Also, absolutely and incredibly poignant for you to point out the double standards regarding face journeys/expressions. Because the show is full of this lumon deadpan style of communication, devoid of emotion and only allowing for microexpressions, and while people cheer at white characters like helena for being like "oh my god soo nuanced! look at her left eyebrow or whatever! she was so repressing her anger here", but the moment a woc character like gemma does it (presumably to survive or avoid the attention of her captors) they're like "ohh she's evil" "she looks evil she looks so scary" "she's surely hiding something I cannot sympathise with her" could it really be more obvious
yeppp.... oh i cannot tell you how annoyed it made me when people tried saying how gemma was willingly down there because she was 'acting too calm'... WHAT? if you were imprisoned for 2 years, and every time you tried to rebel or escape you failed, wouldn't you feel a bit helpless as well?? again i ask... is your interpretation of gemma really the subtext of the show, or is it just your internal biases?
again, i reiterate how the reading that gemma was down there voluntarily makes no sense. first of all, why would there be so many security measures to keep her down there if she wasn't at least kidnapped against her will? why would she have said to have broken dr mauer's fingers, or tried escaping in 2x07 if she had supposedly went there of her own accord? it makes no sense, even if you discount the fact that she would never do that to mark or her family, and had a stable career to boot!! it once again shows how people don't see gemma as a character beyond a motivator for mark's journey, despite the show making concerted efforts to show otherwise.
i actually can't because there were people saying that gemma was 'acting weird' during her meet cute with mark... like we must be watching a different show because that scene is so innocuous. like what do you meannnn. okay i can't actually talk about this anymore if not i'll start cokeranting about the racism in the fandom again, queue 27 hate asks in my inbox about how white characters have it worse than gemma. like oh my god.
