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cookinguptales · 2 years

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I honestly think there are so many funnier plots they could have followed in Freddie that don’t have such disturbing implications — with the same outcome, Freddie leaving, which is where I always thought this episode would lead anyway! I’m upset about the wasted potential, devastated by what happened to Marwa, and disappointed by the fact that the writers seem to have sought out the most unpredictable, batshit storyline for shock value and, I presume, because they thought it would be funny (it largely doesn’t seem to have been received that way).

I personally would have liked to see Freddie as an ensemble episode like Gail was, as I think that would have enhanced the humour of another human entering the household — because yes, Guillermo is usually our human “in”, but he’s far from normal. In fact, he’s as weird and unhinged as the vampires, more so sometimes, which would have been hilarious to see in juxtaposition to Freddie’s brand of blandness and normality. And I also think it would have worked better for Guillermo’s relationship with Freddie to fall apart because of Guillermo’s pre-established character traits — his lying and manipulating, pettiness, and devotion to the vampires. Of course Nandor would have played a part, but didn’t the writers tease this season’s (now seemingly incoherent) arc for Guillermo as him having to choose between worlds after gaining some emotional distance in London? Where was that in Freddie, which would have been the perfect opportunity to explain how Guillermo actually spent the year?

And I mean, it would be hilarious for Freddie to meet Baby Colin Robinson one day, and then to bump into him the next day only to find he’s transformed into an adolescent overnight. They could have kept that plot point, and the humour of Guillermo and the vampires trying to explain that to Freddie would, to me, have been classic WWDITS from earlier seasons.

Sorry for this very long ask, and thank you for reading this far if you get here! I’m very much struggling to make sense of this episode, but your takes on it have been helpful so far. I hope you’re doing okay too, it’s never fun when a show you love messes up 💜

It's a long ask, but a welcome one! I do agree with pretty much everything here. This is really kind of where I thought they were going with the season, finally having Freddie show up and Guillermo being unable to keep up the charade, sort of like with what happened with his family. I thought it would be Guillermo's issues that would cause the problem here, not this hellscape of a storyline. That would've felt more organic and, like you said, honestly funnier.

Freddie was so bland (and I say this as a former anth/arch major) and that made Nandor and Guillermo falling for him for any reason other than transference and desperation respectively hard to swallow. But that blandness would have been excellent if he'd been there to show how unhinged Guillermo really is. If either Guillermo's real life (and his tendency to lie) had turned Freddie off or if Guillermo had been forced to choose between a life that's normal, if pablum, and the vampiric life he'd come to love... I think both of those would have been very natural and organic outcomes.

I can think of so many ways to scare Freddie off that would have been hilarious! Or exciting! Or at least interesting! If they really wanted to push the friction between Guillermo and Nandor, there are even so many ways to scare him off that Guillermo could have blamed Nandor for!

It could have been so good, and again, I really do wonder if there were Djinn-related late-stage rewrites for the show. I don't mean this as an excuse; I actually think it's pretty dumb if they did. I just can't get my head around how this episode even came to exist. I feel like my brain shies away from it every time I try to incorporate it into the existing lore, and I may just have to... idk... do my best to ignore it going forward...? Write a lot of fix-it fic? Fuck.

It's wild because I was talking to my parents and my dad specifically said that it felt like they were going for shock value over characterization, and my mom said that it was "a huge disconnect". I was surprised that even non-fandom people were saying that. In my mom's words, "dad and I were legit depressed by this episode." So idk, I really don't think this is gonna be received well by the wider audience.

All this is kind of what I was getting at with my vaguing yesterday... I think I'm most bummed about all the missed potential and the way that this retrospectively makes a lot of storylines just kind of dumb and weird and half-baked. It really felt like they were building to some things that just never coalesced. But if you don't use all those bricks to make a house, you just have a pile of dirty ol bricks. lmao. It's wild that this episode was so bad that it retroactively made the rest of the episodes worse.

God, I just can't get my head around how this episode happened. I was never expecting, like, some prestige drama level of character building but I was expecting more than this. Because damn, this show rarely misses! This was less a miss than a fucking bomb going off, though.

It definitely is a struggle when your favorite show does something fuckin dumb like this. It's hard to figure out where exactly to go from here other than just like... fully ignoring parts of canon. And I've never had to do that with WWDITS. I never thought I'd have to. I'm really pretty sad about that.

