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belmottetower · 11 months

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3.11 - Council Estates and the Right To Buy

In 3.11, we saw Jamie go home to his mum’s, and we learned that she still lives in the council house that Jamie grew up in. This has interesting implications and possibly negative ones if construed the wrong way. In the Subjectify articles, we've already discussed those implications, because it's something I've been concerned about since we first saw the trailer shot of Jamie's childhood bedroom. I knew even then that the story beat would have to be about throwing back to the Roy poster - that's why they had to keep Georgie in the house Jamie grew up in, rather than have her in a new house elsewhere. It was a choice made specifically so Roy could see the poster.

But in making sure that could happen, it leaves us with the unfortunate framing that Jamie didn't buy his mum a house when he got rich, and "buying your mum a house" is basically the first thing a working class footballer like him would do with his money. It's a really standard baseline. I have been nervously obsessing about Ted Lasso accidentally implying that Jamie wouldn’t have done that, for months now. I had already decided, before the episode aired, that if they did not clarify either way, I would have to assume that she did not want to leave the place she lived, and that rather than a new house, Jamie had bought her their old house on the Right To Buy, a government scheme introduced in the 1980s that allows most council tenants to buy their council home at a discount. (I do have issues with this policy generally, and the impact it had on the amount of council housing available, but that’s not for now.)

There is sort of a level of visual evidence for this - the inside of his mum’s house is really well maintained and clearly full of pretty expensive furniture and items. They definitely own it, and having now met her, gotten her vibe and seen the kind of house it is, it makes a huge amount of sense to me that she stayed there. It might have felt different if we saw a different KIND of council home, but in this specific situation, it tracks.

There’s a bit in my primer about this, but in the UK, council housing comes in a lot of different shapes and sizes. Some of them will be flats in tower blocks (like the one Roy points to from the Westway sports pitch in 2.05 - in real life that is a council housing block in Ladbroke Grove and private apartment buildings like that simply don’t exist, Roy is a council estate kid too) or the flat fronted buildings with outdoor walkways (think Kingsman, or Rose’s place in Doctor Who) but a lot of them are houses like the one you see Jamie’s mum living in - solidly built terraced houses on car-free streets, inside the boundaries of an estate. Sometimes the estate in general contains both apartment blocks and rows of houses, with some green spaces built in too. That No Ball Games sign is a staple in any and all council estates across the UK and is ignored in council estates up and down the country by children just like the ones seen in this episode and it is lovely to think about Jamie once doing the same thing. I really liked getting to see the kind of estate he grew up on.

So, TL:DR - they would own that house now, even though it’s on an estate, otherwise they would not be eligible to still be living in it. And it’s not universally horrible to live on a council estate, or in a street of ex-estate houses.

But that “Jamie didn’t buy her a house” discourse is definitely brewing - I have seen people discussing this already as “wrong,” and I agree that it is wrong in the sense of they should have taken a line or two to clarify the way that situation might have worked, specifically to not accidentally paint Jamie in a bad light. What I don’t agree with is that it’s “wrong” for her to have stayed put - that living in that area, in that type of house, on that estate is somehow inherently bad and a situation she should have been rescued from by Jamie. And at this point, insisting that she should leave or have something better is swiftly bordering on classist.

There are a lot of stereotypes that exist about working class families and council estates. That they’re all shitty places to live, that everyone who lives in them is a benefits scrounger, or a druggie, or an alcoholic, or are involved in crime or gangs. Frankly it’s an awful stereotype that just furthers the classism and class divide in the UK. There are issues in some places, but it is not ubiquitous. Georgie clearly had Jamie pretty young and would have been granted a “family home” house by the council. Living in a little cul de sac like that, it’s very likely she had a strong community of neighbors, other families with kids who all would have supported one another. She would have been looked after, as a young single mum, and Jamie would have been safe to run about and be cared for by everyone in the street if Georgie was working. It would not have been perfect, but it may have felt safe and warm in its own way.

So once Jamie got rich - given that Georgie doesn’t seem to have any other kids who might benefit from a bigger house or anything - I can honestly see Jamie trying to buy her a fancy house somewhere else and her being like “What the fuck would I do in some fancy suburb in Chesire? This is my home, I’ll stay here thanks,” and so Jamie just bought her the council house they’d grown up in and paid to get it renovated and done up nicely so Simon could have his laboratory, and Georgie a nice place to live, with her friends still close by. Except for his childhood bedroom, which she clearly refused to let him touch and him being the biggest mummy’s boy ever he didn’t argue.

