Honestly... yes? Absolutely yes? Psychological thriller limited series, by the guy who made previous awards darling limited series Baby Reindeer, on awards darling network HBO. Sleeper hit. A gripping realist series that examines interpersonal relationships. Starring two critically acclaimed actors playing against type. Every critic and awards predictor had Half Man near the top (Variety had Jamie Bell as number 2). The show is quite frankly awards season catnip, I think that's why I'm so baffled.
A lot of people are putting it in the same category as Hannibal (gothic melodrama) and IWTV (horror fantasy), but really Half Man is closer to Adolescence, Sharp Objects, etc. Also these are people in the industry, not randoms--this is the first time I've heard of Emmy voters being so put off by a show's content that they couldn't watch it. Incest, rape, and murder is hardly something outside of the award circuit's wheelhouse.
My genuine theory is that more than anything, the show is too obviously British. And according to articles, it seems to have been more of a hit across the pond. But yeah, honestly, I think part of the reason the producers let RG do seemingly whatever is because they took one look at the script and went awards, awards, we'll win all the awards
Okay I reblogged this post earlier in a flippant way but yeah this too actually! I mean... for one thing, the incest rape and dragons show was an Emmy darling for a while, so I don't think it's that.
But for real, it clearly was held out by HBO and a lot of prestigey media folks to be taken seriously as an award contender. It's not that I'm that mad or surprised... but only because like I said earlier, the limited series category has become an odd space to compete in with so much streaming content out there, a lot of drawing in big names. (Plus awards are generally nonsense, unless they're giving them to people I like.)
So it's nothing to get mad about! But I don't know why we should act silly and self-deprecating about it like it's some Niche Show For Freaks or whatever. Richard Gadd at least came away with a supporting nom and good for him and obviously!
First of all, Baby Reindeer - a show about rape, stalking, and ending up in relationships with your rapist and stalker - was a huge awards contender that practically swept the limited series categories that year it came out. So the idea that the Emmys are incapable of dealing with disturbing content, especially when written by Richard Gadd, doesn't hold much water. Which was also the bar that Half-Man was being measured against, and there's no denying that the show hasn't hit, for audiences or cultural commentators, the way the earlier one did. I think that's partly justified - the script for Half-Man isn't nearly as tight as the one for Baby Reindeer, and that ends up impacting on the whole show - and partly because it is somehow a story that is even more ambivalent about its heroes and villains, and about identifying acts of abuse and love, than its predecessor. So while there's no question that Half-Man would have been on Emmy voters' radar, I'm a little surprised that Gadd and Bell both got nominations, while also being a little disappointed that it didn't do better - in a different world, Stuart Campbell, Mitchell Robertson, and Neve McIntosh would also have been contenders.
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Introduction The inevitable has finally come to pass: Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s U.S. Senate race, has
Very good breakdown of why Platner fell apart. It does a really good job of highlighting how the constant scandals forced Platner to play defense rather than attack Collins' ties to Trump who has a 37% approval rating in the state.
Now that Platner has been shown to be even more of an SOB, he will almost certainly drop out of the race, which lead to Shah or Jackson to be the nominee, two canidates that don't have baggage that Collins can attack. Her whole gameplan hinged on Platner's scandals, without that she faces an uphill battle as Jackson and Shah will be able to tie her to Trump.
Just a reminder that this was obvious from the first scandal. The fact that he had a Nazi tattoo should have been disqualifying in itself, but even if for some reason you didn't have a moral objection to that, you should have had a pragmatic one. Pitting a candidate with such an obvious attack surface - one that drags down all Democrats and any attempt they might make to tie Republicans to rising fascism - against a Republican candidate with as many advantages as Collins has was an act of absolute foolishness. Every revelation that came afterwards just made him a more vulnerable candidate. The fact that his supporters kept insisting that he was the great savior of the left was not just immoral; it was stupid.
I agree. A huge issue is that up until he launched his campaign, there was no credible Democrat running since Mills wouldn't make up her mind. All the state legislators and executive officials didn't throw their hat into the ring for that reason. Once Platner entered the race, he had a ton of momentum and raised loads of money off of grassroots donations and had real enthusiasm. So at that point no one could blunt his momentum.
