Hareofhrair

House is deeply insecure and intensely self loathing, and also a top tier cynic. He doesn't trust sincere emotion from others or himself. He's in constant pain that makes him bitchy as hell, and on top of that he is legitimately a genius and arrogant as shit about it. House is perpetually starved for affection and also absolutely refuses to accept it or show it. He compulsively pushes people away because he feels inherently unlovable, and knows he'll inevitably fuck up and they'll leave him. And he hates being like this.

Wilson is a perfect foil to this. He is an idealistic people-pleaser who is compulsively kind, in part because he derives his sense of self worth from being useful. He needs to be needed, to the point of self destruction. The reason he's been divorced three times is he gets into relationships with his patients or other people who are at a point in their lives where they need constant support. And then when they recover and aren't dependent on him anymore, he loses interest. And he hates being like this.

That's why they're perfect for each other. House is someone who will ALWAYS need Wilson, and because of that, Wilson will never abandon House. Wilson's hangups being so significant and transparent give House a kind of relationship security he doesn't get anywhere else. They're a perfect circle of codependency.

But also, they just like each other. Wilson hates himself for being a push over and admires House for never taking shit from anybody. House hates himself for being an unlovable bastard and admires Wilson's emotional intelligence and genuine kindness. They get each other's humor, they have similar interests, they're both brilliant enough in their respective specialties (House's being deductive reasoning, Wilson's being emotional intelligence) to genuinely challenge each other. Wilson's weird enough that he never gets boring to House. House is kind enough under the layers of curmudgeon that Wilson never feels like his efforts are wasted.

House is someone Wilson feels safe showing his bitchy petty side to, not just because House will put up with it, but because House actively needs it. House can't trust genuine emotion, he needs it to be couched in stupid malicious pranks and bickering, that at their heart show a deep understanding of each other, and a willingness to go out of their way for one another. Wilson can vent the negative feelings he bottles up all day on House and knows the nastier he gets with it the more House will love it, because House loves that Wilson is this goody two shoes around everyone else, and only shows this honest, nasty part of himself to House. At one point Wilson honest to god saws part of the way through House's cane so that it snaps while House is walking on it, something I would find frankly WAY over the line, and House genuinely looks fucking delighted about it.

On top of that, they've known each other long enough and are both smart enough to recognize all of this and correctly interpret each other's slightly batshit methods of communicating affection.

One of my favorite ways the show symbolizes this across the whole series is stealing food.

House steals food from people he likes, all the time, and its such a subtle but meaningful bit of background characterization.

On one level, it's House pushing boundaries of politeness in pursuit of the show's main theme, getting past the barriers to honesty posed by politeness and professionalism and societal pressures. He wants to piss people off enough that they stop acting nice and start being honest.

On another level, its him testing relationship boundaries because of his insecurity. He wants proof that they won't reject him even if he's awful- will you let me get away with this?

And on a symbolic level, it's a request for care. Will you feed me? Will you let me be part of your life?

A lot of his most significant interactions with the team involve food. One of the major times Foreman gets one over on House, he caps off the scene by stealing House's french fries, which simultaneously, to him, symbolizes a reversal of roles, that he's surpassed House. And to House, represents him beginning to see Foreman as an equal. The first time he has a conversation with Thirteen that goes beyond professional and they recognize that shared fear of intimacy in one another, he acknowledges that by offering her his potato chips. He lets her steal food from him.

And obviously there's no one he steals food from more often than Wilson. But Wilson takes it a step further, because he recognizes what the food stealing actually means to House. So he does shit like buying food at the hospital cafeteria that he knows House likes. Or conversely, specifically getting stuff he doesn't like to piss him off. He gets worried House isn't eating well, so he lies about being on a diet and starts bringing a healthy lunch to work because he knows House will steal it.

Wilson takes the implicit request for care and reassurance the food stealing represents, and makes it an explicit offer instead. Not only will I let you steal my food, I will buy food specifically for you to steal. He doesn't just tolerate House's issues, he actively makes space in his life for them.

In short, their friends because they admire each other, challenge each other, and fill each other's most unwieldy psychological needs in a way no one else could. They're toxically dependent on one another, and also the healthiest relationship either of them are capable of having.

And make them easier to remove.

Grace is joking around with a selectively violent creature that can rip his soft squishy body apart in an instant!

But it’s also a lot of fun to hear Weir talk about all the stuff he wants to include in a possible sequel, like the fact that eridians can have several conversations at once even with the same eridian. He imagine Rocky and Adrian bickering in one conversation while having a nice conversation at the same time that slowly turns into a fight and all of a sudden they’re yelling at each other in two conversations about different things.

He also says they have terrible spacial memory because they can see everything around them all the time thanks to their echo location so to them it’s crazy that humans can only see in one direction but still remember what’s behind them and even what the last room they were in looks like. Apparently eridians mostly just remember that the room exists and that it has the computer in it but if you asked them where the computer is placed in the room they’ll struggle to give a precise answer.

And Rocky got scared when Grace hugged him because eridians don’t have a concept of expressing affection with physical touch. To them it’s only neutral or violent because thanks to their hard shell they can’t really feel much. They only use it to move each other around or to break through their prey’s shell to get to the soft insides. So in their inter-species friendship only Grace would feel any desire to touch Rocky. It makes it very cute that Rocky joins in on Grace’s hugging ritual. It’s purely for Grace’s sake.

