#i dont think he has done anything particularly bad he's just pretentious and someone who met him said he was an ass and i believe them

[guinevereslancelot]

i hate when an actor i dislike is in a genuinely good movie

[ethernetchord]

lets talk: popular iwwv criticism

(disclaimer: i know criticism is subjective and thats why im doing this, i wanna look at some common points made against iwwv and dissect them just a little bit in the opposite direction. also none of this is directed at any individual- it’s all based on the general talking points i’ve seen surrounding the book.)

SPOILER WARNING !!

lack of exploration into james and oliver (+ gay characters feel performative)

i’ve seen loads of people say that oliver and james’ relationship felt very performative, a way of including the queer romnce which clearly is very important to the plot but not actually giving it any space in the novel, nor developing it to the same extent which meredith/oliver was.

oliver and meredith had a very strictly physical relationship and while he did love her, he wasn’t in love with her the way he was with james. the juxtaposition in the way that oliver/james is delivered and the way meredith/oliver is delivered is, i believe, far too repetitive to not be intentional. i actually realised upon re-reading how much focus there really is on meredith’s sexuality, even in subtleties in the book. meredith and oliver get more blatant sex scenes, get more physical parts because oliver was (to an extent) using his attraction to meredith to distract himself from his infatuation with james.

we also have to remember that oliver and james didn’t get their real moment of honesty about their relationship till extremely late into the book. i’d honestly see it as more ‘performative’ to then after or in the middle of kind lear throwing in some wild sex scene between the two. it wouldn't have fit.

“why didn’t james and oliver get together earlier then >:(((“ because the slow burn between them, the subtext, the subtle-ness, the yearning, they were all crucial to the decision which oliver made at the end. the fact that they burned so bright for each other but (oliver particularly) were so desperately repressed, that was what made this such a tragic romance. yes its tiring to read stories about queer people being repressed, yes its tiring to see the bury your gays trope. but like oliver says, it goes beyond gender.

if oliver’s second love interest was a girl, and treated this way, we’d be a lot more on board with these tropes- but the fact that james is a man, and this therefor becomes a queer relationship, makes it feel performative. i can’t convince you of anything- but i like to believe that their relationship being treated like this not only makes it so much more “heart wrenching because why! why couldn’t it work out, why couldn’t it be better!” - not because its a queer relationship but because they were soulmates.

alexander wasn’t performative. not in the slightest, rio just didn’t make being gay his entire identity. same goes for colin. just because they’re queer doesn’t mean it needs to be the only thing about them. this isn’t a lgbt novel- characters dont have to be gay just for plot. they can just be gay.

i’ve also seen people complain about not just making oliver bisexual. guys. did you read the book? he was bisexual. he was emotionally and physically attracted to both meredith and james. guys that’s literally what bisexual means.

i'm totally on board with the coming out scenes! and realisation of feelings and all that stuff- but again, not an lgbt centric novel and also- these were things oliver probably did and realised far before this book. remember that its set in 4th year, at an art school. he knew he was fruity ok. not every queer character in every queer book have to have these grandious coming out scenes or realisations. the lack there of doesn’t equal performance.

the ending was rushed and bad

believe what you will, but i don’t think james is dead. there’s a little too much ambiguity in that ending, in the extract he leaves oliver, in the “his body was never found.” so if your main quarrel with the ending is that “bury your gays” situation- please know there’s a chance- and that giving it that chance opens up so much more discussion and reader response.

yes, the ending is sad. but it’s not rushed. “but that is how a tragedy like ours or king lears breaks your heart- by making you believe the ending might still be happy until the very last second.” doing king lear, doing macbeth, doing romeo and juliet, the plays are chosen not only for reader convenience (they’re plays readers will most likely be familiar with) but also because they all, so very deeply, foreshadow a “bad” ending. killing james, makes sense. as much as people don’t want to hear it, from an authorial perspective- from the reader’s perspective and as a human being it makes sense. why do keep arguing that he “should’ve stayed alive for oliver” or that “if he really loved oliver he wouldn’t have done it” - why are we limiting a character’s entire existence down to their love interest. yes, they were best friends, yes they were set up as lovers but that doesn’t mean that that would be enough to keep james around. james was a fragile character- he was always checking with oliver if he had upset him, he was always worried, overthinking, james wasn’t strong minded- and he was suffering. the only person he had left to depend on was in prison, he was plagued with the guilt of causing the death of a classmate and letting oliver take the blame, if he did kill himself, it sure as hell doesn’t have any reason to sound forced.

