#whose on tv and good at faking likeability???

[idsb]

B*g Br*ther stans are literally the stupidest people alive I’m sorry

[firespirited]

some miscellaneous reviews:

The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster: a straightforward Frankenstein retelling with a twist in the last minute that sort of undermines the message. I was hoping for a subversion on the tragedy, if you count the last minute it is, but it's brutal getting there. Vicaria you deserve the world.

Jules 2023: very chill and tender story about an old man whose gardenias are smashed by a broken flying saucer. Ben Kingsley fades into the role, his co-stars are equally touching.

I May Destroy You: binged in a daze. lots of involuntary crying. not ready to review it yet. besides it's too dense, you'd have to go chapter by chapter or character by character. I think i'll rewatch it later in the year or next year while trying to not smash the next episode button and let it breathe.

Something in the dirt: if you go in knowing that it's a lockdown indie film by two friends about the nature of conspiracy thinking: it's a really fun watch... but if you don't I could totally understand not enjoying the way the film jumps around and presents itself as a fake documentary about a fake documentary. It's character based storytelling which refuses to answer the central mystery.

The Creator: incredible visuals and worldbuilding, top tier character design and cinematography but there's no fully fleshed character under that. It reminds me a lot of The Fall by Tarsem: the visual storytelling is incredible but without the human story to latch on to, it's maddening because that design work would be amazing in service to a good plot. I don't know how to appreciate aesthetics for aesthetics alone and it's something I wish i could cultivate. Both films feel incomplete and hollow while also full of fantastic imagery but maybe expecting solid story is impeding the ability to just enjoy moving pictures for what they are.

The Watermelon Woman: I felt deeply let down that the watermelon woman wasn't a real historical figure but that's the point, you're supposed to yearn for the lost stories people didn't think were worth telling. Even though the last video store shut down over a decade ago so it's obviously a culture long gone, these women felt more real than most films or TV I've seen in a long while. Not that makes them likeable and understandable. That too is kind of the point.

[pomegranate-salad]

Seeds of thought : DIE #2

Hey everyone ! So many works I need to be SOTing right now. I decided to prioritize this, because well, new comic, needs all the attention. Plus, everytime an issue gets sold out, we get a new cover from Stephanie Hans. I live for them now. Anyway, spoilers of course, enjoy my thoughts and opinion under the cut.

HINDSIGHT IS D20/D20

 When I was a kid, I had this French comic in which they had a page that asked : “what happens after a movie ends ?” and there were a series of vignettes that answered that question in a proper humorous fashion. For example, one of these vignettes showed the last scene of a movie where a car of the heroic lovers drove in the middle of the road into the sunset onto their bright future. The next panel showed the two lovers in court, and the judge saying : “bright future or not, you crossed the lane line and I’m revoking your licence”.

 When I was seven, as most things do when you’re seven, it blew my mind. Nevertheless, this silly comic highlighted the universal, unbreakable truth of all stories : when it’s over, it’s over. There’s no more. And even today, as fanfiction has become its own genre, as no comedy is complete without a fourth wall break, when you close a book, when you turn off the TV, nothing can happen anymore. There is what the story implies will or might happen next, but sooner or later, you reach the point where you exhaust whatever the story contains of foreseeing. Each story writes its own last will ; but whatever happens after that, the story is dead : it still exist, but it won’t move forward, it won’t go back, it won’t do anything at all because it has stopped being able to do anything with itself. The only way for more to happen is for the author to write more. But that inevitably means writing a different story.

And that’s why, as sad as I could have been to leave a story I loved behind, for me there was always a sort of relief that came with reaching the end of a story : the relief that came from complete stillness. Because there’s no more, there’s no more pain, there’s no more stress, there’s no more excitement even, there’s no more reason to be alarmed at all. No reason be involved at all. Only when we reach the end of a story, can we be free from it. Outside of the contraption of the story, the characters’ actions don’t exist. THEY don’t exist. And you definitely know where I’m going with this.

 The genius of DIE is not to take us to an elaborate gritty deconstructive fantasy RPG world. The genius of DIE is to take us back to it. Back to the story that’s already ended. Yes, I know I said in my last SOT that I didn’t think the characters were over their first visit in DIE by any means. The story of Ash and the gang is not over (by the way, I’m just going to call him Ash and use he/him pronouns until we get more on this issue, if needed I’ll edit accordingly). But functionally, narratively, the story of DIE the world, DIE the tabletop campaign, is over. The heroes arrived, the heroes did some shit, the heroes left. The story welcomed them and then the story ended. More than that, the story ended and nothing came to replace it. Sol’s speech is not the only thing that happens when thoughts curl up. The entire DIE world the gang is now in is nothing but a giant curl up. A new story did not emerge from the same setup. Sol just dug up the corpse of the old one and smeared make-up all over it.

The return of the heroes in a fantasy world they once knew is not a ground-breaking idea in fantasy by any means – I mean, Narnia did it. But in the usual take on this plot, the trigger element to the world the heroes return to is their leaving the world, not their being there in the first place – or in Sol’s case, staying. The second Narnia book showed us a world in shambles because the heroes saved it then left it, not because the heroes saved themselves and one of them was left behind. And maybe what I’m about to say will be disproved by future issues, but I’m not under the impression that the characters were particularly anything to the world of DIE, least of all heroes. They seem to mostly have been there. Some parts they barely set foot in, and the way they talk about the supposed “big bad” of the first game, the main reason they came after him seems to have been that they prevented them from going home. As a setup, the world of DIE seems to have been a bit underexploited. But come to think of it, was it really that great a setup ? Ash’s narration goes back and forth on the issue. Sol’s imagined world is either described as brilliant or the exact kind of pretentious overwritten stuff you’d expect from that particular breed of teenager (Elves but written by William Gibson is complicated… But is it, Ash ? Is it really ?)

