#longer posts

I'm talking, of course, of Baby Jane Doe.

Season 2 does a great job of making you think that the motorcycle is the gun. In fact, at some point it stops feeling like a subtle hint and more of a blatant reminder. "Robby rides without a helmet! He's depressed! He's got a death wish!" It becomes so obvious a Chekhov's gun that I found myself grimacing a bit at the sloppiness, even as the story itself treated Robby's mental health crisis with increasing care.

It was only hours after finishing watching the episode that it occurred to me that Baby Jane Doe had been the real Chekhov's gun all along. Introduced in the first episode, she recurs at the edges of most of the season. After all, she is not a particularly difficult case medically speaking. She's a baby! She's generally healthy! But she's been abandoned and it's unclear who can care for her. And this fires in the final moments of season 2, with Robby holding her close and soothing her, in a way that seems like he's really soothing himself.

There are three babies in the season 2 finale and Robby softens with each one.

We see him tear up after saving a mother and baby under the most intense of circumstances. We see him softening with Whitaker, when Amy and Theo come to pick him up, perhaps imaging a future that could have been. And we see him tenderly hold an abandoned baby and tell her that she's going to be okay, that she'll be loved, and that there's so much yet ahead of her.

Three babies. Three opportunities to demonstrate a particular kind of love that Robby very clearly wishes for. In season 1, we see him much more positively in a father-figure role than in season 2. He gets called on it directly, in the context of how he would teach/impress himself upon his mentees (by Duke, Mohan, Langdon, and Al-Hashimi). He's less patient with the med students and his staff. And there's the explicit absence of Jake, the son-figure. So when we see him with each of the encounters with babies in S02E15, it feels extra meaningful. When speaking with Mohan, he even says how he thought he'd have two kids in college by now. She later asks if it's a real, honest story, and he evades her, smiling instead. But it's hard to imagine that it's entirely made-up, given everything we see in the episode.

alright gang lets talk BriarxJordan.

If you somehow havent seen or caught on, there is currently an arc going on on this blog where Briar and Jordan are like,, in the enemies part of enemies to lovers. (with implied history)

All of this exists outside of the game cannon (obviously) but I wanted to make a post clarifying that and also stating that if You want to rizz up Jordan (or Briar) you can do that!! They wont get jealous (unless you want them to in which case maybe just like include the others name in the ask so we can know)

Neither blog is Off The Market, we just thought it would be funnie to ship the Holy guy and the Brothel guy.

I do not know how long this arc is going to be, or what the long lasting effects of it will be, well see when we get there.

I am Also going to use this post as a master post of all the flirting incidents so everyone who might have missed a page or five can get caught up! I will keep it updated and link it to my pinned post. Links to posts will be under the read more, and they will be in chronological order (order in which the conversations happened) :D

this is what I have been trying to project for the past years

[Image ID: Drag Queens Trixie Mattel and Katya Zamolodchikova sitting on stools in front of an empty background in UNHhhh ep 173. 

Katya: No, I have a lot of free time. 

A table with three alarm clocks is edited in front of her. She puts her arms around them. 

Katya: that I need to keep free. You have a lot of free time...

Trixie: (shocked) Yes, I know what you mean.

The word YES in big bold letters is edited in front of them. 

Katya: (aggressively) Yes, that’s what I love about it. It’s free! It’s not given away.

Trixie: I told this–

Katya: (interrupting) What do you want my time for? 

Katya kneels on her stool and looks at the camera while Trixie looks at her, laughing.

The episodes leading up to PROJECT II - ONE SHOT all feel remarkably distinct and unrelated. Yes, these characters are clearly interconnected (seen in VOX POPS through Ursula's storytelling, but also with the linked scenes in "Football Antics" and the Watch's video), but their vlogs are just... different and unrelated. And best of all, they have such different filming, editing, and storytelling styles. They really feel like they're coming from different characters. And there's no clear narrative! What's the story? Is it just a bunch of vlogs from some high school kids circa 2014?

I love ONE SHOT partly because of how it's shot and all (it's great!!), but also... it's just such a COOL way to show off how so many of these threads do fit together. There's an almost-effortless naturalness to how ONE SHOT shows these teens being silly, arguing, and having fun. It's lovely. It's different. It feels so real, so unscripted, so natural.

Note: This post contains spoilers for Nothing Much to Do.

I'll admit, I haven't been keeping up with the NMTDaily in recent weeks. I'll watch the videos a couple weeks late, in chunks. It feels entirely unlike how I watched NMTD when it was originally released (obsessively, as the episodes came out; I never used subscriptions, so I'd check the channels directly pretty much every day), but entirely reflective of where my life is today, a decade later.

I'll be away this weekend, leading into the 10-year anniversary of Hero's 16th birthday and the radio silence that followed. I'll probably write more about the actual videos when the time comes (hey, remember when I spent hours micro-analyzing a tiny video only for the full-length scene to emerge within that same day? I should be embarrassed by that than I am), but for now I find myself thinking about how the tension ramps up and how the story of Much Ado About Nothing and NMTD's interpretation feels different in 2024 than it did in 2014.

There's a lot that at the time I feel I was less forgiving of, interestingly. Maybe it's because I'm older, but I find myself feeling sorrier for the boys this time around. Claudio's anxiety and self-consciousness feels more... forward. Pedro's need to people-please and "lead". Ben's intense need to be liked and appreciated. Ironically, even as their behavior seems even more "inappropriate" today, I can't help but feel that there's something about it that I better understand today.

