hello

I have insane cramps that incapacitated me for hours. is this my period being bad? oh Ive got pooping problems and food just passes right thru me. Im genuinely lightheaded and nauseous bc it won't stay in my body. is this food poisoning?

sua is willing to do absolutely anything to stay with/in pursuit of mizi, to be her god and universe and all the like. including dying. including kissing her corpse.

mizi on the other hand needs sua to be a person she can just use (to an extent) and when she called her out for smoking you see this criticism strike her already extremely fragile mental state and she lashes out very similarly to the true face comic.

we find it so romantic to die for someone but it's something just as selfish as living in so many ways. I think it's very explicitly shown here just how selfish it is to keep mizi 'alive' like this and then abandon her because you cannot bear to be abandoned, but there's something deeply real and relatable to it too.

edit: burnt. so I was correct

like in S2 of hbh we have the "far left" (moderately left) and genuine far right set up to oppose eachother as both being too extreme. and I was like well it's not reaaaally comparable but I get what you're doing there's flaws on both sides in a way. and then it completely deconstructs the idea they are both equally bad while explaining why people think that way and lending empathy to these boys that have been essentially indoctrinated into the manosphere ideology.

and another completely unrelated piece of media that does this really really well is kumbalangi nights, which is a beautiful piece of malayali cinema and if you haven't watched it please please do and I won't put any spoilers here because I do want people to watch it. and at the start I was like wow there's only male characters there isn't even a token mom and theyre like kind of annoying about their manhood I don't know if I'll like this movie and it turns out to be this insane critique of people's perceptions of masculinity and how that affects mental health in poor communities that don't have the facilities to really understand that sort of thing.

and I'm not someone whose been raised in either of those spheres or pulled into any of those values. but for each of those, the characters make a choice and it's the right one, but you understand they could have easily gone the other way and you see the person they could be if something else had not happened. this is what we need to be considering when boys fall into these patterns of thinking. these are not inherently bad people, they are insecure and vulnerable children. we need to approach and dismantle the systems that push them this way, that frame masculinity as this pedestal of personhood that they can turn to when it feels like the world is against them.