Why does this show have my boy Phaya out here looking so dumb. His confusion when he was talking to the exposition fairy didn’t make any sense:
He has known since EPISODE 1 that Tharn and Wansarut have the same face
He has know since EPISODE 3 that they are reincarnated and have a fated karma together
He has been seeing visions of their past life together FOR WEEKS
And the show has Billy and Babe playing Wansarut and the Garuda. So why would he be so confused about what this backstory has to do with him?
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I’m probably a little late to the party (heh) but there’s something I’ve noticed concerning color theory and Max, and Max in general
When she is introduced to us as MADMAX, her situation with Billy makes her feel lonely and angry. She’s wearing red clothes (with a white stripe!) and her hair is down (letting her rage roam free).
In here, she’s clearly annoyed. She’s just left Billy’s car, Mr. Clarke made her stand before the class and named her Maxine when she just wanted to melt into the background and get over her first day at an unfamiliar school, still not thrilled about having to move from California.
Still, she’s zipped down, since those people didn’t do anything especially hurtful towards her and maybe she’s a little hopeful about them.
When she’s mad after an interaction with Billy she’s wearing red:
Darker red! She’s at school where she won’t have to deal with Billy for a while. She’s cooling like lava but there’s still one streak of the anger in the back of her head.
When the boys approach her, her zip-up sweatshirt is unzipped to show some of the color underneath. She’s happy! She will not let her guard down completely but she won’t hiss at them immediately! Still, she’s ready for disappointment and snapping right back to being fully red.
Yellow is not a lighter shade of red, but it’s definitely close on the color wheel. Closer to white, too! She is showing she’s not only mad, there also is softness inside her! It’s still a shade connected to red (anger) but yellow by itself is more of a happiness color. She wants to make friends but is still scared because of the new environment and Billy.
In the car with Billy (the scene where he wants to run over the party), the entire scene is shot in a way that’s barely letting us see her clothes. It’s mostly covered by hair, too, but we can see it’s still at least a little unzipped as there’s a bit of the yellow collar visible.
In the scene, she’s defending Hawkins saying, that it’s not that bad and that she can’t see any cows (yellow). She’s scared of Billy, so she’s trying to cover up her sympathy towards Hawkins and towards the boys (with red and her hair, Billy saw her get out of the car with the sweatshirt zipped up and hair down, now she’s covering her softness with what is familiar to Billy, so that he doesn’t see anything has changed, notice that softness and hurt her. That’s exactly what she does when she says she doesn’t know the boys trying to protect them from getting ran over).
Yellow! Fully yellow :) She’s happy to be shown weird pollywog-like creatures with the rest of the Party!
Right after Will gets possessed, her question as to what “true sight” means gets brushed off by all of the boys. She’s hurt and feels excluded, but her hurt makes her angry again. Next time we see her, she’s all red again.
“Party members only! This is non-negotiable.”
“I thought you guys wanted me in your Party!”
At the arcade! She’s already acclimated to Hawkins, and the arcade is her favorite place.
Alright, I’m getting tired and my third eye is slowly closing, so I’m going to wrap this up quickly, since I think I presented what the gist of the idea is.
In season 3, yellow, patterns, colors! She is now fully a member of the party! She has friends, she knows the secrets, El is back. This is the happiest she’s been.
Clothes are important in both of the girl’s characters! (El changes from murky colors to vivid patterns when she finds herself and there’s a post about El shedding layers of blue in season 4. I’d link it but can’t find it, I’m sorry!) There being a scene like this, with them fooling around with their clothes is basically the peak of happiness :)
Here Max gets really worried because of Billy. She’s feeling a bit guilty ‘cause that’s her step-brother that’s sowing chaos and hurting her friends. El is straining herself. The situation is looking BAD. Blue!
Beginning of season 4
Blue - she’s grieving and feeling guilty, Black coat - she’s hiding herself in a shell. She’s not particularly hiding her grief but she can close off at any moment.
(Btw Lucas is also wearing a blue shirt with some coats. I’d say he is sad because Max dumped him and doesn’t want to tell him things but the coats have a couple of colors because he’s hiding away his nerdiness in order to be cool :)
Now, the overcoat is blue with yellow elements - Max is being honest about her grief. She’s targeted by Vecna, the Hawkins gang knows she is SAD. It’s her last day, she can unfurl. The sweatshirt is unzipped and showing red and white underneath, the same colors we’ve seen her wear when we first met her. The girl that slammed the door of Billy’s car. The one that was scared of him. That girl is still inside Max.
