Femme Slash Fandoms And Random Gubbins

the device carol has in her car is called an “ignition interlock device” (IID). it was put there by the state as a penalty for being charged with a DWI (new mexico statutory equivalent of a DUI). new mexico is pretty liberal with installation of IIDs, so there’s a few ways that carol would end up with an IID installed in her car: either she had a really severe DWI within the last 5ish years where she was driving blackout drunk (BAC over .17) or she got a DWI less than a year before the show started.

while it’s nice to think that helen loved her so much and protected her from the world such that she was always safe from herself, the IID is proof that carol’s alcoholism put a noticeable strain on their life. an IID makes it even less likely that carol, a prolific day drinker, would be able to drive herself anywhere alone. she couldn’t get groceries and couldn’t perform tasks that involved leaving the house, and likely became more reclusive than she was before the IID was installed. they likely had to shell out for a lawyer to mitigate the charges. carol, at the age of 50, had to go to a class where they teach her about how drunk driving kills children.

her life is in shambles…. i miss her so badly

The survivors who are cool with the hive and refusing to accept that their loved ones do not exist anymore and are (for the time being) essentially dead are the people who assimilate willingly, then refuse to admit that they have done so or argue how it was a good thing.

Manousos is a Colombian man who has watched his home and culture be eradicated through assimilation, with his mother being stripped of her true personality and behaving in a sterotypical 'loving gentle mother' way that contradicts her true personality, while he actively fights against the colonization and destruction of these things. Looking at it allegorically, him accepting the hive would be like him changing his name to something like Mark and getting embarrassed and ashamed whenever anything related to his old culture is brought up.

Carol is a lesbian woman who believed she had to hide her homosexuality from her readers, else risk no one being willing to engage with her media. She literally changed the gender of the main love interest of her novels because she believed it to be the 'safe option'. She is also literally a Conversion Therapy survivor. Carol ALREADY had to actively fight to remain true to herself as a member of a marginalized group. Joining the hive would completely erase her identity as a lesbian. Looking at it allegorically, it would be the version where the conversion therapy traumatized her so badly that she ended up marrying a man and pretending to be straight for the rest of her life.

Now, while it is true that Zosia as the individual was unable to give her consent because that very idea was eliminated from her psyche, I don't think enough people are focusing on how Carol is a victim just as much.

Because the Hive isolated her for forty days, aware of what prolonged social isolation does to a person, especially in a time of confusion and grief. They meticulously crafted a person they knew she would have found attractive on both a physical and emotional level and then snatched her away from Carol.

They made it so that almost every interaction Carol had with the Hive was through Zosia, toying with the perceived notion on individuality. Because even if Carol is aware of the Hive, I guess it would become harder not to think about Zosia as an individual if you almost exclusively hear from her. After all, it's not like the human mind was conceived with the capability to perfectly grasp and come to terms with what a hivemind is.

And to add the cherry on top, the Hive initiated the kiss.

So:

1. Carol has been isolated by all humanity (except Diabaté for like a day) for more than a month.

2. When the Hive returns, the first and only person Carol sees is Zosia.

3. The Hive knows how fragile Carol is at the moment and they need to distract her from asking too many questions about experimentation to turn her into one of them.

4. Through the body of an incredibly attractive woman especially made solely for Carol, the Hive intitiates the first physical contact Carol has had since the Joining.

5. Carol is very obviously (and reasonably) mentally unstable.

So, while I feel sorry for Zosia as an individual, I think largely speaking the audience has fallen into the same trap as Carol and does not see Zosia for what she is in respect to the Hive: a means to an end.

I love that this is a trait they gave her. It’s canon. Like she clearly made it through high school Spanish but her accent is atrocious. I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone sound that white while uttering the phrase “chinga tu madre, cabrón!”

I swear to god, everything I am about to say in this story is true.

When I was eleven, I moved to a small town in rural England and acquired a new best friend at school. Her at that point seemingly-very-normal-parents- nice suburban house, three kids, trampoline in the backyard- invited me over for dinner, and said they were making curry and rhubarb crumble.

“Curry and rhubarb crumble”. Never in the history of mankind have words been so untrue.

The “curry” consisted of, I swear I am not making this up, a vague mixture of * deep breath, oatmeal, tofu sausages, corn, tomato juice, chopped onions, raisins, “leftover broccoli leaves”, kale, and scrambled eggs. The only spice in it was the tiniest smidgen of turmeric. All these ingredients were vaguely stirred together, undercooked, and stuck under a broiler for ten minutes. 

