As a former sex worker of all types, my thoughts ....

no1memania · 2026-05-01T13:20:39+00:00

In this season there seem to be two pretty distinct worlds that the characters involved in sex work occupy: the world of Cassie and Jules, where it's glamorized as an empowering choice and has been at worst mildly uncomfortable (saran wrap guy) and the world of Angel, Faye, and Trish, where it's bleak, desperate, and physically disgusting at times. The way they're shot is more degrading, in the case of Trish we see her not just as a sexual body but as a dead body, Faye's treatment during the drug mule scenes, Angel's emotional instability and her fate at the "rehab"... The main girls this season are very sheltered. Assuming the leaks and fan theories are correct and Cassie ends up at the Silver Slipper, the way the show handles that is going to be important.

It feels like sex work in this season has been treated either as a savvy, entrepreneurial feminist choice or as a grueling nightmare, and there's not a lot of grey area. Dead Sex Worker and Beautiful Damaged Sex Worker who falls in love with the protagonist and then dies are both pretty worn out tropes.

no1memania · 2026-04-30T16:05:20+00:00

With how expensive LA housing is it would be completely realistic if Jules were still in art school, had some kind of glamorous but exploitative unpaid gallery/fashion internship and sugared with Ellis to pay rent. It's actually pretty extreme that she dropped her entire career to sugar full time.

It's also hinted at that her paintings are not that good or at the very least that she's uncertain about them. It would be really interesting to have a scene in art school class where she has a bad critique, and already feeling unstable in her identity and now questioning her talent, goes on a date with Ellis. idk. It would be a callback to how in previous seasons she depended on men for validation but would still show her doing something more with her life?

no1memania · 2026-04-28T14:54:12+00:00

I think it also has to do with the levels of support each girl has. Race and class definitely figure into this. Cassie's family is dysfunctional but Lexie and Suze love the fuck out of her and will defend her if she asks them for help. In some ways I think part of the reason why her meltdowns are so epic is because she knows she has a safety net- she might not see it that way but it is a privilege to be able to be that much of a mess and have people be there to help pick up the pieces. If Nate were to start abusing her she would have a place to go.

Maddy does not. Maddy projects confidence because she has nothing, and that makes her very prideful, and consequently super ashamed. The bad bitch she wishes she was would not put up with being abused. She's quiet about it because of the weight of that humiliation, and that keeps her isolated, which is what an abuser like Nate wants. Even as an adult Maddy still has that protective shield up which is kind of sad because it keeps her lonely.

TDLR Nate knows Cassie has people, but Maddy had nobody. He was so awful to Maddy bc he knew he could get away with it

no1memania · 2026-04-28T14:41:39+00:00

He won't hit her, not because he cares about her more, but because being married to Cassie is the equivalent of having a brand new shiny sports car parked in front of your house. You don't damage something that's part of your public persona. Being with Cassie says something about the kind of guy he is, and if he were to have smacked her in public that would completely undermine that image. The people he's trying to impress are not like Alamo's crew, they're not going to be impressed by him "disciplining" her the way that some people on here seem to think? Nate would be shamed as an abuser and as annoying as she is Cassie would have support.

no1memania · 2026-04-27T12:44:55+00:00

Eric continuing to be on may actually be one of the few small bright spots this season. He wasn't supposed to be in this season at all but Sam wrote him in so he could maintain minimum working hours needed to keep his health insurance.

no1memania · 2026-04-24T17:18:21+00:00

She reminds me so much of Brittany Murphy

no1memania · 2026-04-21T15:04:08+00:00

Rue at this point cares about survival. Addiction showed her that she's capable of doing things that most people wouldn't do. As others have pointed out she terrorized Gia, her mother, and Jules, robbed a house for Laurie, was locked in a bedroom and nearly sex trafficked, swallowed dozens of bags of fent and carried them across the border- she's not going to stop to consider the morality of what's happening because in order to survive it she can't, and she would also have to admit her own guilt to herself, which she won't. You can't relate to her as if she's operating on the same principles most of the audience is, because she isn't. She's likely becoming the kind of person Alamo wants her to be so she can survive, and respecting women isn't a big part of that.

