"You don't fancy a drink, do you?."

Someone who is also doing a Thing

he had to make sure niall loved him the same way he loved niall first. he didn’t want to make him ugly. he touched niall tenderly and with love before he did it. he calmed niall down. he had niall match his breathing. gave him something to drink. he was loving in the best way and the absolute worst ways. he laid on top of him and cried and screamed i love you while doing what his dad did to him. by trying to be the closest to niall like he always wanted. but he couldn’t stop and i think ruben wanted to, but once that switch flips, he just can’t. it’s like he’s outside of himself. it’s why he had to put distance between him and niall’s body. because loving niall is loving himself and killing niall was killing himself.

Why are y'all single?

I never really sought to kind of understand masculinity or even say anything about it. It's similar to Baby Reindeer and the kind of stalking elements or the trauma elements in that. I just really saw a kind of subject matter that I thought was innately gritty, complicated, and I just sought to sort of dive in there and try to get as much interesting sort of material and creativity out of it as possible. I think I went into it exploring, I suppose, masculinity, male violence, male repression, and I came out of it realising just how complicated it is. I don't think I landed on even what an example of masculinity is and nor was I really seeking that. I was more just exploring the difficulty of male connection. And in the end to try and give it some explanation, I think would have been to undermine just how complicated it is. A lot of television shows, they always wrap up in a neat little bow, where you know exactly what they mean, exactly what they want to say, exactly what the character needs. Then they get that thing and everything's okay. And to me, you know, masculinity is going through… it's under such a microscope. It's going through such conversation, such flux, such change, that I thought it would do a disservice to wrap it up into a neat little bow, or to say something that was commenting so clearly on it, what it is. This is what a man has to be. This is what a man should be. This is what the problem is with men. None of that really rung true to to me. The very nature of the theme is fundamentally sort of hard to grasp and that's what I wanted to explore in the show.

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