 But all of that maybe-not-that-great world, all that hammered fantasy stuff, are rendered new and interesting in context. I’m not the first one to point out that this setting allows characters to offer perpetual commentary on their younger selves. My shots at teenage pretentiousness are fucking text. If nothing else, this is a genius move to deflect any and all criticism of the comic’s take on the RPG genre : if it’s overdone, if it’s overwritten, you’re not smart for pointing that out, that characters are way ahead of you. But more interestingly, this moves every single “big idea” of the “transported in a fantasy world” plot further up the road. The main example is the reality vs fantasy ethical debate. Think how many pages in how many books were dedicated to exploring the ethical ramifications of being in a fantasy world without knowing if what you did was “real” or not. Do you have to be ethical when you play a game ? Would Kant play Grand Theft Auto ? This is a massive debate. In DIE, it’s addressed in issue #2 on one page. But it would be a mistake to think DIE is selling this question short, or “getting it out of the way” : like often with Gillen, the form is the point. The underhandedness of this debate among the characters is what makes it interesting. Because it’s a debate they had before. This is something they decided on. They set rules. They built an ethics system. They also saw the limits of it. Because no matter how lawful good they decided to play that thing, there’s always one player to just do what they want, or there’s always not even that same player doing some stupid wordbinding spell because that’s just a throwaway romance secondary plot, and who hasn’t fucked with one of those before. All the time it would have taken the comic to establish the characters coming to terms with this debate, disagreeing, coming to a solution, is time that can be used to see this solution unfold in glorious consequences. And you know what ? I’m willing to bet that the characters weren’t even that bad the first time around. But they were there, and that’s really all consequences need. Another thing to think about ? Maybe the reason the characters came to having this debate was that at some point, they didn’t think they would ever go home. Maybe the world they moulded the first time around, was the world they thought they would spend their lives in. You’re welcome.

 So does that mean DIE is going to leapfrog every single of these important questions to simply present us with the consequences of the characters’ choices ? Probably not. But every single decision and facet of this new story is going to come with its own asterisk : this isn’t the first time around. Everything is loaded. Nothing is ever innocent. This is the Monty Hall problem halfway through : one door has been opened, will you change your choice ? And for us, who didn’t get to see which doors our heroes picked in the first place, that’s going to be a hell of a ride.

  WHAT I THOUGHT OF THE ISSUE

 The idea of this section was for me to get a bit more personal about my thoughts, without feeling like I needed to make a big point. So let’s get personal : I do not like Ash. By which I don’t mean I think he’s badly written, I mean I don’t like him as a person. As in, we would not be friends. I already had that feeling when issue #1 came out, but I tried to be generous because we’d seen so little of everyone, but now we’re two issues in, let me confirm : I do not like Ash. I do not like his fake self-flagellation hiding some very real condescension, I do not like his teenage angst with a twenty years old aging flavour, I do not like that he’s introspective in the least interesting way possible, and for someone who boasts that he learned to “tell stories”, good god is he an annoying narrator. Yes part of it is intentional. And no, I do not particularly like any of the other characters either. And you have to take into account protagonist bias, meaning that the character you spend the more time with is the one you have the biggest chance to like, but also the biggest chance to hate instead of simply dislike. But hey, I never claimed to be the perfect reader. And for now, Ash is annoying the shit out of me. To me, he feels as if you’d taken Laura from Wicdiv, kept her just as laborious and self-hating, but removed all the parts that actually made her likeable. Which leads me to ask the question : can I be honest about the quality of an issue if I’m that bothered by who’s telling it ? The answer, as always, is that I can be honest with myself : I’m probably not as high on this issue as many people are. And the principal reason for that is definitely the main character and narration. Don’t get me wrong, this issue is a thrill : the scene with Sol is chilling – I think he might be my favourite character, actually – the combat scene is narratively masterful, the ending is a bit of cheap shot (I’m fairly certain I’ve seen this eyes plotpoint in several other stories) but god damn if it isn’t effective. Oh, and let’s take a moment to praise the art, Lord knows Stephanie Hans needs me, whose stick figures make the Monkey Christ lady look like Michelangelo, to praise her. But jokes aside, I want to give credit to how Hans resisted the appeal of painting the classic huge detailed fantasy world first chance she got. Instead, her vision of DIE is one of a weirdly deserted, bright yet gloom world, which fits the mood perfectly. To borrow from the issue, her use of colour looks like fantasy feels, without feeling the need to overbear on the raw emotions of this issue with more detailed pencils (Ash’s digression about Maria is also probably incidentally the most I’ve ever liked his narration). Best panels for me are of course the ones where you can see the sides of the DIE. Probably because it manages to feel so small and so huge at the same time. I’m a sucker for intimate fantasy.

