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bloomsoftly · 6 years

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a different kind of danger, pt. 2

pt 1

this is a direct follow up to this tiny shieldshock ficlet, and it won’t make much sense unless you’ve read that one.

this part of a short fic that’s truly run away from me (5k already, and probably not quite halfway done) and is for @littleplebe‘s birthday, well over three months late. i’m sorry, Lil, but i hope you like it! the whole thing will eventually be posted on AO3, but only once it’s complete.

for @littleplebe. love you! ❤️❤️❤️

Natasha didn't speak to him the entire way home.

In all honesty, Steve would've been embarrassed to admit that he didn't notice his daughter’s frosty air for most of the car ride. His brain was caught up in memorizing the curve of Darcy’s cheek, the way her hair shimmered even under the harsh fluorescent lights of the classroom. The way she'd tucked her lower lip between her teeth, trying to hide her dismay at seeing him.

Needless to say, Natasha was not pleased at the stilted meeting between her Papa and her favorite teacher, much less the way Miss Lewis had quickly found a reason to escape their company. The woman had avoided them for the rest of the disastrous evening, and Nat was practically shaking with fury. She barely waited for him to unbuckle her booster seat before she was off like a shot, sprinting away from him and up to the safety of her room. She kept her chin tucked and her face pointed away from him, but not stealthily enough to hide the glimmer of a tear coursing its way down her cheek.

Raking a shaky hand over his face, Steve swallowed down a lump of guilt and shame and followed his daughter at a more sedate pace.

For the first time in a long time, he felt like a failure of a father. Combined with the shock of coming face to face with a woman he'd never envisioned seeing again, and he was overwhelmed. But it wasn't time for him to fall apart.

Right now, his sweet baby girl needed him.

Willing his fingers to stop their light trembling, he rapped his knuckles against Natasha’s door. Silence fell heavily, and for a moment he thought she might refuse to speak to him altogether. He had no idea what he'd do if that was the case: she'd never shut him out completely. But after a moment of bated breath, his heart pounding in his throat, the door creaked open.

Nat was already back in her bed by the time he shut the door behind him. She was engulfed in her ballerina pink blankets, nose in the air as if she hadn’t just raced across the room to climb into her bed at top speed. She reminded him of a disgruntled kitten, and he stifled a smile. All of his good humor fled when she looked up at him, confused anguish written all over her face.

“Why, Papa?”

With a heavy sigh, Steve scrubbed a hand over his face and went to sit next to his baby girl. He smoothed a hand over her blankets, trying to put his thoughts into terms appropriate for his little girl. She scooted over to give him more room, and he dropped a kiss against her forehead in thanks.

“Why what, sweetheart?”

His tiny girl growled a little, a kitten expressing her displeasure by showing off her perfect baby teeth.

“Why doesn’t Miss Lewis like you, Papa?” At her words, Steve closed his eyes in pain. She was hurt, and he had to explain why her usually-sweet teacher couldn’t bring herself to so much as look at him. Any other time, he might try to ignore the question altogether—neither of them were ready for that conversation, not for many years—but her expression was so heartbroken and beseeching that he couldn’t bring himself to brush her off.

“I… met… Miss Lewis. Once. Before she was your teacher.” At her scowl, he admitted softly, “I was—it was after your Mama—I was having a hard time,” he finally settled on, dropping his eyes to the dark pink stitching on her blanket. Natasha dropped her little hand over his, and he stumbled through the rest of his explanation. “Miss Lewis was very sweet, but I…wasn’t very nice to her.”

There. That wasn’t so bad, was it? Not the whole truth, but there’s no way he’d share the full truth with his eight-year-old. That wasn’t happening.

“But Papa,” she whispered, drawing his eyes back to her face. Her eyes were full of tears, and Steve’s heart broke all over again. “If you were mean to her, and she hates you…” He watched with a lump in his throat as she struggled to some kind of conclusion. “Then she’ll hate me too.”

