it doesn’t matter how many “pretend to be dating” fics i read, i’m always fucking in it headfirst every time and i fall for that shit every time. i know the pattern i know the plot twists i know what’s gonna happen but every single fucking time i’m fucking on the edge of my seat wide-eyed whispering like “what’s gonna happen are they gonna fall in love” to myself like of course they are you fucking idiot this happens EVERY TIME but as soon as i see the description and it’s like “x person and x person pretend to do the dating” it’s eternal sunshine of the stupidest fucking mind over here
steven is a really funny character actually. he never went to school. one of his powers is astral projection for no real reason. hes a musical prodigy. he was so traumatized by the end of the show they had to make an entire epilogue series about it. he spent seven years looking like a 3rd grader. he was even bisexual
he went to the center of the earth. he saved the world in flip flops. he broke his bones every day and didnt even notice. he killed someone
he didn’t have a bellybutton. he actively chose to eat super crispy bits of potato that got left in the deep fryer. he lived in a house but his dad lived in a car within walking distance of his house. he could revive people from the dead. all of his clothes were concert merchandise. he had an outdoor washing machine. he was put on trial for murder. he broke both federal and state child labor laws
The murder he was on trial for was different than the murder he committed
The murder he went on trial for was a murder his mom committed. The victim of the murder was also his mom.
using a multiverse as a narrative framework to tell an immigrant story really is THE best possible implementation of this concept. like the idea that every time you make a decision in your life a different branching universe splits off where you chose differently, while obviously broadly universal because of course everyone wonders what if (what if i had chosen differently, what would my life look like then), really does hit such a specific core question that is imo fundamental to the immigrant experience
all the time my parents talk about imagining what lives they might have lived if they had chosen differently, if they had never left home, if they had never come here, if they had not raised their daughter in a world and a culture so utterly foreign to their own where she might make her own choices that are painfully incomprehensible to them. it’s all tied up with a sense of grief and loss and regret and almost existential melancholy, not necessarily because they think they chose wrong specifically, not because they think they’d actually choose differently if they had a chance to do it over again, but merely because that choice is such a monumental one and the enormity of it and the ripples it would end up causing are only obvious in retrospect. you make the choice to uproot your life and move to a different world, a different universe, and once you cross that bridge you can never go back. you can never truly go home again. and when we do go back to visit, we see in their old friends and classmates and relatives funhouse versions of ourselves, people we might have been but never were and never will be.
every immigrant story is a ghost story and the ghosts that haunt you are all the people you left behind including yourself—versions of yourself, of your family, of your children, of the people that are you but that you are not, lives that you recognize but are not yours. immigrant stories are ghost stories are multiverse stories and in multiverse stories all of your ghosts inhabit your body simultaneously, everyone who came before you and after you and everyone you left behind, everything that is and everything that never was… it really is everything everywhere all at once i am going to scream
jobu tupaki is such an effective way of depicting that specific depression of being in your 20s and knowing you can do anything but also knowing that knowing that means any decision you make cuts you off from an infinite number of possible realities… like every step forward also feels like a step in the wrong direction because it technically is when you’re juggling every potential consequence at once and it narrows your life down to just a matter of surviving and trying to focus on the few things that don’t make you feel like a failure and you start to see the loss of will to really live as the inevitable result to your own unstoppable loss of potential. and of course being a gay child of immigrants makes it even easier for joy to feel like there’s no future she can pursue where everything turns out okay enough to have made the effort worth it. and then contrasting that with evelyn’s reality that she is the version of herself where every decision has been the wrong one that has led her away from doing anything remarkable with her life but it’s still a life where trying is worth something, as long as she can still find people to love and things to fight for… yeah
