u/New-acid3882

Since season 3 aired I read a lot of posts about Nate. How the way he was in season 3 didn't make sense, and the shared opinion that Nate is a violent psychopath and abuser, deprived of emotions, barely human. So, I don't think the majority of people actually understand his character or even try to understand him.

Nate suffered a severe trauma at a young age, it wasn't just a funny incident, and his entire personality is built around that trauma, but people don't seem to understand this kind of trauma. I've written this before, I'll write it again: children exposed to porn suffer from a trauma very similar to a sexual trauma, as if they were assaulted, and develop PTSD. The fact that in that porn was his father can only aggravates everything. In fact his worst and recurring nightmare was his father assaulting him. So his trauma symptoms, like his uncontrolled anger, his conflation of sex and violence, his antisocial behavior, and his controlling tendencies are in fact symptoms. This doesn't justify what he does, but it helps understand the character, because he's not a monster and he's still a kid when he does the worst things, and psychopath is no longer a legitimate mental health category.

That said it makes perfect sense that he's different in season 3, because all of his problems stemmed from his father and he managed to deal with him, when he called the cops and then when he got closer to him again after all the mess. Being at peace with his father is a significant and huge change for him, that it's going to have an impact on those symptoms. To that add the fact that he's living his fantasy of being a family man like his dream in season 2, without his father being present. In other words he's different because things have changed for him, and he's "trying to be good", he wants for everything to work, yet it's not even entirely ok, like he still has antisocial behaviours like systematically lying and he's still controlling, but on the front of violence and anger he evidently made progress, because his father was the source of his anger. Do you see how it makes sense?

Instead of taking out the "it's bad writing" card, have you considered all the facts concerning Nate from all 3 seasons, without any bias, to be actually making a point? Nate wishing for the perfect family is also a consequence of his trauma. What does it mean that he doesn't actually know how to fully achieve that?

A passionate rant. If you read it, thank you.

By chance, apparently, both shows, Margo Has Money Troubles and Euphoria, aired at the same time, and here in this sub many started comparing them because both touched upon sex work and OnlyFans. The general opinion was that Margo managed to tell a more complex story about sex work, while Euphoria degenerated into exploiting its actresses' bodies, it was male gazey etc. So I decided to watch Margo, and now that I’ve finished it, I swear I can't understand how anyone can think it doesn't glamorize sex work, that it doesn't simplify the discussion around it, and, again, that it doesn't portray it as empowering.

It does all these things, and in a pretty obvious way too.

The show wants to talk about whorephobia, but it is itself whorephobic at its core. And the writing is truly mediocre compared to Euphoria's.

Why do I say it's whorephobic? Because while it pretends to want to talk about sex work, it completely trivializes it, giving such a sanitized image of it that it ends up being absolutely counterproductive. For instance, Margo’s friends and colleagues, who are supposed to be, right? credible and important characters, since they are the only other sex workers besides Margo, and not just billboards for OnlyFans. Anyway, the two of them declare, with the force of truth and great carelessness, that all sex work is art, accusing Margo of whorephobia because she had just confessed that if she absolutely had to end up showing her genitals, it had to be something artistic. To me, it seems incredibly simplistic, unrealistic, and it also feels like something someone who wants to virtue signal would say. I’m not saying sex work cannot be creative, definitely online sex work can, but replying to someone saying “I don’t do porn, I make Art” with “All sex work is Art” (and the whole conversation they have in that scene) is absurd to me, and the paradox is that it ends up creating whorephobia. It doesn't help to understand what sex work is, nor does it erase the stigma. It is a way of representing sex work in a totally distorted way, and of glamorizing it.

I mean, this show represented reviewing dicks as fun… sure, it might even be fun the first time you do it, but the fourth, the fifth, and so on?

Anyway, I don't want to talk only about Margo obviously, otherwise I'd end up off-topic. I want to talk about the difference between Cassie and Margo.

First of all, clearly Margo, due to what her story is, is definitely an easier character to empathize with. And no shit, who in the audience is going to judge a young single mother who opens an OnlyFans? Very few people.