Britain used to be incredibly proud of its strides in social welfare, and council housing was once very good quality building work. (If you ever want to watch a show that depicts the origins of, and pride in, social welfare for the working class communities in the UK in a beautiful, nuanced way that will make you sob every other episode please go and watch Call the Midwife from the beginning and come scream at me about it.) These are desirable homes - in fact, Right to Buy aside, a lot of older council housing, both houses and flats, are “de-counciled” and sold off privately to new home buyers who were never in the welfare system. I actually rent an ex-council flat in London, from a landlord who bought it privately. And I have a friend of a friend who privately bought and renovated an ex-council terrace almost exactly like Georgie’s. It’s not the greatest thing when council housing gets privatized, especially when the new replacements are of such terrible quality. But the original places are built to last, so Georgie’s house definitely could be done up to a high standard once they had the right to do improvements that were not the bare minimum of the overstretched housing organization. And between Right To Buy, private sales, and people who are still in the council housing system, an estate like Georgie’s these days may have any number of privately owned homes mixed in, and different incomes and circumstances within the same street or block of flats. Some are quite gentrified and even trendy.

I’m explaining this so people know the context when they talk about a council estate like the one we saw. I think there is a tendency to want to make Jamie’s background and childhood the most traumatic it could have possibly been, even more so than is on screen, and so it’s possible people who are less familiar with the UK and how council housing works or what council estates are like, could think that Jamie’s home growing up and the estate he lived on was awful and shitty and very very rough. And that could have been the case if he had lived on one of the rougher estates or in a flat in tower block that was falling apart and hard to do up not worth salvaging (a lot of them are being torn down) but that is not the kind of place the episode chose to show us. So now, having seen it, saying “How dare Ted Lasso not show him buying his mum a big house in order to help escape his traumatic upbringing and dirty poverty life” is honestly not a great take and is a pretty classist way to look at the millions of families in the UK that live in council housing. The episode absolutely should have stated that he bought that house rather than risk letting anyone think she’s still living within the welfare system because Jamie didn’t take care of her, but there’s a difference between that and removing her from the environment entirely if she was happy and at home there.

But speaking of adding extraneous trauma, there’s another element of Jamie having been brought up on an estate that I also want to talk about.

As someone who has been, in my fic, flying the flag for Jamie’s mum being alive and lovely and for them to have been super close for what feels like an eternity, this episode was so so so good for me. I’ll be honest, I always found the fact that some people were certain Jamie’s mum was dead quite baffling, because in the show, the way he talks about his mum right as far back as Two Aces, using present tense means it always seemed clear she was alive and I really just took the “Don’t think she would be lately” part about not being proud to mean that she didn’t know how he had been acting at Richmond, in training, with Ted and Sam, because he didn’t tell her. Not that she’d died, or had become estranged or something.

And then even aside from like, grammar, I just never thought the show depicted Jamie as someone who had suffered the loss of a parent. Especially when you compare him with Ted - who we all know did. Jamie was just not written as a character who is carrying around grief, especially recent grief, and his apology to Roy in season 2 proves it - "I aint used to being around dead people. It just, it did something to me, emotionally." This is very different to Roy’s explanation of why he acted so weirdly towards Keeley at the funeral itself - namely that memories of his grandad’s death were messing with him. It would be a very weird choice by the writers to have Jamie lie and say he hadn’t been around death if he had lost his mum.

So yeah, I always thought she was alive, and I always assumed - based on the ages kids tend to get scouted and acknowledged as good by the academies - that James hadn’t been around much until Jamie’s mid to late teens, and as such that Jamie didn’t ever live with James, just saw him occasionally. He certainly would not have ever had custody rights, if he walked out when Jamie was a baby and showed back up when he was 14.

But while I found the “Jamie’s mum is dead '' takes surprising, I almost preferred them to the theories and fics (sorry, people have the right to write what they want in fic, but I just hate it) that his mum was probably an alcoholic or a drug addict, or absent, or complicit to the James abuse, or just generally a bit shit and anything less than fantastic. Because Jamie talks about her in nothing but the nicest, softest terms, and Jamie himself - when not in his prime prick era, which legitimately only lasts for about three episodes - is the nicest, softest boy with the strongest sense of self. Even if he’d never mentioned his mum, his whole personality felt like it was the product of an upbringing with a whole lot of love and kindness and nurturing and being made to feel special.

