#i know its not love benji but we can see other people's pov in the show

[corvusaur]

okay so im about halfway through hell followed with us by andrew joseph white and Oh My God!!!!!!! this book is literally everything my horror loving trans self could want in a ya book! the story follows benji who is on the run from a fundamentalist cult that released a viral plague on the earth. from there, he is found by a group of teens from the local lgbtq+ center. the groups leader, nick, is gorgeous, powerful, and knows his secret: he has been infected with a deadly bioweapon that threatens to turn him into a monster.

i really like benji as a main character!!! he is not perfect by any means but he does compel me so far. the effects of the cult he grew up in really has a strong effect on him and it makes him a fascinating character to read from. his relationship to the body horror/his sense of self as well?? immaculate. plus we love to see trans people in fiction

im not always the Biggest fan of the genre of love interest that nick seems to be, but i find myself thoroughly enjoying him. the stark contrast between how he sees the world and how benji sees it (including benji himself) has made both the worldbuilding regarding the inhabitants of this world and nick himself feel more real. the Strong Silent Leader of the Rebel Faction is a ya love interest that can often feel cookie cutter and underdeveloped in ya distopia, but nicks pov really gives that insight into his character. plus as a neurodivergent reader, so much of that aspect of him is so relatable.

speaking of trans/neurodivergent rep, i like what theyve done with it! im white, so i cant really speak to the quality of the racial rep, but i like what i see so far with trans rep in particular. i love that there are both multiple trans characters and that they are allowed to be very different from each other. theyre messy! they disagree! its very refreshing

i am so so so excited to finish this book and if you reading this want to try it out please check out the cws for this one! most notably off the top of my head theres lots of religious trauma, body horror, transphobia, queerphobia in general, familial relationships that are toxic if not abusive

#sorry this is so long i cant figure out how to do read more on mobile #bookblr #hell followed with us #also the cover is Gorgeous i didnt mention that but it is

[everyone-has-their-story]

Imagine not being allowed to say anything in the heat of the moment when you're embarrassed, anxious, your shit was put on blast before you had the chance to tell the person you love, and shit has been piling up without being vilified? Benji can't relate.

#like damn people...can we see things from other pov sometimes? #i know its not love benji but we can see other people's pov in the show?? interesting... #and hearing that your bf's mom accepts some random dude but not you? that's not exactly the easiest thing to hear #sorry but in this house and this blog we stan benji campbell #love victor

[greyeyedmonster-18]

hello! i just finished ten reasons and oh my god 😭😭 oh. my. god. it was soo good!! i absolutely loved it! just the way they both came together and the intimacy between them before they even shared their first kiss was phenominal 🙌🏼 anyway, i was wondering if you had any scenes cut with Regulus in them! i loved him so much in ten reasons and his relationship with Sirius was lovely. Do you see him ever finding someone in New York?? i can see both Remus and Sirius teasing him ab it 🤣 if you don’t have anything with Reg maybe a scene where Remus talks more ab his parents or just some more Jily!! I don’t think i fully understood what happened to Remus’ dad 🤔 if nothing else i’d love to read another Harry scene as well 🥺 you write teenage Harry so well and I just love the little family Sirius has created for him in this fic, its so sweet <3

hi anonnny!!!

thank you for reading my little love letter to the midwest. it makes me very happy when people enjoy my work of heart.

lets answer these!

1. i hadn't thought about regulus finding a partner tbh! i know...theres a lot of fics out there that are like SIRIUS IS THIS HEARTTHROB BACHELOR FOREVER but like, I can very easily see Regulus just...not having a partner? And he's just happy with his little family and his job and really not concerned with love. especially in this universe.

2. Remus's Dad died. So did Hope lol. nothing tragic. Remus's dad died like...younger though? So when Remus was early in college. Hope wasn't until later.

3. thank you for loving teenage harry <3

4. below the cut--i only have one cut scene with regulus but like...i do have this conversation cut: initially the first kiss that remus dodged was not in SIRIUS POV and was in remus. but then we reformatted entire thing for consistency, and this was kept from the REMUS POV kiss where he talks a little bit more about his growing up in the UP.

"I'm sorry."

“Why?”

“I’m sure you’ve never had anyone duck away from kissing you,” Remus said, and Sirius ran his tongue along his teeth before he answered.

“Not exactly.”

“So...I'm sorry."

“At your pace.”

“Glacial.” Remus looked down, “10 years ago, eight even…maybe even six if I had met you before I was married…I wouldn’t have hesitated kissing you. I would’ve bent over and grabbed my ankles for you--” Sirius laughed loudly, diffusing some of the nervousness Remus felt, compelled to smile a long. “It’s not 10 years ago though.”

