Marta Estrella's #1 Fan

Among other things | 22 | I tend to wander from fandom to fandom so don’t expect consistency

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

You’re telling me that Charles-Haden Savage, a man who lives a very rigid, sterile, lonely, repetitive life, a man who uses fiction to navigate and script reality, a man who has often felt like his fate is inevitably tragic but desperately wishes it could be anything but, owns Stranger Than Fiction on DVD?

Oh, I’m sure.

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

I finally put aside a few hours to actually learn how to draw the character I've been struggling to draw for a year and a half.

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

Joy and happiness and sunshine and rainbows 😊 <- me when I look at these two being friends

Reference + previous versions of this drawing that I hate now

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

References

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

I like to think that, similar to how Charles is haunted by how alike he and his father are, Doreen is haunted by how alike she and her mother are.

[timothechallamet]

#gay disaster

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

Nicknames, amirite

[samthecookielord]

Man i hope im not mischaracterizing or flanderizing the character....

>looks inside source material again

>they are exactly like that

>sometimes even more like that than i remembered

[4thelneyjones]

This show is so fun

[superohclair]

s4 might have been a weird one, but the scene with charles desperately trying to mop up sazz's ashes off his bathroom sink will always make me emotional. it's such a great way to depict the absolute ludicrousness that is the sudden loss of a loved one. you really just kind of lose your mind a bit, in the most farcical, out of body kind of way, where everything is a comedy and a tragedy at the same time. steve martin should have won the emmy for this scene alone. he encapsulates the strangeness of this feeling so well.

[whyiamapotato]

Okay now that I have finished Arrested Development, I can finally rank Gob's season 5 outfits by how gayishly slutty (by all means not actually slutty) they are

5. Performatively gay suit (s05e08)

4. Shirt so unbuttoned even the beard isn't impressed (s05e01)

3. Zebra-adjacent patterned-shirt with booty shorts (s05e04)

2. Purple suit I use to repress my gayness in front of the guy I pined for the whole season and he's the only reason I would show that much chest hair for probably (s05's intro and what he wears on s05e16)

1. I seek out validation from my dad and call myself butch- sleeveless flannel edition (s05e02)

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

I really love the implication in this scene that the reason Eugene was able to understand Charles is because Sazz understood Charles and that came through in the script she wrote.  It’s incredibly sweet, but also kind of heartbreaking when you take a step back.

Nobody else in the room knew what was happening. Of course, I can't blame them, they've never seen Charles act like this before, but it is very indicative of what most people who have seen him like this would have thought; it's nonsensical. That kind of dismissive perspective is almost certainly what built his belief that he needs to suppress his emotions, that yelling or even violence would be better than acting weird.  I can imagine he heard a lot of “use your words” and was told to stop throwing a tantrum.  But it was never a tantrum.  Just because he wasn't able to literally say something doesn’t mean he wasn't trying to communicate in a very real way, and none of the people who shamed or dismissed Charles over the years bothered to get to know him well enough to find that out.

Then Sazz came along and for maybe the first time, Charles had someone in his life who didn’t just take his differences at face value.  Instead of judging, she listened and looked deeper. It's because of that that she was able to understand him, and as we see in this scene, if others do the same(and they should), they can too.

[essentialalls]

Omitb being about late bloomers (and late friendships we find in our lives, and relationships, and figure-it-out-careers...) is so sooo personal to me, I cant even explain how much this mean. Welcome back my dearest show, we missed you!!

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

OMITB if it was epic

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

In season four, we’re introduced to what Charles calls his emotion suppression technique, where he suppresses socially unacceptable expressions of very intense emotions using breathing exercises and lots of room straightening. Of course, we’ve known from the very first episode that Charles is someone overly concerned with being orderly, but that moment in season four gave us insight as to why that is; it’s self-soothing. We now know that escalated indulgence in organizing and neatness can be an indicator of distress, meaning seemingly innocuous, quirky behavior can turn out to be something quite revealing.

On the day before the residents of the Arconia are expected to move out, Charles very suddenly withdraws emotionally. Not long after being insistent on not giving up the fight, he’s telling Oliver he won’t be attending his farewell party and that he’s moved on to new friends and new hobbies, all the while seeming almost entirely unaffected. His emotions are completely suppressed. And hey, would you look at that, at the start of the scene where his emotions are very suddenly and completely suppressed, he’s reviewing his neatly packed and stacked boxes and he’s being weirdly and overly meticulous about how he’s taping them.

Of course, it’s not as if he doesn’t just do this kind of thing regardless of how he’s feeling, he does, but the fact that he’s diligently going over a checklist to make sure he’s packed everything in his completely packed apartment and requesting more tape just to take a short strip and put it on an already sufficiently taped box and this leads into the scene where, all of a sudden, he’s acting emotionally detached because he’s trying to cope with the fact that his life as he knows it is over and his worst fears are coming true, I think, makes it seem like more is going on than just your typical Charles orderliness.

[pseudonymous-enthusiast]

I really like that the stuff Charles said in his speech at the end of season one about how Jan could shoot him but not his friends, cause he doesn’t want to live in a world without them was brought back for his season five arc, which was about him accepting the reality that one day, he might have to live in a world without them.

Discussed more in depth below:

It makes sense that Charles, having felt like a hollow shell before Mabel and Oliver made him feel alive again, would rather be dead than not have them in his life anymore. And it was first and foremost important for Charles to learn to open up and that he’s not alone and that he deserves joy and can be loved as his true self, as we saw him do over the course of seasons one through four. Having healthy feelings about the idea of no longer having his friends in his life was not a top priority. But it needed to be addressed eventually, because it is, indeed, an unhealthy mindset to have. Stuff happens, stuff he can’t control or predict, and what will he do then? After Oliver gets engaged, he starts to wonder exactly that.

He handles it about as poorly as you’d expect: after wallowing for a bit, he tries to buy himself more time with health tips and scrambles to find a girlfriend so he’ll have someone even if he loses his friends, but that plan fails to succeed instantly so he tempts fate at Bash’s estate because he feels like he has nothing to lose so would it really be so bad if Bash kills him, and later when losing his friends becomes a genuine threat, he starts to withdraw and avoid them, saying he has a new friend he’s hanging out with except the “friend” is actually some random guy he stood next to for 15 minutes in 1986 that died two years ago.

By the end of the season, though, he accepts that he has to be okay with living in uncertainty. It’s true, he could lose his friends one day, and he’ll have to keep going even though it will hurt. In the meantime, he’ll spend whatever time he has left with them by their side, making memories he can look back on, not wasting it searching for a way to prevent himself from feeling the pain of loss.

[vintricles]

free my girl she did all that and that’s what makes her such a compellingly complex character. that’s her essence