According to Weir eridians never had a reason to develop spacial memory because as soon as they enter a place they know where everything is, even if it’s behind something else, unlike humans who have to look for it. It reminds me of this video by a guy who has facial blindness.

He explains that humans have a part of our brain dedicated to remembering faces because we’re social creatures who need to remember friends and foes, but that part can be damaged despite our memory being perfect otherwise. The way Weir explains eridians memory it almost sounds like something akin to aphantasia but for spaces specifically. They never forget info but visuals are more wishy-washy. Thats why they know what’s in a room but they don’t know where it is if they’re not “looking” at it.

There’s definitely an argument to be made that eridians might feel differently about physical touch in the movie canon, especially because eridians lie on top of each other while watching each other sleep in the movie but watch from a distance in the book. But Weir explained in an interview that hugging is part of an exchange between Grace and Rocky. They do things for each other that makes the other happy despite not enjoying it themselves. Rocky let Grace hug him but would never ask Grace to do it, and Grace let Rocky watch him sleep but would prefer if he didn’t. They both know these things make the other happy and are an expression of care, trust and affection so they do it for each other.

Ever since I read Final Girl Support Club I’ve been fixated on the idea that the Columbine school shooting killed slasher films by shifting the idea of the murderer, the personification of personal violence in US media, from the very tropified Serial Killer of previous decades to the Mass Shooter.

And where the Serial Killer as a cultural artifact is a sort of fun spooky monster with very little grounding in reality since it was largely a construct of “criminal psychology” pseudoscience and a very small handful of real world examples who primarily targeted people Usians don’t care about, the Mass Shooter is random violence made very real in a way that’s deeply uncomfortable. A mass shooter isn’t a monster with some special broken biology stalking one person at a time, it’s a kid with a gun, mowing down a dozen people in the space of a few minutes.

I think we like to pretend horror begins and ends with slashers because slashers are silly and straightforward and relatively unthreatening, compared to the very real threat of mass shooters and the way in which they perfectly encapsulate the US’s refusal to look at or do anything about the violence it generates, even when it’s slaughtering their children in droves.

I think slashers represent an idealized version of the past where the US was so safe and prosperous that the only violence people could imagine was some kind of once in a lifetime monster with a chainsaw.

Baby I’m so sorry but a LOT of white people had periods of time as kids or even early adults where they regularly regurgitated slurs and direct racism and performed cruelty on racialized people. It can legitimately anywhere from “saying slurs on COD at 12” to “putting various unsanitary and hard to remove things into Black classmates hair” to “excluded racialized kids around them because they were yucky/etc.” to “assaulting racialized people around them” to “spent time on /b/ and gained standard 4chan racism brainworms”

You also straight-up can’t guess what it’ll be until they mention it or it jumps out. As an example, back in montana there was a white woman in my local kink community who was generally SO fucking sweet, kind, and caring to everyone around her, including me. One day she posted this on Facebook out of literal nowhere:

And doubled down after I called her on it.

Please understand that “hasn’t deconstructed racist social beliefs” means “can and will use racism when useful or they think they’re safe to, or will engage in white solidarity”

If they haven’t actually put in the work to destroy the white supremacy they’ve been internalizing from society their whole life, this can be basically any white person, at any time, no matter how they’ve behaved previously and how much you think they’d never do something like that.

Being fully honest, over the past few years I’ve met multiple white queers who were literally born and raised in full-on white supremacist cults and only escaped as adults, and every single one of them was leagues more tolerable than the average white queer because they KNEW their shit was fucked to hell and they were quick to self-question, address, and apologize when something they didn’t know was false/racist/supremacist came up and they actively wanted to do/be better.

Meanwhile average white queers just don’t want to be cancelled and often don’t actually give a fuck whether they’re harming racialized people around them or whether they’re doing the work of picking the white supremacy brainworms out. Getting an apology, reparation, or basic fixes is like pulling fucking teeth with them.

1. This reply is two words and they managed to misspell both of then

No rest for the undead.

A cishet man getting pegged by his cishet girlfriend is not gay, he's not less of a man or submissive by default. A cishet man getting pegged by his cishet girlfriend can be sexually dominant and simply likes to be fucked in his ass - these two can co-exist. Yet, in the eyes of cishet society, a man that likes to have his ass played with, must enjoy it because it's "degrading" , not because it simply feels good.

so many responses of “its nice that you’re privileged enough to be able to steal from Target willy nilly!” and that’s not at all what this is about. like, yeah, shoplifting and loitering and graffiti and breaking the rules is, obviously, part of “do crime”. but they’re not parts you have to do.

would you help someone get an abortion where it was illegal?

would you help a trans friend get healthcare that had been criminalized?

would you shelter someone fleeing persecution, even if the law said not to?

would you help a gay couple stay together when the state decided their relationship was unlawful?

instead, would you report someone else for breaking the law? will you snitch on your hungry neighbors for stealing food? on your homeless neighbors for sleeping where they’re able?

So yeah, you GOTTA get out there and do the bullshit crime too, so that when the world doesn't end and the FBI don't show up to publicly execute you for swiping some gum or "forgetting" to scan something at self checkout, you're already over that hurdle when it comes time to break the law that really matters.

Don't fall for the trap of assuming of course you'll make the right choice when it's something that matters because you're a good person. Lots of good people make stupid, cruel, awful choices when they're under stress and in an unfamiliar situation.