#yes i suppose i am still in discovery of myself and my identity

[melting-morning-blues]

tagged by @icychoerim! ty :D

rules : you can usually tell a lot about a person by the type of music they listen to. put your playlist on shuffle and list the first ten songs, and then tag ten people. no skipping!

① waterfall by milet

② july (later on) by lily williams

③ suzume by radwimps ft. toaka

④ there by stray kids

⑤ emulation by stargaze shelter

⑥ W●RK by millennium parade

⑦ FAM (korean ver.) by stray kids

⑧ BIBI vengeance by BIBI

⑨ INVU by taeyeon

①⓪ I GOT A BOY by girls' generation

tagging some people, but u can ignore!!

@lacunasbalustrade / @end1essquestions / @thehistorynut19 / @kawaiilizzie / @dudebro231

[aliffwuff]

I read somewhere few weeks ago about a guy who is still dealing with his karma of the same fucked up things i did, except the ought punishment was not identical with what has happened, instead it was a chaotic quietness. And truth is, i am absolutely that. I'm not dismissing the idea of 'you cheated, you get cheated', or 'how you treat your children is how they grow up to treat you', karma i think is open to interpretation. It surely revolves around one's character and one's future. In my case, my karma is far from serenity, yes i have been learning and getting better but somehow it is disorderly in its betterment. It's lonely. It's very quiet. I'm doubting my emotional discoveries all the way. I went all Marie Condo of my selection of people, keeping my circle too small. Questioning even my best friends' intention of me. I'm losing my trust in people, my very own definition of myself —It's not like i'm losing myself, it's simply growth i suppose, but the part of growth that is painful and slow in the beginning, the part of growth that needs to burn the skin and flesh down in order to stop the bleeding, the part of growth that will scar for life as a lesson. Yes I am in that very part and i am entirely in pain.

[agumonger]

tangent! "being a man".

tangent! how i overthink things

tangent! how i finally figured it out and realized i am, indeed, just a cis dude

it really helped me to realize that while i don't want to be an andrew tate alphahead fast cars football materialism hiding your emotions type man, and i don't want to be a femboy either, i do want to be the kind of man that irradiates a wholesome energy, maybe a bit wacky, but not without a certain kind of wisdom, nerdy but not the petty incel entitled um akshually type, i want to have healer animal talker character type energy, i want to have gentle giant energy, bob ross energy, posy energy, i want to be fascinated by life and by humanity and make people feel like the time they spend with me is time that counts, i want to make them feel safe, loved, supported. i want to create beautiful things, i want to make people go through emotions with what i make, perhaps even discover something about themselves. i want to be warm and approachable and strange and unpredictable and hilarious and idealistic. i want to believe in things like love, honesty and kindness

that's the kind of man i want to be

the detachment that i always felt from traditional masculinity was never truly about aesthetic, or about gender identity, it was always about the toxicity. it's not about dysphoria - i've actually learned to like my body, too. i'm not a demiboy or agender or nb or anything of the sort, i just. don't like the extremely narrow definition of what masculinity is supposed to be, but i don't feel attracted towards the other side either, which is why i always hesitated to speak up about my issues, like "can i really say i'm Not Attached to my Own Gender(TM) if the idea of wearing makeup or a pearl necklace or a skirt clearly makes me glitch out?" was always the question that made me stay silent. "you're overthinking", i told myself, "you're not inventing Masculinity 2 you're just Some Guy. don't be so full of yourself"

and like, actually, yeah of course! of course i'm just some guy! i kept looking at the issue backwards. i kept asking myself "am i really a man?" when the question was "is the stupid ass alpha male method the only valid way to be a cis man, without being labeled as queer?" which, yeah, i am queer (bi) but still!! of course not! of course that's not the only valid way. it's just the most common one that dudes follow, but it doesn't have to be like that

i'm not *not* a man, i'm just not macho and that's different. and yes, 90% of people would consider my outward appearance to still be milquetoast and basic and normal as fuck and that's okay as well. i'm not the type that obsessively hates everything related to the alpha/chad aesthetic thing either

and yeah you might be like "but jojo, you had a gender questioning phase? but you seem as regular vanilla as dudes go! look at you talking about videogames in a hoodie and jeans and a buzzcut" and you would be absolutely right. i just think Too Much About Things

bonus points for reading this: how many male fictional characters with a similar vibe do you know. because i'll probably love them. i love every character that has been written with the understanding that men can be sensitive and sincere with their emotions and vulnerable AND that difference doesn't have to imply any orientation or specific special label of gender identity AND that sensitivity is to be understood and respected and not laughed at

fun fact this is why i love himbos so fucking much. because they got the traditionally masculine aesthetic that i'm hopelessly attracted to (though i wouldn't apply it to myself) but also the potential for genuine sensitivity and kindness and gentleness. emotional intelligence

i think this phase of self-discovery and overthinking that started around lockdown is probably over.

extra bonus points for reading: whatever rappers had goin on aesthetically in the mid 2000s. that. bring it back idc

[nolongerdani]

hatchling and its unsettling light on the self.

Hatchling by Sayaka Murata is a short story about Haruka, a woman who claims that she has no true self. To remedy this, she creates personas that are shaped by the social groups that she’s in, resulting in to multiple different selves. But as she’s now getting married, she wishes to choose only one persona that would please her husband and stick to it, so she asks help from her best friend who knows truly her. While the story was written in Murata’s style -- dry, direct to the point -- the story was unsettling and struck a chord with me because it made me confront the my people pleasing self (which I’m doing everything to grow out of, by the way). 

Growing up, my mom always dictated who I’m supposed to be. She imposed very early on that I should be this bubbly, extroverted kid who’s friends with everyone. Exhibiting traits contrary to what she wanted -- this meant being introverted, reserved, shy --  was deemed wrong. Obviously this made me become this self that my mom created for me, which was plainly called people pleasing. 

Like Haruka, I too had many selves for different social groups. At home I was this always happy, always OK daughter for my mom, with my mom’s friends I’m this prim and proper, always went with everything what the grown ups say person, at work I’m that employee who’s always going the extra mile even though sometimes it’s detriment to my well-being. At some point I got confused who I really was because my whole identity was shaped by my mom and as Haruka said, the self is a result of a back and forth in a community, so it certainly was shaped more by our environment than by us -- all to conform to societal norms. 

I admit, to this day I’m still confronting myself about who I really am -- my likes, dislikes, quirks, etc. -- and while it’s still confusing sometimes, it’s better now because I’m more in control of knowing who I really am. And I’m doing everything I can to synthesize this true self into every social group because well, this is me, and I deserve to have a space in the world. Self-discovery and introspection is a continuous journey, after all.

While my journey into accepting myself and translating it to the world is majority of my efforts, the encouragement from my closest friends and significant other are a great help, too. Their acceptance and support of my efforts keep me going. So yes, I guess I do agree with Murata that the self is shaped by society, but with a great support system, and with enough introspection, it can also be shaped by the self, too. 

[teacherintransition]

The Irish Say …

“De cares av de-morura must wait til dis day ‘tis doon…“

“The cares of tomorrow must wait until this day is done…”

Wisdom is beautifully common on Èire

Memories can be one of several things: a fond remembrance of shiny times, a nagging regret or a buildup of anticipation to revisit that place of joyful moments. They can also be deceivers of what we experienced and mislead our judgement as we move forward. Despite what we may try to convince ourselves, we tend to idealize our past or overly demonize it. At this point if you’re a regular reader, I’m hoping you are, there’s probably an urge to remind me, “aren’t you the advocate for being in the now?” Why yes, yes I am. I have to remind myself that past experiences and living in the moment aren’t mutually exclusive …we don’t get to now without building on where we’ve been; indirectly setting the stage of where we’re going. Damn …living doesn’t always get easier.

It’s been my discovery that being in the middle age of our lives can intensify the importance of how we deal with the past, the right now and the times to come. Why? I guess I gotta say it …time is running out; but if you’re in my demographic, you knew that. If you’re younger, the reality hasn’t hit you yet …it will, the sooner the better. Similar to a recently written article? Yeah, but it’s a thought that’s been heavy on my mind of late. The recent trigger was a documentary called, “The Irish Pub.” Seeing the people, the settings, the wisdom of the Irish public house hit me like a train on what I think I’ve become and want to be in the days ahead. Am I obsessed with drinking? No, though I get it if you think so …trust me. Am I obsessed with travel, Scotland and Ireland in particular? Yes, but more than that, I’m consumed with the Celtic mentality; of a people with such an immersion in their past yet, who squeeze the most joy out of life for each moment lived with the wisdom of philosopher kings …or queens.

It’s a mindset that goes beyond being just Celtic in ancestry. I see the same love of life in the face of oppressive pasts in the other half of my lineage; my mothers side of my family is proudly Mexican or Latino or Hispanic. It is a way of looking at life that transcends culture …it is uniquely human, though many are unwilling to see it. To love the people near you intensely; to make where you are …now, of pivotal importance; to see the good of both based on your memory and dreams; to not deny our past or become its slave this is where memory and the moment peacefully coexist. All too often and to varying degrees, we let our painful remembrances dictate the nature of the direction we go forward. Thus begins the great American psychosis…insert medication here.

The panacea for all of it …where we were …where we want to go is Celtic, Latino, African; it’s human in thought and practice. If we know we learned from our past in any way we are ok, despite the pain events might have caused. If we deeply internalize the knowledge that we can avoid repeating any mistake and realize it is gone, we move forward. If we choose to logically idealize and not demonize our past we can plan a path of happiness and being with those we love

Perhaps it’s not just one or the other: living in the past or living in the moment. The memories of our lives drive us to where we want to be, and gives us an identity to our belonging to that future time and place. There is a sense that this piece of writing is all over the place …frustrating. Seeking out a peace between what was and what will be in the twilight of our years. How does that happen in an effective way? Helluva I know; I suppose if you’re still seeking and dreaming of a glorious future …we must be headed in the right direction.

[hmslusitania]

My mind was racing this morning thinking about an Almost Kiss scenario because I can see Eddie leaning in, then Buck, then Eddie and Buck closes his eyes and Eddie is already up and nearly out the door saying "Buck... I'm sorry. I can't do this." With Buck confiding in Hen because Maddie's still missing so Hen is the proxy big sister figure for him and he just assumes that Hen knows what to do in this situation. "Do I let him work through it or do I confront him? He's clearly interested but he's like... you know." Hen raises an eyebrow and finishes "semi-closeted?"

This is such a tricky ask to respond to. I have been trying to get my thoughts coherent about it all day and I don't know that I've actually succeeded, but here goes.

Because like, first and foremost, I very much do not want to see this scenario play out on the show. I can see it playing out, but I do not in any way want it to, but I didn't want to just like, leave you with that sentiment and bounce, so forgive the following ramble, please.

The main issue here is that I am exhaustively tired of queer love stories going sideways because of the ajar-ness of one party's closet doors. Coming out is such an incredibly personal journey, even when you have a partner who you love and who's out, and at the end of the day, it's still very much your journey not your partner's. I don't know if you watch Sex Education, but we just had a bit of this in season 3 and it's... it makes me sad that this is the narrative we have over and over again in fiction (fiction specifically; what happens in real life is another story) and I don't want to see it again in any form whatsoever in 9-1-1. Whether or not that's a reasonable request? I don't know, probably not, but I have come to realise that I am, against my best wishes, inherently an optimist.

I feel like this is the sort of storyline we'd get if they tried to rush things between them, but because we have a buffer character right now, we also have the opportunity for Eddie to grow and develop into his own queer identity without rushing it.

And maybe it's too much to ask, but I just... I just want a story where the discovery of the character's queerness isn't a cause for alarm. It's a rough transition for so many of us, and I talked kind of at length yesterday about the mourning period that goes into letting go of the life you thought you were supposed to have, and yes, it would feel unrealistic to me if we didn't see at least some of that with Eddie, but I just want the next step in that journey for him to be relief. Because there's a relief in accepting who you are and not trying to chop the extra pieces off your feet to fit into miss-sized glass slippers, and there is joy in being yourself and in finding a community of people like you and so, so much of the queer stories we see on television focuses on the ostracism and the internalised homophobia and the damage we do to ourselves and the damage done to us by others, and because ultimately, 9-1-1 is as optimistic as I am and is a show about healing and recovery and even sometimes about hope, it could so easily become the vehicle for the other side of a queer awakening, the happy side, and not just have it be the last ten minutes of the movie, but have it be the point.

This is...not a proportional response to your ask, and I'm so sorry, I'm apparently in the "making myself cry over a firefighter soap opera and also the queer experience" kind of mood.

[vampish-glamour]

I was tagged in this by @ugh-fml but was recently blocked by OP for, unbeknownst to me, being a terf. Their reasoning for my supposed terfy ways; believing enbies can’t be lesbians. Which is the opposite of what terfs believe, but I guess that doesn’t matter because as we all know, “terf” means “person (lesbian) I don’t agree with and who makes me feel invalid”.

I’d still like to respond, because I have Thoughts.

Okay, let’s break this down.

For the whole “validity” aspect, I’ll link this post. I was actually going to include it here… but decided it should be it’s own post. So that post will cover anything here that makes an argument based on “validity”.

Now let’s look at the whole “it’s their business if they want to call themselves something that doesn’t describe them, people who that word does describe can’t complain” thing.

I’m not transgender. I don’t experience gender dysphoria, I have no desire to transition. I am comfortable with my birth sex, my birth pronouns, my birth name, everything.

But you know what…”transgender” just has such a nice ring to it. And the flag is really pretty, pink blue and white are just such a nice colour combination. I think I’m going to call myself transgender.

No, I’m not planning on transitioning from one gender/sex to the other. No, I don’t have any discomfort with my birth sex. No, the word “transgender” literally does not describe me. But it just feels right. So transgender people have no right to come and tell me that I’m not valid, because I get to pick my own identity and it’s my own business and I’m valid!! I am a female to female (FtF) transgender!!! If trans people don’t accept me as one of them, they’re FtFphobic. And to those of you who say I don’t fit the definition of transgender; I changed the definition to fit me. It doesn’t fit transgender people anymore, but that’s okay because I feel good.

I would really hope that this sounds ridiculous to you. I would hope that anyone who reads that, especially transgender people, would be rolling their eyes and ready to tell me off if I were being serious.

It doesn’t matter if I think a word (in this case, transgender) feels good, or if I think it’s my new identity. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell you I’m valid. The word does not describe me, and I therefore should not and can not use it. And if I insisted on using it despite it not describing me, trans people absolutely have the right to make it their business, because I’d be hijacking a word they use to describe themselves and using it in a way it’s not intended to be used (and in a way that it doesn’t make sense to use).

Apply this to combining nonbinary and lesbian.

Lesbian is understood to be a descriptive word of women’s homosexuality. Nonbinary is understood to be a descriptive word for those whose gender falls outside of the binary.

The two do not mix. If you say “I am a lesbian”, you are saying that you are a homosexual woman. If you say that you are nonbinary, you are saying that you are not a woman and not a man.

So to say “I am a nonbinary lesbian”, you are literally saying “I am not a woman or a man and I am a homosexual woman”.

It makes no sense.

Now regarding my above statement on how I could claim to be transgender despite not being transgender… the ridiculousness of that statement is what many people, especially homosexual women, see when we see people claiming to be a “nonbinary lesbian”. We see somebody who quite literally does not fit the definition of lesbian, calling themselves a lesbian for no good reason. We see somebody changing the definition of a term we use to describe our sexuality (note: sexuality, not identity).

On the part about “journey to discovery of self”….

What are you even talking about? What journey? What discovery? This seriously just sounds like some words strung together to sound profound and meaningful when they just… aren’t.

Yes, figuring out sexuality and gender can be a journey for some people. Redefining words and calling yourself something that doesn’t describe you doesn’t necessarily need to be part of that journey. Seriously, “lesbian = woman” is not a hard concept to grasp. If your little self discovery journey leads you to discovering you’re not a woman, congratulations, you’ve automatically discovered that you’re not a lesbian.

“Nonbinary lesbians have told me they’re lesbians, and that’s good enough for me”.

How dense. Just because somebody tells you something, doesn’t mean it’s true. I just told you earlier in this post that I’m transgender despite not being transgender in the most basic sense of the word. If I were to say what I said with complete seriousness, would that be good enough for you?? Would me, a cis girl, simply telling you that I’m FtF transgender, be good enough for you to believe that I really am transgender?? What if I started spreading my idea for FtF and got a bunch of other people on board? What if you had a bunch of FtF people telling you we’re transgender, because we saw a bunch of Tumblr posts about it and believe we’re valid trans people? Would that be good enough for you to support the idea of FtF transgender??

I certainly hope not. Because there’s no such thing as being both cisgender and transgender at the same time. Just like there’s no such thing as being not a woman, and a woman exclusively attract to women, at the same time.

And I’d like to ask, why do they think they can call themselves lesbians? Why do they want to call themselves lesbians? Why is it that people who claim to not be a binary gender, want to use a term that is binary in nature? Why do they feel the need to use a term that does not describe them?

And using the definition of lesbian that says “lesbian means woman exclusively attracted to women”, because that’s what it meant before a bunch of enbies changed it to suit their wants… what about “woman exclusively attracted to women” describes a nonbinary person in the way it describes a homosexual woman?

“You know what it’s like to be told what you should or should not be”

Yeah, I do. I see people telling homosexuals all the time that homosexuality is a sin, that it’s a temptation, that it’s unnatural, that we should get therapy to “fix” our sexuality, that our natural sexuality should be criminalized, that we should be killed for being homosexual… I could go on.

This is nowhere close to being the same as enbies being told that they cannot claim to be both genderless and a homosexual woman.

To even imply that homosexuals being told all of those things, and enbies being told to not be contradictory, are the same thing… is tone deaf and incredibly fucking insensitive.

Being told that your sexuality is unnatural and that you should change, is not the same as being told that the labels you’ve picked out for your “identity” are contradictory.

So I’m not even going to take that argument seriously, because what homosexuals are told about being homosexual, and what “nonbinary lesbians” are told about being “nonbinary lesbians”, ARE NOT THE SAME OR EVEN COMPARABLE.

At the end of all this… there is still no concrete reasoning for why somebody should be able to use a label that doesn’t describe them. Why somebody should be able to redefine that label to fit them, why they even need it to fit them in the first place.

“They’re valid” is not an argument.

“They told me so” is not an argument.

“It’s their identity” is not an argument.

What I am saying, which is;

“you cannot be both genderless and a homosexual woman. That is contradictory. You cannot use a label that doesn’t describe you, and you cannot redefine it to describe you if you cannot give a solid reason why it should describe you in the first place”,

that is an argument.

[a-dragons-explanations]

Haha, I'm using "identify as" to mean that... This is how I view myself, I suppose? I know I'm not ACTUALLY this thing, but I also see myself as it and want to be perceived as it. When you put it that way and I actually think about it, you're completely right and I think I'm just in denial, lol. "I am this thing but I'm not actually but also please see me as this thing". I am still in the discovery phase of my identity, so...

xD Yeah, I would also consider "this is how I view myself" to be pretty synonymous with "this is what I am," though there's a bit more wiggle room in those two for me, for sure. (What you're describing, though, I would indeed say is basically what people are usually trying to get across when they say "I am this thing," ha. Sorry to accidentally whack you in the face with a doubt check there, I suppose.)

Assuming you weren't in denial, for the sake of the aforementioned wiggle room: Yes, if you view yourself as nonhuman I would consider you 'kin if you want to use the term, largely because while there might be a difference between "this is how I view myself" and "this is what I am" for some people, the difference is going to be extremely small even when it exists and the experience is probably going to be overwhelmingly the same.

[tundrainafrica]

i really thought hange was non-binary bc the one who said hanges gender was up for interpretation was kodansha us but isayama asked for gender neutral pronouns right?

here!

