#anyways ellen? an angle among us

[boykingdom]

Dean doesn’t have to drive far before he finds Cas. He’d had a hunch Cas might be waiting for him no matter the direction he went, but still he can’t help the sigh of relief he lets out when he sees the slump of Cas’ shoulders among the trees.

He doesn’t have to walk far, either, once he’s pulled the Impala into the grass beside the road and let the metal door shut behind him with a creak. He’s in the forest after a few paces—it’s a pretty forest, all green and overgrown, the tan of Cas’ coat standing out purely for its dullness. Cas’ back is to him and he’s looking down at something, hands in his pockets, but the rigidity with which he holds himself gives away his awareness of Dean’s presence. Cas won’t turn toward him but will angle his head so Dean can see the sharp line of his cheekbone, like he’s any sort of thing that would need ears to gauge how close Dean is.

Dean has half a mind to hesitate, to stop and take a deep breath and collect his thoughts or something, but he’s so fucking tired of not being near Cas and of schooling how much he gives away to Cas in every conversation that he walks up so their shoulders are inches apart and he doesn’t think twice about it. He looks down to take in what Cas is looking at and finds a small pond with a few muddy-gray fish scooting their bellies across the silt. Dean thinks Cas might be gearing up for a speech about the fish and creation and humanity, something nice and cinematic to bookend their journey, but instead Cas says, “Hello, Dean.”

That works, too. At least Dean knows how to respond to that one. “Heya, Cas.”

They’re silent for a second.

“Sam?” says Cas. 

“Went off to the Roadhouse. Wanted to see Bobby and Ellen and Jo,” says Dean. “But you knew that already.”

“Mm. I did.”

They both watch the fish drift. One comes close enough to the surface to form gentle ripples in the water.

Then Dean is smiling, because he can see Cas out of the corner of his eye, see the way he shifts and fidgets and is so clearly also looking at Dean out of the corner of his own eye. It occurs to Dean that Cas is nervous—that after everything they’ve been through, after the end of the world, after Cas’ big sacrifice, this angel of the Lord is nervous to speak to his best friend of twelve years. Dean can’t help but take the opportunity to tease him.

“What, did you think we’d never talk about it?”

A pause. Cas half-grumbles, “I thought I’d have a few decades to prepare something to say.”

And then Dean is laughing and laughing and bent over double with it because this whole thing is so fucking absurd and he’s so happy to be standing here next to Cas, weird and awkward Cas who pulled him out of Hell and told Dean he was in love with him just months ago. Cas who he thought he had lost forever. Dean laughs so hard he cries and then he—he cries, and cries, and he’s not laughing anymore. It happens fast and hard. Cas finally turns to him, eyes wide and hands suspended in front of him like he’s not sure if he’s allowed to touch. Dean’s sniveling and holding his jacket sleeve under his nose so his face doesn’t get all snotty but he probably looks fucking gross anyway, the way the tears won’t stop coming. Cas says, “Dean?” all worried and concerned. Dean practically falls forward into him, wraps his arms around Cas’ waist to clutch at the back of his coat and shakes when Cas immediately holds him in return.

“I missed you so bad,” Dean sobs into Cas’ shoulder. “I missed you so bad. I thought I would never see you again. I missed you so bad.”

“Oh,” Cas breathes. “I’m here. It’s okay. I’m right here.” Cas hugs him tighter, leaving no spaces between their bodies. His voice breaks a little when he says, “I missed you, too.”

They stand like that for a moment. The forest buzzes around them, twiddling with birds and squirrels and insects. Dean breathes Cas in, feels him warm and safe and real in his arms. It’s a small piece of Earth here in Heaven. Unlike any other time before, Dean lets himself lean into it, touch Cas without Death looming over their shoulders. It feels good.

Dean does calm down after a few minutes, and as much as he would love to freeze time and stay suspended in that moment, he knows he can have even more if he gives it one last push. He pulls away, Cas’ hands sliding off his coat, lingering. “Sorry,” he says, a little embarrassed despite himself.