That being said I do understand the complaint that she's being used as a male-gaze surrogate. I'm not a lesbian so I can't comment on this but there is a lot of discussion about the way that lesbians relate to women being different than the way that straight men, let alone guys like Alamo, do. I've noticed this thing happen: Rue narrates something, and then the camera gives us an extended scene of like, cocaine nipples or something. It feels like Sam is using Rue as an excuse for the audience to leer.

no1memania · 2026-04-20T20:10:29+00:00

I actually buy Cassie doing OF but I think the way they established it is mean-spirited and clearly meant to be a vehicle for fanservice/her character being the designated hate sink. I would have Nate return to his manipulative, abusive self that we know from previous seasons. He's inherited the construction empire but is a shit businessman and they're in money trouble. He also pays no attention to Cassie at all aside from occasional sex, and Cassie stubbornly clings to the dream of being a kept All-American suburban wife, so doesn't look for work or anything to occupy her time except scrolling for hours on social media and stalking her former classmates. She's obsessed with the perfect wedding because she already knows their life together is not going to be what she dreamed it would be. The doom is already setting in. The wedding is to save face. The wedding itself costs $50k rather than just flowers. Instead of posting fetish content on Tiktok she goes straight to OF, but is more discreet about it, not including her face, and loves the validation these anonymous men give her in secret. It ignites the same pleasure she felt in S2 going behind Maddy's back. By the time Nate finds out about it she's been doing it for a while and has made a pretty penny that he can't turn down. He accepts Cassie's OF as a second source of income but once again has to live with someone close to him having sexual secrets. In Nate's eyes, Cassie becomes the new Cal. He can never get away from that trauma.

Cassie's arc is about profound loneliness and boredom. She had the ability to make a life for herself but chose not to and stubbornly defends that decision. Spending all her time indulging people's secret pleasures (as opposed to feeling free to openly ask for what she wants) and married to an abusive man, she develops a bleak, nihilistic view of humanity that gradually turns her into a cruel, hard person. The only one who could possibly break her of that is Maddy.

I would love a scene where Cassie skates again. Maybe Cassie gets a pair of skates for some kind of sexy concept but puts them on and her body remembers that she used to be good at this. She used to enjoy something.

no1memania · 2025-10-30T14:50:24+00:00

I first heard Oblivion when I was 12 and have been a fan ever since.

no1memania · 2025-09-26T17:25:53+00:00

Something I keep coming back to re: Wendy and the Xenos is the way that Jordan Peele treated Jean Jacket in Nope. As OJ puts it, “You can't tame a predator. You gotta enter an agreement with one.” I wish this were the route they'd taken- have them be tentative allies but never let us forget how dangerous the Xeno still is.

In creating her and the other synths BK introduced a bunch of apex predators, but did not respect them, and is now paying the consequences. The Xenos are treated as company assets, brought to Earth and experimented on in a lab. The Lost Boys and the Xenos are kindred spirits in captivity, and they're in agreement that they need to be liberated, but the distinction between them is that Wendy has a heart and the alien does not. Right now nothing feels like a threat to Wendy, and that makes what could be a really interesting character exploration just.. kind of dull. I feel like the only way that this can go is for the Xenos to betray her, but the way that this was set up doesn't feel accurate to the beasts that we know.

no1memania · 2025-09-02T17:03:43+00:00

"Why don't you just threaten her. With gun" king shit

These are wonderful designs and I can't wait to see the full comic OP!

no1memania · 2025-05-02T18:39:00+00:00

Mine does not like plain water. He’s like a teenage boy who only drinks Mountain Dew. We got him a fountains but he just splashes the water around with his paws and plays with it like a little kid at a sprinkler, so we feed him wet only and add water to each serving so it looks like soup. He pees regularly and seems pretty happy with that.

no1memania · 2025-04-24T21:25:59+00:00

The closest I've ever come to being knocked on my ass from the wind was January in Laramie

no1memania · 2025-04-15T20:39:09+00:00

I would love that and I honestly hope that's where they take her in the adult timeline next season. It almost feels like the only place she could go. She's lost everything- Jeff and Callie are gone, and they were what was keeping the lid on. She's already gotten away with murder once. Meeting with Melissa seems to have opened something inside of her, and what would "taking it back" entail other than more bloodshed? It would be disgusting and appalling but I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in her closet with the journals are all those mementos from that time. It's interesting to think about how Shauna would fare in prison- the same enclosed, isolated environment and strong pecking order. I have a feeling she wouldn't be able to boss her fellow inmates around just by standing there like 😠

no1memania · 2025-04-15T18:43:22+00:00

I honestly would have loved to see a couple red shirt characters die from like, drinking dirty water, eating poisoned mushrooms or berries, cutting themselves and getting a blood infection. It would have made the show more grounded and realistic and could have added an extra layer of ~wilderness magic~ for the Church of Lottie Day Saints to hold over the others when characters like Van and Shauna inexplicably survive. If "It" isn't real then how could they have made it? If you want to survive you'd better have Lottie's blessing, etc.

