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lizzydizzyyo · 2 months

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I think what's really compelling about House's absolute unwillingness to bow down to anything or anyone (the ethical board, the law, extra rich CEO, vindictive police officer, and even the patients themselves) regardless of how absolutely batshit and downright illegal his actions are, is because it's coming from a chronically disabled person, in more ways than one.

He cannot walk without agony or his cane. His chronic and severe pain led him down the path of deep Vicodin addiction until he also becomes psychologically dependent on it too (once, Dr Cuddy gives him saline placebo and it "works", in that he is not feeling his leg pain anymore for a few hours).

He understands it deeply just how desperate people can be when they're in pain and nobody can (or are willing to) help them—at least, so far, until they land on his doorstep. Which is canonically the most extreme step patients take when everything else fails—you don't just go straight to Plainsborough Teaching Hospital and to Dr Gregory House MD's office; you have to go through dozens of other doctors in various specialties and failed treatments too.

(Although that's a separate discussion about how doctors, particularly resident ones, are overworked and underpaid and redtaped by shithead insurance companies even if they do know how to treat a patient and want to).

He knows, from the bottom of his heart, that having such a painful and life-limitting debilitating condition is comparable to hell on earth, because he has one. He knows, that despite his disability being visible to everyone, yet no one wants to put an effort to help him deal with it—is also hell on earth.

Cuddy simply throws money at him and turns the other way to his Vicodin abuse, like she is saying, "I don't care if he takes 10 Vicodin pills a day or more, and I have to pay at least $1M every year for lawsuits, as long as he gets the job done," (and when they decide to go into relationship, she immediately drops him when he relapses, even if the reason for his relapse is her—although, yes, there is another discussion to be had about keeping yourself and your child(ren) safe being a priority compared to helping an addict, recovering or not). Wilson, as loyal as he is to House, simply either enables him or lectures him without going into the root of the issue and thoroughly help House that way. His subordinates, especially after the original trio, are simply too scared, too ignorant, or too ambitious to even approach the issue and choose to keep their job than help House (also another discussion to be had about how you can't help people who don't want to help themselves and so on).

So when he sees a patient who has gone through hell trying to get a correct diagnosis and treatment, he becomes laser-focused on doing everything under the sun to get to the bottom of it and cure the patient. He doesn't care if he has to break into countless of houses (haha pun) and collect insane and probably biohazard samples to do it—he absolutely will, no question.

Yes, hate-criming and being a bigot is his favorite hobby (still livid at the asexual ep and the production's choice for the resolution, let's just say I still have beef with Hugh Laurie and the entire production team for it), and so is insulting patients in so many ways that Shakespeare would personally fly to New Jersey and shake his hands if someone manage to successfully perform necromancy on ol' Billy boy. But House is no one if not dedicated. "Yes, my patient is an idiot, everyone is an idiot too, but I WILL cure their condition like my life depends on it," is basically his middle name.

Besides, you can make the argument that he is more compassionate than all the other doctors around him, because despite his absolute disdain towards some of his patients' beliefs and stupidity, he still works his ass off to treat them. He will call your god an idiot in 7 different languages while putting you in a diagnostic machine he manipulated the whole hospital into letting him use so that you could get a test which weren't available to you before. He will tell you that your currently-happy marriage will end in a bloody divorce and your ex will leave you penniless so love is not real while injecting you with a medication he had to hack the CDC's database for.

There are even episodes that show him being truly earnest, like the clinic duty scene where he is snarky as usual to a girl who seemingly stupidly had unprotected sex until she lashes out, and House is like, "Oh shit, this is above my paygrade", and immediately goes to Cuddy with a very serious expression and no sarcastic dilly-daliying, demanding her to transfer the patient to someone else because he is not good with "curing" rape case (interesting choice on the writers' part to make the patient insist to have therapy with House, though).

There is an episode about a very workaholic woman executive in a fashion company who has tremor and partial paralysis, and later on it's shown that she seems to tie her worth as a person to her corporate success while band-aiding her deep psychological issue like her suicidal ideation, and House genuinely asks her, "Do you want to live? I cannot help you unless you want me to," or something along the line.

