#laura redman

[embodiedinscribed]

Wayward is groundbreaking in a number of ways, but can we talk about the groundreaking nature of the sex scene in Wayward?

I don't mean the incredible hotness of Mae Martin crawling across the floor with no shirt on (though thanks for that). I mean a pregnant woman having sex. When does the media ever depict that? And it's not just that she's hot, but where she's the one who initiates, and she is sexually dominant?

The way she leans casually on the side of the chair with her leg out and says, don't stand up. 🔥

[holyblanchett]

So I just finished wayward and im ngl that ending had me cracking up because what do you mean its the towns baby?? Alex RUN

[phosphorusab]

I’m not digging this revisionist history of the Tall Pines Ponderosa cult being ‘queer accepting’.

Because they weren’t accepting, they were either transparently manipulative or outright bigoted. Here are my examples;

Laura’s friend from Tall Pines who got sent there by his family only because he was gay, who insists to Alex that Evelyn didn’t perform conversion therapy on him, but helped him ‘accept his true self’. Despite this, Laura is disturbed to learn that this friend has remained completely celibate and that Evelyn told him to abandon all attachments (romantic and sexual included) that weren’t about her. He later joins Laura’s developing cult and said that Evelyn ‘used his deepest, darkest secrets against him’ while Leaping him.

Homophobic comments and insults towards Abbie and Leila go unchecked and are even encouraged, because of the nature of the Hot Seat “therapy”.

Laura and Rabbit clearly had something going on, but Evelyn turned them against each other.

Alex’s manhood is only affirmed by the men at Tall Pines when he kills Riley, to manipulate him into thinking he did the right thing. When he starts questioning and investigating on his own, the other men become antagonistic. His trans status is manipulated to get him not to leave, because he wouldn’t be accepted in the real world and Tall Pines had been collecting blackmail on him - and were ready to smear him at a moments notice for things he either didn’t do or to manipulate the truth of what he did do.

Other Tall Pines graduates like Rabbit insult his manhood and relationship with Laura behind his back. Evelyn undermines his masculinity when she and Laura are playing their game, and goes on a transphobic tirade against him when she’s about to Leap him, and I’ve seen people say that ‘she clocked his tea’. Fuuuuck youuuuu.

[alwayslamonika]

My favorite parallels in the show

I really like that this show consists entirely of parallels, but I liked some more than others, so here's a list:

1. Alex is as invasive to the community as toads are to the ecosystem of the city; and, like toads, he finds use within the cult

2. Evelyn is the only mother to all the children at the academy, who has taken away the cult members' rights to their own bodies; Laura's child becomes the child of every member of the community, thereby taking away the right to borders and connections from the child

3. The birth and transformation of a cult taking place in the same house

4. Alex, who ended Dwayne's life with a stone (as Laura did to her father). A husband and wife are one Satan, right?

5. It was all meant to be "Becoming the best version of yourself", but in the end Laura and Alex become the worst versions of themselves

Also, of course, I really loved the line of students (Abbie and Rory… my poor meow-meow…), but I'm too sad to think about them (；′⌒`)

[menasimagination]

what kind of interview is this

[embodiedinscribed]

Continuing thoughts on the uniqueness of Wayward.

Typically media presents cops in 3 ways: heroes whose violence serves to protect others; antiheroes who are violent in an ends justify the means way; and corrupt cops who are brought to justice by the "good" cops. They all posit and celebrate "good violence".

Alex Dempsey fits none of these. He does want to protect others, but his violence isn't in service of that. It arises from the trauma of his inability to protect his mother from his abusive father, which of course wasn't his fault seeing as he was a child, and yet still it fills him with shame. When he becomes violent, it doesn't save anyone. The help he provides Abbie does not come via violence. He gives her a way to communicate, listening and believing, information. He gives her the resources she needs to save herself. His violent acts on the other hand are covered up. They are not celebrated, even by Tall Pines. They use it to control him. Alex tries to be a protector, but continues to fail.

Alex wrestles with whether he can be a good parent and spouse, when his parents relationship and parenting were so terrible. He longs for an idealized marriage and family life. A layer of that longing is connected to him being trans. However those are questions, a journey, that every spouse and parent has to wrestle with, no matter their background or identity.

I read people arguing that he's not good trans representation because he wrestles with violence. But that is part of what is so brilliant about this representation. He is neither valorized nor villainized. We root for Alex even as we are appalled by some of his choices. Actual people are not solely good or bad, they are a mix of beauty and ugliness and trauma and joy and longing and mistakes and pain and hope. Instead of reducing the character to a self-conscious prop of goodness, he is a fully formed complex messy human being.

I just hope they decide to do a season 2 so he can try again to be the protector that he wants to be (and escape his insane wife and her cult and all those damn toads.)

[embodiedinscribed]

Evelyn cut the umbilical cord tying those kids to their parents, and rebirthed them as her own. She thought that parents were inherently hurtful, and she wanted to save them from that pain. Yet it never occurs to Evelyn that she too would hurt her children. The pain and confusion she experiences as Laura pushes back is genuine.

Some think Evelyn is Laura's biological Mom. It's possible of course but I don't think that's the source of her parental connection to Laura, even if it is true. She feels that way toward Leila. Rabbit feels that way too toward Stacy. But of course, Rabbit's not allowed because only Evelyn gets to have a connection. She can't quite control Laura, so she allows her to have Alex and the baby, but just as a means to regain control.

Parents and children do hurt each other all the time. If they are good parents, it's unintentional and not abusive, but when we get intimate, we make mistakes and misunderstand things.

It's when we try to control people that everything goes away.

[embodiedinscribed]

Evelyn teaches that attachment is bad. One of the Tall Pines folk (I can't remember his name) points this out when Laura asks if he's seeing anyone. Laura points out that Evelyn made everyone attach only to her. She became their new parent. Then she decided which kids got to be with which adults. Did she also decide which adults got to be together?

So it seems that in contradiction to Evelyn, Laura thinks romantic relationships are ok. She also tells the weeping woman, who I'm guessing had a hysterectomy or her tubes tied, that she "can have it all."

But then Laura says that the baby belonging to everyone is the only way to break the cycle - presumably the cycle of traumatizing parenting.

So now, everyone has a baby. And Laura doesn't care that it belongs to everyone because she's totally detached. But Alex cares. You can tell by the devastated look he has when the baby is taken from him and passed from shirtless person to shirtless person. That was supposed to be Alex's baby. Will the baby know that? Will everyone else get to have babies now and those babies will belong to everyone?

What happens when someone gives birth but isn't detached like Laura? What if they want the baby to know who their bio parents? What if they don't agree to how someone treats that baby and thinks they should have a bigger say? Does Laura as the new cult leader decide all the parenting conflicts? And how will that go when she has zero feelings for that baby? If you have 50 parents, who do you live with and for how long?

And what about the romantic relationships? Does everyone belong to everyone like the baby? Is Alex, who was looking for a nuclear family, supposed to be everyone's husband now?