ep 9 notes
haven't checked the tag yet, need to sort through / document my thoughts first.
i'm a bit... disappointed, i guess? but i think that's owed to my expectations. after a week of collective theorizing i was (not so) secretly hoping for a sauruman VS gandalf style face off and so what we got felt a bit... pedestrian?
so i guess the gardener did hurt him after all, just not the 'shears-in-your-body' kind of inury? i honestly thought he'd stick to stalking.
speaking of which, i'll be disappointed if it's really garden dude using nayeon and not the other way round. nayeon being skilled in black magic and just using / playing men left and right to reach her own various ends and satisfy her needs would have elevated the character immensely. feels a bit disrespectful tbh.
speaking of disrespect, i suspected as much, but still... how can they have the mother not know? like honestly? how can her asshole husband tell the woman his son just broke up with about the illness but not his wife? i reeeaaally want hj to hex him... like, make him step on a lego everyday of his life. or have shampoo get into his eyes. something like that.
back in ep. 3 when sy saw hj in the dress and just last episode, we focused on his right hand. same happend during the proposal scene in ep. 5 and yesterday in the hospital with nayeon. i guess that holds significance?
were sy and ny ever intimate with each other?
i liked how they filmed the nightmare hj had.
also, how ambigious jg still feels. though i'm leaning towards ally who hasn't realized yet that he missed his shot. (also, does jg know the mayor is dirty? the mayor is dirty, right? playing footsie with the haum ceo? is that why he poached sy? to take on the mayor? and if he doesn't know, doesn't that just really undercut his character?)
did garden dude hit sy with some magic to make him black out? did that magic bring back his past memories? i thought he remembered when he woke up in the hospital.
but then i really don't understand the artistic decision process behind the scene in front of the hospital. that scene made (makes) me think i must be mistaken? how can he remember loving / killing her 300 years ago and the first thing he asks about is the in house messenger? (yeah, i know, he wanted her to go back on her word...) but even if he wanted to not let on, where were the longing / pining / loving eyes from last episode? the whole thing just felt very bland and weird.
also, poor rowoon. they obvs. didn't find hospital pants long enoug for him.
also, pls. don't push sick / hospitalized people. you don't know what tubes / needles they have sticking in or out of them. drama writers, find other ways to initiate physical touch. (just as lazy as drunk alley dude in ep 2).
i cared about ma and go for the first time. that scene was funny. i don't appreciate that once again show insinuates that a man is needed to keep a home in order, but since ma is freshly divorced it is plausible. for a moment i thought he was gonna choke her out or pass out himself. lol
also, re the hug, 'what kind of man asks that beforehand?'. the kind that respects boundaries and gives you the chance to say no? uncool ma, uncool show.
i guess no tentative friendships at work, but passive-aggressiveness?
loved the fireworks and the traditional music. was my favourite part of the episode. that slapped. wished they would have kept that music for the romantic scene.
there's still the option that him wholeheartedly embracing his feelings for hj brought upon the past memories. in which case that must be one long-ass hug. still, i'd prefer that scenario over the hospital-dream one. embracing his feelings because he remembers cheapens it a bit imo. its prob. the latter though seeing how he asked his mom about past lives.
his parents' bickering is getting on my nerves.
this episode felt really disjointed. i understand the cuts / edits were to not reveal too much, but at this point i'm just really annoyed by it.
for that reason bridge scene didn't have the impact it prob. should have had since i wasn't really sure what was going on?
spell scene too short, dress not as strange / pretty. but loved the music. also, what spell did she use? seduction?
i liked the child actors surprisingly much. i liked it even more that already as a child she had shaman capabilities.
i know tall people fall in love too, but man those hugs looked uncomfortable.
there's many other thoughts in my head but lastly: i guess only him remembers the past out of the two of them. i don't like that. at all. after 8 episodes it finally felt like they were on somewhat even footing when it came to knowledge about magic, spells, curses.... having only him remember once again means he knows more and is the proactive one, whereas she is only reacting and being driven by him. (but, if only him remembers, how can we as an audience see the things that only she can know? being brought to the shaman as a child? her premunition of the bloody hand?)
on that note, i hope the next kiss is initiated by hj. would be nice to see her express her desires / feelings. 3 kisses in and it's always him planting one on her. reciprocity is hot!! gimme gimme gimme!
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do you think max was characterised for a bait-and-switch final girl. preferring max than maxine, being boyish, seeming to reject the boys at first, being the one to defeat billy over steve holding his nail bat (check the castration fear threat when she slams it down to the floor between billy’s legs) while all the boys are prone bystanders. but this then falls away as her story prioritises her romance with lucas and female solidarity, and why she isn't able to escape her victim role coming to head in s4 saving herself
I don't think I mentioned this in my Will post but Max is absolutely a Final Girl, from what you said anon with her boyishness as well as her function in the story. S4 is the most slasher-y season (they even bring up Freddy Krueger by name, just in case we missed the reference) and Max is the final victim and does manage to survive, even narrowly.
