Whatever happened to Mutually Assured Destruction?
I don't care to root for a romance where one person has all the power, throughout the entirety of the relationship. Honestly so tired of this.
But give me a couple that has reached peak toxicity to the point where both are fully capable of hurting one another, an ever shifting power struggle where it's like "wow, yall are fucked up and yet so perfect for one another". I want proper enemies to reluctant allies to friends to enemies to lovers or some variation of this.
Each is fully capable of destroying the other but they hold back a little and don't give it their all in fights.
i've been seing A LOOT of jeff love lately so i wanted to remid you that your quirky white boy straight up BLACKMAILED a bunch of traumatized adults, LIED to his also traumatized and very paranoid wife, INVADED her privacy by reading her personal journals that she wrote when she was a literal kid stuck in the middle of nowhere for 18 months. and THEN he also had the NERVE to blame it on them when things started going south.
like i'm not saying everything that went down on the adult timeline is entirely a consequence of his actions. but he DID played a major role in leading up to everything that happened, yet he accepts none of the blame. and i think people baby him a little too much considering everything he's done, it really annoys me.
A dark skinned Black woman being the female lead on Bridgerton was either going to be…
A rapist (Daphne)
One corner of a love triangle involving another dark skinned Black woman in which the object of their affection is a White man (Kate)
Fat (nothing at all wrong with this but I saw the way y’all talked about Annie on Sinners 😒)(Penelope)
A maid to a white family propositioned as a mistress (Sophie)
Not present for another six years (Lucy)
There wasn’t really a choice here that wasn’t going to cause negative discourse. Except maybe Eloise (and like, if Bridgerton actually had balls then they would have made The Bridgertons Black instead of just giving most of them love interests of color, although again that would have made a Black female character a rapist), and a large section of the fandom is against Eloise being married due to her politics.
I’m truly all for criticizing the show’s colorism. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t enjoy it or that I’m not still very excited for Michaela Stirling.
and it’s… fine. The prince is great! They’re in love, he’s very sweet and passionate, writing her poems and songs, giving her anything she wants. The time she spends with her husband is great.
but cinderella is not royalty, her family was noble but she never spent time in those circles. She’s used to being busy, she’s used to cooking and cleaning and mending. There are hours, days, where she has nothing to do.
time passes. cinderella learns the fancy lady type of needlework. Learns to ride horses. Reads a lot.
as is normal for royalty at the time, they travel and are hosted by nobles or stay at castles owned by the king. But even that variety begins to become routine. The prince is distracted, there’s a lot of young women living and working on their route. Daughters of nobles. Younger and prettier with soft hands that have never done a day’s work.
cinderella needs something to spend her time on, and there’s a part of her thinking a couple-only trip might get her husband’s attention again, so she suggests making an old castle that’s fallen into disrepair their “project.” It was built in the time when castles were made to be defensible, so it’s quite sturdy, but it’s overgrown and secluded. The prince doesn’t know why his family stopped living there either. A hundred years ago it was their summer home.
so they go. And they work. And for a while it’s great! But when they leave for winter cinderella’s husband forgets her once again. cinderella resolves to make the best of her life and stop worrying about a man who has gotten what he wanted from her.
summer comes again and this time cinderella goes alone to the old castle (minus staff, of course, but cinderella manages to narrow it down to only repair workers and one maid). She can cook and clean and mend again, but this time it’s her own choice. She is happy.
this summer they make more progress on repairs. The workers say that most of it can be salvaged, except one tower that’s been completely overgrown with vines and briars. It will have to come down, eventually, but for now it can be safely ignored.
cinderella has more free time now. The old castle has a surprisingly untouched library, though time and moisture have damaged many of the books. Behind a collection of greek poetry cinderella finds an old diary. Very old, in fact, at least a hundred years. It’s rude to read a diary, of course, but whoever wrote this is long dead, and cinderella is bored, so…
from the description of activities the author looks to have been nobility. Maybe even a princess. She’s sensitive and sweet and smarter than she seems to realize. If circumstances had been different cinderella wishes they could have been friends…
after the summer ends cinderella returns to her husband. He’s spending a lot of time with a young musician and cinderella can’t even work up the energy to care. She does some research about the castle and the family she’s married into, finds out the name of the princess who wrote the diary.
aurora. Cursed and forgotten. She died young, they say, in a plague that also took out the castle staff and her own parents. Luckily they avoided a succession crisis, but not so lucky for the dead.
time passes. cinderella goes to the old castle again and again, even out of season. Soon enough all that remains to be done is the old tower, and the builders say they should tear it down and fill the gaps before it gets cold.
one night cinderella is restless. The princess from the diary had been fond of that tower, and cinderella is far more attached to a dead woman than she ought to be. She gets out of bed, reads by candlelight, and finally goes to walk the empty halls.
