play out? i assume mike gina and tracy managed to scrape enough together to help her but we could’ve done with a few more episodes with her, especially since her and rick seemed to be so close and then he never mentions her after that

you better be prepared for when i get back around to the s6 finale because the ryan angst. also t r a c y

lmao wait i forgot that even ryan ships jyler

wow this has been very disjointed i apologise

More like hourly askdhksaj

I'm with you on hating the whole dumbleby plotline (we're calling them that, just go with it, they suck). I rarely rewatch that season for that reason.

FATE MATES. IS FATE MATES SOMETHING A STRAIGHT PERSON CALLS THEIR BEST FRIEND? I THINK NOT. The queer energy in Chloe and Candi-Rose's first episode is off the charts. I remember that scene and I remember dying over it because I genuinely thought, "Oh, okay, so Chloe fancies this girl HARD" the moment she saw her.

I honestly kinda hate the way Ryan's treated in that episode, because he was genuinely terrified that something had happened to her when he couldn't find her, and he was blaming himself, and then Chloe was angry with him, and it kinda felt like he Was being blamed?? He was worried, the poor boy looked like he was going to start crying!

You can't just bring up Liam's queer vibes, that's a whole other seven paragraph post! But you are right, he was so jealous of Lizanne and Frank. Honestly, I also feel he and Toby had this really close bond in the earlier episode of Tracy Beaker Returns, and I can just imagine one or both of them having a crush on the other. And I will absolutely get you started on Johnny because I have never believed that boy is straight. It really is the same as my reasoning for Ryan, like, the way they lash out because of their own insecurities and deep-rooted self-loathing -- there's such a queer kid experience going on with those two, it's no wonder a ton of kids (specifically, queer kids) relate to them specifically! Oh, and yeah, there's no doubt about Sasha. I'm waiting for those unrequited feelings for Jody to finally come out.

I really wish they had given more Kitty screen time!! She was the second mostly non-verbal character we've had (Millie in TSOTB being the first), and her aversion to touch to a point where she hurt Tracy was such an interesting thing! I like your idea that Mike, Gina, and Tracy got the money to get her a specialist. Like you said, I just wish we'd seen it (and more of her and Rick, because the way he tried to defend and protect her melted my heart).

I am already preparing to relive the s6 finale angst with you, don't worry!

And yeah, Ryan is a Jyer shipper lmao.

[dillydedalus]

april reading

oh yeah this is a thing. anyway in april i read about uhhh.... first contact (twice), murderers on skis & victorian church politics

the yield, tara june winch a novel about indigenous australian identity and history (now and throughout the 20th century) in three narrative strands. imo the narrative strand that consists of a grandfather writing a dictionary of his language (wiradjuri) in order to prove a claim to some land is by far the strongest, but overall i liked this quite a lot. 3/5

land of big numbers, te-ping chen a solid short story collection focused on modern china and young(ish) chinese people, both in china and the diaspora. i particularly liked the stories that had some slighty surreal or speculative elements, such as one about fruit that strongly evoke emotions when eaten and a group of people stuck in a train station for months as the train is delayed, which imo use their speculative aspects in effective (if not super subtle) ways to talk about society. 3/5

the pear field, nana ekvtimishvili (tr. from georgian by elizabeth heighway) international booker prize longlist! a short, fairly depressing read about a 18-year-old girl at a post-soviet school for developmentally disabled childred (but also orphans, abandoned children & other random kids) who is trying to get a younger boy adopted by an american couple. there seem to be a lot of novels set at post-soviet orphanages etc & imo this is a well-executed example of the microgenre, with the pear field full of pears that are never picked bc they don’t taste right as a strong central image. 3/5

the warden, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #1) ah yes, a 6-part victorian series about church politics in an english town, exactly the kind of thing i’m interested in. not sure why i committed to at least the first two entries of the series but here we are. despite this lack of interest (and disagreement with most of the politics on display here) i found this quite charming; trollope has a gift for an amusing turn of phrase & making fun of his characters in benevolent ways. 3/5

