cosmicwhalesong

Latest Posts by cosmicwhalesong

Killing Eve 4x08 - Eve & Villanelle (Stills via ffaupdates)

This is what you wanted.

KILLING EVE (2018–2022)

I just love when they plead guilty to the gay allegations for a brief moment even after the show has ended—

canon: they died

fanfic: fUCK YOU

Killing Eve (2018 - 2022)

Two years ago Jodie Comer and Sandra Oh gave us the best onscreen kiss of all time. - April 10, 2022.

Favourites Per Show - Favourite Relationship - Killing Eve "When I try to think of my future, I just see your face over and over again."

I had to do something that I did not want to do, even though it was my job. And it hurt them.

AGATHA ALL ALONG 1.01 | 1.04

If you're going to have somebody who can go toe-to-toe with Kathryn Hahn, you can't really do better than Aubrey Plaza.

THE SECRET GARDEN (1993) dir. Agnieszka Holland + autumn colors (requested by anonymous)

Agatha All Along 1x05 "Darkest Hour / Wake Thy Power"

AGATHA ALL ALONG 1.08 - Follow Me My Friend / To Glory At The End

AGATHA ALL ALONG 1.08 Follow Me My Friend / To Glory At The End | 1.09 Maiden Mother Crone

#no thoughts #just (gay)vibes

Deep down, you’ve always wanted Buffy to accept you, to love you, even.

Just finished watching Dollhouse, I'm 15 years late. This amazing video does it justice

I'm So Evil, And Skanky, And I Think I'm Kinda Gay (Bad Girls)

In 1872, a full twenty-five years before the release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Irish author Sheridan Le Fanu published Carmilla. This story depicts the relationship between the young and innocent protagonist, Laura, and the confident and mysterious title character, Carmilla. A friendship blossoms between Carmilla and Laura and the two become close, but over time Laura becomes suspicious of Carmilla’s strange behaviour. She flees from her, and it is revealed that Carmilla is a vampire who has been preying on Laura – feeding on her nightly and attempting to turn her into a creature of darkness. Carmilla is confronted, killed, has her head removed and body burned, and the ashes of both are thrown into the river. 

A simple story and much shorter than a true novel, Carmilla’s historical impact outweighs its length. Not only is it one of the earliest and most notable pieces of vampire fiction, and a great influence on Dracula itself, it is also the origin point of one of the most controversial tropes in this genre of fiction: the Lesbian Vampire.

The vampire myth as constructed by Dracula and its compatriots positions vampires as a corrupting sexual influence upon women. Older men sneak into the bedrooms of virginal young women, penetrate them, and therefore transform them into something tragic and ungodly. They personify a threat to patriarchy; a threat perceived in the form of female sexuality. The idea is that an unmarried woman having symbolic sex will irrevocably twist them into some kind of monster.

The Lesbian Vampire exists as an extension of this idea, focusing on one of the most diabolical threats to patriarchal ideology – a woman who sexually desires another woman. Carmilla’s victims are exclusively female, and her pursuit of Laura is very visibly romantic in nature. She kisses Laura, confesses love for her, the two take walks in the moonlight and embrace each other. This is what leads to Carmilla feeding upon Laura and threatening her death. Symbolically, there is no separation between the two. The danger Laura is in is caused by same-sex desire. Carmilla’s villainy is her lesbianism. The trope does not have to include vampires in a strict sense, but more generally the link of sapphic seduction leading to corruption.

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buffy/faith for the ask game

(Reverse unpopular opinions)

Easily my favorite Buffy ship and one of my favorites in any work of fiction. I think the main reasons it works so well for me are:

The way it resonates so strongly with what's going on in the rest of the show the season Faith arrives. I mean, Buffy comes out to her mother (as a Slayer), which is treated by the show as ... well, as Buffy coming out ("it's because you didn't have a strong father figure, isn't it?" / "have you tried ... not being a Slayer?" / "I've tried to march in the Slayer Pride Parade...") and a handful of episodes later Buffy meets another girl who is also a Slayer and who she starts spending a lot of time with (because they have a connection -- "it's kind of a Slayer thing" -- which she doesn't have with her other, non-Slayer friends). And while they're busy patrolling cemeteries and looking for vampires every night, this other Slayer is keen to (1) talk to Buffy about sex and quiz her on her love life; (2) repeatedly tell her that "all men are beasts" and "losers" who can't be trusted; (3) suggest that Buffy should be more open to having sex with the people she spends her nights hunting vampires with (like ... who, Faith?); and (4) is delighted when Buffy breaks up with her boyfriend (and later furious when she gets back together with her previous ex) and immediately suggests that she could replace him ("You're still going to that dance, right? [...] Why don't we go together?"). If this was deliberately laying the ground work for an explicitly romantic arc, it would feel pretty heavy-handed. The fact that it apparently wasn't (at least not on the part of the showrunner or of most of the writers) almost makes it work better, in some ways.