“Don’t be,” says Cas, in a way a that shows he really means it. Dean clears his throat and looks at him. Cas looks back. The whole thing is so achingly familiar, so akin to how they were when they first met. Even when Cas was alien and unknowable and potentially a threat, Dean always had to stifle the breathless thrill of having Cas’ attention. He doesn’t stifle it now.

He hasn’t quite internalized all the things Cas said to him, but he can see Cas was telling the truth about one thing—he is clearly so happy to be standing at the edge of this pond with Dean. Nothing in his gaze is asking for something more.

And as much as Cas would argue differently, Dean isn’t as good as him. He was never content just wanting. He had long ago accepted that he could never have Cas, sure, had recognized that he would spend the rest of his life with a horrible ache in his chest, that he would white-knuckle the wheel of the Impala to keep himself from touching. But he couldn’t find peace with it. Love rotted in him like a body at the bottom of a well. He spent a long time thinking it would kill him and kill Cas too, that it was a weapon to be used against them both, that the heat of his gaze would actually burn Cas if he looked long enough. He still has to choke down those half-formed thoughts when he looks at Cas now and can see in his eyes that he loves Dean without reservation, that despite everything he doesn’t think of Dean’s love as a death sentence. That he wants him.

Dean’s mind was made up the second Bobby had mentioned Cas’ name on the porch. It took him too long to untangle that part of himself that couldn’t separate loving men from danger, but he did untangle it, in the end.

“I know I can do it,” Dean says, both to Cas and to himself, “but I think it might be hard.”

Cas’ brow flickers in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“This,” he answers, gesturing lamely at the two of them, at the space between them. He swallows, steels himself, thinks of all the words he spent the nights since Cas died murmuring into his pillow, deliriously drunk. “I don’t know— I don’t know how to be this to someone— to you. I’ve never— and you’re—”

He’s getting frustrated, is upset that after thinking so long and hard about this moment for so many years he somehow still doesn’t know how to explain to Cas how much he means to him, how much he wants him, how hard it is to beat down his self-hatred and accept that he might just deserve Cas, too. But Christ, he wants to try.

“Dean?” Cas says. Dean can see in his expression the flowering bud of hope. He is so beautiful.

“I love you too,” Dean says, because it’s the best explanation he can give. His heart is beating so hard he can feel it in his throat. Cas blinks; his mouth drops open. “God, Cas, you have to know that. Of course I love you too.”

“You mean...?” Cas can’t finish the question. He’s looking at Dean like a man finding faith, finding Heaven. Dean feels so overwhelmed and so happy for the two of them and surely he’s still red from crying before, but again he feels himself burning.

“I’ve been yours,” he chokes out. “You can have me. Please.”

Cas kisses Dean. It happens so fast that Dean feels it coming rather than sees it, feels Cas’ hands on his face, feels himself be tugged forward. Cas’ hands are shaking and Dean’s are too when he grips the front of Cas’ shirt and the back of his neck, eyes closed tight, learning the shape of his mouth. It’s hard and a little desperate and not at all artful, and Dean’s whole self feels a bit like an open wound but Cas is healing him, like he always has, like he has since the beginning.

Dean pulls away for air but doesn’t pull far, keeping his forehead pressed to Cas’ and his eyes shut. Cas’ thumb strokes his cheekbone. “Dean,” Cas says, and Dean takes a deep, shuddering breath. The way Cas says his name doesn’t scare him anymore.

Dean opens his eyes. He smiles. “Hi,” he says.

Cas smiles back.

**

They’re sitting in the Impala, Dean’s hand on Cas’ thigh, when Cas asks, “What do you want to do now?”

Dean pauses, thinks. The answer to what do you want has been Cas for so long, but he never let himself think far enough to decide what he would do if he ever got him. He’s safe, Cas is safe, Sam is safe. Realistically, he shouldn’t want for anything.