I’m gonna answer all of the gender asks in one go because for one, I don’t think I wanna flood my own feed and my own tumblr with the same arguments. 

I think a lot of the questions on Hange’s gender and the topic of  gender and sexuality overall are kinda intertwined and I feel like for anyone who actually reads my stuff, it’s better understood as one big wall of text. 

So I was wondering, is that song the absolute proof about hange's gender?

No. I think the interpretation of the song which people are using to prove that Hange’s nonbinary is very western centric. I actually did research around this song and knowing what I know about Japanese culture, I actually interpret the song as a way for Japanese people to break out from gender norms. 

For people who are not aware, Japan is incredibly strict with gender norms. The LGBTQ community is not as progressive as it is in Western countries (I mean gay marriage isn’t completely legalized yet). And just looking at it from the stand point of gender roles and gender expectations, despite the progressive thinking, there are a lot of things Japanese men and women have to conform to just to be respected in everyday society. Because in Japan, the community has always been more important than the individual and it’s honestly the same for most asian countries as well. 

A lot of the pressure of living in Japan, working with Japanese people is the pressure to conform and I’ve seen my friends do it through small things like getting bangs (because all Japanese women have bangs apparently), wearing make up when going out (because this is generally an accepted for all Japanese people) and always dressing your best because in that manner women are held to an incredibly high standard in Japan. And this goes similarly for men who are constantly pressured to be the breadwinner in the family. If your wife is making more than you, be ready to hear people talk. I know these expectations exist in a Western setting too but Japan is incredibly stiff as a society and this is one reason why, despite having numerous opportunities to moveto Japan myself, I am not at all entertaining that possibility. I have worked in a Japanese company and I hated it and moved to a western company right after six months. I have completely accepted the fact that there is no mobility career wise from a non-Japanese (and a woman at that) in Japanese society. 

In conformity, hierarchies etc, Japan is its own monster. That’s why when songs like Jibunrashiku, Hitchcock (by Yorushika) or Shisoukan (by Yorushika) come out, for one it’s in Japanese so I wouldn’t approach the songs from an English and as a Japanese speaker and someone who is pretty familiar with Japanese culture, I can’t help interpret that song as a social commentary for the shitty parts of Japanese society and how they tend to shoot the concept of an ‘individual’ down. 

But does that mean I completely shoot down the idea that Hange is NB? 

NO. Yams said so himself, Hange’s gender is unknown. But at the same time, Yams recognizes the fact that in the anime and in the live action, Hange is a female. If Yams were that adamant to make Hange NB, I think he would have at least made more of an effort to police how she is depicted in the anime and in the live action. 

 His exact words were:　「ハンジは彼（彼女）みたいな、ちょっと浮世離れした、枠にとらわれない自由な感じで描きたかったんです。」If I roughly translated it to English, “I wanted to draw Hange as someone otherworldly, free from the confines of gender.”

Tbh, I wanted to avoid these gender asks altogether but I’ve seen the environment in twitter and the ways many people approach gender, particularly ‘nonbinary’ or genderfluid and it really just doesn’t sit well with me. For one, what’s up with all these rules on how to approach our nonbinary and LGBTQ friends? What’s up with all these accusations that if we don’t follow them to a T, then we’re suddenly transphobic or homophobic? 

The fact that we’re creating all these rules on how to go about her nonbinary gender for one, just defeats the whole purpose of Hange being a free bird in the first place who wouldn’t have cared and who wouldnt’ ever have been confined to gender in the first place. 

I mean the establishment of set rules and social norms on how to navigate gender, sex, sexuality and gender roles is the reason why we had heternormativity in the first place. And what I can see, yes, we did get progressive, we did start recognizing other genders, other ways of thinking but the danger in all this is that, we’re once again creating frameworks and norms about how people that identify as these genders are supposed to act. And this defeats the whole purpose of why we recognized concepts of other sexualities, other genders and breaks from gender roles in the first place. 

We wanted to show these people that their feelings are valid, that the way they’re navigating their relationships and their identities are valid and the heternormative society we’ve lived in that has been condemning for so long, was flawed, was wrong. 

But the thing is, with the establishment of all these social norms on how to navigate our relationships with LGBTQ people and how to navigate our own gender, sexuality, sex and role is just making us regress back to that shitty heteronormative society of a hundred years ago. Because suddenly, everyone is questioning once again ‘How am I supposed to be feeling if I’m nb?” “How am I supposed to be feeling if I’m trans?” “How am I supposed to be feeling if I’m LGBT?”  

And we’re creating these abstract ideas of how exactly, being genderfluid is supposed to feel like. Am I really supposed to be going by ‘they?’ Am I supposed to be uncomfortable with CIS pronouns?

And If I don’t go through this process… If I don’t feel this way then maybe I’m not NB? Maybe I’m not Trans? Maybe I’m not LGBT? And if I don’t conform to this clear cut idea of what NB is which people set up for me, god forbid I might just be transphobic or homophobic. 

And Here’s the thing, everyone’s journey to self discovery is unique and there is no exact way to go about your gender or identity. I find it terrifying actually that creating all these clear cut rules have built misconceptions in so many people already on what they are supposed to feel like when they decide to identify with a certain gender which is no different from long ago when people had to hide the fact that they liked people of the same gender because god forbid they might just be persecuted for being gay. 

Creating these frameworks, these incredibly strict rules on how someone is supposed to navigate relationships with LGBTs and their own personal identities is only making it all the more dangerous for people who are in the process of discovering themselves. 

Back in college, I used to accompany a friend to a clinic when he was starting HRT treatments and before he started them, he had to consult with a doctor and the consultation lasted months. Before all that, they gave him a checklist of ‘feelings,’ which if he does experience them, he checks it and if he does check enough of them and agrees with a huge chunk of them, then he might have gender dysphoria and maybe the HRT treatments and sex reassignment was for him. It was a hundred item checklist,  pages full of waivers, warnings and questions about his own experiences with his gender identity. And the fact that he had to consult for months after on that? There must be a reason. 

Maybe because the academe realizes, maybe because those adept on the field on gender realize that gender is too complex of a subject to have been boxed into these categories in the first place. 

And this whole discourse or I wouldn’t say discourse more of like, this ‘pushing of agendas’ as to say, ‘this is how being gender fluid or non binary is supposed to feel like’ this is how being transgender is supposed to feel like and if you don’t fit it to a T then you’re not transgender or you’re not nb. Or if you don’t fit it all, maybe you’re just transphobic is dangerous for many reasons. Either it gatekeeps people who want to explore their gender further. Or it forces people to have to conform to these and force themselves to ‘feel’ all of these things in the first place. 

And god, this is just the gender issue, I haven’t even explored the sexuality, gender roles or biological issue.  

i mean pronouns are important but they don’t really reflect someone’s gender??? like there’s people who use he/they, she/they or all pronouns(? they just don’t conform to gender binary ahaha

Given the environment on twitter and having witnessed the bullying first hand that came with one writer who is active on twitter using she/her pronouns for Hange, I feel like my own writing and my own POV on how I go about my writing and how I approach the gender of Hange (since I strictly use she/her) might just be a ticking time bomb and I might find myself at the end of whatever hate war or ‘education’ or as I like to just refer to as bullying, one day. 

I believe though I at least have enough knowledge and awareness of the LGBTQ situation and I think I did put a lot of thought already into this before I made my decision to use ‘she’ to refer to Hange.

(And tbh, you can be nonbinary and you can be female at the same time and I’ve written about that multiple times already BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT EVEN IN THE SAME CATEGORY. And creating this mutual exclusivity between being nonbinary and female just kinda invalidates a lot of those people who are still deciding where exactly they fall in this complex web of identity discovery)

As someone who generally mainly hangs out with LGBT people and i have been doing this since high school by the way, and as someone who has tried all the sexualities on the spectrum, I talked to my asexual friends about possibly being asexual, I have experimented with women and sometimes, I just had dry spells and it just so happened that in the end of all these, I fell in love with a guy but I really believe that gender is such a flexible thing and even though I am with aguy right now, I still simp over lesbians, gays, ciswomen, transgenders because simping isn’t about gender. 

And these set of rules on how to navigate genders is just invalidating the experiences of people who are flitting in between the two identities and it just hinders the process of self discovery for a lot of people. 

Anyway, the point is, there is only one statement I found fundamental when approaching my relationships with the LGBT community and my own perspective on my self identity. 

Recognition of someone’s feelings and their journey to a gender identity and the pronouns that come with it are important.

Then someone might go “THEN WHY DON’T YOU RESPECT HANGE’s NON BINARY PRONOUNS. Because just because someone is nonbinary doesn’t mean they automatically go for they. Just because someone is non-binary, doesn’t mean I have to use every single pronoun on the spectrum. The only one who can tell me what pronouns they want used on them is the person in question. 

(I actually read an argument somewhere that going for ‘they’ just because someone is NB is transphobic lmfao. Assuming someone’s pronouns is apparently transphobic too lmfao.)

AND HANGE IS FICTIONAL. And we will never hear about which pronoun she would have wanted in the first place and I think the great ‘nontransphobic’ in-between is just letting people interpret characters how they want to interpret characters in this fictional world (And Hange can be both interpreted as nb and female). It’s the policing which makes the whole process of self discovery, the process of navigating genders all the more difficult for a lot of people. 

And policing how exactly people should navigate gender and sexuality is just gatekeeping. Hange is everyone’s character. The only gender and sexuality identity people have complete jurisdiction on, is their own. And this policing of what exactly certain journeys to discovery are supposed to feel like is inherently harmful for those who are still in the process of deciding for themselves where they stand. 

And going back to what Yams said “I wanted to draw Hange as someone otherworldly, free from the confines of gender/sexuality/gender roles.” I agree with that. 

Because even though I do use ‘she’ with Hange, I do not firmly believe that Hange is a cisgender heterosexual female either. I just believe there are so many more layers to her whole identity and I believe similarly for every single person. Just concluding for one’s self that Hange is nonbinary with a very narrow minded view of what non binary just generally defeats the whole purpose of being ‘free from the confines of gender’ and hinders a lot of discourse and analysis on Hange’s identity over all.

I mean, I don’t know if people agree with this but in the decades I have spent with my close friends figuring out their gender identities, changing pronouns, transitioning, coming out to their parents, here is one thing I noticed. They weren’t asking for a celebration of their gender or sexuality, they weren’t asking for all these policing on how people should approach them. All they wanted was for their feelings to be validated, normalized as an everyday occurrence. I think the point of all these LGBTQ discourse (and by extension race and sex discourse) were all there to just make all these different identities normalized and to completely eradicate the concept of a negative bias or an other which was generally plaguing society for a long time. 

And as their friends, I have never approached them as this champion who would make sure EVERYONE RESPECTED THEM IN THAT WAY IN TWITTER THEY BELIEVE LGBTQ PEOPLE SHOULD BE RESPECTED. All these nonverbal rules I have set up for myself on how to go about being friends with them is because I wanted them to be happy and comfortable in their shoes. And what were the types of things they appreciated? Me hiding it from their parents until they were ready to come out, me helping make their relationship work with their partner, me respecting the pronouns they requested for themselves, me accompanying them to HRT when their parents refused. 

And you know what, that was only a facet of our friendships. My friends’ gender identities and sexualities never dominated discourse. None of them were the ‘token gay friend,’ the ‘token lesbian friend’ or the ‘token asexual friend’ or the ‘token NB friend.’ They were all people I genuinely care about who just happened to have fallen in love with someone of the same gender. They were just people who just happened to be uncomfortable with their original sex. But I would never just describe them as just that. My friend who just so happens to identify as assexual makes a great companion on a night out drinking. My friend who just so happens to be trasngender is really great with logistics and planning and was super helpful and I was eternally grateful when we worked together on that one project. My friend who just happens to be a lesbian has the cutest picture of her girlfreind on her phone screen. 

I will memorize their favorite orders, what makes them tick, what makes them such a great companion, their talents, capabilities more than I will remember their gender. And that’s the characetr song in question is called “Jibunrashiku” or in English “just like me.” Because in the end a strict society which creates all these maxims of what exactly people of a certain gender should act would of course birth songs like “Just like me” A society which puts so much emphasis on gender and sex  as an identity instead of other things like personality, preferences, skills etc. 

And I don’t know if it applies to everyone. But my friends appreciate it because this journey to whatever gender identity they chose wasn’t rooted in some sort of strict framework on how they should be treated according to twitter. It was rooted in their own experiences and how these experiences made them feel. 

Do they feel weird in a woman’s body? Do they just don’t feel any romantic attraction to the opposite gender?

Just treat them as how you would treat anyone else you respect. Just be a decent person. Just be a good friend.

Respect their requests for their own personal pronouns. If they need help, help them to the best of your abilities. 

And here’s the thing, the approach I use with navigating identities, sexuaities genders are rooted in one very simple concept which can be applied to the race discourse, the feminist discourse etc etc. 

Don’t be an ass. Respect people. Don’t reduce people to one facet of their identity. And by extension, when faced with such a dubious situation, think, discern for yourself what’s right or wrong. When there are people educating you, policing you on what is right or wrong, process that information objectively.  

All I have here right now is my own opinions on the gender discourse on Hange and my own opinions on the discourse overall. 

If you don’t agree with it, then have a nice day and I hope you find something else that will convince you to be more openminded but...

UTANG NA LOOB HUWAG LANG KAYO MAMBULLY NG TAO POTA. MAGHANAP NALANG KAYO NG IBANG PWEDENG GAWIN SA BUHAY MO. 

ANG DAMING NASASAKTAN ANG DAMING NATRATRAUMA ANG DAMING NAWAWALANG GANA MAGSULAT KASI DI KAYO NAG-IISIP. PURO TIRA LANG. 

Okay thank you for listening. Do what you want with the information up there but I have said my piece.

[accioecho]

Tkem novel 13

Chapter 17 “A joint investigation”

Tae-Eul’s grand plans for the two of them that night consisted of dropping by the shooting range, winning the biggest prize there and walking through the quiet city streets.

The soft stuffed lion was definitely bigger than something that fit the palm of a hand. Tae-Eul successfully hit all seven targets and gave Gon the bulky plush toy.

Tae-Eul’s shooting abilities were incomparable. Gon was no match for her. Sure, when he saw Tae-Eul’s remarkable skills he had first felt a little embarrassed by his poor performance. However that feeling had quickly been replaced by pride.

Gon held the toy against his chest, dimples crinkling, a content expression adorning his face.

“Why do you like that stuffed animal anyway?” Tae-Eul asked when she saw his proud smile.

“Because it’s a lion. It resembles you. Lions are fierce, courageous. And impressive.”

“Ah, I see.”

Her shoulders shook with mirth. They had barely spent half a day together and she had laughed several times already.

Gon put his arm around her. They were walking side by side, like any other regular couple. Spending time together like this… It would be really easy to fall into the quiet comfort of daily life.

As they neared her house, Tae-Eul finally broached the subject she had avoided until then. She  had initially planned to bring up the subject as soon as she saw him but she had also really wanted to spend the precious time they had without any interference. Just her and him.

“Answer me without letting me go.”

“I won’t.”

“I want to ask as soon as I saw you but I was holding back. I waited for you as a detective but also as myself all this time.”

Gon halted his steps and turned to her. Eyes slightly widening, lips forming an uncharacteristic grim line, he grabbed her shoulders. Truth be told, there were a lot of things he had wished to discuss with Tae-Eul as well.

“Has something happened? Were you threatened by someone? Because of me?”

“I guess that means it will happen. That’s why you came.”

So much for a quiet daily life together. The idea of a regular life would have to wait some more.

Their eyes locked. Tae-Eul held Gon’s sharp, worried gaze.

“What is it?” Gon asked.

“Is there a dome stadium named K Stadium in the northern region there? With a capacity of 16,890 seats?”

“How do you know that? Did you look that up too?”

So she was right. Tae-Eul’s face tinged with concern. She had a lot to explain. Her hands slid inside her pocket and pulled out the usb key, the tiny item held tightly between her fingers.

Without waiting any further, Tae-Eul hastily ushered Gon to her place.

Gon, who had mostly hung around Tae-Eul’s now very familiar courtyard, who had never gone further than the Taekwondo Dojang, suddenly found himself stepping into the intimacy of her bedroom. Although he was there for a very specific purpose and not in the context of a romantic date.

Gon briefly looked around his surroundings. Her room was sprinkled with countless pictures from her childhood. A few shelves were pushed against the wall and were filled with books she had probably all read. A multitude of other belongings littered the small space.

Slowly approaching her bed, Gon carefully placed the stuffed lion next to her pillow.

They both sat down by the desk. Tae-Eul turned on her laptop, slid the USB key in its slot and played the audio file.

Gon didn’t need to listen for long. He recognized the news anchor’s voice. This was a piece of broadcast from the Kingdom.

“Is it?” Tae-Eul asked.

“Yes, it’s news from my world. But you found it here?” His mind was sent reeling at the thought of Tae-Eul’s discovery. “Who else knows about this?”

“Just me for now. I can’t really tell anyone about this. Nobody will believe it anyway.”

“What are you thinking of doing?”

“I need to investigate further and figure this out. This was my case, before I even met you.”

He respected, no— liked her bravery. This trait was one of the things that made Tae-Eul inherently her. But just this one time, he wished she was less courageous.

“It could be more dangerous than you think.” Gon swallowed the lump in his throat.

“That’s why I thought about just covering it up. But… if I cover it up, then no one will ever find out about this, since there would be only two people who know about this. Me. And the culprit.”

He was wrong.

She was braver than he thought.

She was brave and amazing.

“The two worlds shouldn’t get mixed up like this. They’re supposed to stay on their respective paths. But the two worlds are already colliding, and I’ve discovered it. So what else can I do? That’s why I decided to investigate. I’m a police officer in the Republic of Korea.”

He couldn’t stop anything then. Changes were already in motion, there was nothing he could do to prevent danger from reaching Tae-Eul.

She was in danger the moment she met him, yet she showed no fear, her sense of justice unwavering.

As the King of a nation, responsibilities weighed heavily on his shoulders. Tae-Eul equally felt the same responsibilities as a government officer of the Republic of Korea.

For a tiny second, Tae-Eul had worried Gon would perhaps hold this against her. She was wrong from the start.

Gon still seemed to be lost in thought, his mind going over the recent events. His posture was stiff, eyes unfocused and looking into the distance. As an attempt to distract him, Tae-Eul forced out a shaky laugh.  

She also shared his sentiments. What were the odds that the one case she had been investigating for the past few weeks turned out to be tied to another universe. This was bigger than simply the two of them. She had no idea what she was getting into and she felt apprehensive by the sheer unknown that lay ahead of them.

Despite all this, there was one thing that she was sure about.

Gon probably didn’t know this.

Yes, she had always been courageous. But in that instant, the reason that gave her strength, the reason why she felt she could be braver was because of him. Because he was by her side.

“So tell me everything you know about this. This is a cooperative operation that only we can do.”

“How goes the order of command?”

“I’m your superior of course. I give the orders here.” Tae-Eul answered without hesitation.

Gon let out a small chuckle and reached into the inner pocket of his jacket. He pulled out a neatly folded enveloppe that contained a copy of Lee Lim’s death certificate and fingerprints confirmation. With shaky fingers, Tae-Eul grabbed the document.

“Lee Lim? That’s…”

“Yes, the traitor. If he’s alive, he’ll be 69 right now. You should find someone who matches his age, blood type and fingerprints. In my world, his body was found the year after he committed treason. But the body… was someone else’s.”

Something was definitely strange. Staring at the file, Tae-Eul sat still, all muscles in her body tensing up. This was beyond their imagination. That a dead person could somehow still be alive.

Tae-Eul knew this was possible though. Because out there stood a gate leading to another universe. A parallel world, where individuals that looked exactly the same as in the Republic existed.

“If Lee Lim is alive… He’s here, using that body’s identity.”

