3x09, "The Small Dark Movie of Your Life"

[Elizabeth Bear]

How can I delete all my posts, please?

I can do that for you if you insist, but I hope you will reconsider.

[Elizabeth Bear]

If you guys don't mind humouring me: What's made this third one so emotionally different from the two before?

I am also asking because this is honestly not the general tenor of the reaction I anticipated.

I, too, am a little croggled that y'all PTB wouldn't have anticipated some of the reaction. I'm curious how it differs from your expectations.

Leah is not y'all. Leah is Leah.

We are different people, with different expectations, and sometimes quite different opinions on how the story should go.

I'll say that I'm not seeing anything here that surprises me--the range of reactions is about what I expected, and a few that I did expect haven't show up yet. But possibly those people aren't posting.

[Emma Bull]

What Bear says, there.

[Lioness]

How can I delete all my posts, please?

I can do that for you if you insist, but I hope you will reconsider.

I have reconsidered, and have posted a new thread elsewhere, and there is being useful constructive discussion in it, and that is of the betterness.

And I really should go to sleep one of these hours.

And thank  you.

[Emma Bull]

I send you peaceful sleepies. Bear's the only one in this conversation who's supposed to be awake, I think. [yyYYAWN]

[Lioness]

I port the following thing (which is meant to be comforting) from the Constructive Discussion Thingie:

I hereby propose that all of us Deltas, now and to come, hang out and Not Belong together.

My fandom belongs together because we never quite feel like we belong.

There's probably a bench for that.

And to all a good night, and see you in the morning, for whatever values of morning obtain.

[Elizabeth Bear]

I send you peaceful sleepies. Bear's the only one in this conversation who's supposed to be awake, I think. [yyYYAWN]

I'm just glad all y'all are Still Up rather than Up Already. Because I can do math, and I am nine hours ahead of Emma, and it's not yet lunchtime here.

[Leah Bobet]

Leah is not y'all. Leah is Leah.

We are different people, with different expectations, and sometimes quite different opinions on how the story should go.

Just to reinforce that: I'm speaking entirely for myself.

[DavidG]

If you guys don't mind humouring me: What's made this third one so emotionally different from the two before?

I am also asking because this is honestly not the general tenor of the reaction I anticipated.

Leah, for me it isn't so different emotionally, but that's only because I've sat down and thought about that comparison. I'm not sure that many of us have stopped and compared reactions between the season ends as yet, that's why I was trying to bring it into the discussion, and then there is the loss to get over. People like Daphne, like her a lot, and the story has taken her away from us. And that will take some getting used to. As I said in a previous message, there's going to be a big Daphne-sized hole in every episode from now on.

There's a permanence to the loss here that there wasn't in S1 and S2. Chaz was hurt, but grew, Hafs was hurt, but survived even if she is in Idlewood, and there is hope for the future. With Daphne there is no hope for someone people genuinely cared for, even if she was only words on a page, or a friend on LJ. Even if I can frame her death as a narrative essential (something I don't think is true of more than a minority of the Deltas at the moment*), I liked having her as that friend, I am genuinely going to miss her posts, because they interested me as much as posts from any of my flesh and blood friends. They might have come courtesy of the PTB, but they passed through a Daphne-shaped filter to get to me. The difference from S1 and S2 is that genuine sense of loss of a friend.

I trust the PTB that this is an essential part of telling us the SU story, but not everyone is focussing on that yet, Daphne is still on the ventilator as I type, ask us again when she has been in the ground for a month or so, when the rawness of loss has receded for people.

*Which I want to emphasize isn't a criticism or an insistence that things should be interpreted in any particular way, I'm simply predisposed to dig into story structure and that's pulled me past the sense of loss.

[DavidG]

This analysis assumes that the threat of death was the main axe being hung over the team in those other season finales.  To me it wasn't - it was loss of self.  

My perspective on this is that I don't really distinguish between the two, they both represent the character in mortal danger of permanent harm or worse.

(And just to add a complicating nuance, I don't think I regard the idea of loss of self with quite the horror that most people seem to).

[DavidG]

two weeks ago, she was worrying about Chaz, who was out BASE jumping - off a bridge. [snip] Foreshadowing, we can haz it.)

Which reminds me that that was an even more awesome piece of writing than we first thought now that we know what it really related to.

[jimsmyth]

My reaction is from both friend-brain (she CAN'T be gone!) and reader-brain (this isn't how the story is supposed to go!).

Because of her use in Breathe as the let-us-explain-it-to-you character, she has been a touchpoint character for me, both my surrogate in the SUniverse as well as the expected-to-be-the-final-viewpoint character.

And, in a possibly-weird way, the reaching-out she did to Chaz, to Hafs, to Brady is felt like reaching-out to me.  She is a good friend because I've seen her in action as a friend. 

There was so much left of her story -- her and T having kids, her and Lau finally bonding (I'm really worried about Lau, btw), her finally accepting herself as a leader, all those moments of unterrified-but-not-real-good cooking...  and that story, too, has died.

So it's all kind of jumbled-together grief.

I'm sure there is more to it for me, but that's what I got right now.

[DavidG]

Slightly different thoughts from Reader Brain, but other than that - what Jim says!

[Lioness]

This analysis assumes that the threat of death was the main axe being hung over the team in those other season finales.  To me it wasn't - it was loss of self.  

My perspective on this is that I don't really distinguish between the two, they both represent the character in mortal danger of permanent harm or worse.

(And just to add a complicating nuance, I don't think I regard the idea of loss of self with quite the horror that most people seem to).

THANK YOU.

signed,
definitely on that bench with you

[miminnehaha]

I port the following thing (which is meant to be comforting) from the Constructive Discussion Thingie:

I hereby propose that all of us Deltas, now and to come, hang out and Not Belong together.

My fandom belongs together because we never quite feel like we belong.

There's probably a bench for that.

And to all a good night, and see you in the morning, for whatever values of morning obtain.

Yup, the Not Belonging Bench.  It's the one that's built in & runs the length of the wall.

The bench from which we jump onto/under the other benches...