The winner from each match will move forward to the next round! More info and polls here. Gayest can mean whatever you want it to mean!! as long as it’s positive I am a bisexual person and I will block homophobes on sight <3
48 notes
·
View notes
something i haven't seen much of so far is analysis of charlie's journey from the perspective of someone who also needs to change how she engages with others (vaggie too, but that feels more obvious as she's an ex-angel/exorcist and a sinner)
when charlie tries to help angel by confronting valentino it's been built to in the other episodes, because it's made very clear that she doesn't respect sex work -- she's got that "we need to save them from themselves" type attitude you see a lot with people who haven't done critical analysis into their own biases from a position of mildly-to-severe privileged disgust and haven't engaged with the perspectives of sex workers as people who can frame and understand their own experiences (whatever work they engage in and why they do sex work to begin with). same for her opinions on addiction
the scene where angel has to do a reenactment with sir pentious frames addiction as
something to be judged
something pitiable
something predatory
which isn't exactly a great way to bring angel onboard with the programme/make him feel less like shit. meanwhile the anti-sex + weirdly heteronormative attitude is also present in that scene by having sir pentious dress up as a virginal young girl in an anime-type school uniform with a big lollipop (the irony of this being practically indistinguishable from a porn setup feels very intentional), who declares that "she" won't be having sex before marriage as the great crescendo (sidenote, monogamy in the afterlife sounds.... like a long time to be monogamous......... yzma voice: "why do we even have marriage??")
angel, up until his duet with husk, is having it made clear again and again that the people seemingly helping him find the essence of his being inherently gross. he likes sex -- yeah there's the performance/face he has to wear to get through the day, but i think the bdsm club was a sincere suggestion and vaggie literally calls it disgusting/shoots it down without thinking about how to do so respectfully (again, she's an ex-angel/exorcist, she has biases of her own to contend with, but also the implications that nobody in heaven is having fun sex or negotiated kink and bdsm... tragic. do they even have a sex club called consent up there?)
charlie is a fairly conservative person at the beginning of the story. yes, she wants to help, but her framing of what "help" looks like doesn't take into account her own biases; presumably she grew up with the idea that "sinners are bad people" as much as anyone else did, if not more considering lucifer gave up on the sinners and that's been her environment from birth -- cut off from the people she's supposedly in charge of, but "hearing stories." (in both the pilot and happy day in hell she clearly has a fondness for the sinners, but it's as an outsider, someone who does not relate to them, and generally there's that overtone of "royalty doesn't know shit about what anyone is going through" which, charlie being a ruler, i wonder if that will be a focal point or just something to accept, it's not a dealbreaker for me, just something i noticed, esp as helluva boss has poked on power dynamics in hell along those same lines). the yearly murdering of demons is, likewise, something that is simply status quo and so even getting to a place of "hey maybe we shouldn't do that" is big and was inevitably going to create more cracks in the logic of black-and-white heaven-or-hell, so it's cool that that's where we the audience get to first meet her -- right as those threads are about to start unravelling
but at the very beginning, in some ways she echoes elements of characters like adam and lute (who are of course far more in-your-face, being villains) in her original assessment of what makes someone "a bad person" -- it causes her to create a system that doesn't actually work, and then of course the hotel is destroyed, but next time they'll build it to be better! (metaphor *jazz hands*)
why is angel in hell, is the question later asked. is it because he was/is an addict? because he drinks? because he does sex work? because he likes sex? (it may be because he's killed people/was in the mafia, but we don't have all the context yet, for now those are the things people know in the story itself) at the beginning charlie isn't asking the right questions, questions that would need her to go into herself and challenge her own biases, but throughout season 1 she goes from merely proclaiming that "everyone" can be saved, to sincerely challenging the idea of "needing to be saved" from things that shouldn't be judged in the first place. "if angels can do whatever and remain in the sky." yeah, how are we stipulating what's allowed and what isn't hmmmmmm? stay tuned for s2
(and youknow, apologises to angel for overstepping his boundaries, so it's not like angel doesn't know that she does care for him, ep4 gives a lot of development for their relationship as well -- it's the tipping point for a lot of what comes next)
interested to see how that challenging will continue in s2. she's gone from "we have to make you into a good person by cutting out things that make me (and others) uncomfortable from a conservative/purity-based judgemental framework" to "why do we have these systems of judgement in the first place?"
tl;dr angel changed a looot in s1 but so did charlie. she understands better now that the work she's doing is going to look very different from what she'd first anticipated, and poking at her own biases in relation to angel helped that journey and brought her closer to actually understanding and relating to the people around her
(there's another element here about charlie and vaggie as queer women in this particular universe, but it's a slight tangent so... different post)
82 notes
·
View notes
// i need to CLARIFY i was giving PERMISSION for this 👌//
[ something was heavy- something was warm that fell over him like a blanket... It was foreign and yet faintly familiar, Like having a heavy load of fresh laundry ontop of him. It was nice- but the shape was off- squishy? It felt likd something he recently touched. . . Then the smell hit Lawrence... Sweet- and creamy...]
[ it wasnt all to surprising to see it was lou... Staring blankly at law with their big round doe eyes that felt very un fitting in this situation - it was weird- it was off putting. wernt rabbits supposed to be submissive??? Skittish? Scared?
She didn't speak. Just reaching over to move hair out of Lawrences face... Then he relized that his arms were taped to his metal bed fraim. . . it felt kinda lose- if he worked in it he could brake free! But the rabbit was holding an object that glimmered in the dim light.]
//CLARIFYING AS WELL: I AM MORE THAN HAPPY TO SEE LAWRENCE GETTING DESTROYED. He may not like his suffering but I eat it up, we both have full permission an continue to ask for consent in DM's 💜
------
Everything is wrong. Lawrence carried the pressure of a headache in his loosening sleep, each minor movement guiding him closer to the land of the living. The tightness around his arms made him move, knees bending to turn his hips-
A shock.
Eyes open, circulation in his wrists being weak, stomach being weighed, sweat developing on his face. Lawrence is weak and vulnerable. Tired, groggy, confused, in disbelief. A groan. Tired blinking, as if it'll change his situation.
"Lou?.." He asked with uncertainty. "Are.. Is.. Are you real?.." Voice quiet, pathetic. As if he's still dreaming. His eyes found the shining metal. His heart sunk to his guts. Lawrence is now silent, making intense, frightful eye contact.
42 notes
·
View notes