Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table (anime)
Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, also known as Shiboyugi, is the best anime released in the past 15 years. As someone who assiduously tracks and rates everything they watch, I don't say this hyperbolically; I have to go back to 2011 to find a show I think is better. I'd rank Shiboyugi as the third-best anime of all time. (Limited, naturally, to anime I have seen.)
Typically, my essays aren't focused on how much I like or dislike a work. Instead, I tend to write about a work's importance, context, or what it might mean, without expressing a value judgment such as "This is good" or "This is bad." As such, these essays are generally written under the assumption the reader has seen or read the work themselves.
This essay is an exception. It is more of a review than an essay, and its goal is to convince the reader to watch the work (which is currently on Netflix). It is aimed toward an audience unfamiliar with Shiboyugi and won't reveal any spoilers. If what I've said so far has at all intrigued you, I recommend you read on.
Given the audience for this essay, I'll start by explaining Shiboyugi's premise, though its full translated title offers some hints. Shiboyugi tells the story of Yuki, a shut-in loner who competes in death games as a full-time job. Rather than a single game, the show depicts a series of them, arranged in non-chronologic order. The games vary in scope and rules. Some are escape rooms filled with deadly traps, while others are glorified battle royales. Rather than react with terror or panic, Yuki approaches these challenges in a detached, professional manner, doing what is pragmatic to win without being excessively cruel to her fellow competitors (usually).
I have a theory—perhaps it applies only to me, but I believe I've seen it in others, too—that the most important determiner of whether someone likes or dislikes something is based on whether its premise innately appeals to them. (Or, similarly, that they find a major character relatable.) A work's technical quality, uniqueness, narrative consistency, and so on are secondary factors in comparison, and when a reviewer brings up these elements to explain why a work is good or bad, they are typically dancing around the core issue.
For instance, someone who is personally interested in robotics, transhumanism, and speculating about the future—or even a more general interest in science and technology—will find a cyberpunk dystopia an innately appealing concept for a story. Upon a viewer being "hooked" by the premise, the work's technical qualities will enhance its appeal, while its technical flaws will be acceptable or even ignorable. Whereas someone like me, without much interest in robots, might find the work boring even if it is well-made, and its few technical flaws will stand out more glaringly.
Despite this, I find that a lot of criticism is often rooted in these secondary details. It makes sense, since "I like Cyberpunk Edgerunners because I think cyberpunk is cool" is not a particularly interesting argument, whereas analyzing technical details lends a sense of objective nuance to an opinion. But I find this type of review disingenuous, which is a big reason why I don't typically write about whether I liked a work or not.
With that preamble out of the way, Shiboyugi is, at its core, combining three things that strongly appeal to me:
Death Games. I love death games. To me, they are similar to slasher horror stories, where the core tension is the question of who will live and who will die, a question that more conventional narratives—even ignoring the question of the protagonist—often resolve with predictable tropes (i.e., the likeable comic relief character lives, the old mentor dies). A death game has an element of unpredictability to it, combined with clear and immediate stakes (win or die), that immediately piques my interest.
Ennui. I wrote a whole novel about this one. I find works about the existential emptiness of contemporary life compelling and relatable. The question of how people create meaning for themselves in a fundamentally meaningless environment is one that matters a lot to me.
Liminal Spaces. Shiboyugi's death games take place in surreal locations that are often uncanny and unsettling in their layout and presentation. As someone with a strong interest in geography, I've always found strange permutations of space—including the internet itself—to have a fascinating pull. The popularity of liminal spaces in independent internet fiction has only magnified my interest.
Simply by being about these things, Shiboyugi already "hooked" me before it really even lifted a finger. If none of these appeal to you, you might not have as powerful a reaction as I did, and that's something I intend to be upfront about, rather than present a bunch of excellent technical details (of which there are many) to claim they make Shiboyugi "objectively" good or some nonsense like that.
But while I said technical excellence is a secondary factor in whether one finds a work good or bad, it is a factor. A shot that looks good will look better than a shot that looks bad, even if you're more interested in what the bad shot depicts. My love of death games and slasher horror has put me into contact with a lot of low-quality works that are "doing the thing" I want, but that I am forced to admit flub the execution. In fact, sometimes my most hated works are those that are something I should ostensibly like, but which are such an unmitigated disaster that I am more personally offended than by a worse work I had a neutral interest in. A work I particularly dislike is The Hunger Games, which takes a death game premise and does everything in its power to cram it into the shape of a conventional, predictable narrative that goes against what I find so exciting about the genre to begin with. (A death game with deemphasized death game, if you will.)
As such, when I first started watching Shiboyugi—knowing nothing about it beyond it being a death game story—I felt my stomach sink in dread as the first few minutes played out. Shiboyugi's tone and visual style is one of quiet detachment. It is, in a word, "artistic," established via very pretty backgrounds and an unexpressive protagonist (whose silence, surely, means she is ponderous and profound!), which frankly suggested to me that Shiboyugi would do everything in its power to distance itself from the chaotic brutality that makes the premise so appealing.
I was afraid it was going to be pretentious.
I don't like using the word pretentious. It's a word that gets thrown around often, and in an online milieu where people like to think they are smart but do not like to think, I tend to worry that "pretentious" is shorthand for "I didn't understand it and don't care to try, secure as I am in all the facts I already know."
Even so, there is stuff I do find "pretentious," especially in anime, a medium primarily targeted toward teenagers. Stuff that presents a lofty tone, but when it comes to substance seems to express almost comedically childish concepts. (Do you think the light, will defeat the darkness? No, I think the darkness, will defeat the light.) More generally, if a work's tone doesn't appropriately complement the content, the work starts to feel emotionally manipulative. How well, I wondered, would an elevated tone complement a death game?
The answer to that question came about 20 minutes into Shiboyugi's first episode. After a lot of meandering, a lot of pretty backgrounds, a lot of atmospheric music, a quaint and bloodless blowgun trap, and most of all plenty of silent thoughtfulness, suddenly the lights go out. The ceiling opens. The players, chained to the wall, look up. Eighteen buzzsaws start descending. Everyone has to fight among themselves for the key to escape before they are gruesomely ripped to shreds.
It's essentially a trap from the Saw franchise—it even features saws—and despite the elegant if increasingly surreal setting in which it takes place, it is every bit as savage. What's more, the tone of the preceding 20 minutes emphasizes, rather than detracts from, the savagery. The opening produced a false sense of security, a feeling that despite this being a death game, it would adhere to a sort of sporting propriety, a PG-13 distance from its own concept, and the reality crashing down from the ceiling is such a stark juxtaposition that the emotional impact is phenomenally potent despite the short amount of time spent getting to know the characters beforehand. The airy, atmospheric music of before continues to play, layered with the loser's horrific screams as they are diminished into pulp over a period of several excruciating seconds. For almost a minute afterward, stillness and silence reigns as the survivors stare at the unrecognizable remains, broken only by one—the last to escape, dooming the loser to their fate—softly repeating, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry."
