bad bitch... illeGAL

take a bite of the big apple

What Euphoria characters actually taught me about writing!!

So i've been watching Euphoria and i've been doing the thing where i write down everything i notice, everything that makes me go "wait, how did they DO that", and i figured i'd just share it here because why keep it to myself. This is going to be a long post, but if you want to learn something and get better at writing, stick around. Just know that everything here is my personal opinion. If you see it differently, drop it in the comments, I genuinely love hearing other takes and learning from them.

── .✦ Rue Bennett ✦.──

MY FAVORITE CHARACTER IN THE WHOLE SHOW. YES I SAID IT.

Okay i'm just going to say it: Rue is the best written character in Euphoria and it's not even close for me. And i don't mean best as in most likeable. I mean best as in most TRUE. She is messy in the exact right ways. She is awful to the people who love her and brilliant and funny and self-aware enough to narrate her own destruction with full clarity and still not stop. That combination (knowing exactly what you're doing and doing it anyway) is so hard to write and Zendaya just. does it. Every scene. But beyond the performance, the WRITING of Rue taught me more about addiction, unreliable narrators, and the difference between a character being sympathetic vs likeable than anything else i've read or watched. She's not here to be saved. She's not here to be an inspiration. She just exists, completely, and that's terrifying and beautiful.

⋆˙⟡ An unreliable narrator doesn't have to lie to you to be unreliable. Rue narrates the whole show and she believes everything she tells us. that's the WHOLE trick. she's not manipulating the audience, she's just wrong about herself in the specific ways that people who are deep in addiction are wrong about themselves. If you're writing an unreliable narrator, you don't need them to be deceptive. You just need them to have a blind spot so consistent and so human that the reader sees around it before the character does. ⋆˙⟡ Let your protagonist be genuinely, non-romantically terrible sometimes. Just bad friend, bad daughter, person making choices that hurt people who don't deserve it. Rue steals from her grieving neighbor. she lets her little sister find her overdosed. she manipulates Jules in ways that are specific and calculated. And we still root for her. Not because the show excuses it, but because we understand the shape of why. That shape is EVERYTHING. If you want a morally complex protagonist, the complexity has to be specific. Vague "flaws" don't count. ⋆˙⟡ The funniest characters are often the ones in the most pain and that's not a coincidence. Rue's narration is genuinely funny. The dry delivery, the absurdist asides, the way she describes things. And it coexists completely with the horror of what's happening to her. Humor as a coping mechanism is a survival strategy, and when you write it that way it becomes one of the most revealing things a character can do. What does your character laugh about? what do they use a joke to avoid saying directly? ⋆˙⟡ A character can be self-aware and still not change and that's valid storytelling. Rue knows. she knows what she is, what she's doing, what it costs everyone around her. the self-awareness doesn't save her. this is maybe the most honest thing about addiction the show does and it's also a really important craft note. Insight and change are not the same thing. Your character can understand their problem completely and still be unable to stop

── .✦ Maddy Perez ✦.──

THE CHARACTER I PERSONALLY LEARNED THE MOST FROM AS A WRITER. STILL PROCESSING WHY.

Here's the thing about Maddy that i don't think gets talked about enough: she is the character who is performing the hardest and the show never lets you forget that the performance is exhausting. The confidence, the looks, the whole "i know exactly who i am" energy, it's real AND it's armour, at the same time, always. AAnd somehow that's more interesting to me than any of the characters who are obviously falling apart. Maddy is falling apart in a way that looks like winning and i learned more about writing exterior vs interior life from watching her than from any craft book i've ever read. She taught me that what a character projects and what they need are almost never the same thing.

⋆˙⟡ Confidence is not the same as security and your writing should know the difference. Maddy is genuinely, authentically confident in some ways. She knows she's beautiful, she knows she's magnetic, she owns every room. And she also stays with a boy who hurts her because some part of her believes that's what love looks like. Those two things are not contradictions. They're both true at the same time. A character who is confident in their exterior and completely unmoored in their interior is one of the most real things you can write. stop making your insecure characters visibly, obviously insecure. ⋆˙⟡ let your characters want things that have nothing to do with the main plot. Maddy wants to be seen, wants to be chosen, wants a life that looks like the movies she grew up watching. Those wants exist completely separately from whatever is happening with Nate or Cassie in any given episode. She has her own interior direction. when you know what your character is oriented toward (not just what they're reacting to) they stop feeling like they exist to serve the plot and start feeling like they'd be doing something even if the camera wasn't on them. ⋆˙⟡ the most devastating scenes are often the quiet ones. Maddy's best scenes aren't the fights. they're the moments where she's alone or almost alone and the performance slips. the babysitting episode. the way she looks at herself in the mirror. those scenes do more character work than any amount of confrontation because they show us what's underneath when there's no one left to perform for. does your character have scenes like that? moments where the thing they project to the world just. isn't there? ⋆˙⟡ a character can have genuinely good instincts and still make terrible choices and that tension is interesting. Maddy reads people correctly almost every time. she knew about Jules before anyone said anything. she sees Cassie clearly even when it hurts. and she still makes choices that contradict what she knows, because knowing something and acting on it are different skills and not everyone has both. This is so much more interesting than a character who makes bad choices because they don't understand the situation. Maddy understands the situation. she just can't always get out of her own way.

