#tbseu

[sinceyouaskedme]

Y'all, I just found the absolute funniest playlist in the depths of my Spotify WIP folder. Apparently I made this when The College Tapes was first releasing lmao

[myopicchange]

Not a bad game at all https://www.instagram.com/p/B8VC--tBSEU/?igshid=16210os3g3v8w

[sinceyouaskedme]

one deeply underrated reason that everyone is a little bit in love with Mark Bryant is that he talks like he's in therapy all the time. there's truly nothing hotter than a guy who can identify and clearly express his own emotions.

[sinceyouaskedme]

Oh, you know what's very funny is the episode where Sam tells Joan about seeing Mark for the first time. She's like:

I find Jane Austen stories unrelatable because I don't believe in love and I have no friends. Anyway, I just met a man whose smile is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. No one has ever looked at me like he did. I haven't spoken a single word to him, but our connection is already unbreakable. I had to come tell you about meeting him as soon as I could, because you're the person I trust most in the world. I would do absolutely anything to protect you and him, btw.

[sinceyouaskedme]

something something something Damien was obsessed with finding someone who was "like him" and he thought that would mean Mark but it actually meant Wadsworth something something

[sinceyouaskedme]

You ever think about how Joan and Sam stayed, in the end? Stayed in the city and also stayed together.

Damien and Mark and Chloe and Frank and even Ellie all dipped out. All decided to be someplace other than here, with some people other than each other.

It's been said that a good ending is one that lets you imagine the characters continuing on as they've been; still able to grow as people, sure, but having found what and where and who they love, and getting to keep it all.

That type of good ending is what Joan and Sam got.

With each other.

[sinceyouaskedme]

also everyone who shipped fucked up joan/damien back in the day was so right. i didn't really understand this in 2017, but i get it now.

[sinceyouaskedme]

The true tragedy of the Bright Sessions is that the early episodes had so much heart, both in the sense that all the characters were so shiny and innocent and earnest and striving to do good and to be good and to improve the world around them, and in the sense that you can tell every single person involved in making this show was there purely for the joy of it. Heartbreaking to remember that it somehow started there and ended...where it ended.

[sinceyouaskedme]

hey you have the same name as my sister and also have good takes on TBS/TCT/TAMA so 👍

😎👍 extremely cool, thank you very much

[sinceyouaskedme]

one important and fun and underrated thing about sam/joan is that the relationship is fundamentally unethical and they literally don't caaaaaaaaaaaare

[sinceyouaskedme]

(source)

Joan sends this to Mark the day after she finally hooks up with Sam, and she doesn't even fill in any of the placeholders or anything, she just thinks "what's the most impersonal way I can let my baby brother know I picked up the ex he's probably still in love with and I plan to continue fucking her for all of the foreseeable future, but also express my low level guilt without genuinely admitting anything close to culpability?" and lands here.

[sinceyouaskedme]

Cannot emphasize enough that when I said Sam and Joan deserved the chance to fall in love and make each other better, I obviously also meant they deserved the chance to fall in love and continue making each other exponentially worse forever.

[sinceyouaskedme]

A thing on my mind today is how Lauren Shippen took precise aim at a hornets nest in SFP by having Aaron be concerned about his teenage sister becoming afk friends with a man ten years older than her, only to turn around and reveal that Aaron and Damien had themselves been internet friends the entire goddamn time. Like, I'm desperately curious to know how that was taken by the corner of TBS fans who assert that creatives have certain moral responsibilities when it comes to portraying friendships between people of different ages in fiction, but if anyone actually tries to tell me how that discourse went down I will block them on sight.

[sinceyouaskedme]

the thing about Sam Barnes and Joan Bright is that they both started the show utterly alone and socially isolated and they both went through arcs of realizing that lifestyle was unsustainable and then trying to handle their trauma from the people closest to them being hurt by that proximity and figuring out how to forge new relationships despite their fear

and it would have been thematically excellent if they had fallen in love with each other

[sinceyouaskedme]

I for one think that the TBS novels should have committed harder to being in an alternate universe from the podcast.

I'm primarily saying that because I would have loved if a Neon Darkness was an AU where Damien's parents were just shitty parents in a more regular way and they stuck around to finish raising him as best they could despite everything, and then when he was sixteen or seventeen or eighteen he still decided to leave the nest in the exact same fashion (i.e. on the most chaotic and unplanned solo road trip imaginable) but with the addition that he stopped at a payphone once a week to call his mom and tell her all about his brainless teenage adventures.

That would have been fun for me personally.

[sinceyouaskedme]

Things I enjoyed about Some Faraway Place:

The psychic damage I took upon opening to the first page and being immediately confronted with Damien/Mark content

When Rose met Mark for 0.3 seconds and fluidly moved from guessing he could be Joan's husband, to assuming he's actually her brother, to assuming they're actually really close siblings who get along very well and talk all the time, to being jealous and sad that she (Rose) didn't have that same relationship with her own brother. Phenomenal mental trainwreck there, babe.

Every description of Owen. I miss him 💔. Ooh, and when he caught Rose breaking into the AM and was like "I know you're not supposed to be here because I would know if you were doing a program again because I care about you" - the manipulation really never ends with him, huh?

(Terrible garbage trash man of my heart!!!)

Also, I LOVE that Damien invited Rose to Do A Crime with him after ghosting her for two months, and she agreed immediately

The scene were Rose sheepishly admitted that she liked Damien, and Mark was like :( yeah. me too :(

When Rose asked Damien if he'd been in love with Sam, and he F L I P P E D O U T. lmao, how delightful.