As the article states, the Democratic leadership in DC fucked up by telling everyone who was interested in running for the Senate "no", and they all ran for the governorship instead.
I don't see why any of this matters since the Nazi tattoo revelation came nearly a year before the primary, and was followed by many other revelations. There were months in which support could have transferred to Mills or some other candidate, but Maine voters remained loyal to the Nazi tattoo guy. That's on them, not the Democratic establishment.
Because he tapped into something real, namely frustration among Democratic voters in Maine. His "I'm working class" shtick (that is an outright lie) also played well with voters since it made him look like he's one of them (he ain't). People were willing to look passed his scandals (up until this one) because of his every man image, that he made mistakes like everyone else. What they were blind to was that he is also a
As for Mills, she ran a horrible campaign and her heart clearly wasn't in it. Not to mention she unpopular and 78 years old. And outside of her, there really wasn't any other candidate.
If the Democrats in DC hadn't cleared the field, there's a good chance Bellows, Shah, or Jackson throw their hat in, all pretty progressive and popular and in the case of Bellows and Jackson, they are electoral over performers. If Mills announced early in 2025 that she wasn't going to run, one or two of those aforementioned potential candidates would probably throw their hat in the ring rather than join a crowded Democratic primary.
"Tapped into something real". Look, man, if you're willing to overlook a Nazi tattoo for "something real", I'm going to judge you, not the politicians who supposedly didn't give you a better option.
I never said that I overlooked his tattoo (I literally called him an SOB), I was talking about Maine Democratic voters, so I don't know where you are getting this idea that I'm overlooking his tattoo or serial lying. Maine voters were willing to believe that he had changed, but I knew he was lying the moment his statement came out, and if I was in Maine I wouldn't vote for him (I'd have written in Jackson or Shah).
And there was real frustration among Democratic voters in Maine over the Party and that there was no viable candidate to take on a super beatable Collins. So in comes this guy that speaks to their frustration with no legit opposition, and that's why people gravitated towards him.
But now he's done (CNN reported he plans to drop out today) and the party will hold a statewide caucus to choose a qualified nominee that Maine voters will rally around.
Forgive me if I do not trust the wisdom of the same Maine voters who were fine with the Nazi tattoo guy through multiple revelations of racism, inappropriate behavior, and sexual violence, until they finally found a red line with rape. You can keep telling me that they had no choice, but they did, and they made one that was both stupid and immoral. I won't forget that.
Introduction The inevitable has finally come to pass: Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s U.S. Senate race, has
Very good breakdown of why Platner fell apart. It does a really good job of highlighting how the constant scandals forced Platner to play defense rather than attack Collins' ties to Trump who has a 37% approval rating in the state.
Now that Platner has been shown to be even more of an SOB, he will almost certainly drop out of the race, which lead to Shah or Jackson to be the nominee, two canidates that don't have baggage that Collins can attack. Her whole gameplan hinged on Platner's scandals, without that she faces an uphill battle as Jackson and Shah will be able to tie her to Trump.
Just a reminder that this was obvious from the first scandal. The fact that he had a Nazi tattoo should have been disqualifying in itself, but even if for some reason you didn't have a moral objection to that, you should have had a pragmatic one. Pitting a candidate with such an obvious attack surface - one that drags down all Democrats and any attempt they might make to tie Republicans to rising fascism - against a Republican candidate with as many advantages as Collins has was an act of absolute foolishness. Every revelation that came afterwards just made him a more vulnerable candidate. The fact that his supporters kept insisting that he was the great savior of the left was not just immoral; it was stupid.
I agree. A huge issue is that up until he launched his campaign, there was no credible Democrat running since Mills wouldn't make up her mind. All the state legislators and executive officials didn't throw their hat into the ring for that reason. Once Platner entered the race, he had a ton of momentum and raised loads of money off of grassroots donations and had real enthusiasm. So at that point no one could blunt his momentum.
As the article states, the Democratic leadership in DC fucked up by telling everyone who was interested in running for the Senate "no", and they all ran for the governorship instead.
I don't see why any of this matters since the Nazi tattoo revelation came nearly a year before the primary, and was followed by many other revelations. There were months in which support could have transferred to Mills or some other candidate, but Maine voters remained loyal to the Nazi tattoo guy. That's on them, not the Democratic establishment.
