hey guysss so unfortunately the rumors are true and im leaving the narrative. Buttt the good news is my absence will create such a gaping hole in your lives that it will become a sort of presence itself, and so in a way it will kind of be like i never left! But i am. Leaving just to be clear.
maybe something i love about lolilo is its tendency towards being a 'house as character' story. despite meg's insistence, we see outside of the flat basically four times in ben's videos. and this is ofc a feature of vlogseries and their constraints and what they're trying to do. but more than any other series i can think of, the flat carries so much feeling. where the characters decide to spend time, and maybe even more, where they almost decide to spend time, is so important. it's the divide between the flat and the tent of course, but it's also balth and peter coming so close to knocking on each other's doors, or the times ben decides to film in his bedroom instead of the main living space. we get to know all its little quirks and idiosyncrasies, just like we do with the flatmates, the stairs to nowhere, the weird taps. and the house changes with them. blutack from the rules stripping the paint off the walls, dents in the carpet from moving the couches around for challenges, egg stains. it influences their decision making up to the point where they're making rule to enforce that they spend more time there. like they love the flat and the flat loves them back.
ben actively and purposely shares his surface-level feelings with the camera while concealing everything else so thoroughly that he seems to have fooled even himself, freddie tries to forget that the camera is there and shows us her true self only when she succeeds at that, peter truly does not give a shit about the camera's presence and barely remembers to offer to turn it off even when he thinks he and balthazar are about to make out, and balth only shows the camera what he's really thinking and feeling in those rare moments when he's so worked up about something that he lets the mask slip
the idea of an editor having to, in a sense, perform as a character while editing the show that said character appears in is ummmmm a mindboggling undertaking. and for your sophomore project, no less!
balthday and aftermath are so.......i love how we don't actually know much about the flatmates' emotional states from that night, only what we get explicitly told to us through dialogue (and even that is not necessarily to be trusted cough balthazar jones cough), and the rest is inference. in fact, it's even more tangled and mysterious than usual, because ben wasn't filming and capturing all the dramatic bits!
instead, it's happy-go-lucky chelsey, our cameraperson from fellowship. chelsey loves dancing and chatting and getting artsy shots of her friends having fun. she likes filming stuff, but she calls the camera a "conversation starter," which just goes to show how differently she and ben view it. balthday is fellowship's sad evil twin. we only get snippets of information, thanks to chelsey's propensity to get distracted and her relative distance from the insular, cultish world of the flat. throughout lolilo, but in this video in particular, we have to resort to guessing
we know freddie fought with kit and then made up with kit and then spent the night with him somewhere. we also know ben probably didn't notice, because his edit doesn't dwell on these moments. (editing this show must have been maddening. a performance in its own right, having to edit AS ben or meg or jaquie or whoever. jesus fucking christ, you know?) freddie seems happy enough in the morning to joke around with ben, and relaxed enough to be wearing kit's shirt, but she's still on her guard. she repositions herself as the king of the flat ("i let you have a taste of the forbidden fruit") mere moments after trying to convince ben to let her break a rule. she's not content to let the party fade into happy memories either, whether as a means of regaining control or linking her fight with kit to an overall pervasive bad vibe rather than personal conflict. she expresses concern over the flatmates splitting off during the party (despite the fact that they live together and can/do hang out all the time) and even brings up temp flatmate john's underage drinking (despite the fact that he spent most of the night quietly reading). she feels anxious, and maybe lonely in that anxiety since she isn't ready to open up to her boyfriend about it, and so she wants ben to be anxious too
