😎

good evening everyone i’m thinking about how lily turns back after amanda snores. she’s already killed her stepfather, she’s already wiped the blood all over amanda, she’s already staged the crime scene so she can go on with her life. and then she goes to leave, but amanda snores, and it awakens something in her, and she turns back. because it’s so human and so real and the tiny sound is enough to break lily and make her understand what she’s just lost. she’s past the point of no return and she’ll never have amanda again, never hear her snore again. and so she gives herself one last moment with amanda, curls up in her arms and cries and it’s just the two of them and amanda is passed out (she drank the drink, she knew that lily drugged the screwdriver and she drank it anyway, did something so selfless and so fucked up for lily and lily alone), and lily has nothing to gain from this, and it’s the only time in the movie that she’s not playing pretend, because it’s just her and amanda it’s the last time they’ll be together, and they’re both so deeply fucked up but maybe that’s why they understood each other. more than anything or anyone. most of all.

It's late and I should go to bed instead of talking about media again but I've had Utena on the brain because Reasons and I keep thinking about how much I love the Juri/Shiori relationship, especially because of what a fucking mess it is. And how much it speaks to the brilliance of that show. The usual "closeted gay kid falls in love with their best friend" story goes a couple of ways: a) best friend is gay or bi too and falls back; b) best friend is straight, but is really nice and lets them down easily and they stay friends. Now, it's not like that never happens that way in real life, it does, but it's an ideal and a fantasy...and not right for a series that's about exposing and deconstructing the truly vicious and brutal aspects of adolescence and especially adolescent sexuality and the way those experiences can fuck us up for life. So instead, we get the story of two girls whose feelings are mutual, but one of them is deeply, existentially terrified of those feelings, so she lashes out at her "friend" in rage at forcing her to confront them. Even before she knew what it was she felt, Shiori was competing with Juri over boys because she refused to conceive of bonds with girls as anything but competition. And her rage in "Thorns of Death" shows that she is still largely in denial. She can't openly love Juri, can't even admit to herself that she loves Juri, so she instead takes pleasure in punishing her and watching her longingly as she suffers ("I love the look in your eyes when I hurt you" in the sword-pulling scene...)

“I think a lot about queer villains, the problem and pleasure and audacity of them. I know I should have a very specific political response to them. I know, for example, I should be offended by Disney’s lineup of vain, effete, ne'er-do-wells (Scar, Jafar), sinister drag queens (Ursula, Cruella de Vil), and constipated, man-hating power dykes (Lady Tremaine, Maleficent). I should be furious at Downton Abbey’s scheming gay butler and Girlfriend’s controlling lunatic lesbian, and I should be indignant about Rebecca and Strangers on a Train and Laura and The Terror and All About Eve, and every other classic and contemporary foppish, conniving, sissy, cruel, humorless, depraved, evil, insane homosexual on the large and small screen. And yet, while I recognize the problem intellectually–the system of coding, the way villainy and queerness become a kind of shorthand for each other–I cannot help but love these fictional queer villains. I love them for all of their aesthetic lushness and theatrical glee, their fabulousness, their ruthlessness, their power. They’re always by far the most interesting characters on the screen. After all, they live in a world that hates them. They’ve adapted; they’ve learned to conceal themselves. They’ve survived.”