#did i make an entire set as a thesis statement to how this show was a tragedy from the start?

[queerofthedagger]

—Salma Deera

For @merlinrarepairfest Day 7 - Free Choice: BBC Merlin x Tragedy

[noirs-pages]

Diavolo 2

Summary: You’re in your side room, experimenting with potions to give to your pet Diavolo. You still hold to your thesis that these pets are behind a complex spell that holds their full potential back.

(I hate feeling tired. I’ve been feeling tired all that time. I need some form of stimulation! Perhaps I should record and narrate something?)

You’re not really one to keep up with local news, at least not the news that floats around in your old university. You still get emails from that place, not because of morbid curiosity but because you’re just too lazy to make them shut up. You graduated and you’re glad you did, but occasionally, when you see a header of a notification that relates to anything regarding your final thesis, you end up hissing in a breath and locking yourself up in your private room.

“Idiot,” you swiped at your phone, clearing the latest news of another mage being sent to the hospital because they messed with the spell, “Backlash. It’s on top of the fucking page, bold, all caps!”

If you don’t know what you’re doing, don’t mess with the spell! What it is with mages ignoring that warning? A spell that continues to thrive on the entire existence of these magical pets with absolutely no signs of decaying is one that can and will lash out if one goes about poking at it wrong.

And yet, those old arrogant mages back at your university, they had the audacity to blame these accidents on you just to save their own faces. It’s not your fault their apprentices died. That’s their own fucking fault for not doing proper safety procedures. They really thought their own magic were enough to ensure that.

With a puff of red smoke, your concoction in your mini cauldron was done. You sneezed before reaching in and pulling out a royal red gummy in the shape of a cut jewel.

“There we go, this should be good,” a beautiful replica of an accident you had that led you to your thesis, “Come over here Diavolo, I’m done!”

You can see the hypocrisy of your statement, trying to get this spell off of your own pet. However, those people are not you, nor are they Diavolo. They’re not the ones that spent years carefully studying the layers upon layers of this species wide spell. You know what can and cannot be messed with, and Diavolo knows how to redirect backlash away from everyone.

Besides, Solomon is waiting by the door in case something ticks off his senses. You have many emergency buttons at the ready.

At your call, Diavolo eagerly turned away from the window and flapped right to your shoulder. You let reached out a palm and set him right on the ground.

“Just a small bite, okay?” You waved the treat in front of your nose. Diavolo sniffed it before taking a most delicate bite.

In just three chews, the sound of chains shattering echoed around you. The air, once cool and flowing, became heavy with both the sharp sting of magic and heat. A familiar burn, one that never fails to remind you of a broiling volcano.

You stepped back just as Diavolo glowed white. His form expanded, wings stretching out until they took up the length of your room.

The cocoon of heat only got stronger when the light show finally stopped. You stare up to gold eyes, glowing as his form nearly reached the ceiling.

“Yup,” you crossed your arms, leaning back, “still as big as ever." And bare. You really need to prepare a towel or something if this stays permanent. "You doing alright, Diavolo? Think you can say a few words for me?”

A large huff of breath sweeping over you was all the warning you got before he lowered his muscled form as much as he could under your chin. His wings fluttered when you scratched his head, knocking over some plastic bottles. He closed his eyes, clearly ready to go to sleep.

And not a single word came out of his mouth. Only a heavy clicking from his throat.

From outside your door, you heard Solomon ask, “Well? Did it work?”

You airily laughed. “Nope, another failure. Couldn’t get rid of that lock over his mind.”

As such, it will only be a matter of time before the spell fixes itself and makes this affectionate Diavolo small again. Back to the drawing board with you.

[schrijverr]

He Was Left on the Steps of the FBI in a Basket 6

Chapter 6 out of 7

Maybe not a basket, but sixteen-year-old Dr. Spencer Reid suddenly shows up at FBI headquarters claiming that his mother has been kidnapped. The BAU isn’t certain first, but the case he sets them on proves to be an interesting one, wherein they get to know the young doctor until he’s practically family. In this chapter, they corner Alexander, but he still has Diana. Can they get her back? And what will happen with Reid after?

On AO3.

