i think this new round of med students are supposed to serve as foils for javadi and whitaker. they're put there to highlight the ways dennis and victoria are specifically well-suited to emergency medicine but also might be the most negatively affected by it.
if you think about their major pitfalls on their first day, it makes a lot of sense. dennis not being able to accept losing his first patient to something he couldn't have prevented, and victoria passing out at a particularly gory moment directly contrasts with the two new students being very disconnected from their first death and seeming fine with the lung flip. this highlights the sensitivity whitaker and javadi came in with.
in season one, both seem like they'll crack under the pressure, but their sensitivity is actually what makes the job worth doing to them. like how frank told mel that they needed more people like her, ones that cared enough to be moved to tears.
this season seems to be smacking with themes of dissociation. robby is completely checked out, pushing off conversations that will never happen, accepting changes he hates because he doesn't have to deal with them, staring off into space while people talk to him. dana refers to herself as a horse who can mindlessly find her way back to the barn, she's cracking off-color jokes that don't seem very sensitive (more than the previous season), and she implies that she's back because she doesn't think anyone else can get them through the 4th of july, not because she actually wants to do the job anymore.
obviously you want to maintain that same softness and empathy you come in with, but is that reasonable after what they see? is it harmful to them as people to not completely dissociate the way we see some of the senior staff do? or is it more harmful to wall that negativity off?
i think this goes well with the other obvious theme of parenthood (donnie's a new dad, samira has mommy issues, the baby being abandoned). the ways being a parent simultaneously energizes and exhausts you. connects and isolates you. gives you purpose but ultimately limits what is perceived as acceptable. the ultimate question will be what does balance actually look like? a cruise? a sabbatical? getting laid?
“find balance if you can.” can you? is that even possible?
not to vague post but seeing people earnestly think they're like "pwning" the creators of netflix's biggest television series ever because oh, boom calling out homophobia.
like. canada's next top bottom is getting railed in like 4 out of 6 of hbo's biggest show yet. just watch something else???? i truly and sincerely need y'all to realize that the world is not out to get you because two teenage boys on a TV about generational trauma and fucking demons dogs don't kiss. i say this as someone who was incredibly invested in klance in the 2010s.
a romance plot in a show that is inherently not about that romance is not in anyway shape or form indicative of social progress or tolerance towards gay people. especially when the characters are played by white actors - romance between white men has been continuously represented in film and television for like 20 years.
i promise you, life engaging with media becomes so much richer and fulfilling when you seek out Creators who are interested from the get go in telling queer stories, when you seek out queer storytellers and community. your identity does not rely on the wish-fulfillment of your preteen brain. netflix is not on your side. never has, and never will be. the creators don't seem to be either, you cannot fix that. trying to parasocially rectify a perspective of obstinence and artistic freedom is futile. it is not the story they wanted to tell. it has never been the story they wanted to tell. why does this relationship need to exist in the canon for you to enjoy it? have you not been enjoying making art and writing fics and making friends? you can continue to do this. nothing is stopping you because YOU have been fueling the joy the whole time. it was always you and thats okay, it really truly is.
beyond that, is pressuring people you do not know, will never know, and cannot know really how you want to engage in media and spend your precious time? are you not fulfilled by fandom culture? are you not fulfilled by media that does depict queer relationships? because surely you must realize that it exists. if you're looking for a cis gay male romance the world is literally your oyster.
this is genuinely a plea. do better for yourself because if you continue to expect the world to cater to you and you alone, if you continue to perpetuate the exclusion of queer voices in film and television by encouraging the depiction of homosexual romance over the employment and sponsorship of queer artists and storytellers, your world will not change and you will suffer along with it.
this show does sex well, because the absence of graphic sex in this episode was powerful. sex was always the easy part for the both of them. this episode was them saying, what i like about you isn't just skin, isn't just skin deep. they love each other's hockey, they love the way each other feels, they love talking and listening to each other even when they don't know what the other is saying, they slowly make space for each other. this episode was like that real point in relationships after the good sex, when all the deeper, wonderful, terrible stuff that comes into your life when you let yourself be loved and known.
