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#think when i help others i can start to help myself. ill try to wake up early tomorrow again and clean around the house. that usually makes

nerdvi · 5 months

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In the wake of the whole james somerton fiasco and inspired by this post, I wanted to share a few of my um, soft signs, like, orange flags to detect when someone is bullshitting you.

First of all, I am on the spectrum which means 1) I tend to take what people say at face value and 2) I have a strong sense of justice which makes me prone to biases, all of which combined means I am at perpetual risk of swallowing the bullshit.

So, what to do about it? You turn on the critical thinking and pay attention.

As one of my favorite youtubers, Hannah Alonzo, likes to say: "consider the source, remember the motive". Who is talking to you?? What do you know about them?? What biases might they have?? How do they interact with your own biases?? Where are they talking from?? Is it anger?? happinness? boredom?? Also, why are they talking to you? Are they trying to sell you something?? Are they trying to convince you and why?? How do they go about the finantial motivation, if present? If you have, in this case, a white cis gay man talking to you as it he has it the worst of the worst in the world, there's probably some exaggeration and you should start to wonder. There's a good chance he's bullshitting you.

How they talk about women and POC No, no, stay with me. There's a rule I had back when I was dating men: Always beware of how they treat their mother. With the exception of extremes like mama's boys and cases of abuse, how a man treats the woman with whom they have that familial bond is a good indicator of how they are going to treat you. Do they berate her? speak ill of her? are aggressive or controlling? do they dismiss her opinions? Same with creators, and by god I tell you, specially cis male creators, queer or otherwise, always always beware of how they speak of women, how they treat women, how they treat POC. Somerton had a weird vendetta against straight women. It went mostly unnoticed. Then, he was dismissive towards lesbians and other queer women and it was once again overlooked. Then he went ahead and made sinophobic content about genres and cultures he knows NOTHING about. Again, it went unchecked. What I am telling you is IT'S NOT NORMAL. Contempt about women and non white-western cultures is not normal and if someone has them as them as an enemy or a scapegoat, they're probably bullshitting you. Take what they say and fact check it, see for yourself.

If at any point in a video or an essay you find yourself thinking "wait, really??" then it's time to fact check. Is it a bit suspicious?? is your logic telling you that's not quite how this works?? Then take to google, my friend, they might be bullshitting you. At worst, you dodge a fake fact, at best, you learn way too much about a topic you were already interested in.

Beware of the lack of nuance. I can not stress this enough. We all love monochrome, but life and societal issues are never black and white. It's just impossible, there's too many factors to consider. If you are being presented situations or anecdotes as absolute truths, you're probably being bullshitted. If it's too good to be true, it is. If it sounds waaay too convenient, it probably is. A good researcher, a serious investigator, will always have some nuance because they have done the work and checked the sources. If someone provides you 1) no nuance and 2) no sources, THEY'RE BULLSHITTING YOU.

These are the ones I can come up with just of the top of my head, I'm sure there's more and please, add them. Remember that naivité isn't a crime, I'm fairly naive and that's made me distrustful, and these are some of the techniques I've found that help me navigate through a world of information without losing myself.

#james somerton #hbomberguy #plagiarism

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lizzieislife94x · 2 months

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Birthday Present (e.o)

Requested ❤️

LizziexG!P Reader

Another new one shot for yall enjoy. Always open for Requests to keep the one shots updated so don't be shy no judgements here 😊

Y/ns POV:

I wake up with the smell of eggs and bacon a smile appearing on my face as my gorgeous girlfriend walks on with a tray of of breakfast "wow what's all this for baby" I smile my morning voice a little raspy "it's my baby's birthday so I wanted to make breakfast in bed before the madness of today starts" I groan a little taking the tray as lizzie sits beside me her hand resting on my arm "I love our friends and family but do we have to have a party I hate attention on me I'd rather spend the day with you just going for a meal and being with my love" she giggles and leans forward pecking my lips "sorry baby they want to celebrate with you but don't worry I have great presents for you when they leave and it's just us I think it will help you unwind" she smirks biting her lip I can't help but giggle as I eat my breakfast lizzie cuddling into me.

5 hours later:

"Baby please tell me you're ready people will be arriving in like 5 minutes" I hear lizzie yell from the bedroom I take one final look at myself in the mirror and walk out "how do I look" I say looking at lizzie as her jaw drops "babe it's just smart dress pants and a shirt it's nothing special" I laugh walking towards her my hands resting on her waist as I kiss her head "no you look fucking sexy god damn if we didn't have people arriving any minute I'd be ripping those clothes off you" I bite my lip feeling a twitch in my pants "behave baby or I won't be able to go see people" she let's out a groan as we walk downstairs the house slowly filling with our friends and family I greet everyone as they arrive and thank them for coming after an hour the party is in full swing people people talking from both our familys, music playing some people outside talking I can't help but smile we've been lucky that both our family's get along amazingly and enjoy being the others company "hey baby here you go" I'm snapped put of my thoughts by lizzie handing me a beer I take it and laugh slightly "babe it's only 4.30pm are you trying to get me drunk" she smirks as she sips her drink "maybe now drink my love " I don't argue and join my girl in having a drink as the party continues.

7 hours later:

"Thanks for coming" I yell a little to loud as the last of the guests leave lizzie giggling beside me as we close the door and head inside as I go to start cleaning lizzie calls my name making me turn as I turn she pushes me making me stumble back falling onto the chair that was behind me "wh.." before I can question her she walks towards me slowly "shhh baby you got your gifts from everyone else now it's time for mine" I laugh and hold her waist as I pull her closer "but baby you got me a watch and new pant suit" I whisper "that was the first part of the gift time for the second part that I couldn't give you infront of everyone" I moan at her tone and nod my head she turns her back and turns on some sensual music as I bite my lip watching her hips and ass sway "fuck lizzie" I moan out as she sways her hips walking towards me "now now babygirl we both know that isn't my name is it" I shake my head as the member in my pants grows hard "words y/n words use your big girl words" I gulp and watch at she starts to dance against me "so..r..ry mommy" she bites me ear and whispers "that's better baby" I close my eyes as she grinds against my dick her clothes coming off slowly as she gives me a lap dance my hands holding her waist "please mommy wanna be inside you so hard.." I practically beg "oh I know baby mommy can feel your dick getting nice and hard but have a little patience or I won't let you fuck me ill make you watch as I fuck myself all night understand" I whine but agree as she wraps her arms around me her tits in my face as I try to take her nipple in my mouth "awh poor baby you wanna suck mommy's nipples" she questions as I nod furiously "please mommy" she smiles sweetly and guides her tit to my mouth "since its your birthday and you've been a good girl all day" I moan as her nipple slips into my mouth and start to suck like there's no tomorrow she continues to grind against me as she moans above me "mhhh fuck that feels good baby youre such a good girl" she moans out as her hands slide down my body to unbuckle my pants "let go of mommy's nipple so I can get rid of these clothes" I instantly let go and watch as she removes her panties and makes quick work removing my pants and boxers "there we go look at that dick standing so proud for me" she smirks as she puts her legs at either side of me sitting slight making my tip tease her soaking pussy "so wet mommy" I whisper looking up at her as she kisses my jaw "you wanna be inside mommy, do you want me to sit baby" she moans into my ear "please.. want to be inside mommy"

I groan as she sinks down on my dick both of us moaning loudly "fuck mommy so tight and wet" I moan wrapping my arms around her resting my head on her shoulder "all because of you baby you get me so wet baby I love the way you stretch me out" she pants as she shifts slightly "do you want mommy to fuck you" she asks making me look into her eyes "yes mommy" and with that she starts to bounce up and down slowly on my dick my hands sliding to her waist to her her move "yes fuck mommy don't stop wanna fill your tight pussy " she starts to bounce harder and faster at my words as her tits bounce in my face both of us moaning loudly "fuck baby so fucking big you want to fill mommy's unprotected cunt" she questions her eyes locking onto mine "yes fuck wanna fill your unprotected pussy mommy please" I pant as I feel the knot ready to snap "please mommy gonna cum please can I cum" I ask as she bounces faster the sounds of her wet pussy making it harder to hold back "not yet baby I want you to cum with mommy hold back do fucking close" she screams as her bouncing becomes sloppy both of us moaning sweating messes "fuck baby I'm cumming cum with me cum inside mommy" she cries out as she slams down on my dick with on final thrusting shoot my load deep inside her as her body slumps down on mine "I got you baby" I whisper as I wrap my arms around her holding her close as I continue to cum both of us breathing heavily staying in eachothers arms, after 10 minutes she sits up and holds my cheeks kissing me gently "happy birthday baby I love you" I smile against her lips "I love you too so fucking much" we both giggle as I get up and carry her to bed.

AN: these might not be great as I'm just getting back into writing but I hope you enjoy, I hope yall have a great day/night my beautiful people to the people who constantly vote and show love to these thank you it means alot to me! Drink water and stay hydrated babes 💗 word count 1.4k

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sleeplesslionheart · 6 months

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The Haunting of Bly Manor as Allegory: Self-Sacrifice, Grief, and Queer Representation

As always, I am extremely late with my fandom infatuations—this time, I’m about three years late getting smitten with Dani and Jamie from The Haunting of Bly Manor.

Because of my lateness, I’ll confess from the start that I’m largely unfamiliar with the fandom’s output: whether fanfiction, interpretations, analyses, discourse, what have you. I’ve dabbled around a bit, but haven’t seen anything near the extent of the discussions that may or may not have happened in the wake of the show’s release, so I apologize if I’m re-treading already well-trod ground or otherwise making observations that’ve already been made. Even so, I’m completely stuck on Dani/Jamie right now and have some thoughts that I want to compose and work through.

This analysis concerns the show’s concluding episode in particular, so please be aware that it contains heavy, detailed spoilers for the ending, as well as the show in its entirety. Additionally, as a major trigger warning: this essay contains explicit references to suicide and suicidal ideation, so please tread cautiously. (These are triggers for me, and I did, in fact, manage to trigger myself while writing this—but this was also very therapeutic to write, so those triggering moments wound up also being some healing opportunities for me. But definitely take care of yourself while reading this, okay?).

After finishing Bly and necessarily being destroyed by the ending, staying up until 2:00 a.m. crying, re-watching scenes on Youtube, so on and so forth, I came away from the show (as others have before me) feeling like its ending functioned fairly well as an allegory for loving and being in a romantic partnership with someone who suffers from severe mental illness, grief, and trauma.

Without going too deeply into my own personal backstory, I want to provide some opening context, which I think will help to show why this interpretation matters to me and how I’m making sense of it.

Like many of Bly’s characters, I’ve experienced catastrophic grief and loss in my own life. A few years ago, my brother died in some horrific circumstances (which you can probably guess at if you read between the lines here), leaving me traumatized and with severe problems with my mental health. When it happened, I was engaged to a man (it was back when I thought I was straight (lol), so I’ve also found Dani’s comphet backstory to be incredibly relatable…but more on this later) who quickly tired of my grieving. Just a few months after my brother’s death, my then-fiancé started saying things like “I wish you’d just go back to normal, the way you were” and “I’ve gotten back on-track and am just waiting for you to get back on-track with me,” apparently without any understanding that my old “normal” was completely gone and was never coming back. He saw my panic attacks as threatening and unreasonable, often resorting to yelling at me to stop instead of trying to comfort me. He complained that he felt like I hadn’t reciprocated the care that he’d provided me in the immediate aftermath of my brother’s loss, and that he needed me to set aside my grief (and “heal from it”) so that he could be the center of my attention. Although this was not the sole cause, all of it laid the groundwork for our eventual breakup. It was as though my trauma and mourning had ruined the innocent happiness of his own life, and he didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

Given this, I was powerfully struck by the ways that Jamie handles Dani’s trauma: accepting and supporting her, never shaming her or diminishing her pain.

Early in the show—in their first true interaction with one another, in fact—Jamie finds Dani in the throes of a panic attack. She responds to this with no judgment; instead, she validates Dani’s experiences. To put Dani at ease, she first jokes about her own “endless well of deep, inconsolable tears,” before then offering more serious words of encouragement about how well Dani is dealing with the circumstances at Bly. Later, when Dani confesses to seeing apparitions of Peter and Edmund, Jamie doesn’t pathologize this, doubt it, or demean it, but accepts it with a sincere question about whether Dani’s ex-fiancé is with them at that moment—followed by another effort to comfort Dani with some joking (this time, a light-hearted threat at Edmund to back off) and more affirmations of Dani’s strength in the face of it all.

All of this isn’t to say, however, that Dani’s grief-driven behaviors don’t also hurt Jamie (or, more generally, that grieving folks don’t also do things that hurt their loved ones). When Dani recoils from their first kiss because of another guilt-inspired vision of Eddie, Jamie is clearly hurt and disappointed; still, Jamie doesn’t hold this against Dani, as she instead tries to take responsibility for it herself. A week later, though, Jamie strongly indicates that she needed that time to be alone in the aftermath and that she is wary that Dani’s pattern of withdrawing from her every time they start to get closer will continue to happen. Nonetheless, it’s important to note that this contributes to Dani’s recognition that she’s been allowing her guilt about Eddie’s death to become all-consuming, preventing her from acting on her own desires to be with Jamie. That recognition, in turn, leads Dani to decide to move through her grief and beyond her guilt. Once she’s alone later in the evening after that first kiss, Dani casts Eddie’s glasses into the bonfire’s lingering embers; she faces off with his specter for a final time, and after burning away his shadow, her visions of him finally cease. When she and Jamie reunite during their 6:00 a.m. terrible coffee visit, Dani acknowledges that the way that she and Jamie left things was “wrong,” and she actively tries to take steps to “do something right” by inviting Jamie out for a drink at the village pub…which, of course, just so happens to be right below Jamie’s flat. (Victoria Pedretti’s expressions in that scene are so good).

Before we continue, though, let’s pause here a moment to consider some crucial factors in all of this. First, there is a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and simply discarding it…or being pressured by someone else to discard it. Second, there is also a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming. Keep these distinctions in mind as we go on.

Ultimately, the resolution of the show’s core supernatural conflict involves Dani inviting Viola’s ghost to inhabit her, which Viola accepts. This frees the other spirits who have been caught in Bly Manor’s “gravity well,” even as it dooms Dani to eventually be overtaken by Viola and her rage. Jamie, however, offers to stay with Dani while she waits for this “beast in the jungle” to claim her. The show’s final episode shows the two of them going on to forge a life together, opening a flower shop in a cute town in Vermont, enjoying years of domestic bliss, and later getting married (in what capacities they can—more on this soon), all while remaining acutely aware of the inevitability of Dani’s demise.

The allegorical potentials of this concluding narrative scenario are fairly flexible. It is possible, for instance, to interpret Dani’s “beast in the jungle” as chronic (and/or terminal) illness—in particular, there’re some harrowing readings that we could do in relation to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging (e.g. dementia, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, progressive supranuclear palsy, etc.), especially if we put the final episode into conversation with the show’s earlier subplot about the death of Owen’s mother, its recurring themes of memory loss as a form of death (or, even, as something worse than death), and Jamie’s resonant remarks that she would rather be “put out of her misery” than let herself be “worn away a little bit every day.” For the purposes of this analysis, though, I’m primarily concerned with interpreting Viola’s lurking presence in Dani’s psyche as a stand-in for severe grief, trauma, and mental illness. …Because, even as we may “move through” grief and trauma, and even as we may work to heal from them, they never just go away completely—they’re always lurking around, waiting to resurface. (In fact, the final minutes of the last episode feature a conversation between older Jamie and Flora about contending with this inevitable recurrence of grief). Therapy can give us tools to negotiate and live with them, of course; but that doesn’t mean that they’re not still present in our lives. The tools that therapy provides are meant to help us manage those inevitable resurfacings in healthy ways. But they are not meant to return us to some pre-grief or pre-trauma state of “normality” or to make them magically dissipate into the ether, never to return. And, even with plenty of therapy and with healthy coping mechanisms, we can still experience significant mental health issues in the wake of catastrophic grief, loss, and trauma; therapy doesn’t totally preclude that possibility.

In light of my own experiences with personal tragedy, crumbling mental health, and the dissolution of a romantic partnership with someone who couldn’t accept the presence of grief in my life, I was immediately enamored with the ways that Jamie approaches the enduring aftereffects of Dani’s trauma during the show’s final episode. Jamie never once pressures Dani to just be “normal.” She never once issues any judgment about what Dani is experiencing. At those times when Dani’s grief and trauma do resurface—when the beast in the jungle catches up with her—Jamie is there to console her, often with the strategies that have always worked in their relationship: gentle, playful ribbing and words of affirmation. There are instances in which Dani doesn’t emote joyfulness during events that we might otherwise expect her to—consider, for instance, how somber Dani appears in the proposal scene, in contrast to Jamie’s smiles and laughter. (In the year after my brother’s death, my ex-fiancé and his family would observe that I seemed gloomy in situations that they thought should be fun and exciting. “Then why aren’t you smiling?” they’d ask, even when I tried to assure them that I was having a good time, but just couldn’t completely feel that or express it in the ways that I might’ve in the past). Dani even comments on an inability to feel that is all too reminiscent of the blunting of emotions that can happen in the wake of acute trauma: “It’s like I see you in front of me and I feel you touching me, and every day we’re living our lives, and I’m aware of that. But it’s like I don’t feel it all the way.” But throughout all of this (and in contrast to my own experiences with my ex), Jamie attempts to ground Dani without ever invalidating what she’s experiencing. When Dani tells her that she can’t feel, Jamie assures her, “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us.”

A few days after I finished the show for the first time, I gushed to a friend about how taken I was with the whole thing. Jamie was just so…not what I had experienced in my own life. I loved witnessing a representation of such a supportive and understanding partner, especially within the context of a sapphic romance. After breaking up with my own ex-fiancé, I’ve since come to terms with my sexuality and am still processing through the roles that compulsory heterosexuality and internalized homophobia have played in my life; so Dani and Jamie’s relationship has been incredibly meaningful for me to see for so, so many reasons.

“I’m glad you found the show so relatable,” my friend told me. “But,” she cautioned, “don’t lose sight of what Dani does in that relationship.” Then, she pointed out something that I hadn’t considered at all. Although Jamie may model the possibilities of a supportive partnership, Dani’s tragic death espouses a very different and very troubling perspective: the poisonous belief that I’m inevitably going to hurt my partner with my grief and trauma, so I need to leave them before I can inflict that harm on them.

Indeed, this is a deeply engrained belief that I hold about myself. While I harbor a great deal of anger at my ex-fiancé for how he treated me, there’s also still a part of me that sincerely believes that I nearly ruined his and his family’s lives by bringing such immense devastation and darkness into it. On my bad days (which are many), I have strong convictions about this in relation to my future romantic prospects as well. How could anyone ever want to be with me? I wonder. And even if someone eventually does try to be with me, all I’ll do is ruin her life with all my trauma and sadness. I shouldn’t even want to be with anyone, because I don’t want to hurt someone else. I don’t want someone else to deal with what I’ve had to deal with. I even think about this, too, with my friends. Since my brother’s death and my breakup, I’ve gone through even more trauma, pain, grief, and loss, such that now I continue to struggle enormously with issues like anhedonia, emotional fragility, and social anxiety. I worry, consequently, that I’m just a burden on my friends. That I’m too hard to be around. That being around me, with all of my pain and perpetual misfortune, just causes my friends pain, too. That they’re better off not having to deal with me at all. I could spare them all, I think, by just letting them go, by not bothering them anymore.

I suspect that this is why I didn’t notice any issues with Dani’s behavior at the end of Bly Manor at first. Well…that and the fact that the reality of the show’s conclusion is immensely triggering for me. Probably, my attention just kind of slid past the truth of it in favor of indulging in the catharsis of a sad gay romance.

But after my friend observed this issue, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

I realized, then, that I hadn’t extended the allegory out to its necessary conclusion…which is that Dani has, in effect, committed suicide in order to—or so she believes, at least—protect Jamie from her. This is the case regardless of whether we keep Viola’s ghost in the mix as an actual, tangible, existing threat within the show’s diegesis or as a figurative symbol of the ways that other forces can “haunt” us to the point of our own self-destruction. If the former, then Dani’s suicide (or the more gentle and elusive description that I’ve seen: her act of “giving herself to the lake”) is to prevent Viola’s ghost from ever harming Jamie. But if the latter, if we continue doing the work of allegorical readings, then it’s possible to interpret Bly’s conclusion as the tragedy of Dani ultimately succumbing to her mental illness and suicidal ideation.

The problems with this allegory’s import really start cropping up, however, when we consider the ways that the show valorizes Dani’s actions as an expression of ultimate, self-sacrificing love—a valorization that Bly accomplishes, in particular, through its sustained contrasting of love and possession.