“No, no, no. Sweetheart, no,” he muttered, gathering her up into his arms. She didn’t resist, just draped limply across his chest. “I think she was just surprised. I’m sure Miss Lewis loves you as much as you love her. Okay? It’ll be fine.”

Natasha said nothing, but he could feel the doubt lingering in the air between them.

Without stopping to consider the consequences of his words, Steve promised, “Don’t worry, sweetheart, I’ll fix it. I’ll talk to Miss Lewis.”

It wasn’t until later, after he’d tucked her in and watched her drift off into an exhausted slumber, that he’d realized what he’d done. He’d promised his little girl. And he never broke his promises to Natasha. Not ever.

Fuck.

(read more link here)

-:- -:-

It took him three days to gather the courage to show up at Miss Lewis’ classroom slightly earlier than usual. He leaned against the wall on the opposite side of the hallway for over ten minutes, visitor’s badge stuck to his shirt and a hand raking through his hair. He dithered for so long, the classroom was almost empty by the time he gathered the courage to step inside. No doubt his hair was sticking up at all angles, too. Little Nat was never going to let him live it down.

To be fair, though, she’d have to forgive him first. His little girl could hold a grudge like nobody’s business. And she showed absolutely no sign of unbending even the smallest bit about Miss Lewis. In fact, she was currently watching him approach her teacher with an expression of unholy glee, reveling in her father’s clear discomfort. Steve swore she got the vindictive streak from Peggy. Or Bucky, for that matter. Or Sam. Come to think of it, she’d had a lot of role models in that regard.

All thoughts of grudges and awkwardness faded when he met the woman’s eyes. For a brief moment her gaze lit up with a bright welcome, lips turning up into an inviting curve. But as recognition flared and she realized who had come to see her, he could practically see the shutters sliding over her expression.

When Darcy—Miss Lewis—said nothing at all but arched an elegant eyebrow (and since when did he start to find eyebrows attractive, he wondered), Steve gathered the courage to take a step forward.

“Miss Lewis.” Thankfully, his voice didn’t crack like a pubescent teenager’s, but it was a close thing. She stared at him in stony silence, lips curled in a decidedly unfriendly manner, ready and waiting to rip him into shreds. He tried not to flinch, and failed.

The corner of her mouth twitched. He took a step closer.

“Darcy.”

The line of her mouth flattened completely, and Steve raised a conciliatory hand. To an outsider, he probably looked like a rabbit approaching a lion, trying desperately not to get eaten.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s appropriate to call you. May I speak to you for a moment?”

When she visibly wavered, he muttered a soft “Please,” and cut his eyes over to his daughter. Natasha wasn’t even pretending to be anything other than an avid spectator. He rolled his eyes at her blatant perusal, and Miss Lewis stifled a snort. They shared a single commiserating glance before her gaze shuttered once more.

She let him sit in agonized anticipation for a moment longer. Darcy—Miss Lewis, damn it—still hadn’t said a word, but her eyes flicked from him to Natasha and back. The punishing silence was a harsh reminder that he’d never really known her at all. On the night they'd met, Steve had felt such an amazingly strong connection—too strong. He’d run, and now here they were.

With one final glance at Natasha’s sweet face, she breathed out a tiny sigh and capitulated. “Alright, I can wait a minute or two. But no longer than that.”

Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, Steve immediately turned to his daughter. “Nat, please go wait for me by the door. I’ll be right over.”

For a moment it looked like his daughter might argue, but she quickly wilted under his glare. And if she stomped a little louder than usual on her way across the room, he wasn’t going to call her out on it. After all these years, Steve had learned when to pick his battles, and he had no intention of making things any more awkward than necessary.

Once Natasha was a safe distance away, he turned back around. Darcy was staring at him expectantly—arms crossed across her chest and clearly not willing to give an inch to make it easier on him, not that he deserved any leniency—and he blew out a heavy breath to ease the awkward tension. It didn't work.