the lesson, cadwell turnbull first contact scifi novel set on the virgin islands, where an alien ship arrives one day. the aliens seem benevolent & share helpful technology, but also react with extreme violence to any aggression. they claim to be on earth to study.... something, but it’s never entirely clear what. the book makes some interesting choices (like immediately skipping over the actual first contact to a few years in the future, when the aliens are already established on the islands) but i thought much of it was kinda disjointed and confusing. 2/5

the heart is a lonely hunter, carson mccullers look, i get it, it’s all about the isolation & alienation (& dare i say loneliness) of 4 miserable characters projecting their issues on the central character singer, who is kind and patient and also deaf and mute, thus making him the perfect receptacle for their issues without really having to connect with him as a person and how that isolation hinders them socially, artistically, emotionally, politically, but like... i didn’t really like it. i didn’t hate it but i just felt very meh about it all. 2.5/5

acht tage im mai: die letzte woche des dritten reiches, volker ulrich fascinating history book about the last week(ish) of the third reich, starting with the day of hitler’s suicide and ending with the total surrender (but with plenty of flashbacks and forwards), and looking at military&political leadership (german and allied) as well as prisoners of war, forced laborers, concentration camp prisoners, and everyone else. very interesting look at what kästner described as the “gap between the not-anymore and the not-yet.” 3.5/5

firekeeper’s daughter, angeline boulley) i’ve been mostly off the YA train for the last few years, but this was a really good example of contemporary YA with a focus on ~social issues. ANYWAY. this is YA crime novel about daunis, a mixed-race unenrolled ojibwe girl close to finishing high school who is struggling with family problems, university plans, and feeling caught between her white and her native familiy when her best friend is shot in front of her and she decides to become a CI for an fbi investigation into meth production in the community. i really appreciated how hard this went both with the broader social issues (racism, addiction) and daunis’ personal struggles. there are a few bits that felt a bit didactic & on the nose (and the romance... oh well), but overall the themes of community, family, and the value of living indigenous culture are really well done & i teared up several times. 4/5

the magic toyshop, angela carter i love carter’s short stories but struggle with (while still liking) her novels so far. this one, a tale of melanie, suddenly orphaned after trying on her mother’s wedding dress in the garden, coming of age and awakening to womanhood or whatever. carter’s really into that. it’s well-written, sensual as carter always is, and the family melanie and her siblings are sent to, her tyrannical puppet-maker uncle, his mute wife and the wife’s two brothers, both fascinating and offputting (& dirty) make for an interesting cast of characters, but overall i just wish i was reading the bloody chamber again. 3/5

barchester towers, anthony trollope (chronicles of barsetshire #2) (audio) lol tbh i still don’t know why i am committing to this series about, again, church politics in 19th century rural england, but it’s just so chill & warm & funny (we love gently or not so gently - but always politely - mocking our characters) that i’m enjoying it as a nice little trip where people do some #crazyschemes to gain church positions or fight over whether there should be songs in church or whatever it is people in the 19th century fought about. it’s very relaxing. there also is a lot of love quadrangleyness going on and that’s also fun. trollope has weird ideas about women but like whatever, i for one wish mrs proudie much joy of her position as defacto bishop of barchester, she really girlbossed her way to the top. 3.5/5

semiosis, sue burke (semiosis #1) i love spinning the wheel on the “first contact with X weird alien species” & i guess this time we landed on plants! plant intelligence is interesting and the idea of plant warfare is really cool. i do like the structure, with different generations of human settlers on the planet pax providing a long-term view but this allows the author to skip over a lot of the development of the relationship between the settlers and the plant and locating the plot elsewhere, which i think is ultimately a mistake. i might continue w/ the series tho, depending on library availability. 2.5/5

one by one, ruth ware a bunch of start-up people go on a corporate retreat to a ski chalet in the alps, avalanche warning goes up, one of them disappears, presumably on a black piste, the rest get snowed in & completely cut off when the avalanche hits and then they get picked off *title drop* (altho really not that many of them). nice fluff when i had a miserable cold (not covid) but fails when it tries to go for deeper themes... like an attempt to address classism and entitlement sure... was made. also like what kind of luxury skiing chalet does not have emergency communication devices in case internet/phone lines are down...  i’d have sued just for that. 2/5