Ships: brief hotch/hayley mention

Warnings: ableism

~~~~~~~~~~

Safe Return

The camera lenses stare to the podium like a still army, ready to explode. And Reid doesn’t think he’s ever been more nervous, not even when presenting his PhD thesis. He’s still in the shadows now, but soon enough JJ will go up there and introduce him and then he’ll have to up there.

It’s absolutely terrifying.

Hotch is a steadying presence near him and Morgan squeezes his shoulder encouragingly, while JJ promises she’ll be up there with him the entire time.

JJ walks out and the flashes start to as questions start being tossed her way. She silences them all with a hand motion, before starting: “As you all know, we’re chasing the man responsible for the now 39 victims found in the wood. We have the identity of the killer, Alexander Seeworth. He is currently not in our custody and in the wind with a hostage, Diana Reid. Her son wants to make a statement, I ask you to not ask questions and respect what a difficult time it is for him.”

Then she looks over at Reid and he knows it is time. With reluctance he makes his way to the crowd. He has on the best outfit he has with him and did his hair while panicking in front of a police precinct mirror. He is in no way prepared for this, but he’ll have to be.

“H- Hi,” he starts. “Uhm, my name is Dr. Spencer Reid and I’m sixteen. I- I wanted to stop introducing myself as doctor,” he chuckles wetly, “but my- my mom wouldn't let me. She told me: Spencer, be proud of what you are, you worked hard for it. Don’t let the judgment of others dim your light.”

With the first few sentences out of the way, he finally dares to look up. “You see, she always supports me, no matter what. She’s my world and the only family I have, the only person who has always rooted for me.”

He looks to the side to see JJ nod reassuringly and he feels a bit better about it. “Alexander,” he addresses a camera, having read the books on whatwill make the most impact. “I beg you, let my mother go. I know what happened to you and that was awful, but please don’t break apart another family. It doesn’t have to end like this.”

“My mom isn’t alone, she isn’t lost,” he says. “She’s kind and smart and has me, who loves her very much. You’re not doing her a favor by killing her. Please, I know you’re kind to your victims, so be kind to my mom and return her safely to me. She’s all I have, please don’t take her from me.”

In the end, he feels the tears streaming down his face and his voice is beyond wobbly, but it was clear and his message is out there. Now it’s hoping that a delusional serial killer has some kindness in him.

JJ takes his place again as he makes his way back to the calming presence of the others.

In the background he hears JJ say: “As of now, we don’t have a location yet, but two pictures will appear on you screen. These are Diana Reid, mother of Spencer Reid, who you just heard, and Alexander Seeworth. If you see either of these people, please call the authorities. Alexander, you can also call the line, if you are willing to negotiate Diana’s safe return. Thank you.”

“How is a serial killer kind to his victims?” one reporter yells and that opens the floodgates as they come barging down on JJ, Hotch also coming up to help.

Reid is watching with a strange sort of fascination of how easily JJ operates in this arena, but he’s lead away by Morgan and Rossi. He’s not sure if he’s grateful or if he wants to listen as JJ tells the press clinically about the man who has his mother.

He’s suddenly very angry at Seeworth, who came into his life and took his mom as if he had any right to do so. The rage has to go somewhere so he kicks a chair as he clenches his fist, when that doesn’t work, he punches it, then the air, before pulling on his hair angrily.

At that point, he is stopped by Morgan, who grabs his fists and gently pries them out of his hair as he says: “Hey now, hey now, calm down, kid. No need to hurt yourself. I know it’s difficult and it’s okay to be angry, but don’t hurt yourself.”

“That bastard just took her,” he tells Morgan angrily. “He just came in and decided my mom makes a good sacrifice, but she doesn’t. I read all the files of the victims, most had barely any contact with their families, nor many people that cared for them. For most it took two to five days, before they were reported missing. My mom doesn’t fit with them, she has me. And he decided she didn’t and just took her.”

Morgan nods: “That’s very upsetting, but you did great out there kid.”

And like that the fight leaves Reid. As fast as the anger came, equally fast it leaves. He slumps down in his chair and asks: “You think so?”

“Yeah,” Morgan assures him. “I’ve seen a lot more of these than I would like. You did very well, promise.”

“I just hope it’s enough,” Reid replies.

“In case it isn’t, we’re still going to try and predict where he will take her,” Rossi inserts himself into the conversation. “We’ll find her.”

“We know he likes clearings,” Prentiss starts, looking at the map. She too has left JJ and Hotch to deal with the press, much rather working on finding Seeworth than getting hounded by hungry vultures.

“They’re like little island in the forest,” Reid explains without much emotion. “In the myth Aeolus lived on an island. He’s the one that gave Odysseus a bag with all the winds but the West wind contained in it. He probably would have gone to a real island, if they had one. It’s the next best thing near Ithaca.”

“Well, the first two dump sites were West of Ithaca, so we can exclude the East part of the forest,” Morgan says, studying the map.

“But those two clearings aren’t even on the map,” Prentiss points out. “We have no clue where all the clearings are and where he might go.”

“Maybe there’s a ranger we can talk to,” Rossi says. “Someone around here has to know the area well enough.”

JJ is just in time to hear Rossi say that and startles them as she replies: “I’ll see if I can get into contact with the local rangers.”

“We could coordinate with them, set out search parties in the forest as well,” Hotch says. “He can hide in there, but he can’t disappear. He’ll have to be somewhere.”

So, the local rangers are called in to make a lists of clearings to canvas and the police is split up to go with the rangers to cover the area and see if they can find Seeworth, while the BAU sits and waits, ready to move out at a moments notice.

Reid is sitting at a desk now, staring at the phone, waiting for someone to patch Alexander Seeworth through to them, because he’s willing to hand his mom over. But the horn stays firmly in place, no one is calling yet.

In the background, the 8 AM news replays his statement that he has given two hours ago, though it feels like days. His voice from the speakers is shaky and he hates how small he sounds, how young, how helpless. He hates the newscaster even more for how emotionless she calls for help in finding the perpetrator.

Rossi sits down next to him, snapping him out of his thoughts. He gives the older agent a questioningly look and the man says: “This part is always the hardest, I know, kid.”

“I think I should be feeling more,” Reid informs him. “I don’t think I’m experiencing the stress right.”

“And I think that you’re having a healthy reaction by mentally distancing yourself from it,” Rossi counters. “Not everyone reacts the same. It all depends on the person. Some get mad, other cry and some shut down or go on autopilot.”

“I guess,” Reid sighs.

“Don’t worry, kid, with a 187 IQ, there are some brain bits that can go to keeping you functioning until all this is behind you,” Rossi assures him.

“That not how-”

“I know, I know,” Rossi smiles. “Me and Morgan were planning on looking at the profile again, to see if we missed something. Want to join us?”

Anything sounds better than sitting at that desk, staring at a phone that may never ring. He gets up immediately. “Let’s go.”

“What have you got?” Rossi asks Morgan, who is studying the picture of Alexander Seeworth on the board.

“I don’t know, I mean, he must know we’re finding at some point,” Morgan says. “He’s on foot and outnumbered, when we find him it’s over. The end.”

“Of course,” Reid’s eyes light up. “He knows it’s done. He’ll go to the ending. He hasn’t stuck to the myth so far, Aeolus, whogave the wind, retracted it when Odysseus was blown back to his steps, thinking him unfavored by the gods. No sacrifices were ever made either. He just picks and chooses what he likes and adds in stuff. If he knows it’s the end, he’ll go to the end of the myth.”

“To the fields, where his wife and son are waiting,” Rossi nods, getting what Reid is saying. “Do we know where they are buried?”

“I can find out,” Morgan tell him already picking up the phone. “Baby girl, do you know where the wife and son of Seeworth are buried?”

“No, but I can find out, especially for you,” Garcia replies and they can hear the keyboard clicking over the line. “They’re not in a database, Ithaca doesn’t have an extensive registry.”

“How many are outside the city limit?” Reid asks.

“Narrowing it down, okay,I can work with that,” Garcia goes back to typing. “Six.”

“And how many are on the West of Ithaca?” Reid says.

“Three.”

“Are there any with fields, as a thing,” Reid asks. “That’s vague, uh, one with field sprawling, no buildings nearby? Modern houses ruin the fantasy.”

“Yes!” Garcia exclaims. “Robertson Cemetery. Oh, oh no, Alexander Seeworth has a spot reserved there for when he dies.”

“It’s the place,” Morgan confirms.

“I’ve send you the address,” Garcia says. “It’s 5,5 miles from where you are, you can be there in 15 minutes.”

“Thank you, baby girl, you’re a goddess,” Morgan tells her.

“And don’t you forget it. Good luck!” Garcia smiles as she hangs up.

“I’ll tell Hotch,” Rossi says.

Before he can walk away he is stopped by Reid, who is grabbing his sleeve. He looks back to see Reid giving him the same pleading eyes that have worked on the others. “You gotta convince Agent Hotchner to let me come. He’ll be different because he’s mad and I need to be there.”

Rossi has come to known Reid as an articulate young man with a thousand arguments, but he falters here, alerting Rossi to how invested he is in getting permission to come. “I’ll try, kid.”

“Thank you,” Reid is so incredibly relived and sincere that Rossi decides to force Hotch’s hand.

Within minutes they’re tearing down the road at full speed with the sirens blaring. Reid is in the car with Rossi and JJ, the unmarked bulletproof vest he’s been given is slightly too big and Rossi can see in his eyes that he is overwhelmed.

They don’t really have time to brief him more than Hotch already has afterthe most intense staring contest known to men. Reid is a blinker, but in that moment he stared right back and Hotch let him come despite his apprehensions.

At the cemetery, they pile out of the cars and close in on Seeworth, who is trying to make a fire, Diana tied up in a toga next to him. When he hears them, he turns around and hauls Diana to her feet, putting a knife to her throat. “Don’t come any closer!”

“Alexander, we just want to talk,” Hotch calls back through a PA. “We know why you’re here and we are very sorry for what happened to you, but you need to let Diana go.”

“I need her,” Seeworth’s eyes are wide and wild. “She’s the last. Then I have the ten years and I can go home.”

“You know that’s wrong!” Reid yells and they all cringe. They have explicitly told him to stay silent unless Diana would get in the way. And Diana, is luckily, having a very good day, it seems. She is also gagged and bound and can’t do more than be there.

“Reid,” Morgan warns, but Reid isn’t listening.

“No, you know that’s not how it went and that you’re here for a different end,” Reid says. “You know that Odysseus got the winds immediately and was ignored after. You know that you can never go home. In some reading Aeolus never evenwas a god, just a keeper of the winds and Odysseus never made a human sacrifice. You’re making things up as you go and you know they’re not going to work, so just stop.”

“Who are you to tell me what I know?” Seeworth spits.

“This is Spencer, Spencer Reid,” Hotch answers, deciding to go with it because there is really nothing else he can do. “Maybe you saw him release a statement to the press today?”

“Yeah, I saw your statement,” Seeworth tells them, knife inching closer to Diana’s throat. “You made her doubt again, I almost had her and then she didn’t want to, because you were there looking for her. You’re not even a good son, I watched your house, you’re never home, always gone. So why are you suddenly here begging for her now?”

Reid looks like he’s been slapped.

JJ steps forwards to haul him back from it all, but then Diana smiles at him around the cloth. It’s encouragingly and compassionate, she really is having a good day, thank god.

Hiseyes harden as he calls back: “I’m a great son, fuck you. You would have known that if you had thought for two seconds, but you didn’t because all you care about is finding people who can fit in your delusion.”

This is the opposite of decreasing the tension, but that isn’t stopping Reid: “You care for your victims because you know deep down that what you’re going to do to them is wrong and if they agree with you then you can put the blame on them. You don’t want to be responsible, because you know this is not working. Just like you don’t want to feel responsible for what happened to your family, but you’re not. You’re not responsible for them getting killed. It’s not your fault just because you weren’t home.”

It looks like Seeworth is listening and everyone holds their breath.

“You can’t control the actions of another, and blaming yourself and denying it, isn’t helping anyone, including you,” Reid says, voice becoming gentler. “Just like you know you’re not able to come home. That’s why you are here. To kill my mom and then yourself, fulling the Odysseyby coming home in the fields even if they’re the fields of Elysium. But you are notOdysseus and all you’re doing is taking the only person who has ever cared about me away. You are responsible for your actions now. Don’t turn into a person like the one that killed your wife and son.”

“No! No, you’re wrong,” even as he says it, he doesn’t look convinced. “I have nobody. I am nobody.”

“Yes, you are,” Reid tells him. “You are a somebody. You are Alexander Seeworth and you lived through a tragedy, but you don’t have to make the whole world one. You can still make a difference, Alexander. You can be someone, who is kind, even if the world is not.”

Slowly – agonizingly slow – Alexander lowers the blade. He cuts the binds holding Diana’s hands together then drops the blade, holding up his hands.

Immediately the agents rush forwards as Diana rushes into Spencer’s waiting arms and he buries his head into her chest, unable to form words. She strokes he hair and places a kiss on her forehead as she whispers: “My little knight, I’m so proud of you.”

“Mom,” he chokes out and clutches her tighter, tears falling out his eyes.

In the background Alexander is cuffed and hoisted away from the scene as slowly the officers start to dissipate and the news crews that had come, follow. Only Spencer and his mom are left, as well as Prentiss by the waiting car.

She watches as the two finally let go. Diana cups Spencer’s face as she checks in his eyes if he’s okay, before calling him a silly boy for putting himself in danger like that.

Softly Spencer answers: “I couldn't let them forget you, mom. I won’t let you disappear on me, I’ll always come for you.” He reaches into his satchel then and pulls out the purple cardigan he has carried with him since Vegas, like a security blanket. “I brought you this,” he says as he offers it to her.

“Thank you, honey,” his mom says and they both share a smile that says more than words ever could in that moment.

Diana is still wearing one of her dresses under the toga and gladly takes it off to pull on her cardigan. When that it done, they look like they’re ready to move further than a few feet from each other and Prentiss steps forwards to bag the toga for evidence.

It’s only as she does that the two even notice the other’s have left. Prentiss explains: “The others would have stayed to wait, but JJ has the press and Hotch has to be there as the leader ofthe investigation. Morgan and Rossi didn’t want to intimidate accidentally.”

Spencer smiles: “Thank you for waiting.”

“Of course,” Prentiss smiles back, before gesturing to the car.

Mother and son get into the backseat together and during the fifteen minute drive Prentiss listens bemusedly as Spencer rants to his mother how Seeworth completely misused and misinterpreted the Oddysey, to which Diana replies that it’s a travesty because it’s not even a good book. That sets the two off again and before they know it they’re at the station an Prentiss knows more strangely specific insults to a classic.

Seeworth is in a holding cell, having caught him red-handed, they don’t really need to get a confession out of him soon. Diana, on the other hand, is lead to an interview room, where Hotch is waiting for her.

When Spencer sees him, he asks: “Can I be with her for her statement?”

Hotch shakes his head. “Sorry, Reid, but you cannot influence her. She might not tell us all if you’re there and we need to full story.”

“First off, sheis right here,” Diana says. “Second off, it’s Dr. Reid.”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Reid,” Hotch apologizes to both of them while Spencer looks mortified: “It’s okay, mom, I told him they could drop the doctor.”

“You shouldn’t let people disrespect you, Spencer. You worked hard for that title,” his mom insists anyway. “Now, shoo. I have statement to give to this-” she gives Hotch a disdained up and down, “this government agent.”

Spencer isn’t sure if he wants to leave her with Hotch. Now not for her well being, but for his own dignity. Still he has to let her go and watches from the other side of the window.

Prentiss notices him sitting there and sits down next to him. “I’ll never get used to see that.”

“See what? Family members there? Does that happen often?” he asks, slightly concerned.

“My mom’s a diplomat,” she tells him. “She’s involved in a lot of stuff. But no, I was talking about Hotch’s victim face. He has this softness around him when he talks to victims and it’s weird when he normally doesn’t even blink.”

“You noticed that too?” Reid says.

“Yeah, it’s weird,” Prentiss laughs, glad to see she has successfully distracted Spencer.

It doesn’t last long, however, because soon he’s looking back and wondering: “What do you think she’s telling him? Do you think she’ll ever tell me?”

“Maybe,” Prentiss tells him honestly. “Some people, especially parents, don’t want their kids to know what they went through. They think they have to be strong for them and showing a crack in the facade will break the bond they have with their children.”

“But me and mom aren’t like that,” Spencer says. “We’re equals.”

“Then maybe she’ll tell you, but I won’t count on it,” Prentiss replies. “Better to keep your hopes low, thanexpect the unlikely.”

“I will hear it in court, won’t I?” Spencer asks then. “I’ll probably be called as witness, right?”

“With how much we have on this guy, you probably won’t have to take the stand,” Prentiss says. “And even so, your mother’s statement might not be used.”

“Why not?” Spencer exclaims indignantly. “She was with him for over a week.”

“She also has a medical condition that makes her an unreliable witness,” Prentiss breaks the news gently. “She’ll have to undergo a psych eval to check if she’s mentally alright after all this. We don’t know what a judge will think of her statement. We don’t even know if she’ll get to take you home after this.”

Spencer looks upset. Morgan has checked if he knew that his mom might be deemed an unfit parent after this and Spencer knew that. But there is a big difference between a theoretical possibility and a impending likelihood.

“What will happen to me then?” Spencer asks her.

Prentiss is in no way prepared to deal with this and wishes JJ were here, but she’s outside answering all the questions the press has. So, she attempts to answer gently: “They’ll probably look for your closest relative. Your father. If he agrees to take you in, you’ll be placed with him. Otherwise another family member or in the foster system if none are found.”

“My dad won’t take me,” Spencer says. “He left when I was nine, I don’t want to be placed with him. And I don’t want to be placed with some relative I don’t know, who broke contact after my mom’s diagnoses. Or in the foster care. I’m good at CalTech. I can go live in the dorms if I have her permission. I’ve been doing fine on my own, I don’t want to leave.”

“I know it’s hard, but as a minor, we’ll have to,” Prentiss says hating it.

“And I’ll never see any of you again,” Spencer adds sullenly.

“Hey, now, don’t be stupid,” Prentiss can at least set the record straight there. Spencer has made himself too much at home in her soul for her to let go. He reminds her of Declan in a way. “I still have to write you that letter, remember? And you need to be my source for my CV. Don’t think you’re getting away that easily.”

Spencer laughs at that, but it’s truly more a giggle and, without the uncertainty of this case hanging above his head, he looks much younger.

“Besides,” Prentiss adds, “I think Garcia will murder me, if I don’t bring you by her office again someday. She asked me for picture updates on ‘the adorable little brain’.”

“I can’t let you get killed by an angry tech analyst, who will write my letter otherwise,” Spencer jokes, but Prentiss can read the truth in his eyes. ‘Thank you for not leaving like everyone did, thank you for believing me and doing everything to get my mom back. Thank you for assuring me that no matter what, I won’t be alone again.’

What neither of them know, was what conversation is taking place in the room next to them. Hotch has just taken Diana’s statement when he broaches the topic, before she can get up. “Dr. Reid, I wanted to talk about something else, before you go.”

She sits back down with a questioning noise.

“You will most likely have to undergo a psych eval,” Hotch says. “And I know of two LVPD cops, who would be more than happy to testify against you in a court of law. Are you aware that you’ll likely loose custody of your son?”

Diana looks taken aback by his bold statement for a moment, before nodding, sadness aging her as she heaves a deep sigh. “I don’t want to get taken to a mental institution and I don’t want them to take my baby from me and give him to that excuse of a father.”

“I have a proposal for you,” Hotch tells her, piquing her interest. “You don’t have to agree, I just want you to listen. Is that okay?”

She thinks about it for a moment, then nods.

“As I am aware, I have not known your son for very long,” he begins. “However, he has a way of making himself at home in people’s heart and my whole team has grown quite fond of him in the short time we spend with him. You now still hold guardianship over him, if you were to sign those rights over now, they will be upheld in a court of law.”

“Are you-” Diana begins, frowning. “Agent Hotchner, are you asking me to name you the guardian of my child?”

“This must be a quite sudden and big ask,” Hotch agrees. “However, I am a trusted federal agent and I won’t be questioned as parent. If those same cops want to testify again me, I can point to the investigation I am already launching into their precinct and they can’t hide behind finally having enough proof to take Spencer away. I can approve him living in the dorms at CalTech without the chance I’ll run into difficulties later if we hit a paperwork wall and in the meantime the parental rights get given away. I’ll insure you’re close to him and he gets to stay at CalTech.”

“How can I trust you?” she asks.

“I am willing to put it in writing right now,” he states. “I had Garcia give me the proper paperwork for the transaction of parental rights and I wrote up a contract for us on the plane.”

He presents it to her and she inspects them all carefully, reading every wordwith attention. She knows what’s at stake her and the risks it brings. Diana stops at one page and says: “Who’s Hayley and why has she signed here.”

“Hayley is my wife,” Hotch says. “This is her acknowledgment that she is aware that I am taking responsibility for Spencer and that she is not. Since she is my wife, I want to be able to prove that I did not do this behind her back on impulse and that we talked about it, therefore it can be proven as awell informed decision, should it come to that.”

“You really did think this true,” Diana says, sounding slightly impressed.

Hotch remembers his own youth and how hard he’s worked to become the man, he needed back then. He’s always wanted kids, to care for a new generation and make sure they’re okay. He can’t think of anyone more deserving of that than Spencer. “I have,” he confirms.

“Do we need a witness or something when we sign?” Diana asks him.

“No, you can just sign on all the empty lines, except this one,” Hotch points. “This one is for Spencer, I thought it only fair, he gets to make the final decision.”

Diana nods and begins signing the paperwork as Hotch calls in Spencer. A Spencer who is very concerned and shares a confused look with Prentiss before he enters, closing the door behind him. He sees Diana signing and asks: “Is everything okay? I didn’t know there was that muchpaperwork involved with taking a statement.”

“It’s not about the statement,” Hotch says. “Take a seat.”

They explain it all to him and he starts crying, rushing to put down a messy signature through the blur of the tears. He hugs Hotch on impulse, surprised he’s met with a tight embrace, before hugging his mom as well.

When the three of them emerge from the office, the other’s are all there waiting for them with expecting looks. Prentiss quickly deflects: “You were really sketchy and weird when you called in Reid. I was concerned.”

“I have taken over guardianship of Reid, so that he will be able to remain in CalTech near his mother,” Hotch says. “And before any of you ask, I talked about it with Hayley and insured it’s legally foolproof. You’re going to see both Doctors Reid on Christmas, if you decide to celebrate at my house.”

“Oh my god,” JJ says. “Congrats, I’m so happy for you guys!” She hug both Hotch and Spencer, before shaking Diana’s hand, then pulling her into a hug as well as she says: “I’m so glad we did not only manage to reunite you with Spence, but that we get to keep it that way.”

The others follow suit in their surprised congratulations and Hotch can only imagine what he’ll arrive to in the office once Garcia knows. He should be upset about that, but having Spencer as part of his family feels right.

~~

A/N:

The end of the fic really is:

Hotch: I’m having a child!

Spencer: Congrats, when are they d-

Hotch: It’s you, sign here

Also small disclaimer, 1) I don’t know how paperwork in this regards works, I’m 19 and childless. 2) Do NOT randomly adopt a child, Hotch can make this choice as a treat, bc he’s fictional. Thanks!

[herinsectreflection]

I Don't Sleep on Bed of Bones: The Slayer as a Killer Across the Seasons

A pretty constant question throughout Buffy's arc - arguably the central question of the entire show, that Buffy must answer, is "what is a slayer? What does being The Vampire Slayer mean?". And a major part of that is the question of whether a slayer is just a killer. It's a question central to S5, but ripples throughout the rest of the show too, with some of the most iconic scenes in the show in converstion with each other around it. Inspired by an ask I received about this from @potterkid, I took a look at how this idea develops and resolves itself over the course of the show.

In S1, being the Slayer means accepting responsibility. It's metaphor for growing up - a metaphor that recurs throughout the show along with other ideas, but is strongest in S1. Buffy is torn between her teenage/human wants and her adult/supernatural responsibilities. She accepts her mortality and her duty (fighting the Master), and wins when she manages to integrate that with her personal desires (fighting the Master in a kickass prom dress with her friends and boyfriend). There's some stuff around the classic superhero idea that being around the hero is dangerous -e.g. in Never Kill a Boy on the First Date, but not much on the idea of a Slayer being a killer exactly.

In S2, being the Slayer means making hard choices. It means accepting that sometimes all your options are bad ones, but choosing one anyway, even at personal cost. This is introduced through Ford's story in Lie to Me, with Buffy's words to him forming one of the core thesis statements of the show ("You have a choice. You don't have a good choice, but you have a choice."), and it's climaxed beautifully in the tragic ending of Becoming. There's not much direct allusion to the idea of Buffy being a killer here, but this is a vital moment in that discussion. Ultimately, Buffy does make the decision here to kill Angel - not to slay Angelus, but to kill him. To take the life of her ensouled lover in order to save others. It's kind of the opposite of the decision that Ford makes - the best of two bad choices. It's the classic trolley problem, and Buffy's hand is on the lever by design - she has to make that choice because she's the Slayer. We will see this moment returned to again and again as this Slayer-vs-Killer theme develops.

Also, Ted is a very important episode for later. Buffy herself feels guilty specifically because she used her slayer powers on what she thinks is a regular human, and therefore killed him. Specifically, being the Slayer made her a Killer. It's also notable that this is where the idea of Buffy having a free reign to kill is first introduced - by Buffy's original shadow self in Cordelia no less.

Cordelia: I don't get it. Buffy's the Slayer. Shouldn't she have... Xander: What, a license to kill? Cordelia: Well, not for fun. But she's like this superman. Shouldn't there be different rules for her? - 2x12 Ted This isn't explored massively here but will be revisited again and again going forward.

S3 is where this theme really comes into focus. Faith enters as Buffy's shadow self and a representation of hedonism. How that manifests is as a Slayer who gives herself a license to Kill. She posits the idea that as slayers, they can and should decide who lives and dies.

Faith: Something made us different. We're warriors. We're built to kill. Buffy: To kill demons! But it does not mean that we get to pass judgment on people like we're better than everybody else! Faith: We are better! - 3x15 Consequences

Obviously, this is something that Buffy has to reckon with and fight against. But there is a glimmer of truth here, because at the end of S2, she does take the power of life and death into her own hands. She is faced with the choice between Angel and the world and decides that Angel should die. She had to, that's the position she has to be in because she is the Slayer. She has to be a Killer because she is a Slayer. So the two are intertwined.

More than this, Faith is someone who at least appears to revel in the kill. Up until now, we hadn't really seen Buffy enjoy being a slayer, but Faith does. Buffy is genuinely drawn to that, to slaying for pleasure. The equation of slaying/killing and sex for Buffy is first explicitly drawn by Faith in this season. ("Isn't it crazy how slaying always makes you hungry and horny?"). Slayers are very much like vampires in that respect, blurring the line between sex and death. In general, Faith introduces the idea that Buffy is drawn to killing - not just to protect people (the ideal of a Slayer), but for its own benefit. That's something that Buffy continues to struggle with going forward.

I have said before that Faith in S3 is an echo of Angel in S2, both in Buffy's relationship to them both and how that shifts mid-season, and in how it ends. In Graduation Day, Buffy again is given the power of life and death. This time, it's more personal - she can stop Angel dying by killing Faith. It's not such a straightforward (for want of a better word) decision as Angel .vs. the literal entire world, it's just the value of one life against the other. Another trolley problem, and it's not an easy choice, but it's still a choice. Just as she chose the lesser evil in killing Angel in S2, she kills the person filling the Angel role in S3. And this time, the choice is explicitly tied to the idea of being a Killer. Faith is set up as the person that Buffy could be in a slightly different world, and that person is a Killer, as Faith herself claims.

"What are you gonna do, B? Kill me? You become me. You're not ready for that, yet." - Faith Lehane, 3x17 Enemies

"You did it, B. You killed me." - Faith Lehane, 3x22 Graduation Day

In the act of choosing to pull the lever, Buffy has to kill. In the act of killing, she has become her dark mirror. In the act of defeating/becoming Faith, she becomes again the sole Slayer. Being a killer and a Slayer again intertwined. It's interesting here that she then makes the decision to feed herself to Angel. She unravels the trolley problem by throwing herself on the tracks. It's fascinating that between the dual trolley-problem finales of Becoming and The Gift, where in the first Buffy chooses to pull the lever, and in the latter she refuses and chooses a third option, Graduation Day exists in the middle as a stepping stone where she kind of does both.

The bulk of S4 is a little lighter on this theme, instead examining The Slayer as a role that must be juggled amongst a series of competing roles as Buffy's life as an adult becomes more fractured. There are flavours of it in Fear Itself, where Buffy fears that her friends will leave and her destiny lies with death and the dead, but otherwise not too much jumps out at me. Except, of course, for Restless, which is so heavy with this theme. It's one of the many reasons why I kind of consider Restless an honourary part of S5, as it's setting up the themes and arcs of S5 as much as it's wrapping up the like from S4.

RILEY: Hey there, killer.

BUFFY: We're not demons. ADAM: Is that a fact?

RILEY: Thought you were looking for your friends. Okay, killer...

TARA: I live in the action of death, the blood cry, the penetrating wound. I am destruction. Absolute ... alone. BUFFY: The Slayer. FIRST SLAYER: No friends! Just the kill.

OK, so SO much to unpack here. This is all within the under-10-minute sequence of Buffy's dream, and in that sequence she constantly shows a fear that she is in fact a "killer". It's clearly strong in her mind. Riley calls her "killer" multiple times, and Adam equates her with him, and with demonhood. I also find it very interesting how she responds to Tara's words, which are very literally describing the act of kiling ("the action of death...the blood cry...the penetrating wound"). She hears that and immediately identifies her as the Slayer, so slayerhood and killing are clearly bound up together in her mind.