Because he tapped into something real, namely frustration among Democratic voters in Maine. His "I'm working class" shtick (that is an outright lie) also played well with voters since it made him look like he's one of them (he ain't). People were willing to look passed his scandals (up until this one) because of his every man image, that he made mistakes like everyone else. What they were blind to was that he is also a
As for Mills, she ran a horrible campaign and her heart clearly wasn't in it. Not to mention she unpopular and 78 years old. And outside of her, there really wasn't any other candidate.
If the Democrats in DC hadn't cleared the field, there's a good chance Bellows, Shah, or Jackson throw their hat in, all pretty progressive and popular and in the case of Bellows and Jackson, they are electoral over performers. If Mills announced early in 2025 that she wasn't going to run, one or two of those aforementioned potential candidates would probably throw their hat in the ring rather than join a crowded Democratic primary.
"Tapped into something real". Look, man, if you're willing to overlook a Nazi tattoo for "something real", I'm going to judge you, not the politicians who supposedly didn't give you a better option.
Introduction The inevitable has finally come to pass: Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s U.S. Senate race, has
Very good breakdown of why Platner fell apart. It does a really good job of highlighting how the constant scandals forced Platner to play defense rather than attack Collins' ties to Trump who has a 37% approval rating in the state.
Now that Platner has been shown to be even more of an SOB, he will almost certainly drop out of the race, which lead to Shah or Jackson to be the nominee, two canidates that don't have baggage that Collins can attack. Her whole gameplan hinged on Platner's scandals, without that she faces an uphill battle as Jackson and Shah will be able to tie her to Trump.
Just a reminder that this was obvious from the first scandal. The fact that he had a Nazi tattoo should have been disqualifying in itself, but even if for some reason you didn't have a moral objection to that, you should have had a pragmatic one. Pitting a candidate with such an obvious attack surface - one that drags down all Democrats and any attempt they might make to tie Republicans to rising fascism - against a Republican candidate with as many advantages as Collins has was an act of absolute foolishness. Every revelation that came afterwards just made him a more vulnerable candidate. The fact that his supporters kept insisting that he was the great savior of the left was not just immoral; it was stupid.
I agree. A huge issue is that up until he launched his campaign, there was no credible Democrat running since Mills wouldn't make up her mind. All the state legislators and executive officials didn't throw their hat into the ring for that reason. Once Platner entered the race, he had a ton of momentum and raised loads of money off of grassroots donations and had real enthusiasm. So at that point no one could blunt his momentum.
As the article states, the Democratic leadership in DC fucked up by telling everyone who was interested in running for the Senate "no", and they all ran for the governorship instead.
I don't see why any of this matters since the Nazi tattoo revelation came nearly a year before the primary, and was followed by many other revelations. There were months in which support could have transferred to Mills or some other candidate, but Maine voters remained loyal to the Nazi tattoo guy. That's on them, not the Democratic establishment.
Introduction The inevitable has finally come to pass: Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s U.S. Senate race, has
Very good breakdown of why Platner fell apart. It does a really good job of highlighting how the constant scandals forced Platner to play defense rather than attack Collins' ties to Trump who has a 37% approval rating in the state.
Now that Platner has been shown to be even more of an SOB, he will almost certainly drop out of the race, which lead to Shah or Jackson to be the nominee, two canidates that don't have baggage that Collins can attack. Her whole gameplan hinged on Platner's scandals, without that she faces an uphill battle as Jackson and Shah will be able to tie her to Trump.
Just a reminder that this was obvious from the first scandal. The fact that he had a Nazi tattoo should have been disqualifying in itself, but even if for some reason you didn't have a moral objection to that, you should have had a pragmatic one. Pitting a candidate with such an obvious attack surface - one that drags down all Democrats and any attempt they might make to tie Republicans to rising fascism - against a Republican candidate with as many advantages as Collins has was an act of absolute foolishness. Every revelation that came afterwards just made him a more vulnerable candidate. The fact that his supporters kept insisting that he was the great savior of the left was not just immoral; it was stupid.
