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nickblaine · 2 years

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I had this question for a long time. Figured you are the safest person to ask. Do you sometimes have the feeling that June could be toxic for Nick? Like she’s single mindedly selfish and takes Nick and his love for granted. She never acknowledges how much he’s done for her. Instead she keeps pushing him to do more.

Like when she forced him to have sex with Eden, I believe she contributed to a lot of his trauma. Nick was absolutely shattered afterwards. Then in season 3 she tells him he’s good for nothing and she also tells him he’ll have only one chance to a be father to Nicole.

In season 4, she doesn’t think of him unless she needs something from him. She never as much asks him to leave Gilead and come to Canada. This bothers me more because she even asked Lawrence to leave Gilead but not Nick. I agree June’s going through a lot. But does that mean she can continue being mean to Nick and think of him only when she needs something?

(i just wanna put something out there before the rude messages and vagueposts roll in: June isn’t real. she is a fictional character. just because a character has experienced trauma doesn't mean they are above criticism or that anyone has to like them. it doesn't reflect on anyone's ability to empathize with real life survivors, either. we are all entitled to our own opinions about a TV show and deserve to feel safe expressing them outside of anonymity. just something to think about before some of y'all go around railing fellow Osblaines and making the community feel unwelcome to different opinions. this is something all of us already experience from the THT fandom of a whole and it doesn't need to be reflected amongst ourselves.

if you are a June fan, that’s great! make content. write metas. talk about how much you like her. but dictating how other people should or should not feel about her? uncool, man. just do you and let others be.)

with that out of the way... you're not wrong to feel this way, anon, and i'm glad my blog feels like a safe space for you to express that!

i agree completely with all your examples listed here. many of these scenes don’t seem to come from a place of love, and made me question how June really feels for Nick - especially during season 3 when her behavior was particularly insufferable.

I agree June’s going through a lot. But does that mean she can continue being mean to Nick and think of him only when she needs something?

she can, but she shouldn’t! and this is the root of most of my issues with June. it's not just Nick she takes it out on - it's everyone around her. people who help her. people who love her. people who are loyal to her. like Joseph said:

and based on everything we’ve seen so far, he isn’t wrong. who hasn’t been fucked up by June?

i would like to be able to root for June. she doesn’t have to be perfect for me to do so. (if it’s not clear by now, all of my comfort characters are deeply flawed.) but when she continues to treat others like shit (and in some cases actively harm them for her own agenda) 4+ seasons in without ever learning or growing from those mistakes, it’s difficult to maintain positive feelings for her.

and that’s ok. there’s no obligation to. it’s a freakin’ TV drama.

but i will say... even though i harbor doubts sometimes, i do believe June loves and cares for Nick in her own way. i haven’t completely given up on her because there are moments where you can see how deep that love goes, like in 4x03 and 4x09. maybe she’s just such a fundamentally flawed person that it’s difficult for her to express it in a way that comes across natural. maybe she doesn’t even fully realize the magnitude of love there, or maybe she represses it. it’s difficult to say because even though she is the titular character we rarely get to see what’s going on inside her head when it comes to her personal relationships.

like sure, we know all about June’s trauma and her vengeance and how pissed off she is at the Waterfords and the patriarchy, but how does June feel about putting Moira in a position to raise a child she never wanted? how does June feel about raping Luke? how does June feel about manipulating Emily’s pain for her own agenda? how does June feel about Nick constantly doing THE MOST for her, without asking for anything in return? the show barely scratches the surface of these things... and when it does it’s done in a throwaway manner before moving on to the next big shocking moment, leaving far too much distance between the audience and June’s real feelings.

so yeah. i guess the point is, i agree June can be toxic to those around her and after 4 seasons of it i expect nothing more. but the blame doesn��t lie solely on her - she was made into a poorly written character, after all. characters can go through trauma and still grow as a person, maintain organic relationships, and invite the audience to connect with them (instead of demanding it “because she’s a victim.”)

but instead Bruce & co prioritize making June a symbol rather than a human. she’s a symbol of vengeance against the patriarchy, of (white) feminist violence, and of devoted motherhood - with little meat in between. this is very clear from the way they all talk about June and the show as a whole, too. and that’s where June’s character flaws really come from - not her personal trauma - but from the writers’ failure to humanize her in a substantial way.