── .✦ Cassie Howard ✦.──

I DON'T LIKE HER. I WANT TO BE VERY CLEAR ABOUT THAT. AND.

Okay so. Cassie. I don't like Cassie. I find her frustrating in a way that made me want to close the laptop multiple times and that is, annoyingly, a sign of good writing. Because she's not frustrating because she's badly written. She's frustrating because she's written exactly right and the exact right version of Cassie is a person who makes choices i find genuinely hard to be patient with. The way she reconstructs her entire personality for every boy, the thing she does to Maddy... i don't like it. and also. The show understands WHY she is like this in a way that is so specific and so sad that i can't fully hate her either and that, that right there, is the thing worth learning from.

⋆˙⟡ a character you don't like is not the same as a badly written character and knowing the difference will improve your writing immediately. I think people confuse these constantly, including writers about their own work. Cassie is written well. She has consistent, specific, traceable reasons for every choice she makes. The reasons come from her childhood, her relationship with her dad leaving, the way she learned early that being beautiful and available was how you got love. I don't like the choices. I understand every single one of them. That combination is the goal. Not likeable. understandable. ⋆˙⟡ Show where the wound came from, not just the behavior it causes. Cassie doesn't just randomly betray Maddy. the show builds the whole architecture of why, what she needs, what she's never gotten, what Nate represents to the part of her that never stopped being a little girl waiting for her dad to come back. you don't have to do a whole backstory episode. You just need, somewhere in your writing, to have figured out the original wound. The behavior is a symptom. if you only write the symptom, the character will feel shallow even if they're dramatic. ⋆˙⟡ A character who performs femininity as survival is not weak, she's adapting to something real. this is the thing i have the most complicated feelings about with Cassie. the way she becomes whoever the boy wants her to be, it reads as pathetic on the surface and it is, actually, a really rational response to a world that taught her that her value is in being desirable. that doesn't make it okay or good. it makes it sad. and sad is more interesting to write than weak. what did your character learn about how to survive, and how is that survival strategy now destroying them?

── .✦ Cassie AND Maddy ✦.──

A MASTERPIECE OF FEMALE FRIENDSHIP WRITTEN AS TRAGEDY AND I WILL NOT TAKE QUESTIONS

Okay forget everything i just said about not liking Cassie because the moment you put her in a scene with Maddy my whole brain short-circuits. This dynamic is one of the best written female friendships (and i'm using that word loosely) in recent TV. Because it's not a friendship anymore, hasn't been for a while, and the show makes you feel the ghost of what it used to be while watching what it's become. They know each other completely. they weaponize that knowledge. they also, underneath everything, still love each other in the way you can only love someone who was there when you were becoming who you are. It's DEVASTATIING. AND a MASTERPIECE. take notes.

⋆˙⟡ Cassie and Maddy don't fight like strangers or even like regular enemies. They fight like people who have spent years learning each other's softest spots and the intimacy of that is horrifying. If you're writing a falling-out between close friends or former partners, the cruelty should be specific. Not generic insults. the thing only that person would know to say. the detail that proves they were paying attention all along. ⋆˙⟡ Let female friendships be complicated without making one girl the villain. The show does this imperfectly but it tries: both Cassie and Maddy are wrong about things. Both of them are doing damage. Both of them are also, underneath the wreckage, comprehensible. The second you assign one girl the "bad friend" slot and one girl the "wronged" slot, you lose half the story. Real close female friendships have power dynamics and resentments and histories and they're rarely as simple as one person being the problem. ⋆˙⟡ Write the history, not just the present. What makes every Cassie and Maddy scene land is that you feel the weight of everything before it. Sleepovers and secrets and the version of Cassie that Maddy loved and the version of Maddy that Cassie was loyal to. None of that is shown directly in the later seasons. You just feel it. that's the goal with any long relationship in fiction, the past should be a physical presence in the scene even when it's not being talked about.