#replies #wwdits tag #wwdits s4 spoilers

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plotvanova · 2 years

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WWDITS FINALE LEAKS

thoughts!

after i woke up i got to rethink the whole finale and it's just. UGH.

i won't stop watching the show but i have so many questions related to the ending

a) what the fuck happened to nandor

i mean this season we finally got to see him grow as a person. he finally started showing some sympathy for guillermo and in the finale he acts like THIS??? WHAT IS EVEN GOING ON

yes of course he realized he was wrong for making his wife the exact copy of guillermo's bf (which is also a big fucking problem) and he made guillermo upset but why did he dO THAT??? WHY WOULD WRITERS EVEN THINK ABOUT IT??? EVEN THE DJINN WAS TERRIFIED

i ACTUALLY considered this plot twist after i saw the leaked freddie script and i was hoping that it wasn't what they've done. but no. holy fucking shit im losing my mind

b) yeah what have you done to marwa

marwa was the character everyone liked. everyone wished the best for her. she was nice, sweet and was the victim of nandor's bullshit that's going on in his head. after treating her like shit for this whole season they didn't even THINK about giving her some justice, about treating her like a real character and not some background instrument for showing what's going on in nandor's mind. no. she was just THERE. did she bring anything to the plot? yes. was she an interesting character? no. she could be one. they didn't want her to be interesting. when it was actually one of the best outcomes for both her and nandor and it would work so well in the plot. fuckers.

c) .....the way guillermo just left

did yall notice how little of him there was in the ep10? did yall notice how fast he left? did yall notice that it pretty much came out of nowhere?

a few scenes of him considering to leave. a scene of him having a shitty conversation with nandor about his feelings. then boom - he just left. do you remember s2 and s3 endings? a roller-coaster of emotions for all the characters. s2 - guillermo left, they're all in misery, guillermo comes back and saves all of them. epic, sexy, tasty. s3 - colin's dead, vampires are about to go to different places, guillermo is panicking and then ends up not going anywhere with nandor, laszlo stays home to look after baby colin. the whole episode is filled with tension, it's sad and hits you in the head last minute.

s4 finale is just. not it. it's probably just me, but i feel like it lacks many things that previous finales had. there is a tension, but it's gone the moment we find out they don't need the club money anymore since colin robinson is there again w $600k on his bank account. we saw guillermo leaving, and at the same time we didn't see if it had any impact on the household whatsoever. the only thing that actually concerns me are laszlo's feelings after he finds out colin forgot everything about his childhood. this is sad and emotional. everything else?..

i only hope that nandor will be more pathetic next season. i only hope they don't treat female characters like shit. i only hope we get to see characters actually going through their development arc. please. it's not that hard.

#wwdits #what we do in the shadows #wwdits leaks

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therelentless · 2 years

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❝ you need someone. let me be that person. let me be what you need. ❞ memo!

IT’S ALL ABOUT THE YEARNING II accepting II

The few weeks his marriage had lasted Nandor had spent every day hiding from Marwa, avoiding her, and making excuses to occupy himself with whatever he could find. This marriage, while short lived, it had helped him to realize a lot of things, things that had been right in front of him all these years. With Marwa gone, it did feel strange to be all on his own again. Well, not on his own, there was Guillermo. There was always Guillermo, but that was exactly the problem, he always wanted him there, and he felt that if he allowed him to be in his life in any other way than what he already was, everything was going to fall apart. It always happened. It kept happening. He thought of himself in love, poured himself onto this person, and then they left. What if the same thing happened here? why would it be any different?

Guillermo and him, they were fine now, in fact, he dared say that they were better than ever, but adding a new layer to things could change everything, and probably not for the better (according to his experiences). "I do need you. I do want you. I missed you for one whole year. It was a fun trip not going to lie, but also... pretty lonely.” And it would definitively have been better with him there. “But... this. You. Me. This whole thing. It won’t work. It never works. Didn’t you see. A whole wedding and for what? a lot of shit relationships, thirty-six re-dead wives... it worries me. What if you leave too? then what would I do? There’s no another Guillermo after you. There will never be another Guillermo.” There hadn’t been someone like him in seven-hundred years, and he was sure that there wouldn’t be another one in another seven-hundred more.

#wasworthy #{ electronic letters } ;; !ask #just a lot of feelings

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sallysklar · 6 years

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Janresseger: What is the Legacy of Renaissance 2010 School Choice in Chicago?

On Tuesday evening’s PBS NewsHour, I was surprised as I listened to an interview about the tragic gun violence in Chicago last weekend to hear the speaker name public high school closures as among the causes. Certainly exploding economic inequality, poverty, lack of jobs, the presence of street gangs, and other structural factors are contributing to this long, hot summer in Chicago. But Lance Williams, a professor at Northeastern Illinois University, blamed Renaissance 2010, a now-20-year-old charter school expansion program, for today’s violence.

