Top of the Lake
I have been writing a post about Top of the Lake for literally like 4 years. FOUR YEARS. I keep writing drafts and never finishing them, because it all just feels so enormous and too much and I need like an entire day to get all my thoughts in order.
But, it's happening today friends. IT'S HAPPENING TODAY. SO HELP ME, THERE WILL BE A POST. It will be cobbled together from different drafts I've started over the years, but IT WILL EXIST.
So, below are my thoughts, which were written a few years ago, before I'd seen Mad Max: Fury Road, before Jessica Jones, before Wonder Woman.
Anyway, this post is still not even a fraction of the thoughts I have in my head about this show, BUT. We are doing this. THIS POST IS GETTING POSTED.
*
Well, there's now not one, but two versions of Broadchurch (both starring David Tennant!) and I still haven't gotten around to the show that, to me, is the far more subversive, far more interesting, far richer and more beautiful original version of what has now become a multi-season franchise.
I haven't been able to write about Top of the Lake until now because my talents do not lie in talking about the things I find overwhelmingly amazing. I had to wait such a long time for the edges to fade, for this show to settle in my head and become digestible (this is after multiple viewings, because of course I rewatched parts of it ad nauseum) and analyzable and describable.
The non spoilery version is this: Robin (Elizabeth Moss) is a detective who comes back to her small town in New Zealand to visit with her gravely ill mother. At the same time a 12 year old girl in the town is discovered to be pregnant. Robin is called in, because of her big city specialist training, to help interview the girl - however the girl claims she remembers nothing, and Robin ends up leading the investigation into what happened. To unravel this mystery Robin will have to face old friends and enemies, the local gang, police corruption and the secrets of her own family.
If you, like me, are utterly bored by detective stories and mysteries, let me attempt another pitch: Top of the Lake is probably the greatest story I've ever seen about a heroine who is flawed and competent and human, who's allowed to unravel, whose power is never undermined even when she's as low as she's ever going to get, even when the odds are insurmountable. Robin is a heroine you root for when, like Buffy, she has nothing left but herself, her body, her wits. She's someone you root for while you recognize her blind spots, her privileges, her biases. Robin is someone who always, always comes through. Stripped down to the bone she rises, like Lazarus, unstoppable in her passion, her moral duty to do right by the marginalized, her incredible strength.
The amazing thing about Top of the Lake is that it's about a girl who loses everything, but never loses herself. It's about trauma, it's about survival, it's about revenge, it's about justice, it's about compassion and love and forgiveness, it's about asking the ugly questions about ourselves and being uncomfortable and trying as hard as you can to be the best person you can be. It's about trying to make sure no one has to suffer the way you've suffered.
And of course - Jane Campion is an amazing director, and stepping into her world for 7 episodes was like suddenly finding myself in an alternative universe where complex, challenging visual stories are told for me, as a woman. Where the male gaze is not even a distant memory.
Here's one last way of putting it: Robin and Leslie Knope (of Parks and Rec) are two extremes on the same continuum. Leslie is Robin in a light-hearted, brightly lit comedy - Robin is Leslie in a graphic, gritty detective story. Robin is the grown up version of Veronica Mars. The settings, the moods, the tropes are different but the women are the same - beacons of resilience, fortitude, open-eyed optimism, competence, who are the heroes rather than the victims of their narratives.
ROBIN. ROBIN ROBIN ROBIN.
Let's try and do The Things I Love About This Show by sections:
1. Robin's unraveling. Every inch of it, every bit, every second. Yes, it's complete and utter bullshit that Campion gave her female lead a rape backstory, just like a lot of the writing/plotting on this show is bullshit, but as long as she did it, my god. MY GOD. It was just... breathtaking.
Robin moving into her dad's cabin, not far from where he drowned. Robin getting a bottle of vodka and drinking all of it, alone on the beach, after listening to her mother die via voice mail. Robin finding out her biological father is the murderer and rapist she's been hunting all this time, that this paternity means she has to let go of the one good thing in her life - her boyfriend, who is now her half-brother. Robin going into a bar full of drunken men, seeking out the man who raped her years ago, getting steadily more drunk and furious and violent, picking at her past like a scab, pushing and prodding it until it bleeds again.