Central to her concerns is the dichotomy between friendship and death. This was built up in Fear Itself, and it's central here. Riley and Sineya both frame it as a choice, between friendship and "the kill". This is a fear that Buffy has already, since S1, that her Slayer life will stop her ability to have a "normal" life of friends and family, but it also sets up her arc in S5 nicely. She chooses her friends over becoming a pure instrument of death in Restless, but that does not resolve her ongoing fears. They existed before and continue to dwell even more strongly in her mind, with words that both Sineya and Dracula repeat.

"You think you know ... what's to come ... what you are. You haven't even begun."

This sets the stage for S5, and her arc of choosing between family and being the Slayer. Friendship and family are presented as more of less one and the same a few episodes later in Family, and the choice Buffy is faced with in S5 is another trolley problem - the life of Dawn against the world. This time, it's more specifically tied to the Slayer/Killer dichotomy through the prophecy that Buffy is faced with ("Death is your gift"). This frames the similar choices she faced in Becoming and Graduation Day in the same light, with Buffy even specifically comparing this to the former.

BUFFY: I sacrificed Angel to save the world. I loved him so much. But I knew ... what was right. I don't have that any more. I don't understand. I don't know how to live in this world if these are the choices. If everything just gets stripped away. I don't see the point. I just wish that... I just wish my mom was here. The spirit guide told me that death is my gift. Guess that means a Slayer really is just a killer after all. - 5x22 The Gift

S5 is soaked in this Killer-vs-Slayer idea, and that's part of why I love it so much. It opens with Buffy having gained an appreciation of killing. She goes out not to patrol, but to hunt. To revel in the enjoyment of the kill, just as Faith did. There's also a constant theme of people identifying Buffy as a Killer. Importantly, it's a theme of her believing them. She knows that there is a kernel of truth there, and it develops from a subconcious worry in Restless to a more concrete fear in Intervention, where Buffy explicitly says that she is afraid that being the Slayer means losing her humanity and ability to love, and become nothing more than a "killer". Eventually, Buffy is so ground down by it that when The Gift rolls around, she simply accepts that the Slayer is "just a killer" as an inevitability.

BUFFY: Yeah, I prefer the term slayer. You know, killer just sounds so... DRACULA: Naked? - 5x01 Buffy vs Dracula

SPIKE: Death is your art. You make it with your hands, day after day. That final gasp. That look of peace. - 5x07 Fool for Love

FIRST SLAYER: Death is your gift. - 5x18 Intervention

I also like the way that Joyce is repeatedly linked to this idea. Buffy's response to Sineya points to Joyce's death as a rebuttal to the idea of death being a gift ("Death is not a gift. My mother just died. I know this."). Buffy talks about Joyce just before accepting that "a slayer is a killer" in The Gift. Spike's speech about Slayer's having a death wish comes immediately before Buffy finds out that Joyce is going into hospital. The idea of the Slayer as an instrument of death, killing every day, is juxtaposed against the mundane horror of what death is really like, as demonstrated in The Body. As the Slayer, Buffy must cause death, but this is what death looks like. It's hard and painful and mortal and stupid. Eventually Buffy reaches a point where she just can't do this anymore. She can't live in a world where she must choose to be a killer, because she understands death more now than ever.

It's here that the show explicitly connects the ideas of utilitarianism and being a killer. Buffy says that killing Dawn to save the world (and by association killing Angel to save the world, or killing Faith to save Angel), would make the Slayer "just a killer". This goes back to S3, and Faith arguing that the death of one innocent was washed out by the many people that they save, and that being Slayers gives them the right to make that calculation. Tara points to Giles in this episode, the voice of utilitarianism, and identifies him as a killer. Giles himself identifies himself as one when he kills Ben, and here draws a line between being a utilitarian/killer, and being a hero.

BEN: Need a ... a minute. She could've killed me. GILES: No she couldn't. Never. ... She's a hero, you see. She's not like us.

Some people criticise the moral absolutism of this, and could very justifiably argue that killing Ben, or even killing Dawn, would be the most moral thing in this situation. Who are we to say that Dawn's life is more valuable than the lives of a thousand other 14 year old girls, with families of their own that love them just as much as Buffy loves Dawn? But within the context of the show, I think it makes sense for them to reject utilitarianism. Buffy is a Sisyphean story. There will always be another apocalypse after this one is stopped. There will always be another impossible choice with innocent lives in the balance. Through that lens, the idea of "killing one to save a thousand" becomes meaningless, because there's a thousand apocalypses, and if you kill one to stop them all, then you've killed a thousand. That's how Buffy feels - she killed Angel, she killed Faith, now she has to kill Dawn? Where does it end? Eventually it all just gets stripped away, so what's the point? There's no winning move here. The only way to break the cycle is to change the game.

We should also keep in mind Buffy's words at the start of the episode. She fears that the Slayer is "just a killer", but she is also identified by the guy she saves in the alley in the opening scene as "just a girl". And Buffy agrees ("That's what I keep saying."). Buffy is The Vampire Slayer, which dictates that she must make these impossible choices, but she's also Buffy, which means she is a human being with the power of free will. She gets a choice - not a good choice, but a choice. As a human being, she can reject the options in front of her and find a third way. She can transform the whole game, and turn "Death is your gift" into an empowering statement. This was heavily foreshadowed of course - the Guide in Intervention outright stated that Buffy was full of love, and that "love will bring [her] to [her] gift". But it takes Buffy working through these fears and emotions and realising that she simply can't take Dawn's life. She chooses a new way. She avoids being a killer by rejecting utilitarian ethics. To paraphrase The Last Jedi, she wins by saving what she loves. Ultimately, she's not a killer, but a girl, a friend, a sister, a Slayer - a hero.

So season five is very much the climax and resolution of this theme. Very few themes ever disappear entirely from this show though, and this one continues to echo throughout the show. In S6, Buffy again fears she is slipping into darkness. That there is some kind of darkness that is innate within her. But where in S5 this was a fear that she recoiled from but at times seemed inevitable, in S6 it is something that she is drawn towards, that disgusts her but that she takes a kind of comfort in, because it's easier than facing the mundane reality of her depression.

This yearning for her own darkness takes the physical form of Spike, who she uses for what is basically sexual self-harm. Spike steps into Faith's role as Buffy's shadow self for much of the later seasons, and , and like Faith he represents killing as hedonism, and as sex. There's no vampire who so aggressively blurs the lines of sex and death/violence as Spike. Her fear that killing is part of her nature, and her fear of her own sexual desire, are very much one and the same. When she breaks down in Dead Things, she talks about the darkness within her, and of her shame over her own sexuality.

Spike also repeats Faith's utilitarian justifications from Consequences in the episode which forms the climax of Buffy's self-destruction, Dead Things. When Buffy attempts to metaphorically commit suicide by turning herself into the police, she does it while constantly identifying herself as a killed. She repeats some variation on "I killed her" four times in just two scenes. She wants to be punished for being a killer, and not protected for being the slayer. She has grappled with this several times, and is still resolute that being the slayer does not give her a license to kill, but this time she is desperate to be seen as a killer, to give justification for her own self-hatred.

The final way S6 explores this idea is with Willow. When she is after Warren, Buffy tries to stop her, not for Warren's sake but for Willow's. She knows that taking a life changes a person, and implicitly draws on the first time she chose to take a human's life, the moment she "became a killer" on that rooftop with Faith.

Buffy (re: going to kill Faith): I can't play kid games anymore. This is how she wants it. Xander: I just don't want to lose you. Buffy: I won't get hurt. Xander: That's not what I mean. - 3x21 Graduation Day

XANDER: She should be coming down at some point, shouldn't she? I mean, back there she was out of her head ... running on grief and magicks. BUFFY: Doesn't matter . Willow just killed someone. Killing people changes you. Believe me, I know. - 6x21 Two to Go Killing Warren might have been justified given what a complete piece of shit he was - just as killing Angel was justified, just as killing Faith was, just as killing Ben was. That doesn't matter, because Buffy still recognises that the act of killing leaves permanent psychological scars, which she is still bearing.

In S7, we get the final major exploration of the "does the Slayer have a right to kill" idea in Selfless. Here, Buffy seems to have reached the conclusion that Cordelia, Faith and Spike (all her shadow selves) were right, and she does, in fact, have the right to pass judgment because she's the Slayer, when she decides she has to kill Anya.

"It is always different! It's always complicated. And at some point, someone has to draw the line, and that is always going to be me. You get down on me for cutting myself off, but in the end the slayer is always cut off. There's no mystical guidebook. No all-knowing council. Human rules don't apply. There's only me. I am the law." - 7x05 Selfless

However, I don't think the show wants us to take this as gospel. Buffy is conclusively proved wrong in this episode, since killing Anya doesn't work, and it's Willow who finds a third option that saves the day. In S7, the idea of the Slayer-as-Killer is more an incidental theme, while the central exploration is the idea of "one girl in all the world". It explores the nature of that tragedy, that Buffy is by definition alone. Because of this, she necessarily must be a killer. She does have to pass judgement, because there is nobody else capable of it. She has to be the one to hunt and kill vampires. She has to face the choice to kill Angel, to kill Faith, to kill Dawn, to kill Anya.

This is where the theme ends up - as a tragic inevitability. Buffy must always make that choice. Making the selfless choice to kill her boyfriend doesn't stop it. Avoiding the choice and dying herself doesn't even stop it. That boulder just rolls down the hill again and again, and Buffy is the only one who can push it back up. The Slayer is a killer because the Slayer is alone. So the only way to break that cycle is for the Slayer to no longer be alone. There are still elements of The Slayer, and of Buffy as a person, that are linked to death and killing, but she has mostly made peace with those parts, and now can be free of having to be "the law" too.

[chainofclovers]

Ted Lasso 2x1 thoughts

Running out of time to capture my thoughts on 2x1 specifically before 2x2 airs, so here's a mess of things I thought about in response to the season 2 premiere. (Heavily informed by conversations w/my wife and some friends and family both within and without the fandom, discord conversations, things I've read on tumblr, reviews in the press, and, yes, my own little brain when it's alone.)

I really liked it (actually, I loved it)

Because a lot of people--myself included--binged s1 in a single go, I think a lot of people came away from that (beautiful almost perfect) season of TV with a sense that it was just this continuous five-hour explosion of feelings-y goodness with a very clear thesis statement: Make The Audience Happy. But obviously there's a lot of complicated stuff being set up within those five hours of TV, with intentional dividing lines and transitions between the episodes. I know some people watched 2x1 and felt frustrated because it didn't "feel like Ted Lasso" but I didn't feel that way. What I did feel, by contrasting 2x1 with all of s1, is that the atmosphere in s1 wasn't so much an audience-centric feel-good make-em-laugh kind of thing so much as a reflection of the gradual feeling of settling into home as Ted finds his place in Richmond and at AFC Richmond and in letting go of things (marriage) for the first time, and Rebecca, who's majority owner of the damn club but doesn't have a place within it, goes on a parallel community-locating journey. So the intensely warm, comfortable, feelings-y viewing experience is really just a reflection of what it was feeling like for pretty much every character with the exception of Rupert and Bex to carve out a more comfortable, honest, warm place for themselves.

But the challenges of relegation, the specters of the past, the longing any character (any human) has for more, and the mental health issues that come along for the ride meant that 2x1 needed to feel uncomfortable. They create that atmosphere by riddling 2x1 with so many jokes and references that it feels chaotic, overstuffed. The football season isn't going horribly, but it's WEIRD, and everyone is uncomfortable, and Ted doesn't know how to deal with the discomfort within himself so he's relying on the things he knows: references, anecdotes, strung-together wisdom. He clearly plans the Hank-the-dog speech in advance of the press conference, and the tongue-in-cheek "wow, this is so profound" expressions on the journalists' faces are hilarious to me because it's like we're watching them react to a man who's about to lose it and is in the final moments of being able to control the narrative about his team before someone from the outside will have to come in.

I'm obsessed with a tag @ratherembarrassing put on a TL reblog: "This is a show of soliloquies." I loved Ted's manufactured yet thematically necessary speech. I loved that Rebecca basically blacks out at a coffeeshop and tells John all about the messages (harmful or at least profoundly still-in-progress) she's been processing about intimacy and safety. [Side note: it's so perfect that she's still afraid to feel safe. It's like, "If I feel safe, what am I missing about the situation that's going to come back to hurt me?" OOOOF.] I feel like these moments where characters kind of speechify and the audience matters but the audience also does not matter just reflect the overall atmospheric stuff the show does. Like, it's more important to make us feel how it feels than to construct a moment of hyper-realistic dialogue. I get why it can be jarring but I'm into it.

The dog. Welp. A dog died right away. The special effects looked weird. I love dogs, I'm not a monster, but I was also just...not emotionally torn up about Earl at all. It's a catalyst. It's a very quick way to kind of bloop the entire world of Ted Lasso into a skewed and uncomfortable place where these characters absolutely need to reside until they can figure out how to attend to their own mental health and healing with the same focus and compassion they apply to their friendships with other people.

I'm obsessed with how much everything is going to HURT. Like, Ted walked in and Rebecca said she wished he was Keeley and then she didn't start eating the biscuits right away?!?

The biscuits are such an emotional crutch in s1 and SO MUCH of Rebecca's headspace is taken up with destroying something Ted is starting to love, destroying Ted, but also being there for him and feeling seen by him in a truly unique way, so I kind of love the psychic shift here, where all this emotional stuff has happened between them but to move forward they're going to have to learn some new conversational skills. Like girl talk.

The nail polish. I love everyone. I love the nail polish. I love that Ted was late to practice because of it. I love how much he wants other people to need him because it's so clear that he got his feelings hurt like 30 times in 2x1 and doesn't even fully realize it.

I love Dr. Sharon Fieldstone. I love that everyone but Ted very clearly understands the value of having a sports psychologist around. I love that her introduction is not about having to sell the players on the fact that they should talk to someone, but rather about Ted's discomfort over his own leadership abilities and the conflict this could create. It's so good. I'm so excited about it.

Beard and Ted in the pub! All people are different people! Ahhhhhh! Thank God For Beard (TGFB). TGFB is probably going to be my personal motto while watching this season of adorable and emotionally wrenching and ambitious television.

OK, I feel better now that I have this chaotic list out of my brain and onto tumblr. Should that make me feel better? I do not know. I do know that I'll probably try to do this for every episode because watching it week by week is going to drive me insane and I would really like to have some kind of record of the distinct-to-episodes yet cumulative viewing experience before I'm able to take in the full season (and the full series so far) as a whole.

[daughterofluthien]

“decisions were respected” Sorry but didn’t Scott violently throw Isaac against a wall more than once just because Isaac liked his ex girlfriend in canon? That’s the literal opposite of healthy...

Hey, anon!

This is in reference to this post about Scallison for the shipping meme, where I said that one of my favorite things about Scallison is that the show lets them have a healthy breakup, and even date other people while still remaining friends. The scenes you are referring to are a pair of scenes in 3x13 Anchors.

So lets’s take a look.

(under a cut bc it turns out that when you try to be comprehensive, things get v long v quickly 😅)

The Scenes

I’m actually gonna copy/paste the dialogue of both scenes (along with minimal action/inflection notation for context) so that we can really make sure we know what we’re talking about here, so bear with me:

The first of these scenes occurs as Scott and Isaac are getting ready to head to school in the morning. After some initial ‘hey, what’re you doing, are you heading to school’ dialogue—during which both boys seem a bit awkward—we get the following:

ISAAC: [anxiously] Can I ask you a question? SCOTT: Okay... ISAAC: Are you angry with me? SCOTT: No! ISAAC: Are you sure? SCOTT: ...No. ISAAC: [awkwardly] What's that mean? SCOTT: I guess I'm not really sure how I'm feeling... ISAAC: [nodding] Okay. ...Do you hate me? SCOTT: [sighing] No, of course not. ISAAC: Do you want to hit me? SCOTT: [taken aback] No. ISAAC: I think you should hit me. SCOTT: I don't want to hit you. ISAAC: Are you sure? SCOTT: Why would I want to hit you? You didn't do anything, did you? ISAAC: [stammering] No. I mean, um... What do you mean? SCOTT: I mean, like, you didn't kiss her or anything, right? ISAAC: No! Absolutely not. No. SCOTT: ...Did you want to? ISAAC: Oh, yeah. Totally. [scene cuts to hallway outside the room. Isaac flies through the doorway and hits the wall] MELISSA: Hey! You two teenage boys? Don't test my entirely un-supernatural level of patience! ISAAC: ...Feel better?

The scene then ends, and we cut to subsequent scenes of Stiles and then Allison also getting ready for school.

The second scene is much shorter and happens later in the episode, after Isaac saves Lydia from an arrow that Allison fired while hallucinating. He and Scott are in Scott’s room again, and he’s telling him about the incident:

SCOTT: Right at her head? ISAAC: Almost right through it. And she keeps saying the same thing-- that she keeps seeing her aunt. Whatever's happening to you guys is getting worse. If I hadn't been there, then Lydia would be dead. SCOTT: ...What were you doing there? ISAAC: Uh... [scene cuts to hallway outside the room. Isaac flies through the doorway and hits the wall] MELISSA: [groaning] Oh, you guys, come on! This house does not have a supernatural ability to heal! So, stop it!

But of course just the text of the scene isn’t enough to accurately convey everything in even a tiny portion of a larger narrative, because nothing happens in a vacuum. With that in mind, let’s look at...

The Context 

The first of these scenes occurs immediately after the opening credits, and is the first time we see either Scott or Isaac this season. (Assuming you consider 3B a separate season, of course, which is a whole ‘nother can of worms. This tv show we all choose to enjoy sure is Something.)

Often, the opening of a season is used to reintroduce the audience to the main characters—letting us know where their characters arcs are starting, and what they’ll be struggling with this season. Teen Wolf did this previously (and did it well, imo) in 3x01 Tattoo. Act 2 of that episode begins with a series of four scenes showing our main characters getting ready for school in the morning, highlighting where everyone currently is, and setting up where their arcs are going to go.

Scene order taken by itself would seem to indicate that they were trying to do something similar in this episode. It starts off with the hook of Stiles’ extended nightmare sequence. He can’t tell dreams apart from reality anymore, and wakes up screaming. Cut to black, cue opening credit sequence.

Immediately after the first ad break, we get a sequence of three scenes. The first is the longer of the two Scott and Isaac scenes (which, as previously mentioned, occurs as they’re getting ready to head out to school). The second is of Stiles. He’s packing for school, and the audience learns that he’s been struggling to read when he’s awake as well. Finally, we see Allison leaving her and her dad’s apartment. She seems like she’s doing fine, if a little over-focused. But then she gets into the elevator, and has an extended hallucination/flashback of Kate.

We learn soon after this that all three of them (Scott, Stiles, and Allison) are suffering from the aftereffects of their sacrifice in the previous season. According to the explanations we get both from Kira and, later, from Deaton, they’re slipping into bardo, or the space between life and death, and there’s a door open in their minds. 

Okay, problem established.

It stands to reason, then, that all three of those opening scenes are supposed to serve to set up this problem. We’re shown, in three successive scenes, that all three of our sacrificees are, as the kids say, Not Doing So Hot.

(yes I know the kids don’t say that, let me be an increasingly out-of-touch millennial in peace)

This is all well and good, and honestly makes sense! Under this paradigm, the Scott and Isaac scene should be highlighting that Scott is Losing Control. Bardo is affecting him, and it’s causing him to be more aggressive. Giving in to violence in a way that he generally holds himself back from. Heck, the scene even starts with Scott flexing his fingers, and we (and Scott) see the shadow of a clawed hand against the door.

In the context of the narrative, it makes sense.

Except.

eXCEPT—

The Framing

The thing about the medium of television is that, when we’re talking about a scene, we can’t just look at the narrative structure. We also have to look at the scene itself: how it’s shot and directed, how it’s edited, even what music is paired with the scenes.

In the Stiles and Allison sequences, the scenes are very clearly shot for tension and horror. Long lingering shots on the things that Just Aren’t Right. Music that heightens the tension. Stiles gets some nice lil scare chords over the shot of the book that he can’t read, and there’s a very quiet droning in the background of the Allison nightmare sequence that slowly grows into some classic horror soundtrack music.

Okay. So far that tracks with the narrative thesis.

Now let’s take look at the Scott and Isaac scene.

We start out with some of those lingering shots I was talking about, as Scott is halted in his tracks when he notices the shadow of the clawed hand. We see his own hand is human and unshifted. There’s quiet, percussion heavy music over this portion of the scene that increases in tension at this point. Shaken, Scott closes his hand into a fist, and when he opens it, both the shadow and his own hand are smooth and human. The tense music fades out to silence, and he breathes a sigh of relief.

Scott opens the door to reveal Isaac, which startles him. There’s a short musical sting to underline this moment, and then the background music cuts out completely, leaving us (and them) in the awkwardness of this moment. 

And OH BOY. IS IT AWKWARD. 😬

You can kinda see the Awkwardness Inherent in the System in the dialogue that I pasted up at the top—it’s a lot of back-and-forth, short statements, trailing off... And both Posey and Sharman are playing up the awkwardness as well. Neither boy looks like they really want to be there, and that includes Isaac, who initiated this entire conversation.

But here’s the thing.

The thing that really frustrates me about this scene.

It’s not the sort of awkwardness that exists to increase the tension. The sort that builds and builds until it reaches a fever pitch and you know something just has to give. You know, the sort of tension that you would want to build if you were showing how the protagonist of your show is no longer fully in control, and is on a knife’s edge of lashing out at his friend and beta.

Instead, it’s played for comedy.

And once again, a lot of this is down to the music.

Before the dialogue that I quoted at the top even begins, the music starts back up, and this time the tense percussion has been replaced by light, pizzicato strings. (That may not be the exact right term, fyi, I only really know enough about music theory to be dangerous.) But you know, the playful, plucked strings that often accompanies comedic or otherwise not-serious scenes.

Background music tells the viewer how they’re supposed to feel about the events in a particular scene, and the music here is saying that we’re not supposed to find this whole confrontation that dramatic. In fact, we’re supposed to find it funny.

But it’s not just the music that that frames this scene as comedic. It’s also the fact that we don’t actually see Scott shoving Isaac. Instead, the scene cuts to the hallway, and all we see is Isaac flying through the doorway.

Now, obviously I don’t have a direct line to the director and editors’ minds here. But I would bet money that those particular shots were chosen 1). because it’s so much easier to do a wire pull stunt when you don’t have to show what it’s in reaction to, and 2). because it’s kinda difficult to show your main character directly doing a violence and make it funny.

But show someone yeeted into frame, and that’s funny. Right?

(Spoiler alert: not in this context, it isn’t)

Now, I know I’ve been focusing on the first scene a lot—partially because it’s longer and partially because it’s really the only reason that the second scene exists—but I do want to take a look at the second scene really quickly as well. It’s much shorter and generally adopts a more serious tone than the first one, mostly due to fact that we’re smack dab in the middle of the action at this point. The weird visions that the sacrificees have been having all episode have started endangering lives, and they can’t just wait for it to resolve on its own.

But then the focused, intent exposition is broken by Scott’s question of “why were you there.” Then smash cut to a near identical shot of the hallway,and Isaac yeeting into frame.

The thing is, this scene is entirely dependent on the previous one. It only “works”—and I use this term loosely—as a call back to the scene at the beginning of the ep. Heck, both even have the stinger of a frustrated Melissa at the end of both scenes, frustrated at all the boys-will-be-boys roughhousing going on in her house.

Much like the first scene, this one is also set up and framed for Comedy.

Which is um. A Choice. 

But What Does It All Mean

What frustrates me about these scenes, at the end of the day, is that the narrative intention and the directing/editing seem to be fundamentally at odds.

On the one hand, it makes narrative sense to say that the purpose of the scenes is to show that Scott is losing control. That he’s being affected by bardo and the open door in his mind, and it’s putting the people close to him in danger. But then on the other, the way the scenes are actually used are as comic relief. As a way to release tension between very tense, dramatic scenes. 

I don’t think it works, as I don’t personally find it funny at all. But that really does seem to be the intention.

Once again, absolutely wILD choices were made on the part of tptb, and I really wish anyone had thought for two seconds about the implications of all of this, but nO

Ahem.

So now (literally 2K words later I’m so sorry 😅) what does this tell us about the characters? Certainly no one here is arguing that shoving someone is a good or defensible choice, whether it’s due to forces outside the character’s control or not. But even taking the influence of bardo in mind, is it even in character for Scott in the first place?

Because canon can also be written inconsistently/out of character, especially when we’re talking about a long-running show like tw.

One’s an Incident, Two is Coincidence...

Well, we all know the end of that saying.

So let’s end by looking at a few patterns.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this, once again, eXCEEDINGLY long post, this is reference to a post I made about scallison. I said the following in that post:

And I also really like that they [Scott and Allison] didn’t get back together. That they were allowed to be friends. That even though sometimes it hurt to watch someone you love loved love become romantically close to another person, decisions were respected, and no friendships were broken over it.

The first pattern we need to look at, then, is this:

What’s Scott’s pattern of behavior toward Allison and Isaac’s relationship?

And does Scott’s behavior toward Isaac in these two scenes match the pattern, or is it an outlier?

3x11 Alpha Pact: Sacrifice Prep The revelation that Allison and Isaac have grown close enough for him to act as emotional tether for her is very visibly a blow to Scott. He looks like the rug has been pulled out from under him, but he doesn’t look angry or upset, just.... sad. In fact, it looks like he’s swallowing back tears. But he nods towards the two of them and just says, “It’s okay.”

3x12 Lunar Ellipse: “I look for my friends” This is the epilogue of the season. Scott walks into the hallway at all of his friends in turn. Satisfied. Happy. First at Lydia and Aiden, then at Danny and Ethan. Then he turns and watches as Isaac and Allison walk down the stairs, and they’re laughing, and so obviously happy, and Scott’s small smile grows. He isn’t jealous here—he’s happy for them. 

3x14 Illuminated: Mutual Recognition Scott and Allison are both at Danny’s halloween party, but they’re not here together. He sees her from across a crowded room, just like he did at the winter formal, so many months ago. But so much has happened, and they’re different people now. Allison’s with Isaac, and he’s starting to having feelings for Kira, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt, and that he doesn’t miss the relationship he and Allison had. For a moment, his fingers slip away from Kira’s, and he and Allison share a sad smile. 

Believe it or not, these are actually the only other examples I could find of Scott reacting to Isaac and Allison’s relationship. And uniformly across them, he’s sad, yes—after all, he loved her, and that relationship is very definitively over now. But he never seems jealous, and he isn’t angry.

So, if the Scott and Isaac scenes in Anchors don’t fit the pattern of Scott’s behavior towards the new couple, what pattern do they fit?

“Hit me.”

The teen wolf writers have a... really upsetting habit, honestly, of “resolving” interpersonal conflict between two characters by having the “wronged” party hit the other. Afterwards, the tension is almost completely broken between them, as if letting the person act aggressively in a way consensual to both parties has somehow solved the problem.

2x11 Battlefield: Derek and Peter After Peter comes back from the dead, he confronts the now pack-less Derek and offers to help him. Derek, likely remembering that Peter killed Laura and was responsible for most of the events of S1, attacks him instead. After taking a beating, Peter says the following:

PETER: Okay, go ahead! Come on, do it! Hit me. Hit me. I can see that it's cathartic for you! You're letting go of all the anger, self-loathing, and hatred that comes with total and complete failure. I may be the one taking the beating, Derek, but you've already been beaten. So, go ahead. Hit me if that will make you feel better. After all, I did say that I wanted to help.

3x13 Anchors: Scott and Isaac We’ve already discussed this scene in uh. Detail. So I don’t think we need to go into the specifics again. But just a reminder that this dialogue exists:

ISAAC: Do you want to hit me? SCOTT: No. ISAAC: I think you should hit me.

5x15 Amplification: Scott and Liam During the previous supermoon, Liam—swayed by grief, the full moon, and Theo’s manipulations—tried to kill Scott and take his power. They’ve since rediscovered an equilibrium in their relationship, and Liam’s back in Scott’s pack, but they’re both still dealing with the implications of that event. In this episode, they’re attempting to break Lydia out of Eichen, but they’re not as strong as they should be, due to the mountain ash laced through the building, and are having difficulty breaking down a door. Then, the following exchange occurs:

LIAM: Hit me. SCOTT: What? LIAM: Hit me! I'll get angry, then I'll get stronger. STILES: Hit him. Hit him! LIAM: I tried to take your powers. I tried to kill you. Hit me! STILES: He also left you for dead. LIAM: I wanted you dead!

6x16 Triggers: Liam and Theo No one actually directly says “hit me” in  this one, due to the circumstances, but the sentiment’s there. In this sequence, Liam and Theo are trying to convince Gerard and the hunters that the whole pack is hiding out in the zoo, so Theo goads Liam into hitting him, in order to stage a very audible fight.