They gave me a massive portion. I somehow, I still don’t know how, was polite enough to finish it.

“I’m done,” I said.

“No,” said her father. “In this house, we LICK our plates clean.”

He did. They didn’t make me hold it up and lick it like they all did, but they did make me clean the plate with a piece of bread and my fork until they were satisfied.

Desert came. The rhubarb crumble was entirely unsweetened. Not so much as a raisin. I can’t remember what the crumble part was, because my mind is still haunted by the memory of being forced to eat an entire bowl of unsweetened rhubarb. You know in old Looney Tunes when characters would be tricked into eating allum and their heads would shrink? That’s what eating it felt like. They made me clean my bowl of that too, and wouldn’t let me leave the table until I finished. 

The next time, (I was in middle school and as yet too polite to turn down my best friend’s parents) they made “spaghetti and meatballs and salad”. The spaghetti was utterly plain and so undercooked it was crunchy, the “meatballs” consisted of a single large orb of some grey material i have yet to identify, and the salad was, i shit you not, limp boiled lettuce. Crunchy spaghetti, unidentified lumpy grey stuff, and boiled lettuce.

The fascinating thing is that, while yes, these people were obviously health nuts, it was so much more than that. They were health nuts who also cooked like aliens who had never seen human food before. Or like small children making “potions”. One of the more edible things they served to me once was a dessert they made up which consisted of halved apples rolled in cornflour with some milk poured on top. One time, they were convinced to make pizza as a treat. They decided to put an onion on it. Fair and fine, you’d think. Not in that house. They just cut the onion in half once, and stuck each unchopped half facedown on one side of the pizza.

Speaking of onions, one time, my friend decided to make a banana and yoghurt smoothie. Her dad came in, said it wasn’t healthy enough, and made her add an onion to it.

They had a homemade cereal I thankfully was able to opt out of trying which 100% looked like the contents of a vacuum bag. I still have no idea what it contained.

Amazingly, it was by no means just me who experienced this. It was a small town, and every girl in it my age had a selection of horror stories about being invited to dinner at this friend’s house in the exact same ritualistic horror-film fashion. We used to sit around comparing them at sleepovers. Age did not exempt you. One time, this friend’s six year old brother had a friend over for dinner at the same time, poor soul. His mom arrived to pick him up, and wasn’t allowed to take him home until he finished whatever crime against cooking was on the menu that night. 

Every story was the same. The ritual that never varied. Every time, these people would make a huge fanfare out of inviting you over for dinner, act all hospitable and excited, set the table, and then serve you a massive helping of the worst food in the world, and make you clean your plate of it, desert included. Who the hell forces you to finish your DESERT?

It’s a mystery to me. They clearly had SOME degree of self-awareness, because after I came to my senses and started coming up with excuses to avoid eating at their house they would tease me saying things like “ohoho, you don’t like LIKE our food do you”. If they had been a bit more fun and less generally puritanical sort of people, I could totally believe this was a family trolling activity where they secretly schemed to come up with the worst possible dishes, secretly filmed themselves forcing people to eat them and watched it and laughed afterwards, I could believe it.

We see her lose her partner, her rock and anchor point, in such a traumatic way and then have to deal with an apocalypse on top of that in the span of maybe 2 months? Kudos to her for lasting even that long because if my partner died in front of me like that, even without the end of the world, I’d also be considering trial by fire(work) if you catch my drift.

And yes, Carol’s not overly concerned with niceties and can come off as a mean drunk, but who wouldn’t? There’s a quote that basically says when the whole world is blind, the man who can see is called crazy. And that’s her perspective - for some reason, nobody is as alarmed as she is and she can’t figure out why. She feels like she’s the only person who can see how bad things are (because, to be fair, she’s had the worst go of it).

She didn’t want the translators because she didn’t know at the time that the Hive couldn’t lie and didn’t trust them to not manipulate her words, not because she’s inherently racist. It’s crazy that people are upset with Carol for not considering the feelings of the other survivors when hardly any of them considered her. What she was going through? Why was she the way she was? How could you blame her for being angry and inadvertently causing deaths from that anger when she didn’t know that would happen? Did anyone ask her why she was so angry and haunted? (Anger is one of our foundational emotions, btw. I think it’s very deliberate that they wrote a situation where her anger is essentially policed.)

Carol is someone who values truth, choice, and agency, things that have all been denied to her at some point in her life, which in part fuels her misery and discontent.