Hero herself somehow feels more mature. There's something about watching with the retrospect of a decade that makes the coming punch hurt all the more. It's been long enough since my last rewatch that I'd forgotten so many smaller details, like the way the girls have their sleepover or the fact that Hero has her own charming relationship with the camera independently of Beatrice. (I'm not sure why I'd forgotten these moments specifically, but it's interesting! I suppose it has something to do with the fact that I always clicked with Bea more as a character, but in this rewatch I feel like I'm finally seeing the version of Hero that many of my friends from the NMTD era always saw.)

Hero seems more mature and Bea seems more childish. Ten years ago, Bea was just a few years younger than me; she was immature, but not so different from where I was in life. Now, both Bea and Hero feel like teenagers and I'm very much not a young adult anymore. I look at both of them and think how fragile they are, how much they're taking on themselves at such a young age (independence is wonderful, but do they have the love and support of a good adult mentor?). I think of Bea's discomfort talking about Ben and her fear of being hurt. I think of Hero's open love and trust. I think of how both will soon be heartbroken by the same event, in very different ways.

Hero's birthday is one of those plot points in the world of literary webseries. It's iconic for a reason. And I know that as things "unfold" this weekend (and are only revealed next week), I'm watching it from a very different place than a decade ago and with a completely different mindset. But I suspect that the sadness and anger I felt then will not be completely obliterated. I suspect that I'll still have a moment of anguish for Hero, for Bea, for shattered dreams and the end of innocence.

----

(I also didn't remember the sloth part being quite so long.)

The past two weeks of videos have been about expanding NMTD's world. Yes, all of the pieces were already set in play, but now they start to move in a coordinated, plot-like manner. First we get closer introductions to characters like Claudio ("CLAUDIO"), Pedro ("A Special Announcement"), and Leo ("Introducing Leo"). Then we get a better sense of how this friend group extends, seeing Ben with Claudio and then with both Claudio and Pedro (and I do still love the casual dynamic of that group), as well as Beatrice with Pedro. The story widens further as we get the first hints of the romance ahead - Claudio's mystery crush follows Beatrice's teasing of Hero, but of course we know what's coming up, despite Ben actually not revealing anything on camera. We see Claudio as a bit abashed, uncertain, and heavily influenced by his friends. I'd forgotten how early it shows up.

On Beatrice's end, we still have slightly more structured videos. "Single Pringle" is one of those episodes that's lived in my brain for the past decade, where I can genuinely feel how she's shaped my life and voice. I can still remember almost every beat of the episode, even if I didn't remember the exact quotes. But I had the rhythm down. And it's this that continues to be NMTD's strongest side. "Single Pringle" maps (like the episodes before it) pretty neatly to Much Ado About Nothing, taking scenes from the play and reworking them to a modern context rather brilliantly. But at the same time, they feel real. Bea feels like a teenage girl complaining about something that's come up between her and her cousin. Nothing feels scripted or acted. The rant is performed, sure, but just like any vlog might be. Just like the boys fighting on camera in Ben's episodes feel like teenage boys scuffling, not like something overly scripted. (Huge credit goes to how these episodes are edited, seriously.) Do all of the translations from the play feel as seamless? No. But they integrate shockingly well, as I remembered.

The plot is ticking forward, but it still clearly feels like the beginning. But... we're starting to reach the point of no return with the plot. Hey, didn't someone mention a party...?

The first episode of NMTD is naturally Beatrice's first vlog. I still find it immensely watchable and engaging. Bea is funny, approachable, and bursting with a liveliness. She feels realistically teenaged and Harriett Maire's acting makes Beatrice seem entirely real, particularly in the way she shifts between different performance styles as she introduces herself and her family. I've long adored "And So It Begins..." as an excellent example of how an episode manages to cram its background in without seeming like it's trying too hard. It's also just... enjoyable to watch, and this is again purely down to having such a charismatic lead.

If we then loop back to "VOX POPS" (don't ask me why I wrote it normally earlier but am now stylizing with caps), there's a sense that Beatrice belongs to a whole, rich world. In "VOX POPS", she's hardly the main character, which is of course the point. Watching these videos in their chronological - rather than logical - order makes the show feel a teeny bit wider from the start. But it also begs the question why Beatrice is vlogging at precisely the same time as Ursula begins uploading her "artsier" videos. This is answered to some degree in "And So It Begins...", by the fact that Bea's life has undergone major changes of late and she's figuring herself out. Would it have made some sense to have an in-story inspiration from Ursula's videos, in that first episode? Maybe! Then again, this is one of those things that necessitates some degree of suspension of disbelief, when asking why webseries characters begin (or stop) filming videos when they do.

Both of these videos are just introductions... and of course, there are several more introductions to come (not just in terms of characters, but distinct channels/styles, like the Watch videos and Ben's vlogs). NMTD is one of the best shows I've ever seen when it comes to having a full, ensemble cast, which I think is beautifully illustrated by "VOX POPS" being its "accidental" premiere. Yes, Beatrice is the show's main character (and she is, both in terms of plot-centrality and driving the presentation/performance of this story), but she never feels like a character who sits alone at the top of a pedestal while other characters revolve around her. She doesn't change based on who's filming her, but her centrality does. It's something that I still think NMTD did best out of so many webseries.

There's not much to write at this stage, given how little of the story has unfolded (and knowing just how much plot is still to come. So far, I'm mostly surprised by the transmedia (which I remember being fairly thin and far from NMTD's strength, an assessment I stand by so far... it's not bad, but it's clearly supplementary) and by the instant worldbuilding.