“That’s right. We have to figure out what he’s done here for the past 24 years.”

“I’ll look into it. But until I figure it out, do just 17 things. Stay quiet, don’t draw people’s attention, don’t tell anyone you’re a king, keep Jo Yeong out of trouble, don’t use any guns, contact me whenever you go somewhere. And I’ll tell you the rest when I think of any.”

“I’ll do as you order. Just do two things for me.”

Wondering what he would say, Tae-Eul turned her face towards Gon. He wore an unreadable expression and wouldn’t meet her gaze.

Gon pursed his lips. He hesitated for a moment, and then finally spoke his mind.

“Don’t tell me not to come. And don’t tell me not to leave.”

“…”

“I have to go back sometimes, and when I do, I want to come back soon. Whichever it is, if you tell me not to come or leave, I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything.”

Even in normal circumstances, people easily got tired of their partner when they stayed apart for a short time. In their case, a whole universe stood between the two of them, like a wall standing firm and tall. Gon deeply hoped Tae-Eul wouldn’t experience any difficulties or become weary.

This was the very first time he felt this way. He knew this was selfish of him. In all his life as a King, ever since he was born, he never once harbored any selfish interests.

“So I’m asking you not to get exhausted. I feel like a lousy man after saying that. Am I?”

Still staring at Gon, Tae-Eul slightly nodded.

“I’m confused about which part you were nodding to.”

Tae-Eul let out a small giggle and started tidying up the desk. There was a time not so long ago when Tae-Eul thought she would never understand him. That was when he first came to the Republic, babbling about parallel universes, quantum mechanics and what not. She thought he was just a crazy guy and they would never be on the same page.

Before she knew it, she found herself understanding Gon’s way of thinking and perfectly being able to read his feelings. Because she was the same.

“You should go now. Yeong must be sick with worry since he doesn’t know where you are. He must be waiting for you.”

“Why would you think Yeong doesn’t know where I am?”

Tae-Eul abruptly stood up and went to the window to look outside. Seeing the empty courtyard, she looked around her surroundings.

“He’s following us around here too?”

“I guess I’ve made you curious. I’ll be off now.”

“There’s something else I’m curious about. Am I really not in your world?”

Gon who was about to open her bedroom’s door, stopped in his tracks.

“Eun-Sup and Jo Yeong. Nari and that palace worker. Even this person has the same face. Do I really not exist there?”

Gon stood still, unable to confirm or deny. His silence was answer enough.

“I do, don’t I?” Tae-Eul didn’t know what to think. This felt strange.

“I wanted to wait until I was sure before I told you. But it looks like it. There seems to be a person that looks like you, yes.”

Long after Gon was gone, Tae-Eul couldn’t shake the image of her double existing somewhere in another world.

—

“Your Majesty. You must return to the palace. I can’t protect you here, your Majesty. What is this place, and how long have you been coming here? Your Majesty, we don’t have a life here.”

Unable to hold back, Yeong let out all the things he’d been thinking about but couldn’t say aloud when they were with Tae-Eul and Eun-Sup.  

Always looking out for him. Always defending his best interests. Gon was proud of him.

And he was about to relieve him of these daunting, heavy responsibilities.

Ever since their first meeting when Gon was eight years old, not once did Yeong disappoint or upset him. Yeong had become his most loyal subject, his best friend, his brother.

He felt guilty and sorry. But he was the only person who could carry out the task he was about to give him.

“You’ve endured a lot, Captain Jo. Yeong-ah. I can’t leave the palace permanently or give up coming here altogether. So you have to help me.”

[nacrelyses]

okay brain if i make the post will you shut up

so love, me normally can be interpreted in a romantic sense, and it would make sense for it to be interpreted in a romantic sense of someone who desperately wishes they weren’t so different from the norm, so “bad”, so “abnormal”; that they’re so tired of being different and being treated different that they just want to be loved like they’re normal, loved like a nobody

but that’s not what i’m making this post about god damnit keep on track-

[under a read more because it’s very heavy. tw external and internal queerphobia, existential despair, also this is so long oh god 2k words]

 i could make a joke about how “cross my i’s, dot my t’s” is a joke about going on testosterone but uh i’m just going to talk about first stanza 

“I was delivered holding scissors, I live deliberately, I’m a quitter And a winner anyway, cause I never agreed to participate in this game”

this’ll come up later in this long ass post but the child is delivered holding the scissors to cut their own umbilical cord. when a child is born and they are a queer individual, it is up to them to cut the ties that hurt them the most - even the most close and familial ones. in the way that an umbilical cord is cut because the baby no longer needs the mother’s nutrients, the child is born with the inevitable fate of having to cut off those whose approval and love they can no longer thrive off of, or can no longer receive. or, it could be a metaphor for the scissors of fate, where the child is born with their fate in their own hands and they, being an outlier in queerphobic society, must make do with what they’ve got.

“i live deliberately, i’m a quitter” the child lives deliberately in their quest for self discovery and their need to understand and accept their queerness but at the same time they are a quitter in all the things that society considers normal but they cannot utilize to function: a white collar job when the child is an artist, a nuclear family when the child just doesn’t want one, keeping in contact with your parents when the parents do not accept their child.

“And a winner anyway, cause I never agreed to participate in this game” this comes up later in the post as well but yeah the child never agreed to participate in this game of life. they didn’t ask to be a player, but by default of their unwillingness and their lack of consent, they are made a winner because they are the only player at the table of their own life. they are made an unwilling winner for something they never had the consciousness to consent to experience. they can be called “strong” later in life for overcoming queerphobia, lauded as a “winner” over their oppression, but it rings hollow because to be a real winner, you have to have agreed to be playing in the first place. 

and then the chorus, this is pretty obvious. like the 

“And I'd rather be normal. Yes, so normal I suggest that we keep this informal Cause a normal human being wouldn't need To pretend to be normal to be normal Well I guess that's the least that I owe ya To be normal in a way I couldn’t be C’mon, c’mon, and love me normally”

because you know, that could kinda be interpreted as a queer child talking to their queerphobic parents. it doesn’t fucking matter if their parents are proud of them for their grades or their achievements now because no matter what, they’re proud of the persona of the child they’ve constructed for themselves. they’re proud of a fraud. the child knows they’ll never truly be loved the way they are, that their parents will only love who they want the child to be and they’ll only love the image they have of their child. think of it like internalized queerphobia, homophobia, transphobia, the idea that similar to i/me/myself, it would be easier if i were a girl [or cisgender, for a general application] and it would be easier if i were normal. the child would rather be normal in the way their parents see normal and they feel that they owe their parents, for all their parents have done to provide for them and pay for their bills and everything, the bare minimum of pretending to be normal so that they don’t break their parents’ hearts. and it’s really for the sake of everyone in the family because if they’re outed, the parents will argue, the parents will be sad, their siblings will be upset by the arguing and the mourning, they feel as though they owe their family this bare minimum of pretending -  both for their own safety, and for the prosperity of their family. moving on.

“If I could live in third person, well I don’t think life would be much worse than it is In the current tense, presently, this sentence ending in question marks or dot dot dot…”

the child feels like if they were an outsider witnessing their own life in a third person perspective, it still wouldn’t change a lot. or it wouldn’t be much worse, it might actually be better, in a sense, because they’re fully disassociated from the identity that alienates them so from their parents and their parents’ approval. but they’re living in first person, so this sentence (their life, basically, drawing upon how a suicide prevention thing a while back was using a semicolon as a symbol of your life being an author’s sentence) ends in two ways. a question mark, showing how their existence as someone outside the “norm” of a queerphobic society is rife with constant questioning and identity gaslighting because of how “abnormal” it is to deviate from the norm that you are left without many resources to figure yourself out. you die at the end of the day perhaps not even knowing who you truly are because society has not yet normalized terms that could better articulate your identity, and because you can never really know yourself. or, your sentence ends in a dot dot dot. forever unfinished. you leave with so many loose ends - maybe you move out and cut off contact with your family forever, and live perhaps happier but never knowing if they change their mind (oh god now i’m thinking about change your mind from steven universe and how steven’s entire story is a metaphor for the trans experience). maybe you decide to continue pretending and you cut off the option of really getting to know yourself a little bit better, and you die never knowing who you could have been. so living in full disassociation would at the very least not be much worse than how the first person tense currently is.

“I drank myself to death to be the afterlife of the party When the afterparty came, I was rolling in my grave”

no i am not an alcoholic, thank you very much, i am a responsible person. but the substance abuse reference can be applied to any self destructive habit that arises out of a need to cope - in this case, the child’s need to cope with their fractured identity. maybe they turn towards being hyperfeminine or hypermasculine in an attempt to feel connected with their assigned gender, which branches out into so many different destructive habits (aforementioned drinking, drugs, eating disorders, etc). they do so to become the “afterlife” of the party - if you think about a “party” as a moment in time, it can be the moment you are in in your life. the child turns towards these destructive habits to try to achieve the unachievable. to bring the afterlife into life, to bring their parents’ false image of the child into fruition when that is never impossible and that in itself becomes destructive. but they do this in the current moment of their life, in the current party, so when the afterparty comes, they’re already dead. when the afterparty comes, they roll in their grave because it’s a hollow call for what they could have been: a more genuine person to themselves, a happier individual free of parents’ queerphobia. 

“I want you to love the way they so seamlessly, like a dream for me, so beautifully, oh so dutifully jam that square peg in the round hole in their hearts”

the bridge monologue is very very romantic-coded and i don’t think i can pull much meaning from the first bit but here, have the “jam the square peg in the round hold in their hearts”. the child has learned to “seamlessly”, like a second instinct, to jam the square peg of their parents’ false image into the round hole in their hearts, to somehow cram something into a space that was never meant to fit and should not be fitted at all. this quote speaks as though it’s the child talking to their parents, telling them, “i want you to love me, but you are only loving me as i am now, when i am literally destroying myself to be who you’re capable of loving”

“I want you to tell 'em that you love the way that they don't stick out like sore middle fingers That they crawl their way up the side of the bell curve, stick their flag in the peak, and slide their way back down I want you to tell them that you love the way that they're not maladaptive, not malcontent, not malignant or maleficent, but rather that you love them exactly the way that everybody else is”

yep. so the bell curve, the statistical graph, the idea that their child could sit perfectly at the average as the cishet kid their parents expected them to be. the way that they’re not “maladaptive, not malcontent, not malignant or maleficent”, which can all be adjectives weaponized in queerphobic rhetoric against the queer community. and the final line, that their parents love the child “exactly the way that everybody else is”. their parents hold their child to a supposed “norm” that does not really exist because of how suppressed queerness is in society, that the norm is most likely not the norm at all and who’s to say what’s a norm? their parents love them when they are “normal” and it feels like that’s the only way they’ll ever be able to love you. they’ll not be able to learn how to love a different you. 

“I was nothing before so I couldn’t have asked to be born I'll be nothing again, so what am I between now and then? Is there nothing to fear? Cause sh*t's getting weird So to God who made this man, you better have one hell of a plan”

deep breath. okay. okay. first of all, will wood’s inflections from the last line of the first bridge all throughout the second bridge are gorgeous and hit so hard. 

but yeah. here we go here we go ho boy

the idea that birth in itself is actually an immoral thing, since children don’t ask to be born. they don’t ask to be brought into this world, to experience this world, to develop mental illnesses and to face queerphobia or discrimination or danger in any sense because of who they are. they don’t ask to be born into a family that consistently alienates them and forces them to keep quiet about something that’s so important to them. and the child, in learning that their parents are queerphobic and will never accept them the way they are, realizes now even more that they never asked to be born. they didn’t ask for this closeted life. they didn’t ask for this kind of pain, this kind of false love, this kind of otherness. they never asked for any of this. 

“i’ll be nothing again...” the idea that life is finite, that they’ll become that “nothing” they were before they were born if they come out to their parents because in that sense, it’s the parents asking themselves, “why did we have a child that turned out this way? we didn’t ask for this kind of child. we never asked for this kind of person. we never asked to raise them as they are now.” look if you can’t fucking accept that your child will be anything other than a cishet individual made to play out your nuclear family life so you can project your ideas of parenting and hopefully help parent your grandchildren in all the ways you fucked up your own kids i want you to-to- the window is right there. leave. fucking leave. 

“Is there nothing to fear? Cause sh*t's getting weird So to God who made this man, you better have one hell of a plan”

is there really nothing to fear, from your parents? they’re supposed to be your closest guidance but is there truly nothing to fear from them if they hate the idea of who you really are? the child is questioning their identity (”shit’s getting weird”) and everything they’ve ever perceived their parents as is thrown up in the air.

and we can’t have all this internalized queerphobia without some religious trauma, can we? the child asks the all knowing, all seeing God, “what was your plan for me?” did this God intend for this child to have to go through this pain? this suffering which is often carried out in the name of aforementioned deity? this God better have one hell of a plan, really, because this child sure as hell needs one, and this God better have a good enough excuse to be able to redeem themselves in this child’s eyes. 

all the choruses are just the child constantly asking their parents: “am i normal enough?” “do i need to pretend more?” “i know i owe you this much at least, can you tell me you love me? the normal me?” “can you tell me you love me at all?”

[pochiperpe90]

Luca Marinelli: "Without growing you get lost"

When director Pietro Marcello asked him to play Martin Eden in his film in competition at Venice, Luca Marinelli was moved. "Many things have changed in recent years, maybe me as well"

From written words to moving images: «When you make a film based on a book, the book, at a certain point, tends to overlap. You no longer know what the novel is and what the screenplay is. Today I remember the end of Jack London's Martin Eden: that poignant conclusion, with him in the cabin reading that poem and deciding about his life».

Luca Marinelli, star of Pietro Marcello's Martin Eden, in competition at the next Venice International Film Festival and in theatre from September 4th with 01 Distribution, brings together memories and emotions, and gives them a precise order: everything starts from there, from the novel by the American writer.

"What was the soul of the book, which in my opinion is above any kind of discourse, political, social and idealistic; that soul, I said, was respected. Because it’s embodied in the character of Martin Eden. And then when you translate a book into a film it happens that some things take another form: it's normal in an adaptation." In the case of this film, says Marinelli, it all started from Marcello's point of view, from his vision: "Which perhaps is not like what someone else can have or like mine, because it’s a vision that belongs to the director: it’s the vision of the artist Pietro Marcello. The first scripts were certainly different, they were longer, denser, full of references to the book. The very first, if I'm not mistaken, was nearly 300 pages long. And this is because we were dealing with a masterpiece, and we didn't want to leave out anything».

Could this film be different?

“No, this film is how it was supposed to be. But with a book like this you can do anything: a 12-hours play, a film, a short film. Martin Eden is one of the best books ever written. Cinema imposes different times and measures from written narration; the balance that Pietro and Maurizio Braucci, co-screenwriter, found and the work they did were excellent, in my opinion".

Let's start with when they proposed you the role of Martin Eden.

“I remember my tears as I was watching “Bella e perduta”; I remember my emotion, and I also remember that immediately after I finished watching it I told myself that it would be nice to work with this director. It was 2015. Three years later they call me, and they tell me that Pietro Marcello wanted to meet me. Imagine my happiness. Knowing, then, that this film would be born from Jack London's book moved me even more».

What convinced you to accept?

«Martin Eden is a human being of great sensitivity, great curiosity and great empathy; he has an enormous desire to discover, to see, to touch with his hand. However, he suffers countless disappointments. He climbs a mountain only to learn, once he reaches the top, that a sad camp resides there, and that the best thing was never to get there, to the goal, but perhaps the very start. The journey".

And was it difficult to make this journey?

“It's a question that I have asked myself too, and the answer I have given myself is both yes and no. No, because being next to Pietro, Maurizio, colleagues and all the people who collaborated on the film, I found the right push and the right support to get into the character. But the difficulties, of course, are always there. What I really wanted to understand was Martin Eden. I abandoned myself to the first sensation I had while reading the book and the screenplay».

What was that feeling?

"A gigantic emotion. This character speaks directly to each of us because everyone shares something with him. Each of us wants to do, to exist. To reach a goal. Only then we come up against obstacles that make us lose hope - in part or in whole».

But when did the spark go off?

“I've always been passionate about writers like London or Stevenson. Adventurers, capable of creating worlds, of giving life to characters with their eyes open to the society around them. Entering a life like that, a life where the sea is so present, a life made of traveling, of seeing, made of pure passion, intrigued me a lot. And then there was Naples".

Compared to Jack London's book, Pietro Marcello's film is a rewrite set in the Neapolitan capital.

“I had never lived all this time in Naples; and I had never known it so much. I have not yet been able to fully understand it; not completely. Naples is a place apart. I have come to love it. Naples is a whole people. Something fantastic. It’s a place with a huge identity. A very strong identity. Think of the language: it’s not a dialect, it’s a language. And then you meet people who make you realize how beautiful it is to be Neapolitan: how welcoming it is, how fascinating it is, how deep it is. Naples, for me, was a great discovery».

Is sensitivity a condemnation?

"I don’t know. On one hand, yes, it can make you suffer more. But I wouldn't see it as a sentence. Sensitivity allows you to see the world; it leads you to respect what is around you».

But it also brings loneliness with it.

«Martin Eden distances himself from everything and from himself: he can no longer be in contact with anything or anyone, he is disappointed».

In this film, the clash between the class of intellectuals and the so-called people also finds space.

"I think that the true intellectual, like Pasolini was, manages to put himself on the same level as the society, to look at it in the eye, to speak to the common man without being opinionated, just showing what is there: what is happening".

At one point, you find yourself sharing the scene with Carlo Cecchi, who plays Russ Brissenden.

«I was very excited because I found my teacher. And it was great to be with him there, on the set, more than six years after we had last acted together."

You said you got excited

“Because in the film he plays Martin Eden's mentor, and Carlo was a mentor to me too. It was a real gift”.

How many things have changed over the years?

"Many."

And you? Have you changed as an actor?

“I don't know, I swear. But maybe I was better before (laughs)».

What do you mean?

"I started with the theater, where there is no safety net, there is no" stop, let's do it again!" and there is no possibility to stop, start over, rethink. I miss that courage».

Is theater a torment or an obsession?

"It’s never a torment or an obsession. Sometimes at night, however, I dream of going on stage and not remembering anything anymore».

Perhaps it’s today's cinema that tends to be not very brave.

«In my opinion it’s experiencing a new period. And it’s not a coincidence that Marcello's Martin Eden arrives right now, in this moment. Surely we could give a voice to many more people. Even that, if you like, is a question of courage».

Martin Eden also speaks of talent and perseverance. What is more important, in your opinion?

“They go hand in hand. Talent is the first thing you see. It’s the primordial spark. But you can't just rely on that. You have to be curious, eat life, live it to the fullest, intensely and consciously. But to live it, one must also commit oneself: and one must be prepared».

You need to read.

«For me a book is always a victory. Because you have been elsewhere and have lived a story that is different from yours."

What kind of reader are you?

“I wouldn't call myself an avid reader: but the more I grow, the older I get, the older I get and the more I read. Because I am more and more aware of how beautiful it is».

Reading isn’t just a hobby.

"Thoreau says: "As if you could kill time without injuring eternity". It’s important not to waste time; but it’s important to do it without causing anguish or fear. You have to be there, stay there, live in the moment. But without exaggerating».

When you were younger - when you were a child - what were you like?

“I've always been surrounded by curious people. Even my friends, the ones I had as a child and the ones I still have now, are curious. We liked to move, to go around, to be together; we lived the street. We also enjoyed listening to music, reading comics and books, and watching movies."

And curiosity soon turned into fascination.

“Acting has always fascinated me. And only at a certain point did I manage to find the right courage to try. And I don't know why: I really don't know. In the Academy this phrase was always repeated: “play seriously”. And maybe was this that interested me; or not".

We talked about teachers. Who were they to you?

«People like Carlo Cecchi or Anna Marchesini. They were moments, very important meetings».

