#jeynepoole

The BCS finale was... fine. It's what the series was building to in terms of the choices that Jimmy and Kim made. I loved the splash of color on Jimmy and Kim's shared cigarette, the final scene of Jimmy and Kim watching each other as she departs from the prison and Jimmy's unreturned finger gun salute (I think that was the end of their relationship, btw).

The rest of it didn't totally land. I think it was better conceptually than it was in execution because the maneuvering between plot points was abrupt. Maybe a niche example but Kim's confession would have been more impactful to me if it had been aimed at Howard's father, rather than his wife. The other 'H' in HHM had been hanging there since the beginning of the series, whereas I don't think Howard's wife was directly mentioned until the final season. And, look, a lot of the energy that I could have been using to feel sad during that scene went into suspending my disbelief that Howard Hamlin is straight.

Obviously a lot of this is personal preference, and in general I'm super hard to please when it comes the endings. It's also been almost a year (wow) since I watched it.

(Happy belated birthday @jeynepoole, may this nonsense ode to our Tudor slattern ways be a worthy gift.)

‘The Wenches of Wiltshire’ (20?? - 20??)

“There is a place where he keeps his harem. Where he keeps his women...”

Favorite ships this year?

ALDFLAED OF COURSE. Also Isildur x Valandil, and honorable mention to Elendil x Míriel (lowkey the Aldflaed of ROP).

Fandom predictions for next year?

this has been fermenting in my inbox because i saw it and immediately got into a spirited debate with my best friend over the correct ranking of the twilight films (my answer is: twilight/breaking dawn pt 2/new moon/breaking dawn pt. 1/eclipse. my best friend was trying to argue that new moon is the worst but the soundtrack fucks so supremely it saves it from the slush pile). anyway. being a twilight girl (gn) from approx. grades 5-8 was the great equalizer. it crossed boundaries. you found your most unlikely comrades in the foxholes of the twilight trenches discussing how breaking dawn would end in between subjects. it was like what i imagine model un is like. there were at least two other people in my class aside from myself who got alice's haircut (which i do think is genuinely quite cute but the thing is we were all pudgy-faced 6th graders so it was not the most flattering of haircuts. whoever is responsible for alice's hair in bdpt1 i will hunt you for sport). i would sit on my kitchen floor rereading those damn books like i was possessed and i think eclipse was my favourite but don't quote me. the only two movies i saw in theatres were the og and new moon and the memory of rolling my eyes whenever jacob took his shirt off is burned into my psyche. i continued to be repressed for more than a decade after that but to be fair i was also 12 and catholic. the first movie is a Good Movie both in that there are some solid technical elements and in that it's so funny i'm sorry. in uni my roommates and i watched all the films back to back for the first time and we were so emotionally strung out by the absolute roller coaster of emotions we experienced over the course of 10 hours that we all genuinely started sobbing our goddamn eyes out during the final battle/vision and then cried again when literally every single character is given their due in the credits bc it's just really sweet :'). then my parents stopped by for a visit like half an hour later and we were like hello. we are all normal. also the composers on those films were absolutely STACKED??? carter burwell twilight/breaking dawn both parts alexandre desplat new moon goddamn HOWARD SHORE for ECLIPSE??? howard why did you score the WORST one??? the soundtracks ripped. they had no reason being as good as they were. the last two were shot by gdt collaborator guillermo navarro and it SHOWS they look FANTASTIC. by the last two everything genuinely was camp. i think engaging with twilight in the year 2022 is a bit different than engaging with...y'know bc smeyer isn't actively on twitter like i think all trans people should be forcibly detransitioned and then burned at the stake you guys wanna see how much i can hate minorities but then there is the whole vampirism makes you white & indigenous people are literally animals i'm gonna make billions off a racist misappropriation of your tribe while you get nothing thing. i mean it's a case of Use Your Brain While Critically Engaging With Media but if you've spend actual money on something twilight-related in the past like. three years. why? pirate that shit. at least donate the same amount to the quiluete higher ground fund sidenote did you know that quiluete is one of only a handful of languages that doesn't have nasal vowels? that's neat. billy burke charlie swan performance of a lifetime. seth and leah clearwater best characters.

i got this ask before the mcr twilight show in washington happened and i just have to restate. "i want to watch you turn into a werewolf" on the drum. coming back for the encore in a team edward shirt (WHERE DID IT COME FROM. I DESPERATELY NEED TO KNOW THE PROVENANCE OF THIS PARTICULAR ITEM OF CLOTHING) simping for rpattz in the batman into your song about being asked to write a song for one of the twilight movies and saying Fuck No into the first paragraph of interview with the vampire read into the vocal distorter into your biggest banger also about vampires into the final song of the night and arguably your saddest which is about dying of cancer. thanks for coming to the show glad you enjoyed the double vampire encore now think about your own mortality.

Oh wow well. The Abrams "Kelvin timeline" movies are possibly the most polarizing thing in the modern Trek fandom and I feel like I'm like the boring fencesitter on it. I think it's mostly.... fine? I do agree with people that it's not very "Star Trek" in terms of what has traditionally distinguished the franchise's storytelling, particularly in relation to Star Wars. (Although I also think that what makes Star Trek "Star Trek" has always been pretty flexible and means different things to different people, but they do feel like Star Wars movies with Trek paint.) But as movies themselves, they're fine (except Into Darkness, that one's a piece of shit). I also agree with the people saying the movies' representation of women is bad to the point of being embarrassing, but I wish people could say that without trying to whitewash the sexism of the earlier installments they compare it to, most often TOS. Basically I agree with a lot of the criticisms, but not so much where people take them.

I should add to this that the 2009 film was what literally got me interested in Trek as a franchise, so kudos to it for that and to the Trekkie friends I'd made in college for dragging me to it. So I think that might be why I'm more positive about that movie than maybe it deserves. But what's funny is that while those movies got me in that door, I've never been super interested in revisiting them or in participating in the fandom for the Kelvin movies at all. They were a gateway in the sense that I realized I always would've liked Star Trek if I'd seen it earlier (my parents were not Trekkies) and gave it a chance, but then what I really liked were the things that those movies largely don't have... if that makes sense?

ETA: Also was just telling @peterdyckmancampbell that I feel like the fandom for the Abrams movies is like, the Trek fandom that is most like all the broader fandom problems with racism and misogyny and everyone just wanting to ship Two Hot Young White People, whereas broader Trek fandom isn't like that (in that most popular ships have at least one person of color or alien-who-is-framed-as-an-exotified-Other or older-looking/not-conventionally-attractive person in them etc., if not both of them falling into one or more of those categories, and there's a decent amount of femslash even for the fandom that literally created slash). So that's probably another reason I have no desire to engage with that fandom. They can be a containment zone for the MSF people while the rest of us Trekkies keep it real 😎

AAAAAAAA INCREDIBLE I LOVE IT SO MUCH

Aldhelm - Fake dating. I feel like he was really made for this story line. Except I feel like our fake dating story would go "fake dated, thought we liked each other, fucked once, got really awkward, didn't text for 6 months, accidentally ran into each other at a party and then had a threesome and never talked again" is that weirdly specific? i feel like that's weirdly specific

Aethelred - Slow burn. Okay I am trying to make this make sense, I really am. The only way I can describe it as "slow burn" is in the sense that those movies about two toxic straight white people just in a terrible relationship for the whole movie are "slow burns".

Aethelflaed - Less enemies to lovers and more "we got off on the wrong foot and hated each other for no reason for a while until that 💕one weekend 💕 that changed everything" (....cue strings)