she finds herself going to the tower. Pushing past the vines that don’t seem so troublesome really. They almost part before her. The stairs are perfectly intact, the door at the top is already cracked open. As if she should have done this years ago, cinderella steps into aurora’s bedroom.
she’s as beautiful as the stories say. And sitting under her hands, crossed across her stomach as it rises and falls, is a book of greek poetry.
years later, people will tell the story of cinderella as a cautionary one. Don’t seek above your station. Don’t marry for prestige. After all, a girl who grew up as a servant once married the crown prince, and disappeared after only three years. She ran away, they say, she couldn’t handle the lifestyle.
two old women who run a bookshop together agree with the lesson. Marrying for the wrong reasons never ends well. It’s best to wait for someone you have things in common with, shared interests.
or, failing that, the more linguistic of the two says, wait a decade or ten for someone to fall in love with you from your diary.
her partner laughs and hits her with the socks she is mending.
laura lee “haunts the narrative” way more actively and honestly, convincingly than jackie but jackieshauna is a bigger ship than lottielee, and jackie shows up as a “ghost” more often, so no one gaf. sure, lottie still would be schizophrenic, but laura lee planted the seed that she is a prophet with a greater purpose by baptising her. lottie already had ideas, and laura lee solidified them. would we have gotten Father Lottie Matthews if we didn’t have True Believer Laura Lee…
laura lee you’ll always be famous to me i hope season 4 does something so fierce with your character because your potential is unmatched.
Cynthia Erivo is a beautiful and feminine and accomplished actress who is very good in her roles. she deserves protection and praise. seeing people hypermasculinize her and diminish her importance and make racist caricatures “for the memes” makes me wanna punch dirt. that is a person and so is everyone who happens to look like her. think about their feelings before you post stupid shit
also while i’m ranting about gender i always see debate about whether girls are rewarded for being tomboys or not and it’s like. actually girls are rewarded for mirroring whatever the situation demands of them. girls can’t be too prissy and refuse to play in the creek, but girls also can’t show up to girly events covered in mud. girls can’t have makeup art as a hobby or else they’re superficial, but if they never wear makeup they’re a slob and dumpy, etc. it’s not that girls are universally rewarded or punished for being tomboys, they’re rewarded for bending over backwards to always be exactly right for any given situation and punished for breaking those boundaries. so yes a classically pretty girl who cleans up nice is rewarded when she can ALSO be a tomboy. but a girl who is a tomboy all the time is definitely punished for never being able to achieve that prerequisite feminine side. this debate is over now thanks
this is spot on. A woman's masculinity is rewarded as long as it doesn't conflict with being heteronormatively attractive and as long as the masculinity plays harmonising second fiddle to the masculinity of the men around her.
i have more stuff to talk about the announcement of the show ending in season 4 in another post, but, i'm just gonna vent a bit, ok???
about the discourse that the new season is gonna be "horrible" or "gonna suck" bc season 3 was bad, one thing that bothers me is that many ppl criticize the show but don't mention the reasons why the season was inferior when compared to season 2 and, especially, season 1
bc, the truth is, pacing issues aside, a lot of the stuff that was inconsistent was bc they put shauna's storyline, and in a lesser extent misty's storyline, above the storylines of the women of color, with lottie getting the worst of it bc she died offscreen and was used as a prop in a "whodunnit?" mystery
and, while i believe that lottie would probably die either way if the showrunners got to keep their 5 seasons plan and corporates weren't changing everything (e.g. the paramount/skydance merge) after the pandemic and the writers' strike and the sag-aftra strike by putting profit over quality, the idea of using a "whodunnit?" mystery for her death and focusing more on misty's and shauna's reaction over the feelings of a woman of color was still very misguided at best
and the thing is, had the showrunners not need to rush the show bc of these corporate changes and ruined the pacing, would many of these people who complain about season 3 still get mad at the use of lottie as a plot device for her white counterparts????
same thing about taissa, actually
i love taivan bc i think that both the chemistry between jasmin and liv and the chemistry between tawny and lauren are off the charts
but the way that taissa's entire storylines outside of her relationship with van were sidelined, including her adoptive child sammy barely mentioned and simone having just a short cameo in a scene she silently judges the woman taissa cheated on her with, and also cutting off her entire political career
i know bartshley (ashley lyle and bart nickerson's nickname, for those who aren't familiar) said before that they didn't want to focus too much on the political career stuff bc yellowjackets is not a show about politicians (think scandal or house of cards, for example), that was still a part of tai's life that didn't involve van, and the show cut that
would ppl still care if this writing choice of cutting tai's storyline was the same, but the rest of the stuff involving the wilderness and shauna's descent into tyrant in both timelines weren't rushed bc of corporate decisions????
i try my best to not be a cynic, but, as a Black woman who's been in fandom for the past 11 years or so, it's hard for me to believe people would care for these things, you know????