How did you come in contact with Marchesini?

"We studied with her for three months at the Academy, and it was wonderful because for the first time I wrote something of my own. Each of us, each of the students, had to write something about himself, starting from his identity card - this was the initial task. And it was, believe me, very difficult».

What impressed you about her?

"The energy, the dedication, the beauty. I remember the moments with her, the wonderful phrases she said. What has always fascinated me to see was the passion she put into it».

Other teachers?

"My grandfather. I always liked the job he did: he was a carpenter. In the academy they told us many times: "you have to be a craftsmen". And I was always thinking of him».

What, in the end, do you have left of Martin Eden?

«The sense of collectivity. Passion. The importance of looking around. To always look at others and at themselves. The adventure of life, and the wonder it represents. What deeply tears Martin Eden apart is betraying himself and being disappointed in his own dreams. We can fight against this only if we are faithful to ourselves, to our beliefs, to our places of origin. And then, you know, all the rest remains: remains all that world».

VANITY FAIR

Just wanted to translate this old interview for the non-italian’s fans ^^ (sorry for my English)

[thexfridax]

Translated interview (with omissions)

The female gaze: An interview with Céline Sciamma

Michael Ranze, filmdienst.de, 2nd of November 2019

// Additions or clarifications for translating purposes are denoted as [T: …]. A couple of omissions in the first interview, but I provided links to existing articles with more information. I’ve also added extracts from two more interviews with Céline below. Aaaaand... I believe this is it for German Portrait interviews! 😅 //

A conversation with the French director about ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’.

The French director Céline Sciamma already garnered international attention with her debut film ‘Water Lilies’. She is now a regular at the big film festivals. Her recent film ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ is a multi-layered love story between a female painter and a young noble woman, whom she has to paint.

Interviewer: Your first three films ‘Water Lilies’ (2007), ‘Tomboy’ (2011) and ‘Girlhood' (2014) are about the coming-of-age of female characters, about their search for identity, including sexual identity. Where does this great interest in the world view of young women come from?

Céline Sciamma: I was lucky enough to make films as a young woman and to talk about things that I know about and understand. That’s why my first three films were closely connected to the childhood and youth of the heroines, and their female identity. I’m also pursuing the same theme in my new film ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’, this time with grown women. In the other films there was always the desire for love, which is also self-discovery. Love is fully lived out this time – this creates some kind of dialogue. I am 40 years old – I now have to talk about these things. (laughs) [T: Also see here, here, here or here about her previous films]

I: But there’s also the theme of female solidarity, especially in ‘Girlhood’…

CS: Yes, indeed. The more my work develops, the more it deals with the theme of friendship, sorority, but also the ability to enjoy life to the fullest. This also includes solidarity, these small islands that women can establish together. My films open up the space for this idea, this is much more radical in ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ than in my previous films.

I: But you also wrote the screenplay for André Téchiné’s film ‘Being 17’, where the two main characters are adolescent boys.

CS: That’s the same kind of work for me. It’s about creating characters without objectifying them, and to find access to their experiences. The female gaze is not only about filming women. It’s also about being aware about the images and representations. You have to pay a lot of attention, when you are inventing or composing something. Otherwise it becomes conventional, or you create characters that are empty. That applies to men and women. The male gaze is damaging for male representation in my opinion. I thought that it would be interesting for me to do it differently.

I: How did you work together with André Téchiné on the screenplay?

CS: This was the only time in my career as scriptwriter that I worked on the script with someone else. I admire Téchiné’s work. My first cinephile emotions are linked to his films. It was therefore a lot of fun to enter his matrix and get access to his thinking, on the one hand to participate, and on the other hand to support his goals. The fact that he wanted to do a film about youth motivated me to make him a young film director. [T: Also see here about her work on ‘Being 17′]

I: He is now 76 years old.

CS: Yes, exactly. He was 73, when we worked together. But it never felt like there was a huge age hierarchy between us. I admire him very much, he really fuelled my ambitions, we have a very intense relationship.

I: What do you like more: writing scripts or directing films?

CS: This has changed. I always liked the balance between the two, also the fact that I didn’t always have to follow my own wishes, but could immerse myself in another logic and worlds, and distract myself. But over the years I realised that I don’t want to lose any more time. It’s of course not a waste of time to work for others. But you sometimes have to put up with long project delays. For the first time in a long time I don’t have any screenplay assignments, and I like this feeling. But you never know what may happen. I was really blessed with some projects. For ‘My Life as a Courgette’, it just gave me joy to write a film for children. If something like that comes along again, I would do it immediately. [T: Also see here about her work on ‘My Life as a Courgette’]

[T: Omitted Q&A about the reasons why she did a period film, but see here, here or here]

I: What are the challenges when you recreate a period, which was so long ago?

CS: You have to do a lot of research, especially about the situation of female artists. You really have to dig deep, because no one wrote a thick book on it. The other challenge was the collaboration with others. That is the beauty of cinema. The costume designer does research about that period, so does the set designer. This is my third collaboration with Thomas Grézaud (he also worked with Sciamma on ‘Girlhood’ and ‘Tomboy’, editor’s note). He always suggests something, which is then incorporated into the film. When it is about historic films, then accuracy is very important. But sometimes it’s also interesting to consider what is not in the picture. For example, there is not much furniture. We built the few pieces ourselves, out of wood and with cotton. It was more about believing in cinema, in action, in clear lines.

I: So you work closely with the costume and set designer?

CS: Yes, there is a close coordination. I wanted some kind of uniform for the characters, for example. We then looked at various costumes. They were not supposed to be out of silk but rather heavy fabrics, which restrain the actresses, force them into their roles and at the same time describe the sociology of their characters. I also wanted pockets for the costume of the female painter, even though others told me it would be anachronistic or too modern. Fact is that pockets existed back then and that they vanished in the 19th century. The ‘femme bourgeoise’ [T: middle-class woman] was invented, and fashion went backwards. I liked the idea of this silhouette, which was even accurate. That is our job: We try to give a presence to these women from back then.

[T: Omitted Q&A about how the actresses were recruited, it mentions the circulation of gazes between the three, the physical and psychological contrast between Adèle and Noémie, Céline describes them both as strong, intense, determined and courageous actresses, she also wanted to create an iconic and fresh couple; see here or here]

I: You spoke about the ‘circulation of gazes’. Between the actresses there are short and long gazes, shy and curious ones. How did you conceptualise this ‘ballet of gazes’?

CS: That was already in the script, especially the rhythm of the gazes, when they look at each other. The actresses were very much aware about that. It’s not about dictating what they have to do. But it’s rather a way to start the conversation, to show their connection or communicate their intentions. They have to ‘dance’. I call it a collection of gazes. As you already said: We have this gaze, we have that gaze. It changes with every scene. And it shows how good the actresses are. If it’s in the script, then the actresses are very, very good [T: this was weirdly worded]. Otherwise they might suggest something that doesn’t fit. You have to see straight away that they desire each other. And it’s brilliant how they do it.

I: I liked the beginning of the film, when Marianne jumps out of the boat to retrieve her large case. A woman isn’t supposed to do that, so it shows that Marianne is different than others…

CS: And the film also shows that: She is not a woman who follows the rules. She jumps into the water to get her things. The important thing is: The film also jumps into the water. The camera also dives in, we swim with her. That’s two pieces of information: This character will be an active one, and the film will join this jump. [T: Also see here]

I: There are only women on the island…

CS: No – we just don’t show the men.

I: The island seems like a refuge or even a utopia.

CS: Yes – that’s true. In cinema, it is about what you decide to show in the picture. I didn’t want to show men, because then it would have been about the pressure and dominance that existed back then and still does. We now look at what is possible, at the potential of the women. You can also call it utopia, but these are not imaginary futuristic dreams, it is based on life experiences, maybe on a higher level, if it was more based on reciprocity. And political utopia – there has to be a place, where the economy doesn’t determine everything, where there is no sexism or racism. These places exist, in families, communities, maybe in a city. This culture has to grow. This utopia arises from experiences that we make and transform to ideas.

[T: Omitted Q&A about the cinematography of Portrait, but see here or here]

—

Interview with director Céline Sciamma (extracts)

Sportello745, moviebreak.de, 9th of October 2019

[…] Interviewer: In your debut film ‘Water Lilies’ you contrast the uncontainable, awakening hormones of the main character with a perfectly synchronised swimming team. In which way does the landscape characterise the emotions in your new film?

Céline Sciamma: In Water Lilies, it was about what’s on the surface and what’s hidden below. I guess, even with synchronised swimming it’s less about control but more about what you don’t see and the effort you have to make underneath. I don’t think I rely on symbolism too much, I get often asked about the meaning of, for example, colours. That’s not really how I think, I try to embody certain things and be less metaphoric. But maybe in this film the tension is between love and art and beauty. The landscape does fit into this tension very much. [T: Also see here or here for Water Lilies]

I: Did the paintings that you researched have any influence on the language of the film, and if yes, which paintings in particular?

CS: Yes, they did. It was especially the self portraits of female painters, because these pictures were quite different from what you would expect. There was a specific painting, which was actually not from the 18th century but from the 17th century, it was from a woman called Judith Leyster, a [T: Dutch; also see here]. Her work was misattributed to her husband. In the picture, you can see her painting, she smiles, you can see her teeth. I have never seen something like that. It helped me to be courageous, which means it made us invent something new and not be scared of being unconventional. That is exactly the kind of female contribution to art history: When Virginia Woolf writes, she reinvents literature, she revolutionises it [T: also see here or here]. When Chantal Akerman films ‘Jeanne Dielman’, it is a revolution for cinema [T: also see here, here or here]. The voices of women are not only limited to ‘Hey, we have a little story to tell’, but it is always about reinventing art. It is about creating something new instead of the same old. […]

I: When did Marianne paint the eponymous ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’ in your opinion, shortly after her encounter on the island or many years later?

CS: I think, she painted it a couple of years later. That is her memory. When I commissioned the painting, I originally wanted to have 20 frames, maybe even that Marianne’s whole work is based on this moment. A kind of ‘usual suspects’ situation, where everyone reappears. But this moment [T: at the bonfire] is definitely the matrix for what she will do next, and I think, [T: the painting] was made years later […].

I: At the end of the film the love story between the two is ‘concluded’. On the one hand, the ending is bittersweet, because the love has been immortalised in a painting. On the other hand, it is also quite sad, we see Héloïse crying. It felt as if this great piece of art, which tells the story of the two women, can never be exchanged for the love that was lost. What do you think?

CS: We tried to spark a dynamic where the end of the love story doesn’t mean that they spend eternity together or die. It was about getting rid of the sentiment that the victory of love is mutual possession. Their love for each other made them curious about love itself and art. For me, the last scene addresses how art deeply affects us and how love makes us more emotional towards beauty. […] At the end, Héloïse feels the music she would never have felt if she had not loved. Love as curation for being curious about the future, about art, about beauty. That for me is a positive dynamic, even though it is heartbreaking, which was on purpose. At the end, both women are more open, and that is the dynamic of emancipation, which I love. And it is positive to talk about it.

—

Sciamma: ‘I want to show images of daily life that are missing’ (extracts)

Patricia Batlle, NDR.de, 29th of October 2019

Interviewer: You had a very lively screening of your film ‘Portrait of a Lady on Fire’. There were standing ovations from the audience, and there was an animated conversation with you and the lead actresses Adèle Haenel and Noémie Merlant. Were you surprised to be so warmly welcomed in Northern Germany?

Céline Sciamma: It’s funny because you are sometimes cautioned that other countries have a less welcoming culture, but not to take it personally. So you prepare for different types of audiences. But then the reception in Hamburg was really, really warm. It doesn’t surprise me, because I believe that film is a nation, that film culture is unique and unites the viewers [T: PORTRAIT NATION FTW]. A cinema is sometimes like a country. I travel around a lot with the film and I feel the warmth, this fire in the cinema across countries. […]

I: You address topics like menstruation and abortion that are rarely shown in cinema – especially not in love films.

CS: Yes, why is that? That is crazy! This clearly is part of the pleasure of the film, part of its political intention. To show images that are missing, although these are images of daily life. Our story should put our audience on an emotional rollercoaster, where the images have an unusual relationship with the story and are surprising. That is the power of new images.

I: Four women play an important role in your film, men are on the sideline. The names of the women stand out all the more. The self-confident painter is called Marianne. The name is synonymous for the Republic of France – was this on purpose?

CS: I have to admit: I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about the Marianne of the Republic, when I wrote the script. The names of all my characters are related. In my debut film ‘Water Lilies’ my main character was called Marie, in ‘Girlhood’ she was called Marieme, and here she is called Marianne. It’s like a thread that runs from film to film. But it’s true: It is France! I like the fact that you noticed this. (laughs) […]

—

Articles:

https://www.filmdienst.de/artikel/38732/interview-celine-sciamma-zu-portrat-einer-jungen-frau-in-flammen

https://www.moviebreak.de/features/interview-mit-regisseurin-celine-sciamma/item?item=2

https://www.ndr.de/kultur/film/Sciamma-ueber-Portraet-einer-jungen-Frau-in-Flammen,frauinflammen106.html

Picture sources: [1], [2]

[jacepens]

A little Bulbasaur (me) coming out as obscure identities

From left to right: aceflux, bialterous, aromantic

First off, yes. My bulbasaur is little off but it’s fine, he’s beautiful. Second, what the heck am I talking about??

I imagine your first thoughts might be: you? Aromantic? But you like romance and romantic things! You just haven’t met the right person, there’s no need to rush into this!

Well, I’m not rushing into anything. If over time I find the aromantic label doesn’t fit me then, cool, it doesn’t, but actually this is something that’s been on my mind for a while.

I recently developed what I thought was finally a crush. A crush like I haven’t felt in years. I was excited, if I have a crush on this person it proves I’m not aromantic right?! Truth is, those feelings kinda just disappeared. Pretty quickly too. My “crush” didn’t do anything, the feelings were just gone. Yeah, I still get excited when I hear from them and they make me smile and laugh, but it’s not the romantic attraction I wished I was feeling.

It’s odd, but I think I understand now. I can’t force these feelings into existence. The thing is, I’ve been trying my whole life and I thought that maybe everyone felt like their crushes were just their closest friends, someone they picked to date because it was what kids saw. But that feeling didn’t change for me. Getting older, my crushes didn’t magically start to feel like this soul-crushing, awe-inspiring love, or however you want to describe it. It was just, my good friend. It could’ve been any of them.

And that brings me to, alterous:) what’s alterous? Think of it like a middle ground between platonic and romantic. For me, that means I want and try to get emotionally close to all my friends, that’s important to me. I struggle to not constantly tell my friends I love them or give them kisses and hugs because those are things reserved for couples, not friends. And you might be saying to yourself, yeah but everyone has friends like that. I tell my friends I love them all the time! And that’s great! Keep doing that, it’s delightful:) but, it’s different when every feeling you have for people is the same. Aligning myself as bialterous as an identity makes a lot of sense to me. If I don’t feel romantic attraction and rarely sexual attraction, what’s this attraction that I still feel? Thats alterous!

Wanting to be genuinely close and open with someone while also telling them I love them lots and giving them many smooches (damn covid). But also, sometimes forgetting they exist.. or not remembering little details like couples do, you know? (Listen, I promise it’s different from regular friendships, I don’t know what y’all are doing but it’s not what I’m doing)

Everyone will have their own idea of what alterous means, but to me it’s exactly what I said before. The middle ground of platonic and romantic. You know, frantically googling “what’s the difference between platonic and romantic attraction” because you’ve never felt a different kind of attraction probably isn’t an alloromantic feeling.

So yep. This is me. I’m assuming the aceflux is self-explanatory, the ace feelings kinda move around but generally stay on the ace spectrum.

But does this mean anything for the future? Why are you making such a big deal out of this??

Nah, nothings changing. I’m a sap for romance and love even if I’ve never experienced it myself, it’s really fun to write about! And, what can I say, I’m excited. Yeah, these words are very niche, I’m not gonna go around telling everyone I’m bialterous because they’ll have no idea what I’m talking about haha. But it just feels nice because these little words feel right.

At the end of the day they’re just words, I know that. And who knows, I might find even better words to describe how I feel or just gently place them in the trash like I did with gender words (let’s just leave it at nonbinary and my pronouns. Beyond that who knows xD), but I don’t want to be afraid of being aromantic. It’s not an easy thing. I’m supposed to be this way and feel this way, but I just don’t.

I really did deny it for so long, but the discovery of alterous made me realize that all my “proof” that I wasn’t aromantic was actually more like proof that I’m just alterous. And that’s probably not a word I’ll just throw at strangers like- I like you but in an alterous way!! I don’t get platonic crushes I want to know you on an emotional level and almost act like we’re dating but not at all!! Just get ready for lots of affection!!!

Like no, lol. I’ll just be myself and maybe mention it if we’re close or if they notice my friendships are unique.

This has all just been a big tangent to kinda get my feelings off my chest. If anyone read all this wow, hi! Love for you.

But yeeeeah. Romantic feelings are...weird. Falling in love...what is that? I don’t understand and perhaps will never fully understand but that’s fine. Live your best, funky romantic life and I shall live my best funky, alterous life.

How the fuck do I end this-?

[monysmediareview]

Juliet, a novel by Ann Fortier Review

This time I have a review for a one-off book rather than a series for you guys and it may have actually reached the top of my list for favorite books ever. Juliet, a novel by Anne Fortier was so incredibly good I worry I’ll never be able to fully describe the way it made me feel reading it. I read this book incredibly slow because the idea of finishing it made me so upset; I didn’t want it to end but also found myself thinking about it constantly.

The Shakespeare of it All

When I found this book at goodwill, I figured I’d grab it just to see what it was. Having a degree in theatre and having studied Shakespeare in Europe, I even work for a Shakespeare specific theatre; I figured it would at the very least be interesting. And I was right, but for the wrong reasons. Shakespeare is barely mentioned as the book is actually about the true story of Romeo & Juliet.

If you don’t already know, Shakespeare stole the story of Romeo & Juliet from an Italian poet who wrote the story in the early to mid 1500’s. That story may have also been stolen from another author from France, and maybe even someone else before that. Thanks to the lack of records or copyright laws, there’s not really a way to be sure but we do know that Shakespeare was not the first, only the most famous. And to be fair, his story is much more intense since it takes place over the course of less than a week while the original plot takes months. There are a few other differences between the two but the gist of it is, two star crossed lovers separated by family feuds and ending in tragedy. And this book takes us through all of that drama and gives us a beautiful and dramatic ending to it all.

The Real Story

Some of the things I loved about this book were actually the historical events and characters. The three families in the story, the Tolomeis, the Salimbenis, and the Marescottis were apparently all real families that had feuds and stories fairly similar to what happened in this book. Fortier wrote in her authors note that she did take some liberties with the history for the sake of the story but that she tried to be faithful to them. I do highly suggest reading her author’s note if you get the book because for me, it made it that much more special.

I think that her ability to blend the past and present was well executed and emotional in ways I wasn’t expecting. I really felt the connection between the Romeo and Giulietta of 1340 and the Romeo and Guiletta of the early 2000’s. Her ability to connect these people not only by blood but by fate and destiny and emotion and passion is unmatched and she managed to do it in roughly 500 pages.

Divine Intervention

I am normally not a fan of books with religious undertones, especially without some kind of supernatural explanation to it but in Juliet it really didn’t strike me as prevalent even though it was. The Virgin Mother and the “curse on both your houses” are two huge driving forces behind this story. Both felt like completely natural pieces of the puzzle rather than an overbearing push for Catholic guilt which could have easily been the case in a story set in Italy spanning 600 years with generational family drama. There was a real feeling of the Virgin Mother being the overseer of the fate of these people and bringing them together, to righting the wrongs done in the past. In a lot of other books this might have felt preach-y or overbearing but it actually made fate feel real.

