#evacampbells

[daphnemoon]

evacampbells replied to your post “Hi! Can you please make a gifset comparison of Moon Dance and Dark...”

I'm blushing. Whoa. Thank you for this!

Aww, of course! I know when I first started looking for Frasier on tumblr, you were one of the blogs I was so excited to find because your gifs were great!

[markcampbells]

from the 50 questions list! 1; 6; 13; 17; 32; 44; 49; 50!

What are three shows in your watchlist that you’ve been meaning to get to?

[laughs nervously] What if you have so many this is a really hard question to answer? 😬 XO, Kitty; The Owl House; Dead End: Paranormal Park; and bonus "Christ I need to finally watch Andor."

What do you use to keep your place when you’re reading a book?

I have a great many bookmarks but you know also I embarrassingly have a great many receipts and those tend to be what I have to hand first.

Do you prefer to write in pen or pencil?

Pen for sure. Pencils break and erasers can be worn down and they annoy me.

What’s the last thing you ordered online?

To use a $5 Barnes and Noble credit, Her Majesty's Royal Coven by Juno Dawson and I Could Not Believe It: The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear.

If you could dye your hair any color, regardless of how you think it would look, what color would you choose?

I think a pink or purple like the shades Megan Rapinoe has done.

What do you do with spare change?

It goes into the zippered middle portion of my wristlet until the rare times that I'm using cash and I have to dig through it to make exact change.

What’s your favorite thing to do when it’s raining?

I should probably say reading but lately I've found that the gray days are a nice time to hunker down with a long level in a video game.

Describe your perfect sleeping conditions.

This year I got into using two blankets, partly for warmth and partly for the pressure (I use my weighted blanket when I can). I used to be a strict stomach sleeper but now I'm a mix of stomach and back. Since this house is small and my room lets in a lot of noise from the living room I keep my TV going with the screen darkened as white noise to help me filter that out.

[markcampbells]

IIIIII associate you with: rainbows and wolves; purple things; a bit of glitter; lipstick; hot pink; stickers; lemonade; raspberry… 🌈💄

(This made me wish I had a rainbow wolf drawing like Lisa Frank style and I am sad I can't carry this out LMFAO)

you: lemonade / me this Sunday: buzzed as fuck off a pink lemonade vodka

Lipstick! 🥺

[markcampbells]

peter and elizabeth

A brilliant TV marriage hampered by the need for shitty male writers to cling to misogynistic hackneyed tropes instead of being inventive and, you know, not misogynistic <3

I understand why outsiders think Elizabeth "does nothing," because many cop/procedural shows reduce wife characters to just that. Shortly before I started White Collar I watched the first two seasons of Southland, and while that show does a lot I admire, I remember finding all the wife/girlfriend characters stereotypically shrill and abysmal.

Elizabeth is a smart, capable woman who knows she's married a man who values their relationship and the life they have. So where things get really shitty is like the one episode a season where the writers decide, no, actually, either Elizabeth should be a horrid shrewish caricature, or Peter should suddenly stop prioritizing their home life because idk drama.

I don't really know what else to say. Tim and Tiffani had wonderful chemistry and played well off each other. I will always deeply appreciate that Tim stood firm and asked for an actress closer to his own age when the powers that be were pushing for much younger. But the writers frequently ruined what could have been a good and, for the genre, really subversive thing by making Elizabeth in particular the stereotype it seems no male writer can resist writing.

[markcampbells]

brooke and julian

I haven't rewatched the later seasons of the show in quite a while, but I'll restate some of what I did back at time of air: especially in Season 8 and forward, Julian was just reduced to being Brooke's yes man, and it was a shame. I think he never really had the chance to shine as his own character in their relationship.