So, this issue, minus Ash, is nothing I don’t love. But on the other hand, this issue doesn’t really exist without Ash. Try as I may, I cannot deny that part of the appeal of the issue comes from his narration and his personality. Yeah, he’s a whiny controlling drama queen, but I put up with an entire issue of Woden monologuing and this was one of the best things I’ve ever read, so you know what, I can put up with a little bullshit. I don’t think Ash has to be a good person, or even someone I like, for DIE to be good. I guess at this point my problem with him is that I don’t find him interestingly unlikeable, as was the case with Woden. Maybe it’s because unlike Woden, there are several people in my life who remind me a lot of Ash, and since they’re not necessarily assholes, they’re not people I have an excuse to outright avoid and thus with whom I’m much more familiar with. So who knows, maybe I’ll make peace with Ash. Comic’s still young. Meanwhile, my opinion on issue #2 is pretty much the same as for issue #1 : this is remarkable work, brilliant in some aspects, almost irritating in how proficient it is at doing its own thing, and maybe just a touch overconfident in its ability to walk the line between profound and navel-gazing. But when DIE keeps it simple, when it just wants to touch you instead of punching you in the gut, then it’s fucking unstoppable. If you’re not on the DIE train yet – well first, I admire and fear the way you powered through this post, but also, jump in, like now. You won’t regret it.

[themostrandomfandom]

Hi! How would you personally rank the seasons of glee from your favourite to your least favourite & why?

Hey, @sitandsingtoyou!

Since I watch Glee almost exclusively for the Brittana, it’s probably no surprise that their narrative treatment is the single biggest factor that determines how I feel about any given season. 

If Brittana have a prominent, well-wrought arc from season premiere to season finale, then chances are I’ll like said season no matter what shenanigans are going on with other characters or storylines. 

The same is also true in reverse. 

That said, for the purpose of answering this ask, I also considered factors like the overall storytelling (beyond the Brittana of it all), the music, the presence of any standout episodes, general cohesion, etc., when making my rankings.

The final list appears after the cut.

WARNING: Here be strong feelings about Glee and more than a little bit of negativity about its writing and production. Note that the views expressed in this post are the author’s personal opinions based on her preferences, and they may very much differ from your own.

___________

In order from favorite to least favorite:

S6: As I discussed in this post, in addition to providing our girls with the happy ending they always deserved, S6 offers much of the best-written, most fully-developed, adorable, emotional, poignant, and narratively-satisfying Brittana we get throughout the series. We’re talking fanfic quality stuff, and not just in bits and pieces here and there but basically across the board in every episode in which Brittany and Santana feature. While there are a few things I’d change, on a whole, I can’t think of a more enjoyable canonical culmination to Brittana’s journey. As for the non-Brittana stuff, while there are, admittedly, some really low lows—many of the middling episodes of the season are an affront to screenwriting—there are also some suprisingly pleasant turns. Don’t tell anybody, but I actually love most of the New New New Directions and find the storylines that focus on them (as opposed to the adults of Lima and alumni advisers) kind of delightful. While the series finale itself somewhat underwhelms me, the flashback sequence at the end of episode 6x11 totally makes me cry. A lot of this season is about getting back to what made Glee fun and likeable in the beginning: good tunes, camp gags, and stories about a ragtag group of underdogs overcoming adversity through love and music. In general, I feel like S6 does a nice job tying up the loose ends for glee club members old and new and fulfilling the main thesis of the show (“Something is special because you are a part of it”).

S2: Brittana’s S2 storyline is one long, amazing roller coaster ride of emotion. It’s hard to describe exactly what it felt like watching it all play out for the first time as the episodes were originally airing; I hate to use the word “special” because it sounds so quaint, but it’s kind of the only term that really fits. Because the “Sex is not dating” line in episode 1x13 was initially treated like a one-and-done deal, going into S2, no one in the fandom really expected to see a fully developed Brittana romantic storyline—and yet that’s exactly what the Back Six gave us, and each successive Locker scene brought elation, heartache, fear, hope, and continued anticipation. Nothing beats S2 Brittana angst, and especially not the Hurt Locker, which is far and away the ship’s pièce de résistance. Then beyond the Brittana, the rest of the season is generally high quality, at least as far as Glee goes. There’s some nice tongue-in-cheek comedy, iconic scenes, and heartfelt character development, plus episode 2x19 is one of the show’s musical high points overall. As always with Glee, some pitchy moments sneak their ways in and a few episodes beg to be forgotten, but for the most part S2 is Glee in its stride, and it’s held up well over time.

S1: Since Brittana are not yet main characters, they don’t have a main text S1 storyline, per se. Still, when you fill in the gaps, there’s a lot going on with them on a subtextual level, enough so that rewatching S1 knowing what will eventually happen in later seasons will provide a strenuous cardio workout for any serious Brittana shipper. There’s plenty of excellent Heya improv to go around, and the classic “Brittana on the back row” can’t be beat. Plus, Brittana’s mini-arc with Finn between episodes 1x14 and 1x15 is heartbreaking. Still, the reason why I rank this season so highly has less to do with Brittana in particular than it does with overall quality: Simply put, I think that Glee had a better idea of what it was about during the first thirteen episodes of S1 than it did throughout much of the rest of the series. While later on the show would struggle to balance comedy and drama, realism and camp, trying and failing to be all things to all people, in the beginning, it was just an earnest, theatrical little show about nerdy choir kids trying to find their places in the world, and it didn’t take itself too seriously. Though many of the S1 storylines were schlocky—hello, fake Schuester pregnancy!—there were more than enough heartfelt performances and excellent character moments to balance them out. For instance, for as much as I generally dislike Finn, the “I’ll Stand by You” scene in episode 1x10 is so well done on every level. Whatever Glee became in its later seasons, in S1 it was at its core still good. It hadn’t forgotten what it was all about yet.