The Implications of Idealizing Self-Sacrifice as True Love

During a pivotal conversation in one of the show’s early episodes, Dani and Jamie discuss the “wrong kind of love” that existed between Rebecca Jessel and Peter Quint. Jamie remarks on how she “understands why so many people mix up love and possession,” thereby characterizing Rebecca and Peter’s romance as a matter of possession—as well as hinting, perhaps, that Jamie herself has had experiences with this in her own past. After considering for a moment, Dani agrees: “People do, don’t they? Mix up love and possession. […] I don’t think that should be possible. I mean, they’re opposites, really, love and ownership.” We can already tell from this scene that Dani and Jamie are, themselves, heading towards a burgeoning romance—and that this contrast between love and possession (and their self-awareness of it) is going to become a defining feature of that romance.

Indeed, the show takes great pains to emphasize the genuine love that exists between Dani and Jamie against the damaging drive for possession enacted by characters like Peter (who consistently manipulates Rebecca and kills her to keep her ghost with him) and Viola (who has killed numerous people and trapped their souls at Bly over the centuries in a long since forgotten effort to reclaim her life with her husband and daughter from Perdita, her murderously jealous sister). These contrasts take multiple forms and emerge from multiple angles, all to establish that Dani and Jamie’s love is uniquely safe, caring, healing, mutually supportive, and built on a foundation of prevailing concern for the other’s wellbeing. Some of these contrasts are subtle and understated. Consider, for instance, how Hannah observes that Rebecca looks like she hasn’t slept in days because of the turmoil of her entanglements with Peter, whereas Jamie’s narration describes how Dani gets the best sleep of her life during the first night that she and Jamie spend together. Note, too, the editing work in Episode 6 that fades in and out between the memories of the destructive ramifications of Henry and Charlotte’s affair and the scenes of tender progression in Dani and Jamie’s romance. Other contrasts, though, are far more overt. Of course, one of the most blatant examples (and most pertinent to this analysis) is the very fact that the ghosts of Viola, Peter, and Rebecca are striving to reclaim the people they love and the lives that they’ve lost by literally possessing the bodies and existences of the living.

The role of consent is an important factor in these ghostly possessions and serves as a further contrast with Dani and Jamie’s relationship. Peter and Rebecca frequently possess Miles and Flora without their consent—at times, even, when the children explicitly tell them to stop or, at the very least, to provide them with warnings beforehand. While inhabiting the children, Peter and Rebecca go on to harm them and put them at risk (e.g. Peter smokes cigarettes while in Miles’s body; Rebecca leaves Flora alone and unconscious on the grounds outside the manor) and to commit acts of violence against others (e.g. Peter pushes Hannah into the well, killing her; Peter and Rebecca together attack Dani and restrain her). The “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us,” conceit—with which living people can invite Bly’s ghosts to possess them, the mechanism by which Dani breaks the curse of Bly’s gravity well—is a case of dubious consent at best and abusive, violent control at worst. (“I didn’t agree,” Rebecca says after Peter leaves her body, releasing his “invited” possession of her at the very moment that the lake’s waters start to fill her lungs).

Against these selfish possessions and wrong kinds of love, Jamie and Dani’s love is defined by their selfless refusal to possess one another. A key characteristic of their courtship involves them expressing vulnerability in ways that invite the other to make their own decisions about whether to accept and how to proceed (or not proceed). As we discussed earlier, Dani and Jamie’s first kiss happens after Dani opens up about her guilt surrounding her ex-fiancé’s death. Pausing that kiss, Jamie checks, “You sure?” and only continues after Dani answers with a spoken yes. (Let’s also take this moment to appreciate Amelia Eve’s excellent, whispered “Thank fuck,” that isn’t included in Netflix’s subtitles). Even so, Dani frantically breaks away from her just moments later. But Jamie accepts this and doesn’t push Dani to continue, believing, in fact, that Dani has withdrawn precisely because Jamie has pushed too much already. A week later, Dani takes the initiative to advance their budding romance by inviting Jamie out for a drink—which Jamie accepts by, instead, taking Dani to see her blooming moonflowers that very evening. There, in her own moment of vulnerability, Jamie shares her heart-wrenching and tumultuous backstory with Dani in order to “skip to the end” and spare Dani the effort of getting to know her. By openly sharing these difficult details about herself, Jamie evidently intends to provide Dani with information that would help her decide for herself whether she wants to continue their relationship or not.

Their shared refusal to possess reaches its ultimate culmination in that moment, all those years later, when Dani discovers just how close she’s come to strangling Jamie—and then leaves their home to travel all the way back to Bly and drown herself in the lake because she could “not risk her most important thing, her most important person.” Upon waking to find that Dani has left, Jamie immediately sets off to follow her back to Bly. And in an absolutely heartbreaking, beautiful scene, we see Jamie attempting the “you, me, us,” invitation, desperate for Dani to possess her, for Dani to take Jamie with her. (Y’all, I know I’m critiquing this scene right now, but I also fuckin’ love it, okay? Ugh. The sight of Jamie screaming into the water and helplessly grasping for Dani is gonna stay with me forever. brb while I go cry about it again). Dani, of course, refuses this plea. Because “Dani wouldn’t. Dani would never.” Further emphasizing the nobility of Dani’s actions, Jamie’s narration also reveals that Dani’s self-sacrificial death has not only spared Jamie alone, but has also enabled Dani to take the place of the Lady of the Lake and thereby ensure that no one else can be taken and possessed by Viola’s gravity well ever again.

And so we have the show’s ennoblement of Dani’s magnanimous self-sacrifice. By inviting Viola to possess her, drowning herself to keep from harming Jamie, and then refusing to possess Jamie or anyone else, Dani has effectively saved everyone: the children, the restive souls that have been trapped at Bly, anyone else who may ever come to Bly in the future, and the woman she loves most. Dani has also, then, broken the perpetuation of Bly’s cycles of possession and trauma with her selfless expression of love for Jamie.

The unfortunate effect of all of this is that, quite without meaning to (I think? I hope—), The Haunting of Bly Manor ends up stumbling headlong into a validation of suicide as a selfless act of true love, as a force of protection and salvation.

So, before we proceed, I just want to take this moment to say—definitively, emphatically, as someone who has survived and experienced firsthand the ineffably catastrophic consequences of suicide—that suicide is nothing remotely resembling a selfless “refusal to possess” or an act of love. I’m not going to harp extensively on this, though, because I’d rather not trigger myself for a second time (so far, lol) while writing this essay. Just take my fuckin’ word for it. And before anybody tries to hit me with some excuse like “But Squall, it isn’t that the show is valorizing suicide, it’s that Dani is literally protecting Jamie from Viola,” please consider that I’ve already discussed how the show’s depiction of this lent itself to my own noxious beliefs that “all I do is harm other people with my grief, so maybe I should stop talking to my friends so that they don’t have to deal with me anymore.” Please consider what these narrative details and their allegorical import might tell people who are struggling with their mental health—even if not with suicidal ideation, then with the notion that they should self-sacrificially remove themselves from relationships for the sake of sparing loved ones from (assumed) harm.

Okay, that said, now let’s proceed…‘cause I’ve got even more to say, ‘cause the more I mulled over these details, the more I also came to realize that Dani’s self-sacrificial death in Bly’s conclusion also has the unfortunate effect of undermining some of its other (attempted) themes and its queer representation.

What Bly Manor Tries (and Fails) to Say about Grief and Acceptance

Let’s start by jumping back to a theme we’ve already addressed briefly: moving through one’s grief.

The Haunting of Bly Manor does, in fact, have a lot to say about this. Or…it wants to, more like. On the whole, it seems like it’s trying really hard to give us a cautionary tale about the destructive effects of unprocessed grief and the misplaced guilt that we can wind up carrying around when someone we love dies. The show spends a whole lot of time preaching about how important it is that we learn to accept our losses without allowing them to totally consume us—or without lingering around in denial about them (gettin’ some Kübler-Ross in here, y’all). Sadly, though, it does kind of a half-assed job of it…despite the fact that this is a major recurring theme and a component of the characterizations and storylines of, like, most of its characters. In fact, this fundamentally Kübler-Rossian understanding of what it means to move through grief and to accept loss and mortality appears to be the show’s guiding framework. During his rehearsal dinner speech in the first episode, Owen proclaims that, “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them,” with such eerie resonance—as the camera stays set on Jamie’s unwavering gaze—that we know that what we’re about to experience is a story about accepting the inevitable losses of the people we love.

Bly Manor is chock full of characters who’re stuck in earlier stages of grief but aren’t really moving along to reach that acceptance stage. I mean, the whole cause of the main supernatural haunting is that Viola so ferociously refuses to accept her death and move on from her rage (brought about by Perdita’s resentment) that she spends centuries strangling whoever she comes across, which then effectively traps them there with her. And the other antagonistic ghostly forces, Rebecca and Peter, also obviously suck at accepting their own deaths, given that they actually believe that possessing two children is a perfectly fine (and splendid) way for them to grasp at some semblance of life again. (Actually…the more that I’ve thought about this, the more that I think each of the pre-acceptance stages of grief in Kübler-Ross’s model may even have a corresponding character to represent it: Hannah is denial; Viola is anger; Peter and Rebecca are bargaining; Henry is depression. Just a little something to chew on).

But let’s talk more at-length about this theme in relation to two characters we haven’t focused on yet: Hannah and Henry. For Hannah, this theme shows up in her struggles to accept that her husband, Sam, has left her (Charlotte wryly burns candles in the chapel as though marking his passing, while Hannah seems to be holding out hope that he might return) and in her persistent denial that Peter-as-Miles has killed her. As a ghost, she determinedly continues going about her daily life and chores even as she’s progressively losing her grip on reality. Henry, meanwhile, won’t issue official notifications of Dominic’s death and continues to collect his mail because doing otherwise would mean admitting to the true finality of Dominic’s loss. At the same time, he is so, completely consumed by his guilt about the role that he believes he played in Charlotte and Dominic’s deaths that he’s haunting himself with an evil alter-ego. His overriding guilt and despair also result in his refusal to be more present in Miles and Flora’s lives—even with the knowledge that Flora is actually his daughter.

In the end, both Hannah and Henry reach some critical moments of acceptance. But, honestly, the show doesn’t do a great job of bringing home this theme of move through your grief with either of them…or with anybody else, really. Peter basically winds up bullying Hannah into recognizing that her broken body is still at the bottom of the well—and then she accepts her own death right in time to make a completely abortive attempt at rescuing Dani and Flora. Henry finally has a preternatural Bad Feeling about things (something about a phone being disconnected? whose phone? Bly’s phone? his phone? I don’t understand), snaps to attention, and rushes to Bly right in time to make an equally abortive rescue attempt that leaves him incapacitated so that his not-quite-ghost can hang out with Hannah long enough to find out that she’s dead. But at least he decides to be an attentive uncle/dad to Miles and Flora after that, I guess. Otherwise, Hannah and Henry get handwaved away pretty quickly before we can really witness what their acceptance means for them in any meaningful detail. (I blame this on some sloppy writing and the way-too-long, all-about-Viola eighth episode. And, on that note, what about the “acceptances” of Rebecca, Peter, and Viola there at the end? Rebecca does get an interesting moment of acceptance—of a sort—with her offer to possess Flora in order to experience Flora’s imminent drowning for her, thereby sparing the child by tucking her in a happy memory. Peter just…disappears at the end with some way-too-late words of apology. Viola’s “acceptance,” however, is tricky…What she accepts is Dani’s invitation to inhabit her. More on this later).

Hannah and Henry’s stories appear to be part of the show’s efforts to warn us about the ways that unprocessed, all-consuming grief can cause us to miss opportunities to have meaningful relationships with others. Hannah doesn’t just miss her chance to be with Owen because…well, she’s dead, but also because of her unwillingness to move on from Sam beforehand. Her denial about her own death, in turn, prevents her from taking the opportunity as a ghost to tell Owen that she loves him. Henry, at least, does figure out that he’s about to lose his chance to be a caring parental figure to his daughter and nephew—but just barely. It takes the near-deaths of him and the children to finally prompt that realization.

Of the cast, Dani gets the most thorough and intentional development of this move through your grief theme. And, importantly, she learns this lesson in time to cultivate a meaningful relationship that she could’ve easily missed out on otherwise. As we’ve already discussed, a critical part of Dani’s character arc involves her realization that she has to directly confront Edmund’s death and start absolving herself of her guilt in order to open up the possibility of a romantic relationship with Jamie. In Episode 4, Jamie’s narration suggests that Dani has had a habit of putting off such difficult processes (whether in regards to moving through her grief, breaking off her engagement to Edmund, or coming to terms with her sexuality), as she’s been constantly deferring to “another night, another time for years and years.” Indeed, the show’s early episodes are largely devoted to showing the consequences of Dani’s deferrals and avoidances. From the very beginning, we see just how intrusively Dani’s unresolved guilt is impacting her daily life and functioning. She covers up mirrors to try to prevent herself from encountering Edmund’s haunting visage, yet still spots him in the reflections of windows and polished surfaces. Panic attacks seem to be regular occurrences for her, sparked by reminders of him. And all of this only gets worse and more disruptive as Dani starts acting on her attraction to Jamie.

It's only after Dani decides to begin moving through her grief and guilt that she’s able to start becoming emotionally and physically intimate with Jamie. And the major turning point for this comes during a scene that features a direct, explicit discussion of the importance of accepting (and even embracing) mortality.

That’s right—it’s time to talk about the moonflower scene.

In a very “I am extremely fed up with people not being able to deal with my traumatic past, so I’m going to tell you about all of the shit that I’ve been through so that you can go ahead and decide whether you want to bolt right now instead of just dropping me later on” move (which…legit, Jamie—I feel that), Jamie sits Dani down at her moonflower patch to give her the full rundown of her own personal backstory and worldview. Her monologue evinces both a profound cynicism and a profound valuation of human life…all of which is also suggestive, to me at least, of a traumatized person who at once desperately wishes for intimate connection, but who’s also been burned way too many times (something with which I am wholly unfamiliar, lol). She characterizes people as “exhaustive effort with very little to show for it,” only to go on to wax poetic about how human mortality is as beautiful as the ephemeral buds of a moonflower. This is, in essence, Jamie’s sorta convoluted way of articulating that whole “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them” idea.

After detailing her own past, Jamie shifts gears to suggest that she believes that cultivating a relationship with Dani—like the devoted work of growing a tropical, transient Ipomoea alba in England—might be worth the effort. And as part of this cultivation work, Jamie then acknowledges Dani’s struggles with her guilt, while also firmly encouraging her to move through it by accepting the beauty of mortality:

“I know you’re carrying this guilt around, but I also know that you don’t decide who lives and who doesn’t. I’m sorry Dani, but you don’t. Humans are organic. It’s a fact. We’re meant to die. It’s natural…beautiful. […] We leave more life behind to take our place. Like this moonflower. It’s where all its beauty lies, you know. In the mortality of the thing.”

After that, Jamie and Dani are finally able to make out unimpeded.

Frustratingly, though, Jamie’s own dealings with grief, loss, and trauma remain terribly understated throughout the show. Her monologue in the moonflower scene is really the most insight that we ever get. Jamie consistently comes off as better equipped to contend with life’s hardships than many of Bly’s other characters; and she is, in fact, the sole member of the cast who is confirmed to have ever had any sort of professional therapy. She regularly demonstrates a remarkable sense of empathy and emotional awareness, able to pick up on others’ needs and then support them accordingly, though often in gruff, tough-love forms. Further, there are numerous scenes in which we see Jamie bestowing incisive guidance for handling difficult situations: the moonflower scene, her advice to Rebecca about contacting Henry after Peter’s disappearance, and her suggestion to Dani that Flora needs to see a psychologist, to name just a few. As such, Jamie appears to have—or, at least, projects—a sort of unflappable groundedness that sets her apart from everyone else in the show.

Bly only suggests that Jamie’s struggles run far deeper than she lets on. There are a few times that we witness quick-tempered outbursts (usually provoked by Miles) and hints of bottled-up rage. Lest we forget, although it was Flora who first found Rebecca’s dead body floating in the water, it was Jamie who then found them both immediately thereafter. We see this happen, but we never learn anything about the impact that this must have had on her. Indeed, Jamie’s exposure to the layered, compounding grief at Bly has no doubt inflicted a great deal of pain on her, suggested by details like her memorialization of Charlotte and Dominic during the bonfire scene. If we look past her flippancy, there must be more than a few grains of truth to that endless well of deep, inconsolable tears—but Jamie never actually shares what they might be. Moreover, although the moonflower scene reveals the complex traumas of her past, we never get any follow-up or elaboration about those details or Dani’s observation of the scar on her shoulder. For the most part, Jamie’s grief goes unspoken.

There’s a case to be made that these omissions are a byproduct of narrator Jamie decentering herself in a story whose primary focus is Dani. Narrator Jamie even claims that the story she’s telling “isn’t really my story. It belongs to someone I knew” (yes, it’s a diversionary tactic to keep us from learning her identity too soon—but she also means it). And in plenty of respects, the telling of the story is, itself, Jamie’s extended expression of her grief. By engaging in this act of oral storytelling to share Dani’s sacrifice with others—especially with those who would have otherwise forgotten—Jamie is performing an important ritual of mourning her wife. Still, it’s for exactly these reasons that I think it would’ve been valuable for the show to include more about the impacts that grief, loss, and trauma had on Jamie prior to Dani’s death. Jamie’s underdevelopment on this front feels more like a disappointing oversight of the show’s writing than her narrator self’s intentional, careful withholding of information. Additionally, I think that Bly leaves Jamie’s grieving on an…odd note (though, yes, I know I’m just a curmudgeonly outlier here). Those saccharine final moments of Jamie filling up the bathtub and sleeping on a chair so that she can face the cracked doorway are a little too heavy-handedly tear-jerking for my liking. And while this, too, may be a ritual of mourning after the undoubtedly taxing effort of telling Dani’s story, it may also suggest that Jamie is demurring her own acceptance of Dani’s death. Is the hand on her shoulder really Dani’s ghost? Or is it Jamie’s own hopeful fabrication that her wife’s spirit is watching over her? (Or—to counter my own point here and suggest a different alternative—could this latter idea (i.e. the imagining of Dani’s ghost) also be another valid manner of “accepting” a loss by preserving a loved one’s presence? “Dead doesn’t mean gone,” after all. …Anyway, maybe I would be more charitable to this scene if not for the hokey, totally out-of-place song. Coulda done without that, seriously).

But let’s jump back to the moonflower scene. For Dani, this marks an important moment in the progression of her own movement through grief. In combination, her newfound readiness to contend with her guilt and her eagerness to grow closer to Jamie enable Dani to find a sense of peace that she hasn’t experienced since Eddie’s death…or maybe ever, really (hang on to this thought for this essay’s final section, too). When she and Jamie sleep together for the first time, not only does Dani actually sleep well, but she also wakes the next morning to do something that she hasn’t done to that point and won’t do again: she comfortably looks into a mirror. (One small qualification to this: Dani does look into her own reflection at the diner when she and Jamie are on their road trip; Viola doesn’t interfere then, but whether this is actually a comfortable moment is questionable). Then, shifting her gaze away from her own reflection, she sees Jamie still sleeping soundly in her bed—and smiles. It’s a fleeting moment of peace. Immediately after that, she spots Flora out the window, which throws everything back into accumulating turmoil. But that moment of peace, however fleeting, is still a powerful one.

However, Bly teases this narrative about the possibilities of finding healing in the wake of traumatic loss—especially through the cultivation of meaningful and supportive relationships with others—only to then totally pull that rug out from under Dani in the final episode.

During that final episode, we see that Dani’s shared life with Jamie has supported her in coming to terms with Viola’s lurking presence, such that “at long last, deep within the au pair’s heart, there was peace. And that peace held for years, which is more than some of us ever get.” But it’s at the exact moment that that line of narration occurs that we then begin to witness Dani’s steady, inexorable decline. Sure, we could say that Dani “accepts” Viola’s intrusions and the unavoidable eventuality that the ghost will seize control of her. But this isn’t a healthy acceptance or even a depiction of the fraught relationships that we can have with grief and trauma as we continue to process them throughout our lives. At all. Instead, it’s a distinctive, destructive sense of fatalism.

“I’m not even scared of her anymore,” Dani tells Jamie as the flooded bathtub spills around them. “I just stare at her and it's getting harder and harder to see me. Maybe I should just accept that. Maybe I should just accept that and go.” Remember way back at the beginning of this essay when I pointed out that there’s a significant difference between “moving through one’s grief” and allowing one’s grief to become all-consuming? Well, by the time we reach the bathtub scene, Dani’s grief and trauma have completely overtaken her. Her “acceptance” is, thus, a fatalistic, catastrophizing determination that her trauma defines her existence, such that she believes that all she has left to do is give up her life in order to protect Jamie from her. For a less ghostly (and less suicidal ideation-y) and more real-life example to illustrate what I’m getting at here: this would be like me saying “I should just accept that I’m never going to be anything other than a traumatized mess and should stop reaching out to my friends so that I don’t keep hurting them by making them deal with what a mess I am.” If I said something like this, I suspect (hope) that you would tell me that this is not a productive acceptance, but a pernicious narrative that only hurts me and the people who care about me. Sadly, though, this kind of pernicious narrative is exactly what we get out of Bly’s ending allegory.