“its not nearly as good as the secret history!!!!”

to be honest here buds, why the fuck do we keep comparing them so insistently. they are not the same book. iwwv wasn’t trying to be tsh 2.0, yes there are similarities because hey! guess what! books in similar genres tend to do that! always comparing it tsh when they have different motives, different plots and vastly different execution makes no sense. the only reason that they are compared is because tumblrtm dark academics like to group the two together. and yea- makes sense, but stop trying to belittle iwwv because it isn't as grandiose as tsh, because it’s a little more literal, because it’s not as intertextual as tsh. half the people saying iwwv isn’t as good as tsh are practically just subtly going “shakespeare isn’t as complicated as ancient greek huehue” stop forcing the two together and let them be separately appreciated.

the characters were flat/archetypes/etc

sigh. okay.

these characters are actors. this book shows us their transition from themselves entirely into a conjunction of the roles they’ve played and the stereotypes they’ve portrayed.

“we were so easily manipulated - confusion made a masterpiece of us.”

“for us, everything was a performance”

“imagine having all your own thoughts and feelings tangled up with all the thoughts and feelings of a whole other person. it can be hard, sometimes, to sort out which is which.”

“far too many times i had asked myself whether art was imitating life or if it was the other way around”

“it’s easier now to be romeo, or macbeth, or brutus, or edmund. someone else.”

are you seeing it now? this focus on their archetypes, this focus on the character they are; the way they see themselves not merely as human but as a walking concoction of every character they have turned into and out of. they depend on their archetypes to give them meaning. rio uses these archetypes to remind us of the submersion of her characters. they weren’t flat, their intentional lack of dimension due to their pasts is what makes them so intricate. furthermore, there's an evident subversion- the tyrant becomes a victim, the hero becomes a villain (they all become villains really), the ingenue becomes corrupted. like mentioned before, i think we forget ourselves easily reading this book but there is a great deal of emphasis on this being their last year- which is so important. the damage has been done and a lot of the issues people have with the content (or lack thereof) in this book has to do with the fact that it’s all things that would have occurred in books focusing on previous years at delletcher.

“it didn't live up to expectation” (also leading on from read tsh to this and being ‘disappointed’)

i cant argue this because its entirely subjective. whatever expectation was created for you, i cannot know that and appropriately respond however- if you liked the secret history and understood the secret history then there's a good chance you also liked and understood this book- even if not to the same extent but you must be able to recognize the authorial approach and its significance. i think a lot of ppl read iwwv (and a lot of “dark academia” texts and films) and hope to be able to romanticize the aesthetic or the concepts and then are disappointed when they are presented with mildly unlikeable and overwhelmingly human characters who aren’t easy to romanticize.

a great majority of these books are criticisms of the very culture you’re trying to romanticize, and the only time you’re willing to admit that is when boasting about the ‘self-awareness’ of the people indulging in them, and then a moment later complain about those same qualities because they don’t serve this idealized expectation.

bad rep for arts/liberal arts/ humanities students as being pretentious/cultish

as a humanities student with a great love for eng lit- all of these things are indeed pretentious and cultish. not all the time and not always and not every person- but it is a common theme. academia is overwhelmingly obsessive and extremely white-washed. people become so fast to believe that they are indulging in finer arts and are therefore a higher standard of person. academia is problematic. and the recent influx of people interested in it is good, very good because hopefully, we’ll be more diverse, more open-minded, more accepting. that's what i hope at least. if you know, as an individual, that you’re not a pretentious academic who places themselves above non-academics then that's wonderful- but there are dangers and negative sides to academia that need to be understood so that we can see to not perpetuating them.

i cant refute all points, mostly because there's a lot of good and well-explained criticism because no book is perfect. and my intentions are not to belittle anyone's opinion. these are merely opposing arguments, food for thought and to be fair- a critical look into why not everything is always going to be what we expect of it and why every ‘problem’ can be assessed.

[philanthropics]

i had people telling me to watch 13 reasons why but idk why dont you like it? (i dont think i care to watch it i just wanna hear why you dont like it :3c)

I LITERALLY LOVE TALKING SHIT ABOUT THIS SHOW. Thank you for asking me omg.

I’ve watched it twice, let me start with that. However, I did not read the book, so I’m not sure if there are any things that I’m missing out on by not reading it. After watching the show though, I don’t really have an interest in reading it. And before I start talking about the negatives, let me talk about the things that I did like about the show.