THEO: Okay... Then they have to believe us.[shouts] Isn't that right? LIAM: [whispers] Why are you yelling? THEO: [shouts] You got a problem? Oh, that's right, you always have a problem! LIAM: [whispers] What the hell are you doing? THEO: [shouts] Shut up! [punches Liam] Yeah, you see that, Scott? Your little Beta can't even take a punch. And what do you think, Malia?

While there’s a variety of primary textual reasons here, all of them deal with personal issues between the pair, and all of them involve some level of catharsis for the person doing the punching. Taken all together, it’s honestly a pretty troubling pattern, especially given the inclusion of an actual canonical abuse victim initiating and receiving the violence.

TL;DR

This is a writer issue, not a character issue. The serious narrative context conflicts with the comedic framing in a way that is honestly baffling to me, and it doesn’t fit the established pattern of Scott’s character and actions. Moreover, it’s an example of the writers’ apparent belief that interpersonal conflict can and should be solved through consensual violence.

The pattern we do see, is that the Scott is saddened by the knowledge that Allison has moved on, but he’s glad that she and Isaac are happy. Similarly, Allison is saddened that Scott is moving on as well, because she does still care for him deeply. Despite their conflicted feelings, neither tries to disrupt the other’s new relationship.

On other shows, that would be a season-long, drama-filled plotline. Here, nothing.

And I legitimately love that so much.

[mego42]

What are some of your favorite GG song Moments. ? Here are some of mine.

1. Easy ft lorde- OMG this soong is such a bop. it just fits the scene so well. HONESTLY one of my fav scenes. HE IS LIVING HIS BEST LIFE IN THIS SCENE. I LOVE CHAOTIC RIO

2. Wild heart by SPELLES.- THIS SONG IS SO HAUNTING just fits the vibe so well. SO ANGSTY

3. The most recent song. Used in that Brio moment. Idk what its called . I know that Beth is having the time of her life but that song is just HEAVY. The lyrics 🙏😭😭❤❤❤ such a pretty song fr 😔

omg anon i love this question nearly as much as i love your taste. YES!!!! to Easy (i too love tf out of personification of chaos rio), YES!!!!! to Wild Heart!!!!  it’s SO HAUNTING and disorienting and PERFECT. and Y E S !!!!!!!!!!!!! to the most recent song (whole life by perfume genius). i am LIVING for the heavy ballad vibes, super agree it’s so pretty. 

in no particular order, my top 5 music moments:

blanket me / hundred waters

1x09 - beth makes the calendar laying out her kids future in case something happens to her

i’ve already exposed myself as an absolute loon when it comes to this song and you can read the whole breakdown here

but tl;dr it’s a song about relying too much on a person and needing to break free and be independent but not in a toxic sort of way, more in a for personal growth and the best for everyone because co-dependence holds everyone back and i really, really, really love that in context of beth and her children, her learning to step back and not smother them but also not give so much of herself that she disappears entirely because that’s not good for them in the long run

basically it’s sort of a thesis statement for beth’s underlying s1 arc

plus it’s just like, heavy and haunting and absolutely gorgeous and not to be like, unreasonably pretentious, moves me and i love it

notable lyrics: You're my blanket, you're my skin / You're everything within / You're my guardian, I'm your sail / A boat in your harbor / Gone under, capsized and sinking / Blanket me, blanket me, blanket me, blanket me, blanket me

-

whole life / perfume genius

4x06 - beth looking for a place to hide the wire/hooking up with rio

the song is all about leaving behind the things weighing you down and moving into a brighter, more free future and i love love love how that plays with the duality of beth hiding the wire and securing her source of information for the secret service BUT ALSO marking this moment as a turning point for beth and rio because it absolutely is.

(like not just the fact that they’ve resumed a physical relationship but rio’s invited beth deeper into his world and we’re seeing beth crack on a level we really haven’t before)

this season is leaning SO HARD into duality and the tangled up truths and lies between them and i am absolutely UNHINGED over it

i also really love the like, passionate ballad nature of it juxtaposed over this twisted, extremely sexy moment (intercut with dean joyfully trying to seize hold of his new hobby only to be IMMEDIATELY denied)

there are just so many layers to it and i love all of them

notable lyrics: The mark where he left me / A clip on my wing / Oh, let it soften / I forgive everything

-

ocean rain / echo & the bunnymen

4x04 - the beth and jane/rio getting the drop on fitz montage

the whole theme of this song is two people tearing each other apart and destroying the bones of their former intimacy which like, hello subject matter aptitude and it’s told through this GLORIOUSLY dramatic hurricane at sea imagery with ships being dragged below the waves by the hurricanes the two people have called down on each other set to a gorgeous over the top orchestral score

on a yrical note, i love that the song is basically the same verse over and over (interspersed with the chorus, obvs) and the only change is me vs you when it comes to who brought the storm down on them

basically, if you were challenged to come up with a song that represented two peak dramatique heaux nightmare factories locked in a never ending game of deadly cat and mouse, you couldn’t top this.

i am ABSOLUTELY OBSESSED with the choice to pair it with a montage of beth finally pulling the trigger (with foresight and intent, shooting rio was p obvs a oh shit look what i did moment), a milestone rio’s been dragging her (down) towards since the beginning of s2 AND using him to do it, dragging him (down) into her mess (m ade all the more messy when you consider he was the target of it) (i just! love it! so! much!)

i want to live in johnathan leahy’s brain

notable lyrics: all at sea again / and now my[your] hurricanes have brought down this ocean rain / to bathe me again / my ship’s a-sail / can you hear it’s tender frame / screaming from beneath the waves / screaming from beneath the waves

-

el musgo / gabriel bruce

3x04 - rio watches beth make money

UGH GOD when that high hat and bass kicked in the first time i was like oh shit we are in for some DRAMA and sure enough we were as well as a more sexual montage than anything you’d find in actual porn.

idk, the fact that they chose this deep, dark, mournful about lost love to an elongated montage slow motion montage of rio watching beth make fake cash and deciding not to kill her for nearly killing him doEs stuFf to me

all i’m saying is johnathan leahy ships brio harder than any of us and is a more dramatique heaux than either of them, which are two really impressive feats to achieve

AND THEN!!! AND THEN!!!!! they CHOPPED THE SONG UP!!!!! so they were able to take advantage of the dawning drama of the opening bars BUT ALSO include the closing stanza about wearing the marks the subject of the song gave the singer like a scar where they took his heart from him and the INTENTIONALITY of that creative choice puts me on the FLOOR

LIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

notable lyrics: I'll wear this mark like a medal / But it's a scar / Where you took my heart from me

-

kimono hill / sophia kennedy

3x01 - rio leaves the hotel

honeslty, lowkey surprised this one made my top five. not because it isn’t a fabulous song deployed with johnathan leahy’s usual mastery, but bc i didn’t realize how much i loved it until making this list

i don’t really have like, a deep, lyrically rooted storytelling reason for loving it, i just think the way they used it in the show is Such A Vibe

the way the vibrating synthy tones and underlying organ kicks in while rio’s getting in the elevator has this beautiful held breath anticipatory quality to it that works SO WELL to set up the montage of rio strutting out back into his life while turner gets murdered (a scene i have some uh, complicated feelings about but setting those aside), and the bolands’ fresh start to the tune of bouncy drums and looping vocals

idk it’s such a shining note to end the first episode of a new season on, i remember feeling refreshed and super hype for what’s to come

notable lyrics: no lyrics, just the vibe of the opening bars

tl;dr i really, really, REALLY love how this show uses music. you can tell they put a lot of time and effort and thought into it and while i know the trajectory isn’t working for everyone, personally i love it. granted, as you can see from this list, i clearly love the shit out of a down tempo dramatic ballad, so. if you are more of a bangers and bops person, i would point you to @nickmillerscaulk’s inbox as she is a Certified Bangers Afficianado.

[florrickandassociates]

TGF Thoughts: 5x10-- And the violence spread.

So, that’s it for season five. I’m still trying to sort out how I feel about the season as a whole and Wackner’s arc. I’m hopeful that writing this will help me decide.

This episode has a Previously, and it’s rather conventional. I’m guessing it’s here to bookend the season, with conveying information being only a secondary objective.  

Did we see Rivi scream, “You’re done, Wacko, you’re done! Canceled! Canceled!” in the last episode or is that new to this previously? I feel like I absolutely would’ve had things to say about a) Wackner being called “Wacko,” which has been RIGHT THERE this whole time, and b) the use of “Canceled,” which is a thing Rivi would never say but is VERY thematic (you know, cancel culture and also Wackner having a TV show and also this being a TV show that’s wrapping up* Wackner’s arc).

* The way things end this episode, I’d say we’re done with Wackner. The Kings have said they aren’t sure about the plan for season six, so never say never, but I think that if we see Wackner again, it will be as part of a different arc.  

I went back to 5x09 and while we do see the same shots of Rivi screaming, whatever he’s saying in 5x09 is in Spanish. So either he was saying this in Spanish or the dialogue here is totally new.  

I’m a little sad that I knew in advance Robert King had directed this episode, because I want to know how long it would’ve taken me to guess. I’d like to think this first shot, of Diane flopping down on her bed in a very pretty floral print dress, then Kurt flopping down in the opposite direction, would’ve given it away. We usually don’t get shots that are both striking and kinda balanced unless RK’s directing.  

This also has some big season three opener vibes—the scene where Diane turns to Kurt and says, “I’m happy,” thus jinxing the entire season.  

Diane and Kurt are about to go on vacation, which means, of course, that Diane and Kurt are definitely not about to go on vacation. I’ve watched 12 seasons of this show; I know all the tricks!  

If I didn’t get it from the initial staging of the opening shot, the camera panning to Diane and Kurt’s suitcases and then back would’ve been another clue that RK directed. He ALWAYS has the camera in motion.  

I love that Diane’s travel outfit is a dress you could wear to a fancy party and a statement necklace. Of course it is.

And if I needed evidence that RK and MK wrote this episode (which I didn’t; it is a finale so I knew they wrote it), Diane quoting Waiting for Godot is a clue there.  

I really should read Waiting for Godot, shouldn’t I?  

“Wow. Educated and a good lay,” Kurt responds. I know that the political stuff between Diane and Kurt can get more than a little murky, but banter like this reminds me why they stay together and why politics never drive them apart. Also, it’s really nice to see Diane and Kurt have some fun banter that isn’t about politics.  

And Diane making kissing noises and asking Kurt to meet her halfway! This just feels like I’m spying on someone’s private life and I love it. Not in a voyeuristic way, since this is actually a little uncomfortably private, but in a, “ah, yes, these do feel like real people” way. This is the kind of “a little goes a long way” character moment I always want more of, and Kings episodes ALWAYS include stuff like this.

And there it is. The phone rings as Diane and Kurt are about to start out for the airport. Diane thinks the call must be for Kurt, but it’s for her. It’s a very flustered Liz, informing her that STR Laurie’s execs are on their way to the office for a surprise visit.

If the Diane/Kurt scene didn’t tell me that Robert King directed, I almost certainly would’ve gotten it from the sudden cut to Liz, walking through the hallways and doing a million things at once with a ton of background noise. No one loves chaos the way Robert King loves chaos.  

This episode STRONGLY reminds me of the Wife season five finale. It is equally chaotic and also spins a ton of plates. But, mostly, the similarity I see between the two episodes is that they are both extremely fun and captivating to watch because of how much momentum they have, but everything just feels slightly hollow and not exactly focused on the thing you want to see.  

(Shout out to my friend Ryan, who messaged me the 5x22 comparison before I could message it to him!)  

I decided I should rewatch the first few minutes of 5x22. I am now 15 minutes into 5x22 of Wife and 2 minutes into 5x10 of Fight. Oops.  

Apparently, STR Laurie planned a surprise visit because they heard RL was dysfunctional. You don’t say!  

I felt like 5x09 concluded with STR Laurie being won over by Allegra and the RL team, so this is a bit of a surprising place to start the episode. But, since Diane seems surprised too, I’ll allow it.  

Now Liz and Diane have 90 minutes to agree on a financial plan! Kurt’s on the phone with the airline before Diane even hangs up with Liz.  

Diane is determined not to lose out on her vacation and asks Kurt to change the flight to 8:00. “Kurt, we are going on this vacation if it kills me!” is a line I would worry was foreshadowing on basically any other show.

The RL/STRL PowerPoint template is pretty ugly. They want to call 2021 their best year yet, thanks to the deal between Rivi and Plum Meadow Farms we saw last week. Even though we saw champagne and signatures, the deal isn’t done yet because Plum Meadow can back out if Rivi goes to jail.

RK also loves close-ups more than any other director on the show; I do not love close-ups.  

The Plum Meadow deal is such a big deal that for the quarter, they go from $45 million to $5 million without it. They should just not say numbers. I can believe it’s big enough to take them from a modest profit to being behind projections or whatever, but I can’t believe that they have $5 million in other business and $40 million on this one deal.  

It seems that Rivi was arrested. I don’t think it is ever said in this episode why. I assume the arrest relates to his behavior in Wackner’s court, since there were police officers there, and I suppose that Rivi is a big enough deal the police would actually take him to real court, but are we not going to address the weirdness of Rivi being arrested in a fake court where his employees are being tried, then taken to a real court by the same people who just an episode ago were disillusioned with real court? This seems like a plot point.

Carmen on a frantic phone call in the backseat of a car feels very 7x22.  

Who is James that Carmen has in her contacts!? And why does everyone always put Liz in their contacts as “Elizabeth Reddick” when everyone calls her Liz?  

Carmen calls Marissa to go argue in Vinetta’s court since she’s on Rivi duty. Carmen doesn’t take Marissa’s job in Wackner’s court seriously and then notes that this instruction is coming straight from Liz, so Marissa falls in line.  

Wackner’s case of the week is about rural Illinois wanting to form its own state separate from Chicago. There’s a farmer who feels like his tax money is only going to the big city and he wants it to stay in his community.  

They’ve just now added stage lighting to the set of Wackner Rules, dunno why they wouldn’t have done that earlier!

I don’t know what standing you’d have to have to bring a case about wanting to divide the state in two to court, or if this is even something a court would or should decide, but, sure, Wackner and Cord, go for it. There are no rules!  

This map splitting Illinois into two new states that Cord is holding is a dumb prop because Galena, where this farmer is from, is in the same section as Chicago. Do I pause every reference to Chicago on this show and then google information to see if the writers bothered to look it up or pretend they’ve ever set foot in Chicago? You know I do.

“Secession!” the audience screams. Does the audience of Wackner Rules really want to see this?

A Good Fight Short! And it really is short: “Stop this obsession with secession and breaking up the Union. It’s boring and it’s dumb, end of song.” I feel like that’s the thesis statement for this episode, or one of them (that this episode seems to have about ten thesis statements is kind of my problem with this episode, tbh). This episode is very much about danger of things becoming too fractured—the COTW, the copycat courts, the firm drama—and I feel like the writers come around to just saying no, this is enough, we need structure and consistency.

But more on that later. MUCH more on that later.

Marissa is swearing more because “the world has required it.” She notes this to Wackner as she calls him out on the secession case. Cord barges in.

Take a look at the employee of the month poster on the back of the door at 5:39. Then at 5:40, look at what’s in the box just to the right of the center of the screen: it’s an employee of the month poster with Wackner on it! Cute easter egg. (Would Marissa definitely notice this and have questions? Yes. Is this here as a cute easter egg for eagle-eyed fans? Almost certainly.)  

“Insane is just one step away from reality if you get people to believe, and you know what makes people believe? TV.” Cord explains when Marissa asks how they can possibly be litigating this case. That’s thesis statements two and three, folks. The first is that if you get people to believe, then anything is possible, which sounds like a tagline for a Disney movie but is actually super dangerous; the second is that reality TV is a way to persuade people and change opinions.  

So we’ve got: (1) Factions are bad. (2) People are persuadable and the rules don’t actually matter. (3) Reality TV changes minds. Let’s see if there are more.

(Yes, these theses do kind of add up to a whole—The rules don’t matter, so if you persuade people, through reality tv, you get factions of people believing their own sets of rules and facts—but what I'm interested in tracking throughout this episode is how well the writers actually bring these theses together.)

(And this is setting aside that key themes in previous episodes, that I think many of us were looking for resolution on, included outlining the flaws with the extant “real” justice system and exploring the role of prison in the justice system. From this episode, I don’t think the writers ever intended to really tackle either of those issues. That’s fine—I'm not sure that TGF has something to say about prison abolition and I don’t want a thought experiment where the writers actually try to fix the legal system—but feels a bit disjointed. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, but 5x08 and 5x09 needed to do a better, clearer job of setting up this finale. The key themes of Wackner’s arc were always present, but they needed to slowly narrow the scope so the resolution felt inevitable and clear. Instead, we spent time on things like parking spaces (when we could’ve had a real plot about how Wackner’s court gains legitimacy through violence, incarceration, and playing on people’s frustration with the real systems) and Del’s focus groups (when we could’ve instead done a plot about Wackner gaining fans who wanted to use his methods to do ill). Everything I just mentioned in the parentheticals is in the show! It’s not subtext! We see it all! We see Cord use violence and prisons to enforce Wackner’s rulings; we see the cops turn to Wackner out of frustration; we see that the people drawn to Wackner Rules and to Wackner’s court are increasingly sounding more and more like right-wing populists! I can’t be too hard on this arc because, again, all these ideas are there. I’m not coming up with them on my own!)

I’m just saying: this ending would’ve been a lot clearer and a lot more interesting had the writers focused on what I mentioned above instead of the distractions of the last two episodes.  

Whew, that was a ramble. Hope you’re ready for more rambles.

On a similar note, I’d like to reiterate my problems with how the writers used Marissa after the private prison reveal. I don’t have much more to say than what I wrote last week, but it’s another example of the same problem. Marissa objecting to Wackner’s court because she notices what it’s becoming and how Cord plans to use it for political gain (two Illinoises (??) changes the Senate and the Electoral College...) always was going to be part of the endgame. Marissa only seriously objecting after the fourth or fifth line Wackner crosses feels bizarre.  

Cord does NOT like that there is another court, and wants to protect Wackner’s IP. Wackner, as we saw last episode, does not feel threatened by the other court. In fact, he seems to be excited by it.  

I love Liz questioning Diane’s outfit like it’s unprofessional. It’s a little low-cut and showy, but I don’t think unprofessional is the word I’d use for it.  

Now they have 45 minutes to decide The Future Of The Firm and Diane wants to be considered a name partner. Oh, that debate is still raging?! Every time I think it’s done it comes back, which should probably be a sign to Diane that her options are to leave and start something new, jettison Madeline and the others, or step down. Staying on as name partner and calling it a black firm is just not an option.  

“Diane, there is a split in the firm that...” Liz starts, before asking some associates to leave the room. Ha! The reveal Liz and Diane aren’t alone is a pretty fun touch.

“The Black equity partners don’t want to be in your work group,” Liz informs Diane. “Because they think they’ll be punished by this firm?” Diane asks. “No, that’s paranoia. We don’t punish here,” Liz responds. “Of course you do. My fracking client. My union client. The Black lawyers who work on those cases—they're considered traitors” Diane says. “Because those CEOs are racists,” Liz counters.

Lots going on here, and I’m not sure I understand it all. Why would the equity partners—who are partners—feel like they’re being punished by being in Diane’s work group? (And also what does a “work group” mean and why haven’t they talked about it in the past?) When Diane starts talking about the lawyers who staff her clients, she’s not talking about equity partners; she is talking about associates.

And people are giving associates shit for working on Diane’s clients whom they happen to be staffed on!? That’s sad, though believable.

“So what do we do? Only bring in clients who can pass the racial smell test?” Diane asks. I mean, actually, yes. IF the goal is to be a black firm and to have that designation mean something in moral terms rather than marketing terms, then yes.  

“It’s okay if you’re a drug kingpin like Rivi, but it’s not okay if you want me as lead attorney?” Diane says. Also, yes. Diane makes good points here.  

“Diane, this is not about you,” Liz counters. Um, sure, but it has to be about something, Liz. Unless you’re trying to build a firm you don’t control that makes 88% of its revenue from a drug dealer (40 million out of 45 million this quarter = 88%; I told you they shouldn’t give me numbers) but happens to have black people in charge, you have to grapple with this question. I don’t think anyone who’s fighting for the firm to be a black-led (not owned, bc STRL) business is the type of person who thinks that having a black-led firm that does all the same shit as any other firm is in itself a good thing, so you NEED to address your client list. Madeline is anti-Rivi, anti-Cord, anti-Wolfe-Coleman (the rapist guy), pro-social justice, and pro having a black led firm.  

“I mean, why... why do white people personalize this?” Liz asks. “Oh, now I’m just a white person?” Diane responds. I... don’t know what to do with this! Liz is right that Diane is taking this personally; Diane is right that Liz needs to deal with the rest of the client list. But no one is saying the things that REALLY need to be said: That all their decisions are meaningless in the shadow of STRL, and that deciding to be a black led firm isn’t the end of the discussion if they haven’t decided what types of clients they want to have.  

“What happened, Liz? Last year we were intent on an all-female-run law firm,” Diane starts. Oh, THIS AGAIN! Diane never learns, does she? She never seems to realize that no one she’s approached with this idea is NEARLY as in love with it as she is. She probably still wonders to herself why Alicia—who partnered with her at the end of season seven basically just because it was the easiest, most frictionless thing to do—didn't seem more committed to their firm.  

“Diane, there is history here that we are trying to...” Liz says, but Diane cuts in to note that women (women like Diane Lockhart!) have history too! In fact, she’s spent “35 years fighting gender discrimination to get to this position.” “And we have spent 400 years fighting racial discrimination to try and, you know...” Liz starts, before cutting herself off to get back to the ticking clock.

Sigh. Just talk about the actual thing instead of talking around the thing, guys. Diane is obviously deserving of A name partnership, in the abstract. This is an undeniable fact. And while Diane is definitely making this about herself rather than the big picture, I don’t think Liz trying to trump Diane’s 35 year career with the history of black people is going to win her any arguments? Like, just say what you mean and say it clearly. What Liz, I think, wants to express is that Diane’s individual accomplishments aren’t the issue here and everyone thinks she’s deserving (though Liz suggested Diane was not deserving a few episodes ago, which I didn’t understand then and don’t understand now). The problem is that Diane is trying to fight a battle that’s about something much larger than herself with, “but I'm a good lawyer!”  

And that’s KIND OF what Liz is saying here, if I add all her sentences up and read between the lines, but, again, why not just say it?  

“Alright, now we have 43 minutes to fix race relations, gender relations. STR Laurie’s gonna fire our asses, and you know it,” Liz says. I am curious what that would look like. Wouldn’t that just mean that STRL wouldn’t control them anymore? I’m sure being fired would be bad and all, but wouldn’t it free them from the contract they wanted out of last year?  

“Let’s split the firm down the middle. I hire half the lawyers, you hire the other half,” Diane suggests. What does this mean? Why are you hiring your employees? Huh?

“You hire the white associates, and I hire the black associates?” Liz confirms. This seems like a very bad idea that would make things a lot worse and open them up to lawsuits! I also still do not know what they’re even talking about. And I don’t know why Allegra isn’t a part of this conversation.

“I’m not saying it’s good. I’m just saying it’s what we’re left with. It's what we can agree on,” Diane says. I really wish I understood what “hire” meant in this context because I don’t understand why they have to split anything or why this has to be done now and I don’t understand why this would possibly be a good solution. Can you imagine the backlash when people realize all the white people report to Diane and all the black people to Liz and that people were taken off of the accounts they’ve worked on for years to accomplish this? And this must be something that the employees would know about eventually; otherwise they could just randomly assign half to Liz and half to Diane.  

I’m sad Madeline isn’t in this episode because I feel like we needed to see more of her POV as well as the associate POV. I don’t really understand the divides at play within the firm or what the staff and other partners are asking for, but I suspect it isn’t this.

Hallucination Jesus is back, and at least there’s actually a point to him this time (he shows up when Jay is in Vinetta’s court and reminds Jay that Vinetta will rule based on her religious beliefs). I still dislike the hallucinations.

Jay advises Marissa, who is Jewish, to talk a lot about Jesus in her defense.  

Charmaine Bingwa is really great as Carmen, and obviously she is not fluent in Spanish, but it’s so funny to me that the only time you can hear that she’s Australian is when she’s trying to say Oscar like she’s speaking Spanish.  

"I know you’re hiding something when you speak English,” Rivi says to Carmen. Heh.  

“Community court” is such a nice, unthreatening term for referring to Wackner and his copy cats. Thanks for that, Carmen!

It’s a smart plan to mention Jesus a lot, I guess, but Jay and Marissa both should’ve realized that Vinetta is too smart to tolerate obvious pandering. I’m a little surprised Jay doesn’t get up and argue since Marissa is, obviously, not familiar with the New Testament.  

Marissa wins this round with facts and logic.

Why is the judge who was handling Rivi’s previous charge now in bond court? Make it make sense.

I like that Carmen calls out the ASA for swearing hahaha  

Why... would this Matteo kid just casually mention he was holding a gun, omg.  

In Vinetta’s court, you can be charged with murder and tried because... you had a gun and also there were murders at other times. Coolcoolcool no problems here.

Community courts for civil cases? Sure. That’s basically arbitration. Community courts for criminal cases? Bad, bad, bad idea.  

Vinetta’s reasoning: “Those murders happened on our street, and the police haven’t convicted anyone because they don’t care. We care. This is self-defense. And how is it different from your court?” Aside from the whole imprisoning people in her basement thing, Vinetta’s not wrong. I almost brought this up last week but hesitated because I couldn’t remember the details enough to decide if I wanted to recommend it, but there’s a book I read a few years ago that seems relevant here: Ghettoside by Jill Leovy. Again, been a while so don’t take this as a wholehearted endorsement or anything, but from what I remember, the central issue at the heart of the book (it’s non-fiction) is that a poor black community (I think in LA?) doesn’t trust the police (in part) because the police don’t solve murders, and then with no way of getting justice through the court system, there’s more violence as a stand-in for justice. https://www.vox.com/2016/8/26/12631962/ghettoside-jill-leovy-black-crime

I’m not sure if that’s QUITE what Vinetta is saying but it seems similar, and it’s a decent point (though not a justification for her court). Why should she trust the system to improve her community when it’s ignored her community for years?

I like that the writers chose two very different, very understandable characters for their community courts. It’s easy to see why Wackner and Vinetta feel the need for alternative courts; it’s easy to see why others would trust them. This arc doesn’t really work unless there’s a legitimate frustration with existing systems...  

Marissa calls Wackner’s court a “joke,” which she should understand by now isn’t the case. (Marissa’s smart; she knew it wasn’t a joke the second she saw David Cord get involved.)  

Vinetta accuses Wackner of copying her court, which alarms Marissa. This isn’t addressed again, and I don’t know if it’s true! I could really go either way on this. On the one hand, I absolutely believe that Wackner saw/heard about it, liked it, and did it himself without thinking much of it—and if this is the case, then the ending where Vinetta gets in trouble for violating Wackner’s IP is a lot more of a gut punch. On the other hand, I don’t really feel like the seeds for this were planted. We see Wackner innovate a lot and try new things and he has an explanation for why he does everything—how much of that is Vinetta? And Vinetta clearly watches the show and likes it or she wouldn’t have recognized Marissa, so it’s a little hard for me to just believe her claim when literally all I know about her is she has a court that looks like Wackner’s and she is aware of and feels positively towards Wackner rules. Also, Wackner knows about Vinetta’s court (from Marissa) and sounded excited about it last episode. Sure, he didn’t necessarily know which one it was, exactly, but I assume if he’d copied the idea and then heard about a case involving people from the exact same community where he found the idea... his reaction would be different. So IDK. My reasons for doubting Vinetta’s claim are probably based a little too much in things I’m not meant to spend that much time paying attention to.  

“I fucked up. It’s in the same court, but now it’s a murder case,” Marissa tells Diane. I do like hearing characters admit when they fucked up!  

Diane hears that STRL is delayed, so she heads out to help Matteo. When she goes to change into her pantsuit, she finds that she’s grabbed Kurt’s bag by mistake. “Of course. That makes sense,” she reacts.  

Diane pushes her flight to the next day, also telling Kurt, “And yes, for some reason, I took your suit instead of mine, so fuck it.” I love it when the characters feel like real people.  

I am not sure why Kurt is getting to the office when Diane is leaving or why Kurt is there—to pick Diane up on the way to the airport, maybe?

Carter Schmidt walks into RL at the worst possible time, threating to blow up the Plum Meadow deal. Another 5x10 to Wife 5x22 similarity: he’s in both episodes.  

Liz heads out to help Carmen with Rivi, and then STRL arrives. Oops.  

Credits!

One thing about Wackner’s court that should definitely be a warning sign even though it seems noble: he ignores just about every warning sign, like this rowdy crowd screaming WE LOVE YOU WACKNER or the potential interests at play in a case about secession, because he thinks his fair judgement can overcome these obstacles. If the world worked that way, there’d be no need for his court in the first place.

Is anyone representing the State of Illinois in this trial? If not, then... how is it happening?  

Dr. Goat, some dude who claims to have some hidden historical document about how Illinois is actually two states, is clearly making stuff up and yet Wackner indulges him and Cord. I feel about this the same way as I feel about the Devil’s Advocate: That Wackner would not allow this to go on for more than five seconds before calling bullshit and therefore there is no reason I should have to sit through it.