Raking his hand through his hair, again, Steve dove in. “Look,” he began, fixing his eyes somewhere beyond her left shoulder, all the bright colors of the wall behind her blurring together, “I'm so sorry. I really don't want to make things difficult for you. I'm sure this isn't ideal for you—god knows it's not what I expected when I was preparing for my daughter’s Meet the Teacher night.”

He met her gaze, taking a chance, and found it hard and flat. Her eyes met his defiantly, but there was no animation, no spark of welcome in her gaze. She was utterly unreadable, and this was excruciating, but he'd promised Natasha so he soldiered on.

“I promise I'm not trying to harass you or stalk you or—” not a good way to phrase it, but he couldn't take it back and he just kept talking, trying to get through it so he could get back to Natasha, grab her hand and drive home, where he could get in the shower and drown in his own embarrassment and shame— “or whatever. I—I mean, it's just— look, I was a complete dick. A total asshole, and I know it. And I'm sorry, and I'm sure you never want to see me again. It's just—you're Nat’s favorite teacher.”

An unbidden grin spread across his face as he thought of his daughter and her affection for her teacher. Miss Lewis’ expression didn't change, though, and he slid his gaze back over her shoulder. He just needed to get through this.

“You're her favorite teacher. And she can tell something is wrong, that you don't like me. Which is fine, really. It's just that she finds it so hard to open up and I was hoping—”

“Was I the other woman?”

His eyes snapped back to hers.

“What?”

Cold fury slid across her face, which was deathly pale save for two splotches of color high on her cheekbones. Her eyes glittered like ice. She was gorgeous, really, but his brain had shut down at her question and he wasn't processing much of anything at all.

“Did you cheat on your wife—Natasha’s mother—with me last year?” she hissed, gaze darting toward the little girl lingering in the doorway and whose eyes were riveted on the confrontation. Darcy spoke low enough that Nat couldn't hear her, but each word sliced through him as sharp as a knife.

“What? No. No!” he exclaimed, loud enough to draw his daughter’s sharp gaze. Raking his hand through his hair, Steve met Darcy’s eyes. “No, I promise.”

“But—”

“She died. Peggy died. Three years ago. That's why— I wasn't ready for—” With a sigh, he gave up.

Darcy’s expression softened slightly. Her shoulders dropped as she sighed, and a little bit of the defensive tension left her shoulders. “I am sorry for your loss, truly. But that doesn't justify—”

“I know,” he said quickly, cutting her off before she could announce his sins into the innocent air of his daughter's classroom. “Honestly, I was a jackass. And it was unforgivable, I know that. I'm not asking for anything other than you treating Nat the same as you did before. She hasn't connected with anyone this well in… well, in a really long time. She absolutely adores you.”

Steve lapsed into silence, trying not to fidget. He'd said his piece, true enough, but he was suddenly worried it wouldn't be enough. What if she held onto her grudge, unable to keep from transferring the sins of the father to his daughter? How could he face Natasha if that was the case?

“Alright.”

“What?”

She snorted at his disbelieving expression. “Oh, come on. I still think you're an asshole, but I'm not. Your daughter is a really good kid—one of my brightest, in fact—and there's no way I'd hold your douchebag behavior over her. And I adore her, too. I mean, I still don't like you, but—”

He snorted, and she shot him a don't even look. “But I like your daughter. And I respect that you came to apologize—a year late, I might add—to make her happy. You seem like a good dad. So. Let's call it even and go our separate ways, yeah?”

“Yeah,” he breathed, “and if it makes things easier, I can make sure to have ‘prior commitments’ for any school functions in the future.”

She hesitated at that, clearly thinking it over. He could see the dilemma in her eyes—personal preference for his suggested compromise versus concern for one of her students.

“No, that's okay. I have a feeling Natasha really looks forward to spending that time with you, based on what she's said in class. We can just suck it up and be adults about it. Right?”

“Of course,” he agreed, trying to hide how impressed he was with her words. With her, in general.

They stood staring at each other for another half-moment, tense and awkward, before Steve rocked back on his heels and waved a hand in his daughter’s general direction.