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My local library, bless its little heart, has got a somewhat idiosyncratic ebook catalogue - lots of romantasy, nonfiction of a certain slant, for some reason, several thousand graphic novels that got dumped into the catalogue a few weeks ago - but it is pretty good about ordering books that get a lot of attention, which is why very shortly after November 2025 it had a full set of the Game Changers books. And, allowing for waiting lists, I have now read the whole series. So please take your seats for my thoughts on the whole series, as well as how the remaining books might be adapted on the show.
(Before I start, I will echo the fannish consensus that Ilya Rozanov, Bisexual Fairy Godmother of the NHL, is an annoying device that I hope the show will rise above. Particularly annoying because if you want someone to act as the Voice of Gay in the non-Hollanov novels, you've got Scott Hunter - who explicitly says that he's been getting private communiques from closeted NHL players, so why not have him show up for some of the main characters in the other books. And if you want the perspective of an NHL player who is still closeted and not entirely at peace with his sexuality, you've got Shane Hollander, who basically disappears between Heated Rivalry and The Long Game. At the very least, I hope if Ilya keeps showing up at opportune moments to encourage people he barely knows to come out, that the show will show his side of the conversation, and how it emerges from things he's been struggling with - showing up to the funeral in Tough Guy because it chimes with his own issues with depression and self-harm, for example. Now on to the books.)
Game Changer - I can see why this ended up being condensed into an episode and change in the show (which ends up doing things to the story's timeline that make no sense), because ultimately this is a proof of concept. What if gay NHL star + hunky love interest + closet drama + kissing on camera after winning the Stanley Cup. It works, and Scott and Kip are good characters, but while Reid is able to draw this out into a whole novel, I can understand the show choosing to make it into a B-plot.
Heated Rivalry - It's a bit hard for me to judge this book on its own, since I read it after watching the show, and - as is the case with a lot of popular fiction - when you remove a narrative voice that tells you what the characters are feeling at any given moment and let good actors convey that emotion, you usually end up with something much richer and more compelling, which is probably projecting backwards on the book. That said, the basic concept and the characters are strong, and I think it's a testament to how well Reid crafts both Ilya and Shane that even though the supposed rivalry between them doesn't get that much space in the story, you really feel the obstacles that prevent them from being honest with themselves and each other about their feelings, and the courage that each step over those obstacles requires.
Tough Guy - There's a decent concept here. After two books where professional hockey is treated as something fundamentally good, or at least repairable, it's a refreshing change to focus on a character whose relationship with the sport has become toxic - not even because of his sexuality as because of the role he's been expected to play on ice. And after two books in which the romantic leads were all either professional athletes or at least a fairly gender-conforming guy, it's an interesting swerve to focus on a love interest who is extremely femme. But all that falls down in the face of the fact that Fabian is a rather annoying character, and his romance with Ryan never really lands. This is, again, something that could be fixed in the show - get the right actor to play Fabian and a lot of the character's problems will go away - but in the book I was much more interested in Ryan's journey than his and Fabian's love story.
Common Goal - I genuinely do not get why this book exists. On paper it's an interesting swerve because it's about a guy who has done the thing that all the other closeted characters promise themselves, at one point or another, that they will do - put in his twenty, get his payday, wait for public attention to wane, and then explore his sexuality. And then he almost immediately meets the love of his life, so it's all fine, and there's no need to interrogate what it might cost to spend your youth denying a part of yourself. Also, I know that age gap discourse on tumblr has become wearying, but I found the combination of age, wealth, and general togetherness gaps between Eric and Kyle really distracting. Eric has his life so worked out that I ended up feeling that Kyle was being subsumed into him (including into a house designed precisely to Eric's specifications where Kyle only makes sense as a guest) rather than building something with him. It's not that I think no twenty-five-year-old and forty-year-old can have an equitable relationship, but these twenty-five-year-old and forty-year-old really feel like they would have been better off remaining friends with benefits.