He looks out the Impala’s windshield, smooths the hand not holding Cas over the steering wheel. He knows that he loves this car with everything he is—that for a long time it was the only home he had. He also knows that he’s tired of the road. Desire has always come too easily to Dean.

“I think I’ll build us a house,” he answers, and immediately he knows it’s the right thing to do. They can pick a spot wherever Cas wants—Dean’s not picky. It’ll be something solid, something with walls that he built with trees he cut himself. Something that reflects the home he already built for Cas, the one that lives between his ribs.

Cas’ eyes light up. “I like that plan,” he says. “I want that, too.”

Years ago, Cas had sat in Dean’s passenger seat and asked him if he would rather have peace or freedom. Dean never got the chance to answer him.

Dean leans across the seat and kisses Cas again, open-mouthed, slow. He does it for him now and for the version of himself who mourned the distance between them. It’s answer enough.

[rewolfaekilerom]

ginny & georgia is good.

//NOTE: This was originally posted to Wordpress on 05.01.2021//

Let me start by saying that I tried to think of a clever title for this post, but all I could think of was the simple fact that I really like Ginny & Georgia. Excuse my lack of cleverness this week. I’m not sure if it’s my body responding to the first vaccine dose or if it’s the fog of seasonal allergies, but my brain is mush; my sense of smell is also not right. Also, Bug scratched the hair off of one of her ears (I’m pretty sure that’s seasonal allergies, poor thing) and I’ve spent a cumulative 15 hours this past week rendering, exporting, and uploading one single video onto YouTube for work (lost story short: I’m back at the rendering stage after I realized the audio got unsynced in the second half of the video. Ugh). It’s been a WEEK.

Excuses, excuses.

So, while I wait for my laundry and as I take a break from New Pokemon Snap (omg, it’s so good), I thought I’d brain-vomit my thoughts about Ginny & Georgia. Proving true to the portrait I gave of myself in my last post, I’m happy (or embarrassed?) to say that I watched Ginny & Georgia (henceforth G&G) twice this week. I finished episode 10 and immediately started rewatching episode 1, and it’s taking everything in me to not start rewatching for a third time. But depending on what you consider a week, I might be on week two now? ANYWAY.

I’ll start this brain-dump by saying, again, I really like this show. I described it to friends as a cross between Gilmore Girls and Pretty Little Liars or Outer Banks–maybe with a touch of Dexter. I don’t think it’s just that, but I think that’s a good way to summarize how it feels to watch the show, and those are good things in my book. GG and Dexter are probably in my top 5 favorite TV shows, and OB is up there too. I’ve watched OB through twice, and it definitely quenched my mid-winter thirst for the beach and my perpetual desire for a solid mystery/intrigue. I grew up watching the Travel Channel, so any show set in an even moderately interesting locale is immediately catching my interest. Oh, and I watched the entire PLL series with my mom while I was a teenager and even after I went away to college; it was “our show”–our way of sharing cultural ground even when I was away from home for the first time. We watched each episode together when it aired on TV, and we’d be the first to admit that the show was–at best–illogical, comically dramatic, and unrealistic to the umpth degree. But sometimes it’s fun to watch a show and laugh at its absurdity.

G&G doesn’t fall into the same traps that a lot of those types of teen shows do. It has drama and intrigue; it has sex and “teen problems” (which are really just person problems). But it also has real conversations about race and sexuality and parent-child relationships that go beyond the CW/Freeform problem-for-problem’s-sake model (hi, PLL)) or the WB squeaky-clean-problems approach (I’m talking to you, Seventh Heaven). It takes a Skins approach to issues young people face–well, if Skins was made for a puritanical US audience, but not THAT US Skins reboot. We’ll never talk about that. Shhh. Look away.

I’m not going to rehearse the plot of G&G, so look it up for yourself right now. I’ll wait.

Just kidding. I’m not waiting. Go look it up on your own time.