“Well, I'm gonna—”

“Yep.”

“Thanks for—”

“It's no problem.”

“Goodbye, Dar—Miss Lewis.”

“Bye, Steve.”

As he whispered a quick “mission accomplished” to his daughter and accepted a discreet high five on the way to the car, Steve tried very hard not to dwell on the fact that Darcy had used his name, there at the end.

Natasha was energetic and chattering the whole way home, practically glowing with happiness now that everything was right in her world once again. Meanwhile, Steve was most definitely not dwelling on the pretty features of his daughter's teacher. Not on her sharp tongue or her spine of steel. And certainly not on the shape her mouth made when she said his name.

Certainly not.

i’ve been struggling to write with any kind of consistency lately, and feedback is very much appreciated. ❤️❤️❤️

#shieldshock #darcy x steve #ficlet update #a different kind of danger #darcyland #baby!nat #my writing

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rewolfaekilerom · 3 years

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ginny & georgia is good.

//NOTE: This was originally posted to Wordpress on 05.01.2021//

Let me start by saying that I tried to think of a clever title for this post, but all I could think of was the simple fact that I really like Ginny & Georgia. Excuse my lack of cleverness this week. I’m not sure if it’s my body responding to the first vaccine dose or if it’s the fog of seasonal allergies, but my brain is mush; my sense of smell is also not right. Also, Bug scratched the hair off of one of her ears (I’m pretty sure that’s seasonal allergies, poor thing) and I’ve spent a cumulative 15 hours this past week rendering, exporting, and uploading one single video onto YouTube for work (lost story short: I’m back at the rendering stage after I realized the audio got unsynced in the second half of the video. Ugh). It’s been a WEEK.

Excuses, excuses.

So, while I wait for my laundry and as I take a break from New Pokemon Snap (omg, it’s so good), I thought I’d brain-vomit my thoughts about Ginny & Georgia. Proving true to the portrait I gave of myself in my last post, I’m happy (or embarrassed?) to say that I watched Ginny & Georgia (henceforth G&G) twice this week. I finished episode 10 and immediately started rewatching episode 1, and it’s taking everything in me to not start rewatching for a third time. But depending on what you consider a week, I might be on week two now? ANYWAY.

I’ll start this brain-dump by saying, again, I really like this show. I described it to friends as a cross between Gilmore Girls and Pretty Little Liars or Outer Banks–maybe with a touch of Dexter. I don’t think it’s just that, but I think that’s a good way to summarize how it feels to watch the show, and those are good things in my book. GG and Dexter are probably in my top 5 favorite TV shows, and OB is up there too. I’ve watched OB through twice, and it definitely quenched my mid-winter thirst for the beach and my perpetual desire for a solid mystery/intrigue. I grew up watching the Travel Channel, so any show set in an even moderately interesting locale is immediately catching my interest. Oh, and I watched the entire PLL series with my mom while I was a teenager and even after I went away to college; it was “our show”–our way of sharing cultural ground even when I was away from home for the first time. We watched each episode together when it aired on TV, and we’d be the first to admit that the show was–at best–illogical, comically dramatic, and unrealistic to the umpth degree. But sometimes it’s fun to watch a show and laugh at its absurdity.

G&G doesn’t fall into the same traps that a lot of those types of teen shows do. It has drama and intrigue; it has sex and “teen problems” (which are really just person problems). But it also has real conversations about race and sexuality and parent-child relationships that go beyond the CW/Freeform problem-for-problem’s-sake model (hi, PLL)) or the WB squeaky-clean-problems approach (I’m talking to you, Seventh Heaven). It takes a Skins approach to issues young people face–well, if Skins was made for a puritanical US audience, but not THAT US Skins reboot. We’ll never talk about that. Shhh. Look away.

I’m not going to rehearse the plot of G&G, so look it up for yourself right now. I’ll wait.

Just kidding. I’m not waiting. Go look it up on your own time.

