what's going on

It was unreal!! We’ll always be the show that almost got rained out but got thee most incredible surprise song, and I can’t be too mad about it.

But also, conversely, sometimes your friend is hurting and you can’t think of a better way to help them other than volunteering to be their punching bag. you step in and you take it because hopefully it will help them and everyone will be better for it. you’ll be unable to stand afterwards but it’s fine, you’ll survive, you’re pretty sure, probably. again, in most situations this is rarely physical violence, but the verbal kind can hit just as hard, or at least it feels like it at the time. I think at that age you can have such empathy and kindness that you don’t always know how to use, you want to please everyone but haven’t quite figured out the best way to do that, so you put your hands behind your back and you don’t fight back and you hope beyond hope that this helps. maybe I’m just telling on myself here as a forever people pleaser who also frequently experiences The Rage, but I think this dynamic is fascinating and really accurate about the teen girl mindset, even without the obvious traumas these kids have gone through.

When Shauna wakes back up the writing and direction and performances do such an incredible job of showing how all the others felt while she was under. they’ve got a dead baby and their friend bleeding out and they don’t know what to do. they’re all clearly so shocked and traumatized. seeing Tai and Van cry like that, they must’ve been so worried that Shauna was gone, but now she’s awake and they have to tell her basically the saddest thing you could ever tell a person. and at least some of them had to know this was probably going to happen, this probably wasn’t going to turn out well, but the baby had turned into this beacon of hope and now he’s just. gone. and now they have to deal with that while there’s so many other traumas and sins they’ve committed that they can’t even think about because it’s just too much. so good!!