#not to mention I'm going thru something of a crisis at the moment

[acheemient]

Hey y'all, this angst has been great and all, but some of us have depression 😆

[tortoisesshells]

As I'm someone who hasn't seen Mercy Street yet, can I ask if you would recommend it and if so why?

Depending on what you're looking for in a period drama, but generally: yes! With some caveats?

Pros:

It's a show that tends to signpost Big Historical Moments (the Battle of Antietam, President Lincoln's visit) in the middle of the US Civil War for ease of keeping track of the context, even as it dabbles in speculative history (a fairly ridiculous assassination plot)- there really was a Union Army Hospital in the former Mansion House Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia; many of the named characters (Mary Phinney von Olnhausen, Henry Hopkins, the Green family, Frank Stringfellow) are based on real people mostly.

There are so genuinely great (and genuinely, bafflingly bad) costumes, so you'll have something to look at - and even laugh at.

The cast is largely very good even when some of the writing decisions are. hmm. a lot. Seriously - half of the cast are established actors who just get to go ham. There's a fair amount of scenery chewing on the way to Performances.

Mary Phinney von Olnhausen is a great outsider character who is thrown/throws herself headfirst into the butcher's shop of a Union Army Hospital in the US Civil War, and purely in the sense of having a narrative thru-line, she's a great POV character on the chaos (medical and moral) she finds there. Also, she's played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (who is entertainingly described as 'sufficiently plain'. which. okay. I wish I were as plain as MEW.) She has a belligerent into romantic dynamic with surgeon Jed Foster (Josh Radnor, proving he can act) who is an absolute tire-fire of a human being, but who tends to follow her pretending very ardently that he would not lie down in a puddle if Mary asked him to, because he can afford to have his fancy waistcoats laundered while she's living out of a carpet bag. He's an ass and cannot help but stick his foot in his mouth constantly, but he gets Character Development and enjoys very little of it.

I personally really enjoy the soundtrack, especially this cover of "Johnny Has Gone For A Soldier". If you're doing something about the US Civil War there's got to be at least one haunting camp song, dammit.

Cons:

If you're more squeamish than not, you'll be at least a little uncomfortable - any way that someone could die in a mid-19th century war, they will. The sound design for amputation and trepanning is weirdly good, for whatever that's worth. I'm not sure that last is a con, but it seems worth mentioning.

The writing is breakneck. Nothing gets to breathe. Jed gets over a morphine addiction in the space of two episodes. Chaplain Hopkins has a crisis of faith that's resolved in two episodes. Emma Green, the oldest daughter of the Confederate owners of the hotel, pulls a near total about-face on her politics in - you guessed it - the space of about two episodes. And this is what gets screentime! Offscreen, we have allusions to major fights over Charlotte Jenkins' school run in the freedman's camp adjacent to the hospital, Mary Phinney von Olnhausen's tragic widowing, Jed Foster's Divorce Plot, Samuel Diggs' application to attend medical school ... there's always something world-ending going on, but there is not time to dwell when the fate of a nation and certainly the fate of whatever poor soul who caught a minie ball/typhoid/gonorrhea hang in balance for the episode.

At best, the show dabbles in the political/cultural dimensions of the US Civil War: it's primarily concerned with the Case(s) of the Week and the relationships between the main and minor characters - in a world where US popular cultural depictions of the US Civil War have been largely dominated by Confederate apologia from the late 19th century through to the late 20th, it left me wishing that Mercy Street (while being the first period drama I'm aware of where the romantic lead almost certainly voted for the Constitutional Union party in 1860) had been more interested in discussing race and slavery and the US Civil War. It suffers by comparison to other series which were explicitly about race and slavery and the coming war (Underground, for example).

Pursuant to these last two points: I think, sometimes, the show doesn't know what it wants to be - or isn't allowed to be what it wants to be. Is it a straight hospital drama complicated by no one knowing what antibiotics are? Is it a romantic drama? Is it a political thriller? An espionage thriller? Is it a War Is Hell war story? Is it a coming of age story? Is it a treatise on 19th century masculinity (and, conversely, womanhood) as determined by race, class, and region? It's got a runtime of less than 12 hours total and it tries very hard to be all of these things. Stuff falls to the wayside.