I think the thing that bugs me about their relationship looking back on it is that sometimes it felt like two drastically different things being shoved together. I actually really like the speech Brooke gives Paul about the Thin Red Line poster and how much it angers her it's the only positive memory Julian has of his relationship with his father. Even in a show where we already had two male main characters with issues with their father, it didn't feel like a retread; Lucas never had much to do with Dan so he wasn't much of a factor in his and Peyton's relationship, and Haley and Dan had a much more complicated relationship that swung back and forth a fair bit. Brooke took a harder stance, especially as someone who survived emotional neglect herself, and I admire that. That being said, then there's the dumbass stuff with Julian's mom, Woman Who Also Played Izzie's Mom on Grey's, like her dressing him as a dog and... all of that. It was just two really different tones and that stands out in my memory.

Something I wish they would have built on was Julian's backstory with Peyton, which never really got properly explored. When Julian first comes to town he seems more bitter and frustrated, and that goes away super quickly, and while they do have the "footnote in someone else's love story" conversation, I wish they'd dug a little more into Brooke and Julian both being two people who grew past actions they weren't proud of and into a healthy relationship as adults, rather than most of the focus being on Brooke only.

And because I'll never be over this, I'm still angry that Brooke never got to adopt Sam, and that the show further pulled the awful storyline about Brooke's infertility that just ruined so many character beats. Julian really cared about Brooke and Sam both; the scene where Brooke sees that he bought coffee just because he wanted to help her look for Sam really kills me. They would have been a great family. Sam being reunited with her mom is a good thing and an example of foster care working, but the problem is that once Sam is gone, they then turned Brooke into someone who no longer cared to foster and who whines about adopting not being the same as having biological children, which is a real fucking insult when she grew up with an adopted friend whose father probably showed Brooke more love and support than her own did! I did appreciate that Season 9 did a rare serious Julian storyline with him forgetting one of the twins in the car; that scene between him and Haley where she comforts him is beautiful. But I wish that they hadn't gotten there by torpedoing so much character development with turning Brooke into a person so embittered by her fertility issues that she calls Haley a "selfish baby haver" and seems perfectly content to forget the best friend she claims she loves was adopted.

[markcampbells]

for your spotify wrapped: 1; 3; 7; 12; 23; 32; 55; 75; 95!

1. "Kill" - Jimmy Eat World 3. "Stupid" - Brendan Maclean 7. "Somebody That I Used to Know" - Darren Criss and Matt Bomer 12. "My Darling" - Ingrid Michaelson 23. "Somewhere Only We Know" - Keane 32. "Shake It Out" - Florence + the Machine 55. "I Don't Care Much" - Alan Cumming 75. "Dark Blue" - Jack's Mannequin 95. "Young and In Love" - Ingrid Michaelson

Pretty much all of these are on my various ship playlists for writing. "Kill", "Somewhere Only We Know", and "Dark Blue" are making special appearances due to my rewatching OTH.

[markcampbells]

some favorite storylines from your various shows throughout the years (any number you feel comfortable with)

Fun fact I have thought about this for so long and I feel like I'm gonna forget, like, a million.

Niles divorcing Maris (Frasier). Niles and Daphne are one of my favorite love stories in fiction, but I choose Niles' divorce specifically because it stands out as the rare work of fiction that's treated a man in an abusive relationship seriously. The amazing thing is that emotional abuse is never mentioned by name, and yet it's mentioned repeatedly and in no uncertain terms that the way Maris treated Niles is not okay. And regardless of this, Frasier and Martin still support Niles in his various choices--to leave her, to go back to her, to give their marriage a good faith try even when he'd previously concluded it was past saving. One of my favorite scenes for the three of them is the "love's losers" scene at the end of 5x13 where they stand on the balcony quietly drinking beer after Niles has left Maris due to her affair. It's such a quiet, beautiful scene of solidarity and the reason I love the show so much.

Paul, Hugh, and Adira (Star Trek: Discovery). Discovery did found family so well other shows should take fucking notes. I loved watching how Paul softened towards Adira and felt compelled to help them because they've both survived losing a partner, and I loved so much that at the end of the season Paul flat out says he considers Adira his and Hugh's child. Too many shows establish a found family scenario and then never let the characters admit out loud that they're important to each other, and Discovery really said fuck that. I'm really looking forward to what the fourth season will mean for the three of them and Gray.