“But Squall,” you may be thinking, “this scene is representing how people who struggle with their mental health can actually feel. This is exactly what it can be like to have severe mental illness, even for folks who have strong support systems and healthy, meaningful relationships. And there’s value in showing that.”

And if you’re thinking that, then first of all—as I have indicated already—I am aware that this is what it can be like. Very aware. And second of all, you make a fair point, but…there are ways that the show could’ve represented this without concluding that representation with a suicide that it effectively valorizes. I’ll contend with this more in the final section, where I offer a few suggestions of other ways that Bly could’ve ended instead.

I just want to be absolutely clear that I’m not saying that I think all media portrayals of mental illness need to be hopeful or wholesome or end in “positive” ways. But what I am saying is that Bly’s conclusion offers a really fuckin’ bleak outlook on grief, trauma, and mental illness, especially when we fit that ending into the framework of the show’s other (attempted) core themes, as well as Dani’s earlier character development. It’s especially bleak to see this as someone with severe mental health issues and who has also lost a loved one to suicide—and as someone who desperately hopes that my life and worldview won’t always stay so darkly colored by my trauma.

Additionally, it’s also worth pausing here to acknowledge that fatalism is, in fact, a major theme of The Beast in the Jungle, the 1903 Henry James novella on which the ninth episode is loosely based. I confess that I’ve only read about this novella, but haven’t read the story itself. However, based on my (admittedly limited) understanding of it, there appears to be a significant thematic rupture between The Beast in the Jungle and The Haunting of Bly Manor in their treatments of fatalism. In the end of the novella, its protagonist, John Marcher, comes to the realization that his fatalism has been a horrible mistake that has caused him to completely miss out on an opportunity for love that was right in front of him all along. The tragic fate to which Marcher believed that he was doomed was, in the end, his own fatalism. Dani, in contrast, never has this moment of recognition, not only because her fatalism leads to her own death, but also because the show treats her fatalism not as something that keeps her from love, but instead as leading her towards a definitive act of love.

All of this is exactly why Dani’s portrayal has become so damn concerning to me, and why I don’t believe that Bly’s allegory of “this is what it’s like to live with mental illness and/or to love (and lose) someone who is mentally ill” is somehow value-neutral—or, worse, something worth celebrating.

How Dani’s Self-Sacrifice Bears on Bly’s Queer Representation

In my dabblings around the fandom so far, I’ve seen a fair amount of deliberation about whether or not Bly Manor’s ending constitutes an example of the Bury Your Gays trope.

Honestly, though, I am super unenthused about rehashing those deliberations or splitting hairs trying to give some definitive “yes it is” or “no it isn’t” answer, so…I’m just not going to. Instead, I’m going to offer up some further observations about how Dani’s self-sacrificial death impinges on Bly’s queer representation, regardless of whether Bury Your Gays is at work here or not.

I would also like to humbly submit that the show could’ve just…not fucked around in proximity of that trope in the first place so that we wouldn’t even need to be having these conversations.

But anyway. I’m going to start this section off with a disclaimer.

Even though I’m leveling some pretty fierce critiques in this section (and across this essay), I do also want to say that I adore that The Haunting of Bly Manor and its creators gave us a narrative that centers two queer women and their romantic relationship as its driving forces and that intentionally sets out to portray the healing potentials of sapphic love as a contrast to the destructive, coercive harms found in many conventional dynamics of hegemonic heteronormativity. I don’t want to downplay that, because I’m extremely happy that this show exists, and I sincerely believe that many elements of its representation are potent and meaningful and amazing. But…I also have some reservations with this portrayal that I want to share. I critique not because I don’t love, but because I do love. I love this show a lot. I love Dani and Jamie a lot. I critique because I love and because I want more and better in future media.

So, that being said…let’s move on to talk about Dani, self-sacrifice, and compulsory heterosexuality.

Well before Dani’s ennobled death, Bly establishes self-sacrifice as a core component of her characterization. It’s hardwired into her, no doubt due to the relentless, entangled educational work of compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) and the aggressive forms of socialization that tell girls and women that their roles in life are to sacrifice themselves in order to please others and to belong to men. Indeed, Episode 4’s series of flashbacks emphasizes the interconnectedness between comphet and Dani’s beliefs that she is supposed to sacrifice herself for others’ sakes, revealing how these forces have shaped who she is and the decisions that she’s made across her life. (While we’re at it, let’s also not lose sight of the fact that Dani’s profession during this time period is one that—in American culture, at least—has come to rely on a distinctively feminized self-sacrificiality in order to function. Prior to becoming an au pair, Dani was a schoolteacher. In fact, in one of Episode 4’s flashbacks, Eddie’s mother points out that she appreciates Dani’s knack for identifying the kids that need her the most, but also reminds Dani that she needs to take care of herself…which suggests that Dani hadn’t been: “Save them all if you can, but put your own oxygen mask on first”).

In the flashback of her engagement party, Dani’s visible discomfort during Edmund’s speech clues us in that she wasn’t preparing to marry him because she genuinely wanted to, but because she felt like she was supposed to. The “childhood sweethearts” narrative bears down on the couple, celebrated by their friends and family, vaunted by cultural constructs that prize this life trajectory as a cherished, “happily ever after” ideal. Further illustrating the pressures to which Dani had been subject, the same scene shows Eddie’s mother, Judy O’Mara, presenting Dani with her own wedding dress and asking Dani to wear it when she marries Eddie. Despite Mrs. O’Mara’s assurances that Dani can say no, the hopes that she heaps onto Dani make abundantly clear that anything other than a yes would disappoint her. Later, another flashback shows Dani having that dress sized and fitted while her mother and Mrs. O’Mara look on and chatter about their own weddings and marriages. Their conversation is imbued with further hopes that Dani’s marriage to Edmund will improve on the mistakes that they made in their lives. Meanwhile, Dani’s attentiveness to the tailor who takes her measurements, compliments her body, and places a hand on her back strongly suggests that Dani is suppressing her attraction to women. Though brief, this scene is a weighty demonstration of the ways that the enclosures of heteronormativity constrain women into believing that their only option is to deny homosexual attraction, to forfeit their own desires in order to remain in relationships with men, and to prioritize the hopes and dreams and aspirations of the people around them above their own.

Dani followed this pathway—determined for her by everyone else except herself—until she couldn’t anymore.

During the flashback of their breakup, Dani explains to Eddie that she didn’t end their relationship sooner because she thought that even just having desires that didn’t match his and his family’s was selfish of her: “I should’ve said something sooner. […] I didn’t want to hurt you, or your mom, or your family. And then it was just what we were doing. […] I just thought I was being selfish, that I could just stick it out, and eventually I would feel how I was supposed to.” As happens to so many women, Dani was on the cusp of sacrificing her life for the sake of “sticking out” a marriage to a man, all because she so deeply believed that it was her duty to satisfy everyone’s expectations of her and that it was her responsibility to change her own feelings about that plight.

And Eddie’s response to this is telling. “Fuck you, Danielle,” he says. “Why are you doing this to me?”

Pay close attention to those last two words. Underline ‘em. Bold ‘em. Italicize ‘em.

“Why are you doing this to me?”

With those two words, Eddie indicates that he views Dani’s refusal to marry him as something that she is doing to him, a harm that she is committing against him. It is as though Dani is inflicting her will on him, or even that she is unjustly attackinghim by finally admitting that her desires run contrary to his own, that she doesn’t want to be his wife. And with this statement, he confirms precisely what she anticipated would happen upon giving voice to her true feelings.

What space did Edmund, his family, or Dani’s mother ever grant for Dani to have aspirations of her own that weren’t towards the preordained role of Eddie’s future wife? Let’s jump back to that engagement party. Eddie’s entire speech reveals a very longstanding assumption of his claim over her as his wife-to-be. He’d first asked Dani to marry him when they were ten years old, after he mistakenly believed that their first kiss could get Dani pregnant; Dani turned him down then, saying that they were too young. So, over the years, as they got older, Eddie continued to repeatedly ask her—until, presumably, she relented. “Now, we’re still pretty young,” he remarks as he concludes his speech, “but I think we’re old enough to know what we want.” Significantly, Eddie speaks here not just for himself, but also for Dani. Dani’s voice throughout the entire party is notably absent, as Eddie and his mother both impose their own wishes on her, assume that she wants what they want, and don’t really open any possibility for her to say otherwise. Moreover, although there’s a palpable awkwardness that accompanies Eddie’s story, the crowd at the party chuckles along as though it’s a sweet, innocent tale of lifelong love and devotion, and not an instance of a man whittling away at a woman’s resistance until she finally caved to his pursuit of her.

All of this suggests that Eddie shared in the socialized convictions of heteropatriarchy, according to which Dani’s purpose and destiny were to marry him and to make him happy. His patterns of behavior evince the unquestioned presumptions of so many men: that women exist in service to them and their wants, such that it is utterly inconceivable that women could possibly desire otherwise. As a political institution, heteropatriarchy tells men that they are entitled to women’s existences, bodies, futures. And, indeed, Eddie can’t seem to even imagine that Dani could ever want anything other than the future that he has mapped out for them. (Oh, hey look, we’ve got some love vs. possession going on here again).

For what it’s worth, I think that the show’s portrayal of compulsory heterosexuality is excellent. I love that the writers decided to tackle this. Like I mentioned at the beginning, I found all of this to be extremelyrelatable. I might even be accused of over-relating and projecting my own experiences onto my readings here, but…there were just too many resonances between Dani’s experiences and my own. Mrs. O’Mara’s advice to Dani to “put your own oxygen mask on first” is all too reminiscent of the ways that my ex’s parents would encourage me to “heal” from my brother’s loss…but not for the sake of my own wellbeing, but so that I would return to prioritizing the care of their son and existing to do whatever would make him happy. I’ll also share here that what drove me to break up with my ex-fiancé wasn’t just his unwillingness to contend with my grief, but the fact that he had decided that the best way for me to heal from my loss would be to have a baby. He insisted that I could counteract my brother’s death by “bringing new life into the world.” And he would not take no for an answer. He told me that if I wouldn’t agree to try to have children in the near future, then he wasn’t interested in continuing to stay with me. It took me months to pluck up the courage, but I finally answered this ultimatum by ending our relationship myself. Thus, like Dani, I came very close to sacrificing myself, my wants, my body, my future, and my life for the sake of doing what my fiancé and his family wanted me to do, all while painfully denying my own attraction to women. What kept me from “sticking it out” any longer was that I finally decided that I wasn’t going to sacrifice myself for a man I didn’t love (and who clearly didn’t love me) and decided, instead, to reclaim my own wants and needs away from him.

For Dani, however, the moment that she finally begins to reclaim her wants and needs away from Eddie is also the moment that he furiously jumps out of the driver’s seat and into the path of a passing truck, which leaves her to entangle those events as though his death is her fault for finally asserting herself.

Of course, the guilt that Dani feels for having “caused” Eddie’s death isn’t justa matter of breaking up with him and thereby provoking a reaction that would prove fatal—it’s also the guilt of her suppressed homosexual desire, of not desiring Eddie in the first place. In other words, internalized homophobia is an inextricable layer of the culpability that Dani feels. Internalized homophobia is also what’s haunting her. As others (such as Rowan Ellis, whose deep dive includes a solid discussion of internalized homophobia in Bly, as well as a more at-length examination of Bury Your Gays than I’m providing here) have pointed out, the show highlights this metaphorically by having Dani literally get locked into a closet with Edmund’s ghost in the very first episode. Further reinforcing this idea is the fact that these spectral visions get even worse as Dani starts to come to terms with and act on her attraction to Jamie, as though the ghost is punishing her for her desires. Across Episode 3, as Dani and Jamie begin spending more time together, Edmund’s ghost concurrently begins materializing in more shocking, visceral forms (e.g. his bleeding hand in Dani’s bed; his shadowy figure lurking behind Dani after she’s held Jamie’s hand) that exceed the reflective surfaces to which he’d previously been confined. This continues into Episode 4, where each of Eddie’s appearances follows moments of Dani’s growing closeness to Jamie. A particularly alarming instance occurs when Dani just can’t seem to pry her gaze away from a dressed-up Jamie who’s in the process of some mild undressing. Finally turning away from Jamie, Dani becomes aware of Eddie’s hands on her hips. It’s a violating reminder of his claims over her, horrifying in its invocation of men’s efforts to coerce and control women’s sexuality.

It is incredibly powerful, then, to watch Dani answer all of this by becoming more resolute and assertive in the expression of her wants and needs. The establishment of her romantic relationship with Jamie isn’t just the movement through grief and guilt that we discussed earlier; it’s also Dani’s defiance of compulsory heterosexuality and her fierce claiming of her queer existence. Even in the face of all that’s been haunting her, Dani initiates her first kiss with Jamie; and Eddie’s intrusion in that moment is only enough to temporarily dissuade her, as Dani follows this up by then asking Jamie out for a drink at the pub to “see where that takes them” (i.e. up to Jamie’s flat to bang, obviously). The peace that Dani finds after having sex with Jamie for the first time is, therefore, also the profound fulfillment of at last having her first sexual experience with a woman, of finally giving expression to this critical part of herself that she’d spent her entire life denying. Compulsory heterosexuality had dictated to Dani that she must self-sacrifice to meet the strictures of heteropatriarchy, to please everyone except herself; but in her relationship with Jamie, Dani learns that she doesn’t have to do this at all. This is only bolstered by the fact that, as we’ve talked about at length already, Jamie is very attentive to Dani’s needs and respectful of her boundaries. Jamie doesn’t want Dani to do anything other than what Dani wants to do. And so, in the cultivation of their romantic partnership, Dani thus comes to value her own wants and needs in a way that she hasn’t before.

The fact that the show nails all of this so fucking well is what makes all that comes later so goddamn frustrating.

The final episode chronicles Dani and Jamie forging a queer life together that the rest of us can only dream of, including another scene of Dani flouting homophobia and negotiating her own internal struggles so that she can be with Jamie. “I know we can’t technically get married,” she tells Jamie when she proposes to her, “but I also don’t really care.” And with her awareness that the beast in the jungle is starting to catch up with her, Dani tells Jamie that she wants to spend whatever time she has left with her.

But then…

A few scenes later—along with a jump of a few years later, presumably—Jamie arrives home with the licenses that legally certify their civil union in the state of Vermont. It’s a monumental moment. In 2000, Vermont became the first state to introduce civil unions, which paved the way for it to later (in 2009) become the first state to pass legislation that recognized gay marriages without needing to have a court order mandating that the state extend marriage rights beyond opposite-sex couples. I appreciate that Bly’s creatorsincorporated this significant milestone in the history of American queer rights into the show. But its positioning in the show also fuckin’ sucks. Just as Jamie is announcing the legality of her and Dani’s civil union and declaring that they’ll have another marriage ceremony soon, we see water running into the hallway. This moves us into that scene with the flooded bathtub, as Jamie finds Dani staring into the water, unaware of anything else except the reflection of Viola staring back at her. Thus, it is at the exact moment when her wife proudly shares the news of this incredible achievement in the struggle for queer rights—for which queer folks have long fought and are continuing to fight to protect in the present—that Dani has completely, hopelessly resigned herself to Viola’s possession.

I want to be careful to clarify here that, in making this observation, I don’t mean to posit some sort of “Dani should have fought back against Viola” argument, which—within the context of our allegorical readings—might have the effect of damagingly suggesting that Dani should have fought harder to recover from mental illness or terminal disease. But I do mean to point out the incredibly grim implications that the juxtaposition of these events engenders, especially when we contemplate them (as we did in the previous section) within the overall frameworks of the show’s themes and Dani’s character development. After all that has come before, after we’ve watched Dani come to so boldly assert her queer desire and existence, it is devastating to see the show reduce her to such a despairing state that doesn’t even give her a chance to register that she and Jamie are now legal partners.

Why did you have to do this, Bly? Why?

Further compounding this despair, the next scene features the resumption of Dani’s self-sacrificial beliefs and behaviors, which results in her demise, and which leaves Jamie to suffer through the devastation of her wife’s death. This resumption of self-sacrifice hence demolishes all of that beautiful work of asserting Dani’s queer existence and learning that she doesn’t need to sacrifice herself that I just devoted two thousand words to describing above.

Additionally, in the end, Dani’s noble self-sacrifice also effects a safe recuperation of heteronormativity…which might add more evidence to a Bury Your Gays claim, oops.

And that is because, in the end, after we see Jamie screaming into the water and Dani forever interred at the bottom of the lake in which she drowned herself, we come to the end of Jamie’s story and return to Bly Manor’s frame narrative: Flora’s wedding.

At the start of the show, the evening of Flora and Unnamed Man’s (Wikipedia says his name is James? idk, w/e) rehearsal dinner provides the occasion and impetus for Jamie’s storytelling. Following dinner, Flora, her fiancé, and their guests gather around a fireplace and discuss a ghost story about the venue, a former convent. With a captive audience that includes her primary targets—Flora and Miles, who have forgotten what happened at Bly and, by extension, all that Dani sacrificed and that Jamie lost so that they could live their lives free of the trauma of what transpired—and with a topically relevant conversation already ongoing, Jamie interjects that she has a ghost story of her own to share…and thus, the show’s longer, secondary narrative begins.

When Jamie’s tale winds to a close at the end of the ninth episode, the show returns us to its frame, that scene in front of the cozy, crackling fire. And it is there that we learn that it is, in fact, Jamie who has been telling us this story all along.

As the other guests trickle away, Flora stays behind to talk to Jamie on her own. A critical conversation then ensues between them, which functions not only as Jamie’s shared wisdom to Flora, but also as the show’s attempt to lead viewers through what they’ve just experienced and thereby impart its core message about the secondary narrative. The frame narrative is, thus, also a direct address to the audience that tells us what we should take away from the experience. By this point, the show has thoroughly established that Jamie is a gentle-but-tough-love, knowledgeable, and trustworthy guide through the trials of accepting grief and mortality, and so it is Jamie who leaves Flora and us, the audience, with the show’s final word about how to treasure the people we love while they are still in our lives and how to grieve them if we survive beyond them. (But, by this point in this essay, we’ve also learned that Bly’s messages about grief and mortality are beautiful but also messy and unconvincing, even with this didactic ending moment).

With all of this in mind, we can (and should) ask some additional questions of the frame narrative.

One of those questions is: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

Answering this question within the show’s diegesis (by asking it of the narrator) is easy enough. Jamie is performing a memorialization of Dani’s life and sacrifice at an event where her intended audience happens to be gathered, ensuring that Miles and Flora begin to recognize what Dani did for them in a manner that maybe won’t just outright traumatize them.

Okay, sure, yeah. True. Not wrong.

But let’s interrogate this question more deeply—let’s ask it of the show itself. So, Bly Manor: Why is the secondary narrative being told from/within this particular frame?

We could also tweak this question a bit to further consider: What is the purpose of the frame? A frame narrative can function to shape audiences’ interpretations of and attitudes towards the secondary narrative. So, in this case, let’s make our line of questioning even more specific. What does the frame of Flora’s wedding do for Bly’s audiences?

Crucially, the framing scene at the fireplace provides us with a sense that we’ve returned to safety after the horror of the ghost story we’ve just experienced. To further assure us of this safety, then, Bly’s frame aims to restore a sense of normality, a sense that the threat that has provoked fear in us has been neutralized, a sense of hope that endures beyond tragedy. Indeed, as we fade from the secondary narrative and return to the frame, Jamie’s narration emphasizes how Dani’s selfless death has brought peace to Bly Manor by breaking its cycles of violence and trauma: “But she won’t be hollow or empty, and she won’t pull others to her fate. She will merely walk the grounds of Bly, harmless as a dove for all of her days, leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.”

What Dani has accomplished with her self-sacrifice, then, is a longstanding, prevailing, expected staple of Western—and especially American—storytelling: redemption.

American media is rife with examples of this narrative formula (in which an individual must take selfless action—which may or may not involve self-sacrificial death—in order to redeem an imperiled community by restoring a threatened order) to an extent that is kind of impossible to overstate. Variations of this formula are everywhere, from film to television to comics to videogames to news reports. It is absolutely fundamental to our cultural understandings of what “heroism” means. And it’s been this way for, umm…a long time, largely thanks to that most foundational figure of Western myth, some guy who was crucified for everybody’s sins or something. (Well, that and the related popularization of Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey, but…I’m not gonna go off onto a whole rant about that right now, this essay is already too long as it is).

