May 31
I like drawing her making this face: o_o
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I like drawing her making this face: o_o
man. lui dupont.
he's really really interesting to me. especially in light of 2.3—very specifically the way he is the one to take charge on the "we need to be careful" thing and the moment where he snaps at norah for wanting to risk her barely-there sanity to look at the book. combined with the fact that he's their living library
idk. this isn't going to be coherent or have a super salient point because i'm exhausted still from that hellish road trip. but i talked once about how lui recontextualized norah, of all people, as comparatively reckless. and i still think that's true! similar to how he recontextualized will as not the occult expert. and i think a lot of the recontextualizing of norah has to do with the fact that he is the occult expert. he is the one who has read and memorized and catalogued all the horrifying records of history and myth. he is the one who has looked at the diagrams of human and animal sacrifices and the costs of magic and power and the depths that the occult can reach of depravity and inhumanity. even before the grimoire, he was the one most aware of this. and even though he's as much a scared dumb teenager as the rest of them, he is also the one who most understands the actual dangers they're up against. even after the shtriga, more than anyone else in the upp he understands how close they are to dying, constantly.
and that's something i think the others really didn't get before. obviously we don't have a ton of insight into pre-canon dynamics but we know will was and is incapable of putting down a mystery even when a friend's in danger. we know isaac is impulsive and norah is willing to go along with bad ideas in pursuit of knowledge. and we think that's normal until lui comes in and is the only one who really understands, if only briefly, what it means for isaac's window to be screwed shut. or what it means for norah to look at the grimoire. or what it could mean for someone to go inside the abrahams house after the ritual goes wrong. isaac only starts to really understand it after norah's suicide attempts. norah and will, to differing degrees, only really start to understand it after mr abrahams mind-controls lui.
but lui's understood for much longer, because he's looked at the history. he's read the myths. will has the deeper literal connection and isaac keeps getting tapped as a sacrifice and norah is the one with a real thirst for knowledge but lui is the one who's truly taken the lesson away properly. and yet it's not something he's able to communicate well, or something the other teens—despite everything—seem really ready to accept. we're watching them get there. we've watched them get there a couple times now. but lui was already there when we met him, and while he's still a dumb teenager sometimes (see: him arguing with caleb abrahams, the insane grieving father who is clearly into really dark occult shit, about the nature of god) he still manages to show that there is in fact someone who understands what's at stake.
and it's not because he's an oldest sibling or an older brother. it's not because of any quirk of his personality—given the debate i mentioned above, i'd almost argue it's in spite of his general demeanor. but he still gets it. because he's their living library of occult knowledge. because he's the only one who's truly put in the work to understand what is out there, rather than chasing blindly into the dark.
and now we just have to really, really, really hope that's going to be enough to save any of them.
can i ask what motivates the whole Isaac is trans idea? cause i think its cool but ion really get where one gets the idea for her being trans in specific instead of other characters and id really like to hear why :P
HI. ok this is an incomplete and rambling list because I 1) just woke up and 2) really do not have time to double-check the transcripts any time this week but off the top of my head:
I remember when I first thought it, in my very first watch of UPP. In DisRes1 when Isaac and Will were like "how does she (Norah) do it (make our parents like her)" and Norah was like "idk I have a 4.0 GPA," Isaac said something like, "Yeah, I get it, you're everything my parents wish I was." And I, who hadn't even gotten obsessed with Isaac yet, was like "what, a girl, too?"
And then it never left my brain because:
-While I'm not religious, Isaac's struggle with faith and her family relationships reminds me a lot of how I distanced myself from my family and the beliefs I'd learned from them while trying to figure myself out.
-also the moving to Deadwood as a catalyst for this. Again this is partial projection/partial self-recognition but Isaac changing so thoroughly when her family moves to Deadwood reminds me of when I transferred high schools and suddenly realized a lot of things about myself. even though my transfer/realization was a much happier story overall i can't deny the ping of recognition i felt when isaac alluded to being uprooted and forced to adapt so thoroughly.
-Isaac's hair. I'm not a "long hair on a guy means they're not cis/not straight" person at all but Isaac's hair has been used against her multiple times now by people who've explicitly wanted to kill her and she still keeps it long. Given how her parents care a lot about presenting as a good christian family to their fellow churchgoers, and given how Bizly took the time to specify her father's last touch against her head as "gentle," I feel very safe inferring that her parents did not like it when Isaac started growing her hair out. If you're a believer in physical abuser James Brooks (which I'm not always but I'm not not a believer in it), the hair would be my first guess for how that physical abuse goes, since we have I think a couple instances of James physically controlling how Isaac moves? There's the car crash/kidnapping ofc and I thiiiiink there's a moment where James drags her into the house in DisRes but I might be thinking of the shtriga. REGARDLESS the fact that Isaac's hair keeps being explicitly used against her like this and she keeps it anyways. Realistically it's probably just Condi not considering how Isaac feels about that specifically but to me it reads as the hair being so important that despite the abuse/assault it nets her, she needs to keep it. because it matters to her more than the hurt it causes. trans moment.