Cary figuring himself out (The Other Two). I love so much about The Other Two, but as someone who really needed to pick through a lot of internalized biphobia, the way Cary is portrayed as working through his shame about his sexuality is really important to me. There are a lot of little moments that really stand out to me--when he admits to Brooke after the disastrous "acting straight" commercial audition that he thinks he's really fucked up mentally, when he blurts out to Tuc Watkins' character that he thinks his father never came to New York because he couldn't stop thinking about Cary being involved in the queer scene there, when there's a flashback to the family in church and you realize he's been living with a lot of guilt for a long time. As someone who took a long time coming to terms with her queerness and some dead parent-related trauma, it's a really resonant show for me and something I really needed.

George losing his father (Grey's Anatomy). This one is a really difficult one for me to rewatch since it's personally triggering, but it has a place in my heart for Cristina's speech to George about the "dead dads club." A close friend of mine lost his father when we were teens, and we had a similar joke between us about that experience. It's a difficult and alienating thing to go through and I felt like Grey's captured those emotions really well.

Ted Lasso in general. Ted Lasso is one of the best constructed shows I've watched in a very long time. I love all the character arcs for different reasons, and you can read postmortems with the cast and really see how much care and thought is put into the writing for every character. Rebecca is my favorite and I love how thoroughly the show explores her working through the emotional abuse she experienced and changing the way she treats people after her awful behavior is called out during Season 1. And the way Season 2 showed Ted's previous difficult feelings about therapy and psychological help slowly changing was really, really beautiful.

Sheldon and Amy (The Big Bang Theory). As many problems as The Big Bang Theory had, and there were a lot, I do feel that over the course of the show, they learned how to create meaningful character arcs and relationship development. As someone who's been a "late bloomer" romantically and who's never felt comfortable in her own body, so much of what the show treated very sensitively with Amy resonated with me very strongly. One of my favorite television moments probably ever is when Sheldon's awed reaction to seeing Amy in her preferred wedding dress makes her realize the most important thing is that the two of them love it, even if Penny and Bernadette made her feel like the dress was awful and people would laugh at her.

Dan Scott (One Tree Hill). Dan is one of my favorite character arcs ever, and rewatching the show along with Drama Queens has really shown me why. They did an incredible job showing him as a nuanced character whose actions were fueled, as Paul said, by the love he had for his sons, even if he often expressed that love in awful, hurtful ways. Dan does some absolutely irredeemable things and yet in the adult years he manages to find a sort of redemption in his bond with Jamie and the compassion Haley extends him at his lowest point.

Work in Progress and Feel Good. I watched both of these shows this year, and I'm counting them under "storylines" since they're both extremely character-focused shows where the plots focus on the characters coming to better understand themselves through both transformative relationships and therapy. Both shows did things that really resonated for me and made me think a lot about what queer art has meant to me, and I hope more people give them a try.

[markcampbells]

favorite thing to do on the weekend if you don’t have plans

This answer probably would have been different in pre-panini times, since weekend plans are a thing of the distant past 😂

My family used to go to the movies more than the average person; it was our primary leisure activity. Unlike seeing Broadway shows, which was my other weekend leisure activity for a while, it's far easier to do on short notice and costs a lot less!

If I'm with my family, we'll eat breakfast/lunch together and these days watch some Star Trek. (Although two weeks ago I held them hostage to The Addams Family.) I've been cross stitching lately, so I've been doing that too.

If I'm by myself, I like walking places. I go to either the library, Dunkin' Donuts, food shopping, or to get food from a local deli or the taco place. I listen to podcasts like The Flop House or The Magnus Archives as I walk.

While I read a lot, it's been hard to focus in recent years, so I don't read as much on my days off as I'd like. I keep meaning to make more of an effort with that because I'd like to get that focus back.