Sometimes, she’s wearing this. Grief covered up with brownish-reddish... Red. She’s going back to her previous self, she is talking to Lucas again and he SEES her... But to get that shade of red you go more towards black on the color wheel. She’s not that vivid, fiery red anymore. There are bits of that girl deep inside her, but she’s too tired to make it her entire self. She’s tired.
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thinking about "you have a life" / "i don't know what i have" + "what do you want, dana?" / "i want everything that i should want at this time of my life" + the perceived shame in scully's loss of normalcy... "unlike you, mulder, i would like to have a life" + "do you believe in the afterlife?" / "i'd settle for a life in this one" + "don't you ever want to just stop? get out of the damn car? settle down and live something approaching a normal life?"
her friend ellen saying, "well, first you have to get a life." tara, pregnant with their christmas gift, saying that life before one grew inside her was "somehow...less, just a prelude," while barren dana cries in the kitchen. "i know you and dad were...disappointed...that i chose the path that i'm on."
thinking about how mulder said, "this is a normal life," and how she smiled. (he doesn't know any different). how, in the end, he said, "hey, scully? i know it's not your normal life, but thanks for coming out there with me."
(christmas before quantico, "i guess i'm afraid of making a big mistake. dad thinks i am." and missy's response: "it's not his life, dana.")
her application to adopt emily was rejected: "you're a single woman who's never been married or had a long-term relationship. you're in a high stress, time intensive, and dangerous occupation."
bill's reaction: "sounds like something your partner would say. this isn't about any little girl, dana. this is about you. it's about some...void, some emptiness inside you that you're trying to fill."
and mulder to the judge: "the fact that she can adopt this child, her own flesh and blood, is something i don't feel i have the right to question, and i don't believe anyone has the right to stand in the way of."
(that last christmas with missy before everything: "there is no right or wrong. life is just a path...just don't mistake the path for what is really important in life. the people you're going to meet along the way. you don't know who you're going to meet when you join the FBI. you don't know how your life is going to change, or how you're going to change the life of others.")
and ultimately, it all leads to a leather couch. and after contemplating that sacrifice of normalcy, what she should want, the decisions she could have made, she says, "i once considered spending my whole life with this man...what i would have missed."
she could've been a doctor, like her father wanted. she could've settled down, married waterston, had a normal life, like her friends and brother wanted. but what would she have missed?
"what if there was only one choice and all the other ones were wrong?" / "and all the...choices would then lead to this very moment. one wrong turn, and...we wouldn't be sitting here together."
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I personally don't think season 3 will or should be Lestat writing his own book. First of all, because of the abuse, I sincerely think any Lestat POV also needs another party present to call him out and not just let the audience assume his side is the truth, otherwise it will seem like the show is implicitly taking the abuser's side of the story (especially after how it framed Daniel's role in digging through Louis's story). Either he will show up to the penthouse and continue the "interview" framing or he will tell his story to Louis so both can be there to hash out what happened between them or something of that sort.
A straight up Lestat POV where he gets to paint himself as the victim would be pretty gross after what we've seen him do honestly and honestly why would the audience take anything he has to say seriously?
Okay I'm gonna be really honest here, unless Louis and Lestat's reunion has already happened and/or he's in a coma in the basement, I have no idea how people expect him to crash the interview at this point. Like it just does not make sense to me that he would just magically appear like that.
Honestly, I would much prefer that Lestat skips the memoir part and becomes a famous rockstar after reading Louis' interview and asks Louis to meet him with his song lyrics/media exposure so he can tell Louis his story himself before the San Francisco concert because that means we get maximum Louis. If Daniel is there to call him out on his bullshit, all the better, but I do want the story from Lestat's lips because the comedy of his narration is just too good to pass up. I've waited 15 years to hear Lestat describe himself with his own clown mouth and I hope season 3 doesn't disappoint.
