Whenever I can’t work out if someone is aussie, kiwi or kings Russian, I assume they’re south African 🤷🏻‍♀️

Nor Australian and NZ despite the fact that one has huge extended diphthongs and the other has tight clipped vowels that actually sound like a different vowel that is intended. Eg. Noouuu vs. Nu for No.

I’m an aussie living in the US and whenever I hear aussie tourists on the street I cringe. I get the shit end of both sticks now because yanks think I’m super Australian and aussies think I talk like a yank. Guess I’m a hyphenate after 12 years.

In my area, you can’t legally comp alcohol. It’s against the law. I imagine that’s why?

Shandy, to me, is a milestone marker to show us how much Keeley has grown, and how she must make sacrifices to keep doing so, baptizing the old self by fire.

Before Ted’s arrival as the catalyst for growth, she believed that she belonged to that archetype of a model who is vapid and all about the money and the fame, dating players and putting up with poor emotional wellbeing in order to remain part of that world, in which she believes she belongs.

When Shandy comes along, Keeley is feeling insecure about her ability to execute her vision, and Shandy shows knowledge in the area, which reverts Keeley to glorifying that lifestyle/the echo of her former self and letting that back into her new life.

She quickly knows that it feels wrong, but she still doesn’t quite want to let go of the person she was, so she keeps her around and tries to help the mirror of her old self grow to fit the person she has become.

It is not until she is faced with the reality that “the old her” is not something she can or wants to return to/let drive her anymore, and that she will be dragged down if she keeps trying, that she takes the step of cutting ties with her reservations and her ideas about her old self rooted in nostalgia.

For this, her instincts are immediately confirmed by Shandy’s outburst. Just as your brain and body fight back with manipulation when you try to get clean, Shandy does the same and puts Keeley through a kick to detatch from her old self and move forward with the new.

As for Jack… While I appreciate that Jack was an allegorical representation of the way wolves come in all kinds of clothing; I do think it was a bit crappy to make the only character foray into a queer relationship that gets any kind of real screen time, part of the evil lesbian trope.

For someone like Keeley who has already had relationships with men who hurt her badly, it would have been really nice to see her find real stable love with a woman who shared her ambition and interests, along with truly valuing her for who she is and not seeing her strength as a threat. We only had a couple of queer characters and only saw a sliver of Colin’s relationship, while Trent’s were never aired, so it just doesn’t feel good to make the only lesbian character a Slytherin where there was otherwise an opportunity to show Keeley growing as a direct result of her openness to being someone she doesn’t quite know yet, and benefiting from her belief in her own heart’s ability to guide her.

Had she not kicked the boys out in the last episode, this would have been far more queerbaity than I could manage.

I think a storyline where Jack is a man with a very similar storyline, who hurts Keeley the same way, but then has a daughter who she falls for and ends up with, dividing the two sides of that character and giving her the opportunity to choose between the relationships she knows (including the one with herself), and the ones that she needs, would have been far stronger and not fallen into Hollywood tropes about queer women where it is just a phase and the bisexual woman can’t end up in a queer relationship long term.

In fact, the gayness in the show feels performative in a lot of ways. We have little insight into any healthy, ongoing queer relationships, and it would have been great to address the fact that sports and queerness have always coexisted and what that really looks like, outside of the brief and fairly stereotypical insights we received. Hell, it would have been pretty cool to see Sassy and Keeley develop a romantic relationship; that kinda feels like a match made in heaven.

Sorry, end rant. You just got me thinking a lot about these side characters and what they represent! It definitely feeds bi erasure when bisexual women’s queer relationships are consistently undermined in media, where those relationships must be followed up with the woman in question going back to men. Keeley was an opportunity to subvert that trope, particularly after so much of her growth came from developing connections with other women, but instead they fell into it, face first.

This one absolutely destroyed me. Keeley has most of the best lines, due in part to her delivery stealing the show. Such an amazing feat next to actors of such caliber with this writing!