There are some aspects like you said that do set her apart from common ideas of final girls although final girl-ism isn't necessarily a strict set of guidelines and there are plenty of other characters that bend the rules but are still considered to be Final Girls— Sally from Texas Chainsaw was rescued by an outside source and Sidney Prescott had a romance and even lost her virginity in the movie (albeit to the killer himself, and Scream is a film that acknowledged and tried to both embrace and subvert slasher tropes)
I see the part of your ask that asks if these parts of Max that set her apart from other Final Girls is what causes her to not be able to save herself and honestly anon... I'm not sure. I know that the Duffs originally planned to kill her which is... a decision I'm glad they went back on. And really I don't think that this eliminates her Final Girl status as I see the Final Girl as being able to endure and survive and even if she needed outside help and just barely escaped alive, she's still kicking!
Honestly I don't know if Max's rescue by El at the end of the season is meant to be a bait-and-switch and more of a half-hearted attempt to try and string two plots together. Sure it makes sense for El to want to save Max, but El's plot wasn't really about Max, Max's plot wasn't really about El, so it doesn't feel like a culmination of anything. Max was able to help herself out a little by figuring out how to "hide in the light" but after that she was just mulling around until El showed up. If anything it serves El's hero plot more than it serves Max's plot. There's some connective tissue there, but it's loose.
I know that part of Max's plot was about allowing herself to open up and let other people help her, this is a little flimsy because El wasn't the one she was keeping out and they were really only separated by distance. Would Max have shut El out if El were still in Hawkins? Probably. But the way more satisfying moment already came from Dear Billy when the people she was trying to shut out in the first place, Lucas and Dustin, not only get through to her with the music but she also makes the decision to run to them. So now with Max being able to let others in to help her, she needs to decide if she wants to allow herself to keep living.
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would love to write a poem about my sister and I making friendship bracelets while watching Saddle Club even thought it’s 2024 and we’re both over the age of 20 but idk how I’m meant to turn it into poetry.
would have loved to take a picture of us making bracelets together but I was too busy laughing at her character impressions and her swearing when she dropped beads.
would love to have a video of us making a heart with our hands at a concert together and holding hands during the slow songs but I was too busy trying to remember everything I was feeling.
would love to verbalize how much she means to me but I’m too busy laughing at references only we know which confuses our parents.
I will have to settle for remembering, but it is enough, and I hope she remembers too.
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Which era of Archie Sonic did you enjoy more? Pre reboot or post reboot?
Hmmm that's a good question. Idk I think I liked some of the writing post reboot better and I did like the new characters. I also personally think the removal of the love triangles specifically made the comic so much more enjoyable for me and opened up for better characterization for Sally. However, reading post sgw I did miss some of the old charcters (rip all those claimed penders ocs) and their now unresolved storylines, was sad at the loss of certain character struggles (like Rotor who was struggling between his health and wanting to be in the field again), and I missed how pre sgw had just some of the most insane or out of the blue plot developments/world building choices.
In terms of enjoyment, though, I'd have to say post reboot for the following reasons:
1. I enjoyed pre reboot for what it was more often than not, but I had my most fun during Flynn era. I liked how the Penders era moved things to being more serious, but I often felt like he had good and interesting concepts/ideas without the writing to back it up. Meanwhile, while Flynn wasn't perfect either, I felt like he was able to make a lot of those established relationships more believable to me, and while he also made some batshit plot choices he had more of the writing skills to back it up. This is all to say that aside from some stuff at the very beginning of pre reboot, it was a long while before I was able to really enjoy what I was reading instead of just taking things I liked where I could. Post reboot was a lotta Flynn, so despite the loss of characters and plotlines I enjoyed greatly, I at least felt like I could enjoy everything post reboot.
2. It didn't have all of those Sonic based love triangles. I know I know I'm a multishipper I ship Sonic with a lot of people but by god. I just could not take the Sonic/Sally drama anymore. Bunnie/Antoine was fine. Flynn actually made me believe in Julie-Su and Knuckles as decent partners. But by that point (and this is coming from someone who loved Sonic/Sally before reading the comic) everything going on re-Sonic and Sally's romance prospects with the opposite gender and each other was like beating a dead horse. And for Sally specifically, she had been recharacterized so so so many times pre-reboot just for the sake of drama that she often...didn't feel like her own character. So post reboot with the love triangles and the romance with Sonic removed I felt like we could really see who she was as a character and a clear vision of her ambitions/cares. I could feel like who she *is* wouldn't be changed on a whim for the purpose of plot.
3. As they say, people get better with practice. And while I thought some of his pre-reboot stuff was interesting, I felt like by post reboot era, Flynn had grown better at depicting the nuance of living under the eggman empire.
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So yeah I guess I'd say, gun to my head? Post reboot. But it's really more complicated than that. I did enjoy both a lot, and especially in the last like 80 issues pre reboot. Pre reboot was wild an interesting in a way that I enjoyed with characters and storylines I loved, but it wasn't always written amazingly and contained much too many ongoing love triangles and mehhh canon relationships to me. Post reboot gave certain characters more time to shine as characters, reverted the pre reboot growth of other characters, delivered some of its nuanced situations better, and was largely written nicely, but you could often feel that the post reboot team was now restricted in a much different way than they were pre reboot (like, pre reboot's struggle was keeping up with existing storylines and relationships and keeping things true to what they have been, but post reboot's struggle feels more like it may have had some of Sega's restrictions we see nowadays).
In the end, though, I miss characters and storylines from both pre and post reboot after the cancelation.
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