The swiftness with which he reverted to sweetness and openness even in season 1, as well as his natural ego, the funny version of it, felt like his natural state of being, not a new development, and I always attributed this to his mum, which we now obviously know to be true. I’ve seen lots of people this week saying “As soon as we saw Jamie with his mum, EVERYTHING about him suddenly made sense,” and I am thrilled that people see this now, because this is what I always thought. I reverse engineered what his mum must be like based on his character so far, and it turned out just as I thought but even more so. I’ve also seen ideas that even if nothing was “wrong” with her, Jamie was somewhat estranged from her due to James and also sounding wistful when talking about her, or something, but I very much disagree. The two times he’s spoken about her, he has ALSO been talking about James, which was the thing he was sad about - they weren’t moments where he was being peppy and enthusiastic about how much he loved his mum. But also, now that we’ve met her and seen them together, I can kind of imagine him talking wistfully about her after not seeing her for like, a month, just because he is always missing her, LOL.

Anyway, how people interpreted their closeness or estrangement before this week is obviously something we did not know for a fact. The thing is, what we did know is that she was a single mum and that Jamie lived on a council estate in North Manchester, and that knowledge is what made me really side-eye some of the interpretations that framed her as either an addict or a kind of deadbeat figure that meant they had a bad relationship in some way. Because in the UK, there are a lot of stereotypes and stigmas around single mums in general, but in particular working class single mums who live on council estates. It’s really really awful and often revolves around them being unemployed, benefits scroungers, being neglectful or abusive, being drug addicts or sex workers, and it’s a really pervasive part of UK society and classism, and it felt like the details we knew about Jamie’s childhood on an estate is why people leant that way about his mum in a way they wouldn’t have if the council estate thing hadn’t been specified.

Where I work, we represent people across the UK and help get their stories shared to impact politicians. In one instance we got someone we represent onto the national news to talk about the cost of living crisis. She’s a single mum. When the clip got shared on social media she faced so much abuse and harassment and stigma because of these pervasive ideas people have about single mums and ended up having to delete her social media to get away from it. It was deeply upsetting to her, myself and my coworkers.

So I honestly always found fic or meta in which a character who, based on canon, is only ever mentioned as being attentive, loving and someone Jamie has a good relationship with, was portrayed along the above lines really hard to read. It just always felt rooted in the worst kind of stereotypes and classism, even if not intentionally. Anyway, point is…I am so fucking thrilled that we finally got to meet Jamie’s mum, that Georgie is lovely and kind and cuddly and supportive, that Jamie is an even bigger mummy’s boy than I ever could have dreamed, and that he even had a bonus soft baker stepdad father figure who had been around long enough to know that Roy Kent’s poster never left Jamie’s room. And the fact that his parents live in a house they now own, on a council estate where Georgie had a long-established community, is a perfectly fine choice. It isn’t something you need to retcon, you just need to know about the Right to Buy scheme.

#Jamie Tartt #Ted Lasso meta #Ted Lasso spoilers

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ruicchiii · 7 months

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IM SO SOFT FOR BAXTER LIKE LIKEL LIKE

IM IN LOVE WITH THE IDEA OF HIM BEING IN BETWEEN GAMES ?? (like shiloh and jeremy i found their concept so Neet) LIKE AAAA !!!

ESPECIALLY SINCE OLBA CAME BEFORE OLNF SO YOU'RE JUST LEFT WONDERING

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED ???? WHY DOESNT HE WANT TO COME BACK TO GOLDEN GROVE

WHY DID HE AND THE BOYS CLUB HAVE A FALLING OUT

WHY !!!

also

i think about this olnf tease. i see you, baxter. i see you i also see you in olnf HAHAHAHAH

everytime a question that might might might be related to olnf pops up to ask baxter i go "CRUMBS OLNF CRUMBS CRUMBS" it gets me SOOOOOOO ecstatic LIKE AAAAAAAAA

i was losing my SHIT everytime baxter would mention smtg about olnf and it SHOWED like TELL ME MORE !!! but it leaves so much more questions than answers like WAKSGHBHISEOH anyways thank you for coming to my ted talk ; im in love with Our Life and im OBSESSED with it oh my god (i talk about it more on twitter but my twitter is a fandom mess!!)

