#medhini loves to ramble

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why is this killing me.....

#this was so funny for no reason lmaoooo #black sails #medhini loves to ramble

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look what I made during my ochem lecture

#hehe #medhini loves to ramble

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just thinking about when priya made kadhi (without pakora! but that's beside the point) on BA and the title of the video was "creamy Indian soup" and when she made aloo paratha on some other channel it was called "Indian potato flatbread" l m a o which white editors made her do that 🤔🤔🤔

#bon appetit #medhini loves to ramble #Priya Krishna #and kadhi is not a soup lol

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bitches say they have their life together and then go and listen to class of 2013 by mitski

#I'm bitches #mitski #Medhini loves to ramble

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eye....

#cjdnxmsks #is he wrong tho #desi tag #medhini loves to ramble

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if hollywood is so into remakes then why can't we get a bend it like beckham remake except they're actually gay this time

#bend it like beckham #medhini loves to ramble

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derry girls is the embodiment of those teenage girls' diary entries that were like "ugh joe is so awful for ignoring me all day I want to sleep forever also oh yeah someone landed on the moon"

#derry girls #medhini loves to ramble

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can you go into any detail about why never have i ever isn't good? i really wanted to watch it, but if it's trash i don't wanna bother. thank you!!

alright I sat on this for a few hours so I could finish the rest of the show and write this in the morning and now it is morning. also there are going to be quite a few spoilers in here so just...do what you will with that knowledge i guess. also, if you still want to watch the show, I’m not gonna stop you. I binged the entire season yesterday and I have final exams next week. warning: this is super long.

ngl I was planning on just deleting the post you’re referring to, because at that point I had only watched half the season but I already saw a lot of things I didn't like: an Indian character who seemed a little ashamed of her heritage, too many pr*yanka ch*pra references, some strange and unnecessary ableism (i mean, all ableism is unnecessary but this particularly so), bad stereotypical Indian accents, the main character thirsting over white/white passing boys (this is Mindy's show, can you expect anything different?), and a disgusting amount of fatphobia (there is one fat character who is Devi’s age and his only personality traits are eating and making a fool of himself). 

the show also conflates indian and hindu a few too many times, even though there is a self-aware quip about it. and there’s a joke thrown in about m*di that *i guess* is supposed to show that this family at the least knows who the prime minister of india is? but with india’s current political situation and the knowledge of the atrocities committed by m*di I really did not like that a reference to him was thrown in there. I suppose it is an example of how the desi diaspora (particularly upper-caste, upper middle class Indians) are quite disconnected from the homeland, but like...does Mindy not watch the news? m*di literally committed genocide.

there’s also a lot of antisemitism. Devi’s academic rival, Ben, is introduced like a walking Jewish stereotype: just check out this post because op says it better than I could. there’s also a joke where Devi says out loud that she wishes Ben was killed by N*zis. I honestly don’t even know how that made it into the show and none of the context surrounding the joke is funny.

okay on to my personal qualms with the show. I wasn’t a fan of either of the love interests. neither of them really respected Devi as much as I would have liked, and personally, I found it tiring to see women/girls of color chase after men/boys who can’t reciprocate in the same way. I didn’t love how paxton (the cool jock love interest) kept leading Devi on and would then act aloof and I honestly would have preferred if Devi and ben hadn’t kissed, because I just prefer their frenemy dynamic over some potential romantic one. i also just could not relate to Devi at all...I was just too repressed in high school to relate to anything Devi does. she’s also just super unlikeable in the first eight episodes, but she kind of grew on me in the last two. I saw a comparison made between Devi coping with her grief with hypersexuality and the coping mechanisms used by the main character on Fleabag, which kind of made sense to me, even though they are pretty different shows otherwise. and she does get some comeuppance for her actions towards the end. even then, devi never really confronts her trauma directly, especially her paralysis, and her actions are excused too many times for comfort.

a lot of the storyline depended on teen romcom cliches, and were sort of excused because the main characters are poc. i wish this trend didn’t happen so often, especially when it comes to mainstream stories of young women and girls of color. i was also surprised that this show doesn’t really give much screentime to other indian kids that Devi might interact with. that would have been a much more three-dimensional approach to a show like this, but i also think this had to be sacrificed to keep up with the teen romcom aspect of the show. i was also not a fan of the will-schuester-wannabe history teacher. 