Role Model - I was kind of skeptical about this concept (especially since I read The Long Game first, where this story is viewed from the outside, and comes off as quite schmoopy). But having read the book I can see why it's the one that fans are anticipating on the show. For one thing, there's a lot of mirror universe Shane Hollander stuff going on with Troy - he's a closeted gay man who, instead of trying to fly under the radar, decides to project homophobia as protective coloration, and he has a secret relationship that he thinks is love, but which turns out to be toxic and hurtful. The person he is at the beginning of the book is an interesting combination of shell-shock at how thoroughly he has trashed his life, shame at how he got there, and more than a hint of lingering bad boy tendencies. Harris is also a good character - in some ways another pass at Fabian, as a gay man who is not entirely gender-conforming - but with more of a sense of his own personality and point of view. And it's a nice change that instead of a story about two guys jumping into bed and then working out that they have feelings for one another, this one is a slow burn about two guys who are crazy for each other and not sure how to make the first move.
If I have a criticism of Role Model, it's that I think ultimately Troy gets off a bit too easy. All of his toxic behavior happens behind closed doors, and all of his rehabilitation tour happens in public, and as a result he ends up being embraced as an ally instead of someone who is trying to make his way back from being a bad person. It just feels a bit convenient that everyone who knew him when is either siding with a rapist, or, like Ryan, not interested in challenging the sincerity of Troy's transformation.
The Long Game - By far the most ambitious of the six novels, and on the whole I think the pieces are quite strong. Ilya's struggles with depression, Shane's difficulty accepting that the plan he came up with isn't making either him or Ilya happy, the difference between saying "I love you" and living it day to day. But as is the case with many romance novels, a lot of air comes out of the balloon when you try to tell the story of what comes after Happily Ever After, and Reid doesn't quite manage to weave the disparate pieces into a cohesive whole. (The plane incident, for example, works a lot better as a catalyst for change in Role Model than in this book.) I think there are enough good bits here that the show could make something more successful out of them, but the book itself feels a little underbaked.
(In case anyone's wondering, my ranking is Heated Rivalry, Role Model, Game Changer, The Long Game, Tough Guy, and Common Goal.)
So if I were planning the next couple of seasons of the show, I'd focus the second season on the missing year between the end of Heated Rivalry and the beginning of The Long Game - Shane coming out to his team, Ilya spending more time with Hayden and with Shane's parents, Shane meeting Svetlana, plus maybe some stuff from The Long Game that could be brought forward, such as Ilya's mental health issues. And as a B-plot, do Tough Guy, but use that as a springboard to introduce Troy in his asshole phase, including his secret relationship with Adrian, ending the season on his life imploding. Then do Role Model and The Long Game concurrently in season 3. I guess the real question is how much the show is willing to let Ilya and Shane be secondary characters, or even not fully dominant leads, and whether it can make the new characters as compelling as they are.
I feel for everyone who isn’t having the time of their fucking lives with The Vampire Lestat. Every week I clap and cheer for the antics of the world’s saddest buzzword-laden bisexual crash-out diva and his crew of the least healed men to ever grace the small screen. The songs are cringe delightfully camp, the wigs are a nightmare, I’m living my best life, I’m loving every second. Why the fuck would you have a blood shower in your tour bus. The onscreen mother-son incest is only like the third wildest thing happening in any given episode. It’s insane. I never want it to end
It really cannot be sufficiently stressed that a blood shower is completely unworkable. Do you have one of those coffee machines with a milk fridge in your office? Have you noticed how often the milk delivery jams so you can't make a latte? Now imagine that with a substance that coagulates as soon as it meets air. You'd have to either maintain a careful mixture of blood and anti-coagulant, or keep as much air as possible out of the blood tank (which needs to be periodically topped off, of course). And either way, as soon as it ends up in the pipes, it would start clogging.
And this they apparently put on a bus? With a switch so you can get water and blood out of the same shower head? I need to know which member of the entourage has a plumbing certificate, because they should be working on that job full time.
Also been turning over Half-Man the past few weeks
And keep coming back to how...idk I don't want to say Niall or Ruben was doomed. There were, in fact, many junctures where the show presented opportunities for either one of them to take other paths. Some were closed to them, some they ignored, and some they took only to take a bad turn down the road. But there is this persistent sense that all it all goes back to that alluded to shared childhood we never quite see. It was all seeded in trauma and social conditioning long before we see Niall and Ruben reunite as teenagers.
