do one good thing before you go

are there people following this blog who don't know about my eternal boundless love for transfem v!owen..... my heart and soul, my darling beloved, the only light in my life-- [yanked off stage by a comically large hook]

[sounds of a scuffle]

[staggers back on stage covered in sticky notes] okay so i remembered i talk about her most on discord and not Hashtag On Here. but no yeah i fucking adore this headcanon. it is, as with all of my v!owen opinions, totally inextricable from the morass that is my own personal feelings about [gestures uselessly at all of me]. but i Do think everyone following this blog should already know why i started thinking about tfem owen (that one conversation with scott while mining in session 1), and i think it just Works with the way that vampirism for owen was this ~opening up of possibility. louis gets to be this guiding light for owen in all things including matters of gender! AND it forever returns to one of the big things i love to think about with vampirism in vsmp, which is the question of what pushes people into the position of taking a clearly rotten deal? how isolated, how desperate does someone have to be to take [dying and being reborn as an ever-starving thing] as the answer to their problems? what are the circumstances that facilitate someone becoming willing to make that trade? what if you could have everything you wanted, become the person you've longed to be all your life, how high a price are you willing to pay? in the canon case, owen escaping a body he doesn't want, a body that hurts him, is strictly about his disability, but it's hardly as if it doesn't work to add gender stuff to that.

MY OPINION IS THAT IT'S GOOD. like sorry i just . okay bullet points*:

first thing i said after the movie ended was "knowing this movie was adapted from a book feels like it explains so much?", which is still true on reflection. there's a sense of things happening around and to this main character, like the movie's About him but more in the way a sequence of revelations or portraits than A Story With A Plot? (although i wonder also if i'm missing cultural/historical context given the movie being set Quite Specifically in 1970.) to me there is a sense of some broader story going unspoken in favour of unravelling This One Guy Specifically. do i think the main character has goals? rhetorical question. i think he has attachments that create short-term goals for him but not long-term goals. and do i think there Needs to be a long-term goal -> plot? i think that would make it a different movie and i liked this movie as it was

read a review that describes the titular prince as detached -> lack of dramatic punch but i did like that. something if not empty then obscured about him. which works really well with the visual motif of mirrors -- interactions / eye contact / revelations / advancements seen only reflected in a mirror, mirrors where the edges are warped or blurred. on the platform i was watching on, the blurb described the prince as "narcissistic" which was sort of... hm. clarifying? mirrors are for appearances, mirrors are for looking at yourself. the first instance of on-screen rape + the flashback to the prince's grooming both involving this mirror motif -> mirrors for trying to make sense of oneself externally (trying to see how you must be desirable* from the outside), dissociation during violation (the completely dream-like quality of that first shot into the mirror!!), understanding yourself as an image (which can then cultivated and bartered with)

speaking of cultivating an image. the titles. the prince. the stud (which all the blurbs call "the stallion"). the argentinian. yeah i'll fuck you but i won't call you by an actual name. i'm so ill-equipped to talk about....masculinity, queerness, and masculinity and queerness inside of prisons specifically? but i think the titles are tied to the broader thing where there are specific ~demonstrations of intimacy (that is necessarily gay) that are allowed vs the ones that get you called slurs. shoving a broomstick up someone's ass is a demonstration of power that does not make the aggressor vulnerable in the same way as forcing the new prettyboy to sleep in your bed ?

love is totally inextricable from security in the prisoners' relationships? you get nice things and are protected from those looking to pick on the new guy because the older guy from the top of the pecking order decided he liked the look of you. of course you're cracked in half when he dies; even if you grew to care for him as himself, the first thing he was was Better Than The Alternative