If I had to pick a favorite scene that would probably be it - Johno dragging Robin out of the bar, tossing her into the water, literally cooling down her anger, sobering her up, pulling her back from the brink. The thing I love about that scene is that Johno isn't saving Robin from a room of angry, drunk men who might rape or kill her - he's saving the men from Robin. Who has training, who knows what she's doing, who stabs one of them with a dart and then smashes a bottle to cut another one's throat. Tiny Robin who has to be dragged away not because she might get hurt but because she's being self destructive. She's using her power the wrong way. She's frustrated - so, so frustrated - because she can't get the bad guys the right way, the legal way, with her detective skills and her badge, so she goes into the bar and starts picking fights.
Johno is saving her from being a vigilante, from taking the easy way out, from doing something she'll regret the next morning. And the arc of the story is that, unlike Batman or Daredevil, Robin is good enough, strong enough, smart enough to get the bad guys the right way, the legal way, without resorting to this bullshit.
I just. There are many, many, many stories about women brought low, about women going through terrible things, but those stories are rarely the origin stories of heroes. Mostly only men are allowed transformative trauma, transformative loss. But Robin is the hero of this piece even with blood on her knees, even at her weakest, most deluded, most vulnerable moments. Even Robin's past rape is about dismantling rape culture, not about casting Robin as a sympathetic victim.
2. Johno. In a show that is about so many serious things - class, gender, rape culture, terminal illness - Johno is just a bright spot there to pleasure the female audience. He is the epitome of what it must be like to watch media as a straight dude. Serious, heavy drama peppered with hot young things only there for your viewing pleasure. I love that he's a hot young guy who falls head over heels with Robin, I love that he's utterly devoted to her, I love that unlike everyone else in her life he never betrays her and never hurts her, no matter how vulnerable she allows herself to be. I love that when we're introduced to him he literally spends his time sexually servicing the older women of his community who might need some sexual cheering up. I love that he also has a tragic backstory but that it never overwhelms Robin's, that he never becomes a real protagonist, just the side character there to give pleasure and comfort.
And aside from the narrative meta reasons to love Johno, I love him because of what he represents in the story as well. I love that he's the model of non-toxic masculinity in a story where all the male leads are violent assholes. I love that Top of the Lake isn't just about how all men are horrible - no. Men who've ingested and internalized toxic masculinity are horrible, men like Johno are actually really great.
And of course I love, LOVE, that what it took to get Johno to where he is - what it took to bleed all the horrible sexist shit out of him - was to literally break him into little pieces and build him up again from scratch. Johno spends his life living with his dad and his brothers, in a pretty abusive, toxic environment - an environment that drives away women - and then he goes to a foreign country where he's nothing to anyone, and they put him in a hole for 7 years, and everything in him that seeks to control, hurt, push down other people slowly dies in the darkness.
And the only parts left of him when he's done are the kind parts, the supportive parts, the parts that just want to be happy. Johno pays for that adventure with the total loss of his ego, with an inability to tolerate conflict (I love that he literally lives in the woods because he can't really handle human society anymore, that he flees at the merest hint of violence - Robin is used to pushing, mistakes him for someone healthy and strong, but when she prods him he just folds, every time. Johno isn't Robin, he can't take any more badness, any more cruelty. When he offers himself he offers himself fully, and when people try to hurt him he runs).
Basically, I love that Johno isn't positioned as a cautionary tale. This fucking show basically uses him as a positive example - the only way to get men who've inhaled toxic masculinity their whole lives off the addictive cocktail of power and violence is to stick them in a small, dark place for a few years until every part of them that feels superior to others, that feels entitled to anything, dies. I don't have to agree with Campion on this being the best method (I also think she means it in parody and jest), but goddamn it is beautiful to see a piece of media portray this idea in a complex way.
3. I love the way this show handles class, and especially how it ties class in with Robin's biases and privilege. The entire crux of this show, as a mystery, lies on the scars that rape culture has left on Robin, and the particular blind spots it's encouraged. The fact that sexual harassment in a white-collar workplace is seen as more benign and less scary than encountering a large, drunk, unfriendly man from a working class background in the middle of the night.
I love that Robin is an amazing detective, she's great under stress, she's great with a gun, she's practiced and competent, she specifically specializes in helping child victims, she's always a few steps ahead of her colleagues, but she doesn't see the vast difference between herself, a middle class girl, and the poorer residents of her hometown. She feels like her past trauma, her status as a rape victim, gives her insight into everyone's misfortune. But it doesn't. No matter what she's been through, she'll always be the carefree rich girl to some of the people she keeps trying to help. She'll never understand how they live, who they trust and why, what they do and don't accept, and they'll always see her as the girl who went away to uni, went away to Australia, and now wants to pretend she's just like them.