In Bly Manor, the threatened order is the natural process of death itself, which Viola has disrupted with a gravity well that traps souls and keeps them suspended within physical proximity of the manor. Dani’s invitation to Viola is the initial step towards salvation (although, I think it’s important to note that this is not entirely intentional on Dani’s part. Jamie’s narration indicates that Dani didn’t entirely understand what she was doing with the “It’s you, it’s me, it’s us” invitation, so self-sacrifice was not necessarily her initial goal). It nullifies the gravity well and resumes the passage of death, which liberates all of the souls that have been trapped at Bly and also produces additional opportunities for others’ atonements (e.g. Peter’s apology to Miles; Henry’s guardianship of the children). But it’s Dani’s suicide that is the ultimate completion of the redemptive task. It is only by “giving herself to the lake” that Dani is able to definitively dispel Viola’s threat and confer redemptive peace to Bly Manor.

It’s tempting to celebrate this incredibly rare instance of a queer woman in the heroic-redemptive role, given that American media overwhelmingly reserve it for straight men. But I want to strongly advise that we resist this temptation. Frankly, there’s a lot about the conventional heroic-redemptive narrative formula that sucks, and I’d rather that we work to advocate for other kinds of narratives, instead of just championing more “diversity” within this stuffy old model of heroism. Explaining what sucks about this formula is beyond the purview of this essay, though. But my next point might help to illustrate part of why it sucks (spoiler: it’s because it tends to prop up traditional, dominant structures of power and relationality).

So…What I want us to do is entertain the possibility that Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice might serve specific purposes for straight audiences, especially in the return to the frame at the end.

Across The Haunting of Bly Manor, we’ve seen ample examples of heterosexuality gone awry. The show has repeatedly called our attention to the flaws and failings of heterosexual relationships against the carefully cultivated safety, open communication, and mutual fulfillment of a queer romance between two women. But, while queer audiences may celebrate this about this show, for straight audiences, this whole situation might just wind up producing anxiety instead—as though heterosexuality is also a threatened order within the world of Bly Manor. More generally, asking straight audiences to connect with a queer couple as the show’s main protagonists is an unaccustomed challenge with which they’re not normally tasked; thus, the show risks leaving this dominant viewer base uncomfortable, threatened, and resentful, sitting with the looming question of whether heterosexuality is, itself, redeemable.

In answer to this, Dani’s self-sacrifice provides multiple assurances to straight audiences. To begin with, her assumption of the traditional heroic-redemptive role secures audiences within the familiar confines of that narrative formula, which also then promises that Dani is acting as a protector of threatened status quos and not as another source of peril. What Bly Manor is doing here is, in effect, acknowledging that it may have challenged (and even threatened) straight audiences with its centerpiece of a queer romance—and that, likewise, queers themselves may be challenging the status quos of romantic partnerships by, for instance, demanding marriage rights and improvements in media representations—while also emphatically reassuring those audiences in the wake of that challenge that Dani and Jamie haven’t created and aren’t going to create too much disturbance with their queerness. They’re really not that threatening, Bly swears. They’re harmless as a dove. They’re wholesome. They’re respectable. They—and queer folks more generally—aren’t going to totally upend everything, really. Look, they’ll even sacrifice themselves to save everyone and redeem imperiled communities and threatened orders—even heterosexuality itself!

A critical step towards achieving this assurance is the leveling of the playing field. In order for the show to neutralize the threat of queerness for straight audiences, comfort them with a return to safety, and promise them that heterosexuality is redeemable, the queer women need to have an on-screen tragic end to their relationship just like all of the straight couples have. And so, Dani must die and Jamie must grieve.

That accomplished, the show then immediately returns to the frame, the scene at the fireplace following Flora’s rehearsal dinner.

There—after we’ve witnessed so much queer joy and queer tragedy crammed into this final episode—we see Flora and her fiancé, bride and groom, sitting together, arms linked, taking in all that Jamie has to tell them. And with this warm, idyllic image of impending matrimony between man and wife, the safety to which straight audiences return in the frame is, therefore, also the safety of a heterosexuality that can find its redemption through Dani’s self-sacrifice. Not only does Dani’s death mean that Flora can live (and go on to marry her perfectly bland, unremarkable husband, all without the trauma of what happened at Bly), but it also means that she—and, with her, straight audiences—can ultimately benefit from the lessons about true love, loss, and grieving that Dani’s self-sacrifice and Jamie’s story bestow.

And so, Bly Manor concludes with a valorization of redemptive self-sacrifice and an anodyne recuperation of heteronormativity, bequeathing Flora with the opportunities to have and to hold the experiential knowledge that Dani and Jamie have provided for her. Here, queer tragedy serves up an educational opportunity for heterosexual audiences in a challengingly “inclusive,” but otherwise essentially non-threatening manner. The ending is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to heterosexual audiences in the same way that Jamie’s story is a gentle, non-traumatizing, yet frank lesson to Flora.

Did the show’s creators intentionally do all of this to set about providing such assurances to straight audiences? Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t really know—or care! But, especially in light of incidents like the recent “Suletta and Miorine’s relationship is up to interpretation” controversy following the Gundam: Witch from Mercury finale, I absolutely do not put it past media corporations and content creators to very intentionally take steps to prioritize the comfort of straight audiences against the threats of queer love. And anyway, intentional or not, all of this still has effects and implications loaded with meaning, as I have tried to account for here.

Honestly, though, I can’t quite shake the feeling that there’s some tension between Jamie, Owen, and maybe also Henry about Jamie’s decision to publicly share Dani’s story in front of Flora and Miles. Owen’s abrupt declaration that it’s getting late and that they should wrap up seems like an intervention—like he’s been as patient and understanding as he possibly could up to that point, but now, he’s finally having to put a stop to Jamie’s deviance. I can’t help but read the meaningful stares that pass between them at both ends of the frame as a complex mixture of compassion and fraught disagreement (and I wish that the show had done more with this). The scene where Dani and Jamie visit Owen at his restaurant seems to set up the potential for this unspoken dispute. By their expressions and mannerisms (Dani’s stony stare; the protective way that Jamie holds her as her own gaze is locked on Dani), it’s clear that Dani and Jamie are aghast that Flora and Miles have forgotten what happened and that Owen believes that they should just be able to live their lives without that knowledge. And it’s also clear, by her very telling of Dani’s story, that Jamie disagrees with him. Maybe I’m over-imposing my own attitudes here, but I’m left with the impression that Jamie resents the coddling of Miles and Flora just like I’m resenting the coddling of straight audiences…that Jamie resents that she and Dani have had to give up everything so that Miles and Flora can continue living their privileged lives just like I’m resenting the exploitation of queer tragedy for the sake preserving straight innocence. (As Jamie says to Hannah when Dani puts the children to work in the garden: “You can’t give them a pass forever.” Disclaimer: I’m not saying that I want Miles and Flora to be traumatized, but I am saying that I agree with Jamie, because hiding traumatic shit is not how to resolve inter-generational trauma. Anyway—).

Also, I don’t know about y’all, but I find Flora and Jamie’s concluding conversation to be super cringe. Maybe it’s because I’m gay and just have way too much firsthand experience with this sort of thing from my own comphet past, but Flora’s whole “I just keep thinking about that silly, gorgeous, insane man I’m marrying tomorrow. I love him. More than I ever thought I could love anybody. And the crazy thing is, he loves me the same exact amount,” spiel just absolutely screams “woman who is having to do all of the emotional work in her relationship with an absolutely dull, mediocre, emotionally illiterate man and is desperately trying to convince herself that he does, in fact, love her as much as she (believes) that she loves him.”

I feel like this is a parody of straightness?? Is this actually sincere??

This is what Dani gave up her life to redeem??

To me, this is just more bleak shit that Bly leaves us with. It is so painful to watch.

Bless.

Okay, so I know that I said that I wasn’t going to offer a definitive yes or no about whether Bly commits Bury Your Gays with Dani’s death, but…after writing all of this out, I’m honestly kinda leaning towards a yes.

But I’m already anticipating that folks are gonna push back against me on this. So I just want to humbly submit, again, that Bly could have just not done this. It could have just not portrayed Dani’s death at all.

To really drive this point home, then, I’m going to conclude this essay by suggesting just a few ways that The Haunting of Bly Manor could have ended without Dani’s self-sacrificial death—or without depicting her death on-screen at all.

Bly Manor Could Have Ended Differently

Mike Flanagan—creator, director, writer, editor, executive producer, showrunner, etc. of The Haunting of Bly Manor—has stated that he believes that the show’s ending is a happy one.

I, on the other hand, believe that Bly’s ending is…not. In my view, the way that the ending treats Dani is unnecessarily cruel and exploitative. “Happy ending”—really? If I let myself be cynical about it (which I do), I honestly think that Dani’s death is a pretty damn transparent effort to squeeze out some tears with a sloppy, mawkish, feel-good veneer slapped over it. And if we peel back that veneer and look under it, what we find is quite bleak.

To be fair, for a psychological horror show that’s so centrally about grief and trauma, Bly Manor does seem to profess an incredibly strong sense of hopefulness. Underlying the entirety of the show is a profound faith in all the good and beauty that can come from human connection, however fleeting our lives may be—and even if we make a ton of dumb, awful mistakes along the way. If I’m being less cynical about it, I do also think that the show’s ending strives to demonstrate a peak expression of this conviction. But—at least in my opinion—it doesn’t succeed in this goal. In my writing of this essay, I’ve come to believe that the show instead ends in a state of despair that is at odds with what it appears to want to achieve.

So, in this final section, I’m going to offer up a few possibilities for ways that the show could have ended that maybe wouldn’t have so thoroughly undermined its own attempted messages.

Now, if I were actually going to fix the ending of The Haunting of Bly Manor, I would honestly overhaul a ton of the show to arrive at something completely different. But I’m not going to go through all the trouble of rewriting the entire show here, lol. Instead, I’m going to work with most of what’s already there, leading out from Viola’s possession of Dani (even though I don’t actually like that part of the show either – maybe someday I’ll write about other implications of Viola’s possession of Dani beyond these allegorical readings, but not right now). I’m also going to try to adhere to some of the show’s core themes and build on some of the allegorical possibilities that are already in place. Granted, the ideas that I pose here wouldn’t fix everything, by any stretch of the imagination; but they would, at least (I hope), mitigate some of the issues that I’ve outlined over the course of this essay. And one way or another, I hope that they’ll help to demonstrate that Dani’s self-sacrificial death was completely unnecessary. (Seriously, just not including Dani’s death would’ve enabled the show to completely dodge the question of Bury Your Gays and would’ve otherwise gone a long way towards avoiding the problems with the show’s queer representation).

So, here's how this is going to work. First, I’m going to pose a few general, guiding questions before then proposing an overarching thematic modification that expands on an idea that’s already prominent across the show. This will then serve as the groundwork for two alternative scenarios. I’m not going to go super into detail with either of these alternatives; mostly, I just want to demonstrate that the show that could’ve easily replaced the situation leading to Dani drowning herself. (For the record, I also think that the show could’ve benefitted from having at least one additional episode—and from some timing and pacing restructuring otherwise. So, before anybody tries an excuse like “but this wouldn’t fit into the last episode,” I want to urge that we imagine these possibilities beyond that limitation).

Let’s start off by returning to a point that I raised in the earlier conversation about grief and acceptance: the trickiness of Viola’s “acceptance.”

What Viola “accepts” in the end aren’t her losses or her own mortality, but Dani’s desperate, last-ditch-effort invitation to inhabit her. Within the show’s extant ending, Viola never actually comes to any kind of acceptance otherwise. Dani’s suicide effectively forces her dissolution, eradicating her persistent presence through the redemptive power of self-sacrifice. But in all of my viewings of the show and in all of my efforts to think through and write about it, there’s a question that’s been bugging me to no end: Why does Viola accept Dani’s invitation in the first place?

We know that Peter figured out the “it’s you, it’s me, it’s us” trick in his desperation to return to some form of life and to leave the grounds of Bly Manor. But…what is the appeal of it for Viola? How do her own motivations factor into it? For so long, Viola’s soul has been tenaciously persisting at Bly all so that she can repeatedly return to the physical locus of her connection with her husband and daughter, their shared bedroom in the manor. She’s done this for so long that she no longer even remembers why she’s doing it—she just goes back there to grab whatever child she can find and strangles whoever happens to get in her way. So what would compel her to accept Dani’s invitation? What does she get out of it—and what does she want out of it? What does her acceptance mean? And why, then, does her acceptance result in the dissipation of the gravity well?

We can conjecture, certainly. But the show doesn’t actually provide answers to these questions. Indeed, one of the other major criticisms that I have of Bly is that it confines all of Viola’s development to the eighth episode alone. I really think that it needed to have done way more to characterize her threat and at least gestureat her history sooner, rather than leaving it all to that penultimate episode, interrupting and drawing out the exact moment when she’s about to kill Dani. (Like, after centuries of Viola indiscriminately killing people, and with so many ghosts that’ve been loitering around for so long because of that, wouldn’t Bly Manor have rampant ghost stories floating around about it by the time Dani arrives? But there’s only one minor suggestion of that possibility: Henry indicating that he might’ve met a soldier ghost once. That’s it. And on that note, all of the ghosts at the manor needed to have had more screentime and development, really). Further, it’s disappointing that the show devotes that entire eighth episode to accounting for Viola’s motivations, only to then reduce her to Big, Bad, Unspeakable Evil in the final episode, with no rhyme or reason for what she’s doing, all so that she can necessitate Dani’s death.

As we continue pondering these unanswered questions, there’s also another issue that I want to raise, which the show abandons only as an oblique, obscure consideration. And that is: How the hell did Jamie acquire all that extensive knowledge about Viola, the ghosts of the manor, and all that happened, such that she is able to tell Bly’sstory in such rich detail? My own sort of headcanon answer to this is that Viola’s possession of Dani somehow enabled Viola to regain some of her own memories—as well as, perhaps, a more extended, yet also limited awareness of the enduring consciousnesses of the other ghosts—while also, in turn, giving Dani access to them, too. Dani then could have divulged what she learned to Jamie, which would account for how Jamie knows so much. I bring this up because it provides one possible response to the question of “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” (especially given the significant weight that the show places on the retention of one’s memories—more on this in a moment) and because this is an important basis for both of my proposed alternative scenarios.

Before we dig into those alternative scenarios, however, there’s also a thematic modification that I want to suggest, which would help to provide another answer to “What does Viola get out of her possession of Dani?” while also alleviating the issues that lead into the valorization of Dani’s suicide. That thematic modification involves how the show defines love. Although Bly’s sustained contrasts between love and possession have some valuable elements, I think that the ending would’ve benefitted from downplaying the love vs. possession theme (which is where we run into so much trouble with Dani’s self-sacrifice, and which has also resulted in some celebratory conflations between “selflessness” and self-sacrifice that I’ve seen crop up in commentary about the show—but, y’all, self-sacrifice is not something to celebrate in romantic partnerships, so please, please be careful idolizing that) to instead play up a different theme: the idea that love is the experience of feeling such safety and security with another person that we can find opportunities for peace by being with them.

Seeking peace—and people with whom to feel safe enough to share traumas and experience peace—is a theme that already runs rampant across the show, so this modification is really just a matter of accentuating it differently. It’s also closely linked to the moving through grief theme that we’ve already discussed at length, as numerous characters in Bly express desires for solitude with loved ones as a way of finding relief and healing from their pain, grief, and trauma. (And I suspect that I latched onto this because I have desperately wanted peace, calm, and stillness in the midst of my own acute, compounding traumas…and because my own former romantic partner was obviously not someone with whom I felt safe enough to experience the kind of peace that would’ve allowed me to begin the process of healing).

We run into this idea early in the development of Jamie and Dani’s romance, as narrator Jamie explains in the scene leading up to their first kiss, “The au pair was tired. She’d been tired for so long. Yet without even realizing she was doing it, she found herself taking her own advice that she’d given to Miles. She’d chosen someone to keep close to her that she could feel tired around.” Following this moment, at the beginning of Episode 5, narrator Jamie then foregrounds Hannah’s search for peace (“The housekeeper knew, more than most, that deep experience was never peaceful. And because she knew this ever since she’d first called Bly home, she would always find her way back to peace within her daily routine, and it had always worked”), which calls our attention to the ways that Hannah has been retreating into her memory of her first meeting with Owen as a crucial site of peace against the shock of her own death. Grown-up Flora even gushes about “that easy silence you only get with your forever person who loves you as much as you love them” when she’s getting all teary at Jamie about her husband-to-be.

Of course, this theme is already actively at work in the show’s conclusion as well. During her “beast in the jungle” monologue, Dani tells Jamie that she feels Viola “in here. It’s so quiet…it’s so quiet. She’s in here. And this part of her that’s in here, it isn’t…peaceful.” As such, Viola’s whole entire issue is that, after all those centuries, she has not only refused to accept her own death, but she’s likewise never been at peace—she’s still not at peace. Against Viola’s unpeaceful presence, however, Dani does find peace in her life with Jamie…at least temporarily, until Viola’s continued refusal of peace leads to Dani’s self-destructive sense of fatalism. Still, in her replacement of Viola as the new Lady of the Lake, Dani exists as a prevailing force of peace (she’s “harmless as a dove”); however, incidentally, she only accomplishes this through the decidedly non-peaceful, violent act of taking her own life.

But…what if that hadn’t been the case?

What if, instead, the peace that Dani finds in her beautiful, queer, non-self-sacrificing existence with Jamie had also enabled Viola to find some sense of peace of her own? What if, through her inhabitation of Dani, Viola managed to, like…calm the fuck down some? What if Dani’s safety and solitude worked to at least somewhat assuage Viola’s rage—and even guide her towards some other form of acceptance?

Depending on how this developed, the show could’ve borne out the potential for a much more subversive conclusion than what we actually got. Rather than All-Consuming-Evil Viola’s forced dissolution through the violence of Dani’s redemptive self-sacrifice (and its attendant recuperation of heteronormativity), we could’ve instead had the makings of a narrative about sapphic love as a source of healing that’s capable of breaking cycles of violence and trauma. And I think that it would’ve been possible for the show to accomplish this without a purely “happy” ending in which everything was just magically fine, and all the trauma dissipated, and there were no problems in the world ever again. The show could have, in fact, managed this while preserving the allegorical possibilities of Viola’s presence as mental and/or terminal illness.

But, before I can start describing how this could’ve happened, there’s one last little outstanding problem that I need to address. In the video essay that I cited earlier, Rowan Ellis suggests that there are limitations to the “Viola as a stand-in for mental/terminal illness” reading of the show because of the fact that Dani invites Viola into herself and, therefore, willingly brings on her own suffering. But I don’t think that this is quite the case or that it interferes with these allegorical readings. As I’ve already mentioned at various points, Dani doesn’t entirely understand the implications of what she’s doing when she issues her invitation to Viola; and even so, the invitation is still a matter of a dubious consent that evidently cannot be withdrawn once initially granted—at the absolute most generous characterization. Dani’s invitation is a snap decision, a frantic attempt to save Flora after everyone and everything else has failed. Consequently, we don’t necessarily have to construe Viola’s presence in Dani’s life as a matter of Dani “willingly inviting her own suffering,” but can instead understand it as the wounds and traumas that persist after Dani has risked her life to rescue Flora. In this way, the show could have also challenged the traditional heroic-redemptive narrative formula by offering a more explicit commentary on the all-too-often unseen ramifications of selflessly “heroic” actions (instead of just heedlessly perpetuating their glorification and, with them, self-sacrifice). Dani may have saved Flora—but at what cost to herself? What long-term toll might this lasting trauma exact on her?

And with that, we move into my two alternative ending scenarios.

Alternative Ending 1: Progressive Memory Loss

Memory and its loss are such significant themes in Bly Manor that theycould use an essay all their own.

I am, however, going to refrain from writing such an essay at this moment in time (I’m already super tired from writing this one, lol).

Still, the first of my alternative scenarios would bring these major themes full-circle—and would make Jamie eat her words.

In this alternative scenario, Viola would find some sense of peace—even if fraught and, at times, tumultuous—in her possession of Dani. As her rage subsides, she is even able to regain fragmented pieces of her own memory, which Dani is also able to experience. The restoration of Viola’s memory, albeit vague and scattered, leads Dani to try to learn even more about Viola’s history at Bly in an effort to at least partially fill in the gaps. As time goes on, though, Viola’s co-habitation within Dani’s consciousness leads to the steady degradation of Dani’s own memory. The reclamation of Viola’s memories would occur, then, concomitant with a steady erosion of both herself and Dani. Thus, Dani would still undergo an inexorable decline across the show’s ending, but one more explicitly akin to degenerative neurological diseases associated with aging, accentuating the “Viola as terminal illness” allegory while also still carrying resonances of the residual reverberations of trauma (given that memory loss is often a common consequence of acute trauma). Jamie would take on the role of Dani’s caregiver, mirroring and more directly illuminating the role that Owen plays for his mother earlier in the show. By the show’s conclusion, Dani would still be alive, including during the course of the frame narrative.

