#not upset at all that she was killed off

[probablyaseamonster]

p!smp Guqqie is a rich lesbian who is canonically dyslexic and noncanonically autistic and who loves collecting crystals and I love her sm

[camellcat]

WTFFF I thought thirteen would be my new girl crush love of my life heart eyes wife you-came-after-twelve-you-must-be-better-than-they're-all-saying bbygirl and then I had to sit down and watch as she told a man who (if he were not a murderer, of course) literally every regeneration before her would've LOVED and FULLY SUPPORTED that "the systems aren't the problem. how people use and exploit the system, that's the problem. people like you" </33333 !?!?

[iris-kinnie]

Ugh. I had a really bad day.

[that-was-anticlimactic]

the miraculous ladybug fandom really loves hating children for being children. they are literally kids. they are fourteen years old. "alya césaire bashing" should NOT be the top alya tag. what did she do wrong? have an underdeveloped brain since she's, oh, idk, fourteen? or-or is it because she *gasps* has made mistakes? why is "classmates bashing" a popular tag? oh noooo they're kids and they made mistakes! + the writing in those episodes was bad and they were ooc! how dare they! "adrien agreste bashing" - okay. he's flirtatious and has feelings. sue him for acting like the suppressed teen he is. like oh my god. even the lila hate,,, y'all do realize she's a child, right? you're allowed to hate her but wishing death upon her?the way that people write about/refer to lila is sick.

"alya césaire redemption" FROM WHAT!!! why does she need to be redeemed? gosh. no matter how many classmates bashing-related tags i filter out on ao3, i still actively struggle to find fics without it. these characters are 1. fictional and 2. children. if you can't handle kids being kids then stop watching???

not only are they kids, but they're traumatized kids. marinette and adrien aren't the only traumatized characters. every single classmate got akumatized and tried to kill the city's heroes and destroy the city. alix erased people from existence. how do you think she felt about that after the fact? ivan, a fourteen year old kid, was the first person to get akumatized. the first. he had no idea what was happening, people gave him so much crap for it, and then it happened again. sabrina almost killed chat noir. kim tried to make chat noir kill ladybug. alya tried to unmask her hero live. sabrina literally became invisible.

like... and not just that, but they've all been heroes, too. as exciting as it may have been at the time, you can't tell me they aren't at least a Little traumatized after fighting literal villains. oh, and they've been victims of akuma attacks. is chloe a bad person? kinda, yeah (but also partially bc of bad writing-). but she was almost like boiled alive, killed, was taken hostage countless times. max had to deal with the aftermath of markov's akumatization. when juleka became akumatized in "guilt", the classmates were forced to sit and get consumed by guilt. they've had to watch their family get akumatized, watch their friends or partners get akumatized, live through the guilt of knowing they hurt someone so much they got akumatized. bc they're human and they're kids. ofc they're going to hurt someone. it's natural. let them be kids!

[lesbiansanemi]

Was doing so good holding it together today but now that I’m laying down and trying to sleep I’m tearing up and I can feel that I’m about to burst into tears any second now

[marypsue]

I'd love to hear your thoughts on S1 of ST being a tragedy! No main character dies, so I never thought of it that way before

I mean, nobody has to die for a story to be a tragedy (at least, in the modern definition. I'm pretty sure '(almost) everybody dies' is a requirement of Greek tragedies and Renaissance revenge tragedies). But also, no main character dies in season one...if you take season one as part of a series. Which it wasn't originally conceived as.

I am not going looking for copies of the original pitch bible, because I am lazy, and also I only saw them floating around this webbed site. But the show changed a lot from the initial pitch (Joyce had a Long Island accent! Lucas' parents were divorcing! Murray was there and named Terry Ives! Most of what ended up in Hopper's character originally belonged to Mr. Clarke! The original pitch bible is fascinating). And part of the original pitch was a proposal for possible sequels.

The Duffers' proposal for a possible sequel was "It's ten years later, and Eleven is dead".