#ruiirambles #our life #our life now and forever #our life beginnings and always #olba #olnf #baxter #IM STILL ALIVE !!! ive just been lurking more on twitter.. ahah

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thyme-in-a-bubble · 1 month

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cookie cyma ur fav movie/series quotes xx

okay, these were just the first quotes to pop into my head, idk if i have favourites per se:

you – “Cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. No doubt, no doubt, no doubt.” from brooklyn nine nine

@midniteluv – “Anyway, I’m gonna go cry in the bathroom, peace out homies.” from brooklyn nine nine

@appocalipse – “...so, we broke a rule.” “Yeah. Hope it wasn’t a mistake.” “Hope it wasn’t a mistake. Title of your sex tape. Oh! Title of our sex tape!” from brooklyn nine nine

@fxllfaiiry – [walks in wearing a kimono a few sizes too small] “ Friday night, gentlemen. It's on.” “What happened to you?” “It's on and poppin' up in here, you feel?” “What happened to you?” “What?” “You didn't use to be like this, Schmidt.” “What are you talking about? It's on and poppin’!” from new girl

@fettuccin-e – “hey Cece, it’s J–” “ey yo Cece, what up fam? It's your girl, Winston, aka Winnie the Bish, akaakaaka Brown Lightning. Schmidt dropped Fawn like a bad habit OK, so ain't nobody riding shotgun! so you better get on while the gettin' is good, you got it? [tosses the phone away]” “i hate that you’re so good at this.” “i was so nervous.” from new girl

@ghostlyfleur – "Hey, you want to split that pasta from last night, hmm? 🎶Winston and Ferguson 'bout to split some pasta🎶. Yeah, man, you know I got wuv for you. Got nothing but love for you." from new girl

@fushic0re – “She has a flip phone Jess, she’s either poor or a time traveller.” from new girl

@chvoswxtch – “She’s my person. If I murdered someone, she’s the person I’d call to help me drag the corpse across the living room floor. She’s my person.” from greys anatomy

@slvttyfied – “Oh, screw beautiful. I’m brilliant. If you want to appease me, compliment my brain.” from greys anatomy

@chxrryhansen – "This man is a whore, has always been a whore, and will always probably be a whore." from greys anatomy

@inklore – “Tyrone, you know how much I love watching you work, but I've got my country's 500th anniversary to plan, my wedding to arrange, my wife to murder and Guilder to frame for it; I'm swamped.” from the princess bride

@bruisedboys – “Gupta... mmhh... mmhh... mmhh. [hangs up the phone] The Queen is coming, to Grove High School.” from the princess diaries

@oncasette – "If that's a joke, I love it. If not, i can not wait to unpack that with you later." from ted lasso

「 come join my 10k celebration 」

#lea answers #10k celebration #drew🫛

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ratasum · 3 months

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Priory TED Talk!

Welcome to the Durmand Priory! Steward Gixx has graciously allowed us to host a series of talks for our fellow Priory members, as well as anyone with an interest in learning, to attend. But we need to determine a few different things before we get going. First on the docket, help us determine a location for our event!

#guild wars 2 #gw2 #gw2 community #gw2 fan submission

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eff-plays · 6 months

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from what i understand, if you're playing as astarion, he very much remembers the kidnappings, and has narration describing his memories of the event when he meets gandrel. and also, if you talk to gandrel peacefully without astarion in the party, gandrel mentions the missing children, and then... you still have no option to really ask astarion about it. it is a very "the writers were all white and didn't think this through" type of moment, imo.

he also gets super sad about sebastian when you find him, but his response to the imprisoned gur children is to make a shitty joke like "well, at least i just jumped them in an alley and kidnapped them!! i wasn't luring them with candy or anything :)" which comes off to me like he is quite deeply racist.

i think in early access astarion had a more overtly racist tone to his character, in that his whole thing was that he was human trafficking gur people to cazador as a severely corrupt magistrate, the gur beat him to death as revenge, and then cazador turned him. which is interesting, but i am glad they didn't go with that for final release... having the discourse of "excuse me, that is my poor meow meow's emotional support racism, he did that because he was sad 🥺" would have killed me irl. particularly with the way that the gur are clearly paralleled with romani people, and astarion is notably the palest elf with the poshest accent...

anyway i don't mean to harsh your fic writing vibes or anything! it's just my unsolicited ted talk. i do like astarion, but i feel like people skim over this aspect of his writing because it's very un-sexy and not charming at all, just banally evil.

Yeah I agree, even if the writing is good for the most part, it's deeply inconsistent in others. It really is a question of "Did you overlook this? Or did you decide not to look into it at all because it would say something about your fave that you didn't want to be said?"

In terms of Avatar Astarion vs Companion Astarion, I think they're also slightly different characters just because of the player being a new factor introduced in the story. Like, Player!Astarion could happily rescue the grove and the Nightsong and be a hero and that'd be canonically what Player!Astarion does, while Companion!Astarion would hate that shit.

