i was hoping to make a post like this under happier circumstances, but here goes.
as some of you know, everything with the cancellation and renewal campaign has happened right on top of the worst part of my mom's cancer treatment (plus the show was cancelled on my actual birthday 💀). i won't go into details, but it's been tough. lots of ups and downs, mostly downs, luckily ending (for now) on as much of an up as circumstances allow. the whole thing has been weirdly tied to the cancellation for me, kind of amplifying every feeling. the grief got mixed up, and there was so much of it - mourning the loss of the kind of future i thought i'd have with my mother and the time we might not get, mourning the end of a show that means so much to me and is such a big part of my life. different types of grief, sure, and of different magnitudes, but in one big ugly swirl. i sort of had a breakdown right at the start of february, and it was because of news about my mom, but it morphed into my brain telling me everything i'd ever written was shit and wanting to delete it all. stuff like that, spilling over.
anyway. i was holding off on writing this post to see if the show got picked up by someone else. but i still want to say it. because what also spilled over was the support and community from this fandom, and being in this space (despite the rough times and high emotions) helped me through it, because of all of you here. whether we talk regularly, or you left a comforting reply or simply a like on one of my posts about having a hard time (i tried to keep them few), or wrote a nice comment on a fic, or said something funny or nice or insightful in the tags of a gifset, or was active here (or on twt) in any way, talking/sharing/creating stuff about the show - THANK YOU.
you all helped me through all the ups and downs, and i am so grateful. thank you for being here, listening, distracting, helping me feel some joy despite the horrors. i love you and i love this incredible show and all it has brought and will continue to bring and inspire, and although it should go without saying, i'm not going anywhere. just do me a favor and give yourself a big ol' hug from me, and know that you made a difference for some random guy on the internet (but in reality for many more, and for this fandom as a whole, just by being here and being you) 💕
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i figure the doctor’s probably aware of the fourth wall on, like, an intellectual level? they can’t really sense it themself, but timesquid theoretical physics has long known they exist in a fictional-from-a-certain-perspective multiverse, and the doctor’s picked up enough over the years they’re aware of at least the basic outline of the concept. there’s a little doohickey on the tardis console that tells you whether you’re on tv, in a comic, in an audio, whether you’re in an officially licensed story… not that those are how the time lords frame the concepts, but the doctor does have a vague idea that their adventures have an audience, even if they’re not entirely clear on its nature
the tardis, on the other hand
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I still think that there's one bit of A Winter's Tale that a lot of meta and fanfics neatly skip past:
The funny bit is that when I use this in my own fics it's basically the bargain basement level of textual analysis and when I lay it out you'll see why. Because the Endless, after all, are anthropomorphic personifications defined by their jobs, ultimately, that take a physical and metaphorical form as their realms and the nature of their being. Dream and Destruction struggle with it in ways not unlike Death, but here it gets into the interrelated but that I will also bring up.
As per A Winter's Tale and the (slightly modified) version of it in the show, Death has a vision of her job/function unlike any of her siblings. In the comics, the harder version that I prefer to use over the show, she outright walked out because her job wore her down and she had, essentially, a nervous breakdown because of a deep depression that a careful reading of A Winter's Tale shows she's in denial about never addressing. Naturally my stories tend to hit her with this Negan Bat with great gusto.
Now factor this is in from a canonical POV and a family of beings who are defined by tasks, where Dream and Destiny are the most rigid....and then equally factor in the irony that Dream, one of the two most rigid, is at his closest with the one who's ultimately one of the least and the most flighty about aspects of details of her job. Factor in that this family of immortals who date from the dawn of time have one person in the family who completely cracked and walked out and broke reality in the process.
From their POV it would no doubt be a thing that hung over their sister and her decisions and a thing that they and those old enough to have been there would long remember. From the perspective of job-defined inhuman immortals, the very thing that would make Death the most appealing to humans are a mark of permanent failure on her part, while her becoming mortal and taking her mortal days might well anchor her in mortal affairs in a way only Destruction comes close to.....but it can easily be read in a much darker fashion than I usually would be inclined to take it because I've struggled with those thoughts myself and writing that into fiction is playing with fire when soaked with gasoline.
A human would see the events of A Winter's Tale as 'the job got to you and it was hard' and understand that. Would the Endless? Even Destruction? Ultimately no, I don't think any of them really could understand that even if they tried, and there are some careful looks at Destruction's actions in Brief Lives and Song of Orpheus that both strengthen the parallel with Death and where they differ.
Death is willing to fully yield her power for 24 hours a century to live among mortals without any of the sorcery and the responsibility and the nature of the Endless. None of her siblings are willing to go so far, or to truly experience life within the worlds they govern in that way.