it is evident that the general tumblr populous has written off most historically black art forms near entirely. this applies to music, film, art history, etc. rather, the art engaged with and popularized in tumblr spheres is that of "good representation" which usually takes the form of idk, a black side character on your tv show whose personality is a huge nothingburger, but is appealing because they are not "problematic."
i think alot of this comes down to people's inability to make judgement calls for themself about what is ethical and what is right. this can be seen in conversations about kink when people say "anything as long as it's legal," sorry but, that is an incredibly bad faith and spineless read. the law should not decide your morals, you should, because anything can be criminalized, and your distinction of a perverse harmful action versus an acceptable one hinges upon your ability to make a decision about what you think is right.
when white allegedly woke users don't engage with black art, what i see is this: a person who does not know how to engage with art in a critical way that is decided by what they think–because this art causes them to confront what they think. often, when white and engaging with black art, you will be confronted by your own racist presumptions, your own back-of-mind urges, and that is the most important part. everyone is racist, because we undeniably live under white supremacy and are thus subject to racist propaganda near constantly (insert sydney sweeney jeans ad).
i really do think some white tumblr users are afraid of engaging with content made outside of their culture because they could be "appropriating" or having "incorrect thoughts" about race. this thought police bullshit will only coddle your racism. you need to undo it yourself by engaging with black people and black art. nobody else will for you, you will not one day be cured, you are the only one who can dismantle your own racism. you cannot avoid your racism by pretending race does not exist (i.e. by [consciously or unconsciously] not engaging with the works of black people). that is the titular thing, really: do you really want to stay racist? you could be listening to tha carter ii, like
Imagine that one day as you're walking on a hot sunny path, your hat jumps off your head and lands into a muddy ditch. And you look at your muddy hat and ask it: "What did you do that for?"
"I don't want to be a burden anymore", your hat answers. "You are always carrying me around, and I can't carry you. That's not fair."
"I don't mind carrying you, little idiot", you tell your hat, "you hardly weight anything at all, and you shelter me from the sun."
"But that's different", your hat protests. "I don't mind the sun scorching on me. That happens anyway. It's literally no trouble for me to shade you too."
"Just the same it's no trouble for me to carry you. But now, because you wanted to stop inconveniencing and bothering me, I am now hatless and you are in the dirt."
Nothing more embarrassing than accidentally using a big word wrong because now I'm simultaneously both stupid and pretentious, the worst combination of all time
All these people saying ‘shut up that joe and nicky didn’t kiss! Let gay relationships just be wholesome! I’m gay and you don’t need to see them tongue to know they’re in a relationship! stop objectifying gay characters!’ you don’t get it. Youre entitled to your opinion but I don't think you get it. It’s about the Vietnamese antagonist being demoted to henchman so a well-known white blonde actress can be the main antagonist (an original character) instead. It’s about another original character being introduced whose only contribution is to be the wise asian man trope. It’s about the toning down of the two most disgustingly romantic characters to the point where they barely touch eachother, when they were previously on screen spooning in bed, holding eachothers faces, and yes, kissing. Specifically kissing in a van surrounded by homophobes that they then murder in some pretty top tier comedy.
I’m not upset because i was wanting to get my rocks off. Im concerned because these were decisions that were made, and in the era of almost every movie needing corporate board approval, you need to question why these decisions are being made and who’s making them. Why can’t we show our two gay characters kissing in their only intentionally romantic scene together? Why can’t the vietnamese character be the main villain she was originally set up to be? Why has the new asian character presumably spent his immortality amassing knowledge, and not fighting like everyone else, with no explanation?
At the end of the day it was a bad movie. Plot holes everywhere, rough acting, Madame Webb style dubs. But I still think it’s important to acknowledge the slideback that’s happened here and it's okay to be upset about it.
i think what’s most baffling to me about tog 2, is that the first film already laid out the thread for the sequel. all they needed to do was follow though and expand. yet, they completely bypassed that though line, not for something better or more interesting, but rather something so unconvincing, unnecessary, and silly, that it’s making me wonder what, exactly, the people behind this franchise think the draw is.
because the ‘why’ of their immorality was never it. and watching as the film sloppily contradicted and undermined its own premise with patchy pacing, uneven tonality, a shockingly insipid twist, and a shallow, nothing of an antagonist that did little more than slink in and out of the narrative while reciting tepid lines of cartoonish villainy, i couldn’t help but wish i was watching the sharper, more coherent film that was trapped in the shadows of this one.