in taivan's case, many people don't care about it even with the bad pacing in season 3
and many of the people mad at lottie's death were more upset bc they lost their fave than bc of the issues with representation that the way her death was executed in the plot brings
tumblr is kinda chill these days (a surprise to someone who saw many fandom wars back in the 2014-2015 days when i joined), bc people mostly just scroll past the post of people of color critizing these issues with representation when they aren't interested in the discussions
but, back when i hadn't deleted twitter yet, i have seen the fandom try to shut down most of the POC when people tried to start a conversation about racial representation in the show, especially the Black fans who comained about taivan being sidelined by the fandom in fics/AUs/headcanons
they oftenly would use arguments like that people love lottie ships, as if racism towards Black and brown people were the same and the objectification of brown women wasn't a thing.
that's not to get to the discourse of people who don't realize at all that lottie is a woman of color and that both courtney eaton and simone kessell are Māori (with simone being very vocal about it on her instagram, by the way) and say lottie is white or that she is white-passing (i get not knowing about the actresses being Māori, but looking at those two and saying they are white-passing is fucking wild 😭)
and, well, when you have diverse characters but, for whatever reason, you don't develop them enough, you end up getting inconsistent writing aka problems with representation affect the quality of the writing
not that people can't get angry for the way that the pacing was fumbled and plotlines were rushed in season 3, don't get me wrong
but it's kinda sad and painful that many criticize the show all while ignoring some of these issues, bc both of them were already present in a lesser extent in season 2, and the fact that so many didn't notice means that, if it wasn't for the fact that something that personally affects them like the pacing issues happened, many of the same people trashing on the show now would be indifferent to these things and put the show on a pedestal
yellowjackets is not a perfect show, and the current state of the industry and hollywood definetely also impacts negatively in the representation front, bc things like bad pacing affect every character in different ways, POC or not
but seeing people complain about something that isn't in the showrunners control all while ignoring the stuff that is the showrunners' responsability bc said things don't affect those people personally, that's a huge problem bc it's an example on how media literacy and critical thinking in fandoms are conditional to whether something affects their blorbo or their ships
@shaissa , about your tags on this post...no worries, it's perfect fine to reblog 😅😊
i just wrote this last night in a form of venting out frustrations, bc it kinda bothered me that many ppl in the fandom overlooked for all this time some issues with the show and the writing on characters of color that exist right from the start, but now are mad with season 3 bc of the issues with the pacing, issues that can't even be blamed on the showrunners bc of all the mess at paramount with the skydance merge and stuff...
so, it's more like "where was all this energy when us yellowjackets fans of color needed you?" type of thing, you know???? 😅
but, really, don't worry, it's perfectly fine to reblog this
in fact, even non-people of color can reblog this, if it means more people will reflect a bit more about stuff that doesn't directly affect them but can affect their friends/mutuals and ppl around them in general :)
Yellowjackets enjoyers: We do still need to hold space to recognise and talk about how the women of colour have been treated on this show. I’m specifically Adult Lottie and Taissa’s wife Simone who both were written out without a satisfying conclusion to their stories and who still had a lot of untapped potential.
The writers chose to quickly end Simone’s story so that Taissa could be reunited with her white ex gf and Lottie was still a big mystery and initially set up as a very important character just to be killed off screen for the sake of the white characters storylines and she might be considered to be “a sacrifice” that saves a terminally ill white woman. It’s also worth noting that Travis, a moc, was killed off screen for Nat’s character arc in season one and we never even got to meet his adult self.
i definitely feel like it’s underdiscussed that like. jaime and cersei’s incestuous relationship isn’t like an outlier or bizarre within their family but instead a culmination in a way of the lurking menace of incest and sexual violence that is basically omnipresent within their immediate family… tywin and joanna were cousins who grew up together in the same household (and were allegedly happy, but that’s still incest obviously), tywin’s sexualized humiliation of his father’s mistress, the brothel tunnels, sleeping with shae because she was tyrion’s, the whole tysha incident involving rape and incest by proxy of a thirteen year old tyrion (though people rarely in general bring up this clear source of sexual trauma for tyrion, which is odd to me because it’s first established in book one and is incredibly influential to his whole life). tywin as a perpetrator of sexual violence is obvious within the text but underdiscussed
and like the way that cersei harmed infant tyrion’s genitals specifically when she was a kid herself, and the way he thinks of her in a sexually violent way… it’s like. these siblings clearly grew up in an environment where sex and sexuality were entwined with family, with cruelty, with punishment. the lion’s jaws were already around them. JC aren’t incest twins tm in a vacuum but are instead a product of this environment, as is tyrion
seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors
I work at a bookstore and hearing one of my male coworkers call smutty romantasy "the downfall of society" because it's "literally just porn" radicalized me
Men have an entire industry. Entire industries dedicated to their sexualities. Let women have fantasy sex. there's not even a camera crew involved.