Love Story

I’m a sucker for a good romance book; I will read love story after love story after love story, but even I can get tired of the same plot over and over again. Sometimes the misogyny gets tiring and I want these female led stories to be about more than finding a man to complete them and this book gave me exactly that.

The story starts and ends with Julie Jacobs’ family. She needs to learn about her family, about her history, where she’s really from. I got so sucked into her journey of self discovery that I kind of forgot it was a love story for a while. And that kind of messed me up when we got there because I had missed a lot of the chemistry build up that I had to think back about to even realize it was there. I was so focused on her learning about her father and visiting banks and libraries that I nearly missed her falling completely in love. But in the end it was one of the most passionate and tumultuous love stories, because when you’re Romeo & Juliet, how could you have anything else?

My Personal Opinion on R&J

Following that I want to talk quickly about Romeo & Juliet. If you’ve taken a Shakespeare class or even just a high school English class at some point you’ve probably talked about this. Sometimes it gets glossed over because it’s one of the well known stories and they don’t usually waste time on it but I’m going to.

Classes like this tend to brush these lovers off as horny teenagers who are in lust and get married so they can bone each other but I think that’s a sad approach. I’ll even admit that was my view on it for a while, but not now. It’s a love story. It’s the love story. So to read an in depth story like this that doesn’t diminish the real feelings they had for each other was very pleasing. I might write a whole thing about some of my Shakespeare opinions one day but for now I will leave you with this:

To thine own self be true. Shakespeare is theatre. It isn’t mean to be read, it’s meant to be staged. And the beauty of theatre is that every single production of every play is different (at least it’s supposed to be. Some directors have yet to learn this, but I digress). This means that everyone interprets things differently, so while I think Romeo & Juliet are the ultimate lovers, you might think they were just horny teenagers. And that’s okay.

Generational Drama

Generational stories like this hold a special place in my heart. I’m not sure what it is exactly, but the idea of fate and family and stories that span hundreds of years just really get me. I won’t go on about this too much because I’ve already mentioned it a few times but I love the redemption that Romeo and Guilietta get through their ancestors, even if it was 600 years later. I love that their love lasted generations and the thought of how the spirits of the original couple feel looking at themselves, their ancestors, finally bringing their families together chokes me up a little if I’m being honest.

Alessandro

I was really not counting on Alessandro being such an important piece of this story, but his evolution as a character was a fucking ride. Going from a security guard/driver, to basically an undercover cop, to potential lover, to fake identity, to actual lover, to liar and cheat, to being framed and actually being a lover and savior was intense. Ideal. I loved and hated him through the whole thing but I was very happy with where he ended up.

Symbolism

There is so much symbolism in this book. The gems being the color of their eyes, the golden statues, the paintings, the maestros. All of it. It can be found on almost every page. But there were a few that really stood out to me.

The cencio and dagger constantly popping up as important of the story for Giulietta was not lost on me. I’m still tossing around what I think it really means, actually, but where I stand now is the idea of an official marriage and what makes it official in the eyes of the Virgin Mother. Romeo and Giulietta weren’t considered actually married because they never consummated and it didn’t happen on the cencio if it had. So for it to have been hidden in Julie’s bed after that weird secret ceremony with Alessandro, was interesting because they also weren’t really married. Not the way we think of now. It just shows that marriage isn’t defined by sex (which I think futher proves my point that this was never just about horny teenagers. As well as the entirety of this book), or by words. Marriage is defined by love and commitment.

And then there’s the River Diana. Another thing I haven’t quite landed on a full meaning for, but I know what it made me feel. It’s hard to put into words, but the first word that came to mind was literally symbolism. This story, this curse, killed Diana, Julie’s mother. And now Julie made it to the statue, and she found her Romeo and in the moment that she almost dies it’s by drowning in the River Diana. This whole time she was drowning in what her mother started for her and it’s Alessandro that pulls her out and saves her from it. Being with him is what keeps her alive, from being swept away by this curse the way her mother was. So maybe it’s symbolic of the end. Of not falling into the same pattern or being swept into the same current.

Plot Twists

This story never went where I thought it was going to go. I don’t actually want to talk about the plot twists too much because I want people reading this to be as surprised as I was. Not like I didn’t spoil things before but there are still quite a few things I didn’t mention that really fucked me up if I’m being honest.

If you’re a fan of plot twists, please read this book.

Ye Olde Slow as Hell Language

I don’t want to scare anyone off here - most of the book is in modern language and even the parts that take us back to 1300 aren’t that bad. But they are far more detailed and can sometimes just feel really slow. But all of the information is really important so I wouldn’t skip it. But the language and the flow of the story really slows things down in these parts and it’s what made me take so long to finish this book. Well that and the fact that I just wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I finished it too soon.

However, I will give the author credit for having parallel story lines set so far apart. She really pulled it off and made the entire thing just so magical. By the time they died, I didn’t want to leave that world. I wanted to stay and watch them be happy but then I got to go back to Julie and watch her get her happily ever after

Janet’s Character Development

Right off the bat we’re supposed to hate Janet. And we do. She’s awful and when she shows back up we kind of hate her even more because of what she’s been doing. I didn’t feel sorry for her in the slightest. Up until the last few chapters of the book, these twin sisters felt very estranged so to go from that to them being a fantastic duo that you root for was a twist I wasn’t ready for but whole heartedly welcomed. It was a nice change of pace to see a female character arc into a better person instead of someone who got increasingly bitter. Still not a huge fan of the character but she ended up being kind of important and at least it passed the Betchdel test, right?

In Conclusion

I think this might be my favorite book now. High recommend.

[soveryanon]

Reviewing time for MAG177!

- I like that this season, Martin is ready to accept that they not talk about things for a while but is not allowing it to last forever. Same as with Jon earlier, it’s a mix between waiting for others to open up on their terms, when they’re ready, but not letting the situation fester either:

(MAG166) MARTIN: … Ssso, are we going to talk about it…? ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] MARTIN: Or…? [FOOTSTEPS STOP] [BAG JOSTLING] ARCHIVIST: What’s to talk about. MARTIN: What happened back there? What you did to Sa– … ARCHIVIST: Go on. Say it. MARTIN: … What you did to “that thing”.

(MAG177) MARTIN: … Look, this is ridiculous, Basira, can we please just talk? BASIRA: No. MARTIN: Why not? ARCHIVIST: Martin… MARTIN: [EXASPERATED] No, Jon, enough is enough! It has been hours and not a bloody word! We have been slogging our way through literal nightmares to find you, Basira. There’s been, ‘s been plagues, and wars, and monsters, and I– we’ve been worried sick. It has been awful. […] Christ, I just wanted to talk, that’s all…! BASIRA: So talk! [BAG JOSTLING] MARTIN: I mean stop and talk. […] See, this is exactly the kind of thing that comes up when we talk…! […] O~kay, well, since we’re talking, I, I–I was wondering. I don’t know if, if I missed it, or if you both just assumed that I knew since you knew already but, well, I… BASIRA: Spit it out. MARTIN: What was the deal with Trevor? [A TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] Why was he… I mean, I’m not really sure what happened, back there.

It’s interesting that what came spontaneously to Martin’s mind were early bits of the journey: “nightmares” is how Jon had described the domains in MAG163, “plagues” refers to the Corruption village from MAG164, “wars” to the Slaughter Trenches from MAG163 (and “monsters” can cover a lot of things… including Not!Sasha in MAG165). Those were Jon&Martin’s first experiences, and I’m not surprised that they might have shaken Martin in a special way – Martin certainly had a personal fear of the Desolation fire from MAG169, and was personally targeted by the Lonely house in MAG170, but they weren’t the first. They didn’t have that novelty, the discovery of how badly things were out there.

- So far, we had seen Martin not having the codes to understand the new world in contrast to Jon, and relying on Jon to explain things to him. Jon knows about Basira’s circumstances, which once again locked Martin out of the loop; it’s good that Jon has indeed been trying to respect Basira’s privacy (he really showed that he took it into account, as answering Martin would have been easier, and he chose to mention Basira’s situation in only broad strokes), but it’s also understandable that Martin would get so easily frustrated when he’s once again the only one missing the keys and others initially refuse to help him understand until his insistence finally pays off. And even when he tried to change that status quo, he shared some information about Jon’s&his journey, as if inviting Basira to do the same! Part of his frustration might have had to do with dashed hopes, too – Jon had already pointed out, multiple times, that Basira had had it bad, and was still taking that into account:

(MAG164) MARTIN: Is Basira alive? ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] MARTIN: Is she… in… o–one of these places? [STATIC RISES] ARCHIVIST: She’s alive. Out there, not… trapped in a–a hellscape, but… moving. [STATIC DECREASES] Hunting. She’s… she’s looking for Daisy. She’s a few steps behind. […] She… thinks she’s going to kill Daisy. Like she promised. [STATIC DECREASES] But she’s conflicted.

(MAG175) ARCHIVIST: Basira and Daisy. We’re close. MARTIN: Wait, what? Wait, really? B– Th–that’s brilliant! What are we waiting for, let’s go! ARCHIVIST: Uh, y–yeah, i–it’s… It’s not… it’s not going to be easy, things aren’t… good.

(MAG176) MARTIN: How… How are we even gonna approach Basira? [TRILL OF A BIRD] ARCHIVIST: It’s tricky. She’s… [INHALE] She’s had a bad time. MARTIN: [HUFF] I mean… Haven’t we all? ARCHIVIST: No. [TRILL OF A BIRD] No, we haven’t. [SILENCE] MARTIN: … Right. ARCHIVIST: If we approach her directly, she’s likely to bolt. [SQUAWKING OF A BIRD] And she can move a lot quicker than we can.

(MAG177) BASIRA: Can’t have been that bad. MARTIN: I– … What? BASIRA: You look fine to me. MARTIN: [INDIGNANT] Excuse me?! BASIRA: Whole and healthy with a shoulder to lean on every step of the way! MARTIN: Basira… ARCHIVIST: [SOFTLY] Martin. Leave it. Trust me, she’s been through a lot more than we have.

… But Martin had been hoping and trying to improve Things for a while. First, it was through the idea of killing avatars (MAG171: “Jon. We are… doing good, right? Making things better?” / MAG174: “You’re removing evil from the world!”); now, the next hope was to find old familiar faces/allies back… and it’s been another cold shower, although with sprinkles of hope.

(And it is true that so far… Martin&Jon haven’t had the worst fate in this apocalypse. Other avatars can’t touch Jon, and he extends that protection to Martin. Unless you count the whole world as The Eye’s domain, they’re not trapped inside of one like other victims. They’re together, able to have fluffy moments and forms of intimacy, while others are subjected to constant torture. Jon isn’t even hungry anymore or feeling withdrawal symptoms, compared to season 4. They didn’t want that form of privilege, but it is true that they’ve been… mostly fine so far. I’m curious about Jon’s understanding of Basira’s situation: what horrors did she experience on her way? Will she describe them a bit more?)

- I love that Basira’s bitterness immediately came out as an unfair, unwarranted attack… about the fact that Jon&Martin were together. Basira, meanwhile, had been alone, tracking Daisy but without Daisy. She is without her partner, and we know how deeply she identified as a team with Daisy:

(MAG117) ARCHIVIST: I think Basira is the same, she’s coming along to back-up Daisy, or so she says. I–I, I don’t quite get those two, I suppose. What they’ve done, seeing what they’ve seen… It’s a hell of a bond. The sort of thing I’ve mostly done alone. […] BASIRA: But at least Daisy’s coming along. I mean… I know she’s… difficult. Everything they say about her, it’s true, it’s fair. But… she’s solid. She’s a fixed point. And if she’s there, I know exactly where I stand, exactly what I’m doing relative to her. She has no doubts. […] Despite everything she’s done, she’s… she’s still the best partner I ever had.

(MAG128) BREEKON: Dunno. ‘t’s not right… on my own… not right… No point in doing it on my own. Don’t know what happens now… Thought I might kill you. Missed my chance. Thought I might just… deliver something. So here’s a coffin. [RATTLING SOUND] In case you want… to join your friend. BASIRA: Get out. ARCHIVIST: Basira… BASIRA: Get. Out. […] (Breekon) “I am without him, now. I. am. I can feel myself fading. Weak. No reason to move. Nothing to deliver. But I am no longer tied to the casket; so you can have it. You can stare at it, knowing how your feral friend suffers, knowing how powerless you are to help. And when you can’t bear it any longer, knowing that you can climb in and join her…”

(MAG131) MELANIE: Basira’s not going to be happy that you let him out. ARCHIVIST: Basira isn’t here. [INHALE] And if this works… I’ll have Daisy waiting for her when she gets back, so I don’t think she’ll be thinking too much about Jared.

(MAG133) ARCHIVIST: You’re not happy she is back. BASIRA: I didn’t say that, Jon. I would never abandon Daisy and, having her back is… [SIGH] But right now, she’s dead weight. And I need to be able to travel light.

(MAG155) ARCHIVIST: Have you… thought any more about what I said? BASIRA: Yeah. I don’t think I can. Daisy wouldn’t come if I didn’t, and… I’m not leaving her behind. Besides, both of us being blind would be… [PAUSE] Anyway, being stuck here isn’t exactly her main problem right now.

Of course she would be especially on edge, to see Jon&Martin together and… functioning.

- Super happy about Martin’s point that:

(MAG177) MARTIN: I–it’s not a competition! Christ, I just wanted to talk, that’s all…!

Because YEP. He’s right! But Basira might be also right that she isn’t in the mindset to hear about how hard it’s been for Jon&Martin. As usual: complicated situations for everyone involved, where their sharp edges end up hurting the others around. (And we’ve seen way worse, as far as recriminations and conflict in the successive Archival teams have gone: since the episode began with the three of them traveling together, we were already in a set-up in which they had tacitly agreed to work together on some level. That’s… rare enough to be noticeable.)

- … To be fair for Jon, he did mention right away that he knew “everything” – but Martin had trouble understanding the scope of that at first, so Basira has to experience the same clarifications:

(MAG176) BASIRA: … What about you? ARCHIVIST: I mean… I can know literally anything, so…! Ask away, I guess. BASIRA: … You understand how unhelpful that is for proving identities. ARCHIVIST: I’m sorry to be an inconvenience!

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: I told you, I know everything now, more or less. I can see her. With my, uh… BASIRA: … Magic horrorvision? ARCHIVIST: Sure. MARTIN: It’s actually been amazingly useful so far. BASIRA: So you can control it now? ARCHIVIST: … Yes. BASIRA: Hmm.

… From Basira’s point of view, Jon confirming that he had more power, and specifically “control” of it now, might have been gigantic red flags already. In season 4, Jon had told her multiple times that he couldn’t really control them, and that trying to purposefully use them came with huge drawbacks:

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: No, I suppose you didn’t. BASIRA: Don’t snoop in my head. ARCHIVIST: I’m not… “snooping”, I’m not looking – it-that’s not… how this works. BASIRA: Explain it, then.

(MAG140) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Yesterday, I tried something, I… [GLASS PUT DOWN ON THE TABLE] [INHALE] I–I deliberately tried to… Know something, like I did in the Coffin, but… there was a lot. Too much. [SIGH] And I… BASIRA: What did you find out? ARCHIVIST: [SNORT] Nothing. There was too much. BASIRA: You don’t remember any of it? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] You drink the whole contents of a bar in three seconds, you don’t remember what the merlot tasted like. [SIGH] It just… hurt.

(MAG148) BASIRA: Any luck finding [Annabelle]? ARCHIVIST: I haven’t really been trying. Doing that sort of thing consciously, it… makes me hungry.

So what could it possibly mean, if Jon quickly explains that in this horrific transformed world, he can control his powers and that they don’t cost him much? It hurts to see her like this, but I understand that the current circumstances led to her only showing her sharp edges (her impatience, her implacability turned against people who would be supposed to be her allies, her accusatory tones, the overall impression that people around her are only worsening the situation).

- Special appreciation for Basira being so casually derisive about Beholding and everything Beholding-related:

(MAG123) BASIRA: [SIGH] Alright. Best I can understand it, Beholding, or… The Eye, or whatever you wanna call it, we’re one of the only powers that hasn’t actually taken a shot at our ritual.

(MAG140) ARCHIVIST: … Why am I always the last to know about these things? BASIRA: By this point, I just assume the Eyeball tells you.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: I told you, I know everything now, more or less. I can see her. With my, uh… BASIRA: … Magic horrorvision? ARCHIVIST: Sure.

(And Martin had already described Jon’s Archivist Corner Time as “vomit your horrors” and “puke your terrors” (MAG168), but I’m delighted that he also joined Basira in the casual roasting of Beholding powers with “magic Eye stuff” when discussing with her. Basira and Martin kind of have the same method of making fun of concepts: exaggerating imaginary scenarios to point out their ridiculousness (MAG125: “No, I just popped down Superdrug. Yes it was hard to come by.”, MAG140: “You know, we’ve actually got a group chat going called ‘British Cops Who Love To Do Extrajudicial Spook-Killings On Foreign Soil’. I’ll just see if they’re free this Saturday.” / MAG175: “Oh my goodness, really? And here was me thinking the apocalypse was going oh-so-swimmingly!”), but Basira tends to have a sharper tongue and use particularly acerbic vocabulary too… So they could mix well and Basira could have a wonderfully horrible influence on Martin, I’m so ready for this.)

- Oh, Martin… He had shown enthusiasm at the prospect of seeing Basira, even considering her a “friend”:

(MAG170) MARTIN: I want to have friends, I… no, I have friends. I’m… I’m in love, eh! I am in love, and I will not forget that, I will – not – forget. I am Martin Black–

(MAG175) MARTIN: I–I know what you meant! I can still be keen to see our friends! ARCHIVIST: … True. MARTIN: Besides, we can help them now.

(MAG176) BASIRA: Don’t move. Either of you. MARTIN: H–hey, whoa! Whoa, Basira, it’s us…! BASIRA: I said don’t move. This place plays tricks.

(MAG177) MARTIN: You might not care but it is good to see you, Basira. It has been a long time since we saw a friendly face. BASIRA: Friendly wasn’t what I was going for. MARTIN: All I’m saying is, it’s nice to find someone we can trust again. [INHALE] Ever since everything went to hell, it’s just been–

(And it’s true that he had gone for drinks with her and Melanie in season 3! And that Basira was understanding of the pain caused by his grief when his mother died in season 4…)

So no wonder that he’s put off by the “friendly face” being so stern while he’s pushing for cooperation. But once again, circumstances not ideal, and it’s only the beginning of them working together again – they might mellow down after a while – and Basira might have been deceived a few times before meeting with them, as she mentioned the place playing “tricks”. (Although that might also be a lasting trauma from the Unknowing: Basira already experienced it, and was only able to get out of it by grounding herself. She had asked Jon, when he woke up from his coma in MAG122, to prove that he was himself, and wasn’t able to fully trust it for a while. It might be Basira expressing the same cautiousness again.)

- I was expecting Basira (and potentially Georgie) to directly accuse Jon about the apocalypse, and I get her point of view (though it’s still sad!) given how Jon… seems oddly at peace in the new universe, and had just repeated to her that his powers have increased?

(MAG177) BASIRA: Yeah, about that. [POINTEDLY TO THE ARCHIVIST] You caused this, didn’t you? ARCHIVIST: [HEAVY BREATH] BASIRA: Don’t give me that look, you know what I mean. Did you mess up the world? Yes or no. ARCHIVIST: … Yes. BASIRA: Goddamn it! I knew it was you, I knew it! MARTIN: Basira… ARCHIVIST: I didn’t mean to, Elias was… We were all playing out this big ritual for him. With me as the lynchpin, the gate. BASIRA: [EXPLOSIVE SIGH] Oh you didn’t mean to! Oh that’s all right then. Christ! I should’ve known, I… I should’ve just let Daisy take you out at the start. MARTIN: … You don’t mean that.

