hello im nick

In 'Detroit' the editing is frenetic and psychadellic, and the storytelling is sort of flippant. Lestat is putting on a mask, he's high as a kite, and he's deflecting.

In 'Toledo', the flashbacks are short because Lestat doesn't want to dwell on the past. A sort of calm and relief descends upon the viewer when Louis is onscreen not just because we all love Louis and feel comfortable with him and his voice but because Lestat loves him and takes solace in him.

im gonna try explaining myself, cus im a gambling addict and im waiting for the day that it actually works.

"forgiveness" is personal, that's why I said in the post that you might inflict harm on people for which they can never forgive you, but that's their quest. if you abuse someone, you can't go no-contact with yourself. you actually keep living in your own head indefinitely, and ultimately you need to learn to live with yourself in order to continue living a full life without further harm. this is not necessarily an anti-carceral thought, although i am generally anti-carceral myself. I simply want people to like, fix their heart and atone for real with measured accountability & self love instead of dissociating, self-marking themselves forever and guaranteeing their recidivism.

Liked should we go off first come first served or do we give each individual billionaire to whichever community they harmed the most?

obviously we now live in an age where women don't have to be married to a man to have access to money, but the HEA expectation of romance novels is very much formed by this tie between romantic partnership and material wellbeing. no one ends a romance novel homeless, you know? the fantasy is that this institution can work. don't worry about patriarchy as a set of material and psychic conditions. this marriage is good and good marriage is possible.

with this repetition, the narrative fantasy (like gender, like genre) becomes a stable place you visit: sports is somewhere you can go where merit wins; romance is somewhere you can go where love saves somebody. what's striking about the rise of m/m sports romance in particular is that it raises the stakes of that fantasy even further--there is now somewhere you can go where THREE saw traps (marriage, violence, homophobia) become the conditions of happiness. i don't think it's a coincidence that as material conditions worsen, the escape fantasy becomes...more and more fantastic.

one more thing--much of sports romance's fantasy occurs via a specific elision of racism, particularly antiblackness. (sports in general does this much more transparently!) not a coincidence that hockey's the overwhelmingly white big 4 sport and also the locus of western** sports romance, particularly m/m sports romance. not a coincidence that the gays became repeatably consumable as desiring, deserving romantic subjects within the romance genre writ large before black people have. look at these goodreads shelf counts, and keep in mind that college-educated black women read more than everybody else, demographically:

romance as a genre is run by white women. consciously or not, the marriage fantasy these white women write over and over again protects whiteness more than it protects straightness. along this axis, the fantasy actually functions identically to the institution instead of transforming it. as the repetition of stories shows us, there's a hierarchy of which social conditions are onscreen, navigable such that 'marriage is good and a good marriage is possible', and which social conditions don't serve most creators' stakes in the marriage fantasy at all.

*for doing-my-real-job-today purposes i'm skipping some other very relevant overlaps between sports & romance--libidinal imaginaries, economies of ability and desirability, the temporal bound of a championship or a wedding, etc--but somebody else run w the ball pls

Homonationalism rewards the fantasy of selectively assimilative gays and suggests that the (global North, first world, neocolonial, white supremacist) nation state is worth celebrating because it protects deserving gay men.