S3: Now we’re getting to the bottom of the barrel. I rank S3 fourth on my list not because I really enjoy it all that much but because it’s less terrible than S5 and S4, at least imo. The season’s biggest issue is that it’s all over the place in terms of quality. Sugar was a blessing, but Rory not so much. Likewise, on the Brittana side of things, there are some really high highs—our girls officially start dating! they share their first on screen kiss! they have a fabulous time at their senior prom together!—but there is also the giant bugbear that is Santana’s “coming out” arc, which is awful on so many levels. The writing and characterization for Brittany and Santana vacillates wildly throughout the season. In some episodes, like 3x04 and 3x13, it’s really great. In others, like 3x16, it’s utterly headache-inducing. And it’s not just our girls who suffer from spotty writing throughout the season; Quinn’s storyline is a complete mess, and Sue is an unbelievable Yosemite Sam caricature of herself whose exploits are so exaggerated that they make it virtually impossible to suspend one’s disbelief enough to enjoy her scenes. While the Troubletones are a musical highlight for the whole series—and the “Rumour Has It/Someone Like You” mashup is the best musical performance in all of Glee, hands down—a good soundtrack doesn’t make up for some of the season’s more glaring deficiences, and especially not the way Santana’s storyline was treated both inside and outside the universe of the show. Though there are a handful of S3 episodes I will rewatch for my own personal enjoyment, there are many that I’d prefer not to recall. S3 was the first season of Glee to bring in new regular writing staff beyond RIB, and with all its inconsistencies and the disuniform quality of the episodes, unfortunately, the inexperience really shows.

S5: With the exception of episodes 5x12 and 5x13, I hate almost everything about S5—and, yes, that includes the majority of Santana’s NYC episodes. I get that Heather Morris was largely off the show during this season, so it’s not that I blame TPTB for pairing Santana with Dani or making her Hummelberry’s sidekick. It’s just that it breaks my heart watching Santana repeatedly throw herself against a brick wall as she tries over and over again to win Kurt and Rachel’s friendship and trust, always to no avail (see here and here). In theory, Hummelpezberry could have been a really fun brot3—god knows that myriad fanfic authors have been able to pull it off to great effect—but in canon it never really worked, largely because the writers were reluctant to stop using Santana as a convenient heavy whenever they needed to generate synthetic conflict in an episode, even though she had long since ceased to function as an antagonist in terms of her narrative arc. While there were plenty of zingers and jaunty musical numbers in the Loft, I could never really enjoy them because the happy times never lasted. Santana was made to feel like an outcast in her own home, and for someone who loves that character as much as I do, it hurt to see her feeling so lonely and ostracized. Once she ran off into the sunset with Brittany, things took a turn for the better. Still, there were really only a handful of bright spots overall. Anyone who’s read TKTD knows that my second favorite ship on Glee is Samcedes, and I did truly enjoy the cute little romcom that was their 5B storyline. I also loved the Sancedes and later Brittanacedes friendship moments on the tail end of the season. But in general, everything felt strained and disjointed, and my ultimate sense is that the tragic early loss of Cory Monteith proved an insurmountable hurdle for the season’s creativity and writing direction on a whole.

S4: I liked the production of Grease, but otherwise this season was one long fail from start to finish, and there is not a single episode out of the twenty-two that I at all care to revisit. Though I’ve been able to rationalize and justify and meta my way through the Brittana arc, doing so is just more intellectual and emotional trouble than it’s worth. Throughout S4, the depiction of every established character including our girls seems OOC, some to an incredibly noticeable degree. Sam Evans, whom I loved in S2 and S3, absolutely gets trashed, going from a goofy, lovable dork to idiot Finn Hudson Version 2.0. Episode 4x04 represents one of the worst and most misguided writing decisions I’ve ever seen made on a primetime TV show. That a group of professional screenwriters would sit down and say, “Let’s break up three of our flagship couples not for any good or compelling narrative reason but simply because we want to ‘spice things up’ and see how our heavily-invested, emotionally vulnerable, primarily teenaged and young adult audience reacts!” boggles the mind, as does the fact that they were then surprised when their viewership numbers dropped off dramatically thereafter. I do want to say that I liked Marley Rose, Unique Adams, and Kitty Wilde, though I otherwise found the New New Directions kind of meh. Overall, this season is the one that seems to stray the farthest from Glee’s original premises and spirit. There isn’t much that’s fun, triumphant, or satisfying. There’s just a lot of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, cultural insensitivity, bad writing, and miserable story arcs in scads.

Thanks for the question!                                  

[gingilocks101]

A Letter to my Father

Dear F,

You probably think this is about me wanting you to like J; it is not. Our argument at the barbecue was never about that. What it is about is you starting a fight trying to call him a prick for no reason and then thinking I’m overreacting or being unreasonable for asking you to not be a dick for no reason. You had spent the last week essentially bullying him like you do to the rest of us, complaining about him for the smallest things, acting like a degree means you can’t be absent minded or make human mistakes, and then trying to get S to take him home because you didn’t want him there anymore. Newflash, twat face: you fucking invited him! Suck it up!