I mentioned earlier in this essay that I’ve endured even more trauma and grief since my brother’s death and since my breakup with my ex-fiancé. So, I’ll share another piece of it with you now: shortly after my breakup, my dad was diagnosed with one of those degenerative neurological diseases that I listed way back at the very beginning. I moved home not only to get away from my ex, but also to become a caregiver. In the time that I’ve been home, I’ve had no choice but to behold my dad’s continuous, irreversible decline and his indescribable suffering. He has further health issues, including a form of cancer. As a result, he now harbors a sense of fatalism that he’ll never be able to reconcile—he does not have the cognitive capacities to address his despair or turn it into some other form of acceptance. He is merely, in essence, awaiting his death. Hence, fatalism is something that I have had to “accept” as a regular component of my own life. (In light of this situation, you may be wondering if I have thoughts and opinions on medical aid in dying, given all that I have had to say so far about fatalism and suicide. And the answer is yes, I do have thoughts and opinions…but they are complex, and I don’t really want to try to account for them here).

Indeed, I live in a suspended, indefinite state of grieving. Day in and day out, I watch my father perish before my eyes, anticipating the blow of fresh grief that will strike when he dies. I watch my mother’s grief. I watch my father’s grief. He forgets about the symptoms of his disease; he looks up his disease to try to learn about it; he re-discovers his inevitable demise anew; the grieving process restarts again. (“She would wake, she would walk, she would forget […] and she would fade and fade and fade”).

What, then, does acceptance look like when grief is so ongoing and so protracted?

What does acceptance look like in the absence of any possibility of acceptance?

Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” model has been a meaningful guide for countless folks in their efforts to navigate grief and loss. Yet, the model has also been subject to a great deal of critique. Critics have accused the model of, among other things, suggesting that grieving is a linear process, whereby a person moves from one stage to the next and then ends conclusively at acceptance (when grieving is, in fact, an incredibly uneven, nonlinear, and inconclusive process). Relatedly, they have also called attention to the fact that the model commonly gets used prescriptively in ways that usher grieving folks towards the end goal of acceptance and cast judgment on those who do not reach that stage. These are criticisms that I would level at Bly’s application of Kübler-Ross as well. Earlier, we thoroughly covered the show’sissues with grief and acceptance as major themes; but in addition to those issues, Bly alsotends to steer its characters towards abrupt endpoints of acceptance, while doling out punishments to those who “refuse” to accept. At root, there are normative ascriptions at work in the show’s very characterization of deferred acceptance as refusal and acceptance itself as an active choice that one has to make.

This alternative ending, then, would have the potential to challenge and complicate the show’s handling of grief by approaching Jamie’s grieving and Dani’s fatalism from very different angles. As Dani’s caregiver, Jamie would encounter and negotiate grief in ongoing and processual ways, which would continue to evolve as her wife’s condition worsens and her caregiving responsibilities mount, thereby lending new layers of meaning to the message that “To truly love another person is to accept that the work of loving them is worth the pain of losing them.” Dani’s fatalism here could also serve as a different interpretation of James’s Beast in the Jungle; perhaps her sense of fatalism ebbs and flows, morphs and contorts along with the progression of her memory loss as she anticipates the gradual whittling-away of her selfhood—or even forgets that inevitability entirely. Still a tragic, heart-rending ending to the show, this scenario may not have the dramatic force of Jamie screaming into the waters of the lake, but it would be a relatable depiction of the ways that many real-life romances conclude. (And, having witnessed the extent of my mom’s ongoing caregiving for my dad, lemme tell ya: if y’all really want a portrayal of selflessness in romantic partnerships, I can think of nothing more selfless than caring for one’s terminally ill partner across their gradual death).

Additionally, this scenario could allow the show to maintain the frame narrative, while also packing fresh complexities into it.

Perhaps, in this case, Dani is still alive, but Jamie has come to Flora’s wedding alone, leaving Dani with in-home caregivers or within assisted living or some such. She comes there determined to ensure that Miles and Flora regain at least some awareness of what Dani did for them—that they remember her. The act of telling Dani’s story, then, becomes not only the performance of a mourning ritual, but also a vital way of preserving and perpetuating Dani’s memory where both the children and Dani, herself, can no longer remember. To be sure, such purposes already compel Jamie’s storytelling in the show: Narrator Jamie indicates that the new Lady of the Lake will eventually lose her recollection of the life she had with the gardener, “leaving the only trace of who she once was in the memory of the woman who loved her most.” But in the context of a conclusion so focused on memory loss, this statement would take on new dimensions of import. In this way, the frame narrative might also more forcefully prompt us, the audience, to reflect on the waysthat we can carry on the memories of our loved ones by telling their stories—and also, maybe, the responsibilities that we may have to do so. “Almost no one even remembers how she was when her mind hadn’t gone,” Jamie remarks after returning from Owen’s mother’s funeral, a subtle indictment of just how easily we can lose our own memories of those who suffer from conditions like dementia—how easily we can fail to carry on the stories of the people they were before and to keep their memories alive. (“We are all just stories in the end,” Olivia Crain emphasizes during the eulogy for Shirl’s kitten in The Haunting of Hill House. In fact, there’re some interesting comparative analyses we could do about storytelling and the responsibilities incumbent on storytellers between these two Flanagan shows).

Along those lines, I think that this would’ve been an excellent opportunity for the show to exacerbate and foreground those latent tensions between Jamie and Owen (and maybe also Henry) about whether to share Dani’s story with the now-adult children.

In the show’s explorations of memory loss, there’re already some interesting but largely neglected undercurrents churning around about the idea that maybe losing one’s memory isn’t just a curse or a heartbreaking misfortune (as it is for Viola, the ghosts of Bly Manor, and Owen’s mother), but can, in certain circumstances, be a blessing. Bly implies—via Owen and the frame narrative—that Miles and Flora have been able to flourish in their lives because they have forgotten what happened at Bly and still remain blissfully unaware of it…which, to be clear, is only possible because of the sacrifices that Dani and Jamie have made. But this situation raises, and leaves floating there, a bunch of questions about the responsibilities we have to impart traumatic histories to younger generations—whether interpersonally (e.g. within families) or societally (e.g. in history classrooms). Cycles of trauma don’t end by shielding younger generations from the past; they especially don’t end by forcing impacted, oppressed, traumatized populations (e.g. queer folks) to shoulder the burdens of trauma on their own for the sake of protecting another population’s innocent ignorance. But how do we impart traumatic histories? How do we do so responsibly, compassionately, in ways that respect those harrowing pasts—and those who lived them, those most directly impacted by them—without actively causing harm to receiving audiences? On the other hand, if we over-privilege the innocence of those who have forgotten or those who weren’t directly impacted, what do we lose and what do we risk by not having frank, open conversations about traumatic histories?

As it stands, I think that Bly is remiss in the way it tosses out these issues, but never actually does anything with them. It could have done much, much more. In this alternate ending, then, there could be some productive disagreement among Jamie, Owen, and Henry about whether to tell Flora and Miles, what to tell them, how to tell them. Perhaps, in her seizing of the conversation and her launching of the story in such a public way, Jamie has taken matters into her own hands and has done so in a way that Owen and Henry can’t easily derail. Perhaps Owen sympathizes but does, indeed, abruptly cut her off just before her audience can completely connect the dots. Perhaps Henry is conflicted and doesn’t take a stand—or perhaps he does. Perhaps we find out that Henry had been torn about whether to even invite Jamie because of the possibility of something like this happening. Or, perhaps Henry wants the children to know and believes that they should hear Dani’s story from Jamie. Perhaps we see scenes of past quarrels between Jamie and Owen, Owen and Henry. Perhaps, once the story has ended, we see a brief aftermath conversation between Owen and Jamie about what Jamie has done, their speculations about how it may impact Miles and Flora. Perhaps the show presents these conversations in ways that challenge us to reflect on them, even if it does not provide conclusive answers to the questions it raises, and even if it leaves these conflicts open-ended, largely unresolved.

Alternative Ending 2: Living with the Trauma

If Bly’s creators had wanted Viola’s inhabitation of Dani to represent the ongoing struggles of living—and loving someone—with severe mental illness and trauma, they could have also just…done that? Like, they could have just portrayed Jamie and Dani living their lives together and dealing with Viola along the way. They could have just let that be it. It wouldn’t have been necessary to include Dani’s death within the show’s depicted timeline at all.

The show could’ve more closely aligned its treatment of Dani’s fatalism with James’s Beast in the Jungle—but with, perhaps, a bit more of a hopeful spin. Perhaps, early on, Dani is convinced that her demise is imminent and incontrovertible, much as we already see in the final episode’s diner scene. For a while, this outlook continues to dominate her existence in ways that interfere with her daily functioning and her relationship with Jamie. Perhaps there’s an equivalent of the flooded bathtub scene, but it happens much earlier in the progression of their partnership: Dani despairs, and Jamie is there to reinforce her commitment to staying with Dani through it all, much like her extant “If you can’t feel anything, then I’ll feel everything for the both of us” remarks. But maybe, as a result of this, Dani comes to a realization much like The Beast in the Jungle’s John Marcher—but one that enables her to act on her newfound understanding, an opportunity that Marcher never finds before it’s too late. Maybe she realizes that her fatalism has been causing her to miss out on really, truly embracing the life that she and Jamie have been forging together, thus echoing the show’s earlier points about how unresolved trauma can impede our cultivation of meaningful relationships. Maybe she realizes that her life with Jamie has been passing her by while she’s remained so convinced that Viola will claim that life at any moment. Maybe she comes to understand that her perpetual sense of dread has been hurting Jamie—that Jamie needs her in the same ways that she needs Jamie, but that Dani’s ever-present sense of doom has been preventing her from providing for those needs. And maybe this leads to a re-framing of the “you, me, us,” conceit, with a scene in which Dani acknowledges the extent to which her fatalism has been dictating their lives; in light of this acknowledgement, she and Jamie resolve—together—to continue supporting each other as they navigate Viola’s lasting influences on their lives.

By making this suggestion, I once again do not want to seem like I’m advocating that “Dani should fight back against Viola” (or, in other words, that “Dani should fight harder to win the battle against her mental illness”). But I do want to direct us back to a point that I raised at the very beginning: grieving, traumatized, and mentally ill folks can, indeed, cause harm to our loved ones. Our grief, trauma, and mental illness don’t excuse that fact. But what that means is that we have to take responsibility for our harmful actions. What it absolutely does not mean is that our harms are inevitable or that our loved ones would be better off without us.It means recognizing that we still matter and have value to others, despite the narratives we craft to try to convince ourselves otherwise. It means acknowledging the wounds that fatalistic, “everybody is better without me” assumptions can inflict. It means identifying the ways that we can support and care for our loved ones, even through our own struggles with our mental health.

“Fighting harder to win the battle against mental illness” is a callous and downright incorrect framing of the matter; but there are, nevertheless, intentional steps that we must take to heal from trauma, to receive treatment for our mental illnesses, to care for ourselves, to care for our loved ones. For instance…the very process of writing this essay incited me to do a lot of reflecting on the self-defeating narratives that I have been telling myself about my mental health and my relationships with others. And that, in turn, incited me to do some course-correcting. I thought about how much I want to work towards healing, however convoluted and intricate that process may be. I thought about how I want to support my family. How I want to foster a robust social support network, such that I feel a genuine sense of community. How I want to be an attentive friend. How, someday, if I’m fortunate enough to have a girlfriend, I want to be a caring, present, and equal partner to her; I want to emotionally nourish her through life’s trials and turmoil, not just expect her to provide that emotional nourishment for me. I started writing this essay in August; and since then, because of it, I’ve held myself accountable by reaching out to friends, spending time with them, trying to support them. I’ve also managed to get myself, finally, to start therapy. And my therapist is already helping me address those self-defeating narratives that have led me to believe that I’m just a burden on my friends. So, y’know, I’m workin’ on it.

But it ain’t pretty. And it also ain’t a linear upward trajectory of consistent improvement. It’s messy. Sometimes, frankly, it’s real ugly.

It could be for Dani, too.

Even with her decision to accept the certainties and uncertainties of Viola’s intrusive presence in her life, to live her life as best she can in the face of it all, perhaps Dani still struggles from day to day. Perhaps some days are better than others. Perhaps Viola, as I suggested earlier, begins finding some modicum of peace through her possession of Dani; nonetheless, her rage and disquiet never entirely subside, and they still periodically overtake Dani. Perhaps Dani improves, only to then backslide, only to then find ways to stabilize once again. In this way, the show could’ve more precisely portrayed the muddled, tumultuous lastingness of grief and trauma throughout a lifetime—without concluding that struggle with a valorized suicide.

Such portrayals are not unprecedented in horror. As I contemplated this ending possibility, I couldn’t help but think of The Babadook (2014), another piece of horror media whose monster carries allegorical import as a representation of the endurance and obtrusion of unresolved trauma. The titular monster doesn’t disappear at the film’s end; Sam emphasizes, in fact, that “you can’t get rid of the Babadook.” And so, even after Amelia has confronted the Babadook and locked him in the basement of the family’s home, he continues to lurk there, still aggressive and threatening to overcome her, but able to be pacified with a bowlful of worms. Like loss and trauma, the Babadook can never be totally ignored or dispelled, only assuaged with necessary, recurrent attention and feedings.

Bly could have easily done something similar with Viola. Perhaps, in the same way that Amelia has to regularly provide the Babadook with an offering of worms, Dani must also “feed” Viola to soothe her rage. What might those feedings look like? What might they consist of? Perhaps Viola draws Dani back to Bly Manor, insisting on revisiting those same sites that have held implacable sway over her for centuries. Perhaps these visits are what permit Dani to gradually learn about Viola: who she was, what she has become, why she has tarried between life and death for so long. Perhaps Dani also learns that these “feedings” agitate Viola for a while, stirring her into fresh furor—but that, in their wake, Viola also settles more deeply and for longer periods. Perhaps they necessitate that Dani and Jamie both directly confront their own traumas, bring them to the surface, attend to them. Perhaps, together, they learn how to navigate their traumas in productive, mutually supportive ways. Perhaps this is also what quiets Viola over time, even if Dani is never quite sure whether Viola will return to claim her life.

You may be wondering, then, about what happens with the frame narrative in this scenario. If Dani doesn’t meet some tragic demise, what happens to the role and significance of grieving in the act of Jamie’s storytelling? Would Jamie’s storytelling even occur? Wouldn’t Dani just be at Flora’s wedding, too? Would we miss the emotional gut-punch of the reveal of the narrator’s identity at the end?

Perhaps, in this case, the ending removes some of the weight off of the grief theme to instead foreground those troubled deliberations about how to impart traumatic histories (as we covered in the previous scenario). As such, the frame could feature those conflicts between Jamie (and Dani here too this time), Owen, and Henry concerning whether or not to tell Dani’s story to Miles and Flora. Perhaps Dani decides not to attend the wedding, wary of contributing to this conflict at the scene of what should be a joyous occasion for Flora; perhaps she feels like she can’t even face the children. And then, without Dani there, perhaps an overwrought Jamie jumps into the story when the opportunity presents itself—whether impulsively or premeditatedly.

Or…Perhaps the show could’ve just scrapped the frame at Flora’s wedding and could’ve done something else instead. What might that be? I have no idea! Sky’s the limit.

At any rate, even with these changes, it would’ve still been possible to have the show conclude in a sentimental, tear-jerking way (which seems to be Flanagan’s preference). Perhaps Jamie’s storytelling does spark the return of the children’s memories. Perhaps, as they begin to remember, they reach out to Dani and Jamie, wanting to connect with them, wanting especially to see Dani again. And then, perhaps, the show could’ve ended with a scene of Miles and Flora finally reuniting with Dani—emotional, sweet, and memorable, no valorized suicide or exploitation of queer tragedy needed.

Conclusion

In my writing of this essay—and over the course of the Bly Manor and Hill House rewatches that it inspired—I’ve been finding myself also doing a great deal of reflection about the possibilities and purposes of horror media. I’ve been thinking, in particular, about the potential for the horror genre to provide contained settings in which we can face and explore our deepest fears and traumas in (relatively) safe, controlled ways. Honestly, I think that this is part of why I enjoy Flanagan’s work so much (even if it also enrages me at the same time). If you’ve read this far, you’ll have seen just how profoundly I relate to so much of the subject matter of The Haunting of Bly Manor. It has been extremely meaningful and valuable for me to encounter the show’s depictions of topics like familial trauma, grief, loss, compulsory heterosexuality, caregiving for aging parents, so on, all of which bear so heavily on my own existence. Bly Manor produced opportunities for me to excavate and dig deeply into the worst experiences of and feelings about my life: to look at them, understand them, and give voice to them, when I’m otherwise inclined to bury them into inconspicuous docility.

Even so, the show does not handle these relatable topics as well as it could have. Flanagan and the many contributors to this horror anthology can’t just preach at us about the responsibilities of storytellers; they, too, have responsibilities as storytellers in the communication of these delicate, sensitive, weighty human experiences. And so, to reinforce a point that I made earlier, this is why I’ve written this extensive critique. It’s not because I revile the show and want to condemn it—it’s because I cherish Bly Manor immensely. It’s because I wanted more out of it. It’s because I want to hold it and its creators accountable. It’s because I want folks to think more critically about it (especially after how close I came to unreflectively accepting its messages in my own initial reception of it).

Television usually doesn’t get me this way. It’s been a long time since I was this emotionally attached to a show. So this essay has been my attempt to honor Bly with a careful, meticulous treatment. I appreciate all of the reflection and self-work that it has inspired me to undertake. I’ve wanted to pay my respects in the best way I know how: with close, thorough analysis.

If you’ve read all this mess, thanks for taking the time to do so. I hope that you’ve been able to get something out of it, too.

Representation matters, y’all.

The end.

#the haunting of bly manor #bly manor #thobm #dani clayton #jamie taylor #dani x jamie #damie #sapphic romance #lesbian romance #mental health #compulsory heterosexuality #queer representation #not a fix-it fic but a fix-it essay

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kiiwiigii · 8 months

Text

Night-Time Reading

Alec x Fem!Reader

Summary: You are having a rough day managing your POTS/CFS. All you want to do is relax and Alec is there to help.

Warnings:

Fluff! Nothing but tooth rotting fluff.

Word Count: 400+

Requested?: Yes!

So I'm going through a really rough time, I'm disabled (pots and CFS) and my cfs is acting up badly cause school started and I've been so busy I haven't had a break period, constantly walking and running and being busy. now I have a three day weekend so my body is letting myself feel the consequences of pushing myself too far, so I was wondering if I could suggest some comfort? Alec with a mate that either has cfs or just has some symptoms and just him keeping them as comfortable as possible while they're in pain Common symptoms (including the ones I'm going through) - joint pain (I can barely go up stairs and walk -extreme temp fluctuations (really hot to really cold quickly) -brain fog (brain is foggy. I'm too weak to open a bottle of coke so I left it open and while talking I tipped it over and forgot it was open) -migraines/headaches -sore throat -trembling -really tired but can't fall asleep and/or sleeps for a really long time Thank you for listening 🫶🏼 -🦊

A/N: Hey nonny! I am so, so sorry it has taken me this long to write this. Honestly, I was (and still am I suppose) intimidated to write this, simply because these illnesses are not something I am not even remotely familiar with. But I also want to thank you because it's a good writing exercise for me. I'm also sorry that you're having such a rough time. I can't even imagine. So here's a fic, just for you, darling. I hope you're feeling better.

Another A/N: So the wonderful and amazing @alecvolturi did an amazing edit of Alec reading the first bit of The Hobbit. Please give it a listen as you read. It's PERFECT.

Miserable.

I was fucking miserable.

It began just by sitting up. I could feel the migraine building, and I was already in the throws of a hot flash. It didn't help that the pain in my joints was flaring up again.

It was 3 a.m. and I was already this close to crying. I couldn't remember the last time that I had a proper nights sleep. I just wanted one day, one day where I didn't have to be in pain or worry that any movement I made would set off a whole other series of symptoms, all of which almost all of them were painful.

"Darling?" Alec was next to me, his cold hands running over my heated skin, trailing goosebumps behind in his wake.

His hands were a sweet, cool balm on my flushed skin. It gave me a little relief. I leaned into him, enjoying the cold. His lips pressed to my forehead.

"Scale of 1 to 10?"

"7 to 8." I mumbled.

One would think with how long that I've lived with this disease that I would have a high pain tolerance. That couldn't be further from the truth. I could already feel a few tears slipping from beneath my lashes. I just wanted something to make the pain go away.

I whined as Alec disappeared, only to reappear with my meds and a bottle of water a moment later.

"Here, drink." He handed me the pills and water, and I took them gratefully. He pulled the comforter from the floor where I had kicked it off, bundling it back up on the bed for us to lay down on. He then grabbed my phone, pulling up my favorite playlist, the one he made for me to help me calm down when I felt like shit. The music started flowing through the speaker near my bed at a low volume.

"What book, darling?" His eyes were already scanning my bookshelves.

"Uhm…" I blinked back at him slowly, trying to process what he said.

"How about The Hobbit?"

"Perfect." I rasped with a small smile.

He was next to me again in a flash, his back against the headboard as he pulled me gently to him, a pillow already ready in his lap.

