I Love Soulmates But Also This-

I love soulmates but also this-

I remember reading a post about fencing once, and how people who are new to fencing actually tend to win a lot more bouts, particularly against experienced fencers, than most people would guess. The reason? Because people who are new to fencing haven't learned all the rules yet, and they will make absolutely bonkers, unsafe, and chaotic choices that are just not possible for someone more experienced to predict with any reasonable degree of accuracy. So lots of newbies win a surprising number of bouts, not because they are better at fencing but because they are more chaotic and more likely to make objectively more dangerous choices.

It occurs to me now that this makes for a really wonderful analogy to how Oliver ends up "winning" in Saltburn, when Felix and the Cattons were actually much more experienced and subtle manipulators (to the point that a good chunk of the audience didn't even notice how wildly manipulative the Cattons and Felix especially are), while Oliver is out there making wild impulse decisions and then retroactively pretending there was a plan, probably.

Oliver is the chaotic new guy whose understanding of normal social expectations is so far behind his peers that his behavior winds up being not just hard to predict for most people, but especially hard to predict for the wealthy assholes who have made an art form out of manipulating other people to get whatever they want without giving up anything of value from themselves.

And now I'm going to go roll around some more in my endless reams of delight over this movie and these characters and how wonderful and delightful and absurd every bit of it is. Haters can hate, but this movie continues to be perfect and own my whole heart because of it.

i don't fundamentally disagree with the notion of, like, not praising people for doing the absolute bare minimum. however, i am very much opposed to its common usage as an excuse to treat people poorly under the presumption that they probably deserve it, then deflect any criticism for doing so. ie. making a rude comment about a cishet person under the assumption that they're bigoted, being informed that said cishet person is actually an ally, and then angrily responding "so, what, am i supposed to reward them for the bare minimum???" no, buddy, you're supposed to not be mean to people just because you incorrectly assume that they would be mean to you if given the chance. showing ppl basic human decency is not a "reward", it's like. more of a basic right.