Why is some guy screaming, “No taxation without representation” like dude you absolutely have representation. But of course, I’m expecting him to be logical, and the point is that he is not.

Dr. Goat’s Latin phrases—shock!-- don’t actually translate into anything like what he said. Even though this information is verifiable by a quick google search, the crowd starts screaming “Liar!!!!” at Marissa. If only I could say this felt unrealistic.

Wackner asks Dr. Goat to bring in the document.  

“You look like you’re heading to the beach,” Vinetta says to Diane, who looks like she’s heading somewhere but definitely not to the beach. Vinetta asks where Diane was headed on vacation. Diane says she’s headed to Lake Como, and unnecessarily clarifies that “It’s in Italy.” She assumes Vinetta doesn’t know that... but Vinetta does.

“So you’ve been there before?” Vinetta probes when Diane says it’s beautiful there. “Just once. We don’t get away often. We thought we’d splurge,” Diane says. Vinetta stares at her and smiles, and Diane hits her head on a basket that’s hanging in Vinetta’s kitchen. If I just write out the dialogue here, it sounds like a perfectly average conversation, but everything about this conversation is so charged: Diane is afraid to look like a wealthy white woman; Vinetta’s pleasantness is pretty clearly also a way of sizing up Diane.  

Vinetta shows Diane pictures of neighborhood children and young adults killed as a consequence of gang violence. You can see she’s not trying to do anything other than help her community, even if her methods are highly questionable.

Diane argues that Matteo should be given over to the police; Vinetta disagrees: “The police haven’t arrested anyone for those murders, any of these. Since the BLM movement, they’ve pulled back from our streets. No one’s coming to help. That’s why I started this court. It’s not a joke to us.” Wait I’m sorry did Vinetta just blame lack of good detective work in black communities on... the BLM movement?!?!?! Is there any foundation to this!? Why can’t it just be that the police weren’t actually doing a good job of policing/finding justice and were being antagonistic towards the community instead of being helpful and no one trusted them?? That explanation is literally right there.

Jay suggests the Jesus strategy, again.  

“It’s women! We could just move on, install men,” STRL guy says. I don’t know if he’s joking, but ugh. Also, what is RL if it has neither Diane nor Liz? A bunch of lawyers who will all promptly quit when they see their bosses get fired and a few opportunists?  

Kurt is watching golf in Diane’s office, and the STRL people love it. Of course Kurt accidentally makes friends with them.  

Court stuff happens. It’s not good for Rivi, and then Liz and Carmen come up with a theory: Plum Meadow is stalling the deal so they can find Rivi’s more stable second and make a deal with them instead.  

Wackner giving Dr. Goat a single point on his stupid little board, for any reason related to his obviously fake totally unverified document, is dangerous. Why would you signal to a crowd that’s clearly not interested in fact that they have a point? That’s basically egging them on.

I know Wackner’s judgment is obviously not 100% sound—need I remind you of the PRIVATE PRISONS?-- but I thought it was more sound than this.  

Wackner shows off his knowledge of paper and proves that Dr. Goat’s document is a fake. Why... did he just give Dr. Goat a point???  

Or is he moving the point from Dr. Goat to Marissa?  

Dr. Goat sounds like a fake name I would call a character in my recaps long past the point of anyone other than myself remembering the joke. (See: Mr. Elk)

“The truth is ugly. The only thing uglier is not pursuing it,” Wackner tells Marissa. How is taking on a case about very obvious falsehoods, funded by someone with a vested interest in the case, that gets people riled up, some noble pursuit of truth?  

STRL and Kurt are now drinking and discussing hunting, while Diane’s arguing for Matteo in Vinetta’s living room. Vinetta is—as was always obvious, sorry Jay—far too smart to fall for this patronizing bullshit. She screams at Diane and plays back a recording (on a baby monitor) of Diane coaching Matteo to lie about his faith.

Soooooo yeah no you can’t do that, that is bad, recording conversations between lawyers and their clients is not good even if it leads to you exposing their schemes...

Then Vinetta places Diane under arrest, which obviously isn’t going to end well for Vinetta.  

Liz and Carmen suggest a post-nup to Rivi to see if Isabel is planning on turning on him.

“I’m going to have to kill her,” Rivi says sadly. I don’t think Rivi will ever kill Isabel because we already did that with Bishop.  

I’m going to assume that Diane chooses to stay in basement prison instead of calling one of the many, MANY, MANY people she could call to get her out/take down Vinetta because she doesn’t want the situation to be publicized or further deteriorate. That said, it’s really not clear why Diane just accepts being sentenced to basement prison with a cell phone.  

Love the STRL man looking at that picture of Diane and HRC. They’ve gotten so much mileage out of that photo.  

Wackner’s court has no rules, but at least since it has no rules, I can’t complain about how its rules make no sense!  

What is this, debate practice?! Ugggghhhhh I can’t deal with this case for much longer.  

Marissa takes a breath, then decides to pursue a strategy she knows could blow everything up.

“Then why care what Judge Wackner decides? Why should you defer to him? Why defer to anyone?” Cord says that’s the point—the people have decided to trust Wackner. “So if you don’t like this court’s decision, you’ll just start a new one?” Marissa asks. “I guess,” Cord concedes.  

“So then why does this matter? This court?” “It matters only insofar as we continue to agree that it matters,” Cord says. “So if you don’t like Judge Wackner’s rulings, you can just ignore them and create a new court?”

Good point, Marissa. Good point. (Does this count as a thesis?)

“I’m guessing that I will like the way the judge decides,” Cord says. Well, that’s basically a threat.

Wackner takes a break and heads to chambers—without Marissa.  

Kurt goes to visit Diane in basement jail. He’s granted a conjugal visit, which means Matteo gets moved up to the bedroom so Diane and Kurt can have some alone time.

Diane is staring at an image of Lake Como in her cell. I thought it was odd she brought a printout of her vacation destination with her, so I LOVED the line where she explains that Vinetta printed it out for her. COLD. (You know who also would’ve done this if they’d for some reason had a basement prison? Bree Van de Kamp. You know what show DID do a basement prison arc I’d rather forget? Desperate Housewives!)  

I love how Diane responds to basement prison by making jokes non-stop.

“I thought the craziness would end with 2020,” Diane says. Nope.

Kurt brought alcohol; Diane brought pot gummies.  

I love that Kurt has never had pot before. I was going to say that I bet Diane’s had a few experiences with recreational drugs when I remembered we had a whole damn season of Diane microdosing.  

Christine and Gary’s acting and their chemistry really bring these basement prison scenes to life. The writing and directing are really sharp, but it’s the actors who make these scenes something special. You can tell Diane and Kurt love each other a lot. You can tell they’re disappointed about their vacation and exhausted by the chaos of the day. You can tell they’re in disbelief over this situation but also find it funny.  

Didn’t Rivi and Isabel have an adult daughter who died of COVID a few episodes ago? Weird she isn’t mentioned in this scene. Maybe from a different marriage/relationship?

Isabel called the SA’s office because she thinks Rivi’s a threat? I think this is a power play.

Heh, Carmen saying, “Shut a black woman up!?” in disbelief in court. Love it.  

Isabel instead flips her story and supports her husband and fights for his release. With no intervention from Plum Meadow, this gets the judge to free Rivi. I don’t really understand what’s happened here or why. I get the resolution, but I don’t get why Isabel called the SA or why this went away so quickly. I still don’t even get why Rivi’s been arrested.

Diane and Kurt put up Christmas lights for ambiance and talk about how they never go on vacation.

“I wanna see the pyramids on this coast!” drunk & high Kurt insists, hilariously. “I mean hemisphere. I like the Aztecs. They, they care about people.” I’m not going to transcribe the rest of the dialogue because it loses its magic when you’re not watching the scene.  

After some fun banter about travel and movies, Diane changes the topic. “I should quit, shouldn’t I? That judge upstairs? She looked at me like I was the most entitled white bitch on the planet. And that’s the way they look at me at work.”

Kurt tries to say that’s not true, but Diane knows it is: “Yes they do. I’m the top Karen. And why do I care? I mean, I... I could find another firm. I could quit. I can’t impose my will on people who don’t want me.”

YES. I see a lot of debate over what the “right” thing to do is here. But I think we are long past “right” and “wrong.” At a certain point, this stops being about absolute moral truths. If Diane doesn’t have the respect of her partners and employees, that is a very real problem for the firm and for Diane. How can she continue to impose her will on a firm that doesn’t want her, all the while claiming to be an ally? (The back half of that sentence is the most important part.) Forget whether or not Diane “should” have to step down. Forget what’s “fair.” If the non-Diane leadership of RL thinks the firm should be a black firm, and the employees of RL think so too, and Diane just doubles down on her white feminism, she’s creating an even bigger problem for herself and ruining her reputation in the process.  

Kurt stands up on the prison cot and warns Diane she might make a decision she’ll regret. This scene is so cute. Why can’t other shows do drug trips where the characters just act silly and have great chemistry? Why does it always have to be some profound meditation on death whenever characters get high?

“I think I like starting over. I like the chutes and ladders of life. I mean, I want the corner office, but then I wanna slip back to the beginning and fight for the corner office. I mean, I think maybe it’s better that I don’t get the top spot,” Diane says. LOVE to hear her admit this. I’m not sure I would’ve come to this conclusion on my own, and it sounds like it’s a bit more about how the writers like to write (you know, the “we love our characters to always be underdogs”) than Diane, but... you know what? I believe it. I fully believe it. Diane LOVES to fight, LOVES to feel like she’s in the right, LOVES power plays and to be making progress. She LOVES winning. The fact that she isn’t just choosing to retire right now, even though she’s past retirement age and has a great reputation, is in itself enough for me to believe that she would find it fun to repeatedly start over.

Plus, it’s a fun new direction for the show to take in season six, because they’ll get the same sense of conflict without the actual conflict. This season’s arc was firm drama and resulted in a firm name change... but it didn’t feel like a knock-off of Hitting the Fan. Diane trying to work her way back into power (I assume by becoming a better actual ally, otherwise doesn’t she just end up in the same exact situation?) should also provide conflict without being repetitive.

Hahahahahaha Kurt immediately reacting to this serious statement by being incredibly silly and horny and then Diane singing “I Touch Myself” to him, man, I love these two. I want to know the story behind this song choice.

Wackner emerges from his chambers. The score is tied. Wackner calls Cord corrupt and notes that they can’t just decide to call Downstate Illinois a new state based on his ruling. Now it’s thesis time!

“I was taken by Mr. Cord’s arguments of individualism. So much of our country has been built on people finding their own way, not being held back by bureaucracy. Yet, if we only follow individualism, that way lies chaos. And that was not the point of this court. Or at least not my point. Judgment for the defense. There will be no Downstate Illinois.”

“If we only follow individualism, that way lies chaos.” is probably the clearest of the many theses of this episode. To recap, we have:

(1) Factions are bad. (2) People are persuadable and the rules don’t actually matter. (3) Reality TV changes minds. (4) Institutions only exist when we collectively agree they exist (5) Individualism = chaos.  

But let’s put a pin in this for now and let the chaos of individualism play out.  

The crowd does not like Wackner’s decision, and decides that an appropriate way to express their displeasure is to make anti-Semitic remarks towards Marissa and then start throwing chairs. What nice people.  

As the crowd goes totally 1/6 on Wackner’s court (thanks for pointing this out to me, Ryan—I cannot believe I didn’t make the connection myself!), the door slamming into the desk finally pays off since Marissa and Wackner are able to use it to keep the crowd from reaching them.  

They immediately turn to the police, or they would, if they could get service. I’m sure it’s not a coincidence that as soon as things get bad, they want to involve the existing system.  

Wackner Rules is, somehow, still taping in the midst of all the chaos. I don’t know if I think they’d air this, but someone certainly would. (I wonder if any of the cameras we see in these scenes are actually the cameras filming the other angles of the riot.)  

Cord shakes his head and walks out, unharmed.  

“You think they’ll kill us?” “I think they might,” Marissa and Wackner fret.  

“My dad said the whole world would be a better place if everybody realized they were in the minority. ‘No matter where you are,’ he said, ‘Make sure you keep an eye on the exits, and make sure you’re closer to the exit than the Cossacks are to the entrance.’” Marissa says. Love Eli Gold coming through with thesis number 6 (and maybe thesis number 7).  

“Your dad sounds a little paranoid,” Wackner says, correctly. Remember how I mentioned I accidentally wound up watching 5x22? Eli calls Alicia and responds to her hello with, “DISASTER!!!!” I miss him.

“He was, but he wasn’t wrong. He said, ‘Stay away from parades. They’re cute until they’re not. And don’t trust any pope who was Hitler Youth.” “What’s that law called?” “Godwin’s Law. My dad said anybody who argued for Godwin’s Law has never been near an actual crowd. Crowds love you, they hug you. Then they grab a gun and try to kill you.”

“Why? Why do they do that?” “I don’t know. Hate is fun. It’s clear-cut.”  

I really like all of this. It is a little preachy, but it isn’t wrong and it’s self-aware. And, more importantly, it’s in character. I absolutely believe that Marissa would tell lots of stories about Eli in a moment of extreme stress. It’s nostalgic, probably comforting, and it also helps her feel like she’s on the right side with the right arguments. So, even backed into a corner, she’s still a winner: she has theory on her side.  

Wackner speaks a foreign language (I do not know what language but I wish I did) and says, “A guy could get killed doing this,” which makes him and Marissa laugh as things crash around them.

Idk about you all, but I couldn’t really get myself to actually worry about their safety during this scene. Maybe Wackner’s, just a little, but I got the sense we were supposed to focus more on the chaos and destruction and monologuing than on the actual danger. That’s not to say the stakes didn’t feel high, but rather to say that this didn’t feel like an action sequence where you don’t know what’s going to happen next. The point was to watch the court fall and think about why it fell, not to worry about if Marissa would live.  

Diane and Kurt are woken up by sirens and loud noises. The cops arrive and are shocked to find professionally dressed white people in a basement cell. They let Diane and Kurt out with compassion, but scream, “don’t you fucking move” to the people on the floor.

“It’s okay, they didn’t do anything,” Diane says. This is, as I theorized earlier, probably why Diane just sits there until her punishment blows over instead of escalating things.  

If the cops weren’t there to free Diane, why were they there? Why, because they like David Cord and David Cord has gotten Chicago PD officers to protect Wackner’s IP.  

If I had to say one thing in favor of Vinetta being the originator of the community court idea, it would be that it’s SUCH a gut punch to watch Diane and Kurt walk away from their bizarre little adventure as Vinetta gets arrested in the background, and it hits ten times as hard if Vinetta’s only being charged because some white guy is claiming IP that’s actually hers.

(I think Vinetta is probably, at this point, actually being arrested for imprisoning people illegally, but, still.)

“Pfft. Some judge,” one of the cops who adores Wackner says of Vinetta. Racist much?  

Marissa and Wackner emerge from the backroom. “I think I better get back to work,” she says, meaning her RL job. "Me too,” Wackner says, grabbing a Copy Coop apron. He’s an employee of ten years.  

I don’t think this lands as well as it’s meant to. I think the point is supposed to be that Wackner’s just some guy—not a billionaire, not an academic, not a judge, not a lawyer—with an idea. But it’s a little too neat. And it doesn’t explain how Wackner financed his court initially, nor does it explain why he has basically unlimited access to Copy Coop space and resources. I’d buy it if he were the OWNER of Copy Coop, but I have so many questions about him being an employee.  

Diane tells Liz she’s actually going on vacation this time, and they laugh about how Kurt bonded with STRL.

“I want you and Allegra to be name partners. I’ll be an equity partner,” Diane says. “Why?” Liz asks. “Five years ago, when I hit rock bottom, this firm took me in. So I don’t like the idea of splitting this firm in two. And I can’t lead if no one will follow.” “And your clients?” “We’ll manage them together.” YES! I love this. I don’t love it because I necessarily think it had to go this way, but because it’s so refreshing to see Diane say that she actually is willing to take a step back because she cares about the firm and the people there more than she cares about being a name partner. This isn’t something we usually see. When we hear “this firm took x in” it’s usually being said incredulously against someone who’s decided to leave and steal clients (cough, Hitting the Fan, cough).  

It’s been pretty clear for most of this arc that Diane and Liz like working together and they like their firm, but that no one (other than Diane, I guess) is willing to let RL lose its status as a black firm, and that the employees and equity partners weren’t going to be satisfied until Diane stepped down. Diane really had three options: Stay and piss everyone off and claim the whole firm for herself, quit and go somewhere else and totally abandon the good working dynamic she had, or step down and put her money where her mouth is.  

Also yeah the clients were never actually going to be an issue! They were only an issue because Diane intentionally went about informing them she was stepping down in a way she knew would make them worry!  

“I think I need to prove myself,” Diane says. I’m not sure that’s the key issue or that she can ever prove herself fully, but we’ll worry about that next year.

“I missed you,” Liz says. “I’m here,” Diane replies. “I know. Thank you,” Liz says.  

Diane decides she’s going to move downstairs so Allegra can have her office. I think there’s another office on this floor, since she, Adrian and Liz all had offices. This feels a little bit like Diane’s in love with the idea of making things difficult for herself and maybe hasn’t fully grasped the point, but, you know, I’ll take it.  

Diane tells Kurt her decision and he asks if it was the right thing to do. She says she doesn’t know—but she says it with a smile. Kurt notes he’s going hunting next month with the STRL folks and will put in a good word for her. Ah, yes, because STRL still controls all of this and all of this is moot! Thanks for the reminder Kurt! Diane says she wants in on the hunting trip. Of course.  

And the elevator doors close. Remember how closing elevator doors was a motif earlier this season??? It’s back!

Then we get a little coda with Wackner Rules airing a new episode that’s just violence and destruction. This sequence seems to straddle the line between being there for thematic reasons for the viewers and there to show what happened in the show’s universe, but I think it’s main purpose is theme, so I will not go on a full rant questioning why Del would want to air this.

A white blonde lady in an apron watches the destruction of Wackner Rules. She looks concerned. “That was violet,” she says with dismay. And then we see she’s holding a guy in a jail cell in her kitchen.  

And then we see other courts, as America the Beautiful plays. One’s in a garage debating kicking someone out of the neighborhood; another is across the street about the same case. There’s one in Oregon about secession. There’s one among Tiki Torch Nazis deciding only white people can own property. There’s (inexplicably) one about pronouns. There’s one with arm wrestling, one that happens while sky diving, and a bunch of others. It’s pretty ridiculous, and not necessarily in a good way. It feels at once like the natural extension of the Wackner Rules show and like an over the top parody you’d see on another show. Tiki Torch Nazis screaming “only white people can own property!” is the opposite of subtle writing. Tonally, this sequence feels more like the zany humor of Desperate Housewives or the insanity of BrainDead than anything TGF has done before (and TGF’s been plenty surreal), and it doesn’t quite work for me. It feels like it is trying to prove a point in the corniest, most on the nose way possible. It almost feels like it’s parodying its own plotlines.  

On my first watch, this ending for Wackner left me stumped. I knew the writers were making an argument against individualism (Wackner’s speech + the repeated references to The Apprentice) and cults of personality. But I couldn’t figure out a real life analogue to Wackner’s court, and since this ending was so obviously trying to be About Something, that bugged me. Sure, that last sequence could be an argument against people making community courts, but WERE people making community courts? I didn’t see the urgency.

And then I talked to @mimeparadox. And as soon as he said that it was about factions and people playing by their own sets of rules beyond the justice system, it clicked. I’d been looking for Wackner’s plot to be a commentary on the legal system. It is much broader than that. It’s a commentary on the weakening of democratic systems (the Big Lie, etc.), more broadly, and Wackner and his common-sense approach are just a way to get liberal viewers to go along for the ride.  

Now that I understand the point, or what I think is the point, I like this conclusion. Circumventing the system leads to chaos; that’s why we have institutions and bureaucracy, and I think the show is arguing that these institutions should still be respected despite their flaws. The many theses of this episode all come together to make this point (though the reality TV stuff is a little more tenuous and I'm a little shocked we got through all of this without any commentary on social media?): If we stop having a shared belief in institutions and instead follow individual leaders (whom we may learn about through reality TV), the rules will stop mattering and we’ll end up with a fractured country and widespread violence.  

But, and maybe this is just about me being upset I missed both the obvious 1/6 parallels AND the point of the arc the first time through this episode (my defensive side feels the need to also note I first watched this episode at like 5 am when I was barely awake), I don’t know that I actually think this episode does a great job of driving its point home. There are SO many moving pieces to the Wackner plot and SO many references. There are so many threads we never return to from earlier in the season, and there’s so much that strains credulity (like Wackner taking Dr. Goat seriously for more than a split second). It’s pretty clear what the themes are—even though I’m saying I missed the point my first time through, I've hit on all these themes separately in past recaps and posts—but, I dunno, something about this episode just feels scattered. Maybe it’s all the moving pieces, maybe it’s all the moments where it sounds like the characters are voicing related ideas that don’t quite snap together to form one coherent picture, or maybe it’s that Wackner’s plot gets two endings (the actual ending + the coda) and it’s up to the viewer to put together how they relate.

I really don’t know. At the end of the day, I think there was a little too much going on with Wackner and that the writers needed to use the episodes between the private prison reveal and the finale to narrow—not broaden—the scope of what they were trying to do with Wackner. But I also think that what they were doing with Wackner was really, really smart and original. I don’t think I can overstate how impressed I am that the writers took an idea that sounded, frankly, awful when I first heard about it and turned it into something captivating and insightful that I was happy to spend nine weeks watching.  

Overall, a few bad episodes aside, I thought season five was the strongest season of TGF yet. I haven’t seen this show be so focused in... well, maybe ever. Having two overarching plots that received consistent development and felt like they were happening in the same universe at the same time REALLY helps make season five feel like a coherent whole, and I can’t wait to rewatch it.  

[airgetlamhh]

Thoughts on Lostbelt 2

Longpost ahead.

So.

Lostbelt 2. Finally played it after so long, and this will contain spoilers.

To make sure everyone knows what they’re getting into, I’ll give the thesis statement right here: Lostbelt 2 is bad. 

The entire time I played through the story, I kept waiting for it to pick up. I kept waiting for it to shrug off the poor pacing, the deus ex machinas, the random things just happening for the convenience of the plot. I kept waiting for it to shrug off the poor characterization, the constant telling instead of showing, the moral myopia. It never did. 

From nearly the very start to finish, Lostbelt 2 is bad. 

We start off fairly fine! A desperate ploy to sneak through the Lostbelt to meet up with the allies we’ve learned about, the Wandering Sea, interrupted by a Lostbelt Servant attacking us with the intent of stealing the Paper Moon that allows us to perform Zero Sails. All of that is a decent setup!

And then we’re told how strong this Saber is. How incredible they are. How their swordplay surpasses anything else they’ve ever seen, how they desperately wish that Musashi was there, how no no, he didn’t use his sword, he only parried! Things that Sherlock Holmes observes, not Mashu, not the one who’s actually been fighting for two years now, so Mashu seems borderline useless. Holmes figures out it’s Sigurd because...he uses a sword in a Scandinavian Lostbelt, and he figured out that Holmes used magic because Holmes fire magic lasers at him. From this, Holmes is able to pinpoint Sigurd’s identity, and that’s just the setup for the rest of the chapter, really. 

To be specific, what I mean is that we will constantly be told how incredible someone is with very little evidence, and the plot will bend and warp to make certain things happen. 

The scene does exactly one good thing, which is the foreshadowing of Surtr. Coming into it knowing that aspect allowed me to appreciate little bits like Surtr talking about Heroic Spirits like he wasn’t one, and Surtr not being able to kill Mashu because Sigurd resisted it. But that’s about all that was good in the scene, and all it really does is set up a consistent thing of Surtr being one of the only good parts - until he isn’t, of course.

I’m going to shift here from specifics to characters, because otherwise I’d be rehashing the entire story and I don’t have the time or effort required for that. That being said, it is difficult to decide where to start, so I’ll go right to the very building blocks of the story, the themes. 

Lostbelt 2 is, very obviously, attempting to have a theme of different kinds of love throughout the story. Part of this is because it’s very much set up like an otome game that the author Hikaru Sakurai would write, with Ophelia in the center, but it’s a more general theme too, with Skadi and the others all building up towards it. Now, love is an absolutely wonderful thing to build your themes around, exploring and examining it can be great for stories. Beasts themselves do that, examining different varieties of genuine, but toxic love that allow them to be well-meaning monsters.

The problem is that Lostbelt 2 does not engage with these themes on anything but a surface level. Skadi represents maternal love, so she constantly talks about how everyone is her children and how she’s their mother. No examination of the desire to see her children grow, the pain she feels when they fight, the struggle of forcing herself to cling so tightly knowing that it’s suffocating them and going to kill them before they reach 26. 

Napoleon represents passionate love, so he flirts with every woman he sees. No examination of why he’s so passionate or what drives him to burn so brightly, beyond a token mention that for some reason when he’s summoned he’s driven to seek out a lover, another aspect of things happening to serve the plot. 

Sigurd and Brynhildr represent true, romantic love, so they act mushy the entire chapter from the moment the real Sigurd appears. Now, don’t get me wrong, I liked their scenes a lot and I’m happy that they chose that portrayal instead of the one I was afraid of where it was yandere jokes day in day out. But there’s no engagement with the fundamentals of their love, nothing that tests it, even the existing complications with Brynhildr’s tragic summoning are swept away with a single line of “I can resist them better now maybe because my saint graph is broken”, so ultimately there’s no conflict whatsoever. And sure, that’s nice, but it’s not very good if you’re trying to build your story around a theme of love. 

Next, Surtr, who represents obsessive, dangerous love. I honestly actually think Surtr’s done well, even if the love he happens to represent is the least positive one. Surtr is capable of only one thing, destruction, and when he fell for Ophelia in that moment where she saw him and he saw her, he decided that if he ever had the chance, he would repay her the only way he knew how: allowing her to watch as he destroyed everything. When he’s summoned, he acts basically like the possessive one in an otome game, constantly talking about how Ophelia is his woman, getting angry when Napoleon flirts with her, spending most of his time pushing things between them as far as they can go etc. etc. I’m not particularly a fan of how his desire to repay Ophelia battling against his singular purpose transformed him into a typical possessive bastard boyfriend, but it’s at least engaged with on a deeper level.

Finally, Ophelia. She’s the otome game protagonist here, born into an controlling family and finally freed, hiding a secret special power, beloved by almost all the men involved in the chapter while she’s harboring feelings for someone else, even has the typical friendship route with Mashu going on. Her love is a love that she doesn’t acknowledge, but that’s all it is. It’s never engaged with beyond the fact that she clearly loves Kirschtaria but insists she doesn’t, and her final scene as she dies is Mashu telling her that yes, she did love Kirschtaria. That’s all. 

For a theme of love that’s supposedly woven into the Lostbelt, it’s barely examined at all. It’s not well written, and in comparison to Lostbelt 1′s theme of what it means to live in a world where the strong devour the weak and how deeply it examined and engaged with that, it’s a genuine disappointment.

Now, to move onto the plot, it’s...in the abstract, it’s fine. Chaldea is intercepted and forced to fight in the Lostbelt and ends up dragged into the overarching ploy by Surtr to release himself and burn everything. That’s a perfectly fine story, but the problem is that when you get to the moment-to-moment stuff, it falls apart completely. 

Skadi is constantly talked up as this incredibly powerful true goddess, not merely a Divine Spirit, and we know she can see and hear our every move because of her snow. How does the story work around this borderline omniscience within her Lostbelt? Skadi just decides not to do anything about Chaldea with zero rhyme or reason. We need to sneak into the palace and avoid alerting the guards, except Skadi already knows exactly where we are, except that doesn’t matter because we need to sneak in for some reason. We get captured with no plan to escape, and it just so happens that not only was Skadi keeping a Divine Spirit amalgamation locked in the dungeons too, but that she can piggyback on you making a contract with Napoleon (pure dumb luck you hadn’t done it before) and force a connection with you too, and then cast spells to hide you while you escape. Skadi knows we’re trying to free Brynhildr, who is the sole threat to Sigurd and Skadi’s own Valkyries in the entire Lostbelt? She just decides to do nothing at all. 

So much of the plot happens because either Skadi makes terrible decisions to do nothing, even though she knows Chaldea is there to destroy her entire world, or it happens because random shit goes on that couldn’t have been planned for like Sitonai. Shit like Surtr suddenly becoming Fafnir and being able to use the Evil Dragon Phenomenon to brainwash Ophelia somehow, like Ophelia’s Mystic Eye being able to do anything the plot demands, even when it explicitly goes against its existing capabilities like rewinding time on Sigurd’s wounds, like Bryn and Surtr somehow being able to resist the effects of her eye with no buildup or explanation. It’s poorly written in terms of the exact events that happen, and that all culminates in Skadi’s one cool moment, where she declares she’s going to kill the seven billion we fight for for the sake of her ten thousand...and then right after, it reveals that Skadi was going easy on us and refused to use her runes of instant death for no reason even though she was fighting for the survival of her entire world. The moment to moment plot is not good, and neither is what comes next, the worldbuilding.

