Filing An Emotional Distress Claim Against Earl Carpenter's Phantom For:

By request, a Gary Mauer final-lair kiss. With Marie Danvers in 2006.

It's over now, the music of the night. Laird Mackintosh, April 16, 2023. [X]

An Essay on Why David Shannon and Gina Beck Are My Favorite Final Lair Coupling

They are just absolutely brilliant together. And I think it's a combination of bouncing off each other's spontaneous reactions well, but also having a plan and complete synergy in how they understand their characters and the arc of the scene. It all works together to secure the Phantom's transformation and redemption while also leaving the audience feeling like Christine made the right decision, which is such a hard line to walk in the final lair.

I think Gina's Christine genuinely loves Erik in this one, but there was absolutely no way she was going to stay with him after everything he'd done. The decision is questionable for other Christines, but her particular take on the character just wasn't going to allow for that, especially given his Phantom's more aggressive approach to the final lair.

And unlike other interpretations of this scene, both she and David/the Phantom know that and it plays out in their body language post-kiss. Up to that point, David had literally been grabbing Christine at will and throwing her all over the place, all while desperately denying that his actions were dooming their relationship. And now she comes back to return the ring and he literally can't make himself touch her because he knows he's pissed away every claim to that kind of intimacy with her. There's no verbal or physical bid for her to stay; that unfulfilled caress says "I recognize what I've done and that I have no right to ask you to be with me, so I'm letting you go." And even worse is the fact that David also plays Erik with chronic pain, so we can hardly tell if the face twitch/wince he does is literal or figurative (let's just say it's both).

GIVE THEM A DAMN OSCAR, IDC.

Phantom Acting Choices that Live in My Head Rent Free

Kevin Gray touching his face while Christine sings "pitiful creature of darkness."

The point in MOTN when Laird Mackintosh and Earl Carpenter's Phantoms walk up on Christine hesitantly so the segue into "turn your face away" is just them chickening out.

The way Gary Mauer yells "NO!" in the angel before crashing out on "you will curse the day."

Davis Gaines's deliberate hand movements during the kiss and "Christine I love you." And the way he sobs and falls to the floor without it reading melodramatic. (Davis Gaines as a whole, tbh.)

When Erik and Christine lock eyes for a hot minute after the kiss. (Killian Donnelly/Lucy St. Louis and Hugh Panaro/Mary Michael Patterson are so good at this.)

The unique way Dean Chisnall sings "save me" during PONR/AIAOY reprise like his voice is breaking a little.

David Shannon wants to touch Christine's face so badly but just can't bring himself to do it.

I've been thinking a lot about the relationship between gothic romance, melodrama, and fanfiction (mostly Re: POTO) and how they've been shunted into the category of "women's media." Like women and queer folks have been writing their desires into media for centuries and being told that such desires--the excess, the sensationalism/sensuality, the emotional transcendence--are not "realistic" and only good for aesthetic consumption in its place.

But then you look at the general endurance of "women's media" through time...and the fact that even in a capitalistic world obsessed with monetization and the "hyper-real," there are whole fandoms/online communities where authors are writing fanfics with hundreds of thousands of hits for FREE and where third spaces and alternative economies based on trading and sharing have taken shape around the very same desires deemed "unrealistic"....

Idk where I was going with that, but someone gets the point. Is it that queer and feminine desire are "silly," or do they imagine other ways of living and relating to each other, our bodies, our emotions that certain power structures want us to think is impossible?

“I have touched you, heard you, felt the comfort of your presence–the sweetness of your consolation: I cannot give up these joys. I have little left in myself–I must have you. The world may laugh–may call me absurd, selfish–but it does not signify. My very soul demands you: it will be satisfied: or it will take deadly vengeance on its frame.”

— Edward Rochester (Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte) 

David Thaxton's Phantom is a special kind of unhinged and...amazing?

Slowly starting to discover Phantoms 2018-present as I build my mini archive. He and Killian Donnelly (but also maybe Dean Chisnall?) are carrying the post-Panaro era on their backs.

The hug!!🥹

Video from here.

The chandelier rises one last time.