This was the moment when Shiboyugi gripped me. The "pretentious" tone was, in fact, being employed for a reason, one that generated an impressive amount of power regardless of its intellectual content. Shiboyugi is punctuated by many more examples of sudden horror movie brutality that is made more impactful by the refinement on display everywhere else, and any punches it seems to pull are only the setup for a harder punch somewhere unexpected. For example, it's established that the participants of the death game are injected with something called the "Preservation Treatment," which causes their blood to turn to a cotton-like material when it leaves the body. While this at first seems to be a Danganronpa-esque blood substitution censorship, it ultimately leads to even more extreme dismemberment and body horror, as players are able to survive grievous wounds without bleeding to death. Despite the lack of blood, the show doesn't shy away from showing exposed bone and internal organs after a character is disemboweled.
Not to mention, the cottony blood creates the unmistakable impression that these bodies are doll bodies, that these players are something less than human.
This is where the second aspect of Shiboyugi that innately interests me appears: ennui. The elevated tone and impressive visual framing doesn't only enhance the impact of the death game formula, it also feeds into the protagonist Yuki's unsettling and sometimes sociopathic emptiness.
Yuki is Shiboyugi's second great surprise. My initial impression of her was that she was a fairly generic protagonist whose primary purpose was to provide a consistent, objective point of view. This isn't inherently a bad thing, as a neutral perspective character helps place the emphasis on the things they see, which in this case would be the death games. It does, however, diminish some of the surprise factor of the death game format to have a clearly defined protagonist who the audience can expect to survive. Though I theorize the ideal death game would have a fully ensemble cast with no protagonist, that's not an easy narrative for most authors to pull off, and honestly I've only seen it done once in a death game before (the second arc of Magical Girl Raising Project). Even a story like Battle Royale, which creates the feeling of an ensemble cast through its anonymizing uniforms, has a singular protagonist.
But even with the limitation of a protagonist, a death game story can still play to the strengths of the genre by showing the perspectives of other characters and emphasizing their importance, rather than leaving the non-protagonist cast as virtual nobodies who only exist as cannon fodder or challenges for the protagonist to overcome. Shiboyugi does a trick I enjoyed in Magical Girl Raising Project by stating upfront that several people are capable of surviving the game, not just one; this immediately invites the viewer to invest themselves in the side characters, as they have a legitimate chance to win too. Within this framework, Shiboyugi is quite good at making its survivors unexpected. Sometimes side characters who have a lot of emphasis survive, sometimes they die; sometimes minor supporting characters wind up being fodder, sometimes they unexpectedly crawl past the finish line. The show never falls into a pattern; I, at least, wasn't able to reliably pinpoint who would live or die.
(I watched with a friend of mine, and during one hectic death game we disagreed whether a certain inconsequential minor character had died; my friend said they had, while I said they hadn't. When said character showed up alive at the very end, I had a massive pop off. This is the stuff I live for.)
Nonetheless, that still leaves Yuki. As far as "plot armor" goes, she sometimes has the strongest of all: the non-chronological order of the games often means she is guaranteed to survive by default, since the viewer has already seen her in a future game. (Hence why I can bring this up, despite my statement I wouldn't include any spoilers.) What makes Yuki compelling despite this is the unexpected complexity of her character.
At the beginning of the first episode, Yuki introduces herself to the other players as someone who plays "altruistically," willing to help as many people survive the game as possible. Given she's already a 28-game veteran by this point, the newer players glom to her for help. But while her description of herself isn't a lie—at least from her perspective—it slowly becomes clear that her perspective is not, in fact, a neutral one aligned with the perspective of the audience. Yuki is startlingly sociopathic. Her emotionally detached pragmatism reaches extremes that come across as outright cruel. She is without scruple and also without hesitation. She truly will help as many people survive as possible—under the belief that doing so means a survivor might help her in a future game—but "as possible" does the heavy lifting in that statement. These games, despite their Saw-like brutality, lack Saw's twisted morality; they are often designed sadistically, and Yuki is perfectly willing to act sadistically as soon as it is required.
At the same time, though, the non-chronological nature of the games presents Yuki as a much more dynamic character than one so pragmatic would at first seem to be. She appears as both a hardened veteran and a more uncertain rookie; she is shown both strong and vulnerable, in control and out of it. In one game she taunts a girl with a knife just for fun, while in another she risks her own life to save others. Similar to Memento, there is a somewhat erratic nature to her personality that only makes complete sense once the games are rearranged into chronological order, at which point it becomes clear that her actions are a reaction to whatever happened in the game previous.
That begs the question of why the games are non-chronological to begin with. To an extent it enables a more logical drip-feed of information, but in depicting Yuki disjointedly it emphasizes her sense of disassociation.
Yuki is viewing herself from outside herself. At times she slips into third person, or else her voice is layered, with one track using first person while the other uses third. She is unclear what day of the week it is. She lives in a squalid apartment overflowing with trash and seems to do nothing but rot in bed during the day. At night she goes for aimless long walks to nowhere. She walks to the same spot on a highway overpass and stares down at the cars passing, which leads to a brilliant fridge realization I won't elaborate on.
Yuki cannot clearly communicate why she competes in death games. The show's title, Playing Death Games to Put Food on the Table, is kind of a lie. Yuki lives in squalor by choice, not circumstance, unlike many of the other competitors who are in debt or similar dire straits. Yuki doesn't need money.
The Japanese title, Shibou Yuugi de Meshi wo Kuu, is a bit more ambiguous, with "Meshi wo Kuu" translating more directly to "Eat Food." The ambiguity of what "food" Yuki is actually eating correlates to her aimless attempt to create meaning out of her meaningless existence. If anything, she is "eating" the people she meets in the games themselves, taking on bits of their personality from game to game. Even her stated goal of completing 99 games is stolen from someone else.
This is where the show's liminal spaces come in. Yuki constantly refers to the "world" of the death games as its own distinct environment, divided from the real world. It's akin to an escapist fantasy: a gamer transported to a video game world where their exact skillset allows them to thrive. Yuki is a permanent zombie in the real world, a skilled and successful elite in the world of death games. But unlike Sword Art Online, which presents its game environment with an uncritical allure, Shiboyugi's games take place in unsettling, uncanny, and twisted realms, disquieting structures that seem subtly impossible. The calming and peaceful music, the pretty visuals, the serene pace lure the viewer into Yuki's perspective, suggesting the beauty that she sees, but the lurking menace always remains, and when the buzzsaws descend, the disconnect between the viewer and Yuki is severe and uncomfortable. The space itself is the threat, as unlike most death game stories Shiboyugi almost never shows any host or gamemaster, and its uncanny presentation is similar to the presentation of Yuki herself. It is a hole made only for her, though what comes out the other side is increasingly nonhuman.