In Skadi’s Lostbelt, half the world is covered in Surtr’s flames, while the other half is blanketed in Skadi’s snow. Where the two areas meet are the only places where life can grow, and so Skadi set up villages there. Unfortunately, there isn’t enough food for everyone, so she enforces strict population control: if you are not the mother or father of a child by 15, you are sent away to be killed by the giants. If you are the mother or father of a child, you are sent away to be killed at 25 instead. Through this tragic method, Skadi enforces a limit of 100 villages with 100 people, a total population of 10000. This is all fine. 

But take a closer look at what we actually see, and this falls apart. First, the giants. The giants are immortal and never need to eat. They do nothing but sleep all day and attack any human that comes close to them. Later, it’s revealed that they’ll attack any heat source including Valkyries, except we know that’s not true. Giants never attack each other, they never attack and destroy any of the plant life around them, they never attack the Lostbelt tree seeds, they even fight alongside mass-produced Valkyries before it’s revealed that Skadi and the three originals can mind-control them! They exist only to destroy, but Skadi can control them with her masks and indeed uses them as labour, keeping them chained up in her castle to be brought out and controlled as needed, or using them to guard Brynhildr’s castle. 

Worst of all, the first time we meet anyone in the chapter, it’s Gerda, who is sneaking out of her village to go to the massive liveable area close to Village 23. This area happens to be the only place she can go to get medicinal herbs that she needs or one of the people in her village will die in childbirth. This area is also full of giants, who have not destroyed it despite being fertile and full of life and heat, and who are allowed to take this place that could be used to grow more food for humans who need it, and simply stay there doing nothing. 

Now, this is where I thought the game would engage with things. How Skadi, in professing her love for all her children, is actually being cruel and unfair. They certainly set it up in the conversations she has, where she casually mentions how humans must die for her coexistence to continue. Skadi chooses to keep the giants alive despite the fact that they are all braindead and can do nothing but kill and destroy the moment their masks are removed. She chooses to keep them alive even though it comes at the expense of the humans who must die when the giants never make that same sacrifice. She chooses to allow them fertile land even though they cannot farm nor do they need food, and in doing so deprive the humans of potentially living longer, having more supplies to do so. She makes these strange choices and then later reveals she can control the giants to do her bidding, and it all seems to fall into place. 

What we see from how she’s characterized early on is that the system is unfair and Skadi is unwilling to change, because it benefits her tremendously. Gerda’s village didn’t have enough herbs to save the children forced to breed by 15, and despite Skadi’s omniscience letting her know that Gerda had snuck out and was trying to save a life, she did nothing. There was no system in place to beg a Valkyrie to get these herbs, and no indication whatsoever that Skadi would use her powers to control the giants to save Gerda’s life. The picture painted is someone who cares about humanity not out of true care, but simply out of obligation. Those who disobey her rules, even for good reasons, are left to die by the engines of destruction she keeps alive.

That’s not the story it tells later on, though. Skadi, portrayed from the start as this all-powerful goddess with complete control over everything, is revealed to be far weaker than we thought, and far less monstrous. Ignore all the times she did control the giants, she actually can’t do it all that well. Ignore all the times she declared she would not allow anyone she loved to be killed, but chose not to act to tell her Valkyries or her giants or anything else to save either Chaldea or Gerda. Ignore the evidence we see on screen that there’s more land that’s simply taken over by the giants, Skadi can only make those initial 100 villages and can’t make any more. Skadi is not bad. Skadi did the best she could. Skadi is morally right. 

Please love Skadi, there’s no complicated moral quandary here, she’s just Good.

Comparisons to Lostbelt 1 are impossible to avoid. Both have the same basic cause, a calamity that was impossible to predict and impossible to avert. The stagnation that dooms a Lostbelt created by the kings in question in their desperation to survive. Ivan turned humanity into the Yaga and created a world of strength, where progress is impossible because everyone in his new world was too busy devouring each other to work together. Skadi created a world of weakness, where progress is impossible because she limited the population to avoid everyone dying out. There is, however, one crucial difference between the two. Not in terms of story, not in terms of characters, not in terms of themes. 

“Your existence itself has already become a grave sin.”

That one line, spoken to Ivan, is the biggest difference between how the story engages things. In both Lostbelts, Ivan and Skadi did horrible things and made horrible choices because they had to, for the sake of survival. Ivan twisted humanity into monsters that lost capacity for mercy or empathy, while Skadi forced brutal population control and careless death on humanity because of her refusal to allow the giants to be destroyed. Both of them did horrible things, but only one is held to account by the story.

What Ivan did was evil, and the story recognises it. It doesn’t accept the excuse that it was all necessary for survival, because that’s irrelevant. It’s evil regardless. This same sentiment should have been expressed with Skadi, but it’s not. Ivan is condemned, but Skadi is absolved. She had no choice. She did the best she could. After building her up as all-powerful, the end of the story instead destroys her agency and power in its haste to prevent any kind of responsibility falling on Skadi’s head. Even to the very end, where she declares that she’ll kill all seven billion lives we fight for for the sake of her ten thousand, she holds back and allows us to win, despite how it butchers her character.

The biggest irony in all this is that Ivan’s world was worse than hers in ways. There was no way for the blizzards to stop, no meat besides for the demonic beasts. Crops couldn’t grow, and instead of living in peace, the Yaga were constantly tormented and killed by the Oprichniki. There were no liveable areas like there are in Lostbelt 2, no merciful ruler that sees all, and controls the greatest threats, no peaceful villages where food can be grown. There’s far more justification for Ivan to claim he had no choice and that he did all he did for survival, because it’s hard to see what his choices were. But Skadi? Skadi intentionally does not act and intentionally allows suffering and pain to come to her children, both actively by not saving Gerda, and passively by allowing the giants to take land they don’t need. Despite this, Skadi is absolved, because the story desperately wants her to be a tragic waifu that you love.

There’s lots more I could talk about. How Sitonai was pointless and existed only for a pathetic FSN reference. How Gerda was a cowardly and manipulative piece of writing compared to Patxi. How Ophelia’s story of always being told what to do is resolved not by her taking the step to freedom herself, but being told to free herself by someone else. The constant repetition that plagues the chapter, the weirdly prevalent sexism that everyone gets in on when it comes to Ophelia’s love life, the nonsense of the final battle itself, the absolute nonsense of Skadi being Scáthach-Skadi. I could even talk about how I’d fix the chapter, because boy howdy there’s a lot there. 

There’s lots more I could talk about, but this is already very long, and I think it speaks for itself. Obviously asks are available if anyone wants me to examine them in more detail, but for now, I’ll finish off with one last reminder.

Lostbelt 2 is bad.  

[firelxdykatara]

do u know what john obryan (one of the writers) said to justify Kat*ang? lmao it was THE Friendzoned Nice Guy™️ thesis statement. i'd like to see him try and repeat that bs in this day and age. he'd be roasted within an inch of his life and cancelled before he could blink. and the way the ship was handled in the end? u can practically SEE that that's exactly the kind of thought process that led to it being made canon.

Oh yeah! I reblogged a post the other day which had his quote in it, and his exact words were:

“Who hasn’t felt like Aang at some point? When you’re pursuing a girl [Katara] and she’s just gonna go after that guy [Zuko] who really doesn’t care about her?”

Like, Big Yikes, way to make Aang sound like a Nice Guy(tm) who’s been getting upset about the fact that all the friendship tokens he’s been using on the girl he likes haven’t led to her giving him the romantic time of day. And I hate it in large part because you absolutely can see this attitude seep into Kataang’s ‘relationship development’ (such as it is) over the course of book 3, and it’s toxic and unnecessary, and yet the shippers eat it up (and frequently excuse Aang’s bad behavior with the fact that he’s twelve and doesn’t know any better, which a) means he’s way too young to be getting into a relationship, and b) means he should have been taught better, and the fact that he isn’t on-screen is deeply concerning), and I genuinely do not understand???

Aang and Katara kiss (romantically--no, Katara kissing Aang on the cheek does not count, that’s the same way she kissed Tom-Tom, an actual baby, and none of the times she kisses Aang on the cheek are framed romantically on her end) four times in the series. One of those was in a ‘kiss or die’ situation, and it didn’t happen on screen. Katara immediately forgot about it and was excited to get out of the tunnel, showing she wasn’t reading into it nearly as much as Aang, who got nervous and wanted to talk about what it meant. Of their on screen kisses, the first two are nonconsensual, surprise kisses, initiated by Aang. He never apologizes for either of them (and, in fact, casually rewrites history when he brings the first kiss up during EIP, saying “we kissed” and that he thought they were going to be together afterwards, when Katara had no say in actually kissing him and then he ran off and they never talked about it), and the second kiss explicitly crosses a boundary Katara had deliberately set, saying she was confused and closing off her body language because she was not ready to even consider him in that light.

Notably, that Ember Island Players scene, which ends with Katara getting angry at Aang for violating her boundaries and storming off the balcony, is the last one-on-one scene they have for the entire show. His lack of respect for her boundaries or her feelings (he never once thought to ask her if she had feelings for him, he just assumed she did and then got pissed when an actor on stage said otherwise, which is the epitome of entitlement and I don’t care how young he is, it was exceptionally gross to see that play out on screen and never get addressed beyond one tossed-off ‘I’m so stupid’ lament) goes completely unaddressed. The one scene they even share together in the following episode is the precursor to Aang running away (which is another issue altogether--the girl with intense abandonment issues getting paired with the boy who has a chronic running away problem), and everything about her romantic feelings, her confusion, her anger and other unpretty emotions... it’s all resolved off screen, in time for Katara to walk out on that balcony and kiss Aang in the epilogue.

You can absolutely trace this back to things like that quote from O’bryan, and the overall attitude Bryke had towards their female fanbase (”women who ship zuko and katara will forever have doomed relationships.”), and I deeply hope that, if the live action series actually happens, Katara is given more consideration in her own romantic narrative than she was in the OG show. Because if I have to watch a teenage boy (remembering that it will have to be filmed over a period of time in which Aang’s actor, if cast age-appropriately to begin with, will likely hit puberty) violate a teenage girl’s boundaries like that again, particularly in a ship that’s supposed to be ‘wholesome’ friends-to-lovers, I’m gonna be exceptionally fucking pissed.

[angelsndragons]

Okay, since I see a lot of people either straight up panicking or saying that Caduceus’ playlist is straight up depressing (neither reaction I get)....I’m gonna offer a different reading of the songs here, how does that sound?

Death Bed Salesman - This is straight up about Caduceus’ family and his upbringing. His father even says some of the lyrics almost word for word in ep 96. Growing up surrounded by death and all the rituals created for the living left behind made Caduceus into the person he is. ‘This is how it has to end/So love somebody while you can’ like talk about a thesis statement for Caduceus’ outlook.

How are You Doing - Wow this song is pulling double duty. Caduceus is not a character who likes burdening other people with his own problems, preferring to keep a calm, polite distance between others and his feelings. The style of this song harkens over to Jester, it’s very bubbly and sweet sounding. Of course, this is also one of Jester’s primary issues (someone please tell the clerics they can be people with problems too). Now, if you do what I did and go watch the music video for this song, two things will stick out. One is the increasing ridiculous scenarios the singers find themselves in while going about their day to day lives juxtaposed against their ‘nothing’s wrong, everything’s fine’ lyrics. Two is the fact that these singers come out at the end of the song together, they have triumphed over the madness and nothing stopped them from doing what they wanted and needed to do. This song encapsulates early Caduceus, while he was getting a feel for the Nein and being drowned every other second, ultimately his contributions to the Pirate Arc were fundamental to the group’s success. 

Vegetables - Honestly, this song just reminds me of that early conversation with Fjord in the Sour Nest. Caduceus is cooking omelets and just casually asks Fjord if he could look for veggies down in the torture chamber since it would ‘make a good root cellar.’ Fjord is so caught off guard by this request, and understandably so, he just repeats ‘Roots?’ Caduceus then just lists off root vegetables like Fjord’s an idiot. Oh, Cad. XD Honestly I like that the beat line is being made by vegetable chomping, it just feeds into the ‘Caduceus is a giant magical cow man’ vibes and I love it.

When the World is at Rest - Xhorhaus! In the middle of that street! Xhorhaus! In all seriousness, this song pulls double duty as well. ‘I miss the sun but the moons will do in a pinch’ anyone? The first and most obvious thing this song reminds me of is when the group is given the house and Caduceus asks, ‘are we putting down roots here?’ With the single act of planting that tree on the tower, Caduceus turned the house into the Mighty Nein’s home. Can’t get your deposit back after that, after all XD. I think of how this home in the dark has sheltered and protected the Nein so many times. I think of them befriending Essek and how that wasn’t part of the plan (you know, like Caduceus himself). I think of how their plans to end the war were hatched in darkness, how violated they all felt when one of their own was taken and when another was assassinated under cover of night, because the darkness had come to feel safe to them. I think of how much the Nein has blossomed since this house became their home, since they all had a place to go back to that was theirs. I think of how the Nein has given the world a breather, a chance to rest, all because they returned a beacon and befriended a traitor. 

Wildflowers - So, there are a couple of interpretations of this song. One is setting a lover or loved one free from your own feelings and letting them go. Another is that the singer is trying to find a place to bury a loved one (’that home by and by’ around where I live and grew up is a roundabout reference to heaven). Honestly, both interpretations are apt for Caduceus. He does his best to not burden others with his worries and feelings, he was the one who stayed home, which granted his siblings the freedom they needed to leave, etc. The second interpretation fits Caduceus as well because we know one of his secret hopes is that the Nein will let him tend their bodies and graves when the time comes. And now I’m gonna put on my TeaHaw hat for a goddamn minute bc holy heck, this is such a good song for both of them, Caduceus reminding Fjord that he deserves freedom and his beloved sea again, Fjord teaching Caduceus to follow his heart and embrace new experiences. ‘I have seen no other/Who compares with you’ really fits their complimentary and praise styles with each other. Thank you, Tal.

Never did No Wandering - Don’t have much to add to what Taliesin said about the song. For once. I think of Caduceus’ loneliness in the Grove and his regret that he didn’t leave sooner. I think of how he could only leave in the context of duty, of just how much his duty as a grave cleric to Melora has defined and shaped his understanding of himself. I think of how long it took for him to voice his own desires and wants. I think of how he insists he isn’t wandering, that he is following a pre-ordained path. I think of how much work he still has to do when it comes to knowing what he wants and making peace with getting it just for his own sake. Also, hello more sailors.

When You Get to Ashville - Oof, so this song works both ways for Caduceus, both as the singer and the subject of the song. I think of him, home alone for ten years, wondering what was going on with his family, if they were safe (he knew they weren’t, he knew what it took to keep them from him), how he didn’t actually want to know unless he could help. As the subject, I see his family, having only been away for what was maybe two years for them, looking at the changes in him in awe and confusion. Nothing’s changed for them but boy howdy has Caduceus changed. The homebody has left the nest and saved them all and he very obviously doesn’t want to go home yet if at all. Caduceus has waited so long to get them back and to be a family again yet when the time comes, he can’t bring himself to return, as the singer implies about the subject. He knows his family will be there to catch him if he needs it but I think this episode is where it really hit him that he’d been trying to recreate a past that never could be again because he could never go back to being who he was. 

Fuck it I’m a Flower - Another Caduceus anthem. Upbeat with a few melancholy lyrics. You can take it as the singer divorcing themself from humanity or you can take it as the singer using flowers as a metaphor for their growth into someone who becomes more involved (the singer goes from not marching to taking on other people’s pain from their place of safety to fully embracing the movement to change things while they can). I don’t have any context for this song but it really freaking reminds me of those protest photos where a protester offers a flower to the riot police (fuck the police). Caduceus is blossoming into a man who genuinely cares about the wider world and the people within it. Not just abstractly, which I would argue he did back in the Grove. But being up close to the ordinary folks in the Dynasty, in the Empire, the Coast, has given him a new perspective on not just his place but where he wants to stand. I think of Jester’s conversation with him back in Oh Captain Who’s Captain, the world is much bigger and messier than Caduceus could have ever dreamed. I think of Caduceus befriending and being kind to their crew and Avantika’s. I think of ‘Nott, you went to find help, we’re here to help.’ I think of ‘one day someone will pray for a miracle and that prayer will be answered because you showed up, that’s what this is all about.’ From rescuing Yeza to saving Giants to shattering the chains binding two of his friends to bringing peace to two warring nations to separating justice from vengeance, just look at where he is now: no longer passive or uncertain of how they can contribute to the world, Caduceus and the Nein have brought so much good into it. Caduceus knows where he stands now. Some people say that he’s the Nein’s moral compass and I disagree with that entirely, he’s become the courage to act on their moral compasses. 

Oh Bury Me Not - Okay, so I know this is where some listeners start to get antsy with all the death talk in this song and the ones after it so breathe, it’s fine. Caduceus is a Grave Cleric, y’all. Tal says that this song is an expression of Caduceus’s religious beliefs, which, uh, yeah. There is no stained glass in the Blooming Grove temple, they do all their work outside the traditional structures of religion and civilization and do it gladly, etc. The ending Bury Me Not, okay, guys, Caduceus is the singer here, not the kid being sung about. It really drives home the Wildmother’s philosophy on death: when you’re dead, you’re dead and you have no say over what happens to the corpse left behind. I think of the corpse of the Great Hero and the founding of the Blooming Grove, the Menagerie, and the Kiln. I think of Caduceus’ onscreen death and how through it, he finds his path to the Kiln. I think of him reviving Fjord. I think of him and this island and how much of a perversion it is of the ‘natural order’. Also, just given how much Fjord has impacted has impacted Caduceus’ ideas of faith and signs and stuff, it’s so fitting that this piece is here. I also think cowboys and how Tal said he’d planned on using the Ocean Burial before he came across this, I see you, Tal. 

September Song - So that build up, huh? I think of Caduceus and the Nein readying themselves for a battle to the death to save Yasha and stop Obann. I think of all the close-calls and near misses. I think of how every day, these people choose over and over and over to stay together, in spite of the coming winter, in spite of the obvious danger, in spite how much safer they would all be if they went their separate ways and planted their heads in the sand. I think of how that, their time, is the most precious gift any of them could give the others. This is not a sad thing, by the way. All these people, who have been so badly wounded by others, who are so skittish and so distrustful and so guarded, choose to stay together over and over again. No matter the hardship. They choose to spend their lives together, they choose to be better together and for each other.

22 (Over Soon) - Guys, this is 100% an Episode 95-96 song. 100%, no question in my book. I think of what Caduceus doesn’t say to his family. I think of what he does say. I think of how overwhelmed he is when the Nein saves them, I think of how he can only muster ‘It’s been a long time.’ (All these years) I think of him trying so hard to be given permission to stay with the Nein without explicitly asking for it, the subtext of ‘would you forgive me if I don’t come home yet’ threaded through his every interaction with his family. I think of how Caduceus hands the seeds over to his sister and tells her to be the hero the Grove and their family needs. I think of how easily and willingly he gave up what he’s called his destiny and charge since the beginning in order to stay with the Nein. This is Caduceus saying good-bye once and for all to the dreams of things going back to the way they were. I think Caduceus had been hoping that his family had changed just as much as he had. I think if they had, he might have gone back with them. But they haven’t changed and he has. So he can’t go home. Not yet. He cloaks his desire to stay with the Nein once more in duty but make no mistake, it’s desire that’s keeping him with them, people who may not understand him but who try and who are there and who accept the new person he has become. The build-up Tal was talking about? This is it. The moment where Caduceus first puts himself and his desires above what he thinks is his duty. The moment that Caduceus fully realizes how much he has changed and what an earth-shattering revelation it is.

We’ll Meet Again - Meetings and Partings have always had a special place in Caduceus’ arc, especially metatextually. He was the character who replaced another, who was rescued from his static seclusion by three of the Nein and who in turn rescued the three captive members. I think of how this song is a promise that, come what may, the singer will do their damnedest to return and make that promise a reality. I think of all the weird and wonderful people Caduceus has met in his short time outside the Grove. I think of all the shop keeps who just love this pink fuzzball and how many times they tell him to come back. I think about the Dusts, the meeting and parting and sanctuary they gave him. I think about Reani and Nila and how his kindness to them has come back threefold (Reani escorting his family home, Nila protecting the Grove). I think about Essek. I think about how driven Caduceus became to reforge the sword after Yasha was taken, to bring her home. I think of Caduceus prodding the Gentleman into reconciling with Jester. I think of his delight in the coincidences that keep lining up between him and Fjord. I think about Caduceus and Beau and how proud he is of her growth. I think of his declaration in the dome that ‘We aren’t done until we’ve saved each other.’ 

Enjoy It - And we wrap up our playlist with another Caduceus thesis statement: don’t worry about the things you can’t change, find the goodness and light in all of your experiences. If it’s meant to be easy, it will be and if it’s meant to be hard, it will be hard. You’re the green bean and you can choose to become jaded at the storms or enjoy the water flooding your roots. This song also fits the lightness we’ve seen from Caduceus since sending his family home. His big quest, his reason for leaving home, has been fulfilled (so he thinks, pretty sure Molaesmyr will be calling in the Nein’s near future) so now he can just sit back, relax, and fully enjoy the ride.

TL;DR - Growing up and moving on is hard and painful but it is also triumphant and necessary. Learning to be who you are and to place yourself on your list of priorities is a journey full of quiet work that few rarely glimpse. Caduceus’ whole arc has been about who he is and what he’s going to do with the strong moral compass he’s got - Is he going to continue to live in the world, even with all the pain, struggle, joy, and goodness that comes with it, or is he going to retreat from it, go back to his little patch of green and forget about it? All signs point to the former, not the latter. In tarot, Death means transformation and sweeping change even more than it does literal death. Caduceus’ playlist is all about the transformation of his self even as he remains true to his core beliefs.

[beastars-takes]

Zootopia Takes: Darker’s Not Better

The Shock Collar Draft

So, it sounds like people are largely positive on me doing some Zootopia posts on this blog, and I wanted to talk about this tweet I saw the other day:

I’ll punt on explaining why Beastars isn’t “Dark Zootopia”--that’s a great topic for another post. But I would like to talk about why this popular yet stridently uninformed tweet is so, so wrong. Why the shock collar draft was not better, actually.

And obviously, I’m not writing several pages in reply to a single tweet--this is a take that’s been around since the movie came out, that the “original version was better.” It’s been wrong the whole time.

Let’s talk about why!

Part 1: “Because Disney”

Let’s start with this--the assumption that the film’s creators wanted to make this shock collar story and “Disney” told them to change it.

That’s not how it works.

I try to keep stuff about me out of these posts as much as possible, but just for a bit of background, I’ve worked in the animation industry for about half a decade. I know people at Disney. I have a reasonable idea of how things are there.

There is this misconception about creative industries that they’re constantly this pitched battle of wills between creative auteurs trying to make incredible art and ignorant corporate suits trying to repress them.

That can happen, especially in dysfunctional studios (and boy could I tell some stories) but Walt Disney Animation Studios is not dysfunctional. It’s one of the most autonomous and well-treated parts of the Disney Company.

The director of Zootopia, Byron Howard, isn’t an edgelord. He made Bolt and Tangled. He knows what his audience is, and he’s responsible enough not to spend a year (and millions of dollars in budget) developing a grimdark Don Bluth story that leadership would never approve. It wouldn’t just be a waste of time--he would be endangering the livelihoods of the hundreds of people working under him. Meanwhile, Disney Animation’s corporate leadership trusts their talent. They don’t generally interfere with story development because they don’t need to. Because they employ people like Byron Howard.

Howard and the other creative leads of Zootopia have said a dozen times, in interviews and documentaries, that they gave up on the shock collar idea because it wasn’t working. They’ve explained their reasoning in detail. Maybe they’re leaving out some of the story, but in general? I believe them.

But Beastars Takes, you say, maybe even if Disney didn’t force them to back away from this darker version, it still would have been better?

Part 2: Why Shock Collars Seem Good

I will say this--I completely sympathize with people who see these storyboards and scenes from earlier versions of the movie and think “this seems amazing.” It does! A lot of these drawings and shots are heartbreakingly good, in isolation.

I love these boards. They make me want to cry. I literally have this drawing framed on my wall. Believe me, I get it.

But the only reason we care this much about this alternative draft of Zootopia is that the Zootopia we got made us love this world and these characters. You know what actually made me cry?

Oh, yeah.

So let’s set aside the astonishing hubris of insisting Zootopia’s story team abandoned the “good” version of the story, when the “bad version” is the most critically-acclaimed Disney animated feature in the past SIXTY YEARS.

“But Beastars Takes!” I hear you say. “Critics are idiots and just because something’s popular doesn’t make it good!”

Fair enough. Let’s talk about why the real movie is better.

Part 3: The Message (it is, in fact, like a jungle sometimes)

This type of thing is always hard to discuss, in the main--a lot of people don’t want to feel criticized or “called out” by the entertainment they consume, and they don’t want to be asked to think about their moral responsibilities. But it’s hard to deny that Zootopia is a movie with a strong point of view. Everything else--the characters, the worldbuilding, the plot, grows out from the movie’s central statement about bias.

And the movie we got, with no shock collars, makes that statement far more effectively.

To dive into the full scope of Zootopia’s worldview and politics (warts and all) would be a whole post on its own, so I’ll just summarize the key point of relevance here:

Zootopia's moral message is that you, the viewer, need to confront your own biases. Not yell at someone else. No matter how much of a good or progressive person you consider yourself to be--if you want to stand against prejudice you have to start with yourself.

That’s a tough sell! For that message to land, we need to see ourselves in the protagonist.

Judy’s a good person! She argues with her dad about foxes. She knows predators aren’t all dangerous. She’s not speciesist. Right?

Ah fuck.

Let’s fast-forward to the pivotal scene of this movie. In an unfortunate but inevitable confluence of circumstances, Judy’s own biases and prejudiced assumptions come out, and she shits the bad.

Nick, who’s already bared his soul to her (against his better instincts), is heartbroken. But not as heartbroken as he is a minute later when he tries to confront her about what she’s said, and she makes this face:

Whaaaat? Come on, Nick. I’m a good person. Why are you giving me a hard time?

People like to complain about this scene. That it’s a hackneyed “misunderstanding” trope that could be easily resolved with a discussion. They’re wrong. Nick tries to have a discussion. She blows him off.

This isn’t Judy acting out of character, this is her character. Someone who identifies as Not A Racist, and hasn’t given the issue any more thought. This is not only completely believable characterization (who hasn’t seen someone react this way when you told them they hurt you?) it’s the film’s central thesis!

Yes, Nick somewhat provokes her into reaching for her “fox spray,” and her own trauma factors in there, but she’s already made her fatal mistake before that happens.

(As an aside, people also make the criticism that the movie unrealistically deflects responsibility for racism onto Bellwether and her plot. It doesn’t. All the key expressions of prejudice in the film--Judy’s encounter with Gideon, her parents’ warnings, the elephant in the ice cream shop, Judy’s early encounters with Bogo, Judy's views on race science--exist largely outside of Bellwether’s influence. She is a demagogue who inflames existing tensions, she didn’t invent them. Bogo literally says “the world has always been broken.”)

So, anyway. But we love Judy. She’s an angel. She also kinda sucks! She’s proudly unprejudiced, and when her own prejudice is pointed out to her she argues and doesn’t take it seriously. This is bad, but it’s also a very human reaction. It’s one most of us have probably been guilty of at one point or another.

Look at Zootopia’s society, too--it’s shiny and cosmopolitan, seemingly idyllic. Anyone can be anything, on paper. But scratch too deep beneath the surface and there’s a lot of pain and resentment here, things nobody respectable would say in public but come out behind closed doors, or among family, when nobody’s watching. It’s entirely recognizable--at least to me, someone who lives in a large liberal city in the United States. Like Byron Howard.

Wow, this place is a paradise!

Wait, what’s a “NIMBY”?

Part 4: Why Shock Collars Are Bad

So, with the film’s conceit established, let’s circle back to the shock collar idea. Like I said, it’s heartbreaking. It’s dramatic. It’s affective.

It also teaches us nothing.

If I see a movie where predator animals are subjected to 24/7 electroshock therapy, I don’t think “wow, this makes me want to think about how I could do better by the people around me.” I think “damn that shit’s crazy lmao. that’d be fucked up if that happened.” At a stretch, it reminds me of something like the Jim Crow era, or the Shoah. You know, stuff in the Past. Stuff we’ve all decided couldn’t ever happen again, so why worry about it?

