♡

J. queer, 26, any prns nsfw, dead dove enjoyer

[uponyou]

variants

[rosalinesurvived]

Good fucking god the town of Wind Gap being borne from the rape and murder of Millie Calhoun and how her endurance of it was almost sexualised as the desirable trait in Wind Gap’s women and then her descendant Camille having the nickname Mille. God.

[pigandpepper]

These shows feel like they share the same wound

I’ve been thinking about why I latched onto Half Man so quickly, why it pulled me in so completely. And I think it’s that immediate echo of how Gillian Flynn also explores these darker emotional terrains, specifically in Sharp Objects.

What Sharp Objects did for emotionally charged familial relationships and trauma, cycles of abuse, pointed violence, and unhealthy codependency, Half Man looks set to do again. And I’m always weak for stories that don’t try to clean trauma up or make it digestible. Just brutal, uncomfortable reality. Man, I eat that up.

Half Man is obviously darker than Baby Reindeer. There’s this unflinching intensity as Niall and Ruben’s backstory unfolds, trauma slowly exposed as you follow their entangled lives, with very little in the way of humour or levity. It immediately pulls me back to Amma and Camille, with that cyclical nature of how damage perpetuates itself, how it shapes a person. That dangerous bond formed through pain and grief and anger and family. It just digs its claws into the flesh in such an inescapable, recognisable way for abuse survivors.

That's what I loved about Sharp Objects, and what I suspect I'll obsessively adore about Half Man too. I don’t find it cathartic or healing as a piece of media, and to me, that's not the appeal. What does draw me in and stays with me long after watching is the feeling of being uncomfortably, precisely perceived.

The appeal of these kinds of media, to me, is that we don't get a neat resolution or some fun romp alongside cloying insight, just overwhelming, suffocating clarity.

These shows said: "Look at what life can make of you, what it can still make of you. Now what?"

[fullofnails]

my little sister can't be this [SPOILERED]!

based on this, infer what you will from it

[hangsawoman]

sharp objects, gillian flynn

[kovrikkk]

[valtsv]

what are your thoughts on amma from sharp objects?

she mostly makes me really sad, because her sadistic cruelty is very clearly a response to her own abuse at adora's hands and the social environment she lives in. which doesn't make it any less vile that she targets other young girls who she (correctly) interprets as less socially protected and therefore easier to get away with murdering and desecrating the corpses of, or negate any responsibility she has as the primary perpetrator in their brutal deaths. but, as adora points out, she's clearly scared and lashing out, believing that this is the best and perhaps only way for her to seize control and power over her life (as the text implies when amma tells camille how she likes to use sex to manipulate and overpower men*). the tragedy is that, with someone like adora as her primary example of how to behave and the consequences of inflicting that kind of violence on others in her formative years, amma was doomed from the start. she bears the weight of generations of rot built by repeated cycles of incestuous maternal abuse that even camille, who was distanced from it her whole life by adora's bitter resentment towards her, didn't escape untouched, and almost failed to survive at all. a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort, etc.

(*which is a commentary on gender as a structure and means of exercising power in a patriarchally dominated world rather than desire or attraction, as we see amma also attempt to seduce camille, at least partly because she sees pleasing her - by being desirable to her - as a potential means of escape from her current life)

[bowlinggwithmargo]

this has probably been said before but I keep thinking about how much of the violence in Sharp Objects is predicated on the legacy of slavery. The south as a society was/is founded and defined by intense brutality. It's a society where white women weren't the lowest rung on the oppression totem pole because there was always a class below them to torture...a society made up of white women that, in the decades after the end of slavery, have been forced to externalize this desire to control, manipulate, dominate, and torure slaves onto each other. This legacy of pain had to go somewhere or else the teeth of being seen as less than, or property of, their white male counter parts would be harshly felt. That's why Joya tortures Adora who tortures Marian, Camille, and Amma. Amma goes onto to torture other little girls to reaffirm her self worth but Camille seemingly breaks the cycle by redirecting that pain onto herself. Camille is the liberal of the show for doing so (I don't think it's an accident that the only person who notices her self-harm is the black woman who knew her in high school.) But she is just that, a liberal, who understands this legacy of pain but is dismissive of it (making fun of Calhoun day for one thing) and thus is unable to truly reconcile with it to truly move forward (much like how America refused to deal with/reconcile with slavery and the evils it wrought.) I think that's why Sharp Objects ends the way that it does. Camille writes her little article on the events of the show but, because of this lack of reconciliation, is shocked to see the cycle of violence repeat in Amma and can do nothing to truly end it.