I've said all of this while only barely touching on the actual directing, which is some of the strongest and most unique I've ever seen in anime. Most anime that look good—including this season's many juggernauts, like Jujutsu Kaisen and Frieren, but also more historically respected works, like those of Studio Ghibli—look good because the director understands animation, and is able to bring out the stunning details of movement that allow anime characters to really impress. Shiboyugi, the directorial debut of Souta Ueno, generates its stunning visuals less through animation than through an eye for framing and composition more reminiscent of western live action auteurs like Kubrick. Every episode has five or more shots that wow, not just by looking aesthetically pleasing but by weaponizing that aesthetic into emotional impact.
Similarly, the director leans on the visuals, rather than dialogue, to communicate meaning, a technique that massively revolutionizes the show's pacing. In 11 episodes, Shiboyugi adapts four different death games, each with their own characters, rises, falls, and climaxes. On paper, it's a blisteringly fast pace—fewer than 3 episodes per game on average. Because of the effective visual storytelling, however, the games unfold at a calm, quiet pace, establishing the tone necessary for every brutal rug pull. The visuals are aided in this regard by the story's sharp focus on the games themselves. Shiboyugi went to the Battle Royale school of justifying its death game; other than a single card of text ("This is a story about a deranged world," with the world in question as ambiguous as the "food" being eaten in the title) and a few offhanded statements here and there, there is no emphasis on why the games are being hosted, who hosts them, or any other ancillary details that would detract from what Shiboyugi is actually about. Minimalism in some areas is paid back with depth and complexity elsewhere.
Studio Deen, who produced the show, lacks the budget of Mappa or Madhouse, but manages to create something equally if not more visually impressive on the back of the fundamentals of cinematography. I probably would have enjoyed this show even if it looked like any other anime, but the incredible filmmaking is what pushes it into the territory of masterpiece.
To discuss much more would probably require me to delve into more specific aspects of the plot. Hopefully, by this point I've at least convinced you to consider watching this show, which has gone criminally under the radar in this jam-packed season. If nothing else, you can expect something unlike any anime you've seen before.
years ago, i first grew suspicious of some prison abolitionist ideas for marxist reasons, not yet realizing how male supremacist the movement was. primarily the idea that detaining anyone at all ever is an inherent injustice that is incompatible with the world that socialists want to build. this idea may cause a whole host of problems for people who claim they want a revolution, but those issues won’t come to forefront any time soon lol, since western socialists don’t really organize on a mass scale. how do you ensure a revolution doesn’t get rolled back by the militant enforcers of the fallen empire without, at minimum, detaining the counterrevolutionaries? it’s a thought experiment that kind of gets eclipsed by all of the male supremacy in the movement. it’s much less discussed or clarified as a result.
on that note, one of the most prominent prison abolitionists in the US, mariame kaba, got ran off of social media in the wake of Oct 7th for saying that the Palestinian resistance should have never taken hostages and that they need to be released. her leftist audience seemed to agree with her about doing away with detaining people…until she was being ideologically consistent by applying that idea to everything, including zionism. her audience of prison abolitionists appeared to think that israelis ought to be detained for enforcing colonialist violence (correct)…but the same standard shouldn’t apply to americans at home? or maybe, an even more sinister thought—that a lot of prison abolitionists think male violence isn’t worth detaining people for but colonialist violence definitely is. because, you know, men are viewed as the primary victims of colonialism. this leftist flavored misogyny needs to be confronted as harshly as right wing misogyny. mariame kaba was just being ideologically consistent in her opposition to detaining people, but her audience drew the line somewhere. in 2019, she even defended a male sexual abuser who ended up claiming more victims after she advocated for his freedom and participated in a “community-based” “accountability” process that the abuser disregarded. this didn’t cause her to get expelled from online leftist spaces, though. defending a male abuser doesn’t get you cancelled. much to say about it!
and further, there is a significant amount of them who want the “community” to deal with abusers, but they rarely have a sufficient answer for the possibility that the “community” produces and enables abusers. that the “community” is as much a vehicle for patriarchal violence as the ruling class state. they want to reduce violence and abolish criminalization by eliminating privation and poverty, which is correct, but they get really mad when people ask what happens if a sexual abuser happens to exist after this ideal society with no enforced privation is achieved.
i think a marxist would say you gotta detain that person for the practical reason of rendering them unable to physically attack people. you don’t gotta subject them to psychological abuse, inhumane living conditions, labor exploitation, nor solitary confinement. but you gotta, like, detain them so they are physically unable to continue the abuse. ideally they would be receptive to rehabilitation, but if they aren’t, they should remain detained so as to not enact more violence onto people. in a world with no enforced privation, i like to think arresting people will be rare and minimal. but the prison abolitionists who think detaining people (mostly men lol) is an injustice will likely say sexual abuse just won’t exist at all if poverty is abolished, so there’s no need to worry about that possibility. or, you gotta leave it up to the “community” to give the abuser a stern talking to or beat them up and that will be enough to solve the problem. no mention of what happens if they don’t want to be rehabilitated at all. you just can’t detain them!
this kind of prison abolitionism isn’t just male supremacist it is just not very conducive to addressing any kind of violence, even the state violence against men that leftists sincerely oppose. neither the ruling class state nor the “community” want to detain abusers and their motivations tend to converge on the naturalization of male supremacy. 😬🧐 i think the prison abolitionist movement needs to seriously contend with this instead of hemming and hawing about how no one wants to imagine a better future, or whatever. the platitudes just aren’t thick enough to hide the bile underneath, i think. the culture around prison abolitionism has a sexism problem!
anti racism? male supremacy for men of color. gay rights? male supremacy for homosexuals. queer rights? male supremacy for starbucks employees. communism? women are public property. anarchism? a stateless society for men. capitalism? women are private property. “feminism?” lobotomies are fine if you choose to consent to them. religion? male supremacist mythologies. atheism? male supremacist mythologies but reddit. scientism? male supremacy as a biological inevitability. academia? intellectual arm of male supremacy. fanfiction? male supremacy for 30 year old women who watch cartoons. hentai? male supremacy for 30 year old men who watch cartoons. porn? male supremacy, eroticized and commodified. kink? male supremacy for people who stink. heterosexuality? male supremacy for normies. psychology? male supremacist pathologization of women who misbehave. gynecology? medical disregard for women’s pain. beauty industry? you can cure the female body dysmorphia we have socially engineered by purchasing these products and paying a surgeon to play Soul Calibur 2 on your literal face. ai deepfakes? male supremacy, computer generated. language? male supremacy babble. america? united states of male supremacy. The world? male supremacy sphere. the,
i've been doing this for a couple years now and i think this has single-handedly made my reading speed in japanese improve to the point of almost being as fast as it is in english (although i still struggle with kanji and katakana sometimes x_x)
to find one, i usually just search on youtube (song name) followed by either カラオケ or ニコカラ. if nobody has made a karaoke for your song of choice, then i'd otherwise search up (song name) followed by 歌詞 (kashi/lyrics) and you'll usually find them that way. i like to use the site utaten.com because they all feature furigana! be a little careful though because while its only happened to me a couple of times, there's been times where the furigana is wrong for one or two words.