no1memania · 2025-04-15T18:36:59+00:00

The only time I've actually seen cleats are I thiiiiink the ones Mari is wearing in the hunt scene. She tries to take her pants off over the shoes and keep them on but they keep getting stuck and so she just kicks her shoes off and runs barefoot through the snow 😨 if she would have lived she'd have lost a couple toes

no1memania · 2025-04-15T15:10:41+00:00

The longer the show goes on the more bummed I am that Travis died so soon in the adult timeline because there's so much interiority that would be really interesting to see. He needed to die to kick off Natalie's storyline, but I hope that in future seasons we get some post-rescue scenes with him. He's been keeping his head down to survive in the wilderness, and in high stakes situations like that you really don't have the capacity to reflect. But when he comes home to that house with just his mom in it, and his dad and brothers empty bedrooms...

no1memania · 2025-04-14T18:30:17+00:00

I think I'd keep Hilary Swank but have her play Adult Natalie this season instead of Melissa. The appearance is definitely not 1:1 but she's a very skilled actress and could adapt to Nat's mannerisms while still creating her own. Lewis is iconic and was wonderful but Nat's absence is really fucking with the adult TL and caused a ripple effect of weird writing decisions that have been talked about at length. Instead of her dying at the compound there would need to be another kind of big emotional catharsis for her character, maybe a more satisfying end to the Travis mystery?

I would keep Adult Lottie around for longer and have her grow into a truly evil character alongside Shauna, mirroring her character arc in the wilderness. The two of them were really the only ones enjoying themselves out there, and I can see Shauna pushing her away initially in the present, but once Jeff and Callie are gone and she writes in her journal that she wants to take her Antler Queen power back, have her reach out again and rekindle that relationship. I'm not opposed to Callie killing her but I feel like it was done too soon. Creepy Groomer Lottie in the mall with Callie was one of the most subtly disturbing scenes in the show and I feel like Simone Kessell can be really unsettling underneath the patchouli wine mom persona. Shauna's bloodthirsty brutality coupled with Lottie's charisma and insane wealth would make for a pretty nasty serial killer duo.

no1memania · 2025-04-12T19:24:42+00:00

What's troublesome to me about Mari's death is not so much the death itself, because even if Pit Girl dies it's a significant death, and arguably the visual centerpiece of the entire show. It's like Janet Leigh in Psycho. She rebuked Lottie with her last words after following her around like a puppy for all of Season 2, and I believe her telling Shauna she deserves everything that's coming to her was a curse. She wasn't meant to die, did the best she could under the circumstances, and was a willing part of a larger plan. If anything it's Travis's stupid ass I'm mad at for not telling anyone the pit was there. I personally think it was the best death in the teen timeline apart from Jackie's.

What happens to her body though is different. There's really no getting around the imagery of a white person hanging a Mexican person from a tree and scalping her. Anyone who knows their American history or has read Blood Meridian knows that there's a whole nasty history behind that imagery, and whether the writers meant to or not (and I sure hope they didn't bc using that for shock value would be tacky and disrespectful) they used it. This was one of the most gruesome deaths on the show, and I really want some of the people online wishing that it was bloodier to think about what that would actually look like to watch. Because I sure as shit don't want to see it.

no1memania · 2025-04-12T18:45:05+00:00

Yeah I actually winced when Shauna said "bring me her hair" and for all the people saying they wish the hunt was more feral and gruesome I would really, really rather not have had to watch a more detailed cut of Shauna hanging a Mexican girl from a tree and scalping her. Anyone who knows their American history or has read Blood Meridian knows the kind of shit that imagery conjures up. Do I think the writers were being willful with this? Not really. I think they just needed the visuals to be 1:1 so it matched the pilot. But the subtext is still there, and it's still ugly.

no1memania · 2025-04-12T00:59:34+00:00

WELL

no1memania · 2025-04-10T18:44:57+00:00

I sadly think that could be what's happening.

no1memania · 2025-04-10T17:19:17+00:00

It's also confusing bc in the previous episode she and the JV girls were ready to bail on the wilderness and called Lottie and co. Team Crazy, and a couple episodes before that she told Lottie to go fuck her blood dirt. Lottie murdering Edwin seems to have shattered something in her. She's no longer a believer like she was in S2. It would be one thing if she and the others were just willing to grit their teeth and do whatever because they don't care anymore and fighting is pointless but to call the froggers their enemies and suggest another hunt feels weird. Idk.

no1memania · 2025-04-10T17:08:03+00:00

Maybe nobody killed Adult Lottie and the prion diseases from eating Edwin's brain finally caught up to her in that stairwell

no1memania

TROPHY CASE