#asks #the handmaid's tale #osblaine #june osborne

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vdbstore-blog · 7 years

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New Post has been published on Vintage Designer Handbags Online | Vintage Preowned Chanel Luxury Designer Brands Bags & Accessories

New Post has been published on http://vintagedesignerhandbagsonline.com/gwyneth-glows-like-a-radioactive-swan-my-day-at-the-goop-festival-life-and-style/

'Gwyneth glows like a radioactive swan' – my day at the Goop festival | Life and style

Culver City, Los Angeles, is socked in by haze, and a line of women in black athleisure – more blondes than one is accustomed to seeing in one place at one time – stretches down the block. Each has paid between $500 and $1500 (£390 and £1,175) to stand in this line and attend In Goop Health: Presented by Goop, the inaugural “health and wellness expo” of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, Goop.

People are excited, a little nervous and giddy. It feels as if we are waiting for the bus to summer camp, if your summer camp gives out free lube and Nicole Richie is there. At 9am the beefy security team parts and we pour into a courtyard where employees sort us into more lines based on how much we have paid to be here. Colour-coded bracelets indicate whether you are a Lapis ($500), Amethyst ($1,000) or Clear Quartz ($1,500) Gooper. More money means more activities: a foam roller workout, a “sound bath”, even lunch with “GP” herself in the “Collagen Garden”. Apparently, a prohibitively expensive, celebrity-studded self-help salon isn’t exclusive enough: the very rich can’t have fun without a little class hierarchy.

We pass into a second courtyard, which offers clusters of tasteful white furniture ringed by a variety of “wellness adventures”. In one corner, you can sit cross-legged on a cushion and the “resident Goop shaman” will tell you which crystal you “need”. In the opposite corner is a woman who will photograph your aura in a little tent. There is an oxygen bar and an IV drip station. And there is food, of course, just in very small pieces: tiny vegan doughnuts, quinoa and lox swaddled in seaweed, ladles of unsalted bone broth, fruit.

I take a lap of the courtyard and the cavernous hangar where we will be spending the next nine hours (there is no re-entry). Inside, interspersed among the Goop-approved matcha and coconut-water stalls, is the Goop Marketplace, where attendees can buy face potions, rolling pins and Tory Burch’s new line of active wear. For $55, you can buy one of the jade eggs that Goop famously suggested women carry around in their vaginas. Or, a rose quartz egg, if you have “seen results with the jade egg and want to take your practice a step further”. I head back outside and get in line for the shaman.

Probiotic juices are flowing. Photograph: Kolasinski/BFA/Rex/Shutterstock

Turns out, the shaman is a little backed up, so they are scheduling appointments instead. A friendly employee writes my name on a clipboard and tells me to come back at 4.05pm. The line for aura photography is even longer. I wait about 10 minutes before a staffer announces that the schedule is full and we are all fired from the line, but we can check back later. That’s fine. Everyone is feeling good. Employees weave through the crowd with trays of probiotic juice. I decide I like the Goop expo. It is silly, but most of us seem to be in on the joke – like Dungeons and Dragons for your vaginal flora. Why not?

I don’t believe that my proximity to crystals (or lack thereof) has any effect on my wellbeing, but I don’t think it is interesting or sophisticated to mock people who do. These women are having fun. They are sitting on pillows and connecting with each other. It is the kind of spontaneously intimate conversation that happens among women all the time, dressed up in the language of magic and, sure, monetised.

As long as you are not promising miracles and swapping carnelian for childhood vaccines, organising your inner life around crystals doesn’t seem much different than organising it around “bullet journalling”. There is a line, of course, between having fun with rocks and exploiting people’s fears for profit, and I am expecting to approach that soon enough.

I wander back inside and there she is, gliding through the Bulletproof Coffee line like our priestess. Here is just a true fact: Gwyneth glows like a radioactive swan. She emits light. She would be great in a power outage. Though the FAQ specifically directed attendees to wear athleisure (with a link to the Goop store’s athleisure page – just to be helpful!), Gwyneth appears to be wearing a sirocco of flower petals. She leads us, her flock, into the auditorium and the real show begins.