I don’t give a fuck either way about whether or not you like my fiance because I don’t need your approval. You’ve never approved of anything unless it directly benefited you. What I care about is that you treat him like dirt for no reason. He’s never done anything but be polite to you, and you’re here acting like a prick and thinking you can. And I’m the immature one for not just accepting it? Fuck off, fuck off, fucking die. You are 55: I shouldn’t be told to just let you get away with being a grade A fuckwad because you can’t even be polite.

And you’re supported by other adults aged 50+, like Mum, Auntie A, Auntie S, Uncle P (who isn’t 50+ but is close enough) because apparently being a dick is “just how he is”. Your whole life you’ve been allowed to do what you want, and now you’re “upset” because I won’t talk to you anymore? I don’t need you and your emotional abuse, your misogyny, your bullshit life. You have been on this planet for 5 and a half decades, and everyone tells me that I need to be the mature one and just accept blame, apologise and grovel. Why? So you can just do this all again, over and over and over until you finally die? I refuse.

Besides all of which: your reasons for disliking J are bullshit! He “thinks of nobody else but himself,” says man who has two ponds that only he wants. They are two ditches in our garden into which you just throw money we don’t have; one of them in the ground with no fencing or anything to prevent falling into it. You have a six year old running around your garden, and it’s only last week that you actually did something because you were going to have drunk people in the garden at your party on Saturday. And even then, all you did was put solar lights around the edge; still no fence, nothing to actually stop an accident. 

You tried to move the family to Crawley so you didn’t have to sit in traffic on the way home from work. That was your immediate response, before considering leaving ten minutes later to avoid it, before anything else. Did it matter that your youngest two were doing GCSEs and A Levels? Did it fuck. All that mattered was that you were stuck in traffic on the way home and you didn’t like it. You hadn’t even been in the new job that long; maybe two months? Traffic sucks, yeah, but two months is nothing. Mum hits traffic on the way to work every single day, and she’s been working there for about 16 years. And before that she worked in schools and colleges since leaving the factory, when she was probably also in traffic. It is life in our cities, towns and other urban areas. That is the modern age.

Which, I know, you hate. Hence why you tried to tried to make us all move to rural Cumbria so you could set up a fish farm. You expected Mum to quit her job and work in a cafe on a fish farm despite the fact that she hates cooking and baking in all forms; just because you don’t want to live in London anymore. You have no experience in fish farming, no experience in even running a business, and angling as a business is collapsing as younger people just aren’t interested. But you are Super F. This risky venture will obviously succeed, purely because you’re in charge. You know everything about everything, so you cannot fail. And all those who have been in the business 30 years who are closing down shops because they can’t carry on? Well, they don’t know what they’re talking about, do they? God, you sound like Nan, trying to tell me the doctors don’t know jackshit about antibiotics or the human body.

“He only thinks of himself,” said the man who turns the simple act of helping me to move in and out of university every September and June into the F. B. shitshow. A man whose daughter was returning to university, 200 miles from home, and you decided to move me in by driving me and dumping my stuff because you “didn’t want to sit in traffic” on the way home. You stood in my new kitchen with all those housemates I hadn’t yet met, and made my mother cry, because she didn’t believe you all summer. 

Not that you give a fraction of a fuck about my degree beyond how expensive it is for you, how much it’s costing you. You routinely belittle my likes, interests and passions: you don’t bother attempting to connect with me unless it’s one of your own interests like old punk/rock music; newer music or songs you don’t like result in you bitching or moaning over it so I can’t hear it, or until I get fed up and change it or turn it off. The same happens with TV shows, and then you say “oh, I didn’t say you couldn’t watch it!” You are slowly reducing the things we can watch to fishing shows and Fake Britain: you dislike American comedies, you hate panel shows, none of us like soaps, you try to force D to stop watching kids’ TV (I remind you that he is six)...

When we went to visit universities you complained about the lecturer, and said that people with English Literature degrees “just think they’re better than everyone else because they’ve read lots of books”. All the lecturer had done was talk about the course he taught when I asked him for an overview. I will have a degree in English Literature by the end, and yeah, I will think I’m better than you. But not because I’ve read classics that you can’t stick, like Tess of the D’Urbevilles, or Wuthering Heights. I’m better than you because I’m genuinely likeable; I can be polite even if I dislike people (sorry L, I do try!); and I treat people fairly, as best that I can. The last time you cared about my university experience was the summer of 2012, when I was considering Oxbridge. And even that was to use me as a trophy daughter: you paraded me around your birthday party telling all your friends and brothers and sisters that I was thinking about Oxford, because it made you sound good. You couldn’t give less of a fuck about me, really.

You make me feel as though I can’t be freely religious at home: I ended up telling P and K and other people from uni that I feel unable to go to church when I’m at home. You mock me on Sunday mornings if I do go, asking if I’m “going to see [my] imaginary friend with low self esteem” or calling religion “mythology and fairy tales” and those who believe “idiots”. You do this to the point I feel uncomfortable to go anywhere on Sundays by myself, which is exactly your goal. You hate religion and the fact I have one with such vitriol that I cannot understand why you hate me calling you an atheist. Only atheists are that violent towards people with faith. On top of that, you constantly bring up how much you hated Seville Cathedral and how the Church is “a business”, or the “world’s greatest scam”. When I went with the school in 2012, Seville Cathedral was one of my favourite things. You ruined that. Mum promised we wouldn’t take you to the cathedral, but you insisted! And I’m convinced that was just to have the excuse to abuse me further.  You make such a big deal out of religious events: you refused to take me and T to the church for little E’s christening, tried to make digs in my ear during D-G’s christening, and you refused to even go to D’s dedication. You sat in the pub and willingly missed your own grandson’s dedication, and then spent the after party loudly criticising S for having him dedicated, as it’s apparently “indoctrination”. Your violent campaign has served to make me only feel able to express or explore my faith in Chester; hence most of the important people are those that I met at church, or in chapel and chaplaincy: P, G, K, V, Fr. P & A... 

