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March 21, 2020

Can we talk about Vera’s round-eyed puppy stare at Marcela? I think it started when they were dropping her off at the barber shop. And her eyes just got rounder each time she looks at Marcela after that. It’s like she’s so awed by Marcela’s existence, maybe not necessarily in the romantic sense at first, but… Her eyes just get so big and round, it gives her away every. damn. time.

I’m so glad you mentioned this, because I hadn’t really given it much thought, but it’s such a noticeable change, and honestly such a delicious progression. It’s when she starts to see Marcela for who she is instead of what she is.

Vera evaluates people and sums them up, decides if they’re worth her time or not and usually they aren’t. Kind of justifiably, most people in her life have let her down. As soon as she met Marcela, she judged and dismissed her. Quite literally, this is their very first meeting:

Look at that! Her attention shifts to her and in the same breath flits past. She doesn’t even register her.

And so she goes from one label to the next, this heavily tattooed girl obviously about to ask her for money to violent gangster and possible drug runner. Even when she makes a dramatically positive impact on her, Vera (understandably) isn’t in the headspace to do much more than think of her as her savior and then secret-keeper. She’s definitely not seeing Marcela after she saves her and is dealing with the immediate trauma aftermath.

But, and here is the moment I actually think it changes for her, in ep 4 as you said but even before they drop her off at the barber shop, when Ro asks if the cops are chasing them because of her brother, Vera realizes this person she’s dragged into this possible crime and secret with her has her own issues, has her own mess she’s dealing with, she’s not just somebody who’s significant to Vera because she threatened and inconvenienced her, or even as someone who saved her, she’s all these things while still dealing with her missing brother and being this layered person who even now is keeping her secret about what happened the night before, all because Vera asked, even if it makes her look bad in Ro and Carly’s eyes. And this is the look she shoots her then:

And you’re right. She’s genuinely intrigued, wide-eyed with it.

And then as you said, by the time they dropped her off:

She definitely sees her now.

And then actually, as you’d maybe expect, when they get to the house at Huatulco, aside from her hackles immediately going up at her stepmom, we also know what memories that house carries for her, and she retreats back to behind her shell, too brittle to really be taking in things and expanding her worldview. When Marcela gets pepper sprayed, Vera again doesn’t even look at her. And every time Ro and Carly manage to calm her down, her stepmom does something to take her out of it again.

But once they leave, you have these moments piling up:

Like, she keeps being thrown off balance and realizing there’s more to Marcela, again and again. Which is probably the best basis for a romance involving someone like her, who’s so confident in her ability to gauge and judge people, realizing that she can be so wrong, often because people can surprise you in good ways.

Definitely some romantic interest creeping into that wide-eyed contemplation now. By this point, she’s already learned she can trust Marcela, she’s found out the ways in which she’s deceptively savvy and kind. All of that goes into how intrigued she is and how willing she is to find out more, and why. For Vera to really fall for someone, they’d have to interest her at every level.

March 7, 2020December 21, 2020

March 2, 2020

Hey! I was wondering if you could tell me rape trigger warnings for desenfrenadas or point out anyone who’s documented it please? I was watching but had to stop after that Vera backstory, but sexual violence seems pretty prevalent throughout so far and I remember the start where Marcela is all beat up and the bad guys have been threatening her from the start, so will the show go there? I’d like to skip those scenes if so.

Sorry, I don’t know anybody who has, and if you’ve gotten that far, you’ve probably seen most of it, Vera’s backstory was the worst of it to me, but there are a couple of scenes left, with Marcela and Joshua, where it’s their same dynamic as earlier except ramped up, on both their ends, but it feels like Marcela’s more doing it to put on a show and yeah, it feels pretty icky. The beaten up Marcela in the flashforward at the beginning isn’t actually from that, it’s just Joshua being “regular” violent (not that that makes it better), but let me see if I can put together a list:

I’m not really sure what to include and what not to, so I’ll err on the side of going with more, but not all of it is at the same level of awful. I italicized the most egregious cases, to me.