And! Once again: of course, it’s not Jon’s fault. Jonah schemed and caused the apocalypse. … But it’s also true that Jon has not been really good at explaining what had happened, or at defending himself: for someone who doesn’t know how the apocalypse was unleashed, meeting someone presenting himself as the “gate” doesn’t… tell much. It’s different from “Jonah ensured that I would be marked by the Fears, then hijacked my body to recite an incantation that unleashed the Fears into the world”. It’s still hard to hear Basira expressing regrets for not having allowed Jon to be killed back in season 3, when he was still scrambling around and discovering how Elias had roped him into the Fears’ business – but it’s also, probably, part of Basira’s guilt resurfacing. She had less emotional ties to Jon than to Daisy: she thought she was doing the right thing back when she had prevented Daisy from killing him in MAG091, it’s natural that she would re-evaluate that particular act. But it’s also saying a lot about her (and her relationship to Daisy) given her refusal to face and re-evaluate the “fairness” of Daisy’s actions, during the last part of season 4 and in this episode.

And it’s additionally interesting that Basira set that hinging moment that could have made things better (/would have prevented the apocalypse)… back in MAG091. The day when the group went to confront Elias, which led to Basira herself getting tied to the Institute and becoming a prisoner of it. Is that when Basira feels like her whole life derailed, when she began the process of losing Daisy? Objectively, things weren’t perfect before that already: the Fears were still around, Daisy was already a Hunter killing people, whether they were involved with the Fears or not (and although Jon hasn’t explained that part to her yet, we know that Jonah would likely have just used another Archivist for his plans); but I feel like it’s telling a lot that Basira didn’t tell Jon that she regrets not having killed him back in season 4, when he had been hurting people. She longs for a time when she was still mostly uninvolved, when she could have just kept going with her life.

- Interesting that all the other avatars/monsters, so far, seem to share the spontaneous knowledge that Jon was the one who caused the apocalypse and is all-powerful… yet Basira didn’t, and had to ask. (Or did she know about it, but refused to accept it and wanted Jon to confirm it himself?) It might be an indicator that she’s not a full-blown avatar?

- SOB for Martin trying to appease things and obviously disagreeing where Jon is concerned – without being overly defensive either, and letting Jon say his piece.

- Jon has already changed and made peace with a few aspects of what happened, I feel? Comparing him to early season:

(MAG161) ARCHIVIST: Can you imagine…? If we’d had this… MARTIN: [SHARP] But we didn’t, though, did we. [CREAKING SOUND] ARCHIVIST: No… MARTIN: So there’s no point in dwelling. ARCHIVIST: [HUFF] MARTIN: Jon, I… This isn’t healthy.

(MAG165) ARCHIVIST: You could’ve–! … You knew what was happening. HELEN: I suspected. But all I really did was refuse to help! And that is hardly a unique quality. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] HELEN: If that makes it my fault, then surely, this is Georgie’s fault as well, and Melanie’s! ARCHIVIST: Leave them out of this, they didn’t know…! HELEN: There it is again! Knowledge! It’s so very important to you, isn’t it? These fossilised nuggets of pretend comprehension, weighing you down, stopping you thinking or feeling! What about… hypotheticals? If they had known, what would they have done? Is that something you can see?

(MAG167) MARTIN: [EXHALE] So, what? Without assistants, [Gertrude]’d be bad at the apocalypse? [RUSTLING OF CLOTHES] ARCHIVIST: Wi–without… trust, without a, a reason… Gertrude needed both the purpose her mission gave her, and the control her position allowed. To be here, like us, without a, [INHALE] a reason, without someone to ground her, she… She’d have power but… no control. No real… purpose. Perhaps she’d dedicate herself to a, a doomed quest like us, but– … [QUIET] No… I think this would have broken her. And she’d have resigned herself to… ruling her domain. […] MARTIN: [INHALE] [SNORT] Ssso. If you say Gertrude wouldn’t have been able to go on without a reason… ARCHIVIST: Yes, Martin, you are my reason. MARTIN: Just wanted to make you say it…!

(MAG175) MARTIN: I mean… Right, if none, if none of this had happened, if the world had just… carried on? [WET SQUEAK] What would have happened, was… was all that fear justified? [SHUFFLING] ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] I can’t know the future, Martin, not even a hypothetical one. MARTIN: But… you know what was going on, what was happening.

(MAG177) MARTIN: … You don’t mean that. BASIRA: No? [EXHALE] I don’t know. Maybe. If I had… it would have stopped all this, wouldn’t it? ARCHIVIST: Perhaps. Perhaps not. BASIRA: I thought you knew everything? MARTIN: He can’t do hypotheticals. BASIRA: And if I killed you now? MARTIN: What did I just say? ARCHIVIST: You couldn’t. [PAUSE] And even if you could, it wouldn’t be enough to undo what’s happened to the world.

Since Gertrude’s story, and the realisation that she actually would have fared worse in the apocalypse, it feels like Jon has stopped clinging to these “hypotheticals” and how the apocalypse-could-have-been-oh-so-easily-avoided, like he has decided that they don’t matter that much if the point is to only claim and assign guilt through them. It happened, and it happened because Jonah(/The Web?) did everything for it to happen. Even if Jon didn’t explain it well in this episode, he also immediately pointed out that Jonah was the cause of it, even using “lynchpin” to describe himself, a word that we hadn’t heard since… Jonah’s own letter in MAG160:

(MAG160, Jonah Magnus) “And there was only one being that could possibly serve as a lynchpin for this new ritual: the Archivist. A position that had so recently become vacant, thanks to Gertrude’s… ill-timed retirement plans.”

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: I didn’t mean to, Elias was… We were all playing out this big ritual for him. With me as the lynchpin, the gate.

(Interesting that he said “gate” instead of “door”, though!)

- … What is absolutely new is that Jon pointed out that killing him wouldn’t fix the world:

(MAG177) BASIRA: And if I killed you now? MARTIN: What did I just say? ARCHIVIST: You couldn’t. [PAUSE] And even if you could, it wouldn’t be enough to undo what’s happened to the world. BASIRA: So… what? You’re the immortal god of this messed up little hellscape now? ARCHIVIST: “God” might be stretching it. [DEEP INHALE] But I am more powerful now, yes.

Which is new information! I’m (positively) surprised that this option is already crossed out as a “solution”, since I thought it might be brought up or carried out way later in the season! (… But which might mean that Jon could ultimately have to bear a fate worse than death, or to seek death as a liberation. Woops.)

- Yay for Martin asking for clarifications about Trevor, and it was really reminiscent of him asking Helen what had happened with Not!Sasha:

(MAG166) MARTIN: Will you tell me how he did it? ARCHIVIST: Martin… MARTIN: He just keeps going all vague about it! HELEN: Oh, goodness. You see what you’ve done to the poor boy, Jon? He’s coming to me for clear answers.

(MAG177) MARTIN: … O~kay, well, since we’re talking, I, I–I was wondering. I don’t know if, if I missed it, or if you both just assumed that I knew since you knew already but, well, I… BASIRA: Spit it out. MARTIN: What was the deal with Trevor? [A TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] Why was he… I mean, I’m not really sure what happened, back there. BASIRA: Seriously? You brought him here and you didn’t brief him, Mr All-Seeing-Eye? ARCHIVIST: … Oh, I just… MARTIN: He just keeps being vague and ominous. BASIRA: Well, some things don’t change then! ARCHIVIST: It was a courtesy. I wasn’t sure what you’d be comfortable with me sharing. BASIRA: Oh, how generous!

(The phone ringing now and then, throughout the episode? CHILLING, with how it occasionally timed with the content, I kept wondering whether it was Annabelle trying to call Martin again =D)

* “Well, some things don’t change then!” savage but fair, Basira.

* Again: I’m glad that Jon was trying to respect Basira’s privacy! It’s not a lot, it feels very mundane, but it’s also Jon… trying to do the right thing and to respect others. (I feel like it conveys a lot about the fact that he’s aware of her flaws, is now even more ready to call her out on them, but also fundamentally likes/cares about Basira…)

* I love how Martin’s main word this season, when talking about Jon talking, is “ominous”:

(MAG161) ARCHIVIST: No, I don’t need to. “It” can see us here, and… [WOODEN CREAKING SOUND] And I can see out as well. MARTIN: O–kay, we’ll just file that under… ominous, for now.

(MAG163) ARCHIVIST: You could see that tower from anywhere on Earth. And it can see you. And if you walk towards it, eventually you’ll get there. But you have to go through everything in-between. MARTIN: … You’re being ominous again! ARCHIVIST: Sorry.

(MAG169) MARTIN: You sure there isn’t another way? [ANXIOUS BREATHING] … Yeah, yeah, I know, “the journey will be the journey”, blah blah, ominous blah…! ARCHIVIST: … I’m sorry. MARTIN: ‘T’s fine. I know you wouldn’t take us through if we didn’t actually need to go through, so…

(MAG177) MARTIN: He just keeps being vague and ominous.

Martin has One Word and is using it.

- GODS for the way Julia ended… Addition/Confirmation that it was indeed Daisy who killed her (it wasn’t 100% clear whether it had been her or Basira, in the previous episode):

(MAG176) ARCHIVIST: And Julia? [SILENCE] TREVOR: Dead. ARCHIVIST: I’m sorry. TREVOR: Shut it! Should’ve been me. [TRILL OF A BIRD] I’m old… slow… It’s not fair, outliving her…! But that dog of yours, that rabid bitch, she…! Killed her first, so she could see me limp away! [PANTS] It’s a game to her.

(MAG177) BASIRA: … So, when everything went sideways at the institute, I lost track of Daisy and Julia Montauk. I know Daisy managed to kill her, but I don’t know the details. Didn’t find any sign of them in the Archives, at least. ARCHIVIST: It was about a week later. They’d been stalking each other through the tunnels beneath the city. Daisy managed to corner her in an old subway access and tore out her throat. MARTIN: [SIGH] ARCHIVIST: Trevor found the body three hours later. BASIRA: [IRRITATED] Do you want to tell it? ARCHIVIST: Sorry. [INHALE] I thought you’d want me to fill in on the missing details. BASIRA: I don’t.

It’s not an exact parallel, but… there is still something to be said about Robert Montauk getting torn to pieces by a (Dark) Beast in prison, and Julia getting butchered by a (Hunt) Beast in a cramped/dark place. ;;

(Jon and Martin didn’t mention anything about Daisy’s whereabouts in the segment of MAG160 just before Jon read Jonah’s letter: did Jon already know about this? Or did that bit of knowledge come with everything else, after the apocalypse? Julia was already dead by then for around two weeks, if she was called one week after the attack on the Institute…)

- BIG AOUCH for the way Basira described her discovery of the apocalypse:

(MAG177) BASIRA: Anyway, seems like since then, Trevor was tracking Daisy. Wanted revenge, you heard him. I was still in the Institute when everything went to hell outside, so I guess that protected me from the first wave. … Once I saw what’d happened… that we’d… lost… [INHALE] Didn’t feel like there was anything left worth doing, except keeping my promise to Daisy – so I went looking. I’ve found Trevor’s trail eventually and started tailing him. I hoped I could follow him as he tracked Daisy, but… then you had to blunder your way in as always, and I had to step in.

She was basically alone in the Institute when the apocalypse happened… although it was the place she initially got forcibly tied to as “collateral”/a hostage.

* I wonder what protected her from getting imprisoned by a domain: was it the building itself? Her connection to it as an employee? Her connection to the Archives/to Jon? (Or: is she actually trapped in a “domain” on her own, with her never-ending hunt of Daisy?)

* I’m very curious about her mention of a “first wave”, which seems to imply that there have been others? Or at least, that London wasn’t entirely touched and transformed in one go?

* Sobbing a bit about the vocabulary she used: “that we’d… lost…” feels like a fight, a war (one side against another), and that is the siege mentality she had carried all through season 4.

* Aaand Jon had already mentioned that Basira was trying to fulfil her promise to Daisy:

(MAG158) DAISY: [PANTING] Basira… promise me something. BASIRA: What? … No, Daisy, no. DAISY: [PANTING] Mm, Basira… When this is over, you need to find me… and kill me. Promise me. BASIRA: No. No, Daisy, we’ll figure something out! NOT!SASHA: [IN THE DISTANCE] You can’t hide forever, Jon. DAISY: [PANTING] These last months, I… it was always borrowed time. Can’t outrun it forever. BASIRA: Daisy… DAISY: [PANTING] Promise me. BASIRA: … I promise. DAISY: Thanks. [BREATHLESS] Now, run…!

(MAG164) MARTIN: What’s Basira going to do? [STATIC INCREASES] ARCHIVIST: She… thinks she’s going to kill Daisy. Like she promised. [STATIC DECREASES] But she’s conflicted. MARTIN: And will she? ARCHIVIST: I–I don’t know, th–the future, th–that’s… that’s not something I can see.

But sob that it seems to have come as a Last Thing On Earth To Do… Before, Basira was still trying to prevent the Institute from being burned down, and was helping Jon&Martin from afar (telling them what was happening in London, sending statements to Jon). I wonder if before the apocalypse, Basira still had some hope that they could find a way to get Daisy back?

* … I feel like there is a big misunderstanding re:Trevor, since Jon had explained that he was “prey”:

(MAG176) MARTIN: [HIGH-PITCHED AND SLOW] Jon? I know you keep saying we’re safe, and I am feeling very calm. But just so I know, can he… Can he kill me? ARCHIVIST: … He could, yes– MARTIN: Right… ARCHIVIST: –if he were still a Hunter. TREVOR: … Shut it! ‘Course I’m still a Hunter! MARTIN: [GRUNT] Mm-mm-mm! TREVOR: [BESTIAL PANTS] MARTIN: Gotta go with Trevor on that one, Jon! ARCHIVIST: … No. [HUFF] Right now, he’s prey. [TRILL OF A BIRD] How long have you been running now, Trevor? [CREAKING SOUNDS] TREVOR: [PANTING] Don’t know… Too long…!

He was running away from Daisy and/or Basira, when Basira was tracking him, not hunting Daisy. Typical dumb Hunters things, where Basira was apparently following Daisy through someone… who was actually running away from her.

- Cat is out the bag and a o u c h. Jon’s plan worked, at least? Woops.

(MAG177) MARTIN: Sorry…! BASIRA: It’s his fault. He used you to bait Trevor, to bait me. [SHUFFLING] MARTIN: Wait, I’m–I’m sorry, you used me as bait? ARCHIVIST: I used us as bait, I didn’t know which one he’d go for. MARTIN: I mean, yeah, sure, but… only one of us was aware of the plan! ARCHIVIST: I, I’m sorry, I was going to tell you, but then I–I, I got distracted and… then we were within earshot of him, and I couldn't say anything and I… I–I mean… You would have agreed, right? MARTIN: That’s not the point, Jon!

So one of them was bait, to use Trevor as bait, to catch Basira.

It’s usual with Basira, but I love how her words and reasoning imply way more than what her behaviour lets on: she saved Jon&Martin. She is acerbic and bitter and accusatory towards them, but she did save them, when she had an opportunity to see them get killed (well, as far as she knew; she wasn’t aware that Trevor couldn’t have killed Jon). Even if it’s to use Jon as a resource… I feel like it does say something that she made the quick decision to save them instead of allowing Trevor to end them?

REALLY glad that Jon apologised and seemed to acknowledge that it hadn’t been a Great Move towards Martin because, indeed – Martin had mentioned that he would understand Basira in that situation, but it was throwing Martin into the arena without warning and while Jon was in control of the situation, knowing that it was likely to cause Martin distress. I really love how, this season, they’ve not been absolutely perfect but also able to acknowledge when they have hurt the other, reaching an understanding.

- And once again, the FABRIC RUSTLED!

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: … I’m sorry. [SILENCE] MARTIN: [SIGH] It’s okay. I understand. [BAG JOSTLING] [FABRIC RUSTLES] BASIRA: Urgh… [SILENCE] You done? ARCHIVIST: Can we not have a moment? BASIRA: No, Jon, we can’t. This is a chase, remember? Time is a factor.

Still cackling so hard at Basira’s dejected sound. She saw them dancing around each other back in season 3 and got glimpses of Jon’s wallowing in season 4:

(MAG088) BASIRA: I just, I mean he was good company. Y’know, when he wasn’t being a paranoia machine. He was funny, you know? MARTIN: What, Jon? BASIRA: Yeah. MARTIN: I don’t think I’ve ever heard him tell a joke. BASIRA: Maybe you weren’t listening. MARTIN: Right. Well, I’m sure it’ll get sorted out when DAISY brings him in and you can probably talk to him then. Oh! Sorry, I forgot you’re not actually with the police any more, are you.

(MAG106) MELANIE: [CHUCKLE] And anyway, Martin’s always been lovely to you. BASIRA: Hm. I dunno, I mean, you should have seen him when I turned up last year. I think he thought I was trying to steal his precious Archivist. MELANIE: Aaah…! I got the exact same, when Jon was hiding out and came to me with his “source on the inside” stuff. Martin was not impressed. BASIRA: Huff. That boy needs to relax. MELANIE: Or at least find someone else to fuss over. BASIRA: Yeah, he’s got it bad. … Do you know if he and Jon ever…?

(MAG122) ARCHIVIST: Just you and me. … And– Melanie and M–Martin, I–I guess. Honestly, I’m surprised Martin isn’t– BASIRA: [SHARP INHALE] ARCHIVIST: What? Oh God! The, their plan, it’s– Martin i–is…! Is he okay, wh– … What did Elias do?

(MAG123) ARCHIVIST: Haven’t seen Martin about yet? BASIRA: Yeah, he comes and goes. He’s busy. Well, he seems it. ARCHIVIST: Working for Peter Lukas. BASIRA: Don’t be too hard on him, Jon. Your, uh… “situation”, it hit him. Hard.

(MAG127) BASIRA: [EXHALE] … Yeah. People keep saying that. ARCHIVIST: Do they? … W–w–who else– [SHORT SHARP EXHALE] Did Martin say something?

(MAG148) ARCHIVIST: I’ve been meaning to ask. The… tape. The one of the, uh… my victim. You said Martin gave it to you. BASIRA: [EXHALE] Yeah. ARCHIVIST: How was he? H–how did he look, was he, uh… BASIRA: I don’t know. I didn’t… see him. He just left it on my desk with a note.

(MAG151) BASIRA: Jon may be going through a whole “we have to trust Martin” thing, but I’m not. As far as I can see, you’re either compromised, or you’re being played. And I want to know which. MARTIN: … I didn’t know Jon had listened to them already! BASIRA: Well, he has. He seems to think you’ll come to him when you need him. I think you’re feeding him what he needs to hear so he doesn’t bother you.

So now, she has to deal with them as a couple. (And it might sting EXTRA HARD… given how she’s Daisy-less. Basira and Daisy aren’t canonically romantically, but they were partners anyway: it’s still rubbing her loss in her face. Helen’s dig about her being the “third wheel” later… was spot-on.)

- I’m glad that Jon’s shitty sense of humour has resurfaced, too! <3 We saw some of it already this season, but I’m glad that he’s using it with Basira again (she had mentioned that she thought he was funny, in MAG088 – they used to share the same sense of humour!)

(MAG140) ARCHIVIST: I hope you’re not suggesting that Santa works for the People’s Church. BASIRA: [SIGH] Jon.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: When did I become everyone’s satnav? BASIRA&MARTIN: Jon…!

Martin and Basira, same struggle.

- The background sounds were already dreadful and putting you on edge, so YIPS when Jon explained where they were:

(MAG177) MARTIN: Yyyeah, speaking of… Wh–where actually are we, anyway? I mean… I’m happy to be out of the woods, but I don’t– ARCHIVIST: Wonderland House. A, uh… mental “health” facility. MARTIN: … Oh. Oh, dear. ARCHIVIST: Mm-hm.