4. I suppose we must talk about The Older Women. I didn't love everything Campion did with the storyline of a bunch of 40+ year old women setting up a commune nearby, but I loved a lot of it, and it's always interesting to me that that's the only major element adaptations like Broadchurch drop entirely. I think having older women around should be a new metric of feminist storytelling. What does it mean, in a mystery story about women, to have a space where older women receive the youngsters - everyone from little girls to 30-somethings - and counsel them, comfort them, shake them, turn them away. It's such a gorgeous, wonderful element.
And of course, the casual nudity of older women, the humor, the companionship. Not all of it worked for me, but having this group of women who are mothers and grandmothers and mentors, who are still figuring it out themselves, who don't have their shit together, who seek recompense from the world for the years patriarchy stole from them, all of that was wonderful. The space this plot occupied in the meta narrative of the show was so great.
Especially affecting was, to me, the moment where Robin finally shows up at the women's commune - at Paradise - bruised and broken and hollow, and it's Holly Hunter telling her the truth she needs to hear. Not "it's alright honey, you'll be fine", no, but "this is where your ego and your self-involvement gets you." And it's not a statement that addresses Robin as a young woman trying to do good in the world, it addresses Robin's privilege, her blind spots, that in her quest for justice Robin's forgotten to be self-critical. It's just such an amazing, nuanced moment that wouldn't have worked in any other configuration.
5. The ultimate arc of the mystery, predictable and cliche though it may be, ultimately worked for me, because of how careful and insidious it was in showing the white collar monster who's overlooked for the working class ruffian. In particular I loved how in retrospect (in watching the show a second and third time) you realize how targeted and precise the villain's campaign to derail Robin was, how precisely it was meant to hit at her sore spots.
So much of what he does relies on gaslighting and subtly triggering past trauma. The fact that he hits on her even though in reality he has no interest in her whatsoever, just to make her feel unsafe. The way he positions himself as the enlightened, overall decent cop in a department of sexists. The way his character is a play on the idea that women should just suck it up and deal with mild workplace harassment, and not make a fuss, because men just don't know better sometimes, and you have to have a thick skin. The way this show takes that mild harassment and shows it as a cover for a the worst evil that exists in the show's universe, I JUST. GOD.
The scene where Robin wakes up in his house, after he drugs her (but tells her she just had too much wine), wakes up in his bed, with him casually letting her know he stripped her naked after she passed out. On the hand, how SUBTLE that is of him, how brilliantly calculated to fuck with her head, make her feel profoundly unsafe and unsettled, how it's a surgical strike against someone he knows is a rape victim.
And on the other hand, the fact that Robin doesn't see it a GIANT RED FUCKING FLAG. That with all of her instructs, all of her history, everything she knows and has been through, she still doesn't stop and say - this dude is definitely lying, he definitely drugged me, and I have to find out why, he's clearly hiding something major.
Look, I'm sure people who actually like detective stories could analyze whether this is good or bad plotting. But since I don't give a crap about detective stories - the COMMENTARY in that tiny plot point is STUNNING and so layered and nuanced and brilliant, and I just can't.
Alright, and now things I liked less:
6. I'm not from New Zealand or Australia, but in my extremely limited knowledge of both places, it seemed unfortunate that this show focused so heavily on white women. Tui's mom, who we see once and then disappears completely (granted there's also Robin's randomly mentioned brother, but it's different because this show doesn't lack for white men), the fact that if non-white women exist in the older women's commune, I don't think any of them have speaking roles? Tui herself who is... I understand that this show is fundamentally about women who are survivors of violence and trauma and how they rescue themselves and thrive in spite of it, but the context for showing a girl like Tui being the victim of child sexual assault is... different than it is for someone like Robin.
At least in my limited understanding of the context in that part of the world. Like, I love that Tui got a voice, that she was complicated, that she wasn't just a victim and created her own narrative as much as Robin did, but. When she's the only East Asian woman with a significant speaking role on screen, giving her this backstory seems... very iffy.
Like, basically, I love this show DEEPLY (SO SO DEEPLY) but it's also unfortunate that there's so much media lately that's SO GREAT at giving white women new stories and new narratives and letting them be new kinds of heroes, but the same hasn't really been the case for any other races/ethnicities.