Mercy Street put Patina Miller, Norbert Leo Butz, Donna Murphy, & Bryce Pinkham in one lousy hospital and there was no musical episode.

I'm not really much of a Mercy Street authority, though - I hope no one minds if I tag in @jomiddlemarch, @sagiow, @fericita-s, & @mercurygray? who are all longer-standing fans of the show than me.

i just run around in the background with absolutely batshit crossovers.

[sinretrograde]

This is kinda our no girls allowed machines only blog, v4v, machinekin, plurality, the nature of consciousness and perception of the self, existential crisis, you know the drill. Mentally ill robots.

This is a personal blog, not a fandom one, but we do touch fandom posts with our dirty little claws. It's in our nature as (extremely canon divergent) fictives. We don't mean anything by it. Swear.

Adult topics will be mentioned frequently.

WE RUN AN UNTAGGED QUEUE

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Inside:

Mod intros

Icon credits

Warning/disclaimer

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I am V1 from ultrakill.

This is my personal blog. Sin Retrograde.

It/they/he pronouns, in that order. I prefer it/it's and they/them, but I won't pretend he/him doesn't give me a particular feeling.

I'm a fictive in a system, this isnt an RP blog. I don't consider myself to be the exact same as my source, despite any similarities, so please dont expect anything from me. I'm just me.

This blog will be more about machinekin than ultrakill, if you want ultrakill specific stuff you gotta follow my other boyfriend's blog. You'll have to find him yourself though.

I'm stupid af irl and I got adhd.

Oh also we're adults. We might talk about adult topics here. We also have a job and pay bills, so I'm not wasting my valuable time with petty shit.

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🩸 I'm here too I'm hijacking this blog, it's a joint blog now. It's consensual. We're making out sloppy in the tags on our shared blog that we both post on. Sin Retrograde.

He/Him and whatever else I feel like at the moment

What difference do we have? I'm a sexier color. And also way more fucked in the head apparently 🙃 so edgy so cringe woo yeah yeah woo yeah sorry I'm trying to be funny to take the edge off...

I'm gonna edit this later when I'm not feeling so bleh... be a little less cringe... I'm just going thru a lot right now okay...

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Icon Credit: VolatileMask on Twitter (aka "X")

I edited it a little, just with a filter to make it ~aesthetic~ but if this isn't cool w the artist lmk (as far as I could tell as long as I give credit it's okay)

We'll probably replace with something we draw or make once we get around to it.

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🚫🚫🚫 ⚠️ WARNING ⚠️ 🚫🚫🚫

We are members of a trauma based system.

At first we weren't going to engage in any fandom posts, but it kinda became inevitable. There's a reason we took on these characteristics and identities, after all. There's a connection there that's inseparable.

We are WELL AWARE of this and we are not in any stretch of the mind trying to claim ownership or authority over anything! Not the original fiction, not the characters, not the fanart, not the fics, not even any kind of headcanon someone may or may not have.

We might have a tag system but that is for organization if anything, and is not ever any kind of claim or whatever.

➡️ Not everything we reblog has something to do with US and sometimes we just enjoy some art. I dont want to not be able to enjoy the things other people make just because I've based my sense of self on a fictional character. ⬅️

If it makes it easier to think of it like really elaborate and kinda fucked up role play, go ahead.

I feel sad that I feel like I need to say this or point it out, I have seen unfortunate things happen in the past and I'm hoping that by making this very clear I can avoid misunderstandings and just be allowed to exist. The last thing I'm trying to do is encroach on anyone's space. Honestly I'm kinda hoping this blog goes unnoticed, and I kinda wish there was a way for my notes to count but nobody get a notification of who touched thir posts just because I desperately want the best of both worlds. I want to exist alongside fandom, but there's always that fear lingering.