"In the hole in the ground, there lived a Hobbit." His voice lilted over me, and I felt myself begin to relax as his hands gently ran through my hair and along my neck.

The fine mist that signaled the use of his gift began to unfurl from his fingers and I felt myself begin to numb. The first time he had done this it had been disconcerting, but now I welcomed it with relish. A small reprieve from the pain. I smiled to myself, letting my eyes slip closed as I listened.

Then finally, sleep came for me.

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#alec volturi x reader #alec volturi #volturi #twilight #reader insert #fanfic #fanfic request

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slut4els · 1 year

Text

Old Flames 2

omg before i start this second part thank you guys sm for all the support on the first part i love you guys sm and i tried my best to get this out asap!!

contains: !meanellie x !shy/scaredreader, angst, some fluff, some smut, sexual thoughts, alcohol, weed, and i think thats it! lmk if i forgot anything and as always 18+ !!

enjoy lovelys <3

You and ellie barely spoke since saturday. After confessing and hugging for a while you mutually decided to let eachother think in silence.

ellie couldnt stop thinking back to all the times you guys had hung out. what signs did she miss? could she have done something differently? maybe if she told you she was attracted to you maybe you would be together.

You were having similar thoughts, facing the opposite direction as ellie but you decided to text dina.

Dina

12:34 am

y:guess whos my fucking roommate

d:who?

y:ellie.

y:and thats not even the worst part

d: uh oh

d: please dont tell me you did something stupid

y: yeah about that…

y:i kinda told her i used to be inlove with her and thats why i ghosted her.

d: WHAT????

y: I KNOW I KNOW IDK WHAT I WAS THINKING EITHER BUT SHE WAS SURPRISINGLY NICE ABOUT IT LIKE WE HUGGED FOR A WHILE

d: omfg

d: ok whatever just come to my dorm tomorrow morning and we can talk about it while we get ready for the party which you agreed to go to by the way

y: ughhh i forgot about that do i have to go??

d: you promised!!

y: fine ill come over at like 7

d: thank youu and gl with the whole ellie thing.

y: thanks

(end of conversation)

You sighed and put your phone on the charger before deciding you should get some sleep before going to dinas.

you woke up and looked at the flashing red numbers on your alarm clock that read 6:18 AM

you got up and put some sweatpants on along with a hoodie before putting your laptop charger phone and a dress to change into for the party that night into your tote bag. you grabbed your shoes and began tying then when you heard shuffling on the other side of the room

shit you thought to yourself. you really didn’t wanna have to face ellie this morning but she was your roomate after all.

“where are you going this early” she said rubbing her eyes. her voice sounded so raspy, you felt the same butterflies you tried so hard to get rid of senior year but now they were back.

“shit sorry did i wake you up?” you said standing up to look at her ignoring her previous question.

“yea kinda but you didn’t answer my question, where are you going?” she said a little harsher now. “just dinas, ill be back pretty late too so dont wait up” you replied. “oh? and where are you going thats keeping you out so late” ellie replied standing up crossing her arms. she was just wearing a tanktop and sweats, her muscular arms on full display. trying to divert your attention so you wouldnt stare you tried to reply. “just some stupid frat party”.

“oh? well im going to a frat party myself tonight so i guess well both be back late” she said smirking slightly. you rolled your eyes. “yeah ok” you replied turning around and walking to the front door. you opened it but before you closed it again you heard ellie say “you cant pretend nothing happened, y/n” after you heard that you quickly shut the door and started on your way to dinas dorm.

“you need to have an actual conversation with her y/n” dina said. you had spent the last hour and a half talking about your situation with ellie.

“but how i cant even say hi to her without feeling like im going to throw up from how nervous i am” you whined. you could tell dina was tired of listening to you but you didn’t really have anyone else that would put up with it.

“well its gonna happen weather you like it or not, but for now lets focus on your outfit for the party” you knew dina was trying to be helpful by changing the subject but you weren’t completely ready to stop talking about the situation between you and ellie but you complied with dinas request.

“ugh fine, hold on let me get my new dress i bought like two days ago” you showed her the dress. it was black with some glitter and off the shoulder sleeves.

“oh my god it looks amazing! you have to try it on for me” you rolled your eyes before going into the bathroom to change. when you walked out to show dina she opened her mouth slightly with a shocked expression across her face.

“holy shit y/n you look fucking amazing.”

you walked into the party with your hair and makeup done by dina. you made a beeline to the drink table dragging dina with you terrified to see ellie sober. you poured some alcohol from a bottle of straight vodka into a small shot glass sized solo cup.

“jeez slow down” dina said with a slightly concerned look as you downed the first shot and started pouring your second one.

“she said she was going to be here and i cannot be sober when i see her” you said after drinking your second shot.

“well how about you come dance for a bit before you get to wasted” dina spoke as she grabbed your wrist and dragged you into a crowd of sweaty bodies all dancing with the music. after a couple of minutes of pure uncomfort you told dina you were getting another drink. you walked over to the table and poured yourself a cup of vodka and punch and decided to go outside to the patio to get some fresh air.

you stepped outside closing the sliding glass door behind you. it was completely empty which was good. it made it easier for you to think. you sat against the wall and closed your eyes taking a sip of your concoction every once and a while listening to the slight beat of the music coming from inside. you thought about a lot of things, college, classes, but mostly ellie. you knew you couldnt avoid the subject forever, but you wished things could just go back to normal. you both being on speaking terms with no romantic feelings for eachother, but it was a little late for that now, and you couldnt keep pushing ellie away, she was your roomate now but you also missed what you used to have. maybe talking to her would be able to do that, but you still wanted to put it off for as long as possible.

you were deep in your thoughts when you heard the sliding sound of the glass door open. you thought it was dina looking for you so you just said, “yeah yeah i know dina just give me like five minutes and ill go back in” however the voice that you thought belonged to your best friend sounded nothing like her, instead it was ellie. “well im not dina but you should probably go back inside” she spoke.

you were pulled out of your thoughts at the sound of her voice looking over at her as she made her way to sit down next to you.

you already being somewhat drunk you responded to her with a little attitude “what do you want, did dina tell you i was going to be out here or something” “well for one i wasnt looking for you, i didnt even know you were going to be out here, i just came outside to smoke, but it’s probably a good thing i found you, we need to talk” she says pulling out a joint from the back pocket of her jeans. she was wearing acid washed dark blue jeans and a maroon tshirt with a sage green flannel over it. she had her hair in a half up half down bun style and of course, her black converse.

you watched intently as she placed the joint between her lips and lit it, the smell hitting your nose as she inhaled and exhaled the substance.

“you shouldve said something, senior year, i might’ve even felt the same”. she started to speak again. “but what if you didnt?”. “then thats it, atleast we wouldve gotten it out of the way”. you wished that what she was saying was true but you knew better. “dont act like it wouldnt have been a big deal ellie, you and i both know that it would change our entire friendship, plus what about cat?”

there was a moment of silence before ellie spoke again “me and cat broke up after a few months but we werent even dating when you cut me off. we couldve tried it out. we couldve gone on dates and shit. We couldve made it work, even if we decided to just be friends.”

after another moment of silence you decided to say something. “what if we tried just being friends again, we cant really avoid eachother anymore you know since were roomates and shit” you proposed. you didn’t want to be just freinds but after months of not talking you couldnt just ask her to date you. Ellie however wanted you to ask her to be more.

“so just friends? nothing more?” ellie said as she turned to look at you. occasionally glancing at your lips.

“well i mean i just thought-“ you were cut off by ellie. “you thought i wouldnt say yes if you asked me to be more?”. you felt heat rise up to your face as ellie moved slightly closer but enough to the point where your shoulders were touching. “i mean, i-i guess?” you were able to stutter out.

“well what if i told you i wouldve said yes?” as she spoke she moved her face closer to yours to the point where you could slightly feel her breath against you.

“i-i dont” before you could finish you were cut off by her lips lightly pressing against yours. you were shocked for a moment but eventually gave in and kissed her back as she flicked her joint elsewhere. the kiss became more lustful when she slightly bit on your bottom lip and entering her tounge in your mouth when you gasped. you put your hands on the sides of her face to pull her in even more. she pulled you onto her lap and her knee pressed slightly onto your core making you gasp and pull away from the kiss for a moment. you felt your arousal growing as your underwear slowly became wet. you wanted so badly for it to go further but you knew you couldnt do it on the patio of a frat party.

ellie tried kissing you again but you held her shoulders to stop her. “ this is amazing but i think we should go back inside, dinas probably worried by now”

“hmm ok but remember we’re roommates”

—————————————————-——————

A/N

Im so sorry this took me so long to publish but here it is!!! it might be a bit of a longer wait for part three because of school but i will keep you guys updated!! again thank you all so much for the support on the first part im so happy you guys like this series as much as i like writing it!!

#ellie williams x reader #tlou2 #ellie williams smut #ellie williams fic #the last of us #ellie x fem reader #ellie x y/n

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sourbinnie · 11 months

Text

☆ diamond eyes.mp3 ☆

♡ genre ¿? ♡ -> heavy angst ¡! ♡ pair ¿? ♡ -> chan x gn!reader ♡ plot ¿? ♡ -> time will see you realign but for now, he had to deal with the pain of your loss. ♡ warnings ¿? ♡ -> implied character death ; grieving ; cause of death isn't mentioned but i think you can imagine (s*icide)

a/n: new format with the saddest song i could've picked up and a really tragic imagine, i'm sorry if this is too triggering. if it's too bad, i'll delete it!

to the edge.

waves kept crashing on me in the middle of this lonely beach in my mind. places i traveled to, to forget about the reality i lived in. the one where you weren't next to me and i had to live with the weight in my heart. the one where you had to go and leave me all alone because you thought that was a better solution. the one where we had fought, we had made up and i thought we were good but it all had to end too soon when it didn't even start.

i gave you 6 whole years. i gave you 6 years of me, of my life, of my soul and i have to live with the fact that you're not here anymore? wake up and feel numb? dread and sorrow surrounded me. it felt like i was floating for a moment as i tried to get up from our bed. it was always going to be ours, it wasn't just mine and i didn't know why i was making such a fuss over a bed and it's owners.

this is how i spent most of my days now. trying to survive and not being able to handle the truth at all. i stayed in our shared apartment, i couldn't find my way back to the dorms. i knew the boys were worrying but i didn't know why, they knew i could handle myself.

or maybe i couldn't at all.

what mocked me the most since you've left, was the ring. the one i bought with changbin & jisung one day when we were out. they helped me pick it and see what would fit perfectly in your finger. the one that held the promise ring when you decided to leave me. that would've been occupied with this perfect ring that i bought for you but life had other plans and it eliminated everything that we had planned out for the future. a future that didn't hold any hope, just more suffering and illness to haunt me.

i could not do it without you before, what makes them think that taking you away from me is the solution?

it was not easy to wake up, it was not easy to live through the day and then go to sleep at night. having those dreams with you where i hold you and i don't let go because if i do i have to wake up and you're not there beside me anymore. how many times did i have to go through the same routine? how much more work could i drown myself into till it's enough? till the pain is gone and it's all enough. all i wanted was to be enough for you and you didn't want that.

you wanted me to be myself, well here i am and you're not. here i am as i visit you every day, as i bring flowers and place them where you lay to rest forever in peace. here i am as i cry my eyes out and scream till my voice is gone and i have to leave again to die more and more every day. i just wanted to reunite with you one last time to see you, to hold you, to tell you what you deserve to hear and that's more than i love you.

you shined brighter than any star.

now as i look into the sky, hoping you're there, watching over me, i can't help but think.

how beautiful you were the last time i saw you and how sad your expression was. how cruel life is that it took you away from where you belonged and that was here with me. how egotistical and pathetic i was when we fought, how everything was always about me and how you always put me first even though you were the one that mattered. you were the one bringing a change to the world, with that smile of yours and that loving heart. i could never compare to you, yet here i still was and you weren't, you weren't here anymore.

"i love you channie." resonated in my mind, as i tried to not lose my breath again. how many more times did i have to go through a day where you weren't here? how much could i handle without you? why do i have to handle things without you? why didn't i ran out of tears already? why is feeling numb better than being sad?

so many fucking questions and not one goddamn answer, because you weren't fucking here.

you didn't take me with you, didn't think about how i would feel without you and now you're gone. how much longer do i have to do this? how much grief is there in me? do i have to do this? i don't.

but i want to for you. i want to because you would've wanted me to, i want to because you're my light, my world, my star and you deserve it. you've been nothing but good to me these past 6 years and the unconditional love you gave me, deserves to live on. i would do it for you, for my family, for the boys, for everyone. even if it meant i have to fake a smile every single day as a i relive that haunting phone call, i will do it.

i think i am never gonna recover, never gonna be able to walk into a hospital again and never gonna be able to look at the stars and not think of you. i think you took everything from me when you decided to leave.

i think i died with you.

i think i’m always gonna live in the shadow of your death and i’m not gonna be able to get up one day and decide to fall in love again. love was gone, there wasn’t any left to give or take, you took it all from me.

you took my heart, my soul and all of my strength.

i don’t think it’s fair how i get to stay and you don’t, i don’t think i’m doing a good job of carrying on when i don’t get to see you anymore.

oh how i wish we could’ve had that proposal, that wedding, that eternal love. now i had to reminisce about memories i never lived and pray that this pain wouldn’t be eternal.

but i knew that as soon as i got to be with you again, i would be grateful.

#skz drabbles #sourbinnie #skz angst #stray kids drabbles #stray kids imagines #stray kids x reader #stray kids imagine #skz imagine #skz imagines #skz scenarios #skz short imagines #stray kids angst #skz #stray kids #skz x reader

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blackholemojis · 6 months

Note

(not a request)

Hai! As someone trying to experiment with AACs, I can't find an optimal and conveniently organized word list, can you please share any tips for that?

Unfortunately I've had the same problem when trying to make my own AAC boards, as well as with running this blog. There are some general essentials though, I've made some of them and tagged them with #blackholemojis basics, if you want to look through those.

Other than that, I can really only share the types of words I put into my own AAC boards first. I haven't found a convenient and well organized word list anywhere :(

Under the cut though I'll put a lot more words you could include in your AAC, if you want to check that out! I'll update it as I think of more

Basic words

Yes, no, maybe, I don't know, something else, probably, stop, go, I consent, I don't consent

What, when, who, where, why, how

Good, bad, better, worse, best, worst, same, different, alright

Basic activities of daily living

Hygiene: bathe, clean teeth, style hair, wash face, etc

Dressing: get dressed, get undressed, clothing, tops, bottoms

Eating: eat, drink, swallow, chew, breakfast, lunch, dinner, snack

Bathroom: use the bathroom, pee, poop, wipe off, wash hands

Transferring/mobility: walk, stand up, sit down, lay down, transfer to mobility aid, transfer out of mobility aid

Instrumental activities of daily living

Communication: speak, text/message, computer, phone, email, video call, write, call

Transportation: picked up, dropped off, drive, ride, bike, walk, take the bus, take the train, carpool

Meal prep: cook, bake, heat up, prepare food, plan meals, clean up kitchen, put away food

Shopping/finances: shop, buy, sell, donate, pay, write a check, manage balance, wallet, bank account, make a deposit, budget, pay bills, pay insurance, pay mortgage

Housework: do laundry, do dishes, dust, vacuum, sweep, mop, clean, fold, organize, take out the garbage

Medication: take meds, refill meds, order meds refill

Short words

Hello, goodbye, please, thank you, you're welcome, sorry, I forgive you

Do, don't, done, did, will, won't, could, can, can't, should, shouldn't, is, isn't, was, wasn't, were, weren't, want, like, dislike,

Now, later, soon, earlier, today, tomorrow, yesterday

And, a, an, the, or, which, if, so, then, because

Leave, come, walk, run, give, take, throw, catch, move, stay, find, lose, say, mean, think, let, need, want, help, belong, start, finish

I/me/myself, mine, you/yours/yourself, this person, she/her/hers, he/him/his, they/them/theirs, it/its/itself

Essential activities

Eat, sleep, wake up, use the bathroom, drink

Major senses

See, touch, taste, smell, hear, sense, feel

Places

Home, work, school, house, apartment, trailer, park, grocery store, clothing store, daycare, college, religious center

Health

Sick/ill, fever, nauseous, stuffy nose, runny nose

Scratch, burn, cut, bruise, broken bone, concussion

Hospital, doctor's office, dentist's office

Any other specific conditions or symptoms you have, physically or mentally

Any mobility aids you use

Other descriptor groups

Colors, temperature, size, amount, directions/location, time, body parts, family/friend names, relations (grandma, neighbor), emotions, pets, objects/belongings, weather

#asks #blackholemojis talks #blackholemojis basics #since I might as well put that there #AAC

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butchspace · 4 months

Text

Hello, I am going to discuss my thoughts on content/trigger warnings as someone living with OCD. I am absolutely open to good faith engagement and discussion on this topic.

Having some thoughts on the idea that adding trigger warnings somehow ultimately harms the person with the trigger. They absolutely can create an easy tool to obsessively control your access to the topics/to avoid them, but I’ve always felt it should be the potentially triggered person’s decision on what they were ready to do about it. Uncontrolled exposure is just as capable of causing obsession as is avoidance, in my opinion.

I think of the (terrible telephone retelling of a) case I heard about while discovering recounts of actual lived experiences with OCD.

—The following example discusses intrusive thoughts about domestic violence.—

A woman had an obsession with being was afraid of hitting her boyfriend. Her compulsion was that she would have to hold her arms stiffly by her side. She recognized this as OCD and sought exposure response prevention. Her therapist told her to try and ignore the compulsion, or potentially do the opposite. The woman became so obsessed with healing she forced herself to keep her hands away from her sides (almost obsessively) and constantly checked whether or not she “still wanted to hit him.” In the end, the ERP just became entangled with her obsessions.

It takes so much strength to face these types of problems and practice the mindfulness and grace with yourself to recognize it. It’s something you really need to be ready for because it’s going to take a lot of effort to do the hard thing when the easy thing is right there.

How can we claim it’s best to “force” exposure on someone else? How can we go around vigilante therapising people we have deemed too ill to do it on their own (or just be left alone)?

This is not to say that anyone is bad if they can’t or don’t want to tag things. More just my thoughts about how pushback against that idea can swing too hard into trying to prove not tagging was morality correct.

Some articles that articulate so much of my experience with OCD:

Having No Cure for OCD Is the Cure

Help! I Have OCD About What’s OCD

In the spirit of bodily autonomy, I think we all deserve agency in our lives no matter how “incompetent” other people may think we are. When you’re ready, you’re ready. There’s no healing to be had sitting around thinking you’re broken or lazy or whatever for not being ready to change. We all owe each other the kindness to do what we can in good faith, too.

I started doing too much table setting in the tags, so I’ll put it under a read more, lol.

I recognize that this isn’t very radically (in the abolition vs reform sense) anti-psychiatry, and I do have a complicated relationship with that idea. I recognize that I have a good deal of privilege (particularly among people with more stigmatized/less understood “disorders”) but this framework is the only one I’ve ever been able to access that gives me any insight into myself at all. That isn’t something everyone can afford to do in several senses.

As a physically disabled person, I just connect my experiences with chronic illness and mental illness (which I think can fall under the umbrella of chronic on its own) more and more these days. What truly was the difference between not being able to do something out of pain versus anxiety? Our brains are organs, too. Our thoughts are chemical and hormonal, too.

One of the fondest memories I have of coming to terms with disability was explaining my experience with an autoimmune condition to a bipolar friend, and he replied that we were “chronic illness buddies.” And I felt so understood as someone who has suffered with various types of anxieties for their entire waking life.

#actually ocd #antipsychiatry #i guess maybe this falls in that category? idk #mental health #intrusive thoughts #ocd #as an OCD haver I lean a lot on stuff like the CBT methods used in ERP #just in the first article I link the author (therapist with OCD) talks about getting dumped by the book (DSM)#and it just hits home rlly hard #I have more a take what you want and leave the rest approach to it #ocd tag

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sofasoap · 7 months

Note

I would like to apologize for the spam liking but I couldn’t help myself. Once I started reading the Lastochka series, I couldn’t stop until I read everything! I think that you single-handedly made me fall in love with Nikolai and I thank you for it!!

Like playing with Russian roulette, even Lady Fortuna's luck runs out.

This is hands down one of the best lines I’ve ever read anywhere! I was literally frothing at the mouth after reading it!

Nikolai screaming “SHE IS MY WIFE!!” will forever be seared into my brain.

"My brother in law."

"I am not your fucken brother in law."

"Yes you are."

"I didn't agree for you to be in my family. grabbing the glass of vodka Sergio offered to him, he sniffed it before taking a sip. " Steaming Jesus, this is some strong stuff.?

"Best Russian Vodka you can get out there".

"Hm. still a bit short compared to the best Scotch whisky." Soap remarked.

Awww, they’re bonding!!

