lol

He asked: "Oh, was she the only son or something before *waves hand*?" and I was like, warily, no she has two brothers. And he responded with a great deal of confusion: "Then what's their problem?!?!"

When he found and married my mom, he was nearly 45 and they had so much trouble conceiving that he went to a Guanyin temple supposedly "magical" for praying for children. When I was born (not a son, also an only child until now), my mom said, "when you prayed at the temple did you ask for a son?" He said, "Aiya, everyone is asking for sons, so I said any gender is okay. If I asked for a son, maybe we wouldn't have gotten a child because Guanyin's son quota is already used up. Do you want that to happen?" My mom laughed for days about "son quota" and continues to tell people about it today, but her honest answer was: "Any child is okay."

Jokes on them. They didn't specify a gender, so Guanyin Ma gave them a non-binary child!

More seriously: my dad doesn't care about sons. When I told my parents that I wouldn't marry or have children, I thought he might be disappointed, but he wasn't. Then again, maybe I should have expected that, given he tried to become a monk at 18 🤪 I think he said the thing about sons to poke fun at people who care too much about sons because he frankly thinks it's all a bit ridiculous. In his eyes, a child is a child, so what's the point in caring about gender? If the child "changes" gender, does it make a difference?

LBAPH NAMI 🍊💰🐱

And yet, i feel moved. My stomach is in a tight knot every time i think about this young girl who may not have been the best person, but she was also just a child that suffered a terrible loss and tried to escape it any way she could. She felt like she had no choice but to get deeper and deeper into her addiction and debts, while still trying to keep up with her friends and loved ones. She needed her family and friends.

euphoria starts off in season 1 with these dreamy, soft visuals, immersing you in a haze that looks and feels like taking ecstasy for the first time. it continues that way in season 2, but it feels a touch off - as if the drug’s beginning to wear off, but it isn’t fully gone. and then comes season 3 - the high is gone, the euphoria is over, welcome back to reality.

it's why the lighting is harsh, the landscapes unforgiving, and everything feels ugly. everything sucks, like withdrawal does, and the consequences of your actions from that euphoric haze begin to catch up to you. in rue's case, it was every decision she made in the throes of her addiction.

does that mean I liked rue’s ending? nope, and it fucking HURT. but i absolutely get where it came from, especially when you watch the finale BTS. levinson is crying on camera when he talks about it, about the insidious and systemic abuse of addicts, and about how he absolutely wouldn’t have made it if fentanyl was present during his days as an addict. he's heartbroken, and he's furious.

and he has every right to be! fentanyl took angus cloud, someone sam cared about, and it re-opened some very real wounds for that man. so i’m guessing this last season is him finally snapping and going “if the only way for you to understand how fucked up this whole situation is by killing someone you love, then so fucking be it.”

ali’s entire monologue in the finale shows just how pissed off levinson is at the fentanyl crisis, and that showdown with alamo is a cathartic release, a revenge he wishes he could achieve in real life but knows he cannot. he killed off rue because while euphoria is his love letter to addicts, it is also an angry rant to the world about how it treats them.

as a writer and an artist, my belief is that artists don’t owe us anything but the stories they want to tell us, and it’s our job to broaden our horizons to see that vision. what sam levinson made wasn’t really a show for the viewers, but a manifesto from a former addict.

levinson has a lot of problems—and god do i loathe his visual exploitation of women—but his handling of rue’s story, the love he engendered for her in all of us and the devastation that followed, could only be achieved by someone who actually loved her all the same.