*
And now an addendum written by today!me:
Top of the Lake is the spiritual mother of so many modern shows, and I'm so happy (SO SO HAPPY) that I get to place it a broader than ever tapestry of women heroes of all kinds.
comments on Dreamwidth
But, it's happening today friends. IT'S HAPPENING TODAY. SO HELP ME, THERE WILL BE A POST. It will be cobbled together from different drafts I've started over the years, but IT WILL EXIST.
So, below are my thoughts, which were written a few years ago, before I'd seen Mad Max: Fury Road, before Jessica Jones, before Wonder Woman.
Anyway, this post is still not even a fraction of the thoughts I have in my head about this show, BUT. We are doing this. THIS POST IS GETTING POSTED.
*
Well, there's now not one, but two versions of Broadchurch (both starring David Tennant!) and I still haven't gotten around to the show that, to me, is the far more subversive, far more interesting, far richer and more beautiful original version of what has now become a multi-season franchise.
I haven't been able to write about Top of the Lake until now because my talents do not lie in talking about the things I find overwhelmingly amazing. I had to wait such a long time for the edges to fade, for this show to settle in my head and become digestible (this is after multiple viewings, because of course I rewatched parts of it ad nauseum) and analyzable and describable.
The non spoilery version is this: Robin (Elizabeth Moss) is a detective who comes back to her small town in New Zealand to visit with her gravely ill mother. At the same time a 12 year old girl in the town is discovered to be pregnant. Robin is called in, because of her big city specialist training, to help interview the girl - however the girl claims she remembers nothing, and Robin ends up leading the investigation into what happened. To unravel this mystery Robin will have to face old friends and enemies, the local gang, police corruption and the secrets of her own family.
If you, like me, are utterly bored by detective stories and mysteries, let me attempt another pitch: Top of the Lake is probably the greatest story I've ever seen about a heroine who is flawed and competent and human, who's allowed to unravel, whose power is never undermined even when she's as low as she's ever going to get, even when the odds are insurmountable. Robin is a heroine you root for when, like Buffy, she has nothing left but herself, her body, her wits. She's someone you root for while you recognize her blind spots, her privileges, her biases. Robin is someone who always, always comes through. Stripped down to the bone she rises, like Lazarus, unstoppable in her passion, her moral duty to do right by the marginalized, her incredible strength.
The amazing thing about Top of the Lake is that it's about a girl who loses everything, but never loses herself. It's about trauma, it's about survival, it's about revenge, it's about justice, it's about compassion and love and forgiveness, it's about asking the ugly questions about ourselves and being uncomfortable and trying as hard as you can to be the best person you can be. It's about trying to make sure no one has to suffer the way you've suffered.
And of course - Jane Campion is an amazing director, and stepping into her world for 7 episodes was like suddenly finding myself in an alternative universe where complex, challenging visual stories are told for me, as a woman. Where the male gaze is not even a distant memory.
Here's one last way of putting it: Robin and Leslie Knope (of Parks and Rec) are two extremes on the same continuum. Leslie is Robin in a light-hearted, brightly lit comedy - Robin is Leslie in a graphic, gritty detective story. Robin is the grown up version of Veronica Mars. The settings, the moods, the tropes are different but the women are the same - beacons of resilience, fortitude, open-eyed optimism, competence, who are the heroes rather than the victims of their narratives.
ROBIN. ROBIN ROBIN ROBIN.
Let's try and do The Things I Love About This Show by sections:
1. Robin's unraveling. Every inch of it, every bit, every second. Yes, it's complete and utter bullshit that Campion gave her female lead a rape backstory, just like a lot of the writing/plotting on this show is bullshit, but as long as she did it, my god. MY GOD. It was just... breathtaking.
Robin moving into her dad's cabin, not far from where he drowned. Robin getting a bottle of vodka and drinking all of it, alone on the beach, after listening to her mother die via voice mail. Robin finding out her biological father is the murderer and rapist she's been hunting all this time, that this paternity means she has to let go of the one good thing in her life - her boyfriend, who is now her half-brother. Robin going into a bar full of drunken men, seeking out the man who raped her years ago, getting steadily more drunk and furious and violent, picking at her past like a scab, pushing and prodding it until it bleeds again.
If I had to pick a favorite scene that would probably be it - Johno dragging Robin out of the bar, tossing her into the water, literally cooling down her anger, sobering her up, pulling her back from the brink. The thing I love about that scene is that Johno isn't saving Robin from a room of angry, drunk men who might rape or kill her - he's saving the men from Robin. Who has training, who knows what she's doing, who stabs one of them with a dart and then smashes a bottle to cut another one's throat. Tiny Robin who has to be dragged away not because she might get hurt but because she's being self destructive. She's using her power the wrong way. She's frustrated - so, so frustrated - because she can't get the bad guys the right way, the legal way, with her detective skills and her badge, so she goes into the bar and starts picking fights.