After a brief history of Goop (“I started to wonder: Why do we all not feel well? Why is there so much cancer? Why are we all so tired?”), Paltrow introduces her personal physician, Dr Habib Sadeghi, DO. He talks for an hour about “cosmic flow”; his left testicle; the “magnificence” of Gwyneth (“I’ve been down and I’ve touched her feet … and I’ll do it again”); and his belief that “consciousness precedes phenotypic expression”, which means, basically, that all ailments are on some level psychosomatic and your ovarian cysts are really just little nodules of emotion – or something.

Women connecting with themselves. Photograph: Salangsang/BFA/Rex/Shutterstock

The next panel, on gut health, counters Sadeghi’s consciousness theory with the assertion that all human illnesses are caused by antibiotics, ibuprofen, caesarean sections and legumes. The human gut is a rich rainforest, they say. Antibiotics are “napalm”, and taking one ibuprofen is “like swallowing a hand grenade”. Someone relates an anecdote about a marathon runner who had to get a faecal transplant from her fat niece, and it made the marathon runner fat. In mice, faecal transplants have been found to make fat mice thin, and anxious mice calm. Oh, my God, I realise. Paltrow is going to start selling her own poop.

Dr Steven Gundry, author of The Plant Paradox, reveals that from January to June inclusive, he consumes all his calories between 6pm and 8pm, because “we evolved to search for food all day and then fast”. It’s funny how our understanding of human evolution – of the point at which we were once our truest selves – can shift according to which restrictive diet is on-trend that day. Next to each of our chairs is a complementary bottle of hot-pink, watermelon-flavoured water, sickly-sweet with Stevia. You know, just like the cavemen used to drink.

Gundry argues that human beings aren’t meant to eat any plants native to North America, because we are native to “Africa, Europe and Asia”. At one point, Dr Amy Myers casually distinguishes between the gut bacteria Asian people need (because “they” eat a lot of seaweed) and the gut bacteria that “we” need. You don’t have to glance around the room to know who “we” are.

In Goop Health is shockingly white – even to me, a blond, white person who went in expecting whiteness. Obviously, this is anecdotal – I haven’t conducted a census – but I don’t recall seeing more than 10 people of colour among the attendees, and that’s a generous estimate. The panellists are almost exclusively white. I wonder if anyone at Goop brought up the lack of diversity in their speakers during the planning stages, or anticipated this criticism. But to acknowledge it would be to acknowledge politics, and In Goop Health stays as far away from politics as it can get.

Lindy West at Goop in Health. Photograph: Lindy West

However, an event supposedly focused “on being and achieving the optimal versions of ourselves”, as Paltrow put it during her welcome address, cannot truly be depoliticised. You can’t honestly address “wellness” – the things people need to be well – without addressing poverty and systemic racism, disability access and affordable healthcare, paid family leave and food insecurity, contraception and abortion, sex work and the war against drugs and mass incarceration. Unless, of course, you are only talking about the wellness of people whose lives are untouched by all of those forces. That is, the wellness of people who are disproportionately well already.

Towards the end of his speech, Sadeghi tells a story about an epiphany he had in the anatomy lab. He says he discovered that the first valve of the heart flows straight back into the heart: “Selfish little organ there! No, no, not selfish – self-honouring. Wooo! What a difference! I could never give anything to anybody – ask my beloved wife – until I take care of me. Until my needs are met. Right? Right? When you fly down, the first thing that they tell you is that before you put the mask on anybody else, put it on yourself.”

I hear that idea repeated over and over again at the Goop conference – take care of yourself so you can take care of others. Put your mask on first. Hold space for yourself. Be entitled. Take. At a certain point, it begins to feel less like self-care and more like rationalisation. I don’t know anything about the personal lives of the women at In Goop Health – who they give money to, what hardships they have endured, why they were drawn to this event – and every person I interact with is funny and smart and kind and self-aware. But it is self-evident and measurable that white people in the US, in general, are assiduous about the first part of that equation (caring for ourselves) and less than attentive to the second (caring for others).