Professor Williams expressed particular concern about the phase out of neighborhood high schools: “(Y)ou’re seeing the violence on the West Side and the South Sides of Chicago because, about 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, the city of Chicago implemented some very, very bad public policy. The most damaging of those policies was the policy of Renaissance 2010, when Chicago basically privatized, through charter schools, neighborhood public elementary and high schools. It became a serious problem, because many of the high schools and communities that had long traditions of street organizations caused young African-American males to be afraid to leave out of their communities, going to new schools throughout the city of Chicago. So, basically, from the early 2000s, too many young Afrcan-American males haven’t been going to school, meaning that they don’t have life prospects. They can’t get jobs. They’re self-medicated to deal with the stress in their community. And it’s driving a lot of the violence.”

The other speaker in the NewsHour‘s interview, Tamar Manasseh, runs a volunteer organization providing community meals at the corner of Chicago’s 75th Street and South Stewart Avenue—meals that provide food, and meals that try to build community to compensate for the destruction of community institutions. Ms. Manasseh explained: “And it’s not just about the kids. It’s about the wellness of the entire community… There are 100 other organizations just like me who are out here every day in their own way making a contribution to making communities better… Englewood will not have any public schools in the fall. And these kids that Professor Williams spoke of, they will have no options of a public high school in Englewood.”

The research literature has documented that in Chicago, Portfolio School Reform and the subsequent expansion of school choice has been undermining public schools, which have previously been central institutions binding communities together. This PBS NewsHour interview is the first I’ve seen in the mainstream press to connect the dots between the expansion of school choice and the shredding of the fabric of Chicago’s neighborhoods.

What was Renaissance 2010? After mayoral control was established in 1995 in Chicago, Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced one of the first Portfolio School Reform plans—to launch marketplace school choice by quickly adding privatized charter schools. In a climate of competition, the school district would encourage families to choose a school. Then the school district would manage the district like a stock portfolio—phasing out weak schools and schools that would become under-enrolled due to competition. The school district would keep on authorizing new charter schools to keep marketplace competition alive. Renaissance 2010 was managed by none other than Arne Duncan, who later became the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, and after that, U.S. Secretary of Education.

The complication was that many very poor neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago were already losing population, and the expansion of competitive school choice accelerated the under-enrollment of neighborhood schools. Later, in May of 2013, Chicago Public Schools closed 50 “under-enrolled” schools on Chicago’s South and West Sides. These are the neighborhoods where today three more high schools are being closed and then consolidated in 2019 into one new high school. Now that Renaissance 2010’s Portfolio School Reform-School Choice plan has been operating for more than a decade, people are paying attention to what have, apparently, been its long-term consequences.

Here is how the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research describes the impact of the 2013 public school closures on Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” The report continues: “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

The Consortium on School Research continues: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school. Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.” “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments… Creating strong relationships and building trust in welcoming schools after schools closed was difficult.. Displaced staff and students, who had just lost their schools, had to go into unfamiliar school environments and start anew. Welcoming school communities also did not want to lose or change the way their schools were previously.”

Jitu Brown is a Chicago educator and community organizer. He was also one of the leaders of a 34 day hunger strike in September of 2015—a hunger strike that eventually forced Chicago Public Schools to reopen Dyett High School as the only open-admission public high school in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood.

When the school reopened in September of 2016, this is what the Chicago Tribune’s Marwa Eltagouri and Juan Perez Jr. reported: “Families living nearby once again have an open-enrollment high school in their neighborhood. Parents don’t have to worry about their children taking buses or trains to far-off schools. And they don’t have to send their kids to privately run charter schools if they want to take honors or Advanced Placement classes. A first day of school at Dyett wasn’t supposed to have happened this fall. But after a yearslong protest by community leaders that included a 34-day hunger strike, Chicago Public Schools reversed its decision to close Dyett at the end of the 2014-15 school year.”

Eltagouri and Perez quote Jitu Brown describing the need for Dyett High School to reopen: “When you go to a middle-class white community you don’t see charter schools, contract schools or alternative schools. You see effective, K-12 systems of education in their neighborhoods. Our children deserve the same.”

Jitu Brown is also the Director of the National Journey for Justice Alliance. Brown addresses the tragedy of school closures in his Forward to a new report, Failing “Brown v Board” published in May 2018 by the Journey for Justice Alliance: “In education, America does everything but equity. Alternative schools, charter schools, contract schools, online schools, credit recovery—schools run by private operators in the basement of churches, abandoned warehouses, storefronts; everything but ensuring that every child has a quality Pre-K through 12th grade system of education within safe walking distance of their homes.”

elaine August 13, 2018

Source

Janresseger

Janresseger: What is the Legacy of Renaissance 2010 School Choice in Chicago? published first on https://buyessayscheapservice.tumblr.com/