Martin’s reaction… He already guessed how awful it could be, uh. As feared, it echoed what Helen had told Jon in her first appearance this season (MAG164: “Look at this place, look at this… [DEEP INHALE] wonderland! This is the world now, and we are strong and free”) – it was a Spiral domain, and Helen appeared – and Jon&Basira are on “Alice”’s trail.

- I’m still laughing very hard that Martin and Basira’s conversation, with the music in the background, the awkwardness, the small talk while waiting (for Jon to come back)… was literally an Elevator Music scene:

(MAG177) BASIRA: So… Did you actually walk all the way down here from Scotland? [A TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] MARTIN: Hm… Kind of? Scotland’s not really a thing anymore. BASIRA: Huh. London’s still there. Sort of. MARTIN: Yeah, that’s where we’re heading. Eventually.

* Curious about London’s status, since Basira had also said that “” – it seems to have taken less damage than Scotland, is it because it’s close to the new centre of the world (the Panopstitute)? Is all of London considered an Eye domain, now?

* Martin’s “eventually” is… mmm. Does he think they’re still far from London? Jon hadn’t mentioned when they would arrive – just that the journey had to be done, and this is the 14th Fear domain they’ve encountered. The only one potentially “missing” is Beholding, which might just be the goal. What do they need to travel through to reach London, now? Is it because their journey needs to be done on another level, like emotionally or decision-wise, and that they haven’t fulfilled the condition yet?

- The way Martin described Jon going Kill Bill on avatars, as Martin had requested, was absolutely hilarious because of how quickly summarised it was:

(MAG177) MARTIN: He’s been destroying other avatars on the way. BASIRA: Oh. That’s… good, I guess. How’s he doing it? MARTIN: [INHALE] He’s getting The Eye to, like… like, look at them? He–he just kind of drinks up all their fear and they, uh… just sort of… implode? BASIRA: … Sounds satisfying. MARTIN: Myeah… Not sure how much good it does, though. And one of them was a kid. BASIRA: Jon killed a kid? MARTIN: What? No. No! No, I just mean, one of the avatars that we saw was, like, thirteen or so. BASIRA: That’s… messed up. MARTIN: Yeah. We had to let him go, ‘cause… Uh, well, I mean… [A TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] BASIRA: Yeah. MARTIN: Mm, yeah.

I’m noting that Martin understood that “drink your fill” meant that Jon was feeding from their fears (it sure sounded like Jon was feasting when killing them)! I’m still snickering SO HARD at Martin’s shortcuts leading to Basira’s surprised disgust over the idea of Jon killing a kid (but at the same time: the fact that she was surprised over the concept means… that she wasn’t expecting Jon to do these kind of things, naturally). It’s interesting that Martin hadn’t mentioned who that kid was, although he had connected him to Basira in MAG173…

- I’ll roll in my fluffy covers over how we have canon footage of Martin saying that:

(MAG177) BASIRA: … So what’s your plan? MARTIN: Long-term? Elias.

Elias is a long-term plan uwu Geddim, Martin.

I’m… still delighted that Jon and Martin both had problems regarding whether to call him “Jonah” or “Elias”, tried “Jonah” for a while, and yet it persistently doesn’t work and they end up spontaneously going with “Elias”, because SAME HAT:

(MAG161) MARTIN: Elias won, and there were some tapes he’d kept for himself, and he wanted to gloat. So, he sent them! ARCHIVIST: He’s not… MARTIN: I–I don’t see– ARCHIVIST: … “Elias”. MARTIN: Jonah, then. I don’t know, I find it hard to think of him as… I don’t really like to think of him!

(MAG162) ARCHIVIST: No, no, lo–look… I, I–I was listening, and I–I was filled with this… hatred. This anger; I–I wanted to leave, and hunt down Elias, a–and…! MARTIN: W–wow, okay… […] Do you think it’ll do anything? Confronting Elias?

(MAG164) MARTIN: What about Elias? [STATIC INCREASES] ARCHIVIST: He’s inside the Panopticon; the tower, far above the world.

(MAG167) ARCHIVIST: Help us with what? MARTIN: ‘xcuse me? ARCHIVIST: Annabelle, help us with “what”? Our–our, our journey, killing Elias, vanishing the Entities – what?

(MAG174) MARTIN: Thanks for that. … Hang on, you’re still down to kill Elias, right? Uh, oh, Jonah, whatever. ARCHIVIST: I’m still going to confront him. [INHALE] I don’t know if killing him is something I’m even… capable of, but if I can and I have to, I will.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: I didn’t mean to, Elias was… We were all playing out this big ritual for him. […] MARTIN: Long-term? Elias. He’s up in that that… “Panopticon” tower thing.

I love how they’ve basically given up on trying to call him “Jonah”.

- … To be fair with Basira:

(MAG164) MARTIN: How is he? ARCHIVIST: Hard to say. The, the way this works, this… “new sight”, the knowledge is, is… [SIGH] It’s somehow wrapped up in the Panopticon? An eye can’t… see inside itself.

(MAG177) BASIRA: Figured as much. What’s he up to? MARTIN: Jon doesn’t know. He says it’s a “blind spot”. BASIRA: A blind spot. MARTIN: A–apparently. BASIRA: Convenient.

From the outside, it indeed sounds very convenient. (Jon was a bit more talkative about it, described it as the fact that an “eye can’t see inside itself” which, ewww, but also, oh alright, indeed.)

- I’m glad that Basira asked about Melanie!! ;w;

(MAG177) BASIRA: What about Melanie? MARTIN: He’s… not sure about her either? He can’t see her or Georgie. BASIRA: Dead, then. [STATIC INCREASES, THEN FADES] ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] No. Uh, not dead. Just… hidden, somehow.

She sounded stone-cold, but still asked… Their relationship in season 4 had been extremely harsh on Melanie’s end, but they did use to get along in season 3 and, post-Hill Top Road expedition, it had seemed like things were a bit pacified in the Archives…

- I hadn’t gotten that feeling in MAG164, when Jon had asked Martin to ask him questions for him to use his powers, but this time… it really felt like Jon was immersing and then resurfacing from the sea of knowledge that he had mentioned in season 4?

(MAG127) ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] It’s… hard. It’s like there’s a–a–a door, in my mind. And behind it, is… i–is the entire ocean. Before, I didn’t notice it, but now, I–I know it’s there, and I can’t forget it, and I can feel the pressure of the water on it. I–I–I, I can keep it closed… but sometimes, when I’m around p–people, or–or places, or… ideas… a drop or two will push through the cracks, at the edges of the door. And I’ll… know something. BASIRA: … What happens, if you open the door? [PAUSE] ARCHIVIST: I drown.

(Season 5 trailer) MARTIN: Are you still… [SIGH] “feeling it”? Seeing everything? ARCHIVIST: Yes, I, I’m trying not to, but… all of the fear, th–the anguish, i–it just… [INHALE] It keeps coming at me in waves, rolling over me, filling my head with such… awful sights.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] Right. Daisy. Give me a moment. [INHALE] [STATIC RISES] […] BASIRA: Dead, then. [STATIC INCREASES, THEN FADES] ARCHIVIST: [INHALE] No. Uh, not dead. Just… hidden, somehow. BASIRA: Hm, back with us, then. ARCHIVIST: I know the route.

He inhaled before using his powers (and before the static kicked in) and then almost gasped when coming back to them.

- REALLY INTERESTING that Martin described Jon’s need to stop as him needing to “make a statement”:

(MAG177) MARTIN: Really? Now? ARCHIVIST: I’ll try to be quick. BASIRA: What’s going on? MARTIN: [SIGH] It’s… It… He needs to make a statement.

Not read, or spit, or “vomit”/“puke” but “make”. Like statement-givers had been doing at the Institute, putting their stories down onto paper or getting them recorded. It’s true that Jon is creating them in his own way, but it’s still an extremely interesting shift…

And once again: where are these tapes going? Why does Jon need to “pour out” into them?

(MAG162) ARCHIVIST: This cabin. [WOODEN CREAKING SOUND] It’s not right. And, when I thought that, I–I felt… It, it all poured out of me down… into the tape.

(MAG163) ARCHIVIST: [QUIET] I… I know. [SILENCE] I–I’ll use the tape recorder…! [PLASTIC OF A TAPE] I just… [INHALE] You probably want to wait outside.

They’re still presented as a necessary part of that new process, I wonder what their purpose is…

- F for Jon, Basira&Martin teaming up against him now:

(MAG177) BASIRA: Is that like a euphemism, or…? MARTIN: Ew, no! It’s, hum… He sort of describes the place he’s in to the recorder and… Look, it’s–it’s, it’s magic Eye stuff, he can’t help it. He needs to do it, and if he doesn’t… ARCHIVIST: [FAINT GRUNT] BASIRA: He gets constipated? ARCHIVIST: Hardly! MARTIN: Actually, yeah, basically. ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] BASIRA: Right.

- Martin had been keeping lookout around Jon since MAG171, but not necessarily listening to the whole thing:

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: Look, if you can both just give me some space, I would appreciate it. MARTIN: … Fine. I’ll keep lookout. [MARTIN MOVES AWAY] BASIRA: No. If it’s information about this domain, I think I’d better hear it. ARCHIVIST: [SIGHING] If you say so…! [INHALE]

It’s curious that Basira now wanted to hear about it – she was refusing to listen to him read statements, back in season 4. Why did she need “information about this domain”, since Daisy had already left? Was it pure curiosity, did she want to understand what Jon is currently doing and how he operatesnow? (… Was she trying to imitate Daisy, since Daisy sometimes stayed with Jon when he was reading a statement?)

I wonder if Basira got stuck, absolutely unable to interrupt like Martin had been in MAG167…

- … Alright, that was a very intense statement, both from the concept of the domain and how it was conveyed – Jon impersonating the Bad Therapist, and either pantomiming/recreating a scene which had happened there, either encapsulating various experiences in one demonstration, either directly communicating with a victim from the domain and directly being responsible for their pain, terror and anguish?

Jon’s narration tends to follow the victims in third-person internal focalisation, with a few exceptions (MAG172 being a theatre script meant that the voices, both from the Spider tormenting Francis, and Francis themself, were heard without a narrative filter; Oliver added another narrative layer since he was describing one of his victims; same thing with Jon knowing about Gertrude’s life in the Archives, which had traces of his own judgement). It was absolutely chilling that, for once, all we would hear would be the tormentor’s own words, and that we would only be able to get a glimpse of the victim through the former’s commentaries. It was plain scary (Jon was TERRIFYING) and really conveyed a sense of helplessness – we, the audience, were put in the victim’s place, as helpless as them to do anything while “Dr David”/Jon controlled absolutely everything.

All the little tricks were terrible! Negating one’s identity and experiences, the use of derogatory phrases (“people like you”, “meaningless little brat”, “unlikeable waste of air”, “hysterical little creep”), the threats, the absolutely improper airiness given the situation, the medical mistreatment and incompetence, the accusations, the plain meanness, the utter denial of control. Jon presented the domain as belonging to The Spiral, but I felt that this one had some Web-vibes embedded into it, given how it was also about being trapped and at the mercy of someone else, being unable to fight a situation and utterly manhandled?

(I have my own favourite references, but with “Another of your lies, is it, as though we haven’t heard enough of them in the, what, five years I’ve been treating you now? No matter. … Yes, five years, can we please not start that again?”, my brain still screamed about García Lorca’s play. The Spiral could have a day with that one, too.)

Amongst the terrible things: the fact that we could hear the domain so directly now, and especially the sounds originating from Doctor David’s consultation, the motions, the snaps, the pills? Even the pills getting swallowed? What was up with that? It was already a curious thing in MAG175: how the panting and the footsteps of the chase were audible although Jon was staying in a fixed spot. Is reality bending around him in the domains, creating a small bubble in which what he describes doesn’t exactly happen but happens anyway? (My main question is: who or what swallowed the pills we heard? Was Jon really terrorising someone, or was he “alone” in front of Basira, pantomiming everything?)

What is clearer is about the overall sounds of the scenery: we could hear the screams and the wails in the background, and the clock ticking in that room… as long as the statement lasted. But both stopped when the statement was finished (and the static disappeared), while the faint muzak was audible again:

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: [SIGHING] If you say so…! [INHALE] [STATIC RISES] [DOOR OPENS AND CLOSES] [FOOTSTEPS, A TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] [CLOCK TICKING IN THE BACKGROUND] [STATIC FADES] ARCHIVIST: “Hi. How are we doing? You can call me Doctor David. […] Like I say: we have all the time in the world! [STATIC RISES] And good old Doctor David isn’t – going – anywhere.” [STATIC FADES] [THE SCREAMS AND THE CLOCK STOP, THE TINNY MUZAK RESUMES] [SILENCE]

So… there really is a little bubble transforming around Jon, and I wonder whether Basira was pulled into it or remained exterior? At least, the tape recorder caught these sounds…

- Basira, Sayer Of Fuck, thank you for your services:

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: [DEEP EXHALATION] … Satisfied? BASIRA: Ff… Fuck.

Fuck The Spiral, indeed.

(It was Basira’s second “Fuck” of the series! First one had been in MAG148, she’s now on equal stand with Jon.)

- ;_; I feel for Jon, who had trouble explaining exactly what this domain was about:

(MAG177) BASIRA: No, I get that bit, it’s just… So the guy was mad, or…? ARCHIVIST: No, it–it… I–I mean, yes. It’s sort of, like… gaslighting but in reverse? [A TELEPHONE RINGS IN THE BACKGROUND] Uh, this place, it’s built on the fear that your mental health problems aren’t actually real. BASIRA: … Wouldn’t that be a good thing? ARCHIVIST: N–no, I– Hum, I’m not explaining it very well. Uh, it’s, it’s the worry that everything is, is awful, and it’s actually… your fault. That, that you made it up, that, hum… that you’re… BASIRA: What? ARCHIVIST: [SIGH] Bad therapists. Let’s just say it’s the fear of bad therapists, filtered through The Spiral.

It’s a very understandable fear; until Jon cleared it up, I thought it was “that little voice in some people’s head”, because woops. The statement did feel familiar on a lot of levels, for me, and I’m still so occasionally impressed at this series’ ability to give a mirror to so many people in such different ways.

- Was Jon already trying to warn Basira about Helen, before she appeared?

(MAG177) BASIRA: That’s… a lot more nuance than I’ve gotten used to since everything went wrong. ARCHIVIST: Yes, well. The Spiral is nothing if not insidious.

With the way Basira arrived, she screamed “potentially vulnerable to Helen” given that Helen can track her (Basira went through her corridors, after the end of MAG143) and that Helen had already offered Jon&Martin to drop them wherever they wanted…

Regarding Basira’s answer: I wonder if what she had faced in the apocalypse so far really did lack much nuance, or if she was just… plainly unable to see it. We saw with Noah Thomson that her reflex is to refuse to see it when it’s too heavy to bear, and she already knew that Daisy had been killing on her way; if this one’s case wasn’t as straightforward as she wanted to believe (if he’s just a “nasty piece of work”, therefore it’s not a heavy loss if he dies, it doesn’t make Daisy absolutely monstrous, it doesn’t mean that she has to feel empathy for a victim), it… was probably the same for Daisy’s other victims, and perhaps also for the other horrors Basira has witnessed.

- CONGRATULATION, MARTIN! You’ve already run into your ~(almost)corpse of the season~!

(MAG040) ARCHIVIST: That’s where you found her? MARTIN: Yes. She was sat in a wooden chair in the middle of the room. No worms. No cobwebs. Just… an old corpse. Gertrude Robinson. She was slumped forward, but I could see her mouth hanging open.

(MAG080) TIM: Try his office. MARTIN: Yeah. Right. [DOOR OPENS TO THE SOUND OF DRIPPING] MARTIN: Jon? Oh. Oh no. TIM: I told you he was going to do something like this. MARTIN: Oh, no, no… Who is it?

(Season 4 trailer) MARTIN: Hi Jon. [PAUSE] H–how are you? [LIGHT CHUCKLE] … Yeah. Yeah, same here.

(MAG158) PETER: There is… of course… just one other complication? [FOOTSTEPS STOP] You’ll have to dispose of the current occupant. MARTIN: Curren–… [QUICK FOOTSTEPS] [SHARP BREATHING] … Who is that? PETER: Jonah Magnus! His… body, at least. Sitting here; watching; binding it all together; growing ever older. If you want to take his place, well…

(MAG177) MARTIN: [NERVOUSLY] Uh… Is that door meant to be open, heh? And… dripping blood? [BAG JOSTLING] ARCHIVIST: We’re here. [DOOR CREAKS] MARTIN: … Oh! Jesus… [BAG JOSTLING] ARCHIVIST: Yes. Horrible way to go…!

Now, there might be hope that he won’t be discovering Jon’s corpse at the end of season 5 since this tradition is done already.

- ;; Jon’s description of what Daisy did was incredibly chilling, because it felt more like a predator waiting. It felt like someone calculating and planning for the best moment.

(MAG177) ARCHIVIST: I know the route. [BAG JOSTLING] Come on. [FOOTSTEPS START AGAIN] It… will take us past Daisy’s victim, though. MARTIN: Victim? BASIRA: She’s been killing. MARTIN: What? No – no, that can’t be right. I–I thought people weren’t even allowed to die any more. ARCHIVIST: Not permanently, but, uh… Ah. […] BASIRA: You’re sure this is Daisy’s handiwork? ARCHIVIST: Positive. [STATIC RISES] She’d been prowling around for a long time, waiting for a gap in the “treatments”. And when she got one, she carved through the door like it was paper. He tried to run but she was so fast. She took his legs first, slicing through the tendons so that he could– […] MARTIN: Wait. Wait, so… so, she’s hunting down criminals? People who she… thinks got away with stuff? BASIRA: … Sure.

I still wonder if there is a bit of Daisy, right now, within the beast, aware of what it is doing? Knowing that she’s back to being a “sadistic predator”, witnessing her actions, aware of their monstrosity yet unable to stop them, would probably be season4!Daisy’s worst nightmare…

If Daisy is following a personal list of people who (she, as a Hunter, felt) had “gotten away with stuff”… Jon and Elias might be on that list? Daisy had explained to Jon, in MAG132, that she had been planning to kill him after The Unknowing. And she had wished for Elias’s death for a long time (MAG082: “One day, someone is going to kill you. I really hope it’s me.”): could she go after Jon? After Elias in the Panopticon?

- I’m still curious about the “death” status: Jon mentioned that people getting killed wouldn’t stay “permanently” dead. Are they meant to respawn at some point? Go to another domain? Does it also apply to Trevor, since Jon wasn’t the one to kill him? (Julia, however, apparently died before the apocalypse if it was only one week after the attack on the Institute – that’s two weeks before the apocalypse – so… bye.)

- Basira’s attempt to avoid the subject huuuuurts, and I like how Jon, as he is now, is able to carry much more “nuance”, precisely, and to point out… well, how things are rarely dichotomic, and how it’s easy to completely ignore someone’s circumstances and own problems as soon as you label them as “the bad guy”:

(MAG177) BASIRA: [SIGH] Noah Thomson. That… nasty piece of work. Crossed him a few times when we weren’t doing sectioned work. Last I heard, he’d dodged a GBH charge Daisy brought him in on. Blinded a guy during a robbery. I guess she didn’t forget. MARTIN: Wait. Wait, so… so, she’s hunting down criminals? People who she… thinks got away with stuff? BASIRA: … Sure. ARCHIVIST: Really? As simple as that? BASIRA: What’s your point? ARCHIVIST: What, you think he ended up in Wonderland House at random? We’re just going to ignore it, and write him off as a “nasty piece of work”? BASIRA: We don’t have time for this. ARCHIVIST: Then we should make time. You want to hear how he ended up blinding that man? Because it wasn’t a robbery. He was running away from Daisy, lashing out in a panic. The court believed it. But you believed her… BASIRA: [ANGRY] I told you not to look in my head! ARCHIVIST: I didn’t. And I won’t. But you can’t hunt a monster that you refuse to see.