But what I still find really interesting is how the show rebutts time and again what we hear ad nauseum nowadays in response to dysfunction. "Get therapy", "seek support", "there are resources" etc etc. Bc not only were those things seemingly not provided to Niall or Ruben when their first traumas took place (the fucking gut punch that Niall's mom was a social worker all along), but Niall and Ruben do end up in counseling later in life and it doesn't magically fix them!!!!
The times progress. Things change so much from when they were boys (without a father, with a terribly abusive one). Niall being gay isn't supposed to be a big deal, he spends time in-treatment for a nervous break and receives favors and support from friends and family for years while he tries to course correct his life; Ruben reads a ton of books and even gets anger management counseling as part of his prison sentence as the justice system adapts more rehabilitative models as opposed to punitive. And Ruben still fucking kills Niall!!!
You could argue the therapy wasn't good enough. The meds were wrong. That their support systems were flawed. That it all just made everything worse. But I think that's kinda the point? Because honestly hear more often about people dealing with less than ideal support systems and resources than people who have perfectly supportive people around them and grade-A medical treatment for their trauma recovery / mental illnesses. That the bitter reality is that it's so much harder to unfuck decades of your life than "go to therapy".
I do love this little detail poking around the edges of the show!!! That Niall was straight up institutionalized (only when he got to the point of paranoid delusions and *weird* self harm), and it's alluded to that Ruben's been through some prison mandated anger-management type therapy and is actively on mood stabilizers at one point.
There *was* some kinda help or intervention there but for both of them it was in this context of like... whatever bare minimum social services you gotta comply with once something undeniably Bad has happened. It wasn't enough.
There's this dynamic we see over the course of the show with Niall (since his is the POV we're locked in) and more implied with Ruben, where he was absolutely FAILED by his environment and his mom and other authority figures when he was young, but that's not actually the case anymore when he's older. Shit is just ingrained and harder to climb out of by then, even when you can get help and *are* receiving support! Support from sooo many people it's crazy! This is a really clear throughline IMO with the homophobia part of it, but yeah it's there in the margins with the "go to therapy" stuff too in this very bleak and bitter way.
What I think this is circling around - which was also a core concern of Baby Reindeer - is how much even the enlightened, pro-therapy, supposedly gay-friendly present is not designed to deal with male trauma, and perhaps especially male trauma surrounding sexual assault. Ruben gets therapy in prison but I'm willing to bet Niall is the only person he's ever told about being abused as a child. Niall was hospitalized but he still walked out of the hospital deeply messed up about his sexuality (and vulnerable to quack conversion therapists). The system can't help with the ways that their sexual trauma hurts them, because it can't see that trauma where men are concerned.
The more I think about it the more I feel like the scene that is the key to the whole series is the tickling scene in episode one. Maura touches Niall, a child in her care, in a way that is not un-sexual. Niall keeps saying no, and is ignored. Lori just watches, and then says "I thought you'd like it because you used to have a crush on her". The idea that Niall is allowed not to want to be touched is unimaginable, because he's a guy, and guys are supposed to always be up for sexy horseplay.
Same for Niall losing his virginity to Mona(-slash-Ruben). He genuinely doesn't want to do it; even after Ruben gets involved and he becomes aroused, it's something he goes along with rather than actively pursuing. Later on he tells the story like it's a wild night, and only Alby is able to say that that's actually really fucked up.
One of the things that Richard Gadd is clearly very interested in is the idea society has that men are always down for sex, and never traumatized by it. And that victims of sexual violence - perhaps especially male victims who keep being told that they're not victims, and they actually wanted it the whole time - are not going to present in ways that are going to be easily legible, much less easily treatable.
Gotta say, the tumblr DS9 fandom's collective NOPE reaction to Bashir/Ezri, not even just in the context of imagining post-canon Bashir/Garak but just in general, is... well, it's inspiring, frankly.
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i actually dont think anyone told ruben about the wedding i think he woke up one day and could tell niall was pledging his life to someone that wasn’t him like a whistle that only dogs can hear
I mean it was obviously Lori. How else could she spend the rest of her life disclaiming responsibility for everything bad that has ever happened to him while everyone around her shifts uncomfortably?
realizing many people don't know about infinity train creator owen dennis' among us show from years ago, which has been trapped in unreleased limbo all this time and was just dumped on streaming this morning with no advertisement. they don't even know about its weirdly stacked cast
I was thinking about Niall and I can't get over how much of a cringefail little trash person he is. Truly no one does it like him (at least I hope not, if they do then I sincerely hope they get help 🙏).