It is OK to love skin cream and crystals. It is normal and forgivable to be afraid of dying, afraid of cancer, afraid of losing your youth and beauty and the currency they confer. We have no other currency for women. I understand why people spend their lives searching for that one magic supplement, that one bit of lore that will turn their “lifestyle” around and make them small and perfect and valuable for ever. I also understand, especially at this moment in history, why people long to step outside of politics for a day and eat kale-flavoured ice cream (real, not satire, actually good) in a warehouse full of Galadriels. But the idea that anything is apolitical is an illusion accessible only to a very few. And the absolute least the Galadriel-in-chief ought to do is acknowledge that.

The kale-flavoured ice-cream was actually good. Photograph: Lindy West

At 4.05pm I dash outside for my shaman appointment, only to be told they are running about an hour behind. “Should I come back in an hour,” I ask. “I mean, you could try,” the woman says in a way that means, “No”, or maybe, “Not with that bracelet”.

For her keynote to close the day, Paltrow purports to dissect the complexities and woes of being a working mother with a panel of famous gal pals: Cameron Diaz, Tory Burch, Nicole Richie and Miranda Kerr. How do they do it? How do they have it all? The women deliver a bounty of platitudes about ambition, female friendship, self-care, their mothers and sticking to one’s “practice”. They are charming and humble. Richie is funny. But at no point do any of them say the words: “I HAVE LOTS AND LOTS OF MONEY AND A STAFF.” In the context of a conversation about the challenges facing working mothers, the omission is, frankly, bizarre. It is a basic responsibility of the privileged to refrain from taking credit for our own good fortune. They might as well have been reading from Ivanka Trump’s book proposal. As with all the other panels, they do not take questions.

There is one moment I can’t stop thinking about. Near the end, Kerr casually mentions that she once tried leech therapy as part of her wellness practice: “One was on my coccyx because it’s really good to, like, detox the body, rejuvenate the body … I had a leech facial as well. And I kept the leeches. They’re in my koi pond.”

I am fat. I was the fattest person at the Goop expo. Strangers regularly contact me to tell me that I’m unhealthy and I’m going to die. A sampler from my emails:

“Being obese is NOT OK. It is associated with many health risks including: diabetes, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and premature death. Go lose some weight you fat slob, and do it before you go on disability so we don’t have to pay for you.”

“I don’t know what sort of message you are trying to send out to young girls/women, but that it is OK to be obese, and it is some sort of feminist sin to want to keep to a natural healthy shape can’t be a good one.”

Kerr’s body is almost certainly what those people mean when they say “a natural healthy shape”, because our society conflates conventional beauty with health. But, I don’t know – I might be fat, but I’ve never felt like I needed to get an IV drip on a patio in Culver City or put leeches on my butt to suck out toxins, and I’m grateful for that.

I guess Goop did make me feel well after all.

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thesrhughes · 7 years

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Why Dark Fiction?

New Post has been published on http://thesrhughes.com/why-dark-fiction/

Why Dark Fiction?

Hello, imaginary public, and welcome to today’s process blog entry: “Why Dark Fiction?”

Some time ago, on the internet, while discussing writing with a bunch of fellow writers (whom I’ll likely never meet in person), I was posed a question by someone who had actually read some of my work. At first, I was stunned, because who reads my work? But, then, I decided to answer the question. The question, in essence, asked why I so rarely included ‘redemptive’ endings in my stories.

I assumed (s)he was asking about the ending of No Grave, because it seemed like a safe assumption to make. My short stories don’t allow for a wide variety of endings, to be honest. A story entitled “A Black House Rots North of Town” does not seem to promise a happy ending.

But it’s a fair question. It taps into a kind of debate that I’ve seen people get involved with, before. Especially in genre fiction–fantasy and sci-fi and such��where part of the allure is escapism: what ending do we provide an audience? Are authors obligated to leave the audience at-ease? Are we obligated to try to improve their real-life suffering by providing fictional easement?

My answer is unsurprisingly non-committal. Mostly, my answer is an awkward, uncomfortable face and a series of tense, shrug-like gestures. A few sounds akin to words like “eh?” and “maybe?” and “kinda?” and “iunno?” Luckily, I mostly see this debate on the internet, where I’m able to scroll past without comment. When asked about it on a forum, I provided a neat, clean paragraph that hardly covered my actual opinion.

But today, I’m throwing in my 2-cents. And a writing prompt at the end.

Stop Reading Now If You Don’t Want No Grave Spoilers.