I really liked the storytelling aspect of it (but I hated the story.) The cinematography was pretty dope, it had a lot of artsy shots that I really liked. Some places and scenes were very aesthetically pleasing to me. The cast is pretty diverse and surprisingly has several lgbt characters. And the music was pretty banging. There wasn’t a single song that I hated during the whole show. When I watched it with friends on my second watch through, it was their first. They were confused during bits of the show if scenes were flashbacks or happening current day. I struggled with it too, but I think that miiiiiight have been on purpose as we watched the main protagonist, Clay, struggle with some mental issues in which he would have a hard time deciphering if things were happening today or in the past.

Things I hated about it (parts will contain spoilers):

I’m not going to talk too much about how it romanticizes suicide and talks about cutting in a super bad way and stuff because there are already posts about that on tumblr that do a better job explaining why it’s bad. I think the show was trying to show Hannah Baker as being deep or like an eye-opener, which isn’t necessarily bad, I just thought it felt a little uncomfortable for me.

A friend of mine said that the show just felt so /real/ and that’s why she enjoyed it so much. However, there honestly wasn’t much in it that did feel real to me. The relationships between children and their parents was one that I did not have with mine at all. While I did like Clay’s parents as characters, there was something about them that felt so “tv show parents” to me. The high school, which I heard was actually a real school that used to film the show in, felt fake too. This is suuuuuuper picky but it bothers me when shows set up high school as a place with no dress codes, everyone is looking attractive, and like everyone has a tattoo in /high school/.

The show focuses on the tapes to tell Hannah’s story. What kind of pretentious person just assumes that other people have systems that can play tapes?? At times, Hannah seems as though she could be an unreliable narrator. At one point she says that there are many sides to a story, which I find strange. She openly admits that there are many views to how something happened, but she’s placing blame on a person in each tape without hearing the other person’s story.

Now some of these people really are fucked up. And by some of them, I mean like two. Two of them I think are pretty gross and bad and should get in trouble for something. But like, the other 11 (or… 10 actually. It’s stupid) are just people that may have done a shitty thing or two. The level of what shitty thing they did ranges. Everyone seems to hate Courtney, this girl who drunkenly made out with Hannah. She was scared when someone took a picture of them kissing so she avoided Hannah and then later told someone that it was Hannah and another girl that were making out. (People dislike her cus she is pretty fake, but that didn’t particularly bother me). Anyways, so here you have this girl who is scared about coming out with her sexuality and she is given some blame for Hannah’s death. Another person who was blamed for her death was this guy that raped Hannah. Like, that guy is a piece of shit. But I don’t really see how he is like Courtney at all.

Something I don’t like about the show is how Hannah is portrayed. I didn’t necessarily even care about her. I didn’t dislike her, I just felt very neutral towards her. The actress who portrayed her wasn’t bad or anything, I just think there is something about the way she was written that felt very bland to me. One thing that I don’t like about her though is I felt like she wouldn’t take responsibility for anything. Almost the entire show was her blaming other people for her killing herself. I’m not sure what she thought this passive-aggressive way of telling her story was going to accomplish. People that felt like they wronged Hannah before listening to the tapes would feel even guiltier while the people that didn’t give a shit about her when she was alive would feel nothing. So in a way, these tapes are only punishing the people that already were suffering, like Clay.

ALSO this bothered me and one of my friends but the other one never said anything but it was SUPER BAD FOR ME. One of the characters is like /maybe/ a senior at high school but his actor is like 26 or something and that’s fine for most characters but he LOOKS it. Once your in college and you see a bunch of freshmen that just graduated from high school, you know what seniors in high school are supposed to look like. This guy /looks/ like he’s 30. It really bothered me watching him interact with all these people that could pull off “tv show high schooler” cus then it made everyone else look older too.

I heard reports that there has been a rise of high school aged students self harming and stuff because of this show. I do think it’s sad, but I also think that this show isn’t meant for high school aged people (it is rated MA). I think if you /know/ that if something in it will trigger you then you shouldn’t watch it, but otherwise I do recommend watching it at least once (I forced my friends to watch it during finals week and we all had a laugh) so that way you can decide if you if you hate it or love it.

Because honestly, I think that if the story/plot wasn’t pure shit and the writing was better, this could have been a good show (if they changed the whole suicide and tapes. Maybe they could have made it an anti bullying thing or something). Like story wise I give it a 1.2/5 but for music, editing, cinematography and all that jazz I give it a 4/5. I might even watch it again so I can feel angry at the wasted potential.