Ep 1:

34:55 Marcela’s gone up to talk to Sapo to go easy on them but he says Joshua’s made a deal where Marcela has to sleep with him, Marcela pretends to go along, Sapo starts being aggressive, she hits him with a bottle – 35:28 There’s a brief cut to another scene – 35:50 The scene continues with Marcela in the aftermath of hitting Sapo and running off

Ep 2:

1:20 Male truck driver is nasty and propositions Marcela when she’s just walking by, scene ending at 1:41

Ep 3:

5:47 Joshua and Marcela’s sex turns kinda rough, though still consensual, scene ending at 6:11

25:06 Marcela calls Joshua, Sapo answers and is his creepy self and threatens Marcela using Mike, if she doesn’t return, with the call ending at 25:45

30:35 The guy Vera connected with on the app and who met up with her again carries drunk Vera out, lies to her when she says she needs to tell Ro and Carly she’s leaving, then outside tries too hurry her into sex and then attempts to try to rape her, as she tries hard to fight him off. 32:10 Marcela shows up with a gun and forces him away. She beats him up and that scene is the last in the ep.

Ep 4:

00:19 Vera, now in her hotel room, flashbacks a couple of times to the attempted rape, the second scene ending at 0:51

2:26 Vera sobs in the shower, scene going into the credits at 2:47

13:50 Rocio yells at Vera in the car for what happened the previous night (not cool, Ro!), Vera has a bit of a breakdown, Marcela and Carly calm her down at 14:40

Ep 5:

1:03 A flashback with young Vera, like 6 or 7 years old, at a party, that the ep started with turns into a nightmare when suddenly the guy who tried to rape her is there and creepily saying gross things to her young self, she wakes up at 1:11

32:10 Vera in bed, flashback again to young Vera at the party, this old guy, in his 40s or 50s, a friend of her parents, who seems nice takes her up to her bedroom and tucks her in, asks her if she likes tickling, we don’t see anything explicit but hear a zipper. Throughout this scene, we jump back to current Vera in bed, unable to keep her eyes closed, staring emptily. The scene ends at 34:40.

Ep 7:

5:35 Gas station guy leers at Vera stretching, it’s a couple of seconds long, nobody notices and nothing happens

Ep 8:

27:00 Marcela’s back at their home with Joshua, he’s just very physically aggressive, it seems as if Marcela is into it too but once they start to have sex she turns her face away, scene ends at 28:43

35:08 Last scene of the ep, Carly’s sister calls her and starts yelling at her, eventually Carly realizes the guy she’d send explicit nudes and videos to released a video with her, including the toy dolphin she used,

and it’s all over the Internet. There are references throughout Ep 9, including dolphin noises, but it’s also just genuinely frustrating and heartbreaking to watch, Carly is understandably very hurt and embarrassed.

Ep 9:

7:24 Joshua’s brought Marcela breakfast in bed, she brings up Mike again, he thinks she’s ungrateful and smashes the whole tray into the wall, she smacks him, they continue to bicker, he gets physically aggressive with her again, she pretends to seduce him, then knees him in the stomach, he laughs it off, scene ends at 8:54

13:19 Marcela and Joshua playing around on the bed, roughly, but it seems like teasing with Marcela on top until Joshua manhandles her down and it’s not so light-hearted anymore. Marcela hits him and escapes from the bed, the scene ends at 14:45 with him not particularly angry still on the bed, Marcela on the dresser.

Ep 10:

14:25 I guess at this point this level of Joshua and Marcela bickering is mild for them, although Joshua still gets in a facegrab and slapping Marcela’s butt, scene ends at 14:35

20:16 Joshua asks Marcela if she’s okay and when she doesn’t answer immediately, grabs her neck to turn her around, the conversation going back to “normal” at 20:39 for a bit until when Marcela asks him to run away together, and gets mad when he refuses and says he has no balls, at which he says he’ll prove he does and tries to initiate sex, increasingly aggressively, hard enough to leave bruises, while Marcela tries to push him away, until finally the combination of that and another stripper calling from outside the dressing room gets him to stop., scene ends at 21:54

29:30 Joshua questions Marcela on where she got the ring from, increasingly hostile, then straight up shoving her against the wall and when she finally breaks free and gets mad and starts throwing things at his feet, he slaps her, knocking her down, scene ends at 30:43

31:04 Well, the next scene is basically the other trio watching the strip joint’s exit, waiting for Marcela to come out, and she does, and in her viewpoint we see her and Joshua walking, him still being very rough with her, both basically physically fighting on their short walk to the car, ending at 31:29

34:06 Joshua realizes who the girls are and gets mad at Marcela and attacks her, throws her into the car, until at 34:22 Vera stops him

October 16, 2019

Update: I’m a few eps into s4 already and I’m dreading it ending Bc I’ve inhaled these far too quickly and I want more lol. I still love Delle seyah. You’re totally right about the show wanting us to keep liking her. She’s been hilarious and had heart and growth, & I think that makes the difference in not wanting her to suffer and pay for what she did. Plus, Johnny shooting her felt like a bit of revenge for pawter. I also think the fact that everyone is morally gray to a point helps. (1/?)