a film that would have focused on quynh’s return as a sympathetic antagonist, picking up on the pieces they teased in the first film and enhancing the narrative by exploring her rage and grief and adjustment to this new reality; how that reshaped her relationships with the guard now. i wanted to see andy, joe, and nicky grapple with the return of their old friend, who is not quite the same woman, because she is enraged and lonely and in so much pain that she’s determined to tear down the world and them too, if that’s what takes to satiate her hurt, but still someone they love. i wanted to see how nile (and to lesser extent booker) who’ve been sharing this woman’s distressingly furious dreams, felt as they were faced with haunting figure of their nightmares made flesh. how she upended nile's new worldview because if this can happen to quynh maybe it can happen to her and what does that mean? how despite all that she still wants for quynh to be okay, if only for the peace of the others. i wanted to know how andy handled the guilt, relief and love (because in this version there would be no weird hays code no homo-ing of their obvious romantic relationship) as she is confronted with a quynh who feels abandoned and betrayed and wants little to do with her and the mortal world at large—andy’s ‘endless war’. i wanted to watch a film as evocative and emotionally resonant as the first, which was not without it’s own issues, but at least tried. not this flaccid mess that was so preoccupied with flaunting typical popcorn flick aesthetics and overlong action sequences (with few exceptions, like during quynh's fights with andy and nile) that it let the characters and relationships they’d so beautifully built up before, just fall to the wayside.
because what, actually, was the point of any of this? the world building that wasn’t, the new immortals with zero emotional impact (didn’t mind tuah but he didn’t need to be immortal, and disco’s lame ass absolutely didn’t need to be a thing at all) whose existence only eroded the scope of the immortal life/journey, and the story itself?
i've already gone into how badly nile was done in another post, but imma say it again because i truly can’t believe it. how did she go from the heart of the fist film to a magical totem in the second? all so some yt lady can be shoved into the story oh please. and what’s more is my girl was largely ignored outside of that and given nothing to work with that was in service of herself. she got exactly one second to react to her new power and then the end. what????
why was booker’s arc so cyclical and shallow? and framed as a worthy sacrifice when it was nothing of the sort. why were joe and nicky so much in the background, especially when it came to quynh. it’s like the writers forgot that they knew and cared for her too. because in what version of this movie does them not even having an opinion of her return make any sort of sense? just so lazy and disingenuous.
especially when i think of of how quynh's & andy's reunion was so measured and sanitized and abbreviated. all that tidy talking around their relationship and what they actually mean to each other, that was actually just shameless homophobia. it was as if the studio thought if they'd fully acknowledged the depth of these women’s romantic feelings, that they had been a couple and not simply friends, the film would've collapsed upon itself. which it sort of did, but definitely not because of some lesbian implications. if anything their relationship was one of the few moments of emotional resonance, it just wasnt enough. and i hate that i wasn’t even surprised, that i was initially so taken by the fact that quynh was out of the sea and they were even having a conversation at all to see the lack for what it was. because the representational disparity of gay relationships, even between men and women, has always been obvious. from narrative perspective to audience investment. and you don’t need an advanced degree in lesbianism to tell, just one glance at ao3 will tell you that lol. but here, because that connection went unaddressed, even as i enjoyed watching their chemistry and tension, i couldnt help but feel that something was missing (how did they go from feuding to flirting???????? why skip over that?) that their reconciliation felt less like a revelation and more like a paltry appeasement.
and that’s the film in general. an overindulgence in uninspired action sequences at the cost of character work and development.
but it’s not all bad. i think the actors—van especially who was exhilarating to watch every time she appeared onscreen—elevated the material to the best of their ability. injected heart and intrigue and even fun, where they could. but there’s only so much even the most talented actors can do with an underwhelming, uninspired script.
and obviously i didn’t expect it to be exactly what i wanted because that would be impossible (and what fic is for) but i did expect, at the very least, some cohesive and thoughtful storytelling. not a showy, superficial mess that flattened its characters into vessels for a sequel that shouldn’t have been necessary and might never see the light of day.