i think this is a really fun way to practice especially if you love singing, like i do!! i've never seen anyone else recommend this so i hope this helps
honestly, what's your take on the l word? atp i can't tell if it's just shit but i'm too far along to stop. the 5th and 6th seasons seem to be done in a complete different tone too and there's so many problematic aspects just slapped in for unecessary drama. still.. i like the main characters a lot and it is representation at the end of the day. Maybe it would've been cooler if they just did more of a 'slice of life' thing instead of 'drama rama cheating on people is like a slip of the hand thing due to the strong nuclear force'
anyway interested in your take, what do you think are the well- and badly- handled aspects of the show, how do you reflect on the story and character building?
stay cool out there (◕‿◕)♡
MY TAKE ON THE L WORD? getting this ask made me so excited you have no idea how much I love talking about the l word. So excited in fact that I wrote 6165 words about it, sorry, I am so severely unemployed right now. here, I talk about my thoughts, some theory, and then break down some of the intrinsic problems with the show, specifically how it thinks about gender and nonconformity, race, and transgender identities, within the scaffolding of it being a show concerned with women who have relationships with other women, rather than necessarily a truth of lesbianism. i’m citing various linked sources and very loosely using an academic approach, but it’s more like a messy collage of sources than it is a fully fleshed out argument and narrative! if you want the tl;dr, I’d recommend scrolling to the final 3 paragraphs
tbh I haven’t watched it in a while but I really want to rewatch the whole thing and go back to my gif series instead of just making random sets (don’t be put off by my absence its bc I was doing my master’s degree and then I got really sick) and maybe thinking so intensely about tlw these past 3 days will inspire me into it .
I’d be really interested in hearing any thoughts on response to any of this, even though it’s not particularly well written or formulated, so feel free to drop a message/reply/response anywhere if u or anyone else is compelled to. anyway response under the cut ->
so, my opening thoughts on the l word revolve around two things: there is nothing about this show that makes it an inherently lesbian show, and that it functions as a product of its time, not in culture but in Hollywood and show running. the imagined audience of TLW isn’t necessarily the modern ‘sapphic’ audience watching things like First Kill (2022), Do Revenge (2022), or Crush (2022) which are all, generally, pointed towards a younger audience seeking things like validation and romantic projection (from what I understand, and I’ll admit I haven’t watched any of these! But I have read synopsis and seen clips, so I’ll watch soon I promise). I do think this conversation has re-emerged a little in the growing conversations about wanting sexy lesbians having sex, which is a conversation that surrounded Love Lies Bleeding (LLB, 2024) for quite a while, repeating this argument that what lesbians want isn’t romance or tension, but sex, real sex, sex on screen and sex on TV. of course, it’s a little difficult for showrunners to ‘do’ sex or sexual content without it being so brazenly for men – and here I’ll step out and say when, in this context, I discuss women being looked at and ‘male gaze’, it’s more under the original theory of laura mulvey that women are objectified by the camera as men are in control of production, and here I’ll link the article (it’s very short, but I refer largely here to section B) – and to equally appeal to women looking at women but who are, equally not free from patriarchal understandings of the ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways of being attracted to women. I feel a good example of how we saw this was the big tiktok-wide discussion about sapphic cottage-core as an equally white endeavour, a sort of softcore launching of racist white American ideals of frolicking on a plantation. For showrunners to produce sexual lesbian content now, it needs to contend with who will be doing its marketing for them, i.e. a lot of people on tiktok talking about how LLB is for the ‘lesbian gaze’, whatever that means, or that these things are perhaps attractive to men in general, but are specifically geared to being attractive to lesbians specifically. Actually candace Moore, in a really brilliant article (and if u want access and don’t have it… just let me know) describes, through gaze theory, the notion of the straight viewer as a “tourist” and the “traveller”. Here:
Problematizing a distinction between the tourist, who "gladly or unknowingly accepts Disneyland's versions of the world's wonders," and the traveler, who "seeks and knows how to recognize authenticity," Strain argues that perhaps these archetypes are, if not one and the same, both victims to the notion that there is an "authenticity" available to be misrecognized, or grasped, in the first place. (10) But what of the lesbian viewer? (11) At first glance it would seem that the lesbian viewer falls outside of the already-tenuous tourist and traveler distinction, being a "local" intimately familiar with this culture. However, insofar as lesbian spectators are consuming mediated images of themselves, I argue that not only do straight audiences engage in a form of tourism when viewing the The L Word, but lesbian audiences, even those from Southern California, do too. The distinction between the tourist, the traveler, and, in this case, the local-as-consumer becomes blurred. Locals drawn to the latest "lesbian attraction," lesbians enjoy The L Word's eye candy along with straight "tourists." Like straight "travelers," they seek to identify albeit illusory "authentic" elements of the representation. However, for the queer viewer, the mediated reality of the show will never match up to reality.
While the tourist and the traveler of The L Word are at base one and the same, the distinction between them lies not in what they are, but what they think they are; how they conceive of their own intentions, levels of "expertise," relationships to the local culture, and the "gains" that they take away--whether they travel for pleasure or for knowledge. It is through the enticement of lesbian sex (a spectacle of attraction for straight and queer viewers alike) and through the wonderment of either "understanding" the other or "recognizing" oneself (fantasy of authenticity), through both "watching from a remove" and "being there," that The L Word captivates its straight and queer tourists.