Every single person on the show has done some heinous shit. Some on purpose, some on accident, but the entire world is kinda built on heinous shit happening & them either perpetrating it or kinda ignoring it (like the slavery stuff/ letting guards die for them etc). Hell, pawter made a bunch of ppl die to win her battle. Dutch & co may be the good guys, but their hands are far from clean, which I think makes it easier to accept stuff that Delle seyah and aneela have done. (2/3)

I’ll have to see where the rest of the show leads, but I think this may be the one show I have where I would ordinarily hate some characters & possibly the overall msg but it works for kj, maybe Bc I love Dutch / aneela / Delle seyah lol. I tend to go more for righteous vengeance & this show isn’t that. Too much gray to be that. I think Root was the closest I’ve gotten to rooting for “villain” & we never see much of her evil past. Loved Regina too, but didn’t finish ouat Bc I got mad at it (3/3)

Anon, you watched it too quickly! s4 already?? Ah, man, I wish I could watch s3 and s4 again for the first time. s3 especially, WHAT a season. Queens rise! The kiss! Torture and ice cream! Tether! The Scarback origins! Season three had something so dynamic and epic and well-balanced, it was genuinely a really well done season of TV. Remember that moment at the end of 3×09? Not to spoil so uh, where Pree’s Wayfaring Stranger cuts back in right as it’s happening? Yeah, that moment. >_> The direction and music and everything went so hand in hand, all season long.

Although, I did really love season 4 too. There was one ep in the middle of it I really disagreed with (and then another I kinda disagreed with right after) but they seemed to ease back on the characterization they were pushing. It’s amazing to me how even with as much of a setup season it was, trying to fight back to a status quo and not even make progress in the fight against the Lady, but just to a point where they could build from, it was still so good. Weird dynamics, evolving family, things that worked even when they shouldn’t have. Really, even though s4+5 were announced together and written at the same time, it’s s3+4 that fit so well together.

All right, okay, so it might have been a bit of an exaggeration when I said I don’t really root for bad guys, because once I thought about it, I like so many. Root, HG Wells in Warehouse 13, Eva in NCIS: NOLA. I actually have a pretty extensive list of villains in f/f ships, lol. I think what I meant by exception was that when it came to Delle Seyah vs Pawter, because our baddies usually do not directly KILL main characters, I was okay with instantly forgiving Delle Seyah? I stopped watching OUAT a few seasons in and I loved Regina and SQ, from the start, before her background was even revealed, but when it came to Regina vs Snow? I sided with Snow. I was pissed at Villanelle, the ultimate bad girl, for Bill. Until Eve basically gave permission to continue to like her being still as infatuated as ever.

And I think that’s how it usually works, I’ll go with the main characters. And here’s where my exception comes in because for the whole of season 3 things only got worse between the good guys and Delle Seyah + Aneela and I was somehow rooting for them all? Like, maybe they’ll make up when it comes down to it? (And they did!)

As you said, she did have things happening to her, Johnny shooting her, then she had Gander the way Villanelle post-Bill ep had Nadia’s boyfriend, antagonists so annoying you went back to rooting for a murderer. And she herself changes a bit, she helps Johnny, she helps Bea, she cares and suffers. Which is how Root and Regina and HG really won us over, right. We care about people by seeing them care for others and be cared for. Aneela was barely in season 4 but the way she was adored by her family and Delle Seyah, that did so much to endear her to us.

You’re right, everyone’s done something bad, but there’s a difference between–or maybe a scale of–redemption, between people like Dutch and D’av who feel guilty and terrible about what they did and then people like Delle Seyah, or NCIS: NOLA’s Eva, or…Star Trek: Discovery’s Terran!Georgiou. In Discovery, we like Michael and Ash because we see their struggles and progress, while Georgiou is like an asshole cat who we like for being an asshole cat. There are just different expectations and allowances for different characters? Even a little growth and empathy from those characters is such a huge win.