And after all of that, you believe and desire me to be completely dependent on you. I have constant reminders about how you pay for everything and that it’s your house (despite Mum paying half but that doesn’t fit your narrative). My bedroom is “not your room; it’s the room in which you are permitted to sleep”; you’ve been saying this for years. And whilst yes, it is technically true, it also subtly chips away at my privacy. If it is your room really, it suggests I have no privacy and no right to my bedroom. It suggests everything is flimsy. You won't pay for me until I "love you again"? What is this bullshit? At the moment, J is providing his own food at our house because you complain if he eats. I’ll say again: you are denying a guest food, and yet I’m expected to be the grown up and apologise for asking you to be polite. Do you hear yourself when you speak? Or is your head too far stuck up your arse? Besides, you don’t really pay for me anyway! While you’re wasting money on fish, literally throwing all of the family money into a ditch, I’m expected to get a job alongside my studies. It doesn’t matter what I say about doing two degrees, about being a full time student, about how you’ll still demand me home in the holidays, or about how the stress will literally kill me. You won’t listen to any of it: it will always be because I’m “lazy and expensive”. And yet! And yet: despite refusing to support me when I have no money, you still desire me to support you in retirement. No?? You can’t refuse to support me and then demand I support you; it doesn’t work like that. It’s an investment, F. You put in what you want to receive; I am not obligated to support you in your old age if you will not support me now. It works two ways.

You accuse me of wasting money on my degree, and then spent £200 without asking on concert tickets when the family couldn’t afford it. Your current reasoning for why we’re in so much debt is not for anything logical like you wasting money on your ponds, but because I am eating. That’s right: your current excuse for why we have no money is because I eat too much. It makes no sense because, by your own admission, “it’s not like you eat much anyway”. So what the actual fuck? It makes no sense at all. You dislike that I asked J’s dad Te for help with Spain after you refused. You expected me to have it done in advance so you could throw me off a plane and leave again, like Chester. I can’t do that, so I went to someone who can help me in the way I need it, but you are bitter. I don’t have to jump your hoops and do everything your way. Like how you’re refusing to walk me down the aisle at my wedding, and keep saying that other people will also refuse if you tell them to, such as my cousin C. That’s just another transparent attempt to make me beg for your attention, to turn something into being about you. “Oh, why isn’t F walking her?!” Well, I refuse to let you make everything about yourself. That’s why I’m asking S. Suck on that.

There are more things I can scream about: this is 21 years of emotional abuse, 21 years of scars, 21 years of trying to get approval that will never come. I’m over it. I will never apologise, and quite frankly I’m beyond insulted that you haven’t even thought to do so.

I’ll see you in Hell, and I won’t stop to say hi.

Yours sincerely,

Hannah

[gravetells]

Faking It (Ringside Romance #2) by Christine d’Abo #BookReview #GuestAuthorVisit #giveaway

Hello, my name is Christine d’Abo and I’m so happy to be here today.

I’m a firm believer that the good friends are the family members that we get to choose. The get us on a level that sometimes our biological family doesn’t. When I came up with the idea of Ringside Gym and the men who were involved with it, I wanted to make sure that their relationships reflected that feeling.

Max would be the “middle” child of the trio of heroes. He’s my peacemaker, the one who wants to make sure everyone and everything is okay. But Max has a problem – he doesn’t know what to do when he’s not needed. Zack no longer needs him now that he has Noland in his life, and their other friend Eli has been MIA due to his MMA career. Max’s life begins to drift and he questions not only what he wants, but also who he wants in it.

When Grady Barnes shows up on the scene, Max is equal parts intrigued and annoyed. Here is a man who seems to have it all, but is seemingly at the whim of his father. When Grady asks Max for help, he takes a leap of faith and agrees. What Max doesn’t anticipate is how quickly Grady will work his way into his heart.

All Max needs to do is find a way to prevent Grady from being forced into a marriage he doesn’t want, while not giving in to his impulse to sweep Grady into his arm.

Simple, right?

You can visit Christine at her website, and chat with her on Facebook and Twitter (links below). Want to keep up with Christine’s new releases? Sign up for her newsletter and receive a free book!

Read my review

*** This review is SPOILER-FREE! Read on with confidence! ***

Christine D’Abo’s stories always have such heart, a solid thread of human connection, and Faking It lives up to that standard. The characters are likeable and relatable, and the emotional arc is full of that beautiful push-and-pull tension that defines a good romance.

Grady’s celebrity is of the reality tv and old money types, so the story centers around the social and family scenes leading up to his brother’s wedding. Max is solid and self-assured, a man who makes his own choices and thinks before acting out. He has a calming presence on Grady’s more reactive personality, and I enjoyed the easy, natural ways they fit together as as couple.

This story is part of the Ringside Romance series but doesn’t really spend much time in the gym or in Mac’s gay nightclub.

Faking It is recommended for readers who enjoy…

Contemporary gay romance

Celebrity heroes whose notoriety comes from wealth and reality tv

Self-made businessmen at the start of their careers

Strong heroes that don’t let others push then around and don’t act like alphaholes

Faking It is a GraveTells Recommended Read!