So Companion!Astarion being aware of the Gur kids would make him deeply unlikable, so it makes sense that he doesn't, so the player doesn't despise his ass instantly. Him suspecting Gandrel was sent by Cazador also gives the player a decent enough reason to agree to killing Gandrel. However, Player!Astarion needs to have this background information in order to make a more informed decision and understand the character they're playing as. Having the context of who Gandrel is and why he's actually there helps the player decide their next course of action, be it sparing Gandrel because he's a good guy, or killing him to protect themselves.

Obviously this might just be a major cope on my part, but that's how I see it, at least. Honestly, I do wish Larian left kids alone in general. It seems they include them mostly for shock value and to raise the stakes for the player. Like they thought maybe too many players would willingly sacrifice 7000 adults for Astarion, so better put some kids in there to make sure they know it's the bad choice. How does it tie back to Astarion? Um. He kidnapped them. And they also specifically belong to a group of people he's racist against. Because that means ... Something?

Cool. Thanks.

#bg3 #astarion critical #bg3 critical #bg3 spoilers

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themosleyreview · 3 months

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The Mosley Review: Lisa Frankenstein

Often the question the same question comes up in cinema. Why don't we have any more romantic comedies? Where are the quirkie coming of age films that tackle the age old themes of teen life struggles, social constructs within the popularity of each group or just the classic build up to a date to prom? Where are those films?! Well, here's a film that illustrates why that film genre has been buried and is slowing being unearthed. Like many of you, I enjoy a darker and off beat rom com from time to time and how it reflects the current youth lifestyle. Unfortunately, most of today's youth is online instead of in the real world. It was refreshing for this film to strip away modern tech and go back to the often romanticized era of the 80's and fully embrace the sorely missed awkward teen trope and macabre tone of early Tim Burton films. This film excels in that many times when it focuses on that vary grove it tries to stay in. Where it falters is in its weird pacing issues and lack of personal identity. It ultimately had nothing to say that I haven't heard already and it rushed its way through the magical nature of the heartfelt story that exists inbetween the seams.

Kathryn Newton was fun as the shy and distant teen Lisa Swallows. What I liked in the beginning was her innocence and sort of quiet demeanor in the way she would interact with people in her life. For a few moments she had a mystery to her that gave her that needed silent edge. She was a teen of very little words and when she finally finds her confidence, that's when the character really comes to life. I wish we could've played with her psychological decent and how she copes with things. Liza Soberano was really perky and loving as her lively sister step sister, Taffy. I liked their dynamic and how Taffy is always lifting up Lisa from her more secluded nature and gets her to come out of her shell more. The chemistry between them was really good and made for a lighter version of an almost "Heather's" situation. Joe Chrest was good and essentially a little more attentive version of his character from Stranger Things, Ted Wheeler. Carla Gugino was fantastic as always and as Lisa's stepmother Janet Swallows, she was very much the wicked stepmother from Cinderella. Now the real standout of the film and the most charming character was Cole Sprouse as The Creature. His beautifully tragic story was told expertly in the opening credits and he was a joy to watch once he comes back to life. The physical comedy and sometimes micro expressions he made were brilliantly executed and I loved every second he was on screen. The chemistry between him and Lisa was the heart of the film and even though not a word is spoken from him, his intentions are clear. The two of them together bring out the Edward Scissorhands love story aspect of the film and it felt like a gothic fever dream at times.

The score by Isabella Summers was good and serviceable, but I wish she leaned more into the horror a bit more which was also a problem with this film. For the majority of the film, I felt as if the film was really living its namesake. It was a greatest hits collection of all the best parts of the 80's horror comedies and early Tim Burton love stories that had so much heart, but this film failed many times to stay focused on those tropes. Where it was succeeding was when it would go down the implausible and fantastical fun of the love story, but it makes sharp turns away from it as things started to get more serious. The best way I could describe my feelings here is if you just look at the first trailer for this film. You get that exact macabre and comedic horror feel the film wanted to be. You get that, but it feels more watered down. Maybe if the film just focused on her coming out her shell and got rid of the stepsister and the other goth girl bully in the film, then maybe this would've been what that trailer promised. Also, I don't know if it was the theater I was in, but the sound mixing in this film was atrocious in the first 20 minutes of the film. The dialogue and score was turned down so low that I had to really focus on what was being said and I almost lost a god chunk of the story. Overall, this was a gothic rom com that had potential to be a new standout among the other same type of films we get each year, but I think it was bogged down by too many characters and the lack of expertise in the field. It could've been so much more. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in the comments below. Thanks for reading!

#lisa frankenstein #kathryn newton #cole sprouse #liza soberano #carla gugino #Joe Chrest

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