Pulling away from the academic angle, I don’t agree with the idea of LLB being for a lesbian gaze, nor do I think that TLW was ‘for’ lesbians more than it was ‘enjoyed’ by lesbians – a show that can hit as many audiences at once is a good thing. dennis cass for the slade in 2004 wrote that the L word “often feels like it’s not about being gay at all” and that a lot of what the show presents is pretty removed from any lesbian experience as we know it, additionally writing on bette and tina’s marriage counselling that they “aren’t merely in couples therapy, they’re seeing one of L.A.’s hottest personal gurus—that you not only forget they’re lesbians, but that they live on Earth.” A pretty accurate read for how removed a lot of TLW is from anything, and, to me, sort of bypasses any notion of ‘representation’ by just how fantastical it is. ginia bellafante also wrote in 2009, after s6 aired, that “’The L Word’ is a Sapphic Playboy fantasia in which women with wrinkles or squishy thighs or an aversion to lingerie appear to have been flagged down on the freeway with urgent instructions to move to Seattle”. basically, yeah
TLW itself is very clearly appealing to its heterosexual audiences at the same time it appeals to lesbians, even through the same mechanisms – the character’s conventional attractiveness, their skinniness, their lack of bras and how you can 9/10 times see their nipples through their shirts, and all the lesbian sex shown in as much detail as they could get away with – and that is the core driving force of the show in a lot of ways. we can’t really have another TLW today for the same reasons that all media from the early 2000s has shifted to give women more complex characters, arcs, appearances, and functions – and that’s a good thing, obviously – which in turn demonstrates the lack of these things the characters in TLW actually had. At its core, it’s sexy and men are the people behind the companies getting it on TV, not necessarily specific men but the shadow of patriarchy and how women exist on the screen. This isn’t to say media creation and output has become a liberal utopia for women’s rights, but rather there has definitely been a shift in how women exist on screen and what roles they were given before – think easy fast and furious, or megan fox in transformers, or even how very popular musicians styled themselves and appeared to the massive; Shakira, Jennifer lopez, Britney spears, etc – which, to me, reflects a way in which TLW capitalises off the straight heteropatriarchy in its desire to show sexy women at all times, always available to be ogled. in a way, this sorta aligns with bellafante’s observation that the show had ‘never aligned itself with the traditionalist ambitions of a large faction of the gay rights movement’ (written in 2009, 6 years before gay marriage was legalised in the us) – the liberator in the l word is sex, and that’s what all the characters are constantly aiming for, nothing else. Similarly, the show gets so obsessed with defining who or what a lesbian is (throughout the whole of s1 as they look for signs of lesbianism in jenny, with jenny at that party, or with dana talking about her ‘gaydar’, and so by doing this it turns lesbianism into a visual brand, something that be hidden in plain sight, appeasing both the hetrosexual viewer and the lesbian seeker - Martina Ladendorf describes a branding of lesbian identities through TLW in a form of “thingification”, and so “the representations of lesbian identities are discursively displaced and the identity position “lesbian” is partially filled with new meanings in the televised text of The L-word.” Ladendorf offers a far more generous reading than I do – to me, a lot of TLW needs to extrapolate lesbians from their womanhood and vice versa, creating a sort of woman who is a lesbian, rather than, simply, a lesbian
naturally, the l word is inherently a misogynist show , and in a lot of ways I think it’s unavoidable to think about when it comes to discussing schematics or opinions of the show, it’s a show full of, in the words of liz feldman in this interview, ‘beautiful lesbians with just nothing but time on their hands… and just somehow also money’. Obviously, the stereotypes the show puts forwards make it feel pretty cheap at time, and when the show ventures out into attempting to either tackle or just include plotlines about poverty, racism, transphobia, infidelity, (or plotlines it totally avoids, like conversations on butchness, gender non-conformity, or transfemininity), it honestly just gets stranger and stranger, not to mention the very active racism present in the show, via how pam grier’s character was written, handled, and expanded upon when she was by far one of the most skilled and seasoned actors on the show. a lot of issues I and other people have are through this lens, and hence why a lot of the pushback focuses on how little was understood about trans people in mainstream media back then, or how the show was just such a landmark moment that it was purely reflective of the times so it’s just nit-picking to be pointing out all its negative parts, which isn’t a sentiment I agree with at all, and instead I think of the l word as being both progressive and problematic for these reasons. Even as an addition, I feel like TLW is why we just don’t really need more tv shows like the L word… because we have the L word, and it’d be nice if we could have something different
so, when I talk about and recommend the l word I usually put it in these terms: season 1 is a phenomenal piece of storytelling and such a compelling way to create and introduce a show all about lesbianism to a world that is not filled with parallel lesbians, but rather is the only show on air in the world doing that exactly, and, following that, season 4 gets a little art deco and experimental as it pushes its characters through new, meaningful struggle, like tasha working in the military under ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ (fuck the army though), max living his new reality as a trans man (yeah it was dealt with horribly), bette dating jodi and this inviting so much conversation about art, disability, and deafness into the mix, and, in other ways, jenny and tina working together on her show, helena’s… gambling addiction or whatever, kit’s nonsense relationship shane’s nonsensical relationship. Imo these two seasons show the best of what the L word has to offer, which is, in S1, a sensitive introduction that pushes jenny through the wringer as she really becomes herself and takes hold of her destiny, and then in S4, these characters all essentially performing at their apex, in love, making mistakes, trying again, to the best of the l word’s ability to show any of this (relatively speaking, it’s the best TLW ever gets)
with all this in mind, I do think the show thrives in really profound ways at times. The real hook of it is, and always has been, season 1, which is just this ferociously strong exploration in television about such a serious sensitive topic, jenny’s coming out. a lot of criticism sort of facetiously responds to jenny’s character by focusing on her writing quality (which I honestly thought was fine lol!), and will ignore sincerely engaging with her in favour of laughing at how bad her character became as the writer’s lost the plot more and more, but I really do think that jenny in the first two seasons was just phenomenal, and mia kirshner’s fantastic meditative performance just stole the entire show for me. In season 1 as we are introduced to the show and their world through jenny’s process of coming out and ripping her life apart at the seams to live her ideal life (even if it was very explosive with marina and didn’t end well), which I just thought was such captivating writing about that moment of choice, where a character has to decide whether or not they’ll live their easy life or do the difficult thing. one of the scenes I have always come back to is in s1 where jenny has sex with tim and cries afterwards because that moment for her is the one where she realises she just can’t do it anymore, and seeing that in the show was just really otherworldly for me, I loved it and I thought it was amazing, and then later on in season 2 where jenny asks shane to cut her hair for her – a real splitting off from her regular, comfortable life, to ‘become’ a lesbian in heart and soul, was again just another moment where the writing and directing teams could really show some muscle in just how good the show could be, before dropping all presences and going back to whatever drivel they’d been doing. As a more technical note on the show, the inconsistent directors and writing is really hilarious, and sometimes the drop in quality between episodes is… staggering, to say the least
tbh s1 functions well as a drama-comedy mix because those scenes, as well as tina and bette’s fertility journey, is spliced within the rest of the nonsense going on, which I felt crafted this really enjoyable diametric swing throughout . arguably more than anything, jenny’s coming out was the best and most meaningful part of the show, and I really haven’t seen much other lesbian media hold a candle to it (though I could name a few). What they did with jenny as the show went on was disappointing to say the least, but s2 had a lot of heart in it as they attempted to have her coming to terms with her abuse (naturally, having finally discovered herself in s1) and focus more on what makes her happy – her writing. As the show continued to develop and jenny’s character just morphed into this unrecognisable thing, I even still think mia kirshner could perform such a charming take on it that I never really aligned myself to a lot of the jenny hate people joke about
other drama aspects in mind, like bette and tina’s marriage falling apart, bette’s other relationships (bette always seems to be the one facing the ‘serious problems), and even dana’s cancer and subsequent death, I thought were generally handled… ‘well’. Dana’s cancer worked interestingly within this as, while it was kind of bizarre, I think the relationship between alice and dana was a real life force on the show for a while, and that whole situation meant that alice could go through some real, meaningful growth in her character which she’d been a little starved of to that point. perhaps my thoughts are that when the show focuses on cheating as the only method of things falling apart, that’s when it really starts to fumble, because cheating at that level is such a sitcom-only esque plotline that removes a lot of reality you might be looking for and finding charming in these shows. Equally, I just think cheating can be quite an alienating plotline!