This review copy was provided by the Publisher. No compensation was received for this review.

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Buy or reserve your copy online at*: Amazon (Kindle) | Riptide Publishing

My star rating: Faking It (Ringside Romance, #2) by Christine d’Abo Series: Ringside Romance #2 Published by Riptide Publishing on May 8, 2017 Genres: LGBT, Gay, Celebrity, Fighter Pages: 238 Source: Publisher Add it to your To Read shelf: Goodreads

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Max Tremblay should be happy. His nightclub, Frantic, is one of the most popular gay clubs in Toronto, and his childhood refuge, Ringside Gym, is well on the way to reopening. But when he finds yet another drunk in the alley beside the bar, Max isn’t sure this is the life he truly wants.

Grady Barnes has it all. He’s rich, famous, and wants for nothing. Well, nothing but a good relationship with his father. When he discovers that his father is going to force him into an arranged marriage, Grady has had enough. He tracks down Max, the man who got him to safety after a night of overindulgence, and makes him a proposal: pretend to be his fiancé for two weeks and he’ll invest in Ringside Gym.

When the pair travel to Vancouver to attend a family wedding, the flames of their mutual attraction ignite, and they discover that the only difference between pretend and reality is how well they can fake it.

*This post contains affiliate links you can use to purchase the book. If you buy the book using that link, I will receive a small commission from the sale.

About Christine d’Abo

A romance novelist and short story writer, Christine has over thirty publications to her name. She loves to exercise and stops writing just long enough to keep her body in motion too. When she’s not pretending to be a ninja in her basement, she’s most likely spending time with her family and two dogs.

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Giveaway

To celebrate the release of Faking It, one lucky winner will receive a $25 Riptide credit. Leave a comment with your contact info to enter the contest. Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on May 13, 2017. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries. Thanks for following the tour, and don’t forget to leave your contact info!

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from Faking It (Ringside Romance #2) by Christine d’Abo #BookReview #GuestAuthorVisit #giveaway

[popmitzvah]

Now I Am Become Slut, Destroyer of Worlds

The host is alive. She is sentient. She is self-aware. And she knows you have programmed her to attack herself and the others.

Nope! Not a blog about Westworld! At least, most of it isn’t. I want to talk about The Bachelor and I want to explain why this show is the place to be, if you’re into the shock of watching creations outsmart their creator-controllers.  The more I read this Bach season as a rumination on feeling fictional and clawing for “reality,” the more I was reminded of HBO’s ambitious series on gnosticism, humanity, and the function of storytelling. Might even go so far to say that these two shows share a soul; Dolores Abernathy would be right at home at a rose ceremony!

Please follow me, down into a fake mansion that houses a harem, where we can take a closer look at the things that made The Bachelor so distinctive in its 21st season: existential female anxiety, textual reflexivity, and the peculiar journey of Corinne, a single trope that managed to awaken and rewrite herself.

Born into an apocalyptic Trumpworld, this iteration of The Bachelor became something kind of dark, dreadful, and a little bit out-of-control. Of course, The Bachelor is always a circus, and that’s why so many people hate it: for a television fan, it takes a strong set of stones to follow something so vapid, so dependent on tired stereotypes and romantic wish-fulfillment, so misogynistic, so corporate and disingenuous. How many different ways can producers arrange 30 beautiful women in a Love Thunderdome as they compete for the affections of one bland white man? But there was something poisonous in American culture at large that made Season 21 into something else, something crazier. Perhaps the 2016 election left a vacuum of hope that encouraged The Bachelor producers to lean into self-destruction as an aesthetic. Perhaps we, the audience, are evolving to watch ourselves watching TV, and we prefer everything to be kind of about storytelling – ergo the timely popularity of diverse “meta” shows like Westworld, American Horror Story, Fleabag.

Either way, the new Bachelor was defined by these new and distinctive notes:

Contestants who bristled inside their assigned story cages and pointedly drew attention to the process of being written as characters.

The season’s primary “villain,” Corinne, who transcended the confines of the Bach with a Joker-like sense of chaotic sexuality and stunningly re-branded her arc as sex-positive feminist heroism.

An unwilling Bachelor whose weird charisma relied on his apathy, nihilism, and constant critique of the format. Nick undermined our reception of the Bachelor experience by positioning himself as a bored observer – distancing himself from the contestants and the ideological underpinnings of the show.

First, I want to take on Bullet Number One – the Westworldian crises of self that entered this season of the Bachelor early on and began the process of destabilizing narratives and the women forced to live them. Take a look at what happened to Jasmine G on Night 1. Now, it’s not unusual for Bachelor women to immediately recoil from the uncanniness of this environment –  to be a Bachelor contestant, to be on a reality dating competition, is to be subjected to spirit-breaking. These women are tested every moment with the pressures of self-criticism, of being filmed, of being beautiful, of being charming, of systematically attacking and defeating your stunning competitors. But something about Jasmine G’s body language and wording struck me as a crisis of self, a dissociative episode which bespeaks her sudden awareness that she is performing and this whole thing – maybe any love-hunt – is theater without meaning.

“It doesn’t matter. It’s out of my control. There’s nothing I can do. Holy shit. Who the fuck am I? I’m blown away right now. Who am I?”

