Normal People

was puting off pulling my thoughts together on this but i’m starting before sunrise rn so i figured i ought not get behind on my organizational habits. UHHHHHHHHHH this got me good. i can’t believe i waited to long but i guess aftersun put over the edge and now im downright addicted to sad paul mescal. his performances are just perfect and this show requiring so much from him in particular i just can’t stop thinking about how talented he is. daisy edgar jones is terrific too, especially at selling how marryanes actual self looks so different at these different stages of her life—where connell seems to have stages less so and more of a creeping growth. either way they both have pulled off a master class in taking over my headspace for the 3 days it took me to finish these 12 episodes. and that’s not even mentioning sally rooney!! hoooooooly shit this is soooo well fucking written. the scene when they’re talking to eachother at the party may be my favourite all time dialogue at least that i can think of and it almost blends in with how consistently stellar the combination is. the sex seems like it’s the big seller for this story, as the thing it focuses on heavily that other such rom-drams don’t do so much and it nailed that tooooo,, it’s such a bait and switch where the show starts with this forbidden love thing that kind of makes you think it’s going to be some kind of somewhat tropey story (still great tropey tho) but then the rest of the show is the character and their sex lives reacting and revolving form that initial secret sexcapade— a particularly good detail in that arch is how it comes out that no one around them cared that they were fucking and they mostly all knew— kinda making it clear that the pain and excitement in that situation mostly just came from the characters insecurities and not the outside world like they were blaming it on (esspecially connell obviously but kind of both of them). all that steam in the beginning is so much more dramatic and high paced than the rest of the show i would say the pacing lags a bit in the middle — also the drabness of the whole thing, although i get what they were going at, doesn’t really do it for me. there’s just so much more i could say so i’ll stop but god, paul mescal