we know ben seemed off during the party - because he was feeling lost without the camera? because he knows it's all temporary? because of the pressure of suddenly having no constraints on his relationship with beatrice? because he was resisting the siren song of the bath, his one true love? (kidding. mostly) ben's internal world is the biggest mystery throughout the show, and the night of balth's party is no different. we don't even get many shots of ben and bea. in most of their background appearances, they're sitting quietly together with their backs to the camera. same with that last scene, ben facing away from the camera at the sink. seems intentional. without ben being able to use the camera as a buffer, we get the clearest sense we've gotten so far that Something is off. but he's still shutting us (and bea) out, so we don't get any explicit dialogue addressing it. (sidebar: to me, this episode is jake's shining moment as an actor in this series. to be able to believably portray a bombastic character trying to act like their normal self and not quite getting there is deeply impressive)
peter's in a similar situation; he and balth both have consistently been using the rules to postpone thoughts and conversations they're not ready to have. peter especially is super back-and-forth on the rules. they're stupid, they're ridiculous, he's willing to break them to get what he wants (peter ends the show with the greatest number of punishments iirc) except for when he senses emotional vulnerability on the horizon (he's the first to speak up in opposition to the no-rules balthday idea according to ben in classified information and the last to vote yes). the rules are certain, this night is not. peter resorts to drinking, his old favorite method of dealing with uncertainty. and the drinking exacerbates his impulsivity, so we get that classic lethal peter combo of avoidance (ignoring balth in the kitchen) and thoughtless flirting (sitting half on top of him on the couch)
and balthazar, who at first seems to have escaped unscathed and returns from zeb's in a cheerful mood - when he finds out what went down with peter, it's like the guilt erases his memory of the previous night. he indicates that he thinks peter drank too much because of balth going home with someone else, but in actuality, peter was drinking heavily way before that! the edit juxtaposes multiple shots of an unsmiling balthazar with shots of peter drinking throughout the party. when they hug, peter can't even properly embrace balth because of the drinks he's double-fisting - ouch! symbolic!! perhaps balth leaving with zeb made peter go overboard, but ben does say that his last conversation with peter was a happy one, so i don't think we really know for sure how it affected peter or if peter was even lucid enough to realize balth left. we're only getting it from balth's pov. and as usual, balth can't see things clearly once peter is involved and defaults to torturing himself over it, which i suppose is why he has to be the first to leave (thank you john)
tldr if you trust what freddie and balth say about what went down and why, you'll always be wrong, because they have an incomplete and misguided impression of the situation. and if you look to guidance from ben and peter, you won't get any, because they're hiding from their problems and pushing people away. these people are allergic to communication and i love watching it play out. i'm going to trap them in a room and lock the door
i think! that bea making fun of peter and freddie’s love letters in gifts?! and repeatedly insisting that declarations of love are “so last year” is her overcompensating because that’s what she wanted from ben, and she’s hurt that he only sent her fudge. and it’s part of the reason peter posts beatrice and ballads (“figured people would want to see it” he says), as a reminder that ben is always thinking about her and that even the fudge was his version of a love letter, however misguided
I actually think it would be quite cool to do some kind of VlogBrothers thing. This is me, Meg Winter, becoming the other half of your VlogBrother channel.
i know jaquie has this eye-rolling/sarcastic persona but like when it comes down to it she was the one telling costa that chelsey should be faustus in the absence of peter even though it’s a part she really wanted and she was the one who jumped in to offer freddie some free tickets to the play when she expressed an interest. she patted ben’s head when he seemed sad in russianfudge and after +confrontation+ she took the camera home & edited it all because she knew it was important to the flatmates AND she extended the hand of friendship to meg when she’d only just met her. jaquie manders is just a really lovely human being
“just use your new fancy acting talent that i’ve been hearing so much about” the idea of ben bragging to beatrice about peter’s acting - cute !!!
nmtd of course had to come up with excuses for why beatrice and hero aren’t watching ben’s vlogs and vice versa so that the story can happen, and that’s all fine and whatever, willing suspension of disbelief. but the beauty of dogberry and verges is that you can tell within the first 5 seconds of any one of their videos that NO ONE at school is watching this channel. people barely know who these kids are, and i have to imagine the kazoo sherlock theme song is a real barrier for entry. who would watch this?? and yet! this channel is where the real tea is. AWESOME
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