Night 1 would be the first of Jasmine’s many system failures, glitches in her personality and physical affect which provided an alarming counterpoint to the self-policing composure we’re used to seeing on these women. Nick eliminated her because of her unpleasant urge to question the “realism” of herself, of him, of the experience. And this was not the only instance of unusual meta-awareness amongst the women. Many of the others expressed a certain repugnance at the roles in which they were pigeonholed – at their status as storylines. Liz’s only mission, with mounting desperation, was to rewrite her way from Nick’s opportunistic ex-fling all the way to romantic legitimacy. Taylor realized too late that her Bachelor persona and “real” professional life were being mapped onto one another and she’d dug herself into the “bitch bully” hole (with the help of her nemesis Corinne). Taylor also literally theorized that some women are better-programmed for love! What could be more Westworld than attempting to parse the resident slut’s “emotional intelligence”?

So there was a significant change in the show here, in which the women’s grasp or ignorance of “being produced” was of paramount importance to how we perceived them. To compare these women to WW characters like Dolores and Maeve – remaining basic, guileless, and easily overwritten ensured a measure of success in the competition and preserved their classic Bachelor likeability factor.

So with that said, I’m dying to get back to Corinne. Here was a contestant who really jumped off the screen for reasons I’ve never seen an antagonist “pop” before. Unlike a villain such as, say, Season 20’s Olivia, Corinne worked to distinguish herself as a breakout character – not just through behavior but through actual world-building. Starting the show out by mentioning her current nanny Raquel was a stroke of genius; Raquel was a framing device that indicated Corinne inhabited a bizarre fantasy world inside and outside the show. In so many ways. Corinne deliberately ate endless blocks of cheese on camera. She feigned naps, eyes closed, smiling beatifically as she “dreamed” of Nick. She self-consciously and joyfully delivered dialogue she knew would light up the internet. Clutching her breasts and huffing, “Does this seem like someone who’s immature?” Staring soullessly into the lens and intoning, “My heart is gold, but my vagine is platinum.” Luring Nick into an inexplicable bounce house and toplessly dry-humping him with abandon. Corinne’s promiscuity, and her persona, were over-the-top but deliberately, defiantly, and delightfully self-choreographed. We know the floozy never wins, but when the floozy knows it, ignores it, and enjoys her role, she transcends happy endings.

And most interestingly, Corinne elevated her self-awareness and self-programming into a magnificent final act. During “The Women Tell All” (a reunion episode which airs before the finale) Corinne, in one fell swoop, ret-conned her entire Bachelor journey as a feminist rumspringa. “I was just doing me,” she demurely insisted, while the other contestants fought to defend her sexual agency. They leaped to defend the resident slut as the bravest and most authentic person amongst them. Corinne sat, resplendent, her eyes bearing no trace of the mischief and malevolence that had been her character cornerstones. She’d accomplished a rewrite akin to “it was all a dream.” Later, women sobbed while Liz declared her sexual encounter with Nick had not “defined” her, and they took turns praising their sister for her humanitarian work. The thematic tide-turn from “a search for true love” to “an inner journey toward female unity and empowerment” made for the most overtly political and topical episode The Bachelor has had, maybe ever – and it bespoke the malleability of reality fiction in a way the show has never previously approached.

In many ways, it was Bachelor Nick’s abdication of his role that allowed the TV text to refocus itself on the women “waking up” and growing through their relationships to one another. It’s hard, as a viewer, to engage with story about passive female players being driven toward romantic fulfillment, when the end-goal is a guy who’d be content to go home immediately and eat cold pizza. As we know, the guy had already been through two seasons of The Bachelorette and one summer of Bachelor in Paradise – his entire narrative was “last-ditch effort for love.” Nick made it his business to call out the fakery of The Bachelor, and the futility of it: “Let’s try to be as normal as possible in an abnormal environment.” “I’ve been in their shoes, and I know how much it sucks.” I certainly like Nick as a person – I like that he cries when he feels stuff, and I like that he hates being The Bachelor but loves being famous, and I like that he let women who were too good for him go, so they could fly and be free and be the first black Bachelorette. But if Nick did anything other than represent a neat resolution of the presented Bachelor narrative, he effectively denied our suspension of disbelief and exposed this particular season as “reality farce with no point.” Prince Charming was just in it for the international travel and the free food. I sympathize. And it’s fun to watch The Bachelor pretend that this isn’t a huge problem.

SO! I posit here that, at least for this season, The Bachelor evolved beyond the story of single women and their search for love. You might say that instead of being about singlehood, this show became about “the singularity” – that moment when program/character/trope/story/world comes alive and begins to adapt and change itself. I wonder: is it a better ride for the reality-consuming audience, when “we know they know”? At what point does watching a character with meta-awareness become confusing, or tiresome, rather than thrilling? And most importantly, what are the differences between watching reality television and prestige drama when we’re grappling with these issues? This question, perhaps, is of paramount importance for TV fans as we go forward; if there’s something in the water that’s poisoning every genre of narrative experience (or making it tastier), we have to put our fingers on it. Why do I watch so much television about women in traps, whose self-actualization and creative escapes are catalyzed by patriarchal violence? Why is it so easy to find that story?

I think it’s easy to brush aside shows like The Bachelor precisely because they are so heavily consumed, across political and cultural lines, and “mass appeal” television has the reputation of reifying harmful structures of power. For really good reason. But it’s important to locate these small moments of medium-transcendence within these TV texts. More and more, the characters we use and abuse are turning directly towards us. These fictional delights have real ends, and it’s never, never about the final rose.

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