OK CAMP HERE AND THERE SEASON 2 CONQUERED. let me see if i can square my thoughts away. positive and negative, mostly positive... i love this podcast. let's go! WARNING LONGEST POST EVER I THOUGHT I WAS DONE TALKING AND THEN JUST KEPT GOING FOREVER
it took me a bit to adjust to it but i love jedidiah's new va, i feel like belov and vance both shine different angles on the character in their performances that i think really suit what the respective season's going for with him, the more droll monotone i think perfectly fits the exhaustion he has with his guilt as well as kinda inviting the listener to understand the strain between him and sydney. s1 jedidiah didn't really scream "emotionally neglectful because The Feelings are too much to bear" but s2 jedidiah certainly does, while s1 jedidiah is more shy and sweet and pathetic in a way that both highlights his guilt and makes you feel for him more early on which makes the role he plays hit harder. obviously the va change wasnât intentional, just how it shook out, but i think itâs really neat that it feels fitting
MASSIVE FUCKING ROUND OF APPLAUSE FOR DIO GARNER. up and adam is SUUUUCH a good antagonist. so whimsical and revolting and skincrawly and scary and the perfect embodiment of unwell self destruction. voiced EXCELLENTLY and written SO well. elijah in s1 felt like more of a plot device - which is something i am not complaining about because i think that worked with the story being told where he doesn't really need much more depth than Creep - but adam in s2 makes you feel so betrayed and really makes you feel the ups and downs of his relationship with sydney. the mania. the embodiment of being a suicidal teenager who thinks the world is all full of mean old buzzwords and pain is the only thing you will ever understand. the alluring simplicity of destroying yourself and everything around you. simultaneously starving and indulging yourself. EXCELLENT character, i honestly struggle to believe how theyâll top him in the future. his va work is SO expressive and i adore it, absolutely all star performance holy moly!!!!
dunno how i feel about his feelings for sydney being romantic as i do prefer it as a weirdly-erotically-charged toxic queerplatonic guro affair but generally speaking he is such a tragic character in the end. maybe iâm just a bleeding heart but even at his worst i just remember him as sydneyâs familiar and sydney helping him when heâs sick and how he literally exists to embody these miserable stunted emotions and heâs capable of fun but not happiness. if sydney grows then thereâs no more purpose for him. he is incapable of that growth by nature of what he is, a time capsule of sydneyâs idealized misery, for what he represents him dying via suicide just to make his emotions understood, what he was trying to push sydney to do, is perfect
what if up and adam is aromantic. have we considered this. what if you were not made for love and you felt like its presence was destroying you. what if the only love you knew was esoteric kink and indulgence and you had no outlet for this because you will always be seen as lesser to his True romantic love. what if we got evil queerplatonicisms. Walk with me
an angle i find interesting to view the series through is that its really, really 2020s tumblr. mostly in the humor, which doesn't always land for me (though i'm just generally taken out with topical meme references/punchlines, shrug) but also in the fact that you can TELL sydney and adam especially are written by someone who lived through 2010s tumblr Intrusive Thoughts Suggestions dysphoria guro Quirky Mental Illness yandere bitch club suicideposting, in a way that honestly makes it hit way too home for me lol. this is a good thing. i've never had that psychic damage from growing up on this specific corner of the internet touched in fiction before. both in the nitty gritty of that dark hole (adam, sydney, heck soren too) and how it feels to be in the orbit of it interpersonally (jedidiah, yvonne+joshua, fennel). it has made me sick with how seen it makes me feel lol.
honestly admire how much it makes you feel âLEAVE YOUR SHITTY BOYFRIEND OH MY GOD!!!â about BOTH halves of sydidiah at different points. in general sydidiah i adore, i felt just like im sure jedidiah did in 68, still reeling from sydneyâs threat and unsure if i could even feel good engaging in this relationship anymore (side note: i feel like i rarely see âhow it feels to have a suicidal loved oneâ touched on in a way thatâs not just inspiration porn and chnt does it so well with jedidiah+fennel+rowan), and then being hit with the love that got them in this mess⊠excellently done
was not feeling the metaplot stuff with the agents literally at all until the season finale, still doesnt 100% mesh with me but i AM a sucker for "horrible things happen and everyone is in a clinical recovery period and suddenly everything feels much colder/detached" stories and that itch is being scratched nicely. otherwise i tend to find the mystery man stuff jarring (a lot of it is the voice i think) though i do LOVE the prose itself (especially in the jedadam episode), also the epithets are pretty corny and i rolled my eyes whenever they called sydney The Boy and jedidiah The Man. I guess you could argue itâs commentary on the disparity between cis/ablebodied men and trans/disabled men or whatever i just have a pet peeve for adult characters being called boys/girls and feel there wasnt really anything there to justify it as an artistic decision and it kinda made me mad lol
ABSOLUTELY LOVE FENNEL. i already anticipate them becoming a new fave of mine i adore them. i love someone calling sydney on his shit, i love their kindness and how they wield it like a weapon, i love their gender, i love their childhood friendship with soren, i love their desperation to help him, i LOVE their parallels to jedidiah, AUAUGHHH I LOVE THEM. SO SO SO excited for more of them in s3.
