Rogue Magazine

"You're here."

“i just hope none of that gets in the way of our friendship” [immediately tries to start a fight that challenges aforementioned friendship] …

i could really go even deeper into it and say this was roy doing the exact regressing he’s aware of himself doing and wishes could change. and maybe part of it is being scared to have this new intimacy with jamie. he subconsciously self sabotages it even though jamie is important to him. he’s never had a friendship quite like this and it makes him want to turn tail and run. so he provokes him instead of being mature which brings out the ugly side in both of them. back where they started, where they’re familiar being. where it’s easy, not like all the vulnerability they’ve slowly kneaded out of each other. but if he’s honest with himself he knows there’s something more about jamie he can’t bare to admit.

Okay no but full honestly this is EXACTLY why I WASNT upset with this.

I WOULDVE been - if it hadn’t been for his little spiel with the diamond dogs. That lays it out succintly for me, and ties right back into earlier in the season with his backslide re: asking about Keeleys video:

That he’s still Not There yet. He’s trying, and he’s made progress, and he’s taking these huge leaps forward, but every so often there’s a few more steps back.

It’s imperfect and nonlinear and beautiful and human, which is exactly the consensus of the DD’s.

I don’t think it was accidental at all, and it was a great way to say “hey, this guy/these guys aren’t done yet. We might be wrapping up this story, but they don’t stop growing and changing and failing and still trying to be better.”

I think Phil Dunster agrees:

DEADLINE: The finale offered one final reminder of what Jamie and Roy’s relationship dynamic looked like early on when the two got into a fight over Keeley. What does the future hold for Jamie and Roy? We saw them on the lawn in the flash-forward, still looking like best friends.

DUNSTER: It’s funny because it ended with the resolution of it. And yet, we’re thinking about the future of them, and I think that the good thing about it is that if there was an episode 13, 14, 15, 16, we might see them come back up again and they get over this thing, and we would understand that, well, it was just part of a blip that they had together in a longer story of them being friends.

I think that they are in a good place, and I don’t think we could want much more from them in terms of their emotional progression. It’s nice to see that they have some resolution, but still, it’s not quite fully there yet, it’s more interesting that way.

BREAKING NEWS: phil dunster is an official throuple supporter

This man, though. <3

"You’re not only heroes at home, you’re heroes around the world for standing up to tyranny. And you show to the rest of the world that might doesn’t make right. That if you have justice on your side, you will prevail"

He’s such a gem.

‘Rebecca, Jamie, Colin, Isaac and even Higgins all make very questionable choices at the start of S1 - one may even argue just as bad as Nate’s actions in s2 - but our capacity and desire to forgive isn’t early as seductive as our desire to judge.’

holy shit go off Nick

Ted Lasso is a portal fantasy

I know, I know it's not in any way a speculative fiction show. I know. Bear with me for a second. Ted Lasso is a portal fantasy, but the real question is whether this is the story we know from the Wizard of Oz, or Mary Poppins. Ted himself is at once Dorothy and Mary, and I think my reaction to the end of Ted's story, specifically, depends on whether you take the show at it’s title, that it’s about Ted Lasso (Dorothy) or take the show at Ted’s word that it was never about him (Mary Poppins).

To Ted, he is very literally Dorothy.

He’s away from Kansas, he’s surrounded by the reminder that “there’s no place like home”, and he spent the finale wearing honest to god ruby red sneakers. The evil wizard stalked down from his curtained owners box and was removed from power. The lion got her courage, the tin man for his heart, and the scarecrow got his brain, and Dorothy went back to Kansas (leaving Toto behind). But unlike Dorothy, we didn't really get the build up that Ted had to go back to Kansas to get what he wanted -- Henry back in his life. Rebecca even offered him the choice to stay, and the means to bring Henry and even Michelle back to London with him. Exactly zero compelling reason was offered to explain why Ted wouldn't take that offer. But he's Dorothy, in a portal fantasy, and that's what Dorothy does -- she goes home. It is the ending of the vast majority of portal fantasies, no matter how much it will fuck up the protagonist (there's a whole series detailing that damage and undoing it by tumblr's own Seanan McGuire which I highly recommend btw). To me, this is an unsatisfying ending for Ted himself, since no reason was given for him to turn down Rebecca's offer.