Seriously. I’m not going to get too specific, but you’ll know the approximate ending if you keep reading.

Assuming you care.

Which, if you don’t, that’s okay, too.

Alright: last chance to stop reading.

Seriously, you can scroll down to the writing prompt and skip all this.

Still here?

Great.

So, several people I’ve spoken to regarding No Grave have some issues with the ending. It’s a bit dreary. The ‘good guys’ (to the extent any of them can be called ‘good’) sort of lose. Or, at least, they certainly don’t ‘win.’ Whatever that means. And the main character makes a choice that is deeply selfish in the face of great evil. (For the record, I would probably make the same choice). Perhaps worse: once the selfish choice is made, she’s not particularly effective at carrying it out. It all seems pretty unpleasant.

Well, sure, but that’s the point.

I find it therapeutic actually. Because, in real life, we lose all the time. Or we make choices that don’t pan out. Or we try to save people and they die anyway. Et cetera. Mostly, we’re very small and weak and human. We fail probably more often than we succeed.

And this is the important part: that’s okay.

Tristan makes a terrible mistake and tries to salvage it and it doesn’t work. Nicole commits to a losing proposition after essentially being pressured into it and she gets scared and doesn’t do it. Cyrus pursues his own interests selfishly until he sees how far people will go for each other and then those people get fucked because of him. Even though he tries his hardest to turn over a new leaf and save them, it’s just too-little-too-late.

So what happens, then? Everyone packs it in, tail between their legs, goes home, and eats a bullet. No, wait, that’s not what happens at all. They take their moment, they mourn, they cry about it, they feel guilt and pain and suffering and then they pick themselves up and get ready to try again. They’re getting licked out there and they huddle up, count off, and prepare to hit the field. Once more into the breach and all that.

As far as I’m concerned, their failure is a message of hope.

Let me explain.

Escapism vs. Hope

‘Escapism’ doesn’t necessarily mean ‘complete fantasy.’ I don’t need to tell a story where the good guys win. I don’t think the ‘good guys win’ formula is terribly hopeful. Optimistic, sure, but not hopeful. Hope isn’t hard to do when you’re winning. Hope is hard to do when you’re losing. And that’s the narrative I’m building. Losing isn’t the end of a thing and neither is failure. Loss and failure are just things that happen. People make bad decisions, selfish decisions, wrong decisions. People fuck up. Then they try again. Most of us will probably die with works unfinished and we hope others pick up where we left off. The world spends a few months raining shit down on us and we hope we do better next time. Hope isn’t in a victory, it’s in the attempt.

I have no desire to sell the ‘good guys win’ narrative, or any narrative of false optimism. Or any narrative that feels false to me at all. Sure, sometimes the good guys will win, I’ve definitely written and outlined stories where that’s what happens–because that’s what makes sense. But in the main, that’s not the product I peddle. My type of escapism doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, or a ‘redemptive’ ending as it was put to me. But I don’t think people need those. I don’t think they’re particularly helpful. I don’t think they’re necessarily useful in easing real-life suffering or imbuing an audience with a sense of hope or wellness. Instead, I aim to say: “hey, so, things suck right now, shit happens, whatever, but you shouldn’t give up. Pick yourself up, brush it off, and try again. Hold out for next time. And the time after that. And the time after that.”

Or, perhaps, in this trying era, Maya Angelou put it best: “You may encounter many defeats, but you must not be defeated.”

There’s a common saying that things are always darkest before the dawn–so maybe my stories aren’t about the dawn. Maybe my stories are about the darkness getting darker and the characters having the strength to hope that the dawn breaks soon. To have the strength to use gas-station bics and old, beaten matchbooks to make their own dawn because they don’t want to wait anymore.

And sometimes the darkness takes one of them, and all the others go out and gather sticks and build a pyre and set it ablaze and that inferno is its own dawn, for a while.

Good guys don’t always win, but they always keep trying.

That’s the narrative I’m selling.

Writing Prompt!

If you feel like doing some writing today, try this one out: write at least one (1) page where the story begins with the character failing. Bonus points if the character fails because of their own stupid mistakes. After the failure is complete, what happens next?

#author #essay #fiction #horror #metaphor #novel #supernatural #writing

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