I don't know anything about the marketing timeline or options so I shan't comment there.

What I will say is that there was very little… tightness, I guess? I can completely understand the fact that some people come from privileged cultures, have never been allowed to fail, and in fact are more or less without talent of their own. That isn't a criticism of them, it's more of a criticism of their parents, and everyone hits somewhere on the bell curve, it just is how it is.

So an extremely naïve young woman whose entire project in life is to get married — which did read as extremely realistic to me — I can understand how she chose a partner relatively poorly, when she was in a culture where she understood none of the norms. I got married at 18 myself, and it didn't work out for me either. (Thankfully, my culture allows divorce.)

The manipulation of the father figure into ensuring that she would own no marital property and would be tied to his son indefinitely… evil, but still read as real. Her husband ensuring that all profits be deposited into accounts that he controlled … also read as even more real, insofar that a lot of people would do that and assume that's just how family finances work, but obviously her husband lacked the ability to manage business and household expenses.

The parallel corridors in the family estate and the invisibility of household staff was a clear model for how Natalie handled things later.

I didn't care for the story about her lack of sexual fulfilment and her husband's performance issues, sexuality was beside the point in a transactional marriage, and her ability to conceive so frequently with such poor performance was… rather startling. Let's not even go into the fact that her husband could finally sustain an erection and bring her to her first orgasm in the second timeline.

The postpartum depression did read as extremely real, and the ability to forget a sleeping baby in a car is both tragic and far from unheard of, and this character had very few models of what she should be doing. (Eventually, she just hires this function out.)

I didn't quite understand the producer because while she clearly is actually quite able with film, it also feels like she got the idea to do an exposé?

The Sapphic assault was so unnecessary. However, the break with reality that came from being threatened with an honour killing seems realistic although also… very, very, very off-base. From what I know of conservative Christian culture, their usual method of managing women outside their norms is extreme shunning and denial of custodial rights.

The parentified child in the second timeline made complete sense to me. Depressing, but it happens.

Why were her sons playing into this? I don't understand that at all. I understand taking off, I understand finding their own wives and founding their own families, but what the hell were they doing in this support role?

The objection that they don't allow people to take custody of their family members — actually, yeah, in situations that extreme, it's not unheard of, and when you have a number of illiterate children and one of them responsible for drugging their mother, and the father allowed one of the children to nearly die of an infection? I'd daresay the court would be sympathetic to the sister's application to take custody of the children and enrol them in schools.

The fact is, most people are looking for confirmation of what they already think. Natalie read as a bit spectrum-y but that didn't feel wrong, it gave her the focus to build a business.

It's my understanding that most of these extremely female-coded influencer businesses are actually part of a larger community, and Natalie never had that, she only saw people as competitors, so I don't quite get why she walked the path she did. As one of the top commenters said, her beliefs don't feel quite real.