And I think, something that gets lost, is that Carol cares. She cares about her fans (even though she pokes fun at them) through her actions. She kept the crocheted items, she interacted with them so beautifully during the book-signing, she remembered some of their usernames/details. Carol shows through her actions that she cares. She goes on the trips with Helen despite not wanting to because it mattered to Helen. She throws up and feels so obviously remorseful every time she loses her temper. She cares so deeply about the Others because they’re people and their freedom/choice/individuality was stripped of them without consent, which is something that’s obviously important to her given how she views Koumba’s actions. The Others’ lack of want, desire, agency, etc. is clearly upsetting to her.

Furthermore, post-isolation, she gets a lot of flak for breaking down and sleeping with Zosia as if the Hive was not purposefully manipulating her toward this end, playing on her need for connection to foster dependence. Zosia initiated the kiss. It was maybe one of the few times we see Zosia take an action that she didn’t ask for consent for first, didn’t wait for Carol to tell her, etc. Hell, it even had me questioning if that was a moment of agency. A sign of want. Something that would matter to Carol.

I tell people all the time that social connection and love are both up there with food, water, and shelter in terms of basic human needs. The person deprived of them has a hard time accessing their higher thoughts/self-actualization traits. It’s one of the main reasons many places are starting to look at solitary confinement as cruel and unusual punishment. The damage done to our psyches in the presence of loneliness isn’t just mental; physically speaking, prolonged loneliness causes issues in our bodies too.

Like yes, at the end of 40 days of essentially solitary confinement, she trips up, but we see that caring nature deep inside her when she starts asking Zosia questions about herself, and ensuring that she eats too, etc. Carol cares about people even if she is gruff about it. Even if she knows, in this context, it is going to be used against her.

Like in a way Carol and the Hive both have something the other is missing, and her inability to be placated for very long because of how strongly she values choice and autonomy and agency is something I think that draws the Hive to her in a unique way. Carol’s individualism and original experiences is fascinating to the Hive; the Hive’s connection and community is something Carol has always wanted but could never have.

When you think about it, Carol has lived her entire life feeling that some of her agency and choice have been taken from her. She is closeted, essentially, because she fears that being her authentic self will cost her the life she was come to enjoy and the comfort of it. She lost her family/lost the illusion of them loving her unconditionally over her sexuality, and that kind of betrayal from them is enough to have her guard up with everyone else. I think that’s why the idea of agency and consent rings so true to her core motivations. I think it’s different than just “oh she’s an American, of course she values individualism.”

Maybe I’m too close to the subject matter to see it, but I grew up in a southern US town and still live in the “Bible Belt.” I’m fortunate that I didn’t have to come out until I was out of the house and less dependent on my parents. The fear of conversion therapy was there for me, albeit more as a nebulous, vague idea like Hell, but it is still there for some in a far more tangible way.

And besides, even if you aren’t sent to a conversion camp, you’re often disowned or you’re socially ostracized. It’s honestly so similar to the Hive. You are different from these people and you both know it; they wave at you and smile but you have your guard up because you know deep down, if they could, they would change you. They would make you like them.

And the mother stuff, don’t even get me started. Carol specifically mentions her mother for a reason. I can understand why Carol is so bitter, why she assumes the worst: why wouldn’t she? Why wouldn’t she assume the worst when the one person in the whole world who is supposed to love you unconditionally (your mother) doesn’t love you? Or doesn’t love you unconditionally, at least.

So, long-winded, but it’s her empathy, her caring nature, her core fundamental love of humanity, that pushes her to resist the Hive so much. Because she doesn’t want to see what happened to her happen to billions of others. Let them have the choice, because Carol knows what it’s like when you don’t. When people try and take that away from you. When you live a life miserable because of how much of yourself you have to hide from the world.

Carol is deeply empathic person at her core. She’s just also abrasive and not a “people” person. Those aren’t the core traits to her, though. She’s not just purely selfish, she’s reliving the worst thing she has ever experienced and she’s entirely alone after spending a long time having at least one person by her side who showed her that she wasn’t unlovable.

We have seen the trope over and over again of the hero almost losing the one person they loved the most and doing anything in their power to stop it. Carol did lose that person, and she’s having to figure out how to cope with that.

TLDR: I think Carol deserves some grace because at her core, she’s an empathetic and caring person.

I lost a dear friend who I corresponded by snail mail for years with because when I came out to her, she went to her university Christian Union at the time (one of the most prestigious that rhymes with Doxxturd) and the president told her she should suggest I get conversion therapy.

After reading her letter with this awesome advice we didn’t get in touch for 15 years. It took FB and her marrying a physicist (an atheist) and having kids to realise what unconditional love looks like.