-her role in these stories. tumblr won't let me search for the post but someone made a post a while back, soon after 2.2 dropped i think, about how isaac is reduced to the role of mr. abrahams's wife in the sacrifice, and how that ties into her trans coding? i may be paraphrasing a bit too heavily there but regardless there is a LOT of narrative parallels between isaac and typical female roles in horror. while the shtriga was obviously a metaphor for abuse of altar/choir boys (even if they glossed over it YES I'M STILL INSANE ABOUT THAT—) isaac is very much the final girl in that situation with breaking out of the coffin and stumbling free. and later on the shtriga takes janice instead, which is less putting isaac in a woman's place than the other way around, but i think can still be counted. later in empty graves, there is of course the sacrifice parallel. while obviously bizly is pulling from the story of abraham and isaac we can't deny the parallel to mrs. abrahams, and the literal "giving of one's life so a child may be born into the world (again)" of it all. again there's more but i cannot find that post and i don't have time to look more (we'll get to norah parallels momentarily)
-her family. okay. so. her family of course drives me crazy. we have a father who stopped loving her and a mother who can't seem to reach her and a sister who has distanced herself presumably for her own safety. again all troubled kid things but also all queer kid in a precariously christian family things. but i made that post last night about "when your father loves you as a son and then he stops loving you what then" which like. i love when the character is trans because their life changes too much. i love when the character is trans as a response just as much as i love when the character is trans from the very beginning. and it's not just her father's love she lost. what about when your mother is the only one who bothers to reach out but she doesn't even recognize you anymore and feels like she can't say no. what about when your sister is the only one you mourn. being trans as a response!!!! to family trauma!!!!!!!!!!!!
-NORAH. i have talked about how important isaac and norah's friendship is to me. i have mentioned in this post how it was a specific comparison to norah that made this click for me. i have joked somewhere in a tag about how norah cracks the rest of upp's eggs. AND I STAND BY ALL OF IT. isaac and norah in particular are constantly paralleled by the narrative and by deadwood, between them being the only ones to actually encounter the shtriga, them being the only ones to come so close to death, them being the only ones officer donald noticed, them being the "outsiders" of the group, even them being the ones to be trapped in coffins by the evils around them! and just as isaac is physically trapped by her parents, norah is socially/emotionally trapped by hers. the two of them have been cast in similar roles over and over and over again by their choices and by bizly himself (phone calls to the wisp house that ruined their day!! the car rides with their fathers!!!! THE USE OF THE TREES) also the fact. that these two imo are closer to each other than anyone else in upp. i know will and isaac get along like a house on fire and will and norah have some INSANE friendship/selfrecognitionthroughtheother going on but that's not the same as going "this is the person i feel safest around and am keeping an eye out for" yk? and that's them to each other. to me. and isaac is an outcast delinquent sports kid who openly hits on girls (the first meeting with janice) even if she doesn't expect anything of it (almost like she's doing it because she's expected to rather than because she wants to) and that is not the type of person who typically becomes friends with a norah to that degree, even if they have mutual friends! so i look at all that and i say "okay. what's one way we could explain this. could it be that isaac feels a particular attachment to norah because, as she's joked about multiple times, people (including herself) want her to BE norah"
-she's canonically started questioning her sexuality as of the first church incident with the window, it's very easy to extend that to gender to
in conclusion: LOTS. but mostly it's me looking at things that have happened to me and her both and going "huh," and also me looking at things in the show that have happened but aren't explicitly indicative of transness and going "okay, now what happens if we take this one step further?"
and when you have this many things—again this is an incomplete list—that one step further becomes less of a hypothetical direction, and more of an x-marks-the-spot kind of deal.
like, yeah, there's a lot of other ways to think about why all of the things i mentioned are the case. i enjoy thinking about them too! but transfem isaac is to me the most complete and compelling expansion of everything canon has built, with the addition that if i need to not deal myself psychic damage for once i can imagine her alive and transitioned and happy well after the events of deadwood when she moves the fuck out.
