#rosa jones

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ROSA thoughts - Jones Siblings edition

- It’s very cute how much Rosa and Balth love each other. It’s clear Rosa isn’t one for outward declarations of that love (she gets uncomfortable when Balth says he’s glad to have her back), but she shows her love by deeply understanding him.

- She immediately figures out that Balth has a crush on Peter because he’s the one flatmate Balth hasn’t told her about yet. Rosa is sharp and she sees right through her baby brother. She’s a great person for him to have in his corner.

- That being said, Rosa’s perceptiveness is definitely why Balth hasn’t called her in so long. He knew she’d immediately suss out his crush on Peter and he Did Not want to talk about it.

- Balth literally sipping his tea and darting his eyes back and forth to stall answering Rosa about Peter is hilarious lol poor guy

- Master of Distraction Balth KNOWING all he needs to do is get Rosa talking about travel and she’ll forget all about Peter.

- Balth also genuinely does like hearing Rosa’s travel stories. If you watch him while she’s talking about all the different places she’s been, he is just looking at her and smiling the whole time. It’s very cute.

- Baby Pedrazar sitting together in class and Peter having a mullet is so cute.

- Rosa is indeed kind of annoying, in that way of people privileged enough to travel but unaware of having crossed the bridge between sharing stories of their trip and bragging about said trip. Ben’s editing admittedly doesn’t do her any favors, though.

- Rosa would make an incredible member of Team Birdy-Hands, if she and Ben could ever get along. She definitely lowkey ships Pedrazar/wants to meet Peter so she can see if he’s good enough for her baby brother.

- I wish we could meet the other Jones siblings, I bet they’re a fun bunch.

[zarfpoetry]

dear subscribers and friends,

zarf #15 is here!! featuring poems from Zein Sa’dedin, Tessa Berring, Rosa Jones, Nehaal Bajwa, Millie Rosette, Memoona Zahid, Alexa Winik, Anna Cheung, Asta Kinch, & Aisha Farr, plus Matthew Travers on Sean Bonney and Flo Taylor on Dena Igusti. as promised, this is a digital and completely free edition available at zarfpoetry.tumblr.com/zarchive – it also comes in print-your-own-pamphlet format with instructions for assembly.

this will be the last issue of Zarf magazine. thank you to everyone who has read us over the last five years, sent in work, and passed it from hand to hand, and especially those on this list who encouraged and supported. Zarf Editions, our pamphlet press, is still up and running at zarfpoetry.tumblr.com/pamphlets AND many of our past titles are now available as ebooks at gumroad.com/zarfeditions for pay-what-you-can.

so long

callie

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moodboard: trans lesbian rosa jones

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ROSA thoughts - Benedick Edition

*rolls up sleeves* Let’s do this.

- Ben is so cute. I want to see every second of his off-camera hangout with Paige and Chelsey unpacking boxes at their new flat. I want to see them making concerned faces at each other behind his back when he leaves to study because they know he’s bitten off more than he can chew.

- WHY would Ben subject himself to such an absurdly overloaded class schedule? It’s almost like he doesn’t know what he wants to study so he panicked and chose everything. Made a snap decision so he could stop looking at the class selection book that was making him anxious? Because he has anxiety?

- Ben jumps and shouts when Rosa comes in behind him without his knowledge. Now, this reaction feels a bit exaggerated and Rosa seems to think he’s putting it on to fuck with her. But he reacted like this last time she jumpscared him too and he didn’t have time to fake that. (There’s also the fact that out of world, Jake would’ve known the jump reaction was scripted here, and it might be hard to make that look natural when you know it’s coming.) So I don’t think it’s unfair to log “exaggerated startle response” as an entry on the list of evidence that Ben has an anxiety disorder. When you are always already anxious, your startle response can be disproportionate.

- Ben getting angrier and angrier the longer Rosa talks is so fun to watch, he has such an expressive face. Too cute a face to be that angry. I want to pinch his cheeks. That’s my baby.

- I still have beef with the people who enjoyed watching Ben feel uncomfortable in this episode because they hated him and thought he deserved to be uncomfortable. 2015 fandom, we have beef.