fake accounts, lauren oyler the microgenre of ‘alienated intellectual(ish) probably anglophone person has some sort of crisis, goes to berlin about it’ is my ultimate literary weakness - i almost never really like them, they mostly irritate me & yet i can never resist their siren call. this one is p strong on the irritation, altho at least the narrator does not ascribe much meaning to her decision to go to berlin after she a) discovers her boyf is an online conspiracy theorist (probably not sincerely) and b) gets a call that said boyf has died, it’s really just something to do to avoid doing anything else. but other than that it’s so BerlinExpat by the numbers, like she lives in kreuzkölln! put her somewhere else at least! there is one scene that elevates the BerlinExpat-ness of it all (narrator asks expatfriend for advice on visa applications, expatfriend assures her that it’s really easy for americans to get visa, adds “especially now” while literally, as the narrator remarks, gesturing at the falafel she’s eating) other than that, the novel is.... fine. it’s smart, but not really as smart as it thinks it is, which is a problem bc it thinks it’s just sooo incisive. whatever. 2/5

the tenant of wildfell hall, anne bronte this is reductive but: jane eyre: i could fix him // wuthering heights: i could make him worse // wildfell hall: lmao i’m gonna leave his ass anyway i enjoyed the part that is actually narrated by the titular tenant of wildfell hall, helen (which thankfully, i think, is most of it) because the perspective of a woman who runs away from her abusive alcoholic of a husband is genuinely interesting and engaging, while gilbert, the frame story narrator who falls in love with helen, is.... the worst. i mean he’s not the worst bc the abusive husband arthur is there and hard to beat in terms of worseness, but he’s pretty fucking bad. imagine if helen had found out that gilbert attacked her secret brother over a misunderstanding, severely injured him & LEFT HIM TO DIE & then (when dude survived & the misunderstanding got cleared up) apologised like well i guess i didn’t treat you quite right! she’d have to run away from her second husband as well! poor girl. 3/5

[harrysdimples]

miss americana thoughts:

this is going to be very disorganised and long and ramble-y so I apologise lol but I have too much invested in this to not write an essay on it lmao. 

I’ve said before when talking about harry, that I hate when people say ‘oh how could you ever break up with THE harry styles’ because I feel that sort of absolves him from any possible wrongdoing he could ever do in a relationship. the breakup and endings of relationships and even friendships are very, very rarely at fault of only one person in the relationship and that shouldn’t be any different just because they’re a celebrity. I bring this up because with miss americana, the framing of taylor’s apolitical stance and overall good girl image feels somewhat disjointed to me, which is something that carries throughout the documentary unfortunately. It is absolutely true (and I am by no means refuting this whatsoever because it’s very, very apparent this happens in the music industry, especially in the time period taylor was making her debut) that female artists are told to sit idly by and project themselves in a way of being ‘pure’ or play into the sexiness they’re objectified by, but they shouldn’t speak out of turn unless spoken to. BUT framing taylor’s entire career that way to me feels a similar way to what I just mentioned about harry, it absolves her of the responsibility somewhat to speak out and instead frames the issue many people have with her as something different to what it is. 

I completely understand how pressured she must’ve felt to keep that image going (especially with how much she said she fought for approval from everyone) but that doesn’t mean it’s a cover-all bases excuse. for someone who has said before that they are directly involved with the marketing of their music and what she projects as her brand, I don’t think it’s fair enough to pivot to pinning all of what people find frustrating about taylor onto the media. I think that was one of my problems with reputation too, that any time I felt she could’ve really dug into her psyche and the disillusionment with her public image, she backed off or got too scared to push the envelope, and I sort of feel the same here with miss americana. it’s okay to say she fucked up (and she did say that with her politics in the arguing scene with her dad which I appreciated) and that she also was in the wrong at times, but I feel that a lot of the time rather than saying that, she circled back to the talking point of sexism in the industry (which is still prevalent of course) and that’s disappointing to me. 

I would’ve liked to see more about how she had to reject her previous belief systems, because judging from her dad’s politics, he is a republican, which growing up, whether she liked it or not, had to have influenced her, as it does with every person and their own parents. I don’t think she realises how much the kanye/taylor feud (regardless of whether kanye was ever right or wrong) played into the angry black man vs virginal pure white girl trope that was a microcosm of american politics at the time, and that’s why it was so important she spoke up when she failed to. it benefitted her, along with the belief that she was secretly conservative and someone alt-right groups could praise, whether she wants to acknowledge that or not, and I wish someone had challenged her on that. I appreciate what taylor has done in speaking out and what she has done for the LGBTQ community, but it all feels slightly marketed as Taylor Swift Is The First Pop Star To Talk About Politics to me still. 