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cookinguptales · 2 years

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Yes! It's like you put exactly what's been bothering me about the 4.09 into words. I just wasn't able to articulate it before. I love dark comedies and WWDITS is usually very good about balancing the two. The dark things that happen have to be be made funny/absurd, develop the plot and/or give insight the characters, and have some kind of eventual conclusion that makes it all make 'sense' in the larger story. 4.09 didn't make the dark things that happened funny. It was just fucked up and then they told some jokes about it happening. The only moment where anything developed satisfyingly from the the hours was Nandor's realization that 'maybe love isn't about someone liking the things you like' BUT... that monologue doesn't specifically mention freddie or marwa by name (iirc). i think that part was filmed before the rewrites and it was kept bc it was the only moment of satisfying development in the episode

I've had a long time to think too much about it lmao. I feel like I also wasn't quite able to articulate all my thoughts right after the episode came out, but I guess things have settled in my mind a bit since then. The sting of it has faded somewhat, I think.

And yeah, obviously I have no problem with dark humor. It's WWDITS's bread and butter. But usually it's very OTT and silly and we're supposed to laugh at the vampires for doing these awful things and not seeing an issue with it, not at their victims. And Guillermo has been tortured throughout the entire series, but... idk, usually there's like a kernel of hope for him, y'know? That they treat him abysmally but they still care about him. His life is awful but there's hope that it can be good. That fucked up things happen to him, but they're often the result of his own choices -- and he has the power to make different choices.

There were many ways they could have made what happened with Freddie funny or absurd or hopeful or a logical conclusion to his own actions, but... really, none of that quite gelled. The joke was just that Guillermo was suffering on a very deep and very personal level, far worse than he'd ever suffered at Nandor's hands before, and then the knife was shoved home in that last scene when he got it from Freddie, too. There was no punchline or catharsis. It just... sucked.

They sort of pawed at the idea that Nandor was doing this out of love and idiocy, but it didn't work the way Nandor hurting Guillermo by giving him a glitter portrait instead of biting him did in the pilot. I think that's partially because Nandor seemed so genuinely sweet to Guillermo with the glitter portrait (and Guillermo eventually came to love it) and partially because of how the episode ended -- with Guillermo opening the curtain and then closing it again. It was the reminder that he does actually have the ultimate power over them, and he just chooses not to use it. That brings the suffering back to funny because he does have recourse -- it's his own choice not to utilize it.

Both Guillermo and Marwa were not given recourse in this episode, and I think that's part of why it felt uncomfortable rather than funny. There was a real sense of them just... constantly punching down, not up at the vampires, and with jokes that weren't actually particularly funny. God, even just being funnier would have helped the episode tremendously.

I think doing this episode right on the heels of one about him finally coming to terms with his sexuality and coming out to his family didn't help, tbh. We were primed to be rooting for Guillermo to find happiness in this new direction in his life, or to at least have a good reason for losing it. (Which is why, again, I think the theme of Guillermo's lying, which fucked up his relationship with his family in 4.07, would have been interesting to examine in the context of 4.09.) But then... it's just an unrelenting 20 minutes of seeing Guillermo cry and be a punching bag through no fault of his own and honestly? It's just... not fun or cathartic to watch...

Harvey did a great job of selling genuine emotions, of selling the idea that this is so, so important to Guillermo and so, so devastating for him, and I think it just made the whole situation kind of upsetting rather than funny. It wasn't just Nandor being stupid and accidentally hurting him; it was Guillermo realizing that the one person he thought might put him first didn't actually love him at all.

(And I think the fact that Nandor did eventually put him first in the same episode was cold comfort, though perhaps it could have worked if it'd been more deftly handled.)

Like... that's the kind of thing characters in this show usually get revenge for (thinking about Jenna a bit here) not the kind of thing that's just... never really resolved outside of a character being permanently emotionally wounded by it.

And then it happening to TWO characters in the same episode, Guillermo and Marwa? Yeah, I can't say I'm shocked that people didn't respond well to it.

I think WWDITS can actually be so good at showing devastating things happening to their core cast (I mean, 4.10 was very good for that with Laszlo and Colin) and the emotional fallout of those things, but maybe that's even why it felt so jarring to see this awful thing happening to Guillermo and being largely played for laughs...?

Like... even when Gail dumped Nandor, the episode ended with Guillermo comforting him and him joining his friends... 4.09 just ends with Guillermo looking like he's been sucker punched as watches his boyfriend cheat on him in broad daylight. That's rough, man, and what a fucking downer of an ending.

idk man, the actual ingredients of the episode could have turned out all right, maybe? It was just the execution that was so damn baffling. It's like they just forgot to make it funny or charming or at least emotionally satisfying. Not a thing I'm used to saying about WWDITS. :(

#replies #wwdits tag

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