“Well, if it’s any consolation, 10 years ago, I don’t think you would’ve looked twice at me.”

“I would’ve looked.”

“You wouldn’t have liked. I was mostly high and stuck up.”

“Now you’re only one of those things.”

“I am not stuck up.”

“Who makes the belt your wearing?” Sirius opened his mouth and the shut it, “I’m sorry, who?”

“It’s gucci but I can’t help taste," Sirius told him, a wry smile on his face that Remus wished he had the courage to kiss the corner of. 10 years ago he would have. "What were you like then?"

"Eager. Excited. Fresh out of college and thinking that the world was mine. I had a boyfriend, my ex-husband, but even then, if I saw you in a coffee shop..." Remus stopped, "I would've looked."

"Just looked?"

"A lot."

"Not too different."

Remus put his hand in Sirius's, "I also probably would've been nicer to you...talked to you that first day."

"About?"

"The weather? A conversation I had with my Mom. I...I think before Benjy I talked a lot more, and..." Remus trailed off, realizing that the longer he had been with Benjy, the less he spoke. The more he preserved the only part of him he felt was his entirely. "Ten years ago, I was drinking things other than black coffee...and I know this because I worked at a coffee shop and tried everything on the menu. We would've talked about how our orders change every day."

But Sirius laughed.

"What?"

"10 years ago...I had already been out of college for a year...and the firm I worked at, only had black coffee."

#asks #ask me anything #ten reasons #500 celebration

[gossipgirl2019-blog]

'You': TV Review

New Post has been published on http://gr8gossip.xyz/you-tv-review/

'You': TV Review

Lifetime’s new stalking drama imagines what it would be like if Dan from ‘Gossip Girl’ became romantically obsessed with Serena and used social media as a key piece of his manipulation.

The romantic indulgence, or at least extended toleration, of male misbehavior has been one of the pillars of TV’s saturated moment known as Peak TV.

It wasn’t just the Don Drapers, Tony Sopranos, Walter Whites and Stringer Bells, the great antiheroes at the center of classic shows. Chuck Bass attempted to date-rape an underage girl in the pilot for Gossip Girl and was then presented as a romantic figure throughout the series, even after he treated his girlfriend as property in a trade for a hotel. Veronica Mars fans hastily bought into a redemption for Logan Echolls that nothing in the text ever allowed me to embrace. Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans accepted Spike’s questionable transition from murderous adversary to swoony love interest and even, in many cases, shrugged off an attempted rape. Even Dexter Morgan, with a body count in the dozens and a professed antipathy to all things amorous, went through a string of girlfriends.

It’s not incidental to the #MeToo conversation that TV has spent decades perpetuating the notion that no matter how bad the bad boy, rehabilitation and redemption were right around the corner.

The time is probably perfect for Lifetime’s You, an extremely watchable stalker drama with at least peripheral mindfulness of Hollywood’s tradition of writing women who get weak at the knees around men who, in any civilized society, would be walking restraining orders or worse. It shouldn’t be taken wholly as a negative that after five episodes, I still don’t know what to make of You or its tendency to throw provocative ideas on the table only to get distracted by the need or desire for aggressive narrative churn. The breathless pacing of You is what could well make it a juicy guilty pleasure for many viewers, but it falls short of the kind of thoughtfulness that could have made it special.

Adapted by Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble from the novel by Caroline Kepnes, You stars Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg, manager of a small bookstore who falls swiftly and somewhat inexplicably in love with customer Guinevere Beck (Elizabeth Lail), a graduate student and aspiring writer with questionable taste in men and friends and general life choices. Love at first sight, romantic comedies have long taught us, isn’t just acceptable — it’s aspirational. Joe, however, is not a romantic comedy hero. Rather than wooing our heroine through the usual interactions, he takes to social media to learn about Beck (as all her friends call her) and takes to stalking to learn even more about her, using his ill-gotten insight to pursue her in ways that rub Beck’s wealthy best friend, Peach (Shay Mitchell, delivering the show’s best performance as its most interesting character), and ultra-douchy boyfriend, Benji (Lou Taylor Pucci, amusingly transitioning from indie movie dweeb to cable TV heartthrob), the wrong way. They’re right to be concerned, because Joe can’t distinguish between love and obsession, and he has no boundaries when it comes to his willingness to manipulate his way into Beck’s heart. No boundaries. None.