* Not only did Daisy try to charge him with lies, not only did Basira believe her (while justice had sided with him!); it is indeed especially relevant that he was encountered in this domain, where people are denied the help that they would require. When it came to Daisy, Basira simplified things a lot and created another “us” vs. “them” separation… which wasn’t fair and didn’t work. 

* I like that Jon’s understanding of Basira is not entirely provided by his powers: by now, it feels like he’s learned to know her, her flaws and weaknesses, but also to keep in mind how things are more complicated than he would have liked to believe. In season 1, Jane Prentiss had been a monster terrorising them; by season 4, Jon had read enough stories about avatars to know that they tended to be, initially, vulnerable and/or isolated people lured in by a deceptive comfort, power, or their will to survive. It still means something that he wants to talk Basira out of her mindset, is still trying to help her to understand unpleasant bits of reality (even if it hurts her, since it requires her to change… a big portion of how she had grown to conceptualise the world).

* It’s almost verbatim another scene from the series:

(MAG118) ELIAS: Martin, I do not have time for this. MARTIN: Then maybe you should make time.

(MAG177) BASIRA: We don’t have time for this. ARCHIVIST: Then we should make time.

How bad does it have to be, for her to be “Elias” in a verbal squabble?

- Jon’s “You can’t hunt a monster that you refuse to see” is SUCH a powerful line, and I feel like it’s really summarising Basira’s main flaw… and potentially what might be literally happening. Basira can’t manage to catch up to Daisy: I had wondered whether it was because Basira was holding back, unsure that she would be able to kill her… but maybe it’s, plainly, because she’s never be able to directly see Daisy’s actions for what they were, to understand Daisy’s guilt and who was Daisy in season 4. Basira, through her silence, complacency and willing ignorance/denial, both enabled and was complicit in Daisy’s monstrosity; maybe now, in this universe working on dream-logic, Basira can’t reach her because the concept of Daisy has always escaped her.

- It’s interesting that in the episode, different terms were used to describe Martin’s and Basira’s feelings towards respectively Jon and Daisy: Martin “trusts” Jon (to not look into his head), Basira “believed” Daisy’s words. In a lot of ways, Basira and Martin’s situations share similarities (caring for someone powerful, who has the capacity to do a lot of harm). But Martin was able to draw clear lines and get critical of Jon’s behaviours when it was getting monstrous (attacking people in season 4), without being absolutely perfect either – he did push Jon to “smite” avatars this season without taking into consideration the harm it could do to Jon and what it meant on an ethical level, but he also ended up accepting Jon’s reluctance and agree that if Jon didn’t feel like it was the right thing to do, then it wasn’t. They’re anchors in that regard, too, grounding each other to prevent them from drifting away.

Meanwhile, Basira… was ready to tolerate Daisy’s actions, as long as it didn’t happen in front of her or to someone she liked a bit (MAG091: “I know what you do here. […] You’re not that subtle. But I… I always thought you just killed monsters.”). Daisy’s actions as a Hunter in the police were both atrocious in themselves, but also through the complacency of her superiors and colleagues, including Basira:

(MAG082) ELIAS: I was wondering. Is it worth it? Operating the way that you do? DAISY: Just answer the question. ELIAS: Does the lack of oversight make up for the lack of support? […] Please, Detective Tonner. You don’t want this to happen in the police station any more than I do. Your superiors, exactly how aware are they of what you’re doing right now? DAISY: They know enough. They got a call and sent me down here. That’s how it works. ELIAS: And then they don’t ask any questions, as long as you keep it far away from official police channels. Except your partner leaving has made you sloppy. […] Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to make a statement. Your statement. To prove to you what I know, and because I want John to hear it someday. And when it’s over, you are going to leave. Because if you don’t, I’ll make sure your superiors know all about every nasty little thing you’ve done in the name of peace and order, and I’ll make sure they are subject to the scrutiny they so desperately want to avoid. More importantly, I’ll make sure they know it has all been exposed because of you. Is that clear? […] Feel free to see yourself out. If you take any action against myself or this Institute, I will ensure the police become aware of your crimes in a way that cannot ignored or covered up.

(MAG092) ELIAS: Allow me. She rightly suspected that I held evidence of various murders she had committed, and that I sent this to her superiors. DAISY: … ELIAS: She’s quite the killer, your partner. All in the public good, of course. And she was correct, I spent some time acquiring that evidence. Or creating it. And while your superiors don’t much care about the killings, the fact there is proof… They’re not happy. And they want you brought in. […] You think you’re the only police officer eager to do violence and call it justice? No, there are plenty of other rabid dogs out there, mad with the Hunt.

(MAG132) DAISY: I hurt… a l–lot of people… and some who… who I shouldn’t have. Did you ever hear the, the story Elias told me? About what I did. How I am… He, he didn’t get a detail wrong. The Hunt… Hunger was in me all my life. Telling me who to chase, how to hurt them. I never needed to think… who I was outside of that. But down here, where I… I can’t hear the… blood anymore, I d–, I don’t… I don’t know who I am without, without the chase… I just know… that I… I don’t like who I was back outside. I don’t want to be her again. I want… to be… better… [PANTS] Y–you know what I thought wh–when I woke up here? I thought this was hell; I wa–, I was dead, and within hell. And I… eh, I–I knew I deserved it… I don’t want t–to be a s–sadistic predator again… I–I don’t want to… hobble around, like some pathetic, wounded prey either… I don’t know which would be worse. And I’m sc–scared, now, that I’ll never get the choice…

(MAG142) MARTIN: Not nice being interrogated, is it? DAISY: I… [EXHALE] Oh. MARTIN: Yeah. [SILENCE] DAISY: [INHALE] I’m sorry, Martin. MARTIN: It’s alright. Wasn’t you. [INHALE] Not really. DAISY: No, it was. I hate… a lot of what I did back then; doesn’t mean I’m not… responsible for it, doesn’t mean it… wasn’t me.

(MAG153) DAISY: They’re not gone yet. We could still get them. [RUSTLING OF CLOTHES] ARCHIVIST: Daisy, no. It’s like you say. “Don’t listen to the blood.” DAISY: [SLOWER BREATHES] … “Listen to the quiet”… ARCHIVIST: Even so, if it’s having this much of an effect on you– DAISY: I’m not going back. I can’t let it in again. ARCHIVIST: But it– … What if it kills you? DAISY: [CHORTLE] Always said I was dedicated to justice…! ARCHIVIST: Daisy! It’s not… You can’t think like that. DAISY: Jon. Do you have any idea how much damage you can do if you’re a police officer who wants to hurt people? How much the system will protect you? ARCHIVIST: [SHARP INHALE] DAISY: I managed to keep most of it from Basira, but… ARCHIVIST: That wasn’t you, that was The Hunt! DAISY: … [SIGH] We were the same. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: … You’d never known anything different. [SILENCE] DAISY: Because I never wanted to. All that time trapped was good for one thing: thinking. And I did a lot of it. I’ve made my choice.

(MAG155) BASIRA: I’m trying to convince her to go after them. To, er… “Hunt” them. ARCHIVIST: Why? BASIRA: Because I’m not going to lose her. ARCHIVIST: She goes Hunting again, you might anyway. BASIRA: And if she doesn’t, she might die. ARCHIVIST: Something you’re fine with in certain other cases. And something she’s made peace with. BASIRA: Because of the guilt she feels over the stuff The Hunt made her do…! It’s not her fault. ARCHIVIST: Earlier, when she was still out of it, I, uh… I “saw” some of the things she was talking about, some of the things she did, while she was police. I’m not convinced I disagree with her assessment. [PAUSE] Do you want me to tell you? BASIRA: No. No, I don’t. ARCHIVIST: … You knew, didn’t you? You knew the sort of things she did, and you let her. BASIRA: No, not exactly. I thought… [PAUSE] It’s not that simple. ARCHIVIST: It never is. But that doesn’t make it okay. [SILENCE] BASIRA: None of us are who we were, Jon. [SILENCE] ARCHIVIST: No. I suppose not. In many ways, it’s simpler now, isn’t it? At least now, our demons have names. BASIRA: Mm.

Basira felt harsh, in this episode, but the episode was equally harsh on her, with Jon trying to push her to change her mindset and to realise what wrongs had been committed, what the situation truly had been. It feels like we might be getting there, though? Basira had spiralled for the worse in season 4, but didn’t really get an arc of her own so far, and everything has been laid out for it now. (It also… helps me to make peace with Daisy’s likely fate, if the promise is fulfilled and she is killed as part of Basira’s acceptance of what Daisy had done and what Basira had allowed to happen?)

(- Regarding Basira’s harshness and the fact that she tends to throw herself into trying to do something without thinking it through:

(MAG117) BASIRA: I don’t want to be here. But by the end, I didn’t want to be police either, so… guess I don’t really know what I do want, which… maybe that’s just as well. My options… they’ve gotten a lot narrower over the last year. […] And if it’s anything like when we went after Rayner, it’s going to get bad. The sort of bad you can only get through if you stay focused and keep a clear head. You choke down the fear, and not because it’s feeding some weird horrible god like Jon thinks, but because that’s how you keep going.

(MAG119) BASIRA: Don’t panic. Don’t panic. Just close your… Ignore it. ignore the, uh… don’t listen. Focus. Think. This is a place. You are you and you’re in a place now. If… if it’s a place, and it’s now, then… then… then it has an end. The other things, the… […] Good! Then… then keep moving. Keep moving until you find another place. A place you know… just keep moving. Keep moving.

(MAG128) BASIRA: Do you know how I survived the… The Unknowing? ARCHIVIST: I… No. No, I don’t. BASIRA: No powers, no… magic or… help. I was trapped in that place, and so I tried to figure it out. And I did. A little. So I kept doing it. I kept going through until I got out. I… reasoned my way out of that nightmare. ARCHIVIST: Good lord… BASIRA: Then everything ended, and Daisy was gone. And you were gone. And Tim. And then I got back to the Institute, and Martin send me to meet the new boss. Then I stood alone in an empty office for more than one hour. I can trust me, Jon. That’s it.

(MAG142) MARTIN: Would have thought Basira would’ve had more sense, though. DAISY: When Basira and I were partners, I’d see this happen sometimes. She can read a… situation like no one I know, always seems to know the right move, but for all her research, she never wants to put a plan together. I think she just hates all the unknowns, the… variables. [SIGH] Contingencies. If she spots an advantage, she’ll… grab it, and trust herself to figure out the details as she goes. MARTIN: Hm. DAISY: It’s worked so far.

(MAG146) BASIRA: No. No, if he is being controlled, we need to know. And we need to know now. Do you know where she is? ARCHIVIST: H… Not… not properly, I, I think she has some connection to Hill Top Road. BASIRA: Then we go. Now. [SHUFFLING] Unless anyone has any objections? […] Daisy? DAISY: … Be better if we could prepare. MELANIE: I–I just think that… we shouldn’t be exposing ourselves like this until we have a little bit more than a hunch…! ARCHIVIST: She does have a point. MELANIE: I didn’t ask you. BASIRA: ‘Kay, fine. I’ll go, then. I’ll do some recon on my own and update you.

(MAG155) BASIRA: No sign of Annabelle either. ARCHIVIST: You’re still on that? BASIRA: You’re not? ARCHIVIST: … I–I mean, I don’t know how much she can predict or manipulate the future, but I think she’s proven she can at least avoid us finding her. BASIRA: Yeah, well. It makes me feel better. ARCHIVIST: I suppose that’s something.

Given how that’s also what she did upon discovering that the world had “ended”, it sounds more and more like a coping mechanism to not have to deal with everything else, and/or to get back a semblance of control… I’m remembering what she had said about her father’s life-lessons:

(MAG117) BASIRA: I don’t know. I feel kind of bad. Everyone seems to be having a much worse time of it than me, and I was meant to be the hostage. It’s amazing, how much you can ignore when you keep your head in a book. Mf! My dad would hate me talking like this. He couldn’t stand people who just passively moaned about their problems. He always said: “If you don’t like something, you accept it and you adapt; or your fight and you change it. Whining doesn’t help.” I’ve always tried to live like that, but I think sometimes… you feel like you’re adapting, but… it’s just denial. But not anymore. I’m going to fight and change it. I just hope I’m not heading into the wrong battle.

… And back then, it hadn’t really struck me as a potentially toxic mindset. I mean, it’s supposed to be inspiring, but it’s also… so dichotomic. Either you shut up and accept, either you actively fight: there always will be cases where it’s more complicated than this, where you can’t really do either. And it feels like Basira tried really hard to live through these words, without accepting that they weren’t really working because the world is a way more complex place than this…

I’m really/curious excited, because with the way Jon kept pushing for her to understand how keeping her eyes closed and following a pure binarism had been her fatal flaws, it really seems like we’re heading towards something. Crossing fingers for a Basira mini-arc/inner-journey before everything bursts into flames!)

- … On another note, Helen, your entrance, please.

(MAG177) [TENSE SILENCE] [SOUND OF AN ELEVATOR ARRIVING WITH A SUDDEN, SHRILL “BING”] MARTIN: [SURPRISED GASP] [DISTORTION SOUNDS] HELEN: Not interrupting anything, am I? MARTIN: Christ, Helen, you scared the life out of me! HELEN: [INSINCERE] Sorry darling. ARCHIVIST: Not now, Helen.

Best and Worst entrance at the same time.

I didn’t really hear static, this time around? Like, the usual distortion sounds were there, but not the fuzzy static? Is it because they were already in a Spiral domain?

Her playfulness was off the charts this time, and OOFT:

(MAG177) BASIRA: Can’t have been that bad. MARTIN: I– … What? BASIRA: You look fine to me. MARTIN: [INDIGNANT] Excuse me?! BASIRA: Whole and healthy with a shoulder to lean on every step of the way!

[…] BASIRA: Really don’t need your opinion on this. HELEN: Good to see you too, Basira! You’re looking well.

She felt absolutely untrustworthy, in such a cartoonish way… that actually, it probably would have been fine to take her on her offer right now, if expecting to be deceived?

(MAG177) HELEN: I can offer a shortcut. Take you right to that murder machine you call a partner. MARTIN: Basira… Jon can’t go through Helen’s doors, we, we couldn’t come with you. HELEN: Basira is a strong, independent woman. She doesn’t need you two holding her hand. Anyway, it’ll be dead quick. Two minutes, door-to-door, quick shot to the back of Daisy’s head, and we’ll be home before you know it! ARCHIVIST: … You just heard what The Spiral does to people, you can’t… trust her. HELEN: Urgh, nonsense! Martin can vouch for me. You and– what’s-his-name went through Michael’s door, right? And he was rubbish compared to me. MARTIN: … We were in there for two weeks…! HELEN: Exactly! And you’re just fine! Better than fine, flourishing! MARTIN: … You really don’t care, do you? HELEN: Alright, be like that. [FOOTSTEPS] Under new management, anyway. [EXHALE] So what’s it going to be, Basira darling? Quick and easy? Or are you looking to take the long way round as the third wheel?

* It’s… suspicious that Martin ended up explaining/reminding to the audience the Jon Problem about him being unable to go through Helen’s door without likely destroying her in the process. It feels like someone will end up inside soon…? (Also yay for Martin once again stating that if Jon can’t go, it means that they can’t go!)

* Helen’s “dead quick” is awful, I hate it.

* Martin, forgiving and forgetting? NO AHAHAHA RESENT AND REMEMBER:

(MAG080) MARTIN: Sorry? Sorry, what? How can you not care!? TIM: Because this is us now. Worms. Monsters. Corridors. They’ll keep happening until one of them kills us and we’ve just got to deal with it. [SIGH] … Any sign of the woman…? MARTIN: I don’t think so. [PAUSE] We should have helped her.

(MAG082) MARTIN: I told you that there was someone else there. It may… DAISY: Which one should we be asking, by the way? The man with the knife hands or the woman trapped in your “magic corridors”? MARTIN: It happened.

(MAG117) MARTIN: Hey, hey, I mean what’s normal, right? Is living in an old document storage normal? Is losing a friend and not even noticing normal? Corridors? Evil all-seeing managers? I suppose you can get used to anything, but…

(MAG118) MARTIN: [DRY LAUGHTER] Dignity? Alright, yeah; like the dignity of being trapped in your flat by worms, or sleeping in the Archives, clutching a corkscrew! Or– or fetching drinks for the thing that murdered your friend without you even noticing…! Laughing at all their little jokes, then being left to wander impossible corridors for weeks!

… Helen’s lack of respect for Tim, though :w (Peter had also shown some trouble with remembering his name, in MAG158…)

* Squinting hard at Helen saying that Martin is “flourishing” and adding that “Under new management, anyway”: was it referring to herself (as The Distortion’s new management, since she just mentioned Michael having been “rubbish”)? To Martin’s own Fear alignment…?

I’m glad and relieved that Basira refused her offer, even if it’s purely motivated by strategy ;; (And I’m amazed that Martin hadn’t noticed how much fun she’d been having until now – she… doesn’t seem to be getting worse? She’s just consistently casually awful.)

(- I’m wondering if Helen’s “Especially now you’ve got… someone else to do the intense, driven thing. I think you might need to get a new schtick!” was purely gratuitous or a very direct jab… Right now, Jon&Martin’s quest to the Panopticon feels like it has been put to a stop, to allow them to focus on Daisy. The way Helen put it, it seemed as if it was convenient for Jon to not have to handle the “driven thing” anymore at the moment…? Is Jon actually reluctant to reach the Panoptitute, just like Basira might be sabotaging herself from reaching Daisy through nightmare logic…?)

- Once again, the episode ends with Jon leading the way, which he’s done a lot since coming out from The Lonely with Martin in MAG159. It makes sense, since he has the knowledge and a better understanding of the domains compared to the others, but I wonder if there will be a point, this season, when Jon will have to follow someone else instead of taking the lead?

- Amongst the things which were not mentioned this episode and had involved Basira:

* The fact that the “kid” avatar that Jon&Martin encountered was Callum Brodie. Basira had been involved in the mission to rescue him from the kidnapping orchestrated by The Dark, and Martin was aware of that when they met Callum in MAG172. Yet, he didn’t namedrop him in front of her, in this episode.

* Jon mentioned that Elias had manipulated them, but not how it had been done, and that it had required to get him marked by the Fears. Basira was directly pushed by Elias to go to Svalbard, where Elias knew that the Dark Sun resided, on the pretext that they might be attempting a ritual there. If Basira hadn’t listened to Elias, or had shared who was her source with the others… maybe they could have averted that mark for a little while longer.

* They didn’t mention that Jonah launched the apocalypse through a letter which had been hidden amongst the statements that Basira had sent to Jon. (No mention of the tapes either: though Jon&Martin had already understood that Basira wasn’t behind them by the beginning of season 5, Basira might have confirmed that it indeed wasn’t her).

=> That’s a few instances where Basira’s actions had “complicated” consequences and made her an (unwilling) contributor to the Fear business and Jonah’s plans. I wonder if these little details and pieces of information will be revealed to her soon? They… could hurt her a lot, while still helping her to see how the situation is not as simple as she wanted to believe (the victim she had helped to save was a bully and turned into an avatar torturing other kids; her fear of another ritual led to Jon’s second-to-last mark; either she didn’t pay enough attention to the statements she was sending, either the package was compromised before reaching its destination, leading to Jonah’s letter trapping Jon).

MAG178’s title is hard! It makes me think of something Gerry had told Jon, but also possibly of administration-stuff. Elias and/or Rosie stuff? Something about Daisy’s list of preys? Domain with a “minor” fear to show, like with the Extinction, how Smirke’s categorisation didn’t work all that well? Something about the deaths not being permanent? Beholding domain or statement, demonstrating the way it’s a bit more important than the other Fears in this new world?