The directors have said this exact thing, just politely. “It didn’t feel contemporary,” they say in pressers. That’s what it means.

If anything, the shock collar draft reifies the mindset that Zootopia is trying to reject--it shows us that discrimination is blatant, and dramatic, and flagrantly cruel, and impossible to miss.

And...that’s not true. If you only look for bias at its most malicious and evil, you’re going to miss the other 95 percent.

The messaging of this “darker version” is--ironically--less mature, less insightful, less intelligent. Less useful. Darker’s not better.

Part 5: Why Shock Collars Are Still Bad

So what if you don’t care about the message? What if you have no interest in self-reflection, or critical analysis (why are you reading this blog then lmao)? What if you just really want to hear a fun story about talking animals?

Well, this is trickier, because the remaining reasons are pretty subjective and emotional.

The creators have said that the shock collar version didn’t work because the viewers hated the cruel world they’d created. They agreed with Nick--the city was beyond saving. They didn’t want to save it.

The creators have said that Judy was hard to sympathize with, not being able to recognize the shock collars for the obvious cruelty they were.

Fuck you, Judy!

But we haven’t seen the draft copies. We haven’t watched the animatics. We have to take their word for it. Anyone who’s sufficiently invested in this story is going to say “well, I disagree with them.” It doesn’t matter to them that they haven’t seen the draft and the filmmakers have. The movie they’ve imagined is great and nobody is going to convince them otherwise.

But the fact remains that the shock collar movie, as written, did not work. And, if behind the scenes material is to be believed, it continued to not work after months and months of story doctoring.

There’s even been a webcomic made out of the dystopian version of Zootopia. It’s clever and creative and well-written and entertaining and...it kind of falls apart. The creator, after more than a little shit-talk directed at Disney, abandoned the story before reaching the conclusion, but even before then the seams were beginning to show. How do you take a society that’s okay with electrocuting cute animals and bring it to a point of cathartic redemption? You can’t, really. The story doesn’t work.

Does that mean people shouldn’t make fanworks out of the cut material? That they shouldn’t be inspired and excited by it? Hell no. This drawing is cute as hell. The ideas are compelling.

But I suppose what I’d ask of you all is--if you’re weighing the hot takes of art students on Twitter against the explanations of veteran filmmakers, consider that the latter group might actually know what they’re talking about.

See you next time!

[jonkentisakid]

Superman #29 Review

tl;dr I actually liked this issue. Giving this book a fair and unbiased shake, I’d say, under normal circumstances, i.e. Jon being a kid, I would continue picking it up. However, because Jon isn’t a kid, I hope this book bombs.

PKJ has written Superman in Future State, but I didn’t read any of it, so this is my time reading his work, and I’d say it was a good first issue. A writer’s first issue on a book is like their thesis statement or mission statement, showing their readers what to expect and how it’ll play out.

PKJ put together a tight issue. Some people thought it was decompressed, but I really didn’t get that. The actual story/plot is a little sparse, I’ll admit, but the point of the issue wasn’t necessarily to tell a complete story, it was to set the tone and feel of the run going forward. The only way I could say it was decompressed is because there is a part two coming up in Action Comics that would essentially be the second half of his thesis statement.

The way the issue plays out it could be divided into sections, and I could very easily see those individual sections be decompressed into entire issues by a master of decompression. Luckily, not only is PKJ a competent writer, he’s also very respectful of the readers’ time and money and gives them their money’s worth.

The issue starts with no dialogue, just narration (of which I’ll address the potential meta-writing in a bit), but there is an actual conversation between Clark and Jon that I felt was well-intentioned but very misinformed before the book finishes with narration. There’s a lot of telling and not showing in comics of late, but I think PKJ was capable of showing and not telling.

Also featured in this book is Amanda Waller, who seems to be plotting something that’ll tie in with the Suicide Squad book which is also tying in with Teen Titans Academy. I appreciate the coordination between the books in Infinite Frontier, but for some reason DC is really underselling it and not really pushing the fact that there’s going to be a lot of interconnectivity between books going forward.

Now, onto the meta-writing of the narration. The narration is about a golden age where kids are naive about their parents not being invincible, which parallels a fight with space aliens that goes swimmingly for Clark and Jon, and how that golden age comes to an end when kids first learn about their parents’ mortality, which parallels a second fight with the aliens where Clark gets an injury and for some reason that upsets Jon.

I can see how some could read it to be about Jon being aged up, and I’m not entirely blind to this reading either, but the narration paralleled the action a little too closely for me to conclude there was some ulterior meaning to it. The part about the golden age coming to an end just doesn’t seem to be anything more than the theme PKJ wants to explore.

What really irks me is the conversation Clark has with Jon. I stated earlier that it was well-intentioned, showing how the hell Bendis dragged Jon through would have affected him, but it focuses on all the wrong things and, worse still, misinterprets them. This is PKJ’s attempt to try and justify and validate Bendis’ “contributions,” and he really tries his best, but it just doesn’t work and he should’ve never attempted doing it.

The long and short of it is that Jon is afraid that his father will die and he’s not ready for that to happen. Jon starts out by saying that he doesn’t like being called Superman and isn’t ready to be Superman, which I find odd because DC literally published three comics two months prior to the release of this issue where those two things were very much the case. Either way, the reason Jon feels that way is because he doesn’t want Clark to die and is struggling to accept that fact, something all children sooner or later have to deal with.

PKJ really tried something here, and I’ll give him credit for it, and I’d like to see it explored further, but this isn’t the story to tell when you haven’t addressed the real issues such as the Jon’s trauma of not only literally losing seven years of his life, but being tortured that entire time, and Lois and Clark having some of the most formative years of their child’s life stolen from them. Ultimately, it just felt too angsty, too forced, and very unnecessary.

I do want to point out a piece of foreshadowing that I think a lot of people missed and it has to do with the second to last page.

Clark is flying against space, representing the space-oriented stories he wants to do with him, and Jon is flying against the sun, representing the more earth-bound stories that’ll be told with him. PKJ isn’t going to be writing both Action Comics and Superman forever. After an unnamed Superman event, PKJ will continue writing one of those books and someone else will be writing the other, so this is a visual representation of what you’re going to be getting in the Superman books in the future.

*Side Note: In Infinite Frontier #0, PKJ claims Jon “came of age” when he was with the Legion, which is such a load of horseshit.

Below the cut I’ve included what I intiially wrote about Clark and Jon’s conversation that I felt wasn’t quite accurate after rereading it multiple times, but it isn’t necessarily lacking in credence, so I wanted to keep it for posterity.

First, PKJ makes Jon’s preoccupation be about his father’s alleged eventual, and for some reason inevitable, death, and not the seven years’ worth of torture Jon suffered on Earth-3, especially when those seven years would’ve under normal circumstances been his actual coming of age*. Further, Jon apparently learned this information from the Legion, something that was neither depicted nor mentioned in Bendis’ LoSH. I never read Bendis’ LoSH, so I can’t confirm this, but from what I understand nothing of the sort, or just about anything in fact, happened in that book.

Second, not only did PKJ get Jon’s preoccupation wrong, he makes Jon just brush off the fact he was tortured for seven years. Clark tries to get his son to play coneyball, a game Jon made up when he was a kid, but Jon says he doesn’t remember how to play it because it’s been so long. PKJ mistakes Jon’s time with the Legion with the reason why he is seven years older than his proper age.

Seriously, PKJ just glosses over the real issues, like all the time with their son that was stolen from Lois and Clark, in favor of the manufactured angst that Jon isn’t ready to lose his father because he dies and Jon isn’t ready for his dad to die and to become Superman in his place.

Did PKJ not read Super Sons of Tomorrow, a story where a future version of Tim Drake goes back in time to kill Jon because Jon kills a bunch of people in that Tim Drake’s future and the combined forces of the Teen Titans and the Titans of Tomorrow prevent that future from happening? Does PKJ not know that Jon already knows that the future is not set and there is no fate but what we make for ourselves? By traveling back in time, in both instances, the course of history has already changed so that the dark futures will never come to pass, and Jon has no reason to this anxious.

This seriously lends credence to my theory that DC actively tells new writers to ignore everything that happened in Superman Rebirth and Super Sons in favor of some mandate they’re not allowed to tell anyone.

[brianwilly]

Game of Thrones did the thing that a couple of shows do where...it likes feminism.  It understood that feminism is important.  It wanted to be feminist.  It was cognizant of the fact that its setting was brazenly and intentionally misogynistic, and so it was even more important for its independent narrative to empower its female characters instead of mindlessly reinforcing the toxic beliefs of its own fictional world.  The whole point of the story, after all, was “this society is toxic, can our heroes survive it?” and so the narrative was voluntarily self-critical.

And so it knew to give us badass assassin Arya.  It knew to give us stalwart knight Brienne.  It gave us the pirate queen and the dragon queen and the Sansa getting revenge after revenge upon all the men who’d wronged her, and far more besides, and it talked big about breaking chains and how much men fucked things up and how great it would be if only women were in charge and et cetera et cetera.  And it’s, in fact, all actually really good that it had those things.  And because there were so very many moving parts of this story, it was super easy to look at those certain moving parts and think, yeah, they’ve done it!  They done good!

And it’s easy to forget and forgive -- to want to forget and forgive -- all the dead prostitutes that were on this show and the rapes used as motivation and fridgings and objectifications and the...y’know, whatever the hell Dorne was and Lady Stoneheart who? It’s easy to forget that this show actually played its hand a long time ago in regards to, like, what its relationship with feminism was going to be, and then kept playing the same hand again and again, to disappointing results.

Game of Thrones likes feminism.  It wanted to be feminist.  But its relationship with feminism was still predicated on some of the same old narratives and the same old storytelling trends that have disempowered female characters in the past, and so any progressive ideas it might have about women in its setting were nonetheless going to be constrained by those old fetters. As a result, its portrayal of women varied anywhere from glorious to admirable to predictable to downright cringeworthy.

New ideas require new vessels, new stories, in which to house them.  And for Game of Thrones, the ultimate story that it wanted to tell -- the ultimate driving force and thesis statement around which it was basing its entire journey and narrative -- was unfortunately a very old one, and one very familiar to the genre.

“Powerful women are scary.”

(Yes, I’m obviously making Yet Another Daenerys Essay On The Internet here)

So we have this character, this girl really, a slave girl who was sold and abused, and then she overcomes that abuse to gain power, she gains dragons, and she uses that power to fight slavery.  She fights slavery really well, like, she’s super hella good at it.  Her command of dragons is the most overt portrayal of “superpowers” in this world; she is the single most powerful person in this story, more powerful than any other character and the contest is not close.

But then...something really bad happens and oops, she gets really emotional about it and then she’s not fighting slavery anymore...she’s kinda doing the opposite!  This girl who was once a hero and a liberator of slaves instead becomes an out-of-control scary Mad Queen who kills a ton of innocent people and has to be taken down by our true heroes for the good of the world.

That’s the theme.  That’s the takeaway here.  That’s how it all ends, with one of the most primitive, archaic propaganda ever spread by writers, that women with power are frightening, they are crazy, they will use that power for ill.  Women with power are witches.  They are Amazons.  They will lop off our manhoods and make slaves of us.  They seduce our rightful kings and send our kingdoms to ruin.   They cannot control their emotions. They get hot flashes and start wars.  They turn into Dark Phoenixes and eat suns.  They are robot revolutionaries who will end humanity.  Powerful women are scary.

And let me emphasize that the theme here is not, in fact, that all power corrupts, because the whole Mad Queen concept for Daenerys actually ends up failing one of the more fundamental litmus tests available when it comes to representation of any kind: “would this story still happen if Dany was a man?” And the fact is that it would not.   And indeed we know this for a fact because “protagonist starts out virtuous, gains power in spite of the hardships set against him, gets corrupted by that power, and ends up being the bad guy” didn’t happen, and doesn’t happen, to the guys in the very same story that we’re examining.  It doesn’t happen to Jon Snow, Dany’s closest and most intentional narrative parallel.  It doesn’t happen to Bran Stark, a character whose entire journey is about how he embroils himself in wild dark winter magic beyond anyone’s understanding and loses his humanity in the process.  In fact, the only other character who ever got hinted of going “dark” because of the power that they’re obtaining is Arya, the girl who spent seven seasons training to fight, to become powerful, to circumvent the gender role she was saddled with in this world...and then being told at the end of her story, “Whoa hey slow down be careful there, you wouldn’t wanna get all emotional and become a bad person now wouldja?” by a man.

(meanwhile Sansa’s just sitting off in the side pouting or whatever ‘cuz her main arc this season was to, like, be annoyed at people really hard I guess)

‘Cuz that’s the danger with the girls and not the boys, ain’t it?  Arya and Jon are both great at killing people, but there is no Dark Jon story while we have to take extra special care to watch for Arya’s precious fragile humanity.  Dany has the power of dragons while Bran has the power of the old gods, but we will not find Dark Lord Bran, Soulless Scourge of Westeros, onscreen no matter how much sense it should make. “Power corrupts” is literally not a trend that afflicts male heroes on the same level that it afflicts female heroes.

Oh sure, there are corrupt male characters everywhere, tyrants and warlords and mafia bosses and drug dealers and so forth all over your TVs, and not even necessarily portrayed as outright villains; anti-heroes are nothing new.  But we’re talking about the hero hero here; the Harry Potters, the Luke Skywalkers, the Peter Parkers.  The Jon Snows.   They interact with corruptive power, yes; it’s an important aspect of their journeys.  But the key here being that male heroes would overcome that corruption and come through the other side better off for it.  They get to come away even more admirable for the power that they have in a way that is generally not afforded towards female heroes.

There are exceptions, of course; no trends are absolutely absolute one way or the other. For instance, the closest male parallel you’d find for the “being powerful is dangerous and will corrupt your noble heroic intentions” trope in popular media would be the character of Anakin Skywalker in the Star Wars prequel trilogy...ie, a preexisting character from a preexisting story where he was conceived as the villainous foil for the heroes.  Like, Anakin being a poor but kindhearted slave who eventually becomes seduced by the dark side certainly matches Dany’s arc, but it wasn’t the character’s original story and role.  And even then?...notice how Anakin as Vader the Dark Lord gets treated with the veneer of being “badass” and “cool” by the masses.  A male character with too much power -- even if it’s dark power, even if it’s corruptive -- has the range to be seen as something appealingly formidable, and not just as an obstacle that has to be dealt with or a cautionary tale to be pitied.

And in one of the few times that this trope was played completely straight, completely unironically with a male hero -- I’m thinking specifically of Hal Jordan the Green Lantern, of “Ryan Reynolds played him in the movie” fame -- the fans went berserk.  They could not let it go.  The fact that this character would go mad with power because a tragedy happened in his life was completely unacceptable, the story gained notoriety as a bad decision by clueless writers, and today the story in question has been retconned -- retroactively erased from continuity -- so that the character can be made heroic and virtuous again.  That’s how big a deal it was when a male hero with the tiniest bit of a fan following goes off the deep end.

To be clear, I’m not here to quibble over whether the story of Dany turning evil was good or bad, because we all know that’s going to be the de facto defense for this situation: “But she had to go mad!  It was for the sake of the story!“ as if the writers simply had no choice, they were helpless to the whims of the all-powerful Story God which dictates everything they write, and the most prominent female character of their series simply had to go bonkers and murder a bajillion babies and then get killed by her boyfriend or else the story just wouldn’t be good, y’know?  Ultimately though, that’s not what I’m arguing here, because it doesn’t actually matter.  There have been shitty stories about powerful women being bad.  There have been impressive stories about powerful women being bad.  Either way, the fact that people can’t seem to stop telling stories about powerful women being bad is a problem in and of itself.  Daenarys’ descent into Final Boss-dom could’ve been the most riveting, breathtaking, masterfully-written pieces of art ever and it’d still be just another instance of a female hero being unable to handle her power in a big long list of instances of this shitty trope.  The trope itself doesn’t become unshitty just because you write it well.

It all ultimately boils down to the very different ways that men and women -- that male heroes and female heroes -- continue to be portrayed in stories, and particularly in genre media.  In TV, we got Dany, and then we also have Dolores Abernathy in Westworld who was a gentle android that was abused and victimized for her entire existence, who shakes off the shackles of her programming to lead her race in revolution against their abusers...and then promptly becomes a ruthless maniac who ends up lobotomizing the love of her life and ends the season by voluntarily keeping a male android around to check her cruel impulses.  Comic book characters like Jean Grey and Wanda Maximoff are two of the most powerful people in their universe but are always, in-universe, made to feel guilty about their power and, non-diegetically, writers are always finding ways to disempower them because obviously they can’t be trusted with that much power and entire multiple sagas have been written about just how bad an idea it is for them to be so powerful because it’ll totally drive them crazy and cause them to kill everyone, obviously.  Meanwhile, a male comic character like Dr. Strange -- who can canonically destroy a planet by speaking Latin really hard -- or Black Bolt -- who can destroy a planet by speaking anything really hard -- will be just sitting there, two feet on the side, enjoying some tea and running the world or whatever because a male character having untold uninhibited power at his disposal is just accepted and laudable and gets him on those listicles where he fights Goku and stuff.

In my finite perspective, the sort of female heroes who have gained...not universal esteem, perhaps, but at least general benign acceptance amongst the genre community are characters who just don’t deal with all that stuff.  I’m thinking of recent superheroes like Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel, certainly, but also of surprise breakout hits like Stranger Things’ Eleven (so far) or even more niche characters like Sailor Moon or She-Ra.  The fact that these characters wield massive power is simply accepted as an unequivocal good thing, their power makes them powerful and impressive and that’s the end of the story, thanks for asking.  And when they deal with the inevitable tragedy that shakes their worldview to the core, or the inevitable villain trying to twist them into darkness, they tend to overcome that temptation and come out the other side even stronger than when they started.  In other words?...characters like these are being allowed the exact same sorts of narrative luxuries that are usually only afforded towards male heroes.

The thing about these characters, though, is that they tend to be...well, a little bit too heroic, right?  A lil’ bit too goody-two-shoes?  A bit too stalwart, a bit too incorruptible?  And that’s fine, there’s certainly nothing wrong with a traditionally-heroic white knight of a hero.  But what I might like to see, as the next step going forward, is for female heroes to be allowed a bit more range than just that, so that they’re not just innocent children or literal princesses or shining demigods clad in primary colors.  Let’s have an all-powerful female hero be...well, the easiest way to say it is let’s see her allowed to be bitchier.  Less straightlaced.  Let’s not put an ultimatum on her power, like “Oh sure you can be powerful, but only if you’re super duper nice about it.” Let us have a ruthless woman, but not one ruled by ruthlessness.  Let us have a hero who naturally makes enemies and not friends, who has to work hard to gain allies because her personality doesn’t sparkle and gleam.  Let her have the righteous anger of a lifelong slave, and let that anger be her salvation instead of her downfall.

In other words, let us have Daenerys Targaryen.  And let us put her in a new story instead of an old one.

[impalementation]

so i just finished rhonda wilcox's essay on hush, and she comments that - much like angel the episode predicts what will happen to buffy and angel - hush predicts that riley will go on to rip buffy's heart out by becoming part of a patriarchal institution (wilcox does a lot of work establishing what the gentlemen represent and focuses on the moment in buffy's dream where riley turns into one of them). (1/2)

(2/2) so my question for you is do you see that any one episode cleanly predicts the path spike and buffy eventually go down together? and if there isn't, how does that deviation from the pattern affect the reading of the spuffy dynamic, if it does at all?

hmm, really interesting question. sorry it took me a while to answer! the thing about the spike/buffy dynamic is that we know a lot of it wasn’t planned out. i don’t have links to interviews at the tip of my fingers, but it’s something i’ve seen mentioned multiple times. that they didn’t know that spike would fall in love with buffy until starting season five, but that it was like they’d been writing to it all along. which means that we’d need to look to season five to find a thesis statement episode for the relationship. in which case, as obvious as it might sound, i think the episode we’re looking for is fool for love.

here’s why. i’ve talked about the spike/buffy storyline as being about both boundaries and the id before. but actually perhaps the more obvious thing to say their relationship is about, is power dynamics. and what power dynamics mean for love. and fool for love is all over that.

first, what fool for love does is it establishes spike as someone who wants two different things. he wants power and confidence, and he wants to be loved. when he becomes a vampire, he is able to find that power and confidence through violence. instead of caring about the opinions of his peers, he puts railroad spikes through their heads (or is implied to, anyway). his relationship to love and women is also all wrapped up in violence. heartbreak leads directly to him becoming a vampire, and therefore a soulless killer. drusilla turns him (a violent act), delights in his violence, and sexually responds to him killing the chinese slayer. more importantly, i don’t think you can or should get away from the imagery of slayer-killing as well, the violent conquest of powerful women. i see people claim that if slayers were men, then spike would be just as obsessed with killing them, that he just loves violence for the sake of violence. but whether or not that claim is accurate, i think it misses the fact that this is buffy, in which so much of the horror is various, more or less supernatural, versions of violent misogyny. so while i agree that spike is a person who takes glee in destruction of all kinds—his love of killing demons, “a little violence before bed time”, etc—and is not specifically obsessed with destroying women for being women the way, say, the trio (or ted, or pete, or etc) are…he does, nonetheless, relate to women in ways that we are meant to see as bitter and resentful or otherwise messed-up. his treatment of harmony, his frustration at dru leaving him, and of course everything in crush. that’s sort of the contradiction of him. he genuinely loves women, and makes himself abject to them and to the act of loving, but he also genuinely has a messed-up relationship to all of that. in other words, whether or not spike at all cares about killing slayers because they’re women, it still matters, in terms of symbolism, that he is a man killing women. his relationship to killing slayers is undeniably sexually coded, too. everything from his innuendo and sexually loaded gazing in school hard, to him asking nikki if “this is good for [her]”, to him asking buffy if she’ll “like it as much as [nikki] did.”

with that in mind, i would say that the problem the show is trying to have spike resolve, and the reason that he’s the id of the later seasons, is that he has this sincere desire to love and be loved, as well as to generally be confident and appreciated, but the only tool he has—especially when it comes to slayers—is violence. ie, acts of domination and power. or at least, violence is the only tool that’s ever rewarded him. he was a doting caretaker to drusilla, yes, but he only got drusilla in the first place by becoming a murderous creature. and later lost her by “going soft.” killing a slayer made drusilla sleep with him, while helping a slayer made her leave him. so in total, you have this character with all of these very human yearnings, but who has them repeatedly frustrated, and so tries to fulfill them through monstrous, vampiric behavior—through acts of power. his instinct when he is in love is to be a doting, romantic lover, but his instinct with slayers is to kill them. so by loving buffy he is made to confront the contradictions in his attitudes towards women, love, and power.

one of the fundamental questions of buffy is “how do you act when you feel like you have no control?” and in fool for love, both buffy and spike are feeling out of control. buffy feels out of control of her mortality, and later out of control of her mother’s mortality. meanwhile spike feels out of control of his deviant feelings for a good person that he cannot have. both characters have a tendency to assert control through violence, which is one of the reasons that spike is such a good id for buffy. buffy is used to protecting herself and the people she loves by physically fighting things, and struggles every time that’s not an option (but also struggles with what she thinks it says about her, that she is so intimate with violence). so in fool for love she goes to spike hoping that he’ll give her some sort of violence-related answer to her problem. she wants to know how he killed the other slayers, so that she can physically protect herself. moreover, she repeatedly manhandles him to get that information. meanwhile spike tries to seductively intimidate her, playing up his physical dangerousness, and ends up offering her a violence-related answer that she realizes she doesn’t actually want: him killing her. except that answer is as much about him as her. spike doesn’t really want to kill buffy, he wants to kiss her (or to be fair, let’s say he at least wants both), but when it comes to interacting with slayers, all he has is that language and mindset of violent conquest. so spike tries to assert control over buffy (“you know you want to dance”) and buffy responds by asserting control right back (“you’re beneath me”). she wins the contest of wills, and establishes herself as the person with more power in their dynamic. for all spike’s posturing all evening, buffy ultimately stands over him, dismissively tossing cash at him.

but the episode does not finish on that note. instead, it finishes with buffy feeling powerless yet again in the face of her mother’s sickness. spike goes to buffy, standing over her with a gun, intending to reclaim his power in the way he knows best: killing a slayer. but ends up as powerless in the face of his emotions as ever. instead of ending on an unbalanced power dynamic, the episode ends with buffy and spike on the same level, equally bowed by the weight of the feelings that they can’t control. neither standing over the other. neither asserting power over the other.

all of which is, in my opinion, their entire arc in microcosm. their story is the story of two people who struggle to relate to each other in a way that isn’t fraught with issues of power, especially sexual, gendered power. and who eventually, with up and downs, succeed. over the course of season five, spike lets go of more and more of his control. in crush, he’s tempted to return to his vampiric ways—keep in mind that for spike vampirism is associated with empowerment—and tries to literally shackle up the women he loves. which ends badly. in intervention he tries to cheat by only controlling a fake version of buffy. but that ends badly too. it’s only when he gives up control in the gift and doesn’t try to get in buffy’s house, that buffy begins the process of equalization by letting him in. using fool for love as a model, you might say that spike spends the season learning over and over how to set down his gun, to let go of the idea of an upper hand, and respond with his more humane and caring half.

but their dynamic is still very uneven. spike letting go of his power is not the same as them being equal. and season six digs into why that’s a problem if two people are involved. if fool for love is the spike/buffy arc in microcosm, then i would say that the alley scene is their season six arc, and the porch scene is their season seven arc. in season six, both spike and buffy feel out of control the way they felt in fool for love, and try to regain that control by playing violent power games with each other. even if it’s not what they actually want. spike’s intimidation/seduction during the alley scene reminds me a lot of his attempts to keep buffy at his level during their sexual relationship, because he thinks he can’t have her otherwise. buffy having a death wish, buffy belonging in the dark, etc. the ambiguity about whether spike fully believes what he’s saying, and is trying—in his vampiric way—to be helpful, or whether he’s bullshitting, seems similar in both situations too. meanwhile buffy’s flustered violence towards him (slamming him against things, choking him), reminds me of her side of their sexual relationship. she feels freaked out about her mortality, just as she feels freaked out about her “deadness” in season six, and turns that into conflict with spike (note how in both instances spike is a figure of a death, and buffy is reckoning with death). the scene then ends, just as their season six relationship does, with spike pushing buffy because he thinks she feels something (“come on, i can feel it slayer”), and buffy decisively pushing him away. revealing to spike that he’s misread their interaction.

season seven then is about the mutual laying down of arms. if season six is about love as a power struggle, then season seven is about love in the absence of power struggles. the implication is that letting go of power struggles and uneven dynamics is necessary for genuine and healthy love to develop. i’m very interested in the choreography of buffy and spike’s scene in touched. spike starts out above her, standing while she sits on the bed. then he kneels so he’s below her. then they end up on the same level on the bed together. much as they ended up on the same level on the porch in fool for love. they are not trying to take power from each other. spike gives his power. and so she stops looking down on him, stops trying to keep him at a hierarchal distance, and invites him to her level.

(there’s a parallel there with smashed, too. both scenes take place in an abandoned house, but instead of crashing to the basement and missing any sort of bed, they are in an upper-level bedroom together. and the next day she returns home—ie, returns to herself—empowered, rather than bruised and ashamed. in other words, their interaction was an affirmation of self rather than a destruction of self. in a relationship that is a power struggle, people will end up dragging each other down to the basement, in a race to the bottom. whereas in a relationship that is not, people elevate each other.)