Complicity is the name of the game when it comes to You, which draws its name from the second-person conversation Joe is having in his head with Beck, but also from the conversation the show wants to at least instigate with viewers. It’s not a coincidence that two of the drama’s biggest stars come from teen-friendly soaps that normalized all manner of romantic toxicity and that the third — that’d be Lail — could have come from a vending machine distributing attractive blondes in the Blake Lively/Ashley Benson vein. We know from films like Notting Hill and You’ve Got Mail that bookstores are petri dishes for love stories, and from countless movies that Brooklyn and other trendy New York City locations, shot only in a healthy gloaming glow — director Lee Toland Krieger sets a handsome template — are first dates waiting to happen. And we know from real life that cyber-stalking a potential conquest isn’t even “stalking” anymore. It’s a thing that’s practically necessary so that you don’t end up going out with a psycho.

Joe is a psycho. But he’s an amiable psycho and his internal monologue, which steers the show, is designed to be reasonable, with creepiness around the edges, rather than the reverse. By virtue of his decision to play the role of the “nice guy,” he has decided he’s more deserving of Beck than any of the men in her sphere. By virtue of the knowledge he’s gleaned from her Twitter and Facebook feeds, he’s decided he knows her better than she knows herself. Based on what he perceives as his own decency and what he perceives as his love for Beck, Joe has made himself the arbiter of moral behavior in her universe. If you think about it, it’s pretty much exactly what Dan Humphrey, Badgley’s character in Gossip Girl, did, or what he would have done if Chuck Bass were one of Dan Humphrey’s alternate personalities. It’s a part that could have been played more interestingly and believably by an actor with a less memorable bone structure, but there’s a chill in Badgley’s eyes that works nicely, and the producers must have loved the idea of an actor who comes with the baggage of previous roles.

Lail’s casting operates in exactly the opposite way. She’s familiar without being literally familiar — unless you really loved her brief arc on Once Upon a Time — and so the fun of her performance, in combination with the way the character is written, is that you’re constantly projecting the wrong things on her. The Beck that Joe sees, the Beck that her boyfriend Benji sees, the Beck that the audience sees are not exactly the same person. Depending on the scene, you can imagine her as innocent victim or a complicit Jezebel. If Lail’s performance feels fuzzy and indecisive, there’s a strong chance that’s intentional. Joe thinks he’s a man of depth and refinement and that his head has been turned by a woman who’s unique and special. And just as nothing would offend his sensibilities more than being told he’s just a garden-variety predator, it would be no boost to his ego to point out that he has predictably fallen for a rather basic cute blonde with daddy issues.

It’s a great starting point for a provocative story, yet after five episodes I keep waiting for You to do something challenging instead of well-executed variations on “Will he get caught?” suspense. The show doesn’t ask you to over-empathize with Joe, who seems to be a surprisingly placid sociopath, and that eliminates both “stalker handbook” and “effective character study” from its aspirations. He’s the only guy making anything in the show happen, so it’s hard to root for Joe’s demise. The episode in which Beck claims the POV voiceover for a while does little to enhance her interiority, and so she isn’t much of a protagonist either. You’d think that nobody would come away from these episodes rooting for Joe and Beck as a couple, but you’d have thought the same thing about Dexter Morgan and his adoptive sister, so one should never think too highly of the audience and its ability to resist the alleged magnetism of two pretty people making pretty kissy faces at each other.

If anything, You would be more incisive if it were trying harder to make us invest in this relationship, forcing genuine discomfort on viewers. Maybe that’s what the writers think they’re doing with Joe’s friendship with his young neighbor, whose abusive stepfather is the only person who recognizes Joe for who he is. If so, it isn’t working. The thing You does most successfully is stoke digital paranoia, reminding viewers that everything they post online establishes a footprint and maybe, to paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, an ounce of online modesty is worth a pound of not having Dan Humphrey from Gossip Girl stalk you. Unless you’re into that sort of thing, which is a confrontational perspective that You isn’t quite willing to address.

Part of me wants the show to yell at its audience, “This is the price you pay for watching young adult soap operas wrong!” And I know that You isn’t in that same storytelling business. It doesn’t have to be as blatant as it is, though. Look at the truly subversive work being done on Killing Eve when it comes to deconstructing the romanticizing of obsession, the allure of turning violence into another fashion accessory and the narrative upheaval that comes from a gender inversion of the bad-boy archetype. There’s a conversation that connects these two shows; Killing Eve‘s take on it is near great, while You settles for interesting and fun.

Cast: Penn Badgley, Elizabeth Lail, Shay Mitchell Creators: Greg Berlanti and Sera Gamble Based on the novel by Caroline Kepnes Showrunner: Sera Gamble Airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT (Lifetime) Premieres Sept. 9