Johno is saving her from being a vigilante, from taking the easy way out, from doing something she'll regret the next morning. And the arc of the story is that, unlike Batman or Daredevil, Robin is good enough, strong enough, smart enough to get the bad guys the right way, the legal way, without resorting to this bullshit.
I just. There are many, many, many stories about women brought low, about women going through terrible things, but those stories are rarely the origin stories of heroes. Mostly only men are allowed transformative trauma, transformative loss. But Robin is the hero of this piece even with blood on her knees, even at her weakest, most deluded, most vulnerable moments. Even Robin's past rape is about dismantling rape culture, not about casting Robin as a sympathetic victim.
2. Johno. In a show that is about so many serious things - class, gender, rape culture, terminal illness - Johno is just a bright spot there to pleasure the female audience. He is the epitome of what it must be like to watch media as a straight dude. Serious, heavy drama peppered with hot young things only there for your viewing pleasure. I love that he's a hot young guy who falls head over heels with Robin, I love that he's utterly devoted to her, I love that unlike everyone else in her life he never betrays her and never hurts her, no matter how vulnerable she allows herself to be. I love that when we're introduced to him he literally spends his time sexually servicing the older women of his community who might need some sexual cheering up. I love that he also has a tragic backstory but that it never overwhelms Robin's, that he never becomes a real protagonist, just the side character there to give pleasure and comfort.
And aside from the narrative meta reasons to love Johno, I love him because of what he represents in the story as well. I love that he's the model of non-toxic masculinity in a story where all the male leads are violent assholes. I love that Top of the Lake isn't just about how all men are horrible - no. Men who've ingested and internalized toxic masculinity are horrible, men like Johno are actually really great.
And of course I love, LOVE, that what it took to get Johno to where he is - what it took to bleed all the horrible sexist shit out of him - was to literally break him into little pieces and build him up again from scratch. Johno spends his life living with his dad and his brothers, in a pretty abusive, toxic environment - an environment that drives away women - and then he goes to a foreign country where he's nothing to anyone, and they put him in a hole for 7 years, and everything in him that seeks to control, hurt, push down other people slowly dies in the darkness.
And the only parts left of him when he's done are the kind parts, the supportive parts, the parts that just want to be happy. Johno pays for that adventure with the total loss of his ego, with an inability to tolerate conflict (I love that he literally lives in the woods because he can't really handle human society anymore, that he flees at the merest hint of violence - Robin is used to pushing, mistakes him for someone healthy and strong, but when she prods him he just folds, every time. Johno isn't Robin, he can't take any more badness, any more cruelty. When he offers himself he offers himself fully, and when people try to hurt him he runs).
Basically, I love that Johno isn't positioned as a cautionary tale. This fucking show basically uses him as a positive example - the only way to get men who've inhaled toxic masculinity their whole lives off the addictive cocktail of power and violence is to stick them in a small, dark place for a few years until every part of them that feels superior to others, that feels entitled to anything, dies. I don't have to agree with Campion on this being the best method (I also think she means it in parody and jest), but goddamn it is beautiful to see a piece of media portray this idea in a complex way.
3. I love the way this show handles class, and especially how it ties class in with Robin's biases and privilege. The entire crux of this show, as a mystery, lies on the scars that rape culture has left on Robin, and the particular blind spots it's encouraged. The fact that sexual harassment in a white-collar workplace is seen as more benign and less scary than encountering a large, drunk, unfriendly man from a working class background in the middle of the night.
I love that Robin is an amazing detective, she's great under stress, she's great with a gun, she's practiced and competent, she specifically specializes in helping child victims, she's always a few steps ahead of her colleagues, but she doesn't see the vast difference between herself, a middle class girl, and the poorer residents of her hometown. She feels like her past trauma, her status as a rape victim, gives her insight into everyone's misfortune. But it doesn't. No matter what she's been through, she'll always be the carefree rich girl to some of the people she keeps trying to help. She'll never understand how they live, who they trust and why, what they do and don't accept, and they'll always see her as the girl who went away to uni, went away to Australia, and now wants to pretend she's just like them.