── .✦ Nate Jacobs ✦.──

I HATE HIM. HE IS ALSO ONE OF THE MOST USEFUL CHARACTERS YOU CAN STUDY AS A WRITER. HOLD BOTH.

i'm not going to pretend i enjoy Nate scenes. I don't. He makes me deeply uncomfortable in a way that is, again, the point and also not my favorite way to spend a Friday evening. BUT i have watched those scenes back specifically to study them because Nate Jacobs is a lesson in how to write a specific kind of male violence, the kind that's not cartoonish, the kind that's charming and controlled and only shows its teeth when it's sure it can get away with it. He's not a monster in the way fiction usually writes monsters. He's a person who learned a very specific thing about power from his father and has been enacting it ever since. I hate him. AND i wrote three characters better because of him. (But Jacob Elordi is the BEST)

A bit of background before we get more into it:

The Ainu (“human” or “people”) are an indigenous people in Japan native to the regions of Hokkaidō, Northern Tōhoku, and Karafuto, among others. As part of their ancestral tradition, Ainu women had the custom of getting tattoos on their bodies, including their lips. For the Ainu, the tattoo was perceived as a symbol of beauty, a talisman and an indispensable tool to prepare their body for after death. However, the traditional tattoo was legally prohibited by the Japanese government in 1871, in an attempt to force Ainu to follow a “Japanese lifestyle”. As the result, Ainu women reduced the use of tattoos on their bodies, progressively changing their concept of beauty and losing an important part of their ancestral tradition. 

https://dajf.org.uk/event/the-meaning-of-tattoos-for-ainu-women

…the Ainu people were stripped of their land, customs, and language in hopes that they would assimilate to Japanese culture. It wasn't until 1997 that this law was lifted and the Ainu people were allowed to practice their own customs again, but by that time, much of the damage was done. 

https://www.tofugu.com/japan/ainu-japan/

I am building off of this analysis about Sukuna's tattoos which I'd read before but just recently watched the linked yt vid and I'm 

Going insane bc the Ainu tattoo process involves slicing and burning (Sukuna's CT…) 

And the style looks a lot like sukuna's... in color, thickness, geometry... The focus of bands and circles, on the face and arms...

There is also resemblance to inumaki's marks. I wonder if that clan is related... Along with Sukuna, Wasuke (grandpa) and Yuuji Itadori, (and Heian Uraume) their hair is thick, wavy, above the shoulder, and lighter in color. I don't think we ever see Toge write - his preference for speaking could be another hint, with the Ainu language being spoken.

For the sake of staying focused and not spreading misinformation (iirc cursed speech users are supposed to be killed as soon as they're noticed), for now I'm thinking that the inumaki clan assimilated into Japanese culture, possibly hiding, denying, or forgetting their background - but most likely forced into submitting to jujutsu headquarters, who fear the inumaki clan, instead of considering them as one of the major 3. (the Ainu were not legally recognized as a people until 2018, so their rejection from jujutsu politics just seems to fit).

I've only found this photo of Sukuna's outfit irl (innate domain), but pretty much every Ainu character has the same piece in Golden Kamuy - and the colors are the same.

The Ainu language being polysynthetic makes it even more convincing that Sukuna intentionally addressed Gojo as husband.  

I wonder if sukuna preferred to use their CT for more peaceful, creative purposes (there were all those comments about slicing fish, the malevolent kitchen, not to mention their interest in flowers and poetry etc etc). 

The tattoos could have significance in preparing the body for death - which feels relevant, considering how they always show in any form Sukuna takes, and at times when Yuuji is still fronting (after eating a finger). 

They could be symbols of beauty, or coming of age. 

To go along with the trans Sukuna evidence - Ainu men grew beards, and the women got tattoos. 

The use of tattoos as a talisman is interesting - the way that Geto saw Gojo as his talisman, that Sukuna said “love is worthless”, the way that some of them look like eyes - which would give sukuna six eyes (and convinced me that jjk would end with Gojokuna). I wonder if it was partially out of hypervigilance, or to enhance observation - Sukuna's edge was the ability to analyze and adapt faster than anyone else.

They might have been a method of protection from trafficking. There is some historical evidence of enslavement. Forced assimilation and relocation certainly happened during Sukuna's lifetime.

The Ainu people were from the northeast island.

Iirc, Heian events of jjk were around Kyoto (I'll have to read again so pls correct me here) - or at least, Sukuna's appearances are not in Hokkaido, but further west.

As a side note, it was the northeast part of the sea where Momotaro was going to fight demons, which kenjaku (who I blame for history remembering sukuna as a demon) and Gojo (who always wanted to fight sukuna) mentioned… Idk if this has any connection, but I think about it (the theme of momotaro vs momotetsu, mainly).  

