#if we were villains spoiler

[louisfruit]

"If we were villains" spoilers

Kissing you "best friend" who you have had homoerotic tension with for years on the mouth on stage in front of a huge crowd during a Romeo and juliet production where you are a side character while the cops that are there to arrest him watch and then going to jail willingly for a murder you know he committed is so fucking romantic I will never recover from reading this book

[ispeakintypos]

If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio

MAJOR SPOILERS UNDER CUT

I'm going to preface this with, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I love how Shakespearean this novel is. The proper five act structure is a nice nod to the plays. When Oliver is talking about how deeply Shakespeare's characters feel things and that it's not a melodrama because their emotions reflect the severity of what's happening, it parallels how Oliver and his friends are feeling/reacting which makes sense since the novel has a Shakespearean structure.

However,

I don't think the ending made sense. What does James get out of faking his death? And if he didn't fake his death, which I suspect he didn't, what does he get out of sending a letter to Oliver he knows he's going to read into? Why would he get Oliver's hopes up? I was trying to view it through the lens of a Shakespeare play, but when the last character in a tragedy has their final monologue and have a small line about a brighter future and reminding the audience of the lesson (if applicable), this also seemed out of place.

I think the funniest thing about this book is that, opposite to Romeo and Juliet, the plot could have been circumnavigated if Oliver and James weren't so emotionally constipated when they were themselves (and not acting). Didn't love the way Richard said it, but he was right about James and Oliver.

[egophiliac]

LET THE BOY HAVE AN EDUCATION

officially at the point where we're starting to see where it's all headed and I am just going NYEEHEEHEE in delight at it all. ahhh...next week can't come soon enough...

[epickiya722]

[navree]

"helen richardson" well hope this one isn't a fuckin tory

[theotherrichardpapen]

[poppletonink]

Best Quotes From 'If We Were Villains'

"You can justify anything if you do it poetically enough."

"You can't quantify humanity. You can't measure it - not the way you mean to. People are passionate and flawed and fallible. They make mistakes. Their memories fade. Their eyes deceive them."

"I don't know, it's like I look at you and the sonnets make sense. The good ones, anyway."

"Do you blame Shakespeare for any of it?" The question is so unlikely, so nonsensical coming from such a sensible man, that I can't help but suppress a smile. "I blame him for all of it."

'She says, “Were you in love with him?” “Yes,” I say, simply. James and I put each other through the kind of reckless passions Gwendolyn once talked about, joy and anger and desire and despair. After all that, was it really so strange? I am no longer baffled or amazed or embarrassed by it. “Yes, I was.” It’s not the whole truth. The whole truth is, I’m in love with him still.'

'I need language to live like food - lexemes and morphemes and morsels of meaning nourish me with the knowledge that, yes, there is a word for this. Someone else has felt it before.'

'Below was the motto: Per aspera ad astra. I'd heard a variety of translations, but the one I liked best was Through the thorns to the stars.'

"We cracked up. [...] But we didn't really shatter until we were all back together again."

'The clock on the mantel struck twelve, and we stirred, one by one, like seven statues coming to life.'

'Actors are by nature volatile - alchemic creatures composed of incendiary elements, emotion and ego and envy. Heat them up, stir them together, and sometimes you get gold. Sometimes disaster.'

[denkisauce]

(bnha manga ending spoilers)

what was the point

what was the point

what was the point

WHAT WAS THE POINT

WHAT WAS THE POINT

WHAT WAS THE POINT 😭😭

what was the pointtttt

[luck-of-the-drawings]

OOH YEAH BABY ITS THE SURGERY EPISODE BABY!!! ME AND THE HOMIES NEED SOME NEW FACES FOR OUR NEW PLAN, AND WHO BETTER TO GET THE JOB DONE THAN THE TWO MOST EVIL PEOPLE WE'VE EVER HAD THE MISFORTUNE OF HAVING OUR LIVES VIOLATED BY? I MEAN IT WOULD BE FUNNY. IT WOULD BE FUNNY.

[g4rdensofb4bylon]

still cannot fathom how Oliver said like the most romantic thing ever to Meredith and then went to jail for James 5 minutes later

[teapetal44]

The state of the league of villains during act 3 is so sad man. Compress literally gave his ass for the league, got arrested and nobody gaf. Twice’s demise amounted to nothing, nobody cared. The whole discrimination arc Spinner was involved in was a mess. Suddenly Hori decided he cared about realism in his story so Toga dropped like a fly from a simple blood transfusion. Dabi is forced to sit and listen to Endeavor whine and yap about how sad he is about being an abusive pos, all the while nobody actually cares and he never got any real repercussions besides his family being (justifyingly) mean to him. Shigaraki was sidelined for a boring villain and was stripped off all his autonomy and agency.

[fandomnerd037]

Do you know how frustrating it is to watch a man who is VERY gay for his best friend dance around his feelings for a whole book only to realize them to late, have a sad but beautiful gay moment with him for like five pages (at most), have to leave him, lose him, and get a mysterious letter from him and find out he may be alive only for the book to leave you with the ambiguous ending?

[asteroids-and-tractorbeams]

Sorry I’m just really frustrated with the finale of The Acolyte.

For me, Sol’s character arc was very unsatisfactory. We got the traditional Star Wars cues that a Jedi has faced their past mistakes and gained peace and acceptance in his second fight with Qimir (Sol wasn’t angry and upset like he was the first time, the musical cues fit, and he won the fight??) And then, in the exact same scene Sol never acknowledged that he made a mistake killing Aniseya and maintained that he did the right thing until the very end.

On top of that, Osha has been so consistently characterized as being a Jedi and WANTING to be a Jedi. She saves the prisoner in the first episode when she didn’t have to, she’s able to connect with living creatures on Khofar, and at the very least she’s had a consistent attitude about “murder is bad” the whole season and then what?? She kills someone she loves, falls to the dark side, bleeds a kyber crystal and then what??? Are we supposed to root for her?? Is it a tragedy?? It’s still unclear!!!

AND TO FINISH IT UP instead of keeping with the idea that the coverup of what happened on Brendok was horrible but necessary, the Jedi mostly double down and keep covering up more things even though they have different options!! Indara deciding to keep the accidental massacre a secret was the best option in a no win scenario because we know that she’s right and Osha’s life would have been worse if they told the truth at the time. Vernestra deciding to tell the Senate that the investigation was over and Sol was the killer just reads as a bad decision because we know it’s going to immediately backfire and make the Jedi look worse because Osha and Qimir are still out there.

It’s just a bad weird note to end on and I thought it was really unclear what the take away was supposed to be. And it’s not even that I’m upset that the Jedi didn’t win in the end, it’s that there were so many conflicting moments that I was left with no clear sense if we’re even supposed to be upset about it or who were supposed to be rooting for.

[gooseie]

[stillabookworm-ifonlyinspirit]

If We Were Villains

Foreshadowing, or something akin to that

[wenellyb]

Excuse me but how is Namor a villain? Someone explain it to me like I'm stupid because I don't get how he's a villain.

An opponent maybe but certainly not a villain. He didn't do anything Wakandans wouldn't have done when they were still in hiding.

Not saying him or the people of Talocan are perfect, but saying he's a villain is a little too much imo. He's just a ruler protecting his people. Just like the Wakandans.