BUT (if you have been reading this much I sincerely applaud you) there were a few things I did like about the show. I loved Devi’s friends and honestly if I had her friends in tenth grade I would never ditch them for some boy. when I was a high school sophomore, I was closeted, had a musical theatre obsession, and ate dosas for dinner so I felt like a mix of all three of the girls. in fact, I found eleanor’s and fabiola’s storyline to be a lot more compelling that Devi’s at times. i even really enjoyed ben’s arc (and loved the andy samberg narration in his episode, especially because he pronounced Devi’s name with the soft “dh” sound...absolutely wonderful!). i thought fabiola’s coming-out scene was sweet (even though it was very textbook) and i thought eleanor being dramatic was very funny. 

in my opinion, the last two episodes were the best. we really got to dig deeper into Devi’s relationship with her mother and it was eerily reminiscent of my own. she gets told that she has to move to india because family is there, so she naturally fights with her mom and storms off. that literally happened to me (minus the running away part...I actually did end up moving to India in the middle of high school), and other moments like those just hit close to home and made me want to finish the show. i personally didn’t relate to the whole “am I indian or not Indian enough” struggle until I started living in india, but my indian friends who did go to high school in america were all too sympathetic to this struggle. 

so overall, there are some bad things and some good things about this show. if you relate to the premise of the show at all, you may like it more than I did, but if you were raised in india (which is the demographic that most of the criticism is coming from) or generally enjoy good writing, you probably won’t like this as much. i do hope that this show helps pave the way for some representation that brings more nuance to indian-american identity, and different types of indian-american identities (working-class, immigrants who aren’t upper-caste, people who have been living in the states for several generations, LGBT people, indian muslims/christians/sikhs/etc) without unnecessarily bringing down other minorities. and once again, i am really happy that a girl named maitreyi ramakrishnan is getting famous and NOT anglicizing her name. 

i hope this response was good and if you do decide to watch, let me know how you like it!

#anonymous #asks #never have i ever #jfc this became really long i hope someone is jobless enough to read it #i spent an embarrassing amount of time on this essay #medhini loves to ramble #I also think I missed a couple of things so don't hate me

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no cops at pride only brad leone and claire saffitz armed with a food dehydrator

#Brad Leone #Claire saffitz #bon appetit #pride #Medhini loves to ramble #also amiel

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me the first time billy bones appeared on screen: Sir Percival?????

#black sails #I was like 😯 #medhini loves to ramble #bbc merlin

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me watching big eden like country gaayyyss I love youuuu

#big eden #medhini loves to ramble

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online college so far is just like *does homework while listening to the lecture like a podcast* *waits for the professor's cat to sit on the keyboard* *waits for the professor to figure out how to turn the camera back on* *finally sees the professor's cat* *goes back to doing homework while listening to the lecture as a podcast*

#it's great thanks for asking #medhini loves to ramble

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actually zindagi na milegi dobara and queen are good movies only because they're about Indian people going to europe to find themselves

#medhini loves to ramble #desi tag

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was I just supposed to hear mitski sing "and if I gave up on being pretty I wouldn't know how to be alive, I should move to a brand new city and teach myself how to die" and not completely change my personality??

#mitski #medhini loves to ramble

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forget dark academia and admire these bi flag left-handed pens I got

#medhini loves to ramble #and my friend also happens to love these pens too so I'm excited

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this is what college has been like so far

#I'm literally so stressed I have to get at least a 92 on the final to end up with an A- in molecular bio #aaaahhhhhhh #medhini loves to ramble #the office #yeah I know office memes are passé but this one made sense #also this was one of the sweetest moments in the entire show so I like it