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Not sure if you are sitll keeping uo with Lovecraft Country but Euby abd Christina is so enthralling. I mean Christina is evil and up to absolutely no good but whatever she and Ruby have going on is so weird and messed up but also… I can’t look away?

Um. I get it, for sure, I see the gifsets and stuff, and they do look intense and interesting, stuff’s happening there, but I just can’t get over what the show did to two QWOC already. And as I’d said, right, at the time, however badly they were regarded then (and most people hardly seemed to care about the second), they’d be forgotten soon enough and they were. It just bothered me, how cavalierly it was handled. 

Separately from that, I just couldn’t get over how the characters were written, I honestly was starting to dislike all of them as people, they would be so selfish or self-righteous or hypocritical. I like to ship by really getting into the characters and in Christina’s case especially, she seems so weird and racist, I just wouldn’t be able to get into that. But hopefully it ends well for you all!

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why are you done with lovecraft country? too gore? ;/

Well, kinda, and some other things. Maybe the ask right after yours might help.

And another anon:

Lovecraft country really made Tic a whole ass war criminal. Executed a woman in cold blood. Had a gun to Ji-ah’s face and didn’t even remember it when he saw her days later. Tortured and killed her best friend. I hate this. The first three eps were So good then it all went to hell. They’re doing the same harmful tropes to indigenous and Asian characters that white narratives do. Think I’m done watching tbh.

I was saving this to try to arrange my thoughts but I should probably answer it before I forget them entirely. 

I can’t disagree, all that was there and disappointing, in addition to the handling of queerness and WOC three eps in a row, but to me that all’s a symptom of why I don’t want to watch: it’s far more about themes and messages and the plot for that particular ep than it is about the characters organically playing out a story. And that’s just not for me. In the first three eps I thought I could tolerate the distance but apparently it also means this real disregard for the characters. 

It wasn’t even this ep after which I thought that, it might have been 4 or 5, I remember being kind of puzzled and telling my friend, we know less and less about these characters, this far more a characters serving the plot than the plot serving the characters kind of show. But I still watched. And the gore and body horror was a LOT but I still watched after 5. But then 6 gave me the same unpleasant feeling I got watching The Terror s2, where it’s like, we’re already in a damn war, and only now focus on these people already suffering so much, this is the only context you wanna tell this story in? I ended up pausing the ep and looking up comments to see what happened and was like, I don’t even know why I’m watching this. I don’t know or really like these characters, however much I like the actors. I hear the next ep is big for Aunjanue Ellis so I might come back for it, and to see the aftermath of the William/Christina reveal, if we get one.

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I wasn’t expecting lovecraft country to stumble the way it did the last few mins of this ep. Everything about the intro of the two-spirit character to the last scene felt so disrespectful… I’m hoping they fix it next ep, or at least acknowledge how they visited the same genocidal colonizing violence the white ppl did, but even if they ~teach a lesson~ or whatever it’s really shitty they used indigenous/two-spirit ppl like that.

Yeah, I was shocked, since so much of this show is explicitly about awareness of this kind of thing. Even if it was deliberate to show that Black people can be on both sides of colonizer violence and even if that’s actually acknowledged on screen instead of them focusing on the plot, the end result is still this person violently killed and then no longer on the show. I make a big deal about representation coming from actually being visible and in front of us because otherwise, it’s inevitable that no matter how much sympathy we had in this ep, by next week and then onward, we’ll have moved on. It is simply how this works. It won’t even be like George, who lives on by people still remembering and mentioning him, who will mourn Yahima?

And my other concern was like, the focus on the genitals. Honestly, I haven’t even been fully comfortable with the nudity level for Tic, I’m sure they have their reasons and the actors are comfortable with it and maybe it’s like, to take control or make it more matter of fact and less salacious, but it just feels like if certain people are oversexualized by so much of society still, is it really worth showing these kinds of shots? I know it’s HBO and they show women all the time but that’s kind of my point, I don’t love that either. 

Maybe they will reverse it, even if the actor only has this one IMDB entry for the show, that could be to avoid spoilers. But…I don’t have lots of faith in that. And we will move on.

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What is lovecraft country about?

It’s a scifi show, set in the US in the ‘50s and since it mostly focuses on a set of Black characters, there’s a whole lot of racism they deal with amid the scifi. It’s based on a set of connected short stories so while it’s the same characters and it’s all the same continuity, each episode starts and finishes its own complete and very packed arc.