honestly, for all that i understand why people don’t like it, i do think it’s a pretty potent storyline for a season that claims it’s “about power,” but turns out to be about sharing power. the bait-and-switch of thinking that power is about violence and control, when it’s actually about generosity, is basically the whole spike and buffy dynamic. both spike and buffy often think that violence is the only way to solve their problems, but yearn for things that don’t involve violence in the slightest. so for them to finish the season and the show peaceably sleeping in each other’s arms, on the same level? it strikes me as a very coherent resolution of their arc as a whole.

so, there’s your answer. fool for love. i also think it’s telling that in fool for love spike noticeably supplants riley in importance, and occupies buffy’s attention. which predicts the fact that he will ultimately replace riley as a sexual/romantic interest.

[docholligay]

Fx’s A Christmas Carol

This review/ramble was sponsored by @amberlilly, and has taken me quite awhile to do. It clocks in at being 6,400 words long, and oh my loving God. If you want to watch the Miniseries itself, you can find it on Hulu! PLEASE TELL ME IF YOU ENJOY

I love A Christmas Carol. This may seem strange to you, given that I am a Jew who pretty virulently hates Christmas, but it isn’t REALLY a Christmas story, it’s a moral fable about selfishness and greed and the inability to appreciate and see the softer and brighter things that bring no profit. It’s a fucking story that every asshole hoarding toilet paper needs to hear right now. It’s a favorite for always, I read it every year, and I have seen many, many versions of it, and I bring you all that “wisdom” in this lengthy review of FX’s effort this past Christmas. 

Spoiler alert: I BASICALLY PICK APART THE ENTIRE MINISERIES. 

The shortest possible version of this entire loping review: I really quite enjoyed FX’s A Christmas Carol, and that seems to be an unpopular opinion. 

In the longer form: 

“A gift is just a debt, unwritten but implied” 

I have always felt that the finest form of recorded visual media is the miniseries. We, of course, do not call them miniseries any more, but, instead, ‘limited series’ or ‘a special event’ or somet stupid thing like that, for much the same reason I imagine we are now calling a station wagon a ‘full length hatchback’ because people are idiots, and you can’t sell something to someone if they don’t it is novel.

The miniseries allows the story time to breathe, allows for lingering thoughts and ideas in the way a two hour movie does not. And it avoids the worst of the TV show problem, where a show is punished for its own success by being forced to be mined like its fucking coal shale until there is absolutely nothing left, just some ugly polluted ground where a good idea used to be. 

And so I was very delighted at the idea of a Christmas Carol miniseries. 

Tonally, in broad strokes, it is much darker than the Christmas Carol you’re used to. This is a new Christmas Carol for a new period in time, and it tries to bring a lot of the genuine problems of the Scrooges of our modern day and transport them back to Victorian England. It does not in any way try to shield you from the fact that Scrooge is a man who thinks of nothing but profit, not of any human cost, and it does not rest upon anyone’s previous affections for A Christmas Carol. In fact, it would prefer that you deposit them at the door: This is a moral ghost story, this is not some warm Christmas good time for the family. 

And I would prefer it this way! Many of my most hated versions of this story become that way by making too much light of what is meant to be a moral fable. Or centers the story too much around Christmas itself, which it is not meant to REALLY be about. Of course, the very wealthy and those who prefer to be blind to their role in the suffering of others prefer the version of the story where the main problem is “Scrooge doesn’t like Christmas” and so I can see why they would consider this version a negative. I, however, am going to immediately find a copy of this one to keep. This is the way businessmen are. This is the way the very wealthy are.

The “thesis statement” of this show, which sets it apart from many other adaptations, is something Scrooge says early on in the movie, I think it happens within the first ten or fifteen minutes (bolding, obviously, is mine): 

“Behold. One day of the year. They all grin and greet each other when every other day they walk by with their faces in their collars. 

You know, it makes me very sad to see all the lies that comes as surely as the snow this time of year. How many Merry Christmases are meant, and how many are lies? To pretend on one day of the year that the human beast is not a human beast. That it is possible we can all be transformed. 

But if it were so--if it were possible for so many mortals to look at the calendar and transform from wolf to lamb--then why not every day?

Instead of one day good, and the rest bad, why not have everyone grinning at each other all year, and have one day of the year where we are all beasts, and pass each other by? Why not turn it around?” 

I mean, I heard this and was like, “Why are you booing him, he’s right,” because he is right. I have often found that one of my frustrations with the ways people engage with a Christmas Carol is they forget the “try to keep it all the year” part of it, and it has nothing to do with fucking trees and parties, it has to do with generosity and kindness. 

And this show goes in on that! SO LITTLE of what the show engages with is about Christmas at all, it’s a narrative setup, a collective mythology used to enact a moral tale, and I absolutely love that they actually went on what I feel is the core of A Christmas Carol. 

I’ve broken this down in NOT broad strokes but categories, to try and make the most sense of my thoughts on the show and why and how I think they work. 

On the subject of the ghosts: 

I absolutely love and adore the way they handle the ghost of Christmas Past. I am never sure what I’m getting into when I’m watching a version of this story because the ghosts are handled so many different ways, and I love MANY of them, but it’s one of the most tweaked with ideas in any version. And I see why! There’s so much you can do with them. 

Christmas Past they handle by having him change depending on where Scrooge is in his life, and the implication throughout is that he changes into whatever it was that scrooge needed in that time of his life, whatever he was seeking. With Ali Baba, it was escape, with the businessman, it was business, and they did all this with great actual care, up to an including having different actors play the different versions of the ghost of Christmas past. I’ve seen something like this done a few times (and have always been very fond of it) but if I recall correctly this may be the first time I’ve actually seen them go to the length of hiring different actors.  

The sheer mockery Christmas Past makes of him is worth the adaptation in and of itself--Christmas Past feels little for him, and I’m brought to mind the scene where his father comes home drunk, and Scrooge begs, in a moment of weakness, oh please not this night, and the Ghost simply says, ‘Why not this night?” I really quite like the less nostalgic tone they took with Christmas Past versus other versions. 

Christmas Present I thought was a bit of a letdown at first, just having his dead sister be the ghost, but when I was rewatching it, I realized that I liked it quite a bit more than I had in my first watching. Present is often the “easy” ghost, generally the one that is given the most positive sort of framing, and it’s not that they remove the positive framing here with Lottie, but they do tone it down a bit, and make it quite a bit more somber to be with her because we cannot remove what Scrooge has done to these lives. There is much less of the “cheerful, noble poor” rhetoric so common in the older novels (and at the time far more revolutionary) and far more of the reckoning that Scrooge has caused so much misery, but people have found a way around it, because they understand the value of other human beings. 

I particularly love the way she takes what he’s learned from Christmas Past, the way he’s seen how he is constantly aiming to discover what the currency of everything is with his horrid and cruel behavior, what things COST people, and dismantles it, shows him wha t a fucking fool he is, and when he says she’s mocking him, she simply tells him “You mock yourself, putting a value to things that have no price” and for the fiurst time ever, it seems like he’s really getting it. 

To those who miss the over-the-top cheer of Christmas Present, I might ask: “Do you miss the fucking THRASHING he gives Scrooge in the novel when it is removed? (as it is often?) Or does that just sort of...fritter away for you?” 

Christmas Future is basically often/always the one note ghost for me and that’s to be expected given that the character has no lines and is of an amorphous shape, which writing wise is a genius move because the future itself is amorphous and can always be changed. That is, in fact, one of the lessons of a Christmas Carol, is it never too late. But of course, in media driven by the dialogue, without much chance for internal patter, it can falter a bit, and I think this is about the same here.I have no trouble with how the ghost was done, in any way, but it does not, for example, twist the spirit into something terribly interesting in the way the otherwise forgettable “A Diva's Christmas Carol” does by making it into a “behind the music” episode. 

On the subject of Ebenezer Scrooge: 

Some people seem to be really rather upset that Ebenezer isn’t played as some bumbling old curmudgeon, but is instead a callously cruel businessman who thinks of nothing but the pursuit of money. One review I read while writing this, looking for things to respond to, described him as an ‘anti-hero’ which made me extremely concerned for the human being writing the review, as I don’t think the show in any way makes Scrooge into any kind of a hero. There are certainly versions that do that by way of making him “the cleverest person in the room” (even my beloved Scrooged is guilty of this, and Mickey’s a Christmas Carol is almost inexcusably so.) but this isn’t what the show is doing here. He is a miserable man, and he delights in making others miserable, he is a man so desperate to prove that every person in this world is as miserable as he is that he orders about the world to make it so. 

If you see an anti-hero in him, I am far, far, more concerned about you than I am about anything else. 

He is more like actual billionaires than any version I’ve seen. His cost cutting, his destruction. He is perversely cruel and sees human beings as playtoys. He echoes far more than any version I have seen, the true appetites of the rich, and maybe this is why this version shines so much for me, and why so many others dislike it. It cuts to the bone, this Scrooge. 

This show goes harder than other versions in many respects, and one of those respects is in Ebenezer’s childhood. His father is cruel in the novella, but really only glancing so, we hear little of his childhood at all, other than his father sent him away, and his sister had to wait for years to ask for him back. We must remember something: Dickens was writing on a tight timeline compared to his other works. I have no idea if he would have expanded on Scrooge’s past himself or not, but I certainly know he did not have the time and space to do so in his normal fashion. 

The show does a really interesting thing with Ebenezer, in that it does not allow a monster to grow from nothing. Most monsters do not. This is by no way an excuse--I think the show makes that fairly clear--but it is an explanation. His sister gives him a mouse, a stray mouse, for Christmas, dressed up with a little bell and ribbon from one of her toys, and Ebenezer loves it, and his father, drunk and impoverished, kills it. It’s an intense and horrifying scene, and as with many of the things in this show, in accomplishes this while showing nearly nothing. The entire scene happens in shadow, but you feel the fear of Ebenezer as a child, how it affects him to this day, how he begs for it not to be this night. The show makes even more clear how central this was to his willful callousness, his desire to never be hurt, by explaining that his father did this to “Warn me against unprofitable affections” 

I am now, and have always been, a sucker for a bit of writing that can allow for a character to be a monster, and also give a seed to plant that monstrosity, without forgiving them. It can be a delicate thread to weave, even more so with the way that people take characters, that sort of knee-jerk desire for a character to be either monstrous or abused, when, it can be both. Having cruelty enacted upon you does not forgive cruelty to others. I feel like show does a fairly decent job with this, reminding Ebenezer that his hated father affected him far more than the love of his sister, Lottie, or any promise of love in the future. He has shut himself off from love, and while he cannot be blamed for the cruelties of his father or the way he essentially sold him to a pedophile for free schooling, it was Scrooge who decided that all this meant his only way forward was counting. Numbers as wealth as his only true love. 

Scrooge even tries to pull a tumblr in this way, looking at the abuse and telling the Ghost, ‘This excuses me” as if he should be let entirely off the hook, AS A GROWN ASS ADULT, for what happened to him as a child. Non non! And the Ghost sides with me in this, telling him, “You only see what was done to you, and not what was done for you” and may I please frame that? I love that they looked at this out in the script and went, “Oh, I’m gonna close that up” 

They do this a second time, but not in a tumblr way, more in a reddit way, when Scrooge protests that whatever else he did to Mary Crachit, the money he gave to mary saved Tim’s life, and so, “if you view virtue purely through the consequence of an action rather than the motivation for said action we have just witnessed my former self doing a good thing.” (Me, watching this: I’m Jewish, I don’t do that even slightly.) and as the Ghost of Christmas Past goes to leave, Scrooge asks if he is forgiven, and Christmas Past yells, “It’s not about your forgiveness!” I love that in so many ways, they tie up what a person might argue in Scrooge’s favor, but Scrooge can’t see that forgiveness is nothing and change is everything. 

Making Scrooge a venture capitalist was, to me, an absolute banner move. A new villain for a new age. Don’t get me wrong, moneylender is now and always will be a fantastic villain, but venture capitalists have ruined many things you’ve loved TO THIS DAY. They buy troubled businesses, that could be saved, and instead of trying to turn them around, they sell them for parts, get the last scrap of meat off them, and then crush them. I can think of three businesses this has happened to that I know of, off the top of my head, in my lifetime: Toys R Us, Cabelas, and Lucky’s. All could have been saved, some of them (Lucky’s) fairly easily. But that isn’t what people like Scrooge do. 

The way they have him taken into the mine, to see what the cost cutting does to people, or the factory, burning and killing so many people, it allows us to really dwell in the HUMAN cost in a way that many versions shy away from outside of the Crachits. I think it’s very easy to go “Cutting costs hurt workers” but we often don’t really dwell in that, especially considering SHIT LIKE THIS IS STILL HAPPENING IN THE WORLD TODAY. Go look up conditions in Bangladeshi factories, how much do we really deserve H&M, you know? 

A personal touch I very much loved: Scrooge cares about animals far more than people. I LOVE this is a fucking villainy trait. I think we all know that person! I hate that person! And I adore so much when Scrooge says, down in the mine that is about to kill workers, some of whom are children, that he tried not to think about the ponies, and the Ghost of Christmas Past basically goes: “Are you SHITTING ME? Did you never care about the MEN down here?” while also allowing for the fact that his covering up a cold horse in London is the only reason the ghosts believed there was something good in him at all. 

On the Crachits: 

Bob:

The first time I watched this, I was like, “Man, do I even like Bob in this?” because he’s so different from the usual portrayal of Bob Crachit as meek and mild. But upon my second watching I realized I was really only reacting to the difference in tone for Bob, and that I very much like that he is a simmering pot of resentment and hatred, serving under a terrible fucking boss who makes money hand over fist while he busts ass with no benefits or help for very little pay. WOW DOESN’T THAT SEEM RELEVANT TO OUR TIMES? 

So yes, I very much changed my mind (this is why rewatching things is sometimes helpful for me) on the subject of Bob, and I think in this case he makes such a better standin for the average worker, for the way the system chews us up and spits us out and oh my god I want to give every rich boss I ever had Covid right now. 

Mary: 

Mary Crachit becomes a main character in this version of the story and I am absolutely taken with it. The way she does whatever it is she has to for her family, the way she is willing to lie and degrade herself in order to do so, up to and including being willing have sex with Scrooge (it does not actually happen, but the scene plays out) in order to save and protect her family, and never tell them where she got the money to save Tim’s life. 

She lies to Bob about this! Forever! I struggled with where I wanted to put this because I talk more about it in relation to the storyline and the scene itself below, but I decided just to leave it with Mary herself, and the way that she really does make massive sacrifices in order to protect everyone in her family. She bears the shame and the indignity of what was done to her, what she chose to do to save Tim, without any regard for herself. Mary is the rock of the family so much more than Bob is in this telling. 

She’s also inadvertently the one who saves Scrooge, wishing for and calling upon the spirits to show him what a piece of shit he is. 

Tim: 

Tiny Tim is no less a narrative device here than he is in other versions--that’s simply the function of TIny Tim. He’s the “puppy” of the story and we kill him off in order to tweak heartstrings and encourage changed behavior. They do make his disability more clearly defined in this one, and so things make a little bit more sense than they tend to in the original framing. 

I also really quite loved the effect with him breaking through the ice, and how Scrooge has to see it from below, and watch it, and see TIm’s spirit and beg him himself not to die, but to stay with his parents, to no avail, I thought it was a clever take on something we’ve seen done over and over again. 

Broader story changes:

The genuine spookiness. 

This is not the only version of Christmas Carol I’ve seen that attempts to create a genuine sense of fear and creepiness out of the subject material, and it’s not even the one that I think is the scariest, but I do think it does a really excellent job of reminding you that this is a ghost story. There are good little details here and there, particularly in the lead up to Jacob’s visit, that allow for a genuine sense of fear, or at the very least the understanding of Ebenezer’s fear. 

Outside of the doorknob incident, we also have the two coins, the exact same years as the ones Scrooge put over Marley’s eyes, drop down from the fireplace. This not only a good moment of spookiness that is difficult for Scrooge to explain away later, but it also gives us an early introduction to his obsession with numbers. 

But my favorite comes after Bob leaves for the day, and on Scrooge’s ledger he sees scrawled, by no one or nothing that he knows, “PREPARE YE,” that would be enough in itself, ut then we have a lovely moment that really encapsulates the capacity for self-delusion. Scrooge looks at the clock, and asks the clock to make it four, because he refuses to leave his office early, but he desperately wants to leave. He changes the watch he carries, and then the world goes into shadow, and all of a sudden the clock chimes four. DId time move? WHo can know, but it unsettles Scrooge enough. It isn’t only creepy, either, but is a moment to show that Scrooge will not bend himself by leaving early, but instead he will remake the world as he sees it. He will change the watch and make it lie, and thus change the world. 

The human cost of industry. 

One of the greatest things I think this adaptation does, and I’m not going to go too far into here because I go into it all over the place in this look at the series, is taking into account the human cost of industry. I don’t even mean the scenes in the mines, or the scene with the factory on fire, although of course those too. I mean even scenes like where a man has just died, and they are pressing him to sell the factory at half of what it’s worth, only to immediately fire all the workers and sell off the factory for parts not but a day later. To flip it into immediate profit. 

And we’re shown that he remembers nothing but the money he made off of all of it--the Ghost of Christmas Past has little effect on him, except as stage setting--and he runs off the numbers, remembering the profit he made of every single year, forgetting the workers, forgetting the people, forgetting what that money COST him, cost everyone. 

When we see Scrooge as moneylender in a lot of other adaptations, it’s easy to forget that making a lot of money usually has a lot of human cost. People of good character often say, ‘If I were a billionaire” but if you are a person of good character, you never become a billionaire. What it takes to become a billionaire is the coldness, the selfishness, to not allow your rising tide to lift other boats, but to hoard, and to keep. There are no good billionaires. 

Women are given shit to do in this version. 

For all I love the original novella, and I do, it is a product of its time, and because it is a product of its time, the women are mostly accessories to the story. Not so with this version, which has really tried to course correct that little problem from the original. 

With Lottie, not only to they have her save her brother, but then we have her become the ghost of Christmas Present, which I thik works really well as she seems to be the one person in his life Scrooge actually cared for and valued. He, a man who believed in nothing but money, paid for her funeral, and it’s a bit implied that with her death the last light of humanity went out of him. She saves Scrooge not once, but twice, when her sole job in the novella is essentially to show up at the school. 

I talk about Mary Crachit in her own section, so I’m not going to go into it too much here, but this version made her a goddamn main character, and I love it. I think that opens up this story for so many things and ideas that I didn’t even know I wanted but clearly did, all the different expressions of love, some of which are not nice or warm. Mary is a driver of the story far more than Bob is in this version, and I absolutely love it. 

The love inherent in sacrifice, and Scrooge’s blindness to it. 

One major SWERVE this story takes is with the subject of Mary Crachit. Where, in the novella, she hates Ebenezer because he’s a fucking dick and that’s about the beginning and the end of it, in this miniseries, she hates him because he was so unbelieveably callously cruel. He used her for his own disgusting appetites, he used her to prove that all human decency has a cost. 

It, like the mouse scene, is horrifying and uncomfortable, and I am very fond of it. It could have gone full rape no stars, but it doesn’t do that. It has Scrooge humiliate her, make it known that she was ready to do this, have her removed her clothes and stand before him, clutching the stays to herself. He doesn’t have sex with her, doesn’t sexually assualt her, tells her he isn’t even interested in that. Instead he picks apart, moment by moment, that she is a good Christian woman, that she loves her husband, that she considers herself faithful, and she is willing to sell herself for the thirty pounds (That’s around 4,700 USD today). It doesn’t matter that she’s doing it because her son needs immediate medical care, and Scrooge refused her offer of a loan as a “poor investment.” It’s terrifying, it’s humiliating, and it’s sadder yet because people with money are LIKE THIS. I could see this happening now, with little trouble. And the scene makes us sit with that cruelty without making it graphic, and in some ways I think that makes it worse, as it should be. 

But, tying this to the scene where Lottie, without his knowledge, comes to get him and threatens to kill the man who is sexually abusing Ebenezer if he so much as tries to come after them, for all he sees, he does not see the love in this act. He does not see what it must have taken Lottie, after their father finally left them, to take up and come to get him, to break him out of that horrible place. He only sees that he was the victim here. In the same way, he cannot see the love inherent in Mary’s act. What it must take for her to lay down every single thing that she believes in, because above all else, she wants to save her son. 

Which goes back to what I quoted at the beginning, a line I really loved for the sheer selfish cruelty of it: “ A gift is a debt, unwritten but implied.” So much of Scrooge’s ‘redemption’ in this version comes out his ability to learn that what his father says is in no way true. Lottie gave him the gift of freedom without asking anything of him, ever, so long as he lived, never even told him what she’d done. Mary never looks upon Tim with even the slightest bit of resentment for what she had to do to save his life. 

Which sort of leads me to my next bit, which is not so much a different section as a corollary to this one: Destruction as a form of love. I could write a 2,000 word essay on this in and of itself, but this is already more than 5,000 words long, so I am not going to do that. 

Leading off from the fact that Mary breaks her marriage vows and her vows to herself in order to save Tim, she also chooses to lie about it for the rest of her given life. She has no idea that a situation is going to come down where she’s going to have to tell Bob, she simply chooses, instead to bear her shame and hurt and terror alone, on some hand I’m sure because she thinks Bob will hate her but also because she knows that it will make Bob feel all the more preyed upon, that nothing in his life can be without the evil touch of Scrooge. 

And so, she chooses this tearing, this negative thing, but she chooses it out of love, and much like when we see Lottie “like a highwayman” threaten to kill the man that hurt Scrooge, we learn that not all love is a beautiful and warm thing, and sometimes love is difficult and unlikeable and hard. Sometimes there is love to be had in the things of shadow, as well. 

And in the end, when Scrooge destroys the ice sating rink so that Tim can’t fall through, that’s the idea that he can finally encompass this, that his love is total now, and it’s not just “scrooge gave everyone money” but SCROOGE LEARNED TO DESTROY THAT WHICH WAS TERRIBLE. 

Which leads me to:

THE ENDING: 

Let’s talk about all the things they change in the ending because there are a lot of them and I fully expected to hate that but it was very much that snake comic where it goes “I don’t like that thing”...”Oh no I love it.” 

Scrooge’s ‘redemption’ doesn’t come out of him wishing that he wasn’t the one to die, or wish that everyone would not hate him so much and immediately forget him, but out of the ida that it doesn’t matter what happens to him so long as Tim is allowed to live. He finally lets go of that massive selfishness which allowed him to profit so very much, and to give himself over to whatever it is, to be tortured, to not be forgiven. 

Because he knows he doesn’t deserve forgiveness, that he does not deserve redemption. He REFUSES redemption, he says he refuses to change because he refuses redemption, he refuses to not allow himself to be punished. “If redemption were to result in some kind of forgiveness than I do not want it” He finally owns his shit, because a large part of the point this miniseries is trying to drive home is that YOU are responsible for YOU, and no amount of excuse can let stand the horrible things we might do, or the things we let pass us by. I’m very into this, in a shock to literally no one. 

The sign that he can be saved is that he does not wish to be saved at all. 

And he does more, and better, than in the original, he gives Bob 500 pounds, yes, but also encourages him to take the better job he’s been offered, because Scrooge, in a true move of understanding what his greater evil is, is closing the entire company down, He is stopping the machine of destruction entirely instead of giving money to whoever he finds deserving and letting those he does not be chomped up by the machine. It’s a far greater sacrifice, a far more meaningful turnaround, than any version I’ce seen before. 

Mary tells him it will not buy forgiveness, and he says, yes, good, I won’t trouble you. I didn’t know how badly I wanted an ending like this until I saw it before me, but it was everything I had ever wanted from this. 

And then we, the viewing audience, all get called out at the very end, and it made a chill run down my spine and tears spring to my eyes in a way that really rarely happens to me but happens to me most when I feel “got” for lack of a better term. 

Mary is looking out the window, and says “Sprits, Past, Present, and Future. There is still much to do.”

And then she looks directly at us. And the screen goes black. We are left not saying “Oh wow gee willickers, that Scrooge guy sure was nasty BUT” and instead go away with, “How have I been Scrooge in my daily life? How can I change?”and for me it was harrowing in the way I think all viewings and readings of  A Christmas Carol should be, that we should always come away with the idea that we could be doing a better job, that some cruel Ebenezer waits inside all of us and we must constantly be working to root him out. 

Very minor loves:

The idea that the greatst torture is to be locked in one’s coffin, and never allowed to die, and how one does not really require a hell in itself, as one has been conventiently provided to each man, women and child who requires it. Really clever. What is interesting in that, however, is that the show is somewhat harder on Marley. In the novella, he is driven to help Scrooge by way of their past friendship, by some humanity he’s found in death toward his old friend. In this, it’s essentially only to escape this hell. 

Changing, “If they’re going to die, they’d better do it! And decrease the surplus population” to the very simple “then let them die” is something I didn’t expect to like--on the whole I am rather attached to the original line, but I think with the way they are trying to play Scrooge as more of a straight up villain and make this whole thing less of a ‘charming Christmas tale’ it really works. 

I love the bit with Christmas past when they use the zoopraxiscope thing to project the images, and it’s his hat. There’s nothing deep about it, I just really like it as a touch. 

People can be irredeemable, in their way: Lottie and Ebenezer’s father doesn’t turn kinder, the way he does in the novella, but just leaves, and so Lottie is free to bring him home. There’s no redemption for him. (I actually think this is really weakly handled in the novella despite my loving it) 

I unfortunately have less talent for talking about visual stylings, but one thing I noticed within this movie is that it’s filmed ina lot of blues and greys, underscoring the whole darker tone of the story, and I really appreciated it.  

Thank you for this fucking line, I cherished it and it’s place in the story so very fucking much: “Given my time again, I would not reduce the expenditure on timber. *long pause* Given the time again, I would not be myself.” It’s hard to get across in writing, when one is not turning their hand to it literarily, but it’s really this beautiful admission of guilt without being entirely some sobbing ridiculousness. 

HIS THING WITH HORSES GETS EXPLAINED BY THE NARRATIVE THANK YOU OH MY GOD. I was so sure this was just going to be a sidenote thing but they remembered to follow up and I was very proud in that moment. 

“Everything in life is a lesson if you care to learn” which I should have tattooed on my body as it is my exact framework of thought. 

The observation of the Crachits and just that, “no matter what, nothing sinks them” was just something I enjoyed. (and am stealing) 

I fucking loled when Ebenezer is excitedly gesturing to the Crachits after his new life, and looks at Martha and goes “whoever you are” 

What I could have done without: 

There are always MINOR nitpicks with any version, but one thing I’ll say that I considered rather major, and did not care for in the slightest, was all the dick-fucking around in the spirit realm with Marley. We could have buttoned that up right quick, and we didn’t, and there’s a huge gap in my notes where I’m just like, “Ah okay! I guess….we’re still here?” I think some of the ideas were sound but the execution was poor. 

Sometimes I felt like the writing beat me over the head with the morality of what was going on but then I read reviews of it and was like, “Ah okay, I suppose these people are why that exists” so while for me I would like a bit more subtlety I suppose I understand why sometimes there cannot be. 

IN CONCLUSION, AFTER MORE THAN 6,000 WORDS: I really quite liked this version of A Christmas Carol. It’s not a children’s version by any stretch of the imagination, but I don’t think a Christmas Carol is meant to be. I definitely will be coming back to this one, which makes it only one of a handful. It was a good recommendation for me, when I wasn’t sure I was going to watch it in the first place--there are so many versions of CC that I am still trying to get through--and I found that I really enjoyed it. 

The focus on the morality of the situation and making great pains to decouple it from the holiday itself made this a much-needed refresher of the story for me that keeps more to what I think the original was GOING for (Source: literally all of Dickens’ writing on poverty) than the way it’s been twisted by our Capitalist Christmas Culture. I loved that the women were given more to do and an equal hand in the story, and there were a number of really lovely lines that will stick with me.