It’s because of their environment too, like, Georgiou from her hellish Terran universe, Delle Seyah growing up among the Qresh. Certain things are just accepted and expected, as you said, cruel things. Killjoys is definitely a gray kind of world as opposed to, say, Supergirl or OUAT, where morality is set up to define character worth and people are allowed to stray so much less.

Killing Eve goes all the way in the other direction. There’s a distance the narrative sets between us and the victims. A fair number of innocent people die in the first eps, but it’s not until she kills Bill that we’re mad, and even then, because of the way the main character handles it, we get over it. And then sometimes narrative distance is shrunk so we might not even like allies. Jeri Hogarth, on a gray show, sets my teeth on edge. I don’t like her, despite her being a lesbian and my massive childhood crush on CAM. The way she’s bad, the way the show doesn’t really ever soften her through Jessica or other characters, I can never like her.

Heh, this got a lot longer than I expected, but your asks provoked some really interesting dissection of what I like and don’t and why. After your previous ask I was afraid you might have given up on the show, I’m so glad you didn’t. Let me know how the rest of the viewing goes, if you want!

October 14, 2019October 19, 2019

October 14, 2019December 21, 2020

May 18, 2019

Do you remember the feeling you had when we watch juliantina for the first time? Their first kiss? Waiting for Mondays for the novela?

I do! I actually do vividly remember, probably in far more detail than you care to know, when I tried it for the first time–both times. Yepppp. Twice! The first time I got an ask about it, I did actually try it and at the time, it was just the not great wlext subs and it was of course the opening scene where Juls and Lupe walked past Val and Lucho arguing and I was like, hmm, maybe not.

It was a couple of WEEKS later that I tried again and I remember that day perfectly. It was at the very end of December, when a bunch of holidays string together and work is slow because so many people are out. And around this time every year, I binge through something I’ve been saving. In previous years it’d been Heartless and then Crownies + Janet King (the first season) and then Los Vecinos en Guerra. It’d just become something of a tradition to watch these very canon very satisfying f/f stories during that break.

This year, since New Year’s fell on a Tuesday, we didn’t get Monday off. So I was sitting there the Sunday before, trying to find something to do that wouldn’t take that long and then got the second ask about trying Juliantina and was like you know what, this actually could be perfect. I started the clips again, still wlext, though i would discover some hours later that zeroty had started their subbing, but by that point I’d already passed what they’d done.

I had no idea what those two were going to mean to me. I hadn’t seen any gifs, at the time it hadn’t really caught on in SM so I went in completely blind and god, how they gripped me! I was swept AWAY by the chemistry, by how natural their dynamic was, how romantic the slow burn ended up being. I remember wanting to gif so many things, millions of tiny little things as well as all the epic moments, but I just kept on watching. And then it was Monday and the show was back on again. I still would have started giffing from the beginning, but it was the Monday of the 41st ep, which as you might remember, hit a pretty significant milestone in their relationship.

Obviously I didn’t understand the dialogue, but immediately I knew the significance of them returning to the pool. You don’t do thematic callbacks for no reason. And then they stopped floating and stood up again, laughing and I was just soooo….aahhhhhhh.

Do you remember how long the buildup for that kiss was? How the laughter slowly drained away?

How Juls pulled back?

And it just went on forever

and ever! I didn’t even know if it’d happen or not, what with censorship at all. Would they get interrupted again?

Nope! This happened.

I wish I’d started watching earlier so I could have enjoyed the slow burn live, but I can’t help but love that was my intro to live viewing. Could you imagine not knowing this was coming?

Man, that show took over my life. You’re absolutely right, anon, we used to actually look forward to Mondays. Eesh! And the fandom energy! Whan experience it was.

The kind of blog I am now, this is far more representative of how I usually am, flitting from one show to the next, with perhaps Harlots, Killjoys, The Expanse, Killing Eve, and at one time, Corrie, The Rich Man’s Daughter, and, lol, The Mentalist, being the few exceptions. But Juliantina was in a class of its own. And I know it feels right now as if I’ve moved on, and I definitely don’t want to let down the people who’re still heavily invested and who send me asks and would still like gifs, I just…tend to focus on the most recent thing. With the most genuine of intentions, I’ll sit down to do something for Juliantina and wind up doing something else completely. At this point, I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep, but I really, really do hope to get through as many of the Juliantina asks and gifsets as I can, alternating them with newer media. So bear with me on that, guys. 🙂

May 9, 2019October 19, 2019

May 9, 2019December 21, 2020

We are getting there…

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