This mentions a means of preventing evil spirits from entering the body through the mouth. The same source has a historical timeline, up until today (which is interesting and worth reading):

I'll add this screenshot if you want a bit more Heian context:

Since their tattoos were criminalized in the Meiji era, we know less about the practice and significance now. There could have been a lot of style evolution over the hundreds of years since the Heian era. 

Some part of me wonder if Sukuna's tattoos were originally the bands with space in between (one more reason to prefer megkuna over true form), but were filled in later as a mark of ownership. Uro isn't a perfect reference with her CT, but she is always wearing that choker, which feels similar. Idk, the solid ones around true form Sukuna's wrists and ankles read like shackles to me. 

We know from that brief moment in JJK0 that Ainu sorcerers exist in-universe, and it sounds like they work separately from jujutsu headquarters - only contacted as a last resort. We don't get to know what their CTs are like, but I reread JJK0 looking for anyone with a burning or slicing CT during the parade. It doesn't look like the Ainu Jujutsu Society showed up, but there wasn't much in the manga compared to the movie.

This instrument (tonkuri) looks So Familiar (it sounds rly cool, the artist has more chill & acoustic music out also on bandcamp, soundcloud etc), I swear it was shown in the manga. (one more thing to look for on read 4… if anyone finds this, or has anything to correct or elaborate on, please go ahead). 

https://youtu.be/TI6nMOi0IoQ

Additional thoughts are the way that Sukuna's talk about the fish, slicing, mincing, plant identification etc etc it just. Idk if I'm reading too much into this but looking up Ainu foods are like??? Ok I see what you did gege.

Also, from the yt vid that drove me to look into this - Mayunkiki's introduction.

My name is Mayun Kiki. Mayun refers to the clanking sound of metal in Ainu, which is thought to be a noble sound in our culture.

Kiki means "scratching everywhere" and I was given this name as I have a habit of scratching myself.

The clanking sound of metal being noble...

And thank you to @thepersonperson for giving me so much to think about in all those meta analysis posts

Eta; Masamichi Yaga and bears (Panda)

The Ainu people worshipped bears, and at times sacrificed them to release the spirit. But first, the young bear is raised almost like a human child.

While Yaga has made a wide range of creatures, it is interesting that Panda is always sacrificing himself without hesitation, and that Yuuji spent the most time with the bear (i thought the green one, Kathy, is based on the Kappa).

So I can't say anything with certainty, but Yaga also has thick hair and deep-set eyes, and facial hair so... The way he worked with the bear spirit and raised Panda as his own child,, it's there right?

And in jjk0, Yaga made the call to contact the Ainu sorcerers - this is the only time we hear that name in the series (at least in the manga, I haven't finished the light novels yet).

One way that the Ainu were similar to the Japanese is in the way of religion. The Ainu, just like the Japanese people, were animists and believed that all things are inhabited by spirits known as kamuy. While there are many gods in Ainu belief, one of the most important is known as Kim-un Kamuy, or the god of bears and the mountains. All animals are thought to be the manifestations of gods on Earth in Ainu culture, however, the bear is believed to be the head of gods and is therefore known as kamuy, or "God."

Yaga being, by far, the leading expert on cursed corpse sorcery...

Traditionally, the Ainu sacrificed bears in order to release the kamuy within them to the spirit world. One tradition, called lotame, involves the raising of a young bear cub as if it were an Ainu child and then sacrificing once it has come of age.

No shade on Usami, but Toge would've never dared to use his cursed speech on fully incarnated Sukuna at full strength. He knew that the recoil would kill him instantly and that his CT, even with a benign order like "Don't move," wouldn't amount to anything.

That's interesting here because the characters have already compared Dabura to Sukuna. Even in this chapter after Usami ends up like that, they call Dabura a calamity, too.

And still Usami, who's the most level headed adult character we've seen until now, thought he could get away with using cursed speech on Dabura who didn't have a fight against Gojo + Kashimo + Yuji + Higuruma + Yuta + Maki beforehand.

This tells us two things:

the sorcerers of the year 2086 know that Sukuna was the strongest sorcerer of all time but they're so far removed from him and anything close to his level of strength that they can't understand his power anymore

Dabura is significantly weaker than Sukuna, but no one outside of Yuji and Nobara would be able to tell. We know that because Usami's head didn't explode.

Speaking of, I had to see if I can find anything on these flowers (of course, I did, they're pretty purple flowers) and they look to be the Balloon Flower, also known as the Kikyo flower and its meaning intrigues me.

Very interesting to be in JJK 0, just saying.