esse, you wanted to talk about Roswell? This would be the place.

I haven't watched the show at all but that dance video is pretty delightful. I am just tickled by the thought that they hired a fight choreographer and then said "you can do musical numbers? Oh we are so using that!"

Oh right. I mentally conflate Freeform and The CW all the time. They definitely make similar products.

Dana! There was a threesome! They did that! And there was all the queerness!

I did not expect it, my bar is low, and yet o how I was rewarded.

Yeah, this is where being on Tumblr, which was mostly fun up until that point, kind of ruined things for me. The episode leaked early, and people immediately started with the drama, and there's a significant portion of the fandom that believes Maria and/or Michael sexually assaulted Alex.

Which makes me upset in a few different ways, not least of which is that I should have been able to totally enjoy what happened, and instead it was just kind of queasy.

However, plot- and relationship-wise, it's pretty fucking cool. I think Forrest is kind of terrible, but Michael and Maria are adorable, and I know the show is working on having Michael and Alex grow to the point where they can be in a healthy relationship with each other.

Aw, f'n tumblr. I have very little RNW content in my Tumblr feed, really just gifsets, and that's about how I like it.

WRT Alex -- what the fuck what the fuck what the *fuck*. I mean, I get it that people are like that. I am not at all surprised by that. But it was such a loving experience, love on a number of different levels, that I call complete bullshit on anything else. It was a healing threesome! Alex started to legitimately move on! And not just from Michael, but from his own shame and internalized homophobia and his long-term closet space too.

Heaven knows that if they'd wanted to keep the OT3 going I would have been super there for it, but you're exactly right, Michael and Alex need to grow up, separately and together, and could really do with being friends for a good stretch of time.

I am also not sold on Forrest, but honestly, he is exactly the kind of dude Alex would have had a college relationship with, had he gone to a lib arts school instead of the Air Force. It feels very on point for that relationship to happen, as Alex lets himself be himself, and the kind of delayed young adulthood folks -- especially gay cis men -- who come out of the closet a little bit later so often experience.

Honestly RNW is appointment television now, which is so hilarious to me, because I was very side-eye at the whole idea of a reboot. Once the season's over I'm pretty sure I'll go back and watch from 1x01 all the way through season two to see how it feels as a meta-narrative.

I have managed to convince myself not to try and read the books like I attempted once back in high school. I wish the fic was just a litttttttle bit further along, fandom wise, to engage with all the worldbuilding and mythology and not just the OTP(s).

Yeah, about Alex: It really pisses me off and frankly makes me feel like they're diminishing the idea of actual sexual assault, but it's not really anything I have actual standing to get into. And not the kind of conversation that will go well on any level. But honestly, they could not have made it clearer that Alex was consenting.

I understand if people are protective of one of the few gay characters on TV, and if they feel like this is a betrayal of his sexuality, but it was all just really ugly. Let alone the usual racism and misogyny that's inevitable.

So far the theme of season 2 seems to be DNA. The details of the alien biology, but also with a really strong theme of motherhood and genetics running through it. Rosa and her addiction problems, the truth behind what happened to Michael's mother, the revelation that Maria's grandmother was experimented on and is passing that on to her descendants. Plus, Max basically altering Rosa's DNA.

remind me, what is RNW?

Roswell, New Mexico. CW reboot of the old Roswell show, currently airing second season.

Ah yes. I know of it, I was just confusing it with PNW for some reason.

Dana, I completely agree. For folx my age and younger, sexuality has fallen more on a spectrum than a binary; your identity as a gay or queer or lesbian person doesn't 1:1 to your choices of sexual partners, especially as gender identity becomes increasingly more fluid as well. That whole scene felt very true to my lived experience, and very healing and loving. People suck.

I think you're right about DNA and motherhood, but definitely an emphasis on motherhood as an act of continuing a generation -- Isobel's choice to terminate her pregnancy, all the flashbacks to Michael's mom (maybe the Evans' twins mom too?) really are digging in more to those idea. The whole thing where Noah's heart could somehow magically (alienly?) be transplanted to Max's body, as if there was no risk of rejection much less the necessity of the homebrewed pacemaker Michael whipped up -- it hints at things about the alien DNA that I think we're starting to see play out with Rosa, and her manifestation of powers.

I'm guessing you know where this is going vis a vis the books, but just in case here's spoiler text: The whole thing with the three of them being clones in the books sort of drills down even harder into the idea of the importance of DNA -- their DNA as reincarnations(ish) of three significant Altaran leaders, and how important it was to protect their re-cloned bodies in the pods, is the underlying factor in the DNA story. It suggests more largely, since we're seeing other Altaran characters so early in this version of the series, that cloning to reincarnate/maintain immortality was a regular thing, at least for some strata of society.

It'll be interesting to see how it plays out. I don't love Michael coding Maria's psychic thing as a disease -- not only because she herself chose to move away from than language about her own body, but because it's a side effect of some unknown procedure that is sufficiently mutated to pass down through three generations of a matrilineal line. That kind of thing isn't easily "fixed", and I don't think "fixed" is the right perspective at all. This is going to bite him in the ass and, I'm betting now, be the catalyst for fucking up their relationship. (Bless his heart.)

Last week's episode was weird as hell. I'm super curious about this week's ep.