The similarities between G&G and GG are glaring (hell, Georgia even calls herself and Ginny the Gilmores with bigger boobs). In both, you have a young, single mom who had her daughter at 15/16 and then ran away from home. The mom is plucky, charismatic, and doesn’t always navigate the world by making the most, er, ethical choices. The daughter initially seems a bit more reserved and like she wants to play by the rules, but deep down is just a younger version of the mother, and that comes out of the course of the series. The two relate to one another as friends, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re parent and child and that there is an inherent power imbalance there. The daughter is a little too mature for her own good and the mother is a little too immature for her own good. They butt heads, usually over the mother’s past and present choices (particularly regarding men) and the daughter’s present and future choices (also often regarding men). Their fights and falling outs are truly spectacular–they fight like only a mother and daughter could, but they also love one another–though they can’t express that love in the most logical or legible ways. They’re dysfunctional in every way you could imagine, and they really should be in family counseling.

But that’s not all. If that were it, I’d say, “oh, boohoo, they have similar types of characters. As if this is novel? Hasn’t this been done before? Get off your high horse.” NO. The parallels between these two shows go WAY deeper than that. Georgia is Lorelei and Ginny is Rory–hell, their naming practices are even similar. Georgia named herself after the state she was in the first time she had to come up with a pseudonym; this initiated a naming practice wherein she names her children after the cities/states they’re born in–hence Ginny, for Virginia. Rory is a nickname for Lorelei. (Side note: Lorelei is a hard name to type.)

Fine, fine. But we also have the tripartite relationship dynamics. Lorelei’s Big Three are Christopher, Max, and Luke; Georgia’s are Zion (Ginny’s dad and Georgia’s “penguin”–still not positive what that means, except that they can’t let go of one another?), Paul (the mayor, a white collar, public-facing profession), and Joe (the cafe/restaurant owner). If teenaged Rory has Dean and Jess, Ginny has Hunter and Marcus, respectively; Rory and Ginny obviously belong with the “bad boy”–they have infinitely better chemistry and get one another–but struggle with how good they “look” with the good guy, who’s actually kind of a judgmental jerk (as the bad guy points out).

Stars Hollow looks a whole lot like Wellsbury–hell, they’re both in New England. Wellsbury IS the most New England town name ever. Period. I love me some picturesque New England town bullshit.

Oh, and the side characters. Ellen and Sookie fill the same niche, and it’s a good one. They’re easily the most likable characters in both shows, and their husbands are genuinely funny characters in their own rights. GG has the sexually ambiguous (until he’s not) but oh-so-sarcastic Michel while G&G has Nick. Arguably, you could lump Kirk in with Michel to get Nick, but Nick isn’t as bumbling as Kirk, so maybe that point doesn’t stand. Hell, for friends Rory has the angel and devil on her shoulders in the form of Lane and Paris; Ginny has Max and Abby. And if Stars Hollow has Taylor Doose, Wellsbury has Cynthia Fuller. The list goes on.

Of course, a staple of GG is Emily and Richard Gilmore, but we glimpse that in G&G’s flashbacks to Zion’s parents, who help Georgia and Zion when the two first have Ginny. They’re similarly exasperated with their child’s choices and come off as a little overbearing but nonetheless have good intentions. They don’t have nearly as much screen time as Emily and Richard, which is a shame, but they serve a similar function.

Oh! And the flashbacks. They’re one of the charming parts of GG–they give us really important backstory on Lorelei’s life and life choices prior to the series’ start (and Rory’s birth, frankly). They’re less charming in G&G because Georgia’s background is far darker than GG ever could or would have conjured.

This gets me to why G&G isn’t just a GG rip-off. G&G isn’t just a woke GG. It isn’t just GG with people of color, in the LGBTQIA+ community, of varied socioeconomic classes, or from outside New England. If you like GG, you might like G&G, but you also might not. G&G addresses real life challenges teenagers, women, people of colorm hell, most Americans face in 2021. It depicts the US in its multiple angles, some of which are very, very ugly. Some might say that it’s GG for 2021, and maybe it is, but if that’s true, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. I’m just not sure it’s totally true.