4. I suppose we must talk about The Older Women. I didn't love everything Campion did with the storyline of a bunch of 40+ year old women setting up a commune nearby, but I loved a lot of it, and it's always interesting to me that that's the only major element adaptations like Broadchurch drop entirely. I think having older women around should be a new metric of feminist storytelling. What does it mean, in a mystery story about women, to have a space where older women receive the youngsters - everyone from little girls to 30-somethings - and counsel them, comfort them, shake them, turn them away. It's such a gorgeous, wonderful element.
And of course, the casual nudity of older women, the humor, the companionship. Not all of it worked for me, but having this group of women who are mothers and grandmothers and mentors, who are still figuring it out themselves, who don't have their shit together, who seek recompense from the world for the years patriarchy stole from them, all of that was wonderful. The space this plot occupied in the meta narrative of the show was so great.
Especially affecting was, to me, the moment where Robin finally shows up at the women's commune - at Paradise - bruised and broken and hollow, and it's Holly Hunter telling her the truth she needs to hear. Not "it's alright honey, you'll be fine", no, but "this is where your ego and your self-involvement gets you." And it's not a statement that addresses Robin as a young woman trying to do good in the world, it addresses Robin's privilege, her blind spots, that in her quest for justice Robin's forgotten to be self-critical. It's just such an amazing, nuanced moment that wouldn't have worked in any other configuration.
5. The ultimate arc of the mystery, predictable and cliche though it may be, ultimately worked for me, because of how careful and insidious it was in showing the white collar monster who's overlooked for the working class ruffian. In particular I loved how in retrospect (in watching the show a second and third time) you realize how targeted and precise the villain's campaign to derail Robin was, how precisely it was meant to hit at her sore spots.
So much of what he does relies on gaslighting and subtly triggering past trauma. The fact that he hits on her even though in reality he has no interest in her whatsoever, just to make her feel unsafe. The way he positions himself as the enlightened, overall decent cop in a department of sexists. The way his character is a play on the idea that women should just suck it up and deal with mild workplace harassment, and not make a fuss, because men just don't know better sometimes, and you have to have a thick skin. The way this show takes that mild harassment and shows it as a cover for a the worst evil that exists in the show's universe, I JUST. GOD.
The scene where Robin wakes up in his house, after he drugs her (but tells her she just had too much wine), wakes up in his bed, with him casually letting her know he stripped her naked after she passed out. On the hand, how SUBTLE that is of him, how brilliantly calculated to fuck with her head, make her feel profoundly unsafe and unsettled, how it's a surgical strike against someone he knows is a rape victim.
And on the other hand, the fact that Robin doesn't see it a GIANT RED FUCKING FLAG. That with all of her instructs, all of her history, everything she knows and has been through, she still doesn't stop and say - this dude is definitely lying, he definitely drugged me, and I have to find out why, he's clearly hiding something major.
Look, I'm sure people who actually like detective stories could analyze whether this is good or bad plotting. But since I don't give a crap about detective stories - the COMMENTARY in that tiny plot point is STUNNING and so layered and nuanced and brilliant, and I just can't.
Alright, and now things I liked less:
6. I'm not from New Zealand or Australia, but in my extremely limited knowledge of both places, it seemed unfortunate that this show focused so heavily on white women. Tui's mom, who we see once and then disappears completely (granted there's also Robin's randomly mentioned brother, but it's different because this show doesn't lack for white men), the fact that if non-white women exist in the older women's commune, I don't think any of them have speaking roles? Tui herself who is... I understand that this show is fundamentally about women who are survivors of violence and trauma and how they rescue themselves and thrive in spite of it, but the context for showing a girl like Tui being the victim of child sexual assault is... different than it is for someone like Robin.
At least in my limited understanding of the context in that part of the world. Like, I love that Tui got a voice, that she was complicated, that she wasn't just a victim and created her own narrative as much as Robin did, but. When she's the only East Asian woman with a significant speaking role on screen, giving her this backstory seems... very iffy.
Like, basically, I love this show DEEPLY (SO SO DEEPLY) but it's also unfortunate that there's so much media lately that's SO GREAT at giving white women new stories and new narratives and letting them be new kinds of heroes, but the same hasn't really been the case for any other races/ethnicities.
*
And now an addendum written by today!me:
Top of the Lake is the spiritual mother of so many modern shows, and I'm so happy (SO SO HAPPY) that I get to place it a broader than ever tapestry of women heroes of all kinds.
comments on Dreamwidth