i wish i could say the same about soren but he just doesn't(didn't? rip:( ) really click with me, i usually like tonal dissonance but the cartoonish flowery/pedantic way he speaks and is portrayed early on combined with the very real and down to earth(lol) human emotions his character touches on just doesn't hit for me, which sucks because stepping away from the specific execution his concept and ESPECIALLY his relationship with fennel is definitely one of the highlights of the season
SERIOUSLY I LOVE FENNEL SO MUCH
in general, thought this in s1 and i thought it in s2, chnt is the most visceral piece of media i have ever experienced. no punches pulled whatsoever. it is phenomenal at tapping on some very raw nerves of the human psyche. i think it's quite telling that every person i've experienced this podcast with has had some deeply intense emotional reaction to some part of it
that being said, this is very subjective, what's Realistic and Down To Earth for one person may be melodramatic and pointless for another, but i reeeaaally dislike when the show feels the need to spell out the Social Commentary Subtext. i do not need sydney to be called a slur, by himself or other characters, to understand the ableism. i do not need joshua or adam to say the word "cisgender" to understand the cis privilege commentary. i can already pick up on that, it's not exactly subtle (spoken with love). i feel like the need to twist the knife and say things bluntly, though i understand the impulse to make it hit as hard as possible and not be misunderstood as queer/disabled stories often are, kind of cheapens the emotional impact, at least for me. this podcast is so good at writing and making you feel very human emotions and i don't think it needs to outright say "and THIS is about THIS" to accomplish that
in general though chnt is generally very good at writing messiness, messiness =/= depth, hard to be a jedidiah defender sometimes when he will just be made to say some out of pocket shit out of nowhere for presumably just âwell heâs the archetypal privileged boyfriend so itâs realisticâ, really disliked him dropping the c slur in 68 not out of My Blorbo Would Never Say A Bad:â((( but moreso that i just found it pointlessly heavyhanded when i think the subtext of ableism was already pretty apparent and bringing it upfront distracted, imo, from the emotional content of the monologue when this is supposed to be his big moment of guilt and fear
this season has had the most consistent "oh my god no THIS is the new best episode of the show" episode drops. i think gun to my head the jedidiah+adam therapy episode is my favorite but the entire last chunk of the season felt like a, pardon the comparison, train that would not stop hitting. the back-to-back of 59 and 60 is especially SO hardhitting, both some of the best in the show on their own but taken in tandem with eachother oh my goddd they hurt so much.
special shoutout to joshua in general, he's a character i spent the entire show WAITING for the other shoe to drop on and it was SO satisfying when it did. i was like "pleeeasepleasepleaseplease do something cool with how sydney bullies him and the double standard there and how this factors into yvonne's feelings on sydney pleeease" and i was CHEERING when it happened. done so so well. im gonna remember that monologue in 59 for the rest of my life. bojack horseman enjoyer /pos
in general the prose is so good. the monologues, adam's especially. i am going to miss him in s3 just with his amazing monologues! i love 60 so much for being almost entirely prose which is one of chnt's greatest writing strengths, it's SO evocative and i adore it. the food imagery of all kinds and food-as-characterization is done so well. in particular the queen bee/honey metaphor has stuck with me a lot. imagery is something this podcast is so so good at that i find myself frequently opening transcripts just to study the word choices and whatnot. very very good stuff.
