2009 → 2024

I dont think a single being has ever made me more upset than Boston at the end of that latest Only Friends ep, the second he opened his bitch ass mouth i had to stop the video for twenty minutes to compose myself

i can see people being insane about that one post so lemme just say:

narines coffeeshop au

nate is in charge of getting coffee for everyone (lilla, gi, loki, nareen etc. the of brotherhood basically), he's been in line for 5 minutes and is running on fumes when this PRISSY ASSHOLE just CUTS IN LINE like hes king of the fucking world and hes not even that sorry about it

hold on i was in the middle of typing that ojt and i got visions of nate giving himself a papercut just to drop blood in rin's coffee to "ruin it" and rin acting all disgusted and appalled and storming off but then the second he's around the corner he sort of guiltily takes a sip. just to see. just to have that. and then is so overcome by shame he just throws the coffee at a wall and runs away

this is so true rin would have his blood coffee and he'd enjoy it but he'd feel so much shame about that too. has to start taking iron pills but it's not the same

This episode has me joining the Nate Shelley defence team, this man needs some therapy and healing but he’s not a fundamentally bad person and I’m sick of people hating him for making a mistake!

emma you aren't allowed to read this post or the tags it's ted lasso spoilers.

fuck you nate shelley <3 (extremely derogatory)

The thing with DeMatties/Giffen JLI is that everytime I start to think I was too hard on it I get to another panel of Wally West or Guy Gardner sexually harrassing their coworkers

also…when beard breaks up with jane towards the end of season two, it’s not a magic fix. beard isn’t automatically better, nor is he close to being healed. for over a year, beard was enduring a lot of emotional and psychological abuse. arguments and threats against his property and isolation from his friends, etc…beard is going to take some time to get better. it’s not going to change overnight.

Today in "somewhere a villain is trying to book a flight to 'anywhere but here,'"

czw: night of infamy 8 14th of nov. 2009

Nate Shelley should DIAF and suffer forever

I remember thinking when S2 of "Ted Lasso" ended that they were definitely going to try to do some sort of redemption arc with Nate as a key part of S3, and also dreading it because I doubted they were going to pull it off successfully. I wanted to be wrong, because I really hated Jaime during S1 and they managed to get him through a good redemption arc and turn him around. But Nate's actions were much more repulsive than even the worst of Jaime's behavior in S1, and I got the feeling the writers weren't going to understand Nate's arc was going to have to account for that.

What I didn't expect was the show to just chuck all of Nate's character development through S2 out, pretend he had a personality transplant, and expect us to just forget. I have no idea why the writing tanked so hard on this but it did.

Nathan Shelley is a sexist and a bully. He always was a bully. The very first thing we see Nate do? He runs across the pitch to scream at Ted and Beard for being on the grass. Nate can't yell at anyone who actually works for the team, but he sees an opportunity to yell at people who aren't part of the team and he leaps at it, almost literally. (Should he be telling unknown people not to be on the grass? Yeah. He doesn't tell, he runs and screams.) It's played for laughs, of course, that the guys he thought he could chastise without repercussions are his new bosses. But we see this pattern with Nate over and over. As soon as he feels like he's in a superior position over anyone, he bullies them.

The whistle he gets at the end of S1 when he gets promoted? Ted has to take it away. I noticed when I was rewatching, Nate keeps blowing the whistle indoors. He's so addicted to having that power, Ted has to take his whistle away and give him one that doesn't work to stop him from doing it inside.

Obviously right off the bat in S2 he starts bullying Will, which just gets progressively worse during the season. He publicly bullies Colin too, and only apologizes because Beard makes him do it. It's a credit to the acting that we can feel how much Nate is seething through the apology and the scene with the jersey afterward, but Nate, the character, is enraged that he's been made to apologize.

Nate's also a sexist asshole. He makes a number of comments about women that are gross as hell during S1. The episode where he's promoted to being a coach, when at first he thinks he's being fired, he turns to Rebecca and calls her a "harpy." The OWNER of the club, he picks a specifically gendered insult to throw at her in his rage. And of course, he assaults Keeley. I know a lot of people don't want to call it an assault, but he knows full well Keeley is not interested in him, that she's in a relationship with Roy, that she's not coming on to him and is in fact going out of her way to do him a personal favor, and he forces her into a kiss anyway. The magnitude of that fuck up was really glossed over on the show and, unfortunately, by quite a few of the fans. Keeley being hot, or physically close to Nate in the scene, or open about sex and her sexuality, doesn't make it okay for a guy who knows 100% she's not interested or available to force sexual contact on her.