But, to talk about writing alone, my god it gets shit. Various parts of the writing I remember disliking off the top of my head are dana’s season 2 girlfriend which turns into a weird trope of the pretty girls vs the ‘uglier’ one (her then-gf), when the max arc is in full swing (though I’ll be clear as well and say I loved Daniel Sea’s acting within the role, however bad the writing was), papi and the racism that guided the writers in constructing her character, the random plotline of the guy living with shane and jenny in season 2 (though I thought it could have been really interesting, almost a meta comment on men watching lesbians, men watching the l word, men watching lesbians in media). Helena’s entire character was a little baffling to me, and while I did enjoy her at times and thought she was a hilarious addition to the cast, I just had no clue exactly what she was doing. Parts of the shows ideology itself is equally harmful, like alice and dana shopping for strap-ons (bc alice is bisexual and therefore loves penetrative sex, and dana is a lesbian and therefore doesn’t), or just that the shows ensemble cast reflects the background, and everyone is cis white thin feminine, etc. until they’re not, like ivan or papi, or Dylan..? (or a character’s non-whiteness function as a sort of ethnic flair to them, say papi and carmen being Latina and that being their exciting ‘exotic’ traits), that floods the show with a very recognisable sort of white Hollywood liberalism, and if we can understand and comprehend that, we get a good working frame for the rest of what’s going on. as alice and tasha were arguing about the military it was, of course, them trying to suggest that alice is this very liberal character who disagrees with the war and tasha’s politics, but not enough to…. Break things off with her. Instead (fashion tumblr user steps in) she even joins in this roleplay and dresses more femininely around her, growing out her hair a little and everything – and alice in general usually had a pretty fluid sense of style, so it was an… interesting choice. And then Jamie shows up for some reason (and is similarly one of the very few reoccurring Asian characters on the show – her, Catherine (one of helena’s stupid love interests) and adele (who is not serious); actually to make a side note on how this show was received, there was even a petition to get the character’s from alice wu’s Saving Face (which is a brilliant movie, and you should watch it) to be on the show and bring more Asian representation, from autumn 2008)
One episode I think is pretty good for reading the ethos of how TLW engages with women who aren’t their ‘ideals’ is shown is, imo, episode 3? 4? of season 1, where lacey is harassing shane for moving on from her. Lacey is one of the very few characters who leans a little more into being gender nonconforming, yes still with the full face of makeup, but with heavy punk-ish eye makeup, short hair, leather jacket, a demanding attitude, (and she’s not fat, but definietely has more weight on her than any of the verrrrry skinny main cast), and all-in-all embodies a kind of paltry attempt at TLW at bringing in someone with more of an edge, perhaps a modern day masc we might imagine – she’s really one of the only women I can think of on the show, let alone women that shane gets with, who isn’t an ultra-feminine character with long hair, tall, skinny, petite frame, etc. devoid of reality, the show really pushes on her as this over-demanding woman who reactedly badly to shane using her and moving on, and of course the show is trying to show us that shane uses people without much care for them, but doing so through lacey lets you sympathise more with shane than it would if they’d brought in a far more feminine woman who could play that damsel in distress role through looks alone. Lacey’s problems are like a pet or a child’s wherein you do what they want (in this case, another 1 night stand) to appease them, and then you get them off your back. The writing itself is very bizarre, but the fact that they used a woman who was just a little left of centre from the standard the show had set of these beautiful women in Hollywood, demonstrates enough
likewise, to go from here and talk about gender non-conformity, one of the strangest lines on the show was always kit in season 3 episode 9 saying “It just saddens me to see so many of our strong butch girls giving up their womanhood to be a man” – why she said that, I don’t know, some sort of meditation on her bizarre relationship with ivan perhaps? But that relationship fell apart because ivan was… not a man… and couldn’t be a man… whereas max is a man and could be a man, so I just don’t know.
Kit: Why can't you be the butchest butch in the world... and keep your body?
Max: Because I wanna feel whole.
and he is so punished for that split away from butchness into transness, even by the woman who is notably placed outside of the lesbianism of the show – which is arguably worse than having one of the lesbians come at him for it, as kit is more or less representative of “the rest of the world” in these types of conversations, pushing max away from transition while the lesbians of the show, the ones who, you would imagine, have had some sort of intersection with transness once before (again, notably shane, who, as part of her traumatic backstory, was mistaken for a boy when she was a teenager and was paid by men to give them a handjobs) . instead the show curiously places kit there as some voice of reason, and the rest of the lesbian cast are kind of fast and loose with the whole thing. when they do talk about butchness in s3e3, it’s just bizarre. Pre-transition max pulls shane with him to unpack the car as “us butches”, and carmen giggles and jokingly calls shane a “big butch” even though, again, she’s the closest thing the show gets to reoccurring butchism, and is likely seen and imagined as butch by a lot of the people watching . at dinner later on in the episode, they make a joke about him not being “stone butch”… as if that’s a way of measuring masculinity rather than a sexual identity, before shane interrupts the conversation to say “You know what, what difference does it make whether someone is butch or femme?”. again, she is the butchest one at the table, and very notable not butch, but has gone up so close to the border before, you really wonder… why. Why there is such intense resolution to not make her butch, but really it’s because TLW functions in the absence of the butch – alice eler puts it succinctly: “The L-Word asserts that a “femme” lesbian woman is more desirable than a “butch” lesbian.”