The similarities between G&G and GG are glaring (hell, Georgia even calls herself and Ginny the Gilmores with bigger boobs). In both, you have a young, single mom who had her daughter at 15/16 and then ran away from home. The mom is plucky, charismatic, and doesn’t always navigate the world by making the most, er, ethical choices. The daughter initially seems a bit more reserved and like she wants to play by the rules, but deep down is just a younger version of the mother, and that comes out of the course of the series. The two relate to one another as friends, but it’s complicated by the fact that they’re parent and child and that there is an inherent power imbalance there. The daughter is a little too mature for her own good and the mother is a little too immature for her own good. They butt heads, usually over the mother’s past and present choices (particularly regarding men) and the daughter’s present and future choices (also often regarding men). Their fights and falling outs are truly spectacular–they fight like only a mother and daughter could, but they also love one another–though they can’t express that love in the most logical or legible ways. They’re dysfunctional in every way you could imagine, and they really should be in family counseling.

But that’s not all. If that were it, I’d say, “oh, boohoo, they have similar types of characters. As if this is novel? Hasn’t this been done before? Get off your high horse.” NO. The parallels between these two shows go WAY deeper than that. Georgia is Lorelei and Ginny is Rory–hell, their naming practices are even similar. Georgia named herself after the state she was in the first time she had to come up with a pseudonym; this initiated a naming practice wherein she names her children after the cities/states they’re born in–hence Ginny, for Virginia. Rory is a nickname for Lorelei. (Side note: Lorelei is a hard name to type.)

Fine, fine. But we also have the tripartite relationship dynamics. Lorelei’s Big Three are Christopher, Max, and Luke; Georgia’s are Zion (Ginny’s dad and Georgia’s “penguin”–still not positive what that means, except that they can’t let go of one another?), Paul (the mayor, a white collar, public-facing profession), and Joe (the cafe/restaurant owner). If teenaged Rory has Dean and Jess, Ginny has Hunter and Marcus, respectively; Rory and Ginny obviously belong with the “bad boy”–they have infinitely better chemistry and get one another–but struggle with how good they “look” with the good guy, who’s actually kind of a judgmental jerk (as the bad guy points out).

Stars Hollow looks a whole lot like Wellsbury–hell, they’re both in New England. Wellsbury IS the most New England town name ever. Period. I love me some picturesque New England town bullshit.

Oh, and the side characters. Ellen and Sookie fill the same niche, and it’s a good one. They’re easily the most likable characters in both shows, and their husbands are genuinely funny characters in their own rights. GG has the sexually ambiguous (until he’s not) but oh-so-sarcastic Michel while G&G has Nick. Arguably, you could lump Kirk in with Michel to get Nick, but Nick isn’t as bumbling as Kirk, so maybe that point doesn’t stand. Hell, for friends Rory has the angel and devil on her shoulders in the form of Lane and Paris; Ginny has Max and Abby. And if Stars Hollow has Taylor Doose, Wellsbury has Cynthia Fuller. The list goes on.

Of course, a staple of GG is Emily and Richard Gilmore, but we glimpse that in G&G’s flashbacks to Zion’s parents, who help Georgia and Zion when the two first have Ginny. They’re similarly exasperated with their child’s choices and come off as a little overbearing but nonetheless have good intentions. They don’t have nearly as much screen time as Emily and Richard, which is a shame, but they serve a similar function.

Oh! And the flashbacks. They’re one of the charming parts of GG–they give us really important backstory on Lorelei’s life and life choices prior to the series’ start (and Rory’s birth, frankly). They’re less charming in G&G because Georgia’s background is far darker than GG ever could or would have conjured.

This gets me to why G&G isn’t just a GG rip-off. G&G isn’t just a woke GG. It isn’t just GG with people of color, in the LGBTQIA+ community, of varied socioeconomic classes, or from outside New England. If you like GG, you might like G&G, but you also might not. G&G addresses real life challenges teenagers, women, people of colorm hell, most Americans face in 2021. It depicts the US in its multiple angles, some of which are very, very ugly. Some might say that it’s GG for 2021, and maybe it is, but if that’s true, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. I’m just not sure it’s totally true.