- Ben is absolutely talking about Beatrice when he goes on his “you don’t have to travel to be a person” rant. There were a lot of people in 2015 who were afraid this episode meant Rosa was Ben’s new love interest, the Rosaline to his Berowne. But in actuality, Rosa here is serving as a mirror to Beatrice, Ben’s actual love interest. Rosa is the person that Ben is terrified Beatrice will become if she travels without him: filled with stories of experiences Ben can’t relate to, and having no time for anyone who doesn’t appreciate how worldly and cool she’s become. Rosa hates Ben; Beatrice used to hate Ben, and he’s terrified that she’ll go back to hating him, or that on some level, she never stopped. Rosa gets to the part about feeling a “spiritual connection” to someone she met on her travels, and this is the point at which Ben has his outburst against travel- because he’s terrified that Beatrice is going to meet someone else on her travels, find her own spiritual connection, and dump him.

- So, Beatrice is Rosaline and Rosa is Mirror-Rosaline. I believe that this mirroring is why Rosa’s name is Rosa. She and Beatrice are both Rosaline. Beatrice is Benedick’s reason to break the rules, so her role as a Rosaline is clear. For Rosa Jones’s part, she (non-sexually of course) tempts both Ben and Balthazar (B names like Berowne) to break their own rules- Ben, to admit that he does want to travel, and Balthazar, to admit that he wants Peter. That’s her role as the other Rosaline. You can see how uncomfortable both boys are in this video, when Rosa reveals the obviousness of their desires to them through her teasing. She does this more intentionally to Balth than to Ben, because it’s fun to tease your sibling about his crush and because she’s concerned that living with Peter will be stressful for him.

- People have noted that Rosa and Ben both get a lot of details wrong about the places Rosa’s been to. Per the comments: Rosa says “Saigon” instead of “Ho Chi Minh City” (though both names are still used); they both wrongly assume that the Himalayas have no Internet. Per comments and yours truly: Rosa asks if the fake Irish accent is “Northern Ireland or more Central” when I’m fairly sure the right way to ask is “Northern or Republic” and even then the accents will differ based on where in either country you are. There’s a degree to which Rosa and Ben are both full of shit and both annoying here.

- “It must suck to meet all these cool people you’re never going to see again.” “There’s this thing called the Internet, Ben.” This is an important line, because it’s the only direct acknowledgement we get of the truth that Ben doesn’t believe it’s possible to stay in touch with a friend in another country. He moved to NZ from England when he was 12 or 13, as far as we know, and he clearly still has fondness for England based on the UK-themed knickknacks in his room. But he doesn’t mention any friends in England, ever. He moved countries at a very formative time, and despite having access to the Internet and email and Facebook and all, not a single one of his friends in England has managed to stay in touch with him. So he doesn’t believe it can be done. People always leave. This is why he’s holding onto the friends he has now, hard enough to leave claw marks. This is why he needs the flat bonding part of the rules so desperately. And this is why he’s pulling away from Beatrice. Because she’s going to leave him, and no matter how she promises him she’ll stay in touch, his experience renders him unable to believe her. Not because he thinks she’s lying, but because he thinks she just doesn’t understand how hard it will be to keep that promise.

- “I can be happy right here in Kelburn.” He says, reassuring himself, because he’s going to have to find a way to be happy here. He’s going to have to find a way to survive without Bea, and that’s why she’s the third priority on his list of goals- because he thinks he’s going to lose her no matter what he does, and he doesn’t think he’s allowed to stop going to uni even though he hates it, and he doesn’t think he can survive losing the camera. So he has to put the other two priorities first, even though he wishes he could put Bea first. It was never that he didn’t love her; it was that he knew love wouldn’t be enough, so he did what he did to protect himself for when she inevitably left him.