Imagine being addicted to chemsex; being late to visiting your step-mother's deathbed because of it; vomiting on said dying step-mother; finally getting tested for STD's and having two; getting treated for them and told to not frequent the chemsex clubs again; doing it again right off the bat; trying to drive under the influence; driving straight into a lamp post right in front of the chemsex club; being brought to a police interrogation and having the worst lawyer in the entirety of GB (also said lawyer is your fuckbuddy or whatever from the chemsex club); being late to your step-mother's funeral because of all of this; (doing coke in the bathroom if I remember correctly?); seeking out a confrontation with your grieving brother's wife, who you've slept with and whose child is probably yours; telling that woman - the mother of your "illegitimate" child - to kill herself; being caught by your brother during this confrontation; later on trying to use your coming out as cover up for said confrontation; failing because you get so caught up in the moment that you simply blurt it out. And that's certainly not half of it. He's just truly such a useless little fuck-up, I love him.
Honestly, the thing that's probably most unbelievable about the gaps in the story that we don't get to see is the fact that so many good, cool, nice people remain friends with Niall for years and years. To me this is does more to strain my suspension of disbelief than the fact that Alby agrees to marry him, because Alby clearly has his own problems, and anyway it makes a bit more sense that you'd be irrational about someone you're in love with. But friendship is at once more intense, and more clear-headed, than love, and the fact that people like Joanna, Ava, and Butch all remain friends with Niall for years and even decades, while he imposes on them with requests to borrow money or getting himself into stupid legal scraps, is kind of amazing. This is an absolute trash heap of a person who does not seem to ever think about anyone other than himself (and Ruben). Why are all these cool people happy to spend time with him?
Obviously one thing that's happening in this scene is Niall's realization that he's partly responsible for both times Ruben went away and caused Maura so much pain (by which I don't mean testifying against Ruben - though that's probably what he's most guiltstricken by - so much as the fact that he pointed Ruben at Alby like a gun, and then did it even more so with Benji). But it also strikes me that this is the one and only time Ruben admits that ending up in prison was something he did to himself rather than something that Alby, Benji, or Niall did to him. So it's interesting to have them both experience a moment of self-awareness at the same time and then, of course, do absolutely nothing about it.
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It is unbelievably illegal and Niall could have destroyed the guy without even going to the police and exposing himself. Just the threat of doing so should have shut down the blackmail plot completely, because while Niall might have been liable for public indecency, the librarian was committing a sex crime (not just against Niall but against anyone who used the bathroom) and would have ended up doing time and going on a registry.
The problem, however, is that Niall is: a) so terrified of being seen for his full, human self that just the possibility of being outed shuts down all rational thought in his head, b) constitutionally wired to roll up into a small ball whenever a life challenge presents itself rather than fighting back, and c) not actually that smart. And it's quite possible the librarian realized that before selecting his blackmail target, since I think we're told that Niall was far from the only person using the library as a cruising spot.
It's kinda crazy how people complain about Lupita Nyong'o being in the Odyseey movie, when she is the only face of the entire cast that actually fits in a place like the Mediterraneo
I'm sorry, but this is just as wrong. Lupita Nyong'o's face is no more indigenous to the region of Greece than Matt Damon's. Lupita Nyong'o was raised in Kenya, which is around 4500km from Greece. Damon's ancestry is Finnish, Swedish, Scottish, and English, but if we pick the most western of those, that's about 2400km from Greece. People who are from Greece (generally) don't look like either Nyong'o or Damon. They look like Nia Vardalos or Maria Callas.
The way to look at this, I think, is that none of this matters. There could have been people with Kenyan ancestry hanging around the Mediterranean during Homer's time, just as there could have been people with Finnish or Scottish ancestry. And there is no one way for people from a region to look. More importantly, this movie is being made in 2026, and if Tom Holland can use an American accent (not even his real accent) and call his father "dad", then Lupita Nyong'o can be Helen of Troy.
Abigail Nussbaum @abigailnussbaum - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
