Man, I'm in disbelief at the unhinged reaction to True Detective Season 4 as an annoying show with an annoying cast and whatnot whilst lifting up S1, as if it was some unbeatable, god-tier show. (Spoiler alert: it wasn't.) The same show in which a sexually exploited 16-year-old child meets up with Hart about 6-ish years later to receive his dick anally for some good ol' "I fuck younger versions of my wife" character development. That was so fucking unnecessary that it blew my mind as to how it even made it into the show. (It could've been any other young woman, and it would've been A-OK as it was Daddario's character before her, which was fine in that context; yet the show decided on that direction for no apparent reason, and as a result, it came off as crass, vulgar, and incredibly misogynistic; and Hart is my favorite character from S1, so I'm not even trying to tear down the character here; it was just...abhorrent.)
Here, you have two female leads who, thank fuck, have tangible flaws and feel as though they could be people, not "girl-boss" caricatures of some sort. They make mistakes; butt heads unnecessarily that makes them look very unprofessional; and also take advantage of others (Danvers constantly pushes and pulls Prior, a rookie cop who pulls all stops to feed her ego as he lacked a mother figure in his childhood) and pay the price. Why are we so caught up in the quagmire of likability? Why do you care if you can't relate? Why are we not supporting a non-hollywood female director, López, who's written this season with care? Why are we not concerned about the issues of environment that the season brings up? Real issues that cost indigenous people their lives? I don't care what you fuckers say as this is what internalized misogyny (a misused phrase that has lost all meaning) looks like, because you claim that you want to see complex female characters, but really, we know that you don't; no, you've got this pathetic template in your head as to what a well-written female character looks like, a fucking SI headcanon that never perishes for the good of mankind; and Lord forbid if a writer strays from that; then he/she becomes a free target to be crucified.
And frankly, I like all seasons of TD for varied reasons; all of them brought something to the table: delusions, paranoia, obsessions which every character suffers from, which drive people to commit unspeakable acts; contractors, their corruption, and ambitions and many lives that are ground to dust to meet them; racism and isolation at the heart of broken families; and finally, subjugation of cultures through environmental destruction by an encroaching population that doesn't belong. Every director has brought great flair and personal style to each season. Never could understand people bitching about season 1's "godly status", as though it was the only perfect one out of the bunch. That's not true as all of them deal with different themes and different structures. (This whole season is about how native women that are murdered are seldom cared about compared to their white counterparts, which is a fact; there's a dialogue from Navarro that says, "wouldn't have happened if she was white"; yet we still have people bitching at full force.)
I'm so goddamn sick of the public's tendency to flatten everything down to juvenile bits, write a stupid, self-flattering remark, and then scramble to build an agenda around whatever new thing that they've begun to hate. Fuck fandoms. None of them are worth the hassle; and I'd say this straight up: the reaction to his season is rooted in misogyny and racism (I wonder how much of it is due to the fact that Foster is "old" now and no longer conventionally attractive to lead; I even saw someone call the leads sex-crazed, a post that garnered a lot of upvotes, and it wasn't even the odd one out; heaven forbid if women ever want sex; they should be contained in their "acceptable demands" categories for you to feel validated and smug about, sexist pricks, female viewers included). Fuck off if you say otherwise as nothing in the season warrants this reaction. Good God!