#comet negativity

“Your father, Joe, reads her poetry at bedtime. Poems that he wrote for her. She’s the star, and she loves it. She also loves helping your mother, Muriel, in the kitchen.”

It comes down to two things.

1) Harlan’s inability to separate himself from Arthur, which really hurts the narrative stakes, because no one can disagree with him without getting punished, everyone can’t help but love him, and Arthur never needs to actually change or grow as a character despite growth being one of the cornerstone themes of the show. I know that nothing interesting will happen with Arthur because we’ve seen time and time again that it won’t. Harlan takes the easy way out, because he wants Arthur to win and thinks Arthur is always right. Characters like Yellow, Lilith, and Larson, who don’t fall over themselves for Arthur, are punished by the narrative for the crime of…not bootlicking Arthur immediately, even when, in Yellow’s case, ARTHUR is the one who’s aggressive and starts swinging first. And all three of those characters ultimately love him, too, or, in Larson’s case, see him as a savior because he helped free him/kill him.

2) John and Arthur are, in my opinion, boring. They have been since S5. There’s basically no conflict. They immediately forgive each other for everything. John has turned into Arthur’s hype man/narrator who has basically no independent thoughts or feelings, and when he DOES have feelings that Arthur doesn’t like, Arthur immediately shuts it down and gets no pushback. The father & child dynamic/references (while brief!) are never actually addressed head-on by either of them, despite that being something they should by all rights both have strong feelings about. Again, the narrative stakes are nonexistent. It’s fine for Arthur and John to love each other and be devoted to one another to the exclusion of major conflict, but it makes for boring listening. I’d much prefer for them to be side characters to someone else, so that the keystone relationship in the show isn’t just a nothingburger where the same conversations are replayed over and over again and nothing really changes.

A man is directly responsible for his daughter’s death. He says as much. He KNOWS this was a result of his character flaws and it’s one of the things pushing him to try and be a better person. He knows his neglect and abandonment of her directly lead to her death!

And then…he meets a child…who’s been abused…AND IMMEDIATELY PROCEEDS TO ABANDON THE CHILD, presumably resulting in the child’s death, since the child is IN ACTUAL HELL! He has no feelings about this at all! He doesn’t give a single flying fuck!

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