There's more evidence of Nate's sexism too. When he gives the speech before the Everton match, he specifically uses gendered insults on Colin and Issac, but not on Sam or Dani. He says Issac has been playing like a "big dumb pussy" and talks about Colin waxing his pubic hair (something associated with women and gay men, ironic given what we later learn about Colin). And again, this is played for laughs at the time. Colin and Issac were bullying Nate pretty badly (which is terrible! Not making excuses for that) at the beginning so we understand why Nate has an extra animus against the two of them. But he doesn't use gendered insults when he has a go at Dani or Sam, or especially Roy.

His speech to Roy actually made me think the show had a better handle on Nate than it turned out to have, because while he insults Roy, he adds the bit about "I'm worried what it's going to do to you if you keep it all to yourself." It made it seem like Nate does care, at least about some of these guys, which is important to being a good coach. But that care doesn't really make another appearance, and by S2 he's decided all the players are idiots and anything that goes wrong is their fault, or Ted's fault for not listening to Nate.

Bullies are always very aware of the heirarchy and where they are in it. They always know who not to piss off and who they can attack freely. Nate is like that from Day 1. And like most bullies, Nate cannot stand to be made fun of, and he cannot ever admit to a mistake. They run with the whole "wunderkind/wonder kid" thing and he repeatedly denies that he misspoke, because his ego can't take it.

What frustrates me is the show seems like they set a lot of this up on purpose. S1 Issac and Colin don't stop bullying Nate until Roy (at Ted's urging) headbutts Colin and orders them to stop. The bullies continue bullying until someone in power steps in and makes them stop. Nate bullies Colin in front of the whole team (Nate's a coach by then), but Beard (higher in the ranks than Nate, who also has the "I haven't told Ted yet" card) orders him to apologize, which he does grudgingly. Then he takes the fury he's feeling out on the person who can't fight back, Will.

The thing is, there is NO WAY ON EARTH Nate's bullying behavior stopped just because he became a head coach. There's no way his ego suddenly became capable of tolerating people saying negative things about him, especially on social media. Put a bully into a position of power over more people, they get worse, not better. I know they retconned this whole "oh Nate's a certified genius!" thing in there, but there is no way Nate, who was obsessively scrolling Twitter in S2, just got over that in S3, when he was running a whole team, which probably lost some matches, when presumably the fans blamed him as the head coach. But we never see that happen. There's no way he had an entire team and staff under him and he treated everyone nicely. This isn't how actual bullies work, especially when they are in an environment where the person in power above them is encouraging the bullying, which is exactly the kind of guy Rupert is.

We see a bit of Nate being a dick to Ted in S3, but no indication that he's struggling with managing the team or the coaches. All of that power-hungry, ego-obsessed behavior just kind of goes poof. It makes no sense. And somehow I'm supposed to not only care but be happy with all the time wasted on this bullying, sexist asshole dating… the woman from S1 who correctly rejected his attempt to pressure her into giving him his number?

And of course, Nate's ultimate sin, betraying Ted's personal medical information to the press, just sits there. Unaddressed. Never adequately dealt with. Trent pays more of a price for what Nate did than Nate himself does. I guess we maybe were supposed to infer that Nate regretted it? But we're never told it in any meaningful way. We're never shown that Nate grasps that what he did crossed a line from personal insult to risking the team's well being, as well as exposing Ted's private information to the public in a way that is wildly unethical and terrible behavior for a SPORTS TEAM COACH who has to manage personal information about other people all the time. They just handwave it as "Ted forgave him so it's okay."

Beard seems to be the only one who grasps the magnitude of it, and then Ted shames him into forgiving Nate near the end - and for no real reason. Nate contributes absolutely nothing to the team's overall status and success by being there at the end. The play Jaime uses, which Nate came up with, was from S1, so Ted would've used it even if Nate hadn't been on the sidelines. Having Nate in the clubhouse again helps nobody, makes zero difference to the team. My assumption is that Apple was already pressing to try for a spin off and they needed to somehow bring Nate back to Richmond.

Nate's dad also has a total personality transplant along the way here too, so it's a larger problem that makes me think they had something else in mind for how Nate's arc in S3 was going to go that had to get rewritten, but it's one of several pieces of S3 that were really badly done. Maybe if S1 hadn't been so well written it wouldn't stand out how uneven S3 was, but here we are.

Anyway, no redemption for Nate Shelley, sexist bullying asshole. May he die violently in a fire and burn forever.

NATE NOT SPITTING IN THE MIRROR!! we've come awfully far!!

Nate's line in The Last Damn Job "Eliot's killed" really hits me harder after writing NFHFCC; specifically while writing The Hitter Job :''''(

i've decided i'll upload all the rewrite's chapters to tumblr once i've posted them all on ao3. there's a lot so i'll probably space it out either throughout a whole day or throughout a few days-

I just scrolled through the gossip girl reddit page for less than 10 minutes, and I have come back a jaded son of a bitch.

IM STUDYING FOR SOCIAL STUDIES, NOT FUCKING MATH!!!!!!!!!!