#brainedmelts

[meltedbrains]

I spent a lot of my time watching 'The Residence' wondering if the overwhelmingly poc cast was intentional or not. Was this the result of shondaland's famous 'colorblind casting', would it ever be addressed? Was it an accident, or intentional, that the 'political' roles (generally smaller parts) were white and the 'blue collar' (generally more important characters) roles were poc?

I should have had faith.

As we reach the denouement all the important characters are gathered to be given a run down of what happened in the ever popular trope of detective fiction. The characters refer to detective Cupp as 'Miss' and she has to correct them. There was no accidental casting.

The white head of the FBI believes he has jurisdiction over the black chief of police. The white political characters find detective Cupp's behaviour a nuisance at best and infuriating at worst; although she maintains her composure she fights tooth and nail to be taken seriously throughout the series.

And then, as we find out the murderer, the means, and the motive, it all becomes clear. This was not a political assassination, or a crime of passion.

This was a rich, entitled, white woman, who saw an opportunity to kill a black man, and took it. She couldn't stand not being able to do whatever she wanted and that he in particular stood in her way. In making the president gay (and the first gentleman indecisive) there were no other white women in positions of power above her. She was the most 'important' white woman in the building and the only person that could, and did, challenge her was a black man. He had to go.

She may have done the deed herself but this was a case of a white woman's tears killing a black man.

[meltedbrains]

My favourite thing about City Council of Darkness is just how much the players are enjoying each others' characters

[meltedbrains]

Legends of Tomorrow may have been a beautiful garbage fire, but they really had something with Zari 2.0.

You become an overnight childhood celebrity, create an influencer business that makes you and your family incredibly wealthy. Your loser, stoner, brother (that's always had issues with you) brings you to join his group of weird time travelling superhero friends. But there's a catch.

They've all befriended and fallen in love with an alternate version of you. They are constantly disappointed and unimpressed with you, wishing you were someone else.

So you use an ancient magical heirloom to meditate and connect with this alternate you, a version of you that you can never be. And what do you find? She's everything they say about her and more, you talk and connect with yourself on a deeper level than anyone else possibly could. She talks about her brother, someone you never knew, the love she felt for him, the pain of losing him. You talk about your brother, the one she so desperately wanted to save. You find a version of yourself that was willing, not just to die, but to erase herself from existence to save her brother. She couldn't bear to live in a world without her brother, and you realise that you're the same. For all your arguing and fighting, you also love your brother. So you come back to the real world with a new found love of your brother, only to find that while you were gone he was killed. Your relationship, that was just starting to heal, is gone. The alternate you that erased herself for him was wasted, it didn't work. He died all the same.

So you sit there, next to his lifeless body and just sit there, you don't move. The others pick him up and prepare him for a funeral and you sit there.

It's a damn good scene.

[meltedbrains]

I know everyone wants a glass onion/the residence crossover, where Cordelia and Benoit team up to take down the latest murderer, but...

What about, not that...

What about several series/films of each where they don't meet but clearly have in the past, where they politely fight each other to be crowned "world's greatest detective".

Benoit races into the room shaking a newspaper at Hugh Grant "she's done it again! Det. Cupp solved it before anyone else!"

Cordelia rolls her eyes at everyone getting in her way "I bet Benoit doesn't have to deal with this nonsense".

Benoit gets mysteriously into birding in the next film and they keep sending each other messages about the local wildlife in their cases

[meltedbrains]

One of my favourite dynamics is

"This is horrible, I can't believe you would do something so disgusting and immoral! No, not like that, you're doing it wrong. Move, I'll do it."

Easily top five.

[meltedbrains]

I love the simplicity in Mrs Coulter's design. In a world where everyone's soul is able to think and speak on its own, in a shape with clear connotations about your own personality and mindset, here is a woman whose very essence is unnamed, completely unwilling to communicate, in a shape with unclear associations (in western and northern Europe at least) that has the most similarity with an engineer but with an unfamiliar beauty that is both off-putting and entrancing. I just think it's neat story telling.

[meltedbrains]

Chef Terry: Every Second Counts. The world is full of amazing things and you don't know how long you'll have, fill your life with wonder and happiness, if you're going to cook for someone make that meal amazing. Do your best and do it with love, learn from your mistakes and don't do them again. Don't waste your life with banality, make every second count.

Carmen: got it, every second counts. Your best is not good enough, always strive for better, every mistake is time wasted. If you are not counting the seconds you have failed.

[meltedbrains]

Wouldn't it be fucked up if I had a form of magic that made me a monster, that ostracised me and my siblings in village after village, if my siblings learnt similar magic to make us closer, to ease the guilt of making us outcasts, if we finally found a place that accepted us, that saw me not just as an equal but someone to look up to, admired and respected? Wouldn't it be fucked up, after all that, to lose my sister, without even a body to bury, to seal off my magic and change my personality overnight, to move away from the person I was that made my brother attempt the dangerous magic that lead to our sister's death?

Wouldn't it be fucked up if you tried to kill my brother in front of me and I broke my self-imposed limit to unleash a magic power so overwhelmingly powerful that even at your strongest you genuinely feared for your life, if the only thing that stopped me from crushing your skull beneath my fist was my own kindness?