🎶Watch The Last Rays🎶

🧵 THREAD: This #PrideMonth, don’t forget that the fight for queer liberation didn’t start or end with marriage equality.

💪✨ We need to keep fighting for our rights.

Here’s are a few examples:

💋 Before the 2003 Supreme Court ruling in Lawrence v. Texas, same-smex smexual activity was illegal in fourteen U.S. states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. military

👶 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t adopt in all 50 states. Before the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges, laws varied wildly by state.

🏳️‍🌈 Before 1973, the American Psychiatric Association listed homosmexuality as a ‘mental illness.’ In December 1973, a vote was successfully held to remove it.

🗳️ Before 1974, there were no openly gay elected officials. That changed with Kathy Kozachenko, who became the first openly gay American elected to public office in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

🎖️ Before 2011, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” banned LGBTQ+ people from serving openly in the military.

💍 Before 2015, LGBTQ+ couples couldn’t get married in all 50 states. At the time, laws varied by state, and while many states allowed for civil unions for same-sex couples, it created a separate but equal standard.

As for Gemma and her innies! We only really had them in Chikhai Bardo (one of my favorite episodes of tv ever) and Cold Harbor, and we got even less last season. The appearances we got did an incredible job developing her characterization in such little time, but once again I just want so much more! I want her solving problems and investigating shit, hellbent on taking Lumon down, while also dealing with the long term effects of the torture she’s been through and readjusting to the outside world. I’m relying on season 3 to dive deep for both of them.

I don’t regret any of the focus we got on Cobel, Milchick, Ms. Huang, Irving, or Dylan- all of that was amazing and I want more for them too. And Reghabi and Natalie are severely underdeveloped. I think we could efficiently develop multiple characters at once if we got more Natalie alongside Milchick, Cobel, Jame or Helena (in flashbacks if Helly’s holding Helena hostage- then you could include Drummond); more Dylan and Milchick (and Lorne!!) alongside Helly and Mark S in the revolt; more Reghabi alongside Gemma (determined leader), Devon, and maybe Cobel. I would LOVE to see Cobel and Devon interacting again now that their relationship has become much more complicated.

I think it would be really cool for Reghabi to continue to refine the reintegration process more so it becomes much more viable for much more of the cast, and then see different characters’ innies and outies wrestling with the decision and coming to a wide variety of conclusions and philosophies. Especially in contrast/comparison with the odd sort of natural reintegration they’re hinting at for Helly/na.

i like him! i love his writing, i think adam's acting shines the most when he is his outie, and i empathise with him a lot because of his storyline re: grief. i think it's brilliant how he's not written to be perfect, he's sort of a mess when we meet him, clearly struggling. jessica said in an interview about how severance is shot so we as viewers see the world the way mark sees it, and the current timeline of the show is a world where outie mark has made the decision to sever and stop feeling (hence the lack of color, how he doesn't turn the lights on at home unless he absolutely needs it to see etc).

that being said, mark also has moments that make him so endearing to me. he cares enough to know which days of the week to put out the correct trash bins. he lets petey (basically a stranger to him) stay in his basement because the greenhouse was cold. he didn't want eleanor to have the emotional baggage of sharing gemma's name (and calls her a princess). he eats cobel's cookies and calls them magic even though they're disgusting. yeah, he tears gemma's picture while he's drowning in grief and anger but he painstakingly tapes it back together again.

those are just a few examples but all of that, coupled with the fact that we follow him the most out of all the characters, makes him one of the most complex and well-written characters on the show. this is also not discounting innie mark, because i very much think when it comes down to it they share very similar personality traits. innie mark has less experiences than outie mark, which informs a lot of stuff he does, but also they have similar coping mechanisms (or lack thereof), their circumstances are just different (nature vs nurture).

i also like what adam said in this 2022 interview where he says mark is holding on to the grief because it's all he has left of gemma. and i think as much as a story about moving on from grief can be compelling, that is not really mark's journey to me. his journey is more of becoming whole again and feeling the grief, pain, whatever he decided to sever himself from. i don't know if i would go so far as to say getting gemma back was 'his second chance' but i think it's no coincidence that she was the catalyst for his reintegration in the first place. something about how he split himself in half because of her and now he's putting himself back together because of her again.

but i don’t just want to see a helena redemption arc.

i wanna see her have a psychotic crash out. like a full on 808. like the kind of crash out that happens when your highly always-expecting, always disappointed father, after years of chipping away at your child-self says he wants the same child-self back.

the kind of crash out that comes when you’ve broken parts of yourself and sinned for a love that will never be yours.

the kind of crash out that comes when you were forced to dim and finally extinguish that childhood fire only for you to be told, that all along those years, your father wants the same childhood spirit back. the childhood spirit HE crushed.

the kind of crash out that comes when you’ve moulded and moulded and remoulded parts of your body and yourself, quite literally, to fit into his ever-changing human-sized hole where his “perfect” descendent of Kier should belong just to find that an inner version of yourself, essentially your childhood self, a freer version of you, the version of yourself that has experienced more love in less than a month against the THIRTY whole years of your life, fits that hole better than your entire lifetime of restriction, oppression, control, sacrifice and suffering.

the kind of crash out that comes when you’ve given up everything, your heart, blood, tears, sweat, your own fucking body from the skin to the soul only to know that your father never loved you.

the kind of crash out where all you can see is blood red.

i want to see her full on covered with blood, eyes with psychotic anger for all the childhood abuse she’s suffered. (maybe not quite literally but you get what i mean)

i know people had talked about the satisfaction if helly stabbed jame eagan with a pen. but i want to see helena do it. i need to see helena do it.

because there is just something so beautifully destructive about a character so morally grey like her. something so poetic about the justice served when jame eagan dies in the hands of his own blood and creation, and NOT the version of her that she created, NOT the version of her that severance created, NOT the version of her that was born despite the cold of Kier, no, killed by the version he created, he oppressed, he moulded, he made. something so tragically pleasant about a tortured daughter killing her feelingless father. something so frankenstein about a monster, a creation killing her own creator for the torture she had to go through for just being born.

i want to see her break. change. transform. turn into something so fiery, the same fire jame eagan had wanted, but the same fire he will fear.

something about her to truly show him the monster he created.

and not because helly experienced actual friendship with dylan, or the love of real fatherhood from irving, or the unconditional love of a real lover from mark. all the things she was never even born with given to a version of her that never suffered the ruthlessness of her jame.

but because her own father spat at the person he created.

i want her to do what her inner consciousness’s REAL father (irving) wanted to do and that was to burn this place to the ground.

because helena eagan is a woman scorned by her own bloodline.