chocolatepot | siiiiick

At last I have fallen to covid. :( On Wednesday afternoon I started feeling crappy, so I tested, and for the first time it was positive. Had a very bad evening and eventually had to take nyquil to get to sleep because I was so congested and had such aches in my back and shoulders. But I've been much better since then! Blowing my nose a lot and so on. At first I was very upset about the end of my vacation being covided, but I've come to realize that it's basically no different from how these days would have gone without covid except that I would have gone to the coffeeshop and/or Boba Yaga and spent more money, so.

I watched The Banshees of Inisherin and I decided early on that because it's a movie entirely about the relationship between two men, I should interpret the whole thing as about unspoken romantic love, and honestly? It makes more sense than anything else. The basic story is: Colm suddenly decides to cut Padraic off because he's depressed and wants to write fiddle music to last through the ages, and he feels Padraic is a distraction. Padraic refuses to accept that their friendship is over and keeps pestering him. Colm says if Padraic doesn't stop, he's going to start cutting his own fingers off; Padraic doesn't stop and Colm cuts his fingers off. Padraic's donkey dies choking on one of the fingers, so Padraic burns Colm's house down. Colm tries to mend things by asking if they're even and Padraic says they'd only be even if Colm had died in the fire. The end.

So, right??? Colm's depression is inspired in large part by his knowledge of his desire for Padraic (he's shown going to confession, so we can reasonably assume a level of religiosity that would make this depressing to him), while Padraic is unaware of why it hurts him so much to have Colm drop him, he just knows that it's excruciating and that he can't simply accede to his wishes. Colm cuts off his fingers, sabotaging the very thing that is supposedly fueling this split, because he hopes that Padraic loves him enough to stay away to prevent him from having to go through on his threat, and when Padraic won't stay away he self-mutilates as a form of punishment for his own love.

The fanfiction writes itself.

Started reading Ocean's Echo by Everina Maxwell. (It's not a sequel to Winter's Orbit or even in the same universe, but it's the same genre/type - space opera with tropey gay romance.) Loving it. The deuteragonists are essentially Gen and Costis, but like a version of TT!Gen? Anyway, extremely cunning guy and extremely good-hearted guy, cunning guy coming up with plans to get around good guy and good guy being noble and trying to help cunning guy, neither of them being able to quite get the other. And they're being forced into an arranged soulbond. I'd love it if Maxwell would apply her trope genius to f/f at some point but this is still excellent.