Performance Of The Year Tbh

"Immature people crave and demand moral certainty: This is bad, this is good. Kids and adolescents struggle to find a sure moral foothold in this bewildering world; they long to feel they’re on the winning side, or at least a member of the team. To them, heroic fantasy may offer a vision of moral clarity. Unfortunately, the pretended Battle Between (unquestioned) Good and (unexamined) Evil obscures instead of clarifying, serving as a mere excuse for violence — as brainless, useless, and base as aggressive war in the real world."

Ursula K Le Guin at it again, being right as always

the gradual shift in joel from being the guy who’s so desensitized that he can carry a dead kid the same way he carried sarah to the site of her death and toss the corpse into a fire without blinking to being the guy who has a massive breakdown and almost nukes his whole life from the fear of ellie being irreparably harmed while under his care……and the way the last few episodes the show go out of their way to specifically test him on that fear…..like hey joel you’re mortally wounded and can’t protect or take care of her, what do you do. hey joel while you were bedridden she went through the worst experience of her life, what do you do. hey joel [insert spoilers for last ep here, you get the idea]. and he rises to the occasion, he pushes through the fear for her, because she asked him to. she wanted him to be the one to deliver her. she didn’t want anyone else. and he’s decided he’s going to give her whatever she wants

it takes time for the realization that he’s gonna have to confront his worst nightmare to really sink in. he’s built up a mental fortress against what happened to him 20 years ago. and you see that when he really starts to care is when all of that comes back up. the time skip between ep 5 and 6 was probably the Joel Quietly Freaks Out with Increasing Frequency and Intensity variety hour

and him telling her she’s not his daughter. aside from being that thing where you say the worst thing you can think of to someone when you’re trying to end your relationship with them so you can’t go back and change your mind later. but also, when you peel back all the layers of pain and fear, that’s him saying “you are not going to die.” up until that moment it’s the most honest and open expression of his feelings that he’s shared with her. his daughter died in his arms. that’s what happens to “joel’s daughter.” so ellie cannot be his daughter

that probably should’ve been 3 separate posts but it’s season finale day and i’m unmedicated, fuck it

*sitting in my bedroom with nothing going on* HELP!!!! HELP ME!!!! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD SOMEBODY FUCKING HELP ME!!!!

i’m in a good place (my room) but i’m also not in a good place (deep physical and psychological suffering)

“Be gay do crime!!” “Eat the rich!!”

And you can’t even boycott the most famous TERF in the UK

and i think there's something to be said be here about the medical system and how it's reflected in marlene.

doctors, whether they mean to or not, have an amazing knack for dehumanizing you and corroding your attachment to your body

Silver Lake already severed some of that attachment and ownership she feels over her body (just based off the disassociation we see and logic)

so if Joel, say, insisted on waking her up and trying more tests first. or if he wanted the situation explained to ellie before she made the decision. i think we would have ended up with the same problem

if marlene, someone ellie trusts to keep her safe and has that connection to her mother, reaffirmed the idea that ellies body was a commodity, she would have chosen to die

even if joels decision making process wasn't this layered (which it wasnt), the situation still had a lot of nuance that is ignored typically

tw for pretty in-depth discussion of fictional suicide attempts/suicidal ideation ///

i just. think a Lot about how the idea of “well ellie should have had a choice!” often ignores the implied fact that ellie, on the day she was entering the hospital, was struggling with some degree of suciidal ideation to the point where joel opened up about his attempt and ellie’s immediate response was:

“i know why you’re telling me this”

because she’d been so nonresponsive, so far removed from her usual self in her depression, that joel was worried for her and thought the story of him recovering from his attempt, feeling that hopeless, would resonate with her.

“yeah, i reckon you do” – that’s….yeah. 

and she goes for the “time heals all wounds” to wrap it in a bow– the cliche of “it gets better, you just have to give it time” that we give to people struggling especially with suicidial thoughts and joel in a moment of rare vulnerability says “it wasn’t time that did it” – him telling her that he loves her and cares about her, that that is what healed him, that that is why he’s opening himself up because he doesn’t want her to hurt like he did. that it’s not just going to be time, he’s here and he’s not going anywhere whatever healing looks like for her. and it hits her like a gut punch because it’s the last thing she’s expecting and the thing that breaks through to her.

so if you’re asking the teenager with sucidial ideation, who has spent her entire life being told by an institution that she is inherently expendable and her life is worth nothing, coupled with her mom’s friend echoing that same sentiment – of course she would have said yes. marlene with the “what would she want?” gee i wonder how putting her in a system that sees her as expendable would affect like worldview on top of countless traumas! and joel is the one person in her life who does not see her as worth sacrificing, who would mourn her and care about her to the point where he’s unwilling to mourn her even if it means she hates him. 

when people we love and care about go through something like that, we don’t go “oh i guess it’s your choice”. it’s “i will drag you kicking and screaming to go on with me if i have to because i love you and i don’t want to do this without you, because you are worth more than how you’re feeling right now.” it’s what tommy did for joel. he dragged him out of that ditch, took him to a medic camp even though joel swears up and down it’s what he wants and never lets him do it again and he can’t go on and do this. it’s what joel does later for ellie. 

so yeah.

no i don’t think joel should’ve woken up ellie like

“r u sure?”

God is more flexible than whatever you stupid fundamentalists think and more nuanced than whatever you stupid liberals think. And more mercurial than whatever you stupid centrists think. God shares my exact views but with more beauty and truth.

canceled my prime membership today

its always "what are your plans for the future, you should really be planning for the future" and never "wow that character you're obsessed with sounds so cool can you explain them to me. im sure you get them more than anyone else"