I’m going to cool it on the GG-G&G comparisons for a moment and just talk about G&G because I think you get my point. Before I cool it completely, though, and as a point of departure, I’ll say that if we do go with the idea that G&G is GG for 2021, then we need to recognize what G&G does differently: it gives us glimpses into how a whole range of people experience the US, and it doesn’t look away from ugly, unflattering, hateful truths that reside just below the surface of sparkly, shiny, pretty, picture-perfect towns. It doesn’t shy away from reality, even if that reality is uncomfortable for white, middle-class, cis, het viewers.

The important things about G&G that I haven’t yet mentioned in specifics are a’plenty.

Ginny (and Hunter) is mixed-race, a subject that comes up on a number of occasions in the form of explicit conversations about how being mixed-race doesn’t necessarily mean belonging to two communities but can instead mean feeling out of place in both. It also comes up in a very hard-to-watch argument between Ginny and Hunter where the two trade insults about one another’s lack of belonging; the argument escalates into a screaming match in which the two effectively diminish not only one another’s claims to their Black (in Ginny’s case) and Taiwanese (in Hunter’s case) identities but also the prejudices they experience at the hands of a hegemonic white society that systematically denies opportunities or a sense of belonging (among other things) for those who don’t fit into readily identifiable “boxes.”

Georgia ran away from her childhood home in rural, impoverished Arkansas because she was being sexually abused by her stepfather, who then went on to sexually abuse her half-sister.

Georgia has killed people, often for “legitimate” (???) reasons, including posing threats to Ginny.

Georgia used to be in a biker gang and still has connections with at least one member, a lawyer she has on retainer to help her “disappear” her misdeeds, including said murders.

Marcus and Ginny have struggled (or are currently struggling) with self-harm and suicide ideation.

Literally every single one of the teenagers in this show is under immense pressure to over-engage in extracurricular activities that will make them competitive candidates at top universities.

Parents’ unhealthy relationships with one another, divorce, and everything else in that realm also shape the teenaged characters’ lives.

Abby struggles with an eating disorder that’s fueled in part by comments her male peers (notably, an asshole named Press) about her body. Male characters make sexist, stereotyping comments to Ginny about her body, too.

I’ll stop there, but I do so with full knowledge that I’m likely leaving something out. Hell, as I type this I remember that Austin (Ginny’s younger half-brother) literally stabs a kid in the hand and there’s a private detective trying to figure out Georgia’s past, including if/how she murdered her previous husband (the impetus for the family’s move). Like I said, there’s so much more to this show than just its similarities with GG. But I’ve also seen articles online decrying viewers who make the connection, and I don’t think that’s quite the right approach. The show clearly isn’t copying GG. Even if G&G did take inspiration from GG, it takes that inspiration in a fresh direction.

I wonder, though, about how we, the viewers, are supposed to respond to certain aspects of the show.

For instance, the show pits the US South as the source of obvious Bad Stuff ™–child abuse, incest, poverty, etc.– and the US Northeast as a place where the Bad Stuff ™ is hidden beneath a picture-perfect veneer. I get what the show’s creators are going for. They’re attempting to give us a multidimensional perspective on the US in all its prettiness and ugliness, but I wonder if associating the South with only the Bad Stuff ™ is doing a disservice to a region that has a rich cultural past and present–a past and present that’s certainly included problems like poverty, racism, and abuse but cannot be defined by those things alone because those things are not all that’s there. To tie those things primarily to just one region because those are stereotypes that are often perpetuated about that region seems a bit . . . overly simplistic? Troublesome? Dare I use the old grad-student favorite–problematic? It’s too easy–it’s lazy, in fact–to pit South against Northeast as the source of the US’s outright ugliness. It’s the rhetoric surrounding the 2016 presidential election all over again, and, frankly, we could all use a break.