ALSO TO BE CLEAR: i think the other teens are various flavors of trans too! just not with the same conviction i hold she/her transfem isaac with yk. lui in particular reads soooooo nonbinary to me
spoilers
I keep assuming bella died in the same crash that took out james and the abrahams’ kid but yeah we really don’t know that for sure do we? I personally believe it because it adds a lot of poetic “justice” to mr abrahams’ use of the brooks in particular as his pawns and sacrifices, but… for all we know the crash only killed james. Or only james and the abrahams kid. For all we know caleb abrahams killed bella first in an attempt to bring back his son and it wasn’t a sufficient price so he brought back james brooks to kill isaac under his command.
next thing cause yet again you know this show very well as far as i can tell, id like to hear your opinions and this will contain spoilers for basically the whole show up to 2.3 who do you think is gonna die by the end realistically?? cause as far as i remember atleast one member has to die to seal the dark young, and william is guaranteed to aswell im just rewatching rn for the 10th time and im worrying if my lil guys are gonna live :')
man i WISH i had a solid prediction. i think any of them have a strong case to be made for them.
isaac is, of course, the original sacrifice. we don't know what happened to mr. abrahams or his son's corpse; for all we're aware, they're still out there somewhere, hoping to complete that sacrifice to bring one or both of them back. norah is in the most immediate danger—there's every chance one of the people in the woods will find her before the rest of UPP does, and if she goes back in the trees i think she's a goner. will of course has both the curse of a canon death as well as agnes dupont coming after him, and is the likely choice to cast the ritual—although i think there's also a strong argument for lui casting the ritual, because he's the one who comprehended and translated the grimoire. with the emphasis placed on absolute precision, he might have to be the one to push it through.
ultimately i think i'm leaning towards more than one pc death this season. i don't have a solid pick for who besides the fact that will has the most breathing down his neck right now but i'll be honest i'm struggling to see how they make it out of this with only will dying.
Oooooooooo...supersupersuper duper interesting to see your very detailed thoughts abt transfem Isaac as somebody who totally came to the hc more casually than that (combination of a vibe read and a joke reason or two). Particularly cause I usually do lean in this analytical direction with my trans headcanons (I have had a million thoughts abt how a transfem read of Emizel (Condi's Suckening PC, in case you don't know) would tie into her character) but I just hadn't thought to do that with Isaac yet.
I particularly like you pointing out the hair thing, because the moment where Bizly specified that both times that James tried to grab her was what 100%, no doubt committed me to the headcanon. Not because men can't have long hair, but because James fixating on it like that during a moment that epitomizes him trying to control Isaac (even exchange her for a "better" "son", one that hasn't sinned yet because he's 8 years old) colors Isaac's hair in a specific way. As if this is maybe something her and her father have argued about before.
(in case yr curious, I legit had the idea of the headcanon because 1. I heavily hc Will as a trans boy, and I thought it'd be fun to make the UPP 1 cis boy, 1 cis girl, 1 trans boy, 1 trans girl, and then 2. Because I coincidentally already headcanoned basically every other Condi PC I've spent a lot of time thinking abt as transfem. Not trying to claim he's an egg or anything, but I tend to get this vibe from a lot of his male PCs that masculinity is a performance they're only half committed to and not satisfied with.)
I was also expecting it to be a vibe read/joke hc when I first thought it and then I got absolutely eviscerated by the show lol
Interesting to note about Emizel though! I've heard a lot about Jay Ferin being transfem as well, and I'm of the opinion that Shade from the toddler oneshot is also she/her, so you're not alone in seeing a Condi PC and going "hm yeah let's blue pink and white this one up." (Rolan I think has Something going on but I need to actually finish that damn podcast first.) Guy's got a character niche I guess, the same way every Emily Axford character is a wild child.
And yeah the hair thing REALLY solidified it for me too. The shtriga specifically using her hair to hold her in place for infection and James using her hair to throw her to the ground and drag her to the ritual site... it's a lot of narrative emphasis to place on an otherwise innocuous detail is all I'm saying! And again Condi describing Isaac's reaction to all of this as if it's familiar/not unexpected. This is absolutely something they've argued about before, and I wonder sometimes if it played any part in Caleb Abrahams choosing to sacrifice Isaac specifically (aside, of course, from the poetry of the biblical parallels.) Idk something about Caleb kind of casting his son as Jesus and being willing to kill a kid who clearly doesn't fit the ideal of a "son" that he and James both have in their head is. Well. It gives me thoughts!
and 50% trans upplings... i do love that direction lmao. i usually go "one girl three boys turns into three girls one boy/two girls one enby and one boy" with lui and will switching off on the boy role bc i don't have solid opinions yet but i love the "whole binary squad is here" take too
why do all my most killer ideas come to me when i am in the middle of twenty-nine other things. caleb abrahams light of the seven animatic when i get you
i’m finally getting more than ten minutes into Empty Graves and I was thinking to myself “i wonder what horror spin Bizly’s gonna put on religion this time, the last one took me a bit to put together” and then I remembered one of the like two bible myths that I know. Which is Abraham and Isaac. ahaha. haha. surely this will work out fine and no one will try to kill my best girl Isaac—