There is also the cursed 9-year-old terminal brain cancer episode where Chase kissed the patient (ew), where at first it shows House being a usual misanthophe to Wilson and saying, "She is not brave, it's the brain tumor clot talking because it must be near the amygdala." Later in the episode, House sits near the patient alone, and compassionately asks her if she even wants to live, going through the rest of her short-lived but horrible agony, even if they catch the clot. The surgery to find and get rid of the clot is risky and can debilitate her even more, and this is why House is laying the decision to her hands. That she gets to choose. This is what truly reveals to him that she is genuinely brave (aside from the scan showing the clot to be so far away from her amygdala), but for the wrong reason. She is brave for her mom, willing to go through horrible surgery and drag out her already painful cancer-ridden life because, "My mom needs me". When everyone is congratulating her in the end, you can tell House has a bittersweet expression of both awe towards her bravery, and sadness that this 9-year-old sick girl has to bear the brunt of her horrible pain just so that her mother is not sad. That he couldn't convince her to be a child until the nearing end of her life.

The most interesting evidence of his compassion to me is the gunman hostage episode. It might sound weird because in the whole episode, he is depicted to first want to outsmart the gunman patient, then becomes laser-focused but only because he sees it as a puzzle, then absolutely selfish and dangerous because he volunteers himself as the last hostage and gives the gun back to the guy after the MRI. I do think it's true that his dedication to solving patients-are-just-puzzle-to-me conditions shines through in the episode, especially the scene of him returning his gun, but there is something else I catch when I rewatched it before.

When the gunman patient is put in the MRI because Cameron tells him a theory through the hostage call, the remaining doctors in the room including House are wary at the gunman but also hopeful. Yet, when the result shows up on the screen, he realizes that the theory is wrong and the guy let go his only bargaining chip for nothing. If you watch this part carefully, you'll notice that House actually looks pitying and sad at the gunman's disappointed demeanor and expression. He realizes he is going to be another notch in the guy's failed doctors list, and at this point (with the gun given away and even the best, most talented doctor also not finding out what's wrong with him), the guy has given up hope that he will ever see the day he will be cured, certainly not behind the bars.

Yes, his thirst for puzzle is House's big driving force in giving back the gun, but you'll be lying to yourself if you don't notice House's compassion for the guy because he doesn't want the guy to go out empty-handed, with absolutely no more hope because House knows once they step out of the door, this guy will never, ever be allowed to be in the vicinity of any hospital or doctor ever again in his life, aside from jail's bare-minimum exams and medications. House can't handle the thought of putting someone else through his own disappointment—that nothing works to help his leg pain. He especially doesn't want to be the cause for this gunman guy's case either. Even in the end when House realizes the guy is a fucking moron because he doesn't know that Florida is, in fact, in earthwide-horizontal tropical zone and this is what stumps most of the guy's previous doctors—House still gives him a subtle salute to the guy while being handcuffed and led away, almost to say, "Enjoy your healing and the defeat of your arch nemesis The Sickness™, glad to be part of it."

Majority of his drive to stop at nothing until his patient is cured is definitely thanks to his own fucked-up leg, even if there are some dialogues with Cuddy and Stacy Warner (House's ex wife) that seem to imply he has always been a misanthrophe whose hobby is getting into malpractice (or general) lawsuits. I wholeheartedly believe that after his leg clot rendered him disabled and with chronic pain, he became much more dedicated and obsessed with getting to the bottom of a patient's medical information, even for info that seems innocuous or irrelevant that always turn out to be important (probably more like a plot armor than established characterization, to be honest), almost like this is his method of relating to the patients in his own weirdly human way, and maybe a little bit (actually, a lot) of projecting.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

#house md #rec #media analysis #writing #english #me #i hv more to say abt this show like him making the mistake of not amputating his leg bc of his bias against (particularly visible)disabilit #even tho cuddy and his other past ortho surgeons suggest against keeping the leg because the clot is really bad and unsalvagable #years later even while having his leg it's now useless because all it gives him is pain and anger issue with a dash of opioid addiction #so when he sees patient being stupid or refusing a certain test/treatment he KNOWS in the bottom of his heart to be right #he just won't take it lying down & he will drag his patients kicking & screaming bc ''trust me i was an idiot too don't repeat my mistake''#but that's an essay for another day #whump #whump meta #disability

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anambermusicbox · 6 days

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Excerpt from 2024 人物 interview, found here:

For example, [while redoing the album] Qian Lei "forced" him to write a song. Qian Lei thought, this new album was extremely significant to him, so there should be a song Zhou Shen wrote himself. What's more, others have criticized him for not being able to compose. But Qian Lei knows he can---and quite well too. "It's not possible someone with strong emotions and a sensitive heart to not be able to write a good melody, it's completely not possible." Usually, Zhou Shen will hum out a melody and record it with his phone---sound engineer Xu Wei has listened to them and thought the melody lines were really good, and could absolutely be straightened out into an original song. But Zhou Shen always felt it wasn't good enough, and even said, to compose beside such a skilled composer like Lei-ge, it would be like an elementary schooler insisting on reciting their composition in front of a doctorate holder---so imprudent. His friends all know his personality---for a "master in self-deprication," being unduly humble was a daily occurrence. His old friend of ten years, lyricist 沃特艾文儿 said: "Not just composing---when I first met him, he even thought his singing was bad. It was so upsetting to me. I'm very relieved that he at least recognizes his singing ability now." Qian Lei has also listened to Zhou Shen's compositions before, and told him, isn't this pretty good? Zhou Shen said, don't mess with me. Qian Lei said, I'm serious, I'm not joking, it's quite good. Zhou Shen said, bye bye. Qian Lei said, bye bye yourself. Thus, when working on the new album, he would use every means possible to force him to write a song. One moment he would "hold a hammer behind him and get him to hurry up and write," the next moment he would set his mind at ease, saying "you don't have to overthink it, gradually the more you write the easier it will be. I'm here, so don't worry." This song was written at Qian Lei's home---once the first step of writing was taken, the rest went smoothly. Musically, Zhou Shen already had things in mind, and a few hours later, the main melody was basically set. Zhou Shen also participated a lot in writing the lyrics. He really liked the line "I can catch the flowers floating in the wind; I don't care whether I fall into the galaxy or into the mud." But "no matter how I sang it, it felt a little off, like it was missing something." He hummed it and hummed it, and out of nowhere added a soft, low, even a little "rude", "嘿，少管我," and "suddenly it came to life." Before, Zhou Shen had always wanted to write a song called "少管我." In his earlier years, he had randomly used these words in replies to fans, and in an interview where he talked about how his fans were never satisfied no matter what he changed his profile picture to, he ended up jokingly shouting "少管我, " and it then went viral. After that, Zhou Shen thought, as a singer, if one day I could turn "少管我" into a song, how interesting would that be. These past few years, he found a lot of people to compose its melody, but he always felt the melodies weren't quite what he wanted. The album that was cancelled also had a song in it named "少管我," but he still felt it wasn't quite right. Until now, it came to him like a "gift" from above. The first impression many people get from these three words is more or less rigid, sharp, harsh, stubborn, and capricious. But to Zhou Shen, a rebellious attitude is easy but truly knowing yourself is a long journey. "It's not necessarily about rebelling against the whole world, but you have to clearly know what version of yourself you want to be, and only then can you become yourself."

The day of the interview at an art park in Tongzhou, Beijing, the sky darkened a little. Zhou Shen took out his cell phone and played the unmixed recording of "少管我." The melody was light, "like travelling, very free." He shook his head to beat, and listened to the song he had listened to countless times one more time. "When I was writing this song and its lyrics, I didn't have "少管我" in mind, but in the end it became the "少管我" that I wanted." Moments like these, sparks flying, you think, "that’s right"---that's the biggest joy in making an album.

#zhou shen #my translations #uuuhhh this was supposed to be a quick translation why is it so long asdfASDFASD #this post is how i learned that tumblr doesn't like it when u have too many paragraphs in a row indented OTL #but IT DOESNT TELL U IT JUST GIVES U AN ERROR MSG??? SO ANNOYING ASDFASD #speaking of annoying.... all the ppl who criticize zs for not writing his own songs #which is ridiculous for SOOOO many reasons #and like?? there's so many artists out there who are just releasing any and whatever garbage (sorry lol) they come up with #and like!!!!! thats absolutely not bad or wrong at all #but u just KNOW zhou shen could do SO MUCH BETTER #if only he was a little more confident in himself AAAAAAAAA #AND NOW WE HAVE SHAO GUAN WO WHICH IS SO CATCHY AND ADDICTIVE AND SO MEANINGFUL ;;#PLS RELEASE ALL THE ORIGINAL MELODIES YOUVE RECORDED SHENSHEN ;;#U MIGHT THINK ITS GARBAGE BUT ITS TREASURE TO US ;;;;;;;;#anyways there's a LOT (A LOT A LOT) in this interview that makes me feel like screaming crying throwing up #i might?? translate more excerpts?? idk i dont wanna step on resident 大师 presume's toes in case they were planning on having a go at it LOL #but anyways this is pretty unedited sorry LOL #i need to sleep now zzzzzz

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