The way that Faith is, from the very beginning, very deliberately written as a foil for Buffy, a person Buffy might have been if things went just a little differently in her life -- because she goes through things very much like things the audience has already seen Buffy go though (living alone in a small place in a strange town with no friends all season the way Buffy did in Anne, panicking and starting to pack to run away in Faith, Hope & Trick in the same way Buffy was accused of doing just the episode before, killing a person the way Buffy thought she had in Season 2's Ted, the way her fear of Kakistos mirrors Buffy's fear of the Master in When She Was Bad) and because she is so aware of the fact that she's always being compared to Buffy and coming up short, either by other people or herself ("you get the Mom, you get the Watcher ... what do I get?") it's very easy to tie Faith's arc across the show back to Buffy and to her feelings about Buffy. Faith wanting Buffy to accept her becomes Faith wanting this idealized version of herself to forgive her failings. And likewise Buffy recriprocating Faith's feelings and admitting to herself that she is attracted to Faith becomes Buffy accepting that Faith (and the things she represents) really are an integral part of Buffy herself; that Faith isn't entirely wrong when she says that Buffy enjoys being a Slayer and that being a Slayer is something she should be proud of (or, again, being "a Slayer").

Apparently this wasn't the original plan for the character (if there ever was anything like an 'original plan'), but the fact Faith's arc in Season 3 so clearly mirrors Angel's in Season 2 -- and the fact she is so very weird about Angel all season (and that Buffy is equally weird about how attracted to Faith she just keeps insisting Angel must be) just naturally suggests that Faith might have a similiar role to Angel in the narrative beyond just the circumstances of her betrayal of (and later not-quite-being-killed by) Buffy. And Angel is -- for the first three seasons of the show at least -- primarily cast in the role of Buffy's doomed tragic love interest who she has to (metaphorically) kill but will later be reunited with. Which makes Faith ... well, something.

Even if not all the writers were on board, the fact that Eliza Dushku was deliberately playing Faith as attracted to Buffy (and that SMG was playing Buffy as alternately frustrated by and protective of and tempted by Faith) gives their scenes together a chemistry that I don't think most of Buffy's (or Buffy's) canon relationships ever managed. Whether that's the Amends porch scene or Buffy kissing Faith in the hospital in Graduation Day or any and all of their various fights across the show. And those fight scenes are all great, which is another thing I love about the ship: is it really a proper enemies-to-lovers arc if one of the people in it hasn't tried to kill the other one and left them in a coma for months?

Faith's return to Buffy in the last five epsiodes of the show is one of the last season's saving graces, and it helps that by this point the writers definitely seemed to be playing up the ship deliberately ("Willow said you needed me: didn't give it a lot of thought" / "Defensiveness and weird mixed signals ... I've got Faith for that" / "Deep down you've always wanted Buffy to accept you. To love you." / "It feels like it's mine ... I guess that means it's yours"). Even without ever being canon and without wandering what happens post-Chosen, it feels like there's a real narrative arc to their relationship, from their initially rocky start through to "just good friends" to bitter enemies through to Faith seeking (and finding) some measure of redemption and Buffy cautiously letting her back into her life. Faith isn't in the show much (or even mentioned in the show in most episodes), but it feels like she has a genuinely meaningful connection to Buffy that most characters who appeaer in less than a season's worth of episodes can't manage.

The thing that made the ship work for me, rewatching the show after several years back in 2020, is the fact that Faith is -- even at her worst -- incredibly sympathetic precisely because she is such a loser and hates herself so much. She boasts about being a great actor despite the fact we see her awkwardly telling the sort of transparent lies that ... well, normally only Buffy manages (compare "There's this big party ..." in Amends to Buffy trying to tell her old crush Ford that "there was a cat ... and then there was another cat, and they were fighting"), she wants people to think she's cool so badly but only manages to fool Xander and Willow, she tries to act as though she's happy without friends but we only ever see her alone sitting watching old tv shows or lying listlessly on her bed, she insists she doesn't need a Watcher and "has a problem with authority figures" but she is so openly desperate for any sort of parental guidance in her life that she sides with first Mrs Post then the Mayor. She ties Buffy's mom up so she can have someone to listen to how sad she is that Buffy's moved on to a new guy in college and "dumped" her. The scene in the church in Who Are You? where Faith-as-Buffy furiously attacks Buffy-as-Faith while screaming through tears that she's "nothing ... disgusting ... murderous bitch" is, I think, a strong contendor for the best scene the show ever produced.

As Doug Petrie said, the reason Faith works as a character -- and the reason that Buffy/Faith works as a ship -- is that Faith is incredibly unhappy. If Faith was the cool loner she tries to pass herself off as -- and which some of the fandom seems to think she is -- the ship wouldn't be nearly as compelling to me. Faith isn't just the part of Buffy who loves Slaying and pushes back when other people give her orders, and she's not just another verison of Angelus. She's the part of Buffy from Becoming who lost everything and ran away from home, only unlike Buffy she never got to go home again. As Angel asked Buffy in that episode: "no friends, no hope ... take that away, what's left?". Well, Faith is what's left. Of course Buffy would see herself in Faith, right from the beginning. Of course Buffy would want to protect her. As Buffy (Sunnydale Class Protector 1999) tells Angel, Faith is in pain ... she's somebody who "some people ... protective-type people" are naturally drawn to. The show is very consistent about the fact that Buffy's type is friendless losers who look good in leather and can fight alongside her in battle (but not quite as well, so she can protect them and look after them when they're hurt). And what bigger loser in the show is there than Faith?

There's just something very specific about homoerotic character-enveloping friendships from around 2010 where they're semi-aware that gay people exist but queerbaiting isn't quite a thing yet sp their relationship consumes the narrative and changes them both irrevocably forever and they end in tragedy but the ending is JUST open enough for the fic writers to wriggle into that just makes me go fucking FERAL

I am tired of defensiveness and weird mixed signals — you know what? I have Faith for that.

2x12 / 3x12

This is not how I wanted to handle this, and you know it.