The other thing that regional competition does is it makes it possible for the show to gloss over the fact that those Bad Things ™ exist in the Northeast, too. I feel silly saying that because it seems so obvious, but the simplistic portrait the show paints of the US means that it sacrifices accurate representation and complexity for the sake of–well, actually, I’m not sure what it’s for the sake of. Maybe straightforward storytelling? That might make sense if the show didn’t dwell in other complexities and commit itself to attempting to represent other identities and aspects of American life with some degree of accuracy, so I don’t know.

I can’t speak to whether the show accurately represents the experiences of mixed-race people, LGBTQIA+ people, or people with disabilities. I suspect that it represents the experiences of some people accurately but, of course, not all people because that would be impossible. I’m also not sure if I think the show’s commitment to representing a variety of experiences of US life borders on tokenism. I can’t speak for how someone who occupies one of those subject positions experiences the show because I do not occupy that subject position. My gut reaction is that the show does seem to make an effort to go beyond the whole “look at us, we cast all sorts of people in our show” by attempting to humanize all of its characters as real humans with rich, complex lives. It weaves the characters’ lives into a tight web, making clear that a character like Max and Marcus’s dad isn’t noteworthy just because he’s deaf. You don’t look at Clint and think “oh, that’s the deaf character.” You think, oh, that’s Clint; he’s Ellen’s husband, Max and Marcus’s dad, he’s deaf, he makes pithy remarks about his over-the-top daughter and slacker son, and he performs strip-teases for his wife. He’s noteworthy because he’s an engaged (and absolutely hilarious) husband and father whose deafness is one of many identities of his that influences his children’s lives as any other cultural identity would influence a family’s dynamic. The entire family is (at least) bilingual, communicating in sign language and spoken English while also teaching their sign language skills to friends and significant others. His deafness is one identity among many that the show invests him with, and he’s not in all that many scenes.

I could be wrong, but that was my experience while watching the show and thinking about it a bit afterward and while writing this post.

The show depicts mixed-race identity in a complex way, too, but it dwells on it a bit longer and with a bit more detail. I mentioned that Ginny and Hunter are both of mixed-race parentage and that their mixed-race identities become a subject of a relationship-ending argument. To back up a bit, though, the show attempts to paint a vivid portrait of the challenges Ginny in particular faces as a she navigates middle-class, white suburbia as the daughter of a Black father and a white mother. We see how she reacts when a police office walks toward her at a gas station while she pumps gas in her mother’s BMW, when a teacher tells her she’s being “aggressive” (while her classmates, who display similar behaviors, are unremarked upon), when her hair frizzes out after her friends pressure her to let another student’s white mom brush her curls into a ponytail using a boar-bristle brush, when a male friend (multiple male friends?) tells her that she doesn’t look like a stereotypical Black girl, and, among other things, when another student asks her “what are you?” in an attempt to pinpoint her racial/ethnic identities. Each instance is painful to watch because the actress who plays Ginny plays her well; the camera stays trained on her face as she responds to each of these interactions, allowing the viewer to observe the range of emotions she feels as she repeatedly navigates a community of peers and adults who can’t get their shit together and respect her existence. These interactions aren’t quirky neighbors asking silly questions about why she hangs her laundry a certain way or informing her that she needs to only mow her lawn on Thursdays. These are interactions that repeatedly undermine her sense of belonging, that tell her she’s somehow different, and that question her very right to exist. It’s heartbreaking, but I think it’s important that it’s depicted because that’s reality for many, many people.

