listen. . .words TRULY cannot explain how vindicated i am feeling in the fandom after all these interviews and snippets
do you even KNOW how much hate I got for writing Come Over Here and Profound for Me? where Penelope was guilt spiraling over all she did as LW? and people accused me of being a 'psychopath' and needing therapy (as if being in therapy is a. . .bad thing?) and being oh so unfair to Penelope because she was beating herself up a lot and her friends were hurt and betrayed?
and then we got the clip of her talking down to herself, about how embarrassing she is and how no one wants her and 'of course you wouldn't want to court me' and how sad he was about how lowly she sees herself.
how absolutely baffled I was over the narrative that every new male character would be a suitor for her? how little sense it made and how Penelope was for us unseen girlies and her being a diamond would be weird and ooc and unfulfilling?
and then it was revealed that Dankworth is Prudence's husband, and that Anderson is a hit with the older ladies, hinting he's there for Violet (as a continuation of her Queen Charlotte storyline) and that Debling is in a grand total of two episodes and that even Adjoa Andoh said the season was for the wallflowers.
how confused i was over monolithic 'Penelope is a girlboss and never did anything wrong!' narratives that happened over and over in our fandom and that Colin would grovel and beg and cry to be in Penelope's good graces again over one comment?
and then the clip came out and the person she was actually dragging was herself and the worst thing she called him was 'cruel' and just about one day later she's staring into his eyes and telling him how beautiful they are and how they shine when he's kind
how peeps insisted he'd be just fine when the truth comes out that Penelope is Lady Whistledown and that he'd find her clever or already knows or wouldn't be upset at all?
LINK
Interviewer: 'How do you think Colin would react if he found out she's LW?'
LN: 'He would react. . .worst out of everyone in the ton'
NC: 'She slagged off a LOT of people! I'm like 'Girl, you should be worried!'
LN: 'He's also a sensitive boy! We'll see, I'm sure'
i'm not gonna name names. . .but some of y'all owe a LOT of people in this fandom a LOT of apologies
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Congrats to everyone at @re-dracula on such a masterpiece of an episode. It was emotionally harrowing in the best way possible. Special shout out to everyone involved in the ending song for making such a lovely sounding song with lyrics that made me want to crawl out of my skin in visceral discomfort
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This is something I’ve been curious about since I first stumbled down this rabbit hole and was trying to puzzle out if I thought Taylor really would fake relationships (this was in late 2017, so with joe) and one of the things I couldn’t understand was how people could so easily believe that after what happened in 2016 (breakup of her longest relationship to date, rebound with Tom, cancellation that apparently made her suicidal, her friends suddenly showing themselves to be traitors) that she could not just fall in love with joe but absolutely trust him unquestionably enough o write New Years Day 3 months in. And it wasn’t just NYD, but a lot of songs she wrote in fall 2016 that had a forevermore feel to them (is this the end of all the endings, trust him like a brother.) I simply chalked it up to people being a bit young and rooting for love and not really thinking, and them only knowing Taylor as this over-dramatic lover of love. But now seeing it happen again almost exactly the same (betrayal by her father figure business partner, betrayal by the man she though for sure that she’d marry, betrayal by the man she thought was the man who got away who also made marriage promises) and within weeks she has now fallen in love with another man who so so perfect for her that she would just trust him like a brother and fall into the marriage promises AGAIN. And not only that people will believe it, because yeah, she knows her audience, but also that people don’t side-eye this and say “you know what Taylor, maybe it’s time for you to be single for 5 minutes and just like, think about why you keep falling for these men that can’t give you what you want and work on yourself and your constant need to be hopelessly and forevermore in love all the time. Maybe there’s a different issue here?” Like. They think they are her friends, and this is what friends do for each other. I would be so worried about her getting into something YET AGAIN that seems too good to be true. But instead (because they aren’t her friends, they are her audience, enjoying the romcom entertainment of it all) they cheer it on.
Without a second thought. Without really a first good thought either.
Anyway, as always, fascinated by the insight into human nature of it all.
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Wait you guys......
Mike and Will are in love
No because like they're just...they're just a wholesome childhood friends to lovers slowburn I'm gonna rewatch like "aww you don't know yet".
Like....
Mike and Will are in love.
They fell in love from ages 12-16(?). That's so cute. What the hell. I just randomly starting thinking about it like it's just some show I just heard about or something and I'm like "aw cute trope". What a cute trope wtf. That's adorable. Two twelve year old boys in the 80s and they fall in love over the course of many years as they grapple with internalized homophobia and homophobia in their small town? That sounds like a GREAT show where can I watch it? That's adorable.
Mike and Will are in love. And...that's just the premise. That's just the premise of their plot. If you came up to me after you watched episode 1 for spoilers and you were like "What happens to Lucas? Dustin? Mike? That girl they found? The kid who went missing?" I could just be like "Dustin gains confidence and becomes besties with Mike's sister's boyfriend after they break up, Lucas meets this girl who's introduced next season and they're really good for each other, the girl gets adopted by the police chief and then into the Byers and has a great found family and independence arc, and the boy who went missing survives and he and Mike fall in love!"
And that'd just be like...right. I'd just be telling you what happens.
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One thing I really love about Pentiment is that like. For one thing it's very easy to play a very straightforwardly kind, compassionate, sympathetic Andreas who listens to the concerns his friends in Tassing are voicing and tries his hardest to do right by everyone and volunteers to help people a lot. As someone who always worries games are going to force me into making choices I don't want to (or that certain dialogue options will turn out to be harsher than I expected) it's sort of funny that Pentiment, a game that is about forcing you to make difficult choices, at least always let me feel good about Andreas' internal motivations and relationships with others, even when there were sometimes really upsetting consequences in-game.
(And of course, the idea that he's a good person trying his hardest and yet a lot of things go wrong for him and others over the course of the story is one of the things that sends Andreas spiraling, so this is very much something that's woven into the fabric of the game)
But I know on our first playthrough, we chose some of the background options that felt like they specifically lent themselves to that, which lead to playing a very like...polite, bookworm type Andreas. Who I adored as a character obviously, but figured was very specific to our run.
Anyways, I've enjoyed learning that while there are certainly background and dialogue choices that lead to him being brasher/more abrasive and some decisions that cross a bit of a line for me personally (there are a couple suspects I could never accuse, even with solid evidence and I know it's possible to make him a more unsympathetic to the peasants), even some of the more "unsavory" sounding background options really don't lock you into that at all.
I'm specifically thinking about the Rapscallion background because that's what the streaming gang had me choose but I love that the description for it is like "Andreas does CRIME and gets in FIGHTS"
And then in practice a lot of the options it gives you are like
"I'm going to STEAL MONEY from a wealthy abbey to help the NICE PEASANT FAMILY I'm staying with PAY THEIR TAXES!!"
or "I'm going to THREATEN YOU because you are cruelly and unfairly accusing my good friend the SWEET ELDERLY MONK!!"
And when you pair that with certain actions that he takes regardless because they're baked into like the plot or cutscenes, or certain actions he won't take or people he won't agree with because the game never even gives you the option, plus some of the other most popular dialogue choices it's like
Yeah this man does feel a bit like the antithesis of an edgy protagonist
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