In tlw, butch and femme are always roles played rather than realities lived, so it defaults to femininity being ‘standard’ - and this is where, imo, a lot of reaction to max’s transition hinges on. If the show can’t allow any character to firmly be ‘butch’, so when a character takes on butchness as a passage to realising his truth, that he is a trans man, it pulls out all the ugly thoughts and feelings held by certain lesbians about trans men who were, previously, identifying as lesbians/butch lesbians. Here, it really creates a perfect storm for TLW to uphold dangerous ideology (how they showed max’s transition was horrible), and justifying their cis lesbian audience’s response (they got angry that the only character who transgressed gender went ‘too far’ with it, essentially, living his truth in a way they didn’t like). I imagine, if TLW had functioning butch characters on the show, this all might’ve played out differently, but if TLW let go of its standard of femininity, then it… isn’t sexy, becoming too lesbian and too trans and alienates its non-lesbian audience, getting too deeply invested in its lesbianism than it is with its glamour. An interview with Ilene chiaken that gets thrown around a lot is here: on max, “She’s our first real butch on the show — a fabulously attractive butch, but nonetheless a real butch,” Chaiken said. “And we deal with the issue of gender. We wanted to tell that story, a big story in the gay community and, in the last couple years, a huge story in the lesbian community.” it’s an interesting statement for sure– gender transgression has always been a part of lesbianism (read any book ever), and with the advent of the internet and online communities – afterellen being founded in 2002 – more conversations could be had by lesbians from all walks of life, from any economic background or lived reality of race, ability, anything. jack halberstam writes interestingly in Transgender Butch about butch/ftm borders that,
The distinction that some butches need to make between lesbianism and butchness hinges on a distinction between sexual and gender identities. Lesbian, obviously, refers to sexual preference and to some version of the “woman-loving woman.” Butch, on the other hand, bears a complex relation of disidentification with femininity and femaleness and, in terms of sexual orientation, could refer to “woman-loving butch” or “butch-loving butch.
butchness, and max’s ex-butchness, is never truly interacted or responded to in the show – ivan states he doesn’t mind being referred to as a he, shane half-heartedly defends butchism by asking her friends to stop talking about it, and max finds himself as a man through a meaningful identification with butchism and ‘disidentification’ with femininity to then finding a reidentification with not just masculinity, but manhood, which lends way to him truly discovering himself. Curiously, in response to this, this reidentification is one step too far, and suddenly its actually ok to be butch on the l word. The rest of the cast seems to ask him over and over again, why by a man? Why not be butch? But in the world of TLW, to be butch and to be trans are both radical acts of nonconformity, to disidentify is to no longer be the thing that sells, so you very fundamentally cannot do any of it – lisa the male lesbian in s1 is played for laughs as a transmisogynist punchline, and carmen giggling at the idea of shane being butch (and thus disidentifying) demonstrates that this is equally hilarious.
from this angle, i feel that TLW functions primarily as a show about women attracted to women, not lesbians attracted to lesbians (lesbian as gender, as identifier, as being). Immovable womanhood is the centre of everything, constructing familiarity, and to stray is to exit safe perimeters that TLW establishes within unradical, conformist, cisgendered white femininity. candace Moore, again, writes that TLW “positions lesbianism as a sensibility, not a sexuality. This is particularly important because as a sensibility, lesbianism can potentially be co-opted by straight viewers.”
of course, it would be remiss to fail in mentioning that much of this discussion about tlw’s association to butchness is very much within whiteness as well – we can argue that tasha is a stud even if she never says the word herself, her specific attraction being to “girly girls” and her riding a motorbike, always with a more masculine wardrobe, and being in the……. Army………. Really aligns her with this sentiment. I do think she’s a stud, but this being off the back of the show’s depiction of max sits so strangely, and we can’t ignore that her blackness is so instinctually connected to how they wrote her – in a world where no one else can be a butch, why then is the only dark skinned black lesbian more masculine leaning than the rest of them? yes, racism, and all tied in to her nationalism and dedication to the army. It’s certainly an interesting choice for the writers to make and, while she is one of my favourites in the whole show, I definitely have a lot of pause with why she was written and created the way she was, and what she offers the show politically – she holds space as a particularly vulnerable body, a dark skin black stud lesbian, but maintains the status quo of the country and of American imperialism. What’s the message? Even the most unavailable of lesbians can still be patriots??? the individual's physical unfuckable body is still acessible through american aligience?
As later seasons continued to get worse, parts I did really enjoy were tasha’s entire character, molly’s entire character, seeing tina ‘get her life back’ as it were and return to painting, jodi’s entire character, all the music featured, and bette and tina getting back together was really well written and laurel holloman and Jennifer beals are just two very strong actors steering that ship, and random moments throughout I really enjoyed (specifically bette’s professional life gave a lot of breathing room for the show to have other funny little characters, like her office assistants etc) that I’m struggling to remember here rn tbh but generally even as the show was getting bad, the more ridiculous things got the more fun I was having, but the later seasons ‘drama’ was a little painful. If it had started as a drama and then shifted into something more palatable, I think it would’ve been great, but really anything that wasn’t season 6 would have been fine.. just such an unforgiving and cruel way to end the show, and I thought adding jenny to the mix of toxic sad relationships after leaving her straight life and coming to terms with her abuse was such a mean-spirited and cruel way to end it IDK! And this is why the l word FAILS as a sitcom, bc at least usually (to my knowledge) the idea is that at the end… they’re kinda happy and stepping into another new life with some stability and lifelong friends!!! But instead TLW said fuck you and I hate you
anyway yeah closing thoughts… if you watch TLW without even thinking about representation I think it’s an easy watch, bc what I was watching it for is psycho lesbians who don’t act normally and that’s what I got. All caricatures of themselves or whatever they’re performing in the shadows of, and, in a way – and maybe this is a little weird to say – but I think the lesbians in the show are, to me, like watching a species of lesbian that I myself am not. Which is a shame because, if I recall correctly, a lot of those musical performances in the show were about exposing the world to lesbian music that broke the norm and went against the stereotype of music people associated with lesbians at the time, showing them on the cutting edge of new sound, which somehow did not cross into the actual meat of the show at all. And I haven’t spoken at all about it here, but a lot of those musical features are my favourite parts of the show and made some of those scenes just electric, magical parts of storytelling on tv