I said when the trailer came out that the part about nobody actively hating her in the audience was meant to be played for laughs but was concerning to me, and a few things in the doc also stuck out to me in a similar vein. her comment about having a very ‘slappable face’ when filming the ME! music video is....concerning to say the least. i’m not surprised she’s unfortunately internalised seemingly a lot of what people have said about her, but combined with her saying that she had nobody to call after she won AOTY for 1989, I just can’t help but feel worried for her that she’s stuck her heels in the sand about therapy. it’s not a failure, and I feel like from what she’s said in interviews, she feels like it is. her being so upset about reputation not getting nominations was really sad to me, I know how much it must’ve hurt for her to feel she put out a great record and to not get recognition for it, but it was alarming to me that she disregarded it as soon as it didn’t get that validation and she had to be reminded that it was a good record. I think it was the NY Times review, or one of them at least, mentioned how much loneliness seemed to follow Taylor, and I can’t help but agree with that sentiment. the small moments shown with Joe were very sweet, but it all feels very contained and inward-looking, and besides her small circle she doesn’t really have many people around her. I mean, she’s mentioned multiple times in her lyrics on rep and lover that joe somewhat ‘saved’ her from the place she was in, which is lovely, but also she upped and moved to london for him and the kind of idolisation she seems to have in her lyrics about him isn’t really healthy for anyone imho. I don’t know. I just hope she has good people around her and not just yes men when it comes to her music and who she is as a person.

some of the scenes felt out of place in the way they were framing the documentary, like the scene where she and abigail were having dinner or when I felt like she was swearing to prove somewhat of a point (if anyone ever watched them, it felt the same way as to when zoella and alfie deyes on youtube started swearing on youtube to appeal to an older audience but it instead came off as a weird inclusion in their videos) and I think that took me out of what the film was supposed to be, because those scenes read to me as purely there to serve a purpose of pushing an image, whereas the others didn’t, they felt as if they were just following her and asking her questions in a natural way. 

I guess i’ll finish this post (even though im sure I have more thoughts that will come out once i’m reminded of some stuff) with i’m just not really sure what she was aiming for with this doc. I don’t know if it was for the fans, but I felt for me it didn’t include a lot of the stuff I love to see from her (behind the scenes writing stuff) as a fan, or if it was meant to convince or sway those that aren’t fans with her political views, which I don’t think it did, and if she was aiming for both, I don’t think she really achieved that. it’s similar to what I said about reputation before, she mostly backed off when things could’ve been even more interesting than what she presented to the audience in the first place. idk. this was a word vomit lol

[bloonstuff]

ok eva and jonas’ break up scene just like hit me in all the raw places emotionally and sadly megan and marlon’s just didn’t. it didn’t feel as bitter sweet. and while i get the symbolism of the car wash scene, washing all the shit away... i wasn’t into it. i also found it a bit disjointed, them going swimming and then breaking up, then lying in the grass for a while and then going to a car wash and hooking up. i thought they were going to have the goodbye sex in the water tbh. but whatever.

as always, josefina was everything. i think my favourite bit of the whole clip was her dancing with the violin. lmao

it was nice that cleo and megan had some closure. 

lol at tyler carrying the phallic plush and hitting the girls with it but like... also, rude. 

ugh, as expected i guess grace bribed donald to apologise to kelsey. blech. honestly, if nothing changes with season two imma be so mad. i’unno if i’m going to be able to stomach it. we’ll see.

lastly, SHAY IS MOTHERFUCKING ISAK. i mean we all dared to hope and dream and finally it has been delivered. i also liked how they went about revealing it. it kinda made more sense in the context of things. i can’t wait to see how season three plays out, what role tyler plays and whether or not they will introduce any others to the trio’s friend group. will there be a magnus or mahdi character or will tyler sort of be them combined? i can’t wait to find out!