[daintytrollop]

thoughts on how amma is in love with camille?

I don’t believe Amma is in love with Camille, but I do think the feelings they share for each other are (obviously) insanely complex, almost bordering on inappropriate, due to the effects of Adora’s mothering, their shared trauma, and their environment. It’s a devastating mother/sister swap for them both. Amma wants a love that isn’t the conditional poisoning she receives from Adora. Camille wants Marian back, and Amma is the closest thing she could ever get to that, despite the girl’s disturbing behavior.

“This particular dynamic transfers over to Camille when Adora is out of the picture. Regardless of Camille’s parenting style, regardless of her love and how unconditional, Amma was born starved and strangled blue. Poisoned. Like Adora, she can only find the sanctity of love through destruction. So, when Camille’s attention finally shifts for the briefest of moments, there’s another little dead girl waiting to be found. And Amma adds a new lock of hair, woven into the form of a rug, to her dollhouse full of little dead girls. She cannot stand to be replaced. She hurts to be loved.” (From a very old Substack post of mine)

What you could call their whole “almost-incest” thing is trauma-bonded intimacy. Camille feels pulled toward Amma not just because she’s her sister, but because she becomes this eerie, living ghost of Marian: this second chance that isn’t really a chance at all. Amma knows exactly how to fill that space, and she weaponizes it. There’s something deeply manipulative and performative in the way Amma plays at being Camille’s fragile little sister one second, then flips into this seductive, controlling force the next. It’s a mimicry of love. It’s control and desperate need.

And yes, there’s the erotic charge simmering under the surface—not necessarily because either of them wants the other in a romantic way, but because everything in their world has been corrupted by Adora’s version of affection. It’s all blurred. Amma doesn’t know how to be loved without performing for it. Camille doesn’t know how to receive love without absorbing pain. So what they give each other becomes a grotesque amalgam of comfort and contamination. Camille can’t save her. Amma doesn’t want to be saved, unless it still lets her win.

The way Camille looks at Amma, especially in the book, sometimes feels closer to envy or obsession than tenderness. And Amma, in turn, seems to crave Camille’s attention the way an addict craves a fix. The whole relationship is claustrophobic. So no, I don’t think it’s a romantic thing. I think it’s recognition. I think it’s fear. I think it’s both of them trying to rewrite something that was never going to end any differently.

[cavarage]

SHARP OBJECTS ✂︎ episode 1, vanish.

[infermiiterol]

SHARP OBJECTS (2018).

[bbybitchbrat]

⊹ ⁺ 𐔌 ᩧ ຼ ͡ ৯ ♡ ໒⁀ ᩧຼ ꒱ིྀ ⁺ ⊹

⊹ ⁺ 𐔌 ᩧ ຼ ͡ ৯ ♡ ໒⁀ ᩧຼ ꒱ིྀ ⁺ ⊹

[patrick-stewart]

SHARP OBJECTS | 1.05

[bite-my-grimy-fleshy-ass]

Love how Sharp Objects consistently explores the way the parents prefer the dead children to the living ones because how they are able to perfectly control the image and legacy of the child into something that reflects well on them in the community at the expense of both the true personality of the dead child and the autonomy and well being of their living children

[filmreveries]

Sharp Objects (2018) dir. Jean-Marc Vallée

[tokillaking13]

[morpho-mori]

It’s the way we’re wired.