The scene with Hunter is interesting because it shows the two turning something that was common-ground into a source of conflict for them. I’m not entirely sure how to read this scene. It’s difficult to watch because it rapidly descends into a “who is the most disenfranchised?” competition rather than a respectful conversation about each partner’s different experiences with prejudice. I wondered if the subtext here was some commentary on how members of one racial community pit themselves against members of other racial communities. (I’m not being clear here, and I’m struggling to clarify even as I go back to edit this post. I guess what I mean is that, when I initially watched this scene, I worried that this was a negative commentary on the Black community in particular and how it engages with other racial communities. I hope that makes sense.) Frankly, I’m still not sure if that’s not what’s happening there or if that’s not what was intended. What I’m fairly certain of, though, is that the scene makes clear that we, the viewer, are being told pretty explicitly that we can’t identify the two as “good partners” on the sole basis that they have mixed-race parentage in common. In other words, the scene undermines the idea that experience of racial prejudice is the only (or even the most important) factor that brings two people together and makes them good partners for one another. It also undermines the belief that experiencing prejudice doesn’t mean a person is automatically awakened to the prejudices other people also experience.

This is also one of the scenes where Ginny truly is unlikeable. Hunter is, too, but he’s unlikeable in a number of scenes throughout the show. He’s the Good Guy™ character in a nutshell–says all the right things, does all the right things, is all the right things, but maybe isn’t all those things for all the right reasons. In this scene, Ginny enacts the prejudicial treatment she’s suffered at the hands of her peers against Hunter; she questions the validity of his identity and the veracity of his experiences of prejudice at the hands of his peers. This scene is the breaking-point where the two have to come to terms with the fact that they’re not compatible even though, on some surface and by some set of metrics, they might appear to be.

Hunter sucks, but so does Marcus–for different reasons, though. Marcus is detached, withdrawn, sarcastic, unmotivated, disrespectful, and dishonest. He’s unaware–and doesn’t attempt to improve at all on this–of how his actions impact other people. He just doesn’t care about anyone but himself–until he does, a little bit. Some part of me has sympathy for Marcus and genuinely likes him; I’ll blame the show for that. Another part of me–the part that’s 30 years old and has known plenty of Marcuses–doesn’t have time for his shit. I’m conflicted, but the majority of me wants Marcus and Ginny to end up together because the things they have in common and the things that bring them together are the things that most people look for in a relationship. Marcus is a lazy shit most of the time, but he makes a genuine effort to understand Ginny. By the end of the season, we see that he also respects her and accepts her as she is–warts and all. He seems to genuinely want the best for her, which is a nice development in character from our first introduction to him, tumbling out of his mother’s minivan after having been caught smoking weed on a street corner. Again, though, he wasn’t always so respectful. His past behaviors make it hard to trust him, so it makes sense when Ginny doesn’t bring him along at the end of the season. It does, though, make you hope that he’s back in season 2 and that we get to see more of their relationship.

Speaking of which, I hope that season 2 also explores Georgia and Joe’s relationship a bit more. It seems like they’re headed in the Lorelei-Luke direction, which will make me happier than words could express, but I could also see the show’s creators flipping the script on us and setting Joe up with his own gloomy backstory–something to do with the ethically ambiguous labor situation he’s got going on at his farm and in his cafe, perhaps? Still, I think that might make him and Georgia even better suited for one another than they already are. After all, he’s one of the first people who showed Georgia true, genuine kindness after she ran away as a teenager.

And of course I want more of Ellen in season 2. The actress who plays her is hilarious and her character is just . . . really likable.

On a somewhat lighter note, one little thing I noticed while watching the show is that the characters slap their thighs a lot. This, again, might by my seasonal allergies brain, but the “[slaps thighs]” notation on closed captioning came up an infinite number of times over the course of this show. It came up so often that I started thinking you could catch the entire plot of the show if someone just spliced together every instance where a character sighs and slaps their thighs. I’d watch that video.

After all that, I still think the parallels to GG are there, but I still defend that G&G is also more than those parallels. And the “more” it offers is good. It’s intrigue; it’s gloomy realities and often-ignored truths that don’t offer viewers a sunny break from reality. But I think that’s good. I don’t like the argument that TV should be a “break from reality” or that a show is good on the sole basis that it offers us a “break from reality.” I think that argument is an excuse used to defend media that is too lazy to do the responsible thing and convey storylines that are inclusive and meaningful.

Well, my laundry is done, so I have to go deal with that. Happy Saturday, and happy initial inoculation!

XOXO, you know.

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