(Spoilers below the cut)

This is actually what I liked a lot about the movie- how it shows the ways victims hurt other victims.

I think narratively it's supposed to be true that she pulled them in to the fire with her. It's when you're in an awful situation and theres the one who's trying to protect you, trying her hardest to fight and keep you from getting harmed. But the way the abuse left her burning rubbed off on you. Maybe she could have helped it, or maybe she should have, but couldn't.

If only she wasn't burning to the point where she acted based off of pure instinct, and that instinct wasn't the kind that helped anyone. Instead of knowing to stay away it was desperate, reaching for the only people she had close to her, and they were the people who needed her to be strong for them. But what else could she do? She was on fire and no one else was there.

The father reveals this fact (at least I'm taking it as a fact) and tries to spin it as if there's a "whole new side to the story" as if he's at just as much fault as their mother. Obviously, this isn't true, and it's not a twist in the story showing us who the 'real' villian was the whole time. It's just confirming what Ania had been pointing out since the beginning.

Their mother isn't God. She's a woman who was burned and couldn't face her daughters until she was dying. She spelled her own child's name wrong and insults her indirectly through her own pain. And then she sends hoth of them on a mission of more fire, because she's still burning, of course she is, who wouldn't be? But in the end, she's just Ruby, and she's once again getting her daughter's burned.

Ania was always the one to start rubbing the ice over Racine's scars. She was the one who "always got so emotional" because she cried, but out of the three of them, she was acting the least out of emotion.

in the original stageplay version of is god is, it ends with a conversation between anaia and god where anaia brings back evidence of her and racine killing their father and the people around him. god says she didn't expect anaia to be the one to make it back, and anaia points out that she's acting like she doesn't care that racine died. and then anaia kills god. that was the version i saw a few years ago and it was striking to see anaia standing alone onstage now with every other character in the cast having been killed off.

then aleshea harris changed that ending to anaia considering killing god, but choosing to break the cycle of violence and walk away. i'm not sure why that wasn't included in the movie (i'm a little bummed it wasn't) but i did get the sense anaia chose not to go back to god and break the cycle by being a better mother to her own child (who she named enica in the play because it was almost racine backwards)

Mechanical Saturn

Alexander McQueen rtw fw 99, Paco Rabbane haute couture ss 98, Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture fw 22, Guo Pei haute couture fw 16