Rewatching YOU In Anticipation Of The Final Season, And Season 1 Is So Damn Good. The Acting, The Writing,

Murmur, Cameron Barnett

I haven't started s5 yet but I wanted to do a mini review for each season of YOU from someone who loved the first book and enjoyed the others:

S1: obvi most closely follows the books, but also is a great season of TV in general. Performances, music, visuals, story. It grasped some of the series' main themes, about terrible people and delusion and dedication vs dependence. Just excellent.

S2: big departure from the book but mostly pretty good. I actually loved Forty and Ellie and Delilah and Willie B. But this is where the series starts to lose something in the sense that because those characters are sympathetic, balancing them with the humanity of Joe gets tricky. I'm not crazy about the Love twist but at least the season is entertaining.

S3: woof. Possibly my least favorite season of the first four. It's just so sad, Love clinging to her marriage while Joe is Joe. I mean she is also coocoo banana pants but at least she admits it? And although a major departure from her book counterpart, Marianne is amazing. Same problem with S2 though in that many of the supporting characters, at least IMO (Theo, Shary and Cary, Dante) are really compelling and so the portrayal of Joe is flattened.

S4: Honestly kind of a return to form while also being a giant "what the fuck." The supporting characters other than Phoebe, Nadia, and Kate are awful people (cartoonishly so) and while the twist is both a huge cliche and a middle finger to actual psychology, it is fun. Ed Speelers is fucking fantastic. And by this point, at least for me, the show has lost all pretence that Joe is anything but an unredeemable serial killer and they're leaning in. Which is like not really the point of the original story but it was inevitable given the nature of TV, especially in the streaming age.

Tldr; excited for S5 and ready for some justice.

reblog to explode a landlord

Due to some ✨childhood trauma✨ I used to be so anxious about having political discussions. I've always been interested in politics and that autistic boner for social justice, and I believed that by "winning" "debates" I could change the way the other person and/or audience thought, and ideally make them agree with me.

As I've aged the goal has been more to correct misinformation because obviously they've been lied to and don't have the right data or they would already agree? Possibly because I myself have always been learning, gathering more context, adjusting my ideas and beliefs, etc. (For example, as a teenager I didn't understand affirmative action, so I didn't agree with it. That has thankfully changed.)

There's a lot wrong with this approach and this thinking, which I'm working on (thanks therapy). But one of those things that is almost relieving is that data doesn't convince people whose egos are on the line, because nothing does. Once you have determined that your sense of self relies and self-worth relies on an ideology, nothing will sway you, because you'd have to admit you were wrong, or that you caused harm. (For some people, admitting the former is harder than admitting the latter.)

it’s crazy how grrm wrote the first woke beauty and the beast where a hot guy falls in love with an ugly woman and people will bend over backwards still to say brienne is actually attractive. like no she’s not and it’s not more feminist to say she is 👍

I realize that there is nuance in individual beliefs and that politics is a spectrum. But do you think JKR ever looks at the headlines and sees what Trump is doing on the day to day and thinks yeah, that guy is batshit crazy (or insert British equivalent) but, you know, he's right about trans people.

Another one of those things I feel like I should have already known and maybe did but didn't articulate before now:

The way people treat each other has way more to do with their subjective feelings and personal hangups/desires than anything else. To the point where most people don't even realize themselves that this is the case.

We say things like "this flower is pretty." But the flower is just a flower. Someone else could see it and say it's ugly. Neither one of those observations is "true" in an objective sense. And it may be true that humanity as a whole agrees more with one person or the other, but that also doesn't make the observation true.

And further, the goodness of importance or morality of the descriptor (pretty, ugly, stupid, wise, thin, short, useful, natural, cheap, tacky, fancy, special) is not objective or true in any real sense. A flower is not better because it is pretty.

I do think one could make observations about a person's thought process/perspective based on how they call out what they see. Are you someone who only calls out things you think of as negative? Or do you notice/call out things you think of as positive?

It has been helpful to me to mentally add a strong "YOU THINK" before anyone gives their opinion on anything. This is partly because I raised in a house where one person got to define objective truth and any opposing ideas were dismissed. I've spent decades dismantling the idea that there is always a correct or right or true solution and that I should try to align with that, that not doing so is __insert disparaging adjective here__ (stupid, naive, immoral).

I've also long noticed that how I feel about someone/something will change how I value what I observe. If I love someone, I usually think they are beautiful. I'm still puzzling out why beauty is so important to me, but right now it encompasses a host of ideas that I think of as positive. Maybe the association is more than I "like" them. I like sunsets and oceans and cats and flowers and therefore I use "beautiful" when what I mean is "beloved."

The flower is a flower. If you look at it and feel something positive, or even just something at all, then your life was made better by it.

Another thing I've realized is that debate "topics" are not and should not be viewed as existing in a vacuum, and I honestly think that conservatives/right-leaning thinkers push this idea because they know, unconsciously or otherwise, that their ideology is internally inconsistent.

For example, take the abortion debate and the antivax debate. In the latter conservatives will argue that people have the right to choose what happens to their bodies, that the safety of others should be considered secondary or not at all, that their autonomy should come first. And those same people will argue that the life of a fetus is more important than the life of its parent, that the fetus overwrites the autonomy of the parent and that the parent should have no right to end the pregnancy regardless of their feelings on it.

Obviously there are other arguments on both topics out there, but as an example, you can see how disingenuous the thinking is. Somehow the life of an unborn zygote is more important than the life of its creator and the right of its parents to make stupid medical decisions is more important than the safety of all the kids in its future daycare.

This internal contradiction of conservative politics is even more stark when you look at what they say versus what they do.

Going back to the tRaNs WoMeN iN tHe BaThRoOmS bullshit, the fact that you even talk about this shows not only how little you understand about the trans community, but also how delusional you are when it comes to actual crime against non-cis-men.

You wanna protect women? How about stop putting abusive men in positions of power. Stop trying to force women to stay with the person who is statistically most likely to murder them by cutting off abortion rights and no-fault divorce. Stop cutting programs that help the biggest portion of poor people in our society, which is children and single mothers. Start actually prosecuting rapists AND sentencing them like you believe rape is actually a crime. Stop raising boys to believe that their feelings are the most important thing on earth and that any woman who doesn't cater to them should be demeaned, abused, or killed. Stop passing legislation that ensures more women will die because they can't abort a fetus they don't want. Stop ignoring and perpetuating the systems that make Black women and WOC more likely to die in childbirth and more likely to receive inadequate medical care. Start funding more research on female bodies and ending male-centered medicine. Start passing and enforcing regulations to decrease the gender wage gap which at this point is mostly a motherhood penalty. Stop trying to pass legislation that will make it harder for married women to VOTE.

That's how you protect women. Not by scapegoating marginalized groups and pretending like you ever gave a fuck.

Did I mention that this woman is so beautiful but like not in a stalkery way?