the adam gas station episode reminded me of the fly episode in breaking bad, specifically in the "seems like filler but probably has a shitton of really interesting symbolism you could poke at in it" way. i just found that one really interesting
i don't want to judge a story on its incomplete merits because we are only two seasons in. we are just barely at the halfway point at latest. i know this will definitely change, but in the moment it bothers me: i do really wish the female characters had more significance. and that, though i understand this is about paralleling sydneyâs past, there were less abusive moms, or if nothing else different looks at motherhood. lucille especially, i understand she's supposed to be mysterious but it's frustrating to have a character who only appears sparingly not have those appearances really... advance her character at all. i find her conceptually SO interesting and even where we stand sheâs one of my favorites, would love more characterization for her outside of just being a plot device shitty mother. would love more on her feelings on sydney in particular. she paid for his college... again weâre definitely getting more of her but i am still a little frustrated.
in general though i do really like the female characters we have, i wish they had more to do, with how much the show focuses on gender and specifically femininity in its imagery/metaphors (queen bee, the fox in s1, the gravedigress, sydney's relationship with his own femininity and other characters' relationships with that, etc etc) i find the actual female characters tend to stay out of the action, which i understand there's a large cast to juggle so marisol and salem for instance can't have much focus outside of dedicated Episodes, and of course there's more that will come later, in the moment it does sadden me that for instance all the antagonists that have big personalities and screen presences and indepth psyches are men while all the backstory antagonists (lucille, sydney and soren's mothers, the gravedigress, etc) are women. as a marisol enjoyer in particular outside of her dedicated episode with salem i feel like she was just kinda in the background a lot when i think she couldâve had a LOT interesting to say about the main plot. her being especially close with the kids⊠how would she feel about natsume for instance?!? very excited for more of her
all of this to say i had crackship visions of adam x marisol for a bit in their sexualities being compatible and me really REALLY wanting marisol to get in on the drama of the up and adam plot. Make her worse⊠how im not sure. Iâll leave this concept for someone else to cook with? XD
i loved the joshua+yvonne+jedidiah episode in the latter half it felt exactly like waking up and checking your friends group chat to see theres been a catastrophic implosion. in general the trio of joshua yvonne and jedidiah is so good i really want more of them. if college era jedidiah has no fans im dead. his skyrim ost
In general love yvonne, sheâs a very crucial character and a niche i think fennel also fills really nicely in being someone who mostly knows sydney through other people and so doesnât give him as much of the benefit of the doubt. i think the way the sydney-joshua-yvonne dynamic is set up is really really well done, joshua being this sort of memey character who sydney bullies out of him fulfilling this cis weirdo frat bro archetype that offputs him (and portraying him that way to the viewer) and yvonne being joshâs bestie who sees that not for âlol funny sydney!â but âdude what the hellâ is just such a nice way of extending the world beyond sydneyâs perspective. mwah chefs kiss!!
REALLY REALLY LOVED NATSUME. as someone who grew up in his exact boat, both transmasc and a former weird girl, trawler of deviantart and enjoyer of creepypastas, he really hit the young trans experience and mental illness and just plain âaw i did that!â feels. LOVED the bits and pieces of his dynamic with adam especially when it got scary, honestly i was hoping adam would move onto him as a primary victim after leaving sydney as i feel they were setting up for that, the themes all the way in s1 about child endangerment and how to talk to kids about dangerous adults wrt elijah, the active child harm in s2 (TOMMY HOLY SHIT THAT EPISODE WAS SO GOOD), potential commentary on self harm in teenage alt cultures and other marginalized communities â this was touched on a bit in the finale with adam scaring and pushing natsume more and natsume blaming himself for the parade, but i was honestly expecting it to get way darker⊠am i just evil?!?! DX regardless i do expect more natsume going forward so i donât consider this a disappointment as much as expressing excitement for some of those loose ends to be tied. i just have an eternally angst loving heart. i like him :((( little guy :((((( đ€đ€đ€
top favs: jedidiah, fennel, natsume, marisol, up and adam, lucille. do with this list and whatever it may say about my psyche what you willâŠ!
i keep making ocs that are sydneycore, can i help it that heâs such an interesting character?!?!
IN CONCLUSION: camp here and there is excellently written to the point where the emotional damage it will cause makes me actually hesitant to recommend it XD but itâs real good. the parts that hit for me i adore and the parts that donât still obviously give me a lot to talk about. itâs a very human a piece of art and one i am stoked as hell to get an opportunity to experience. very scared for what s3 has in store for us because i truly have no idea where itâs going after this point and im excited to find out. i predict fennel will make me cry at least once. jedidiah probably already has