"I am sure my Russian charm will win them over very quickly." Nikolai laughed.You rolled your eyes, his optimism and ego never cease to amaze you.

His charm will win me over any day.

The crack fics literally made me fall over laughing! Like she was more worried about her floors than marrying him. And the “don’t worry, I’m from Russia” taxi meme had me struggling to breathe. 😂😂😂

Also his nicknames for her…..if anyone calls me those I will marry them on the spot!!!

Your Russian was pretty spot on, coming from someone who is part Russian, so you have nothing to worry about on that end! Side note off of that: Anya is also one of my nicknames so it was fun to see it pop up in your story!

I cannot wait for the rest of your Lastochka-Raging Waves series and more Nikolai stuff from you!! Thank you so much for introducing me to this!!! 💕💕💕

First of all… let me give you a hug *hug hug hug* spam reads are always welcome here on this blog ( unless you are a bot lol )

Second.. * deep breath in *

@siilvan @nrdmssgs @gamergirlbones @roosterr @homicidal-slvt we have another victim for the club!!!

Welcome to Nikolai club, or we have another sub-branch, Slavic man club. * handing out brochures * here you will find Nikolai, Makarov, Yuri, and my secret love, Sobieslaw "Gromsko" Kościuszko

I am so happy I have another tick of approval from another Russian speaking person!!

Oh Nik and Soap has this love hate relationship with each other. Poor Mini is the one to keep the equilibrium, keeping the Russian Bear and Scottish Unicorn in check.

As for crack fics… dont ask me what I have in my brain as well when i started it lol. I have a lot of fun throwing crack ideas in, i just want to share my wacky ideas with you peeps out there 😝

Seriously when I started this series I didnt even think too much of it, until middle of it I started to notice there’s other Nik lovers out there slowly crawling out. And to you guys, thank you so much for the support!

Ill try my hardest to make Raging waves a decent series, even if it burns my brain and souls out…,

And again, thank you so much, you have no idea how happy I was waking up to this ask *hug again *

#ask and answer #asks #call of duty #nikolai cod #lastochka series #sofasoap writes #thank you so much

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astrid-sama · 4 months

Text

Labyrinth of white roses (Effie trinket x fem oc)

Chapter 1)

The harvest

I wake up with the warmth of the sun's rays caressing my face, it's a rare event, usually if I want to sneak away without anyone seeing me I'm forced to get up when there's still the moon in the sky, at first light dawn in district twelve everyone is already at work; today, however, everyone is exempt from work and people sleep late trying not to think that tonight at least two families will mourn the loss of their children.

Today the annual harvest is held, on this day a boy and a girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen will be chosen from each district to participate in the Hunger Games, a deadly game from which only one tribute will emerge alive. At school we kids are taught that the Hunger Games are there to ensure that the Dark Days are not repeated, in reality they are just another way for the Capitol City to assert their dominion over us.

I get out of bed, put on my hunting clothes, kiss my brother on the forehead being careful not to wake him and leave the house as quietly as possible. I arrive on the main road and after making sure that there is no one around I head towards the fence; during the journey I feel my stomach growling, it is normal to be hungry here in district twelve and that is why every day I leave the fence to go hunting, putting my life at risk, between dying of hunger together with my brother and being hanged for betrayal by the peacekeepers I choose the second, it is the least painful option. At the fence I find my friends Gale and Katniss waiting for me, we have been hunting together for more than four years now; the fence should be electrified but here in the twelve there is almost never electricity, one at a time we crawl under the fence taking advantage of a point where it is damaged. According to the Capitol, the fences surrounding the districts are there to prevent wild animals from attacking us, but I think they're there to keep us locked up.

We enter the woods, retrieve our bows and hide among the vegetation waiting for prey to hunt. After almost an hour we have captured three rabbits and a squirrel, we go to hide our bows in an old hollow trunk and start looking for fruit and medicinal herbs; when we have finished the sun is higher in the sky and it is probably just before midday. Before leaving the woods, Gale, Katniss and I take a break sitting on a rocky ledge.

-Girls look what I have here- Gale takes a loaf of bread out of his bag, it seems warm and fragrant, few people can afford such bread.

-But this is real bread! Gale where did you find him?- Katniss said as she grabs the loaf of bread.

-The baker gave it to me in exchange for a squirrel-

-Just a squirrel?!-

I can't help but wonder, the baker is a good person but usually a squirrel isn't enough for a loaf like that.

-Today is harvest day, we are all better-

Gale divides the loaf between the three of us, we eat in silence until Katniss asks a question.

-How many nominations do you have?-

-Thirtyfive-

-Twentyone-

Under normal circumstances a seventeen year old like me should only have five nominations, I have so many because I was forced to trade them for food; my father became ill when I was twelve and died when I was fourteen, but my mother died soon after my brother was born so I found myself having to support both myself and my brother and was forced to apply several times in exchange for food, Gale and Katniss are in the same situation as me.

A few minutes later we set off to return to the enclosure; once we return to the district we go to the black market to barter: we exchange strawberries with the mayor in exchange for a bag of legumes, we exchange the squirrel for matches. After leaving the black market, Katniss, Gale, and I wish each other good luck and part ways.

When I arrive home I find my brother waiting for me, he is dressed in a pair of green jeans and a white shirt, his long black hair is tied in a braid and his green eyes shine with happiness when he sees me.

-Welcome back big sister, how do I look?-

-Elia you are handsome, I bet you will make everyone fall in love with you-

Elia blushes and looks away.

-Big sister it's almost time for the harvest, you should go and change-

I nod, I go to the bathroom and quickly wash both my body and my hair, after drying my hair with a towel I put on my best dress, a light green dress with small white flowers and finally I put on some old brown boots. Elia insists on tying my black hair in a braid like his, when he's finished we go to the square to take part in the grape harvest.

As soon as we arrived we immediately separated, I joined the seventeen year old girls while my brother joined the fourteen year old boys. After all boys and girls eligible to participate have been registered, the harvest ceremony begins; first of all (like every year) the mayor goes on stage and begins to read a long speech in which he explains how the Hunger Games are our just punishment for having rebelled against the Capitol seventy-three years ago; after what seems like hours the mayor finally concludes his speech and gives way on the stage to the Capitol emissary who has the task of escorting the tributes of district twelve to Capitol City Effie Trinket.

-Welcome to the seventy-third edition of the Hunger Games, may luck always be in your favor-

Effie walks very enthusiastically towards the glass bowl containing the pieces of paper with the girls' names written on them.

-As always ladies first-

Effie slowly dips her hand into the glass bowl, pulls out a piece of paper, and returns to the center of the stage; in the seconds preceding the reading of the name of the tribute there is absolute silence.

-The female tribute from district twelve is.... Selene Davidson-

All the girls turn to look at me, some look at me with pity, others with relief. My hands are shaking, my body seems to have turned to marble and even though I know I should go on stage I can't move.

-Darling come here-

Effie Trinket smiles at me and calls me to the stage. I force myself to move and slowly advance towards the stage; I'm trying to hold back the tears, I can't seem weak. Capitol City is watching me.

-And now the male tribute-

I watch Effie take the piece of paper with the name of the male tribute and hope that the name is neither Elia nor Gale.

-The male tribute from District Twelve is... Alexander Morgan-

Alexander is a fifteen year old boy with curly red hair and a weak physique, you can clearly see how terrified he is; once he gets on stage he starts sobbing.

-Now a big round of applause for our tributes-

Nobody claps their hands, silence is the only act of protest allowed. After the harvest we are taken into the courthouse and given some time to say goodbye to our friends and family. I'm sitting on a velvet sofa when the door opens and Elia comes in, hugs me and starts sobbing with his head resting on my shoulder. For a while we remain hugged without saying anything, then Elia dries his tears and begins to speak.

-Win big sister and come back to me, I know you can do it-

-Elia I-

-No Selene don't say you can't win, you are an expert hunter you know how to use a bow and knives perfectly and you also know both edible and medicinal plants-

-You're right, I promise I will do everything to come back-

I try to sound confident but in reality I don't think I have much chance of returning home, after all what can a weak little girl from district twelve with a bow (if there is a bow) do against a volunteer from district one who weighs twice as much as she. A short time later, peacekeepers arrive and take Elia away and let Gale and Katniss in in his place. We hug each other, resigned to the idea that this will be our last meeting.

-Guys remember the promise we made to each other, don't let Elia die of hunger! Take him with you into the woods, teach him to hunt, please don't abandon him-

Some time ago the three of us had made a pact, if ever one of us was chosen as a tribute the others would be taken care of by his family.

-Don't worry, we'll take care of Elia, you think about winning-

-Certain-

A short time later the peacekeepers took Katniss and Gale away, I was escorted out of the courthouse and taken to the train that would take me to the Capitol City.

This is the first chapter of my fanfiction "Labyrinth of white roses", I will publish all the chapters of the fanfiction on Ao3 with the name "Labyrinth of white roses".

These are my fanfiction characters created with artificial intelligence:

Selene

Elia

Alexander

#effie trinket #the hunger games #katniss everdeen #effie trinket x reader #hunger games x reader

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fandom-imagines-stories · 1 year

Text

All For One

Musketeers Comfort Imagine

Words: 3525

Summary: In preparing for her trials to become a Musketeer, the reader’s anxiety begins to get the better of her. Luckily, she has the four best friends anyone could ask for.

Notes: Another comfort imagine dealing with anxiety and burnout because *mental illness* I needed this haha. Thank you end of the semester struggles. Like my Pogues imagine, this doesn’t have any specific ships, but since Aramis and D’Artagnan are my favorites, I may or may not show a little bias. I also really wanted to capture the feeling of them riding off together at the end of the season because that’s one of my favorite parts of the show, so hopefully that came across.

Find more Musketeers: HERE

They all knew something was off. Though it was early and most were still half asleep, exhausted by the night before’s activities, they saw with enough clarity to know that you were not yourself.

You ate your breakfast swiftly- though, poking at your bread could hardly be considered eating- and in silence. You hardly responded to Aramis’s daily teasing, something that had become like a ritual for the two of you, or to Porthos’s suggestion of close combat training later in the day. Worst of all, your eyes were red-rimmed and swollen, though you kept them downcast to try and hide them.

Once you’d hurried off, the four men at the table exchanged worried looks.

“What’s wrong with her?” Porthos asked.

“Nerves maybe,” D’Artagnan observed. “She’s going before Treville next week. I know I was terrified when it was my turn to prove myself.”

“And especially difficult for her,” Aramis added. He gazed after you and shook his head. “But there’s something else. I don’t think it’s just nerves.” The way you’d looked at him just moments before, with eyes both pleading and yet… empty. It worried him. “We should do something.”

“I don’t think that would be wise,” Athos said. He stood from the table and put on his hat. “We should let her come to us. If we try to force her, well-” he blew out a breath. “We all know how that’s gone in the past.”

The other three nodded mournfully.

It was odd. You were one of the more open of the group, but all of them could agree, when something was truly and deeply wrong, you always tried to keep it to yourself, though none could understand why.

“We can’t just leave her like that,” D’Artagnan said. “There must be something we can do.”

“Just be patient,” Athos nodded. “She knows we’re here for her.”

Does she? Aramis couldn’t help but think. While they’d made it clear that you were a part of their group and they all cared for you very deeply, he’d picked up hints that you didn’t quite believe it. Whether or not this was just your mind playing tricks on you, he was determined to show it to you. He turned to the others and a wordless understanding passed between them. They nodded, all feeling the same as he did.

They’d make sure you knew you were one of them, even if they spent all day proving it.

You started the day with close combat, asking Porthos to help as usual, since he was the very best. You hoped the physicalness of the exercise would help wake up your tired senses and give your on-edge body something to fight. Your limbs pleaded for a distraction from their tension while your head desperately tried to focus.

How could you be so exhausted and so unstable at the same time?

“You sure you’re ready?” Porthos asked. When he’d agreed to train, he hadn’t noticed just how tense you were. You paced in front of him like a street cat afraid of its own shadow. While he never used the full of his strength when sparring with you, he feared more than usual he might hurt you if this were to go on.

“I’m always ready,” you said with a little more venom than you’d intended. He narrowed his eyes and you ignored the concern you could see in his gaze. “I don’t have all day, let us begin.” You ran at him before he could object.

Porthos braced for your first hit- a punch toward his shoulder and counter-attacked with a swing at your legs. You jumped and kicked his knee while propelling yourself upward for another hit to his chest, launching away from the impact. You both fell back into the dirt but were on your feet in seconds.

Porthos raised a brow. “Alright, love. That’s how we’re playing it.”

You took a deep breath and went again.

The fight was fiercer than you’d ever done before. Porthos seemed to struggle to keep up with you. He may have his strength, but your agility proved vital. At one point, you were able to climb onto his back, arm around his neck. Your body locked up and all you could focus on was the pounding of adrenaline in your head.

“Y/N!” Athos shouted.

The other three rushed over to the two of you and you suddenly realized that Porthos had hit his knees and was smacking at your legs to let him go. You gasped and jumped off of him.

“Porthos, I am so, so sorry. I didn’t even realize- are you hurt?” You stammered.

He coughed, breathing in with deep, hurried breaths to take in as much air as he could. Aramis knelt in front of him, dark eyes flicking over to you with more questions than you gave him time to ask.

You brushed off and tried to hide the rising panic in your voice as it squeezed at your chest. “Guess I got carried away, huh?”

“Only a little,” Porthos wheezed.

You feigned a smile, turning to Athos. “I’ll go easier on you later, I promise.” It was meant to be a jest, but neither of you laughed.

With your body locking up again, you got away before any of them could see the weakness threatening to overtake you. Once out of view, your fist flew, striking the wall and scraping your knuckles.

“I wouldn’t give her a weapon,” Porthos shuddered as Aramis helped him to his feet.

“She doesn’t seem like she’s going to take no for an answer,” Athos said.

Aramis sighed. “This is worse than I thought.”

“I’ll say,” Porthos grunted.

“She needs to get out of here.” D’Artagnan stared after you with a pained expression. “All of this practice is getting to her. She’s pushed herself too far.” He swung his sword in front of him in frustration. “But how do we get her to take a break? She’s far too stubborn and worried about Treville.”

The four of them pondered this problem for a moment, eventually hearing you start up again, practicing with your sword with barely a minute’s rest.

“I’ll talk to her,” Aramis sighed. “The three of you come up with something.”

“And how do you propose we do that?” Athos asked.

Aramis shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll figure it out.”

You loaded the musket with relative ease, but he could see how your hands were shaking. Of all of the skills you had to master before facing Treville’s scrutiny, your marksmanship was by far your weakest, despite Aramis assuring you otherwise. Why else would he have suggested you practice it now, rather than after your duel with D’Artagnan and Athos? He didn’t believe you were good enough, you could feel it.

“Take a deep breath and relax your body just like I showed you,” he instructed.

“I know, I know,” you said.

Aramis stood behind you as you aimed at an empty wine bottle at the other end of the field. He wasn’t used to you being so closed off to him. In truth, he’d brought you out here with the hope of helping you clear your head, but he seemed to only have made it worse. At least this way, you weren’t directly aiming a weapon at anyone. Given what happened with you and Porthos, he doubted giving you a sword would end well for anyone.

“Alright, ready?” He stepped just enough into your line of vision.

You ignored him and took the shot.

The bottle remained standing, mocking you from afar.

“Damn,” you muttered, already loading the musket again before he could say anything.

“Y/N, perhaps-”

“I can get it.” You took aim and fired. A tree trunk several yards from the bottle splintered from the impact. A frustrated growl tore through your chest. What was wrong with you?

You forcefully set the musket back down, readying to load it for another try. Aramis’s hand covered yours before you could.

“Y/N, wait,” he said softly. “I think I know what’s happening.”

“What’s happening is that I’m not ready,” you snapped, more at yourself than at him. “And I only have a few more days to get it right or else I’ll never be a musketeer and all of this would be for nothing and-” Your words caught in your throat even before he held up a hand to stop you.

Aramis laid his hand on your cheek.

“You’ve worked yourself to the bone for weeks, darling.” He gave you a small smile. “You’re so exhausted you can hardly see straight. Am I correct?”

There was still a part of you that wanted to fight him. To deny everything he’d said. Tired meant weakness and you couldn’t bear it if any of them saw you that way. But with his dark, caring eyes looking into yours, there was nothing you could say.

You bit your lip to keep it from trembling.

He pulled you into his arms.

“There,” he sighed, running a soothing hand up and down your spine. “It’s alright. You’re just working too hard, that’s all. It’s alright.” He pulled back, kissed your forehead, and looked down at you. “Better?”

You shrugged, wiping away tears you hadn’t realized had fallen. “Maybe you’re right.”

He smirked. “I’m always right, darling.”

With an arm slung around your shoulders, he led you back to the courtyard of the garrison where your other three friends stood next to their horses. Aramis and your horses had been saddled and awaited their riders.

“What’s this?” You asked, Aramis handing your musket off to one of the stableboys to put away.

“You are leaving,” D’Artagnan grinned. “Well, all of us are leaving, of course. We’ve all decided that we could all use a break from Paris. You, especially, Y/N.”

“I can’t leave,” you scoffed. “There’s so much to do still! I need to stay and practice and…” You trailed off, as Aramis gave your hand a gentle tug toward the others.

“Paris will still be here tomorrow,” Athos said. He watched you with a raised brow. “As will Treville and all of your training. One of the things you need to learn about being a soldier is knowing your limits, Y/N. You cannot help anyone if you can no longer help yourself. Besides-” He held up a bulging saddlebag which clinked as it moved. “I already bought the wine.”

“I for one think it’s a magnificent idea,” Aramis beamed. “I’m jealous I hadn’t thought of it before. We could all use a day away, don’t you think, Y/N?”

You took a deep breath. There was so much left to be done. You still needed to perfect your marksmanship, ready your fencing strategy, and work on hand-to-hand without strangling your sparring partner this time. The pressure of it all lingered in your chest as you gazed at the four wonderful men who’d helped you this far.

But they were right. How could you possibly hope to achieve your goals if you overworked your body to the point of disaster?

“Alright, I’ll go.”

All four erupted in cheers. Porthos even lifted you up, tossed you over his shoulder, and spun around, eliciting a squealing laugh from your lips. When he set you down again, he kissed your cheek and gave you the biggest smile you’d ever seen.

“It’s been far too long since I’ve heard that sound,” he said.

The others all grinned in agreement and your group of five mounted your horses. You looked back at the garrison as the city passed by and spotted the field where you'd been practicing with the musket. The mocking bottle remained in its spot, untouched.

Aramis followed your gaze and chuckled.

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it,” he nodded. “Just not today.” Aramis reached over and put a hand on your shoulder. “And that’s perfectly fine.”

You nodded in return and urged your horse forward, away from Paris and your responsibilities and your anxieties. You let them fall away with the pounding of hooves against the road and the laughter of your friends in the air.

The sweet summer air filled your lungs, banishing the lingering scent of the city. Wildflowers lined the path, the soft earth shifting under your feet as you leaned down into a starting position.

“I thought the whole point of this was to get away from training,” D’Artagnan teased, taking the same stance beside you. Aramis stood in between, arms raised for the signal.

“Ready?” He glanced excitedly at both of you. “Set.”

“This isn’t training, D’Artagnan,” you laughed. “This is fun!”

“Go!”

You flew down the path, your legs sprinting as fast as they could carry you while D’Artagnan raced next to you. He started in the lead, but as you neared the tree at the end of the lane- your predetermined finish line- you began to gain on him. Your hair whipped around your face but you kept your eyes open and focused on that tree.

The three cheered both of you on, all favoring you for the victory. Their hollering only increased when you finally surpassed your opponent, keeping just a step ahead of him all the way to the end.

When you turned to gloat in your victory, however, you failed to see one of the tree’s roots stretched out in front of you. Your foot caught and, in your attempt to save yourself, your hand latched onto your competitor’s arm and dragged him down with you.

D’Artagnan tumbled, the two of you rolling down the small hill behind the tree. Grass and flower petals broke your fall and burst up into the air as you landed with you on top and D’Artagnan sprawled out beneath you, both of your cackling filling the air.

“I’m-” You snorted. “I’m so sorry. Are you alright?” Your words were hardly understandable between your snickers.

“I’m fine, are you?” His heaving laughs lifted your head which laid on his chest. You peered up at him, taking in his sparkling eyes and bright smile. You couldn’t help but feel all of your worries from before fade away.

After a moment, the other three appeared over you, looking down and shaking their heads.

“I would say Y/N is the winner, but seeing as she’s also the one that caused this unfortunate spell…” Porthos started. He helped you up with a smirk and you playfully punched his arm.

“I agree with Porthos,” D’Artagnan said, brushing himself off.

“Clumsy or not, I’m still faster,” you fired back.

“Perhaps a rematch is in order.”

“You should know by now, D’Artagnan.” You stepped toward him so that you were only inches apart. “I never back down from a challenge.”

