#cecilia was the first to go

[sugarstrawberryshortcake]

[ilvyally]

when you talk about the virgin suicides and now shawty know u a nerd

[stcrewup]

Going from watching the film to reading the book - in a neverending cycle

[bambiali]

The girls were right in choosing to love Trip, because he was the only boy who could keep his mouth shut. By nature Trip Fontaine possessed the discretion of the world's great lovers, seducers greater than Casanova because they didn't leave behind twelve volumes of memoirs and we don't even know who they were.

The virgin suicides, 1993 Jeffrey Eugenides

[fornpt1]

girl that got away

[lanaswansblog]

mood rn

[eleutheria4ever]

kirsten dunst on the set of the virgin suicides (1999)

[gonegirl445]

that girl didn't want to die, she just wanted out of that house.

[evmehh]

They were everything until he screwed her over

[mysticalvoidbasement]

mood: smoking like Lux Lisbon

[ilvyally]

turning 14 in a week makes me want to cry

[bibliosims]

cecilia supreeleela

[lilacbokeh]

🌱🌼 Cecilia 🌼🌱

pose ref

[vcrcnc]

“ YOU ARRIVED AT THE PERFECT TIME ! ” the words were directed at cecilia who was the first to catch verona’s attention. verona was delighted to note that her smile settled onto her face quite naturally ! it had not felt right for several weeks. cecilia was some sort of a miracle medicine. “ first order of business — we decide how to make people forget marcello serra’s nationality and employer. any suggestions ? ” [ @lcmbcrdy​, @barbiebraganca​, @giorxcci​ ]

[lanaswansblog]

Virgin Suicides (1999)

[wild-aloof-rebel]

Hi Leslie! I read your answer about Billy and now I'm curious why you think the story doesn't work. I enjoyed the show but I was disappointed that the only answers we got were about Royal and Autumn. Do you think that's because they're saving things for another season? Is it just that it doesn't work as one season on its own?

i'm going to start with the end of this ask: yes, i do think that they're intending to save things for possible future seasons, but i don't think that's why this season doesn't work either.

i certainly understand that you have to find balance between revealing the answer to every question and saving things for down the line, as well as between spoon-feeding your audience every single detail about the story and letting them infer some things on their own. the problem is that the show doesn't actually manage to balance any of those things, which means we end up being given a hundred clues about autumn's identity and are clearly expected to somehow still be surprised at that reveal or beaten over the head with the message on the billboard in the last couple episodes, while practically everything else is left unexplored and elliptical to the point of opacity.

ultimately, the biggest problem with all of that for me is the actual structure of the show. i know that there are only eight episodes to work with, so some of the questions you introduce are going to go unanswered in that time, but if the Big Answers you're going to give in this particular season are to the questions of who is autumn and what is royal's mysterious past, then you have to structure the season so that those are the Big Questions that it presents.

instead, at the end of the first episode we're shown autumn pushing royal into the void, and at the end of the second, we get what he sees inside the void and the information that in that future he is dead. because that's the big surprising thing we're left with from that first block of episodes, THAT is the main mystery that the show has then structurally set itself up to explore. why is royal dead? did someone murder him, and if so, who? how far away is that future? etc. brian watkins has also said that that story is one of the central pillars of the show: we were all really intrigued by the idea of a journey that starts with a man that knows he’s going to die and thus must prevent a future that includes that. So that’s been a really wonderful, fun narrative track for us to follow throughout these first eight episodes. It really comes to a head at the end of five with Royal seeing that Autumn and his wife Cecilia are linked in the process of his death.

but the issue with that is that those questions and their answers aren't actually "a fun narrative track for us to follow" in this season. in fact, it's the opposite: it's set up so strongly at the start that it then comes across like a dropped plot line throughout the rest of the show. the only other time we really come back to it is indeed the vision where he sees autumn there with cecilia as he's dying, but we get very little new information from that, just autumn's presence, which isn't exactly surprising by then. and while i guess you could say that the discovery that the geologist is associated with the mining company and royal's attempt to call them only to get a disconnected number are also related, mysteries related to the larger world portrayed in that future are largely tangential at this point. none of the actual questions surrounding royal's death are answered or even partially answered, and mostly it just isn't brought up again.

more importantly though, if, as watkins says, the point is that this is the journey of a man trying to prevent his future death, why are we never actually given that as a motivation for the things that royal is doing? i suppose after he sees that vision, the next bit we see of him is the scene where he picks autumn up on the atv and then kind of loses it on her and goes to burn her tent, and so maybe we're supposed to infer from that that those actions are being done in an attempt to prevent her from killing him? but i wouldn't have even thought to try to make that connection if i hadn't read watkins' interview. because what royal is actually yelling at her in that scene is to stay away from his family. i can see how those things would relate—since cecilia is also there in the vision of his death and i guess maybe he also thinks that if he can't stop his own death he can at least keep her from hurting them as well—but there's nothing about that connection that is made particularly clear. in fact, because he has previously warned her about staying away (long before he sees the vision of her and cecilia), the scene simply reads as him being angry that she hasn't listened to him rather than anything specifically related to preventing his own death.

that's the kind of issue that is prevalent throughout the whole show. the structure emphasizes certain things, by where they're placed in the story or how much time we spend on them, and so often they're dropped or made to feel separate from other things happening on the show. and far too often, the events we're shown aren't explicitly or even logically connected to the characters' motivations throughout the remainder of the story. and some of that is fine. obviously we as an audience should be able to read into some things. obviously you're not going to answer every single question that is raised. obviously characters are allowed to change their minds and to do things that contradict the things that happen to them or our previous impressions of them. but there still has to be enough context and connection in the show itself that we can find a discernible purpose for the things we're being shown—there has to be a reason why—or everything starts to feel meaningless. especially with a run time this short. there is no time for filler in eight episodes. if you're including it, you're automatically telling me it's important. and the more times that you contradict yourself or bring something up only to drop it entirely a few episodes later or don't actually give me some reason that you've chosen to show me this particular thing in this particular way, the more i start to think you don't actually know what you're doing.