[loveful-heart]

alicent hightower parallels

[365filmsbyauroranocte]

The Drama (Kristoffer Borgli, 2026)

[enby-axels]

it's interesting how the drama implies that sometime over the years, emma lost contact with her high school friends and was never able to make new ones on her own. and yet being friendless again didnt make her regress or default to her previous state. i think she really did change as a person and took ownership over her growth and beliefs. she never wanted to go back to that bad dream

and imo that really hammers in the theme that emma is just a person, like anyone else. like any other person, she is capable of change, both negative and positive. she can be radicalized and deradicalized. emma herself points this out as a teen, mass shooters can look like anybody! theyre not even all men. and charlie echoes her in the present day when he says there could be thousands of people walking the streets who were radicalized like emma and just like her they ultimately didnt go through with it. and when arguing with his friends about it, he accidentally stumbled upon the really great point that this is a very american problem produced by american gun culture. the individual of course bears responsibility for their actions and their growth, but if we want to understand and solve this problem on a broader scale, we have to understand it is bigger than any one person. it cant be boiled down to a few bad actors and divorced from the material conditions from which gun violence emerges

in contrast, multiple other characters in the drama independently use a very interesting choice of word to describe emma: "psychopath." they all, in different settings and conversations, use a term which carries an incredible amount of baggage in pop psychology and bourgeois psychiatry. their language indicates they see emma as an aberration, fundamentally broken and incapable of change. because that's the safe way of looking at it. it's easy to exceptionalize mass shootings and hard to look at the rot at the heart of the america, the massive amounts of violence we inflict which we take for granted as part of the status quo. because that's their normal and emma, to these characters, is intrinsically abnormal and therefore irredeemable

and look, i dont have an easy answer for whether or not we should assume the best of somebody who once planned a mass shooting. that's a hard pill for anyone to swallow. but the drama believes it's clearly possible for someone like that to truly change, and i want to believe that too

[tris-morreu]

the interpretation and ensuing argument over whether charlie did, or did not actually cyberbully a kid as a teenager is really interesting, but i find that a lot of people ultimately miss the point of what that interpretation, or competing interpretations, are meant to do. we need not discard one over the other, but rather see what meanings and conclusions they present us with, and which we find more compelling or productive for analysis.

if charlie is not lying about having cyberbullied someone, it makes sense that he cannot place himself inside of emma's situation at highschool and it explains why and how he downplays the severity of her hostile high-school experience. it's why he feels he needs to lie and make up excuses for her behaviour, because he does not view mild (or even severe) social ostracization as a serious enough issue to warrant a desire for this kind of violent retaliation. those of us who have been in these situations, however, can quickly infer why emma fantasizes about causing those people what she believes is the same amount of pain she endured. it's a testament to his emotional illiteracy and his position of relative privilege over emma—he occupied a position against which she meant to cause harm, and cannot empathise with her position.

if charlie is lying about having cyberbullied a kid, however, then that is part of a habit. he lied about reading emma's book, he lied about the mug, he lied to mike and rachel about emma's motivations and background, he lied to emma about misha, he lied (though ironically) at the diner about his injuries and, most importantly, he lied about the worst thing he's ever done—which is, in actuality, crucially, what we have seen him do.

and that is the crux of this conversation. whether or not he's telling the truth about having literally cyberbullied another kid at fourteen is relatively irrelevant in relation to the fact that this is not the worst thing he's done. we are, for the duration of the movie, following charlie's worst moment. we know the worst thing he's done, we know what he acts like under pressure, we know where his points of moral failure are and so does emma. and she chooses to allow him to present himself as he wants to be seen, and chooses to include both versions of him (the charlie he wants to be and the charlie he is) in her interpretation of him, as he should have allowed her. so it's upsetting to me that people cannot see the value in either interpretation, when both fit into the themes of the movie and would have told us different, but equally true things, about charlie's character and how we are meant to take him.