So that's the setup. Everything that came after season one was made up wholecloth after season one was a hit and people wanted more, but also people loved the adorable little psychic murder child (cue the Duffers shockedpikachu.jpg) and Netflix obviously recognised it would be a bad call to make a new season without her in it. So it makes sense to take season one as a unit, as a self-contained story on its own. You can also take it as part of a whole, but it makes sense to read it first as a complete story. Especially given the thematic drift of later seasons and the way they are...I'm just going to say it, each new season is very much added-on to what came before rather than being built on foundation that the earlier season(s) laid. It is very clear there was never a planned five-season story arc from the beginning. (This isn't necessarily always a bad thing, when it comes to sequels, but it does mean it makes sense to 'read' each season as its own thing.)

Okay, now that we've established all of that. Season one has one very clear goal, one very clear stake for the characters: save Will Byers from the Upside Down. (I like this. It makes the stakes both extremely high and extremely personal, it makes it very easy to understand each character's motivation, it also keeps the stakes grounded in reality. I like this a lot.) And by the end of the season, that goal is accomplished. So at first blush, you're right, season one doesn't look like a tragedy.

But when you start to unpack it a little, you start to see just how many important things were lost along the way. It's most glaringly obvious with Mike and El, with Nancy and Barb. The whole Wheeler family is fractured down the middle, with Mike and Nancy on one side and Ted, Karen, and Holly on the other, and Karen, who's been trying so hard the whole time to be part of her children's lives and understand what's going on with them, is aware of the ever-expanding gulf between them but will never be able to cross it, and will never fully know why. Hopper's finally managed to snatch a kid out of the jaws of death, save a woman he obviously cares about from the pain of losing a child, and Joyce has finally had someone believe her, support her, trust her. But it became blindingly obvious to me on my fourth rewatch that Hopper's plan, from the moment he went to leave the middle school gym, was always to trade El for Will. And that decision (and the fact that Joyce obviously understands that he did something to get the lab to let them go after Will, but she obviously doesn't dare press him on what) has broken her trust in him, and left him with what looks like an equally heavy burden of guilt as what he was carrying before. The lab stays open. The government gets away with everything. No one will ever know the true extent of the hurt they've caused.

And in the end, none of it even saved Will. He's back. He's alive. But he's spitting slugs in the sink. He's permanently marked by the Upside Down, and by trying to hide it from his family, he's putting a crack down the centre of them, as well. They're losing Will, just as surely as they had when they thought he was dead, just without him going anywhere.

And there's still a hole in the world.

The fragile bonds of community, the things that people share in common, the way catastrophe can bring people together and bring out the very best in them, are the major thematic threads woven through season one. Human connection is the only thing that can change what seems inevitable, the only thing that can bring back what's seemingly lost forever.

And it's still not enough to protect anyone from the random tragedy of the world.

The love was there. The love mattered. The love bent the entire course of the world around itself.

And it still wasn't quite enough.

If that's not a tragedy, then I don't know what is.

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

thinking about nora again

[lesbianlotties]

thought about juliet burke again. got sad. again

[handfulofmuses]

From improperly shut down, half dying in a pile other discared robots to a mansion that mistreats you and kills their servants for messing up to Cyn trying to kill everyone to trying to stop Cyn but getting controlled instead, witnessing likely (and being responsible) for the death of the person that mattered the most to you and destroying everything on earth to getting entirely reprogrammed to kill, still having the memories of that incident while being forced to work for Cyn

All while getting killed over and over again, each death traumatizing you further, leaving you completely broken and vulnerable to a point where you just give up and no longer resist Cyn because it doesn't matter, your core (the heart that keeps these robots alive in the first place) was destroyed and you came back to life

all while getting orders from Cyn, but it leaves N and V alone as long as they are doing their job

She was entirely forced into the clutches of Cyn further by her death in the pilot and she was around her all this time, having no chance to escape or even grow as her own person

[stop-breaking-my-heart-telltale]

Oh god I just finished Book 2 and it was so bad… I went into this with an open mind just like I did with Book 1 and god did I hate this. Clem just annoyed the hell out of me for the entire book. I liked everyone BUT her, Ricca and Morro. And I don’t even hate Morro she just showed up randomly to say weird ominous shit and then went to do her walker autopsies. Idk… it just sucked so hard. I miss Amos.

I've reread it and I'm working on my review so I won't go into a whole spiel but yeah. I mean, I still think I like Book Two over Book One... until we get to chapter 7. It has the same problem as Book One where the ending is just bad.