- I think it’s crucial that Benedick never once asks Beatrice not to travel. He clearly doesn’t want her to go, and he should have communicated that he felt abandoned. But the fact that he knows it’s not his place to demand she give up her dream trip shows why he’s the right person for her- he doesn’t feel that ownership over her that some straight guys feel over their girlfriends, which she mentioned being worried about in NMTD when talking about why she didn’t want a hypothetical boyfriend. He knows it isn’t his place to try to make her stay. Ben is so determined not to ask Bea to stay for him that he stops communicating with her about it entirely, and instead lashes out at Rosa to blow off steam in a video he knows Bea probably won’t watch.

- Caaaan we also throw “wants to travel but is afraid/resistant to actually do it” onto the social anxiety list? Travel involves a lot of small talk and Ben can’t pretend to be Benji to get through every social interaction with a new person in the real world, so it probably would be hard. Also, he doesn’t want new superficial temporary relationships like the ones Rosa had abroad, in the first place. He did that all through high school and was just lonely and unhappy with it. He wants people who will stay in his life long-term. He’s been uprooted twice in five years, he wants to build a home now. He isn’t going to be happy traveling unless it’s with someone he’s building a committed relationship with. (Cough cough, home isn’t a place, it’s a person, cough cough).

- “and it only took me two years” New fear unlocked for Ben: what if Beatrice likes traveling so much she stays abroad for TWO years, or THREE?!?!?!

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There’s something else really interesting about the thesis that Bea and Rosa are mirrors, and Rosa is the dark Bea that never stopped hating Ben: eventually, Rosa DOES actually stop hating Ben. In BALTHDAY, they bond and she decides he’s really not so bad.

If Rosa and Bea are mirrors, then Rosa deciding she likes Ben after all serves to foreshadow that ultimately, Beatrice will forgive Benedick and everything will be fine between them.

Rosa, the mirror-Bea, forgives Benedick and immediately leaves the series forever. Beatrice, however, forgives Ben and stays. She chooses him. She brings him with her on her travels.

Rosa Jones takes on the ending of Rosaline from the play, who leaves for a year at the end/disappears from the series. But outside of the Rules plotline, Beatrice and Benedick are just themselves. They aren’t bound to the story of Berowne and Rosaline. They get to stay together.

And Rosa isn’t bound to the story of Rosaline either. Rosa waits for no man. She just gets to go on living her life.

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Bea and Rosa Mirror Theory

All the ways I notice in which Beatrice and Rosa are mirrors of each other in Lolilo:

- Rosa has a close platonic connection to one flatmate, her brother Balthazar, but their sibling relationship is strained by her having been overseas for two years and him not making the effort to call her.

- Beatrice has a close platonic connection to one flatmate, Peter, but their friendship is estranged because of the events of the previous year.

- Rosa just got back from traveling abroad for two years with a man called Graham who seems to be a platonic friend, or at least not a serious boyfriend.

- Beatrice will, after the series ends, embark on a one-year world travel adventure with Benedick, her boyfriend.

- Ben is startled by Bea suddenly appearing twice in NMTD, and Ben is startled by Rosa suddenly appearing twice in Lolilo.

- Ben is afraid of Bea leaving him, loving her travels more than him, and deciding she doesn’t care about him anymore. Ben dislikes Rosa because she just got back from traveling, loved it, and makes it known that she doesn’t care for him. She’s what Bea could become.

- Rosa gives Bea her ring, symbolically connecting them. She passes on her travel wisdom, also connecting them.

- Rosa wears a green dress to Balth’s party.

- Beatrice wears a dark green top and light green skirt to Balth’s party. (Ben’s shirt is mostly light green, with a bit of dark green, signifying that he’ll end up with Bea, who has light green in her outfit.)

- Rosa hates Benedick platonically and ends up changing her mind and becoming tentative friends with him in the end.

- Beatrice (thinks she) hates Benedick until she realizes she loves him romantically. She also forgives him at the end of Lolilo.

- Rosa leaves the narrative after Balthday, never to return to our screens, filling the function of Rosaline departing for a year at the end of the play.

- Beatrice stays in the narrative, but departs Wellington at the end of Lolilo (with Ben), also fulfilling the plot function of Rosaline leaving the lords’ castle at the end of the play.