However.

To the Richmond family, Ted is Mary Poppins.

One of the complaints I’ve seen about this season is that we don’t know where Ted is, emotionally. Much like Mary Poppins, whose internality as a character is, at best, an afterthought. Mary Poppins is not the point of Mary Poppins. The children she helps are the point of Mary Poppins, and when she leaves at the end, although you’re sad to see her go, you know the kids she left there have grown as people and will continue to grow by her example and her benevolent Julie Andrews ways. And by and large, you don’t really worry about the place Mary Poppins goes to. She’s Mary Poppins and she’ll do what she does and ours is not to question etc. ("Mary Poppins isn't a portal fantasy" yeah, I know, technically, but it's kind of an inside out portal fantasy since there's a character who came from another kind of realm, who swept in to be the answer to some problem, and then went home {or, wherever}; it's just we're seeing it from the pov of the locals rather than the person from the other realm.)

The Richmond Team have all grown as people under Ted's stewardship. As we’ve seen in the character progressions particularly of Roy, of Nate, of Rebecca, they will continue in the Richmond way that they’ve developed. Forever changed by Ted sailing in on his parasol, missing him certainly, but able to continue. More narrative weight is given to the Mary Poppins side of the story, and in this scenario, I take much, much less issue with Ted's the character's ending.

In conclusion, Ted Lasso is the story of Mary Poppins staring Dorothy Gale in the titular role.

The response to "ace people are just virgins who can't get laid!" Shouldn't be "ace people can still have sex!" but instead " being a virgin isn't a bad thing."

The response to "aro people are just heartless freaks!" Shouldn't be "aro people can still feel love!" And instead be "not feeling love or other emotions doesn't make you a bad person."

Instead of pushing the idea that aspec people can be "normal like allos" we should instead be trying to normalize aspec experiences. Yes aspec people can be normal because aspec identities are normal. Some aros fall in love. some aces have sex. but they should not be the only valid aspec experiences. We should not use these experiences to make the aspec identity more palatable to amatonormativity and allos.

Misha in Ukraine

Credit

started from the bottom, now we're here!!

THE BATMAN (2022)

You don’t care about your family’s legacy?

Ok but the kebab place is - in Roy's own words - Roy's church and he's taking Jamie there when in season 2 he didn't even want Ted there?

would love to hear thoughts in the tags!

Universal basic income is essential if we want to build a bright future in the age of automation. 

Seriously. The 40-hour work week was codified in 1940, before computers did anything. Per-hour productivity has more than quadrupled since then, but we’re working even harder, to live not all that much better. It’s absurd.

No, it’s not absurd, it’s deliberate. The ruling class wants us to work as hard as possible, so they have profits to skim and pile up.

I’ll reblog this every time I see it:  Before the 40 hour work week, we had the 80 hour work week, the 100 hour work week.  What got us 40 hours?  Unions.  Want a work week that reflects productivity levels?  Unions.  Want UBI?  Unions.

and that's a wrap on Kripke era SPN! I thought about taking a break before diving into the Gamble era, but honestly I have a lot of fic I want to write and I feel like I need to finish this close read rewatch before I'm ready to really tackle longform post-canon fic, so I'll be jumping right in with 06.01 later this evening or possibly tomorrow. in the meantime, though, I've got a few observations to make before I move on.

I'm not really planning on publishing my full data sets for the info I've been tracking in my spreadsheets, as it's mostly for my own personal use, though once I finish this rewatch I may write up analyses of specific pieces of data I've been gathering. since I've wrapped up the first showrunner era, however, here are a few little morsels that might be interesting to people other than me:

Con O’Neill, MCM Comic Con panel with Nathan Foad and Kristian Nairn, London May 27, 2023

Q: As someone who was a teenager for Section 28 Part 1, I just want to […] say a massive thank you for speaking up about Section 28 Part 2. What’s it been like at the moment, working on a show that has got such cool and interesting things to say about gender broadly and masculinity more specifically?