[leotanaka]

I saw The Drama (2026) the other night and when Emma was talking about the "aesthetics of it all", absolutely everything made sense because you just know she was on THAT side of Tumblr back in the early 2010s.

[realjasperfischer]

this scene quintessentially made me attracted to robert pattinson, in a way twilight can’t

but yea, watch the drama, better than whatever the mario movie has lol

[lakemojave]

[kaletastrophes]

Can people be redeemed? Can they truly change? Can they be forgiven? Is the goodness in people just an act? Is the badness in them still there, just below the surface, waiting for an opportunity to come out? To strike? To hurt? Are we responsible for all of our bad thoughts? Should we be punished for all of our bad thoughts or bad feelings or hateful ideas? Is someone who was once bad and now chooses to be good a better man than someone to which goodness comes inherently and without thought or pause? Thou mayest?

yes yes many such questions

[zapbib24]

The Zendaya Cinematic Slapverse

[thewingedwolf]

one thing i found interesting was how very american mike & emma are. charlie says it, that the school shooter thing is a very american thing & rachel attempts to deny this, using mike as one of the “good” ones - oh my husband was a poor black man exposed to guns at an early age but he didn’t commit The Ultimate ThoughtCrime. and mike immediately slaps this down, that he grew up around guns because his uncle was a cop. but when charlie tells them about how emma could have possibly thought about something like this, he also lies & blames the death of the neighbor. but the thing is - emma being desensitized to gun violence bc her dad is in the military, and not thinking about a) the human cost and b) the way people would talk about her afterwards, this makes complete sense. the child of a cop might be turned off by their love of guns, and a military brat might be too interested in the aesthetic of the lone, tortured shooter! but that is too much for a liberal white person like rachel or charlie to take. it’s too real and it’s not stereotypical enough. especially when both mike & emma feel shame over the worst things they did while both charlie & rachel could not be less bothered. they have actual victims still alive out there! mike was a little shitty to a weird, entitled girlfriend of his & emma was a little too caught up in Making Them Pay but actually did nothing! and that’s something charlie eventually points out - she didn’t actually do anything wrong!!! maybe she turned from those actions for reasons that are self centered (like being upstaged, like what her reputation might be after she’s dead) but does rachel feel bad? does charlie? why is what she didn’t do so much worse than charlie actually kissing someone else?? yes, maybe, it is true that he loved a mask the whole time! but rachel’s ire is not that emma is wearing a mask, but rather that she was fooled by emma’s mask!

[jussanother]

Doja Cat (2026)

[agentmarcuspike]

they have yet to invent a word for his desire

[ozarkthedog]

"Abbot does make eyes at everybody. He's a flirt."

[tabloidsores]

we are teaching him to gamble

[chrysalisgoop]

most people only want to talk about die my love in terms of motherhood and post-partum depression and i think that is just. such an oversimplification of its messaging. like it is much more about the erasure of women’s personhood from birth to death under the patriarchy. the central relationship is not between her and her baby, it’s between her and her husband as she bucks against his increasingly desperate attempts to tie her down. she has a whole monologue about how at the age of three she felt trapped by the filial relationship to her parents, of having to belong to someone. the character she’s most frequently paralleled with is her mother-in-law, who is experiencing a total loss of identity after the death of her own husband. motherhood is an aspect of that erasure, absolutely, but it’s much larger than that, which is why she’s so frustrated when other women try to bond with her over the difficulties of raising a newborn. she does not mind the business of raising a child, but she does resent the invisibility forced onto her by the identities of daughter/wife/mother. this is also why nature/wilderness/wild animals are such a major motif; not because the natural world is inherently feminine, but because to join civilization as a woman, you must be kept.

[andrewminyardslawyer]

I love that Alexander Skarsgård two most recent characters are "autistic sex repulsed romance repulsed construct with rampant PTSD and uses it/its pronouns" and "queer biker BDSM dom"

[weltenwellen]

Hanif Abdurraqib, "Glamor on the West Streets / Silver Over Everything"