I’m going to cool it on the GG-G&G comparisons for a moment and just talk about G&G because I think you get my point. Before I cool it completely, though, and as a point of departure, I’ll say that if we do go with the idea that G&G is GG for 2021, then we need to recognize what G&G does differently: it gives us glimpses into how a whole range of people experience the US, and it doesn’t look away from ugly, unflattering, hateful truths that reside just below the surface of sparkly, shiny, pretty, picture-perfect towns. It doesn’t shy away from reality, even if that reality is uncomfortable for white, middle-class, cis, het viewers.

The important things about G&G that I haven’t yet mentioned in specifics are a’plenty.

Ginny (and Hunter) is mixed-race, a subject that comes up on a number of occasions in the form of explicit conversations about how being mixed-race doesn’t necessarily mean belonging to two communities but can instead mean feeling out of place in both. It also comes up in a very hard-to-watch argument between Ginny and Hunter where the two trade insults about one another’s lack of belonging; the argument escalates into a screaming match in which the two effectively diminish not only one another’s claims to their Black (in Ginny’s case) and Taiwanese (in Hunter’s case) identities but also the prejudices they experience at the hands of a hegemonic white society that systematically denies opportunities or a sense of belonging (among other things) for those who don’t fit into readily identifiable “boxes.”

Georgia ran away from her childhood home in rural, impoverished Arkansas because she was being sexually abused by her stepfather, who then went on to sexually abuse her half-sister.

Georgia has killed people, often for “legitimate” (???) reasons, including posing threats to Ginny.

Georgia used to be in a biker gang and still has connections with at least one member, a lawyer she has on retainer to help her “disappear” her misdeeds, including said murders.

Marcus and Ginny have struggled (or are currently struggling) with self-harm and suicide ideation.

Literally every single one of the teenagers in this show is under immense pressure to over-engage in extracurricular activities that will make them competitive candidates at top universities.

Parents’ unhealthy relationships with one another, divorce, and everything else in that realm also shape the teenaged characters’ lives.

Abby struggles with an eating disorder that’s fueled in part by comments her male peers (notably, an asshole named Press) about her body. Male characters make sexist, stereotyping comments to Ginny about her body, too.

I’ll stop there, but I do so with full knowledge that I’m likely leaving something out. Hell, as I type this I remember that Austin (Ginny’s younger half-brother) literally stabs a kid in the hand and there’s a private detective trying to figure out Georgia’s past, including if/how she murdered her previous husband (the impetus for the family’s move). Like I said, there’s so much more to this show than just its similarities with GG. But I’ve also seen articles online decrying viewers who make the connection, and I don’t think that’s quite the right approach. The show clearly isn’t copying GG. Even if G&G did take inspiration from GG, it takes that inspiration in a fresh direction.

I wonder, though, about how we, the viewers, are supposed to respond to certain aspects of the show.

For instance, the show pits the US South as the source of obvious Bad Stuff ™–child abuse, incest, poverty, etc.– and the US Northeast as a place where the Bad Stuff ™ is hidden beneath a picture-perfect veneer. I get what the show’s creators are going for. They’re attempting to give us a multidimensional perspective on the US in all its prettiness and ugliness, but I wonder if associating the South with only the Bad Stuff ™ is doing a disservice to a region that has a rich cultural past and present–a past and present that’s certainly included problems like poverty, racism, and abuse but cannot be defined by those things alone because those things are not all that’s there. To tie those things primarily to just one region because those are stereotypes that are often perpetuated about that region seems a bit . . . overly simplistic? Troublesome? Dare I use the old grad-student favorite–problematic? It’s too easy–it’s lazy, in fact–to pit South against Northeast as the source of the US’s outright ugliness. It’s the rhetoric surrounding the 2016 presidential election all over again, and, frankly, we could all use a break.

