How running away to another continent can heal your broken heart.
Two years ago 'The Blacklist' broke my heart. Being involved in that fandom for 10 years, the finale left me with something I never recovered from and somehow changed me. I quit writing and tried to move on, and promised myself this would never ever happen to me again. I would never let a stupid TV show do this to me again.
Then a year ago I started watching Hacks. It took me while to ship Avorah but I think it was inevitable, which is basically Jean's and Hannah's fault. In these 4 seasons we got everything Lizzington could ever have wished for.
When Deborah had her earth shattering speech in 4x9 about how her dream has changed, that deeply stirred something in me.
I took my entire savings and flew to New York to see Jean's play at studio 54. I spent two lovely days there all alone, in this big city that I still love so much.
I went to the Central Park, stalked Spader's house and kinda closed the Blacklist chapter for good and let go.
I got to see Jean twice at the stage door. The play is intense and tough. The issue of abuse is hard and difficult to take. Yet Jean is funny, heartbreaking and simply amazing. I sat very much in front of the stage and I swear she looked at me several times. When she signed my playbill after the show, I told her I had traveled from Germany just to see her. She looked at me, touched my arms and said: Are you serious? I said: yes, I'm here only for two days. She then said: well, welcome to New York then. Told her thank you and how intense the play I thought was. Got a thank you back and then she moved on to the next person in line.
Absolutely star-strucked, dazed and deliriously happy my trip had this outcome, I'm returning home as I write this.
Just having met her heals so much that has gone wrong in my life for quite some time now.
And once I'm home, I hope I can continue writing fanfics.
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I never had a best friend. So, I just relied more and more on the Little Debbies, and it was as much for me as it was for them. But then I met you. And I didn’t need them so much anymore. Well, makes sense. I’m your number one fan.
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I've seen your posts in the tag and would love to take a stab at responding to this SOS!
And I really hope you don't mind a cringe reblog-with-additional-text because I actually have lots of thoughts on this and why Deborah's choice (all of Deborah's choices) in the finale worked beautifully for me and didn't at all detract from how much she loves Ava.
This clip that's been going around on tumblr, from a Vanity Fair interview with Lucia Aniello and Jen Statsky, really reinforces and puts words to how I felt during the finale:
(The whole interview is fantastic and includes a truly incredible joke about a Hacks reboot that opens with Ava and Deb at Dyke Week in Provincetown. If you need help getting around the paywall, use archive.is or similar 😇)
I fervently believe that Deborah should have the right to go through with assisted suicide. For her, it's about not wanting to go through the undignified and painful and messy experience of harsh cancer treatments and it's about what that would be like from the outside looking in, that whole control thing. She's scarred from losing a friend to AIDS and her memories of his decline, scarred from her own experiences being misunderstood and lied about and even about her own complicity with those lies at certain pre-Ava parts of her career. Her grasp on her own legacy is often tenuous, but it's never been as strong as it is now, coming off the dual triumphs of her Central Park show and opening The Diva. Deborah is a selfish person (notice that nobody brings up DJ or her grandson specifically when appealing for her to reconsider), but this decision is bigger and more complicated than that because she's always been open about how her image as a public figure is incredibly personal for her. Choosing to die is about choosing to have the final say over her troubled relationship with her body, her troubled relationship with her career, and even her troubled relationship to how other people will remember her. It would have been a kind of victory, unleashing that ultimate control over her life and death.
The raw, overwhelming pain of Ava begging Deborah to get treatment and attempt to live longer is 100% meant to make us all feel distraught. We've spent five years watching the love between them grow, watching their creative partnership survive both external and internal threats, watching them develop a shared voice, and knowing that neither of them value ANYTHING more than the creative energy of that relationship. No matter what happens to Ava in the decades ahead, this relationship with Deborah is so much more than the spark that sets her career on fire--it's really a foundational, intimate, essential thing. Deborah is valid for wanting to choose when she goes, and Ava is valid for feeling abandoned and scared, and the show has to walk a really thin, delicate line to honor both perspectives simultaneously.
(Cutting for length, just a few more paragraphs behind the cut)
And I think they pull it off. That moment when Ava begs "Please don't leave me"? Look at Deborah's face! She's less made up than usual, it's early morning after a sublime night out, she's resolute yet vulnerable, and she's confronted with the fact that the person who understands her and loves her more than anyone else in the world cannot fully understand her now because of that love, because of how much she wants to keep feeling it as a living thing. That quiet "I'm sorry" is just gut-wrenching.
It's really important that this moment moves Deborah deeply, but that it isn't the moment when Deborah changes her mind. She believes she is making the right decision, and it would be something worse than a compromise to relent and give Ava what she wants (so badly it's a need) while she is still actually unwilling to go through treatments. But every moment they've spent in Paris is still accumulating within her. The videos she takes on her phone even though she won't be around to rewatch them (Ava will). The utter freedom she felt on that dance floor, eyes blissfully closed to Ava's moment of feeling sick with anticipatory grief. And in that moment in the hotel, she still has plans for her time left on earth, still has new stuff to live for (like the hand-size reveal, which she's played the long game on for five years).
At that moment, I believe she both has and hasn't let it sink in what death really means. It only sinks in fully after Ava (who is also changing and accumulating memories and growing) agrees to accompany her all the way to her death. And when she and Ava start writing jokes about death in earnest. At the train station, Deborah allows herself the pleasure of a second croissant, but the pleasure of riffing on funny things with Ava is so natural and ingrained that it doesn't feel like a conscious choice. Saying yes to Ava's pleas would have been a decision that required some amount of compromise, some amount of disappointing herself. But when she's basking in the joy of creating something new with her person, so much so that she pulls out her notebook? The choice she makes to keep living is still a painful one to make, because she knows her life is going to involve some very painful things, but it's no longer a compromise or a weakness for her to make that choice.
It's not that she didn't value Ava's love for her "enough" to want to stick around. Rather she was still focused on her life's primary value being about a controlled legacy. When she realizes she can't actually imagine herself choosing to quit writing with Ava and laughing with Ava, the things she is aware of valuing about her own life shift to accommodate all the pain and love and uncertainty that go into a real, intimate, public-and-private life as a comedian. Comedy is Deborah-and-Ava; Ava-and-Deborah are comedy. By ceding control one final time within the show, she chooses herself and Ava and the hope of more laughter sourced from the pain and joy she's signing up for. By constructing Deborah's decision in the precise way it did, the finale solidifies that Deborah's generative relationship with Ava is the most valuable aspect of her legacy of all. And she and Ava might be the only two people who fully understand what it is, and that makes it even more beautiful.
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