to address the “you”/I in what “I think”, and this one actually is TMI, when I first watched the L word, it was when I had really just finished coming to terms with my own lesbianism back in late 2021, early 2022 (I was gay and trans before this, but hiding from myself and my sexuality and my gender in complex ways, living a sort of double life online and offline – this was more an unforgiving reckoning with who I was vs what the life I was leading looked like). i was finally letting myself think about it holistically, reflecting on conversion therapy and how I navigated my desires and my identity. I wrote a lot of melodramatic diary entries and was trying to figure out how to handle a 3 year long semi-formed, confusing, and impressively undefined ‘situation’ship I was in with a guy while I was living alone during a gap year. all I really did in this time was go to the gym, go on walks, go to therapy, and think… a lot. by the time I started watching TLW I had come to terms with my lesbianism (and its inextricable relationship to my gender), but watching jenny go through something I had basically been in the thick of myself (just without all the sex and the cheating and the sex and the sex and the sex), and was, at that point, yet to experience the real horror of, meant a lot to me, and, just from some reading online, I’ve understood too how the early seasons of TLW really helped a lot of other lesbians come out to themselves or start thinking about where they might sit in relation to lesbianism. again, TLW fails time and time again at any sort of political radicalism, but when you’re so, so painfully alone and you don’t really have anyone to talk to about these desires, or even have the strength to talk about these things out loud, I do think somehow the unabashed desire flung around the screen of TLW does one thing, and that is to declare that lesbianism doesn’t have to be in your head, and that even good change can be really difficult when it’s something like this, and that, to me, was the best thing TLW added to the conversation about lesbian TV and reflects, for a lot of lesbians who find themselves trying to navigate repression and abuse, the experience that we’re still moving through: taking hold of our lives with our own hands
beyond that, beyond being a story about transformation – which I do think really permeates the first season (dana coming out to the world and to her parents; shane learning how to love or whatever the fuck genuinely; tina and bette trying and failing and trying to live the life they’d always dreamt of; marina navigating her own bad relationship through a sort of uncaring outwards desire; bette ‘choosing’ the wrong path from her married life and cheating; kit re-entering the world of professional music and working hard to get into that music video thing situation – I think s1 is just such a rare gem of tv, that had so many flaws in it and so much was mishandled, but it came to it all with a lot of heart. But still that same angle is what alienates it from reality and sets it up as this fantasy land of woman-who-engage-in-lesbianism and abstractifies lesbian reality to make way for lesbian (or straight) fantasies of standard hegemony with a little zest. As it goes on however, it falls so hard to the more difficult aspects already clear at its start, and dramatizes their sexual escapades and relationships endlessly in a way that gives, says, and does nothing. jill dolan describes it well, albeit more positively than I have here: “part of the fun has become to simply go with it, to enjoy its excesses of character and plot and to tolerate its rather sweetly absurd attempts at relevance and authenticity.” and you really can ‘go with it’ for a while, but to put it shortly, TLW is not a show worth following to the end of the earth
hazbin hotel was meant to be a deviantart gallery full of character ref sheets, over detailed faction descriptions, and short comics of random character interactions that never really came together as a full story but was fascinating to read when you were 13
The Great Flood of 1924 or 1927?aka, a bored trivia post
s1e05 has become the boogeyman of this fanbase for events that largely occur toward the very end of it, but the flood that leads to claudia’s makeshift burials being exposed is very fascinating in terms of chronology. it speaks to how amc iwtv only slightly shifts around history to situate its immortal characters deeply within the environment of a city thats largely viewed by many, including the source material itself, as an ahistorical pleasure garden with no past or present worth caring about.
from @diasdelfuego’s s1 timeline, we have already seen an example of how the show moves with its environment, altering the release date/place of jelly roll morton’s wolverine blues from 1923 indiana to 1917 new orleans [and it be a record the fictional lestat played a role in creating — lestat aiding in a notorious trickster’s story, one of the most oblique lies on louis’s end to make lestat look more sympathetic or one of the funniest historical movearounds on the showrunners’ end, who knows].
this great flood that brings the living situation in rue royale to a head for claudia is another one of them. when lestat and louis read claudia’s diaries, they discover how shes kept careful record of the people shes buried, killed, and mutilated. they interrogate her to ask where the bodies are, and only toward the end of the confrontation does she reveal where she buried them all.
LOUIS: Where are the bodies?
CLAUDIA: Chalmette. Now get out of my room!
LOUIS: Chalmette's three feet below the river line—
CLAUDIA: So what, get out of my room!
LOUIS: What happens when the next storm comes out the Gulf?
and sequenced near immediately, in classic amc iwtv didactic fashion, the next storm comes out the gulf and unburies the bodies claudia buried on very low-lying ground.
now, temporarily exiting the show and into reality, the true flood of southern louisiana in this period occurred in 1927, when the missisippi river valley experienced heavy rainfall.
where disaster stops, and where segregationist city engineers enter, is that bankers and business leaders in new orleans lobbied the governor to intentionally broke the levee outside of new orleans proper, and so he did, ensuring that the city itself would not be flooded, but flooded out much of the low-lying areas in st. bernard parish. remember chalmette? it is in st. bernard parish.
the subsequent conversation lestat + louis have with tom anderson confirm this even more, with tom describing the number of bodies, the 56 ‘floaters’ from the ninth ward [a neighborhood in new orleans that borders chalmette], all people who have been mutilated in some fashion.
tom anderson notes this as well:
Most of the poor fools they hooked out of the bayou are former inhabitants of the Quarter, so don't be too startled if the police come knockin' on your door.
indicating that most of the people claudia killed, mutilated, and buried there were the wealthy, white neighbors of the rue royale mansion and not residents of low-lying parishes that were seen as fodder by the state of louisiana. now why didnt lestat, who was able to hypnotize an entire room of soldiers in episode 3, hypnotize the 3-4 officers that came to inspect their mansion? questions, questions… (that have very obvious answers but are secondary to this post)
referring back to the s1 timeline linked, this great flood of 1927 was either moved up to 1924, matching the decision to move up + alter the creation of the wolverine blues in episode 3 for narrative reasons, and/or refers to the odyssey of recollection, aka., how keeping exact dates and recalling the numerous historical events u have lived under after 145 or so years of misery become difficult. this post is just a fun little trivia bit + something i found to be interesting
it's like if hot topic fed an AI invader zim and south park scripts, deviant art comments and comics from 2008, and then style trained on tumblr art and "positivity" posts from 2014 to sell shitty t-shirts
Regulators cited Maersk for its “illegal policy” blocking employees from reporting safety concerns to the Coast Guard.
while pete buttigieg states the extremely obvious about how “bridges arent built to withstand container ships hitting them” and would like you to believe that these things just randomly tragically happen, the actual takeaway is that horrible accidents are more likely when companies ignore safety regulations and have little regard for their workers lives or labor laws and value profit more
i would also like to call attention to the construction workers who died in the bridge collapse. when companies ignore safety to maximize profit (and when infrastructure isnt updated and improved) it has real repercussions. all of the men were latin american immigrants, and many of them were sending money back to their families abroad. rip 🕊️❤️
The six missing workers were all part of Baltimore’s flourishing Latino community, immigrant advocates say.
Principality of Blasia @sideeffx - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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izzy806
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2087