Also, I just want to mention this because I feel like when people talk about Lestat there's a tendency to think about Lestat discussing his trauma as him painting himself as the victim and it really grates on me because two things can be true at once. Like, Lestat isn't the victim in his relationships with Louis and Claudia, obviously, but he absolutely was a victim. He was horrifically abused and neglected by his family his entire life growing up and was abandoned by every person he ever loved, even his own mother after he saved her life by making her a vampire bc she never wanted to be his mom (or a mom at all) in the first place. He is profoundly fucked up because of these traumatic events and they have a direct relationship to why he was so abusive to Louis and Claudia. Like he's probably got every trauma-induced personality disorder in the DSM-5 and literally cannot regulate his emotions or make himself stop being terrible until Louis hits his hard factory reset button and gives him an intervention by making him rot in the dump for a while so he's forced to think about what he's done.
Does that excuse any of his horrific behavior? No.
Does that mean he shouldn't have to atone for his bad decisions and the pain he's inflicted on other people? No.
Does that mean we should take every word he says as gospel and cast suspicion on Louis and Claudia's narratives? No.
But that doesn't mean every word out of his mouth is a lie either, and honestly, it's not like Lestat ever says "actually, every bad thing Louis and Claudia said I did was a lie because they're liars and I was a perfect father and husband and they tried to kill me for no reason." He fully admits that Claudia was right to kill him and that it's the kind of thing he would have done himself.
And like, in order for there to be a cycle of abuse, one has to first be abused. That's just how it works. And I don't really get why people are so set on erasing Lestat's traumatic history or viewing it as an either/or situation where only one of them is allowed to have been a victim of abuse and that if Lestat is allowed to talk about his abuse in season 3 he's by definition excusing his actions and challenging Louis' narrative.
I feel like part of the point of Anne Rice's work is that these vampires are, all of them, extremely monstrous AND deeply traumatized. They are both victims AND victimizers. It's what makes them so compelling and nuanced. I don't understand why some people want Lestat to be a cartoon villain with no redeeming qualities or path to redemption, and I also don't know why people seem to think that a season 3 from Lestat's perspective can only mean that the audience will not be asked to question or interrogate his perspective the way they've been asked to with Louis and Claudia in season 1.
Like, after everything they made Lestat do in season 1, if you're genuinely worrying that the writers are going to say "none of Louis or Claudia's trauma happened at all and actually Lestat was a perfect, sad angel the whole time who was unjustly wronged by Louis and Claudia and this is something you, the audience, are meant to uncritically believe because Lestat bat his eyelashes while he said it," I literally don't know what to say. It sounds ridiculous because it is.
There's just no way they're doing that and I think everyone should take a breath and stop stressing over it.
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The pushback to the term "cultural Christianity" from atheists is real odd to me because, as someone who has been an atheist since 13, only ever went to church a handful of times never with my own family (made a note never to sleep over at that friends house on a Saturday again bc I HATED church it smelled like shit, was boring, pews are uncomfortable as fuck, and the religious people I knew were all wildly misogynistic and I've never been here for being told I was less of a person for being Born Like This), and generally had no actual connection to Christianity in a meaningful way but still only knows Christian mythology, has been steeped in Christian values I had to untangle, and my religious understandings are still deeply Christian.
Like Ive never paid attention to the bible, church, Jesus, Christian teachings, or whatever but if you asked me about any religion the one I'll reliably know the most about is Christianity. I don't know why atheists are offended by being called culturally Christian because they have bad blood with the religion because like sorry bruh that doesn't mean you're less indoctrinated by Christian values if the culture you grew up in is predominantly Christian. In fact I'd say that religion being this ubiquitous in the culture regardless of anyone's consent to exactly ONE religion being shoved down our throats is reason to team up with other religious folks who ALSO don't like being constantly evangelized to by the culture at large, not a reason to throw a fit because you don't like being tied to a religion that is so ingrained into the culture that shit like "oh my god" and "Jesus Christ" are common expressions of surprise regardless of how atheist you are. Like surely I'm not the only atheist to notice the shocking amount of cultural religious shit that works it's way into my life and speech despite having not set foot in a church since I was like 10, and I can't remember the last time I was in one before that.
Idk man cultural Christianity seems like a pretty damn useful term to describe my relationship with a religion I never fully bought into and then actively rejected as a child yet still hold weird connections to and knowledge of just because Christianity is so baked into the culture I grew up in like it or not. If you want to be mad, be mad at the Christians who stole your freedom from religion from you, not usually religious minorities who discuss cultural Christianity and how it damages them too.
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