The other thing that regional competition does is it makes it possible for the show to gloss over the fact that those Bad Things ™ exist in the Northeast, too. I feel silly saying that because it seems so obvious, but the simplistic portrait the show paints of the US means that it sacrifices accurate representation and complexity for the sake of–well, actually, I’m not sure what it’s for the sake of. Maybe straightforward storytelling? That might make sense if the show didn’t dwell in other complexities and commit itself to attempting to represent other identities and aspects of American life with some degree of accuracy, so I don’t know.

I can’t speak to whether the show accurately represents the experiences of mixed-race people, LGBTQIA+ people, or people with disabilities. I suspect that it represents the experiences of some people accurately but, of course, not all people because that would be impossible. I’m also not sure if I think the show’s commitment to representing a variety of experiences of US life borders on tokenism. I can’t speak for how someone who occupies one of those subject positions experiences the show because I do not occupy that subject position. My gut reaction is that the show does seem to make an effort to go beyond the whole “look at us, we cast all sorts of people in our show” by attempting to humanize all of its characters as real humans with rich, complex lives. It weaves the characters’ lives into a tight web, making clear that a character like Max and Marcus’s dad isn’t noteworthy just because he’s deaf. You don’t look at Clint and think “oh, that’s the deaf character.” You think, oh, that’s Clint; he’s Ellen’s husband, Max and Marcus’s dad, he’s deaf, he makes pithy remarks about his over-the-top daughter and slacker son, and he performs strip-teases for his wife. He’s noteworthy because he’s an engaged (and absolutely hilarious) husband and father whose deafness is one of many identities of his that influences his children’s lives as any other cultural identity would influence a family’s dynamic. The entire family is (at least) bilingual, communicating in sign language and spoken English while also teaching their sign language skills to friends and significant others. His deafness is one identity among many that the show invests him with, and he’s not in all that many scenes.

I could be wrong, but that was my experience while watching the show and thinking about it a bit afterward and while writing this post.

The show depicts mixed-race identity in a complex way, too, but it dwells on it a bit longer and with a bit more detail. I mentioned that Ginny and Hunter are both of mixed-race parentage and that their mixed-race identities become a subject of a relationship-ending argument. To back up a bit, though, the show attempts to paint a vivid portrait of the challenges Ginny in particular faces as a she navigates middle-class, white suburbia as the daughter of a Black father and a white mother. We see how she reacts when a police office walks toward her at a gas station while she pumps gas in her mother’s BMW, when a teacher tells her she’s being “aggressive” (while her classmates, who display similar behaviors, are unremarked upon), when her hair frizzes out after her friends pressure her to let another student’s white mom brush her curls into a ponytail using a boar-bristle brush, when a male friend (multiple male friends?) tells her that she doesn’t look like a stereotypical Black girl, and, among other things, when another student asks her “what are you?” in an attempt to pinpoint her racial/ethnic identities. Each instance is painful to watch because the actress who plays Ginny plays her well; the camera stays trained on her face as she responds to each of these interactions, allowing the viewer to observe the range of emotions she feels as she repeatedly navigates a community of peers and adults who can’t get their shit together and respect her existence. These interactions aren’t quirky neighbors asking silly questions about why she hangs her laundry a certain way or informing her that she needs to only mow her lawn on Thursdays. These are interactions that repeatedly undermine her sense of belonging, that tell her she’s somehow different, and that question her very right to exist. It’s heartbreaking, but I think it’s important that it’s depicted because that’s reality for many, many people.

The scene with Hunter is interesting because it shows the two turning something that was common-ground into a source of conflict for them. I’m not entirely sure how to read this scene. It’s difficult to watch because it rapidly descends into a “who is the most disenfranchised?” competition rather than a respectful conversation about each partner’s different experiences with prejudice. I wondered if the subtext here was some commentary on how members of one racial community pit themselves against members of other racial communities. (I’m not being clear here, and I’m struggling to clarify even as I go back to edit this post. I guess what I mean is that, when I initially watched this scene, I worried that this was a negative commentary on the Black community in particular and how it engages with other racial communities. I hope that makes sense.) Frankly, I’m still not sure if that’s not what’s happening there or if that’s not what was intended. What I’m fairly certain of, though, is that the scene makes clear that we, the viewer, are being told pretty explicitly that we can’t identify the two as “good partners” on the sole basis that they have mixed-race parentage in common. In other words, the scene undermines the idea that experience of racial prejudice is the only (or even the most important) factor that brings two people together and makes them good partners for one another. It also undermines the belief that experiencing prejudice doesn’t mean a person is automatically awakened to the prejudices other people also experience.