Aramis put a hand in between you two. “Alright, I think that’s quite enough competition for the day.” His deep laugh brought more warmth to your chest. “We should make camp soon anyway before the sun sets.”

You pointed a finger at the youngest musketeer and smirked. “This isn’t over.”

He bowed dramatically. “I look forward to it.” D’Artagnan hurried ahead to start the fire, his laughter still ringing through the air, and you strolled alongside the other three.

Aramis removed a leaf from your hair and tucked the strand behind your ear. He held up a hand to his ear.

“Listen,” he said. “Do you hear that?”

“I hear nothing,” you shrugged.

“Exactly.” He breathed in deeply with a content smile. “Isn’t it wonderful?”

You scoffed. “Aramis, I give us all two days before we’re begging to get back to the noise and excitement of Paris.” You poked a finger at his chest. “You especially.”

He opened his mouth to argue but found that he couldn’t. Instead, he chuckled and held out his arm.

“Fair enough. But it is a break well deserved nonetheless.”

You beamed, taking his arm. “That it is.”

You all sat around the fire, eating rabbit that Aramis had shot earlier and Porthos roasted over the flames with a bottle of wine for each of you. D’Artagnan and Aramis sat across from you while you and Porthos spent dinner discussing your technique in sparring earlier in the day.

“I am sorry again,” you said, putting a hand on his arm. “I hope I didn’t injure you too badly.”

“Just his pride!” Aramis chimed from across the fire.

Porthos tossed a pebble at his head.

This, of course, prompted a small battle between the three of them, picking up various projectiles from the forest floor and trying to hit each other. In the midst of their antics, you saw Athos from his place leaning against a far tree. He motioned for you to follow him.

Having always been a little frightened of the leader of the group, you gulped, believing to be in some kind of trouble with him. Athos’s intensity was known throughout the musketeers, along with his skill with a sword and leadership.

He led you in a perimeter around the small camp you’d made without saying anything at first, which of course only increased your returning anxiety.

“I know you believe that you don’t belong here,” he finally said. His words were so blunt, you didn’t know how to respond and he continued. “I wanted to tell you that you have nothing to worry about, which I know isn’t very helpful given how you’re feeling.”

“Unfortunately, it isn’t,” you sighed. “Though I appreciate your encouragement.”

“It isn’t merely encouragement, Y/N.” He stopped walking to look at you with that same intensity. “I believe it. I’ve never seen someone work with as much passion as you do. With as much tenacity and willingness to learn. Half of the men in the musketeers think they already know everything about the world, but you-” An impressed laugh made his blue eyes shine. “You have done more to learn and to improve than anyone I’ve ever seen. It’s no wonder you’ve exhausted yourself so much. It’s remarkable it hasn’t happened sooner.”

You opened your mouth to rebuke his claims, to deny your skills and deprecate the work you’d done, but he put a hand on your shoulder that silenced you.

“I would be honored to serve alongside you.”

“Athos I-” You blinked back tears. “I don’t know what to say.”

“Just promise me you won’t end our practices the way you ended with Porthos and I’ll be content with that,” he teased. “Let’s get back before they cause any trouble, hm?”

As the two of you returned to the group, you felt so overwhelmed by the feelings stirring in your chest. But this wasn’t from anxiety or overworking yourself. You were just so grateful, gazing over the crowd of your four closest friends, that you couldn’t contain it. It spilled out onto your cheeks with joyous tears.

Aramis noticed you first and his face immediately morphed with concern.

“What have you done, Athos?” He leaped to his feet, soon joined by the other three as they scrambled to your side. “What’s the matter, Y/N, my dear?”

“Nothing,” you laughed through your crying. “Athos has been nothing but kind, I promise. I just…” You took a deep breath. In one hand, you took Aramis’s, intertwining your fingers, and with your other, you took Athos’s. “I didn’t realize how much I needed this.”

“You would do the same for any of us,” D’Artagnan said. “It’s the least we can do after all of the work you’ve put in.”

“Work that has not been ignored by Treville,” Athos added. “I believe he admires you even more than we do.”

“If that’s even possible,” Aramis said with a wink.

“Well, I can’t thank you all enough for taking care of me like this.”

Aramis glanced around the others with a mischievous twitch of his mustache.

“All for one,” he said, twirling you around so that you landed in Porthos’s arms.

“And one for all,” Porthos finished, lowering you into a dip.

“You are all imbeciles. Now let me go,” you squealed merrily as they spun you around again. By the time you’d danced with all four of them, you were all dizzy enough that you collapsed beside each other in a heap of laughter.

My musketeers. You couldn’t help but think with your head on Aramis’s shoulder and your legs stretched out over D’Artagnan’s. You remembered why you were so adamant to join the regiment in the first place. To be one of them. You knew now that, no matter what happened in the coming weeks, you always would be.

The stars twinkled over your heads as the fire died down. You let out a sigh and felt content.

“I love you all,” you whispered into the night. “Even if you are idiots.”

Aramis chuckled beneath you. “And we you.” He kissed the top of your head.

D’Artagnan poked at your calf. “Even if you are stubborn.”

“Some of us are trying to sleep,” Porthos whined, but you could hear the smirk in his voice.

You settled again and heard Athos sit up. He placed his cloak over you as a blanket.

“Rest well, Y/N.”

And you did.

#the musketeers #bbc musketeers #comfort imagine #luke pasqualino #howard charles #santiago cabrera #tom burke #the musketeers comfort imagine #burnout #all for one and one for all

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lizzieislife94x · 4 months

Text

Professor Olsen (e.o)

LizziexFem Reader

Lizzie is your professor your the student of legal age ofc let's say y/n is 19 and lizzie is 25

GirlxGirl

If you want to request something message me and I'll happily do my best for you, feedback is appreciated so I know if you guys like these or not.

Y/ns POV:

"I'm up IM UPPPP!!!" I yell at my roommate as I roll out of bed she can be a fucking pain in the ass would 10 more minutes in bed have been to much to ask "y/n you can't be late you have professor Olsen's test today as do I so get your ass up and ready or I'm leaving without you" I moan and I get ready I really should get my fucking licence because this bitch is annoying me I love her really she's my best friend but when you wake me up rudely it pisses me off, I grab my bag and phone and head to the kitchen to get a bottle of water and turn to my roommate "ta da better seriously take a chill pill we still have 45 minutes we'll be there in plenty of time calm your tits " she rolls her eyes and grabs the car keys "let's go dickhead I'm not getting yelled at because you can't be bothered getting out of bed, maybe you like to be yelled at by pro Olsen because you wanna rail her and think it's sexy I on the other hand do not" I follow her to the car not saying anything this bitch really outing me I can't help but laugh as we sit in the car and I look over at her and she laughs as well.

it takes us roughly 30 mins to get to campus leaving plenty of time toget to class. As I walk in with my friend I take my seat at the front of the class if you knew how hot she was you'd sit here too "morning professor " I say with a huge smile as she turns to face us "morning girls great to see you here on time I hope your prepared for the test later" I let out a nervous chuckle "uh yeah totally professor Olsen" I mean I did study but got distracted by the thought of professor Olsen will I pass I have no idea as the day goes on we're almost at the end of the day and I get up walking over to her desk "done professor " I say handing my test to the goddess infront of me "thank you miss L/N please take a seat and try not to disturb the rest of the class" I nod and head back to my seat and start annoying my friends sending me into a fit of laughter "miss L/N that's detention stay after class one more sound out of you ill make it the full week"

she says in a series tone and I find myself in a flustered state that shouldn't have been as much of a turn on as it was fuck, I gulp and nod looking at her trying to hide my flustered state I slowly sink down on my seat keeping my eyes on my shoes after 40 minutes the bell goes and we all stand to leave as I'm talking to my friends a chill is sent down my spine "miss L/N where are you going take a seat you can see your friends later once your done here" I look at my friends who laugh and tease as I sit back down and the classroom empties slowly "professor Olsen how long do I have to stay" I almost whisper "until I say otherwise young lady now come over here and take a seat you can help me sort these tests into alphabetical order ' I nod and walk over taking a seat beside her and I start to sort the paperwork fuck this is gonna take forever I let out a huff "oh I'm sorry am I inconveniencing you miss l/n" she states with a dominating tone to her voice

"fuck..." I whisper clearly turned on and she raises her eyebrow at me unsure of her next words "miss l/n did that excite you" she asks sliding her pen into her mouth biting gently with a smirk "uhh I umm" she keeps her eyes burned to me "words y/n words use your big girl words" I gulp and play with my fingers "yes ok yes it did professor Olsen" she giggles and bites her lip "well maybe you can get out of detention a little quicker if you help me " I look at her confused as she sits back in her chair and spreads her legs and my eyes instantly snap to her spread legs "professor Olsen don't play don't start something you can't finish " I smirk licking my lips slowly "oh baby I never start something I can't finish now on your knees let's see if that tounge is good for something other than chatting during my test time" I let out a moan and drop to my knees crawling over to her as she pulls her skirt up over her waist as I run my hands up and down her thighs working to her panties I can see the visible wet patch in her panties I slowly run my finger up and down her slit over her panties earning a sexy moan from the older woman above me

"that feels...that feels good y/n" I bite my lip and pull her panties to the side sliding my fingers through her wet folds savouring the feeling of her wet cunt "don't..fucking tease me y/n" she almost yells and I smirk "I'm sorry professor Olsen" I slide my fingers inside her tight cunt and moan at the way she hugs my fingers so well and the moan she let out let's me know she enjoys it tooI start sliding my fingers in and out at a slow place as I latch my lips around her puffy clit swiping my tounge every few seconds just to hear the whimpers leaving her mouth "just like that baby fuck yes don't...stop" she breaths out as I up my pace of my fingers and moan against her clit as she grips my hair tight "shit that's the spot fuck y/n I'm gonna cum" I thrust my fingers faster until her walls squeeze my fingers signalling she's close to cumming I instantly pull my fingers out and slide my tounge in replacing my fingers as she pushes me further into her I feel her release all over my face and lap up every sweet sweet bit of cum she gives I slide my tounge out and look up at the older woman with her head back and thin layer of sweat over her head and face I smirk "was that good enough professor " I giggle slightly as she looks at me smiling "fuck yes I think...I need to...keep you back more often " I get back into my seat and bite my lip "maybe I'll just purposely get detention everyday"I stayed to help her with the tests and after an hour I bid my goodbye to the older woman excited for the following day of school for the first time in a long time maybe school isn't that bad after all.

AN: just a quick update to keep the book up to date also my anxiety has me awake so feel free to message with requests and ill do them right away feedback Is appreciated and welcome good or bad let me know if you enjoy them word count is 1.3k for this chapter (who doesn't love a good ol professor Olsen fic)

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olivyh · 2 years

Text

More format-less hc

So I tested positive for covid shortly after senior prom (which my school said was like the super spreader), and have been feeling like garbage since monday, so have an angsty hc/thought

TW: Mentions of illness, death if you squint and uhh tuna ig bc things go better in threes

Since Yuu is from another world with different diseases, they’re no equipped for the different viruses that can go around twst. This means that a common cold for yuu, since their body isnt used to it, could hurt them much, much more than it would hurt a person native to twisted wonderland. They dont have the natural immunity that everyone else has.

Imagine Adeuce making fun of yuu for falling sick over something that everyone gets as a kid, brushing it off and going about their day. they start to get worried when yuu doesnt show up to class the next few days, which turns into a week. crewel (since we all know crowley isnt doing much) takes them to the infirmary and, without any barriers to magic, magical solutions do nothing for them. that week turns into a month, and that month turns into two. The students don’t know what to do, the dorm heads are scrambling to find a solution because without yuu’s help, nrc has fallen into the disarray that it was before they got there.

the first years don’t care, they snap at their seniors and spend every available moment by yuu’s side. they still host their study sessions, just in the infirmary rather than the library. they still talk to their friend, even if their friend hasnt woken up since that first week. ace wishes he hadnt made that joke, he thinks its his fault that yuu fell so ill. he cursed them, he thinks. deuce tries every single of his mothers remedies, and laments every time they dont work. jack leaves the finished notes and schoolwork by their bed, and he feels a part of him sink whenever he sees how large the pile had gotten- so large that he had to move part of it to the floor. epel talks to yuu as if they can listen, pacing back and forth and ranting who knows what, mostly vils still-strict skincare regime (although he uses those same techniques on yuu, when he notices that they look particularly….gaunt, and pale. he doesnt want them to look like a ghost anymore). sebek can only stand and stare at what used to be his first friend besides silver. he’d known that full humans can get terribly ill, and that fae recover much faster than most species, but seeing it in person sends a chill down his spine. he returns to diasomnia in silence for the first time. grim is inconsolable, refusing to leave his dormleaders side even when offered the most expensive tuna there is, even when bribed and pulled at. he only ever leaves to take care of the dorm, which shocks the rest of the student body. the tanuki claims that he absolutely has ti keep the dorm clean or yuu will be upset with him. in reality, he cant stand to look at their sickened face anymore.

or malleus, spending every moment yuus other friends arent there by their side, quietly telling them stories from his homeland or trying his best to help them magically, but even he knows theres not much he can do without hurting them more. visitors soon notice little things among the gifts, small flowers, intricate jewelry (that is, jewelry that is much different than the gifts from the dormleader al-asim), small statues and books, and… who left a used “gao-gao dragon-kun” toy?

if they do wake up, the rest of campus will never take their presence for granted again, nor will they ever be alone ever again.

if they dont, i mean hey, ghosts exist in twisted wonderland! (really trying to bring the mood up here guys)

this turned out a ton more sad than i wanted it to, and i made myself sad, so im gonna go get myself a popsicle and skip

more of my online classes

#twisted wonderland #twst #twisted wonderland headcannons #twst angst #twisted wonderland angst #twst yuu #ace trappola #deuce spade #jack howl #epel felmier #sebek zigvolt #malleus draconia #grim twst

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sprngcat · 2 years

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i just finished rereading solitaire and I wanna share my thoughts

I just like a LOT how the metaphors in solitaire are used to explain how tori was feeling sad and alone, as the history pass

like, tori is always feeling cold and with several layers of clothes. in contrast, michael with a t-shirt and pants not showing any signs of being cold.

and tori's cold just get worse and worse as the story develops, proportional with her mental health gets worst.

in chapter 14 of the second part of the book, tori says that "the uk has witnessed the heaviest blizzard since 1963" and I really think that this is a metaphor for UK being tori's body and the "heaviest blizzard" being her sadness, that never been so hard to control and pass through.

for Michael, I believe that his body being always warm can be a metaphor for his feelings too. he says that he is always angry, and this feeling cause some kind of heat, like when u have an angry crisis and your ears start being red and u feel hot, etc.

if u start thinking about, sadness and rage are feelings that walk side by side, if too much, can do a lot of harm to a person. and I really think this is tori and michael, u know? sadness and rage killing them because they feel intensely, and this is what unites them, this is how they understand each other so well. they complete.

also, in the same chapter (14) we can see the post that solitaire does, saying "we hope that we have added something to what could be a very boring winter" and we know that Lucas create solitaire because he hopes that some jokes and caos in Higgs can make tori happier (or just with less desire to kill herself), cause he was so angry and afraid that school left tori sad.. I think the word "winter" is another metaphor to sadness: lucas trying to put some happiness in the students lives, trying to do something good for everyone, but mostly tori

and at least but not less important, Michael wanted Higgs to burn, he thought that he can start feeling better if this happens, he thought that this might be a way out of it all (bullying, rage, feeling of not being part of something, etc). tori trying to put out the fire can be interpreted of her attempt to have all in her control, not letting her feelings be shown to the world. when Michael throw the fire extinguisher out the window, he says indirectly to tori "you dont have to hide, let it all out" and this is when she tries to kill herself, cause she is lost: in her feelings, in her mind, in her thoughts and she allows herself to feel what she's been saving for her all this time

but Michael stops her, he offers help and says that he wasn't okay too.. "I was never good enough. I get so stressed, I don't make friends... God, I don't know how to make friends. sometimes I wish I was a normal person. but I can't, I'm not. no matter how hard I try" but they can help each other to pass through this, to understand their feelings. if they are going to be broken, they are going to be broken together.

and after tori and michael let their feelings out of their chests, they start feeling better, not perfectly fine (cause nobody feels like this) but they are ok, neither cold nor hot. just ok.

"I do not say that all this happened in a single day, by a single event, due to a single person. I just know that once it started, it became much easier to let go. and I think that's how I ended up here."

love doesn't heal mental illness, but love can make you start thinking that the world isn't so bad, even if is just for some hours, minutes, or seconds. of course, if u have depression, anxiety or some disorder like this, somedays you are going to wake up and feel like shit, have crisis and think like you did before, but maybe you can count on someone to help you rise from the abyss :)

"well, you hate yourself, I hate myself. common interests! we should unite"

well, this was a little part of my interpretation reading solitaire, I hope u liked it, and if u wanna talk about it, I am very excited to hear some points of view!

btw, sorry if my english is bad, I'm Brazilian and don't speak fluently :(

kisses!!

#victoria spring #solitaire alice oseman #michael holden #solitaire #osemanverse #heartstopper

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thescarletwitchsapprentice · 2 years

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Yandere!Parent!Queen!Wanda Maximoff with an Autistic!Fem!Magic!Child (General Headcanons)

*Not my GIF, but look at this girlboss. Look at her. I want to be with her in some way, shape, or form. I also want to BE her.

Author’s Note: So someone said I should do some more Queen Wanda Maximoff. I kinda wanna be a magic princess, so why not? Am I projecting myself onto the reader? Yeah, maybe, but I know there are some OTHER autistic girls who want to be princesses with magic AND love Wanda Maximoff/want to be with her/want to be her.

I’m kinda basing a bit of this off of my own experiences as an autistic girl, save for the relationship with Wanda because I don’t have the greatest relationship with my real mom.

I’ve been wondering if I have mommy issues.....

Anyway, lemme know if you want a part 2 or if you want a specific set of headcanons.

We all know that Wanda is very sweet and affectionate with those she holds dear. Not a surprise, considering how much she’s lost.

So when you’re born, she can’t stop holding you and crying tears of joy.

You’re her precious baby angel. And she’ll be damned if she lets you get hurt.

Immediately after she gives birth, she orders the servants to make her castle especially safe for you.

Wanda treasures you more than anything. Everyday she tells you how much she loves you.

Overtime, she does notice that you behave a bit differently.

You’re sensitive to bright lights and loud sounds, you walk on your toes sometimes, eye contact makes you stressed, just to name a few.

You soon develop sleep issues and digestive problems. You wake up at night crying. Wanda’s always there to calm you down.

Soon she has some worries; could this be some sort of illness? Symptoms of a plague? Would she lose you so young?!

And so she has you tested; the result is autism spectrum disorder.

And it’s a relief to her, she practically cries out of relief; you’re not dying, you just think differently and have some extra challenges.

But she’s also extra worried about how the world outside will treat you; she wants you to be free to be yourself AND be accepted and loved by people.

She’s seen how a handful of her subjects treat those who are different and she’ll be damned if you turn out to be in their shoes.

Wanda stays close by you, trying to figure out how she can best help you.

She orders the servants to build her little princess a sensory room for when things get too overwhelming.

You turn out to be a rather physically-affectionate child with those you’re close to, meaning that cuddles and hugs from your mother are a must for you.

Of course Wanda doesn’t mind. She loves cuddling you because she knows you’re safe in her arms.

As you grow older, you become more curious. Wanda wants to feed into this curiosity of yours, but also doesn’t want you to get hurt.

This especially becomes a predicament when your magic starts to show itself.

You have the same magic as your mother. This is gonna get interesting.

And she knows it’s gonna be more difficult for you to control because you have *Spongebob rainbow hands with sparkles* emotional dysregulation.

She has to plan how to balance out keeping your security with feeding your curiosity.

Which is not the easiest thing to do, considering just how curious you actually are.

The answer is very.

She has her servants search every part of the universe for the best tutors, but decides to rely on some of her old friends.

She resurrects her husband, King Vision, modifying him just a tad to make him as protective.

She resurrects her brother, Prince Pietro, also making him just as protective.

Let’s just say it’s a lot of resurrecting and a lot of making them protective.

But they still know that she is the one mainly protecting you.

She assures that all of the servants are educated on you and your autism.

If any servant makes even the slightest remark about you having a “tantrum” because something’s too loud, either their tongue will be gone or they will be gone, mentally at least.

As you grow older, it’s apparent that Wanda doesn’t trust anyone to court you, let alone marry you. What if they hurt her baby princess? She’s not going to let that happen.

You don’t entirely mind, at least not right away. You’re very close with her.

But she knows that when you grow older, there’s a chance you might seek someone to marry.

She’ll have to deal with that eventually, but right now, all is well.

Because everyone’s too afraid of the consequences to hurt the queen’s little angel.

#yandere queen wanda maximoff #queen wanda maximoff #queen maximoff #yandere wanda maximoff #dark wanda maximoff #wanda maximoff #headcanons #avengers headcanon #yandere marvel #yandere avengers

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