Cuteness Beam

She did.

And within 2 weeks she met a lesbian couple who saw her from across the [location redacted] and wanted to make her their third and spitroast her.

That's right, with a fraction of my power i made a friend's dreams come true.

cis people love to hard default to they/them for any and all transfems no matter how hard you gender her

And then it all precipitates, crashing down around you at once. Maybe it's something exceptionally terrible that forces your baseline to reconsider new lows, but it's almost even more dangerous if it's something finally feeling good. Because then you're forced to acutely see just how bleak everything had really gotten in clear light again—the full, jagged depths of the hole that's been crumbling away at the center of your life for so long. The effort of filling that back in with new, reinvigorated meaning can feel so fucking terrifying and risky, safer to just let the fog cover it all back up again...

tell someone "congratulations!" tell them "I'm so happy for you. I know you've been trying for a really long time." ask them "do you need help with anything?" throw them a party with loved ones where you all give them some gifts in acknowledgement of how expensive it is. celebrate how far along they are. take photos with them so they have a record of being loved while their body changes. allow them to voice fears and doubts and anxieties about how it'll go, and reassure them that they'll get through the intense medical procedure coming up & you'll be there for support no matter what. let them tell you about the gross parts and laugh together. really listen to them when they talk about how amazing and profound it is that the human body can do this. share in their excitement for beginning a new stage of their life.

It's really, really good, but I think for a lot of people it was so subtle they never realized it was happening. They got boiled like a frog. Episodes 1, 2 and 3 all have big action scenes and a central Adventure Plot to be resolved... still, every episode has a subplot where deeper emotional conflicts happen during the adventure.

However, this structure instantly falls apart by episode 4, when Caine takes a suggestion and has them work in a fast food place. That episode has no action scene, no "adventure plot" to solve, they just have to work a job for a whole day. The entire episode is just character drama. Then by episode 5 the structure is just gone. The lightning round format means none of the adventures even have time for a plot, it's just scenario, scenario, scenario, one after the other, and it becomes clear that the real point is the character drama, the history of these people, their traumas, the way they interact.

Episodes 6 and 7 (haha) are the last dying gasps of the adventure format. Episode 6 doesn't have an adventure plot beyond "shoot eachother" because Caine literally doesn't care anymore, and so the episode is really all about exploring the tenuous burgeoning friendship between Jax and Pomni, again focusing almost exclusively on character drama. And episode 7 is the calm before the storm, the characters trying one last time to get out of the circus, the show's last attempt to be formatted like a normal story that adheres to narrative convention, only for the complexity of Pomni and Jax's characters to deny Caine the narrative format he wanted.

The Last Act is not an action movie. I understand why they included episode 8 with it, because 8 and 9 form a pretty cohesive single two-part episode. And it is ALL character drama. The show was never about running away from monsters or going on adventures. It's about people, exploring their dysfunctions, the struggle of relating to eachother. That's all the movie is.