This is also one of the scenes where Ginny truly is unlikeable. Hunter is, too, but he’s unlikeable in a number of scenes throughout the show. He’s the Good Guy™ character in a nutshell–says all the right things, does all the right things, is all the right things, but maybe isn’t all those things for all the right reasons. In this scene, Ginny enacts the prejudicial treatment she’s suffered at the hands of her peers against Hunter; she questions the validity of his identity and the veracity of his experiences of prejudice at the hands of his peers. This scene is the breaking-point where the two have to come to terms with the fact that they’re not compatible even though, on some surface and by some set of metrics, they might appear to be.

Hunter sucks, but so does Marcus–for different reasons, though. Marcus is detached, withdrawn, sarcastic, unmotivated, disrespectful, and dishonest. He’s unaware–and doesn’t attempt to improve at all on this–of how his actions impact other people. He just doesn’t care about anyone but himself–until he does, a little bit. Some part of me has sympathy for Marcus and genuinely likes him; I’ll blame the show for that. Another part of me–the part that’s 30 years old and has known plenty of Marcuses–doesn’t have time for his shit. I’m conflicted, but the majority of me wants Marcus and Ginny to end up together because the things they have in common and the things that bring them together are the things that most people look for in a relationship. Marcus is a lazy shit most of the time, but he makes a genuine effort to understand Ginny. By the end of the season, we see that he also respects her and accepts her as she is–warts and all. He seems to genuinely want the best for her, which is a nice development in character from our first introduction to him, tumbling out of his mother’s minivan after having been caught smoking weed on a street corner. Again, though, he wasn’t always so respectful. His past behaviors make it hard to trust him, so it makes sense when Ginny doesn’t bring him along at the end of the season. It does, though, make you hope that he’s back in season 2 and that we get to see more of their relationship.

Speaking of which, I hope that season 2 also explores Georgia and Joe’s relationship a bit more. It seems like they’re headed in the Lorelei-Luke direction, which will make me happier than words could express, but I could also see the show’s creators flipping the script on us and setting Joe up with his own gloomy backstory–something to do with the ethically ambiguous labor situation he’s got going on at his farm and in his cafe, perhaps? Still, I think that might make him and Georgia even better suited for one another than they already are. After all, he’s one of the first people who showed Georgia true, genuine kindness after she ran away as a teenager.

And of course I want more of Ellen in season 2. The actress who plays her is hilarious and her character is just . . . really likable.

On a somewhat lighter note, one little thing I noticed while watching the show is that the characters slap their thighs a lot. This, again, might by my seasonal allergies brain, but the “[slaps thighs]” notation on closed captioning came up an infinite number of times over the course of this show. It came up so often that I started thinking you could catch the entire plot of the show if someone just spliced together every instance where a character sighs and slaps their thighs. I’d watch that video.

After all that, I still think the parallels to GG are there, but I still defend that G&G is also more than those parallels. And the “more” it offers is good. It’s intrigue; it’s gloomy realities and often-ignored truths that don’t offer viewers a sunny break from reality. But I think that’s good. I don’t like the argument that TV should be a “break from reality” or that a show is good on the sole basis that it offers us a “break from reality.” I think that argument is an excuse used to defend media that is too lazy to do the responsible thing and convey storylines that are inclusive and meaningful.

Well, my laundry is done, so I have to go deal with that. Happy Saturday, and happy initial inoculation!

XOXO, you know.