And then combine this with the knowledge that unlike the rest she will outlive the universe, and without the universe Death of the Endless is but a title and a moment in time, a true job that will one day end....at the price that all her siblings go into something she cannot see and she alone cannot. And then take another look at the mortal days and as much as it anchors her in the mortal world and in being able to relate to mortals it can be seen in that darker sense as both an escape hatch and a deeply necessary one because she is ultimately still chasing the same outlet she tried to get and failed and only returned to because well....
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part of the reason i feel like i have to do this (rewatch from the beginning and not skip ahead) is that i never did that the first time i returned to vikings and fell for ivar as a character. i learned about him and skipped STRAIGHT to his introduction as a teen and i feel like there was a lot i missed about just how early the villain arcs/hero decay starts with the s1 cast and the kind of context he grows up into and it’s meaningful to see that now. to see in the appointed timeline how rapidly and intensely the ragnar-aslaug marriage degrades, how ragnar’s parenting of bjorn becomes progressively worse as bjorn ages and how that corrodes bjorn’s own personality and robs him of all motivation to do anything but try to please his father, how ragnar treats his younger sons with the same diminishing love as they grow, how ragnar’s desperation for the love he once felt from athelstan drives him to increasingly abandon all other relationships that don’t reflect back to him this idealized vision of himself and his future that he’s walking further away from every day, etc etc etc.
in a lot of ways it’s mediocre prestige tv (and will continue to be that), but it’s also a pretty decent epic family tragedy about ego and memory and the destructive power of a patriarch (in presence or absence) and how we hate the people we love and cling to them past all reason
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Succession Spoilers Ahead
Okay, so... officially caught up on Succession. And fucking wow.
I kept seeing posts pretty much saying 'Fuck Tom' and 'Poor Shiv' and I was so confused. Like I enjoyed Tom and I felt bad for him because Shiv has done him dirty. I kept thinking this guy has to commit the ultimate betrayal for me to hate him and fully back her, and if that's not exactly what that was... then I don't know what the fuck else to call it.
When he was propositioning Greg at the wedding, I was taken aback because he called it a deal with the devil after his call with Shiv, but I didn’t see it, because I still couldn't believe he was going to make that move. That was the one thing that would've turned me against him (though he was on really shaky ground with that guilt trip for a baby; he literally said there was no point in having sex with his wife if they were still using contraception. My entire body writhed at that 🤢🤮)
But most of all:
I hate Logan Roy with a fiery passion. He tears his family apart for control and fun. And he is undoubtedly an evil son of a bitch. Also, he's clearly full of shit on the depth of his involvement on Cruises. In S2, Bill had some direct leverage over him, he said 'diaries' and if it got Logan to back down from pinning him as planned, that means he would be immediately implicated if that shit got out.
I want him to burn. I wish Kendall would've told Shiv and Roman how their dad had said NRPI regarding his confession, the waiter's death. (Honestly, I think that was really what got Ken to flip on his dad in the S2 finale, not the fact that his dad said he was not a killer, but the fact that there's no shred of remorse in his father for the innocent people he's hurt, and Ken doesn't want to be him, but it just feels morally bankrupt to lie down and let the demon win.)
All I want for the final season is the siblings sticking together and taking down the dictator! I love those small moments where you get to see small fragments of who they'd be as a group if their father wasn't the symbol of malignant malevolence. I don't care if they get the business or not, I just need to see Logan a washed up and lonely wreck of a ruin. My happy ending would be for his to be horrible. He deserves no less.
(Also, I just need to say that just because he's a titan, doesn't mean he's a fucking genius. Over the entirety of the series, he's hung his company out to dry, put them in secret debt and straight up just went m.i.a. while his kids had to make the life-saving decisions and he just turns on them, calls them an idiot or a moron and says - without any specifics - that he would've done it better.... somehow. He keeps everybody out of the loop and screws them repeatedly and then pushes them to scramble over his mistakes and when they can't bribe, coerce or threaten things his way, they're suddenly ungrateful trash).
I'm not a malicious or violent person, but if I was his kid, I'd want to mount his severed head over my fucking fireplace. (It's a bit personal, he reminds me of my dad, my stepuncle and the worst parts of my grandfather all rolled into one. Literally every terrible male role model I had growing up, all the one's who fucked up my head with toxic internalized misogyny)
I know this is the show where the bad guy keeps winning.... and I just... that can't be how it ends. He has to lose this time. Please... if the kids stick together... I think they'd have enough juice to finally stick it to him, however that needs to happen. Hell, at this point, I'd be fine with them hunting his ass on some secluded island xthe most dangerous game' style.
I HATE LOGAN ROY!!!
😡😤🤬🤬🤬☠️🤬🤬👹🤬🤬🤬🔪🔪🔪☠️⚰️🪦
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