Clementine still feels out of character when you compare her to game Clementine, but she's consistent with Book One Clementine. I get what her character's supposed to be and why she's going through these things, why she approaches things the way she does but it makes it hard to enjoy when you have context from the games. I've already seen Clementine grow up and face hardships in the apocalypse, and the games have the advantage of showing all that across four games whereas this series only gets three books, so we don't have time to waste, y'know?

But Morro was the biggest wasted opportunity, like... what a disappointment. When I read it the first time, I was giving my first reactions in chat with Pi and we were both like, "So it's gonna be revealed that Morro's actually doing science experiments on walkers, right?" but no.... she's literally just doing autopsies like c'mon, walker science experiments and abominations would've been amazing!

And Ricca... honestly, I like the idea of Ricca because let's be real, a lot of us wear glasses or contacts or have some sort of vision impairment, myself included, and a zombie apocalypse would suck! If my glasses broke and I had no means of getting a new pair and it's the zombie apocalypse, I'm dead. And Book One set up this interesting story where Ricca's brother was an abuser who purposely broke her glasses so that she had no choice but to rely on him, then when she finally found pair that worked, she left him. But now her eyesight is worsening, and that's scary, that's something I could sympathize with...... but it's almost treated like an inconvenience? Because her and Clementine's relationship is the emotional drama that takes stage and frankly, I don't like clemricca. Not just because it's not clouis. I went into it with an open mind wanting to ship it but... meh.

I don't like how Ricca's like, "I'll wait for you," and then later she gets butthurt because Clementine won't get on the same level as her fast enough. Clementine doesn't owe Ricca anything, y'know? But Ricca is like "I love you, and I know you love me too, but I need you to love me always, not start and stop. It's not fair, you want me to wait for the impossible!?" Stop trying to guilt her when she's clearly not ready for a relationship? I get the frustration but c'mon.

And then there's chapter 9 which... I'm honestly this close to losing my shit with people. I don't think I've ever been as disappointed or disgusted of the fandom than I have seeing people send threats to Tillie on her instagram over chapter 9. She posted about how Book Two released AND she gave birth to her son on Oct 4th, and you go to the comments and there are just people calling her a pedophile and writing threats-

On a post. From Tillie. About the birth of her son. What the hell is wrong with you???

And then there are people just straight up LYING about shit.

I read a comment on reddit where someone compared Clementine Book Two to 50 Shades of Grey because there's an explicit sex scene and uhm NO??? There's absolutely nothing explicit, Ricca is not like Christian Grey like?? What the fuck is wrong with you? It's like these people read the summaries on the wiki- WHICH BY THE WAY if any of you happen to see this screenshot circulating anywhere-

^this is not a real quote, this is obviously fake.

Please don't mindlessly believe people on the internet about shit, especially when they themselves haven't actually read it.

Anyway, it's like people read the wiki summaries and decided to spread false and exaggerated information about the comic because they want to paint it in the worst light possible to trick people and it's working and I'm so...UGH.

Sorry to nosedive into this but it pisses me off. There's a lot to discuss about chapter 9- shit, there's a lot of criticism to be had with Book Two, and I will go over everything in my review, but for right now I'll just say yep, Book Two isn't very good.

I miss Amos, too.

[kath-artic]

ohhhh my god if this fight is about what i think its about im gonna lose it

[lesbiansanemi]

WARNING FOR ANIMAL DEATH/MUTILATION IN THE TAGS

I think I’ve figured out why it’s the stuff with my cats that gets me the most viscerally upset when it comes to my roommate and I think I need to tell him why that is… we had a talk and he apologized for a lot of stuff but I just feel like I need to explain why I react so intensely to him hating my cats/wanting me to get rid of them

[oculusxcaro]

One of the things that hurts Khare the most isn't so much the eyes and teeth growing in her flesh but rather her memory issues, how easily she forgets things and struggles with the most basic tasks. Her IQ wasn't impressive before getting experimented on but she lived independently and picked up a range of skills from doing so along with working many odd jobs back in Hull. It's immensely frustrating - and upsetting - to her when it takes so long to learn what should be a simple thing.

[makedamnsvre]

you don't have to read this is for screaming in the void

[fstbmp-a]

She would rip your throat out with her teeth thank you for coming to my ted talk.

[kaoharu]

i dunno man