Cassie, on the other hand, is a different story. You have to force yourself to empathize with her. And precisely this should be the goal of good writing: to involve you intimately, to make you question your values. Not to make you shed a few cheap tears, and make you go Awww every now and then.

The argument that annoyed me the most was the one talking about Cassie and Euphoria as fetish content, and Margo as a proper representation of sex work. What do you think Margo is doing dressing up as an alien who sometimes acts like a child and other times becomes a giantess?

And apparently what holds this argument up is that Cassie’s stuff is shot for the Male Gaze. But no one actually stopped to notice that Cassie is filmed from two points of view: the first is the content she creates and the second is how she creates it. Margo, instead, is never filmed from the point of view of the actual content that goes on OnlyFans, we only see it from afar and in passing. Plus the fact that the dicks are censored. And so the perception changes completely. Especially when that little bit of OnlyFans we do see is then replaced by TikTok. Showing the content does not equate to pleasing the Male Gaze, if it is contextualized by everything concerning the character at that moment. This is what Euphoria does with Cassie, so we get the right perception of what she does: the level of exposure of her own body that it entails and the physical effort come through big time, then the comic-absurdist tone of the opening montage in the fifth episode highlights all the absurdity of the things Cassie now has to do to make a living. And the voiceover communicates Cassie’s thoughts to us. Then, I’m saying this because I know it will be “pointed out” later: the boobs pressed against the glass. Cassie’s giantess sequence is both an exploration of Cassie’s feelings as a sex worker in the form of a metaphor, and a satire of the parasociality of digital sex work. Margo's sequence represents her debut on TikTok.
Which anyway, as it happens, Margo goes viral with a dance… what were the chances? And virality has nothing to do with the quality of the content or the effort put into it. And just like that, Margo gets the followers. Cassie, instead, has to risk snorting laced coke, hit on some guy, and work from morning till night, constantly producing content and handling the mail. Obviously, Margo “doesn't want” 50,000 followers, but that changes very little.

Then the structure of the stories is somewhat similar, because for Margo her whole adventure is a coming of age, for Cassie the same theme is present in the first part of her story.

Margo fulfills herself with the “debut” of her vagina. And I’m not joking, because, yes, she won the lawsuit etc., but the final scene is the meaningful and definitive moment that sees her triumphing. If that isn't an empowering representation, I don't know what is.

For Cassie too, at the beginning, sex work is not just a way to earn money, but to fulfill herself, not creatively, but more intimately. But in the end, it ends up becoming a burden. Cassie doesn't get what she wants. Now the point isn't that one cannot fulfill oneself with sex work under the right circumstances, it's that it is still not a job like any other, not because exploitation dynamics are uniquely its own, but because the degree of vulnerability it requires, how much of your persona you have to expose, is not the same as other jobs. And it presents so many scenarios that a generalization like Margo's is absolutely inadequate.

I could write more, but I think I want to stop here.

So yes, in essence, I think Euphoria did a great job with the representation of sex work. And this comparison with Margo confirmed it for me.

So, I wanted to get some opinions about Alamo, Rue and the DEA.

When exactly does Alamo find out that Rue is an informant? I know the general consensus is that Maddy is the one who 'snitches' to him, but that wouldn't make any sense. Until yesterday, I thought Bishop figured it out because he checked Rue’s phone, but then a Redditor commented that Bishop actually takes Rue’s phone because they were basically kidnapping her, and that makes sense. Rewatching the scene, Rue hands her phone to Bishop without unlocking it, and judging by his movements, it doesn't look like he’s checking it. Plus, he never gives it back, and they later use that same phone to call Faye while Rue is still buried up to her neck.

Why does it make no sense for Alamo to find out through Maddy? Because by that point, he had already put the ambulance-swap plan into motion, since Bishop had already left (considering he is nowhere to be found in Episode 7), and Big Eddy had already left too. The swap only makes sense if he already knows that Laurie and the others are getting busted. On top of that, he even plants a dead rat in the ambulance that the DEA opens.

So, when exactly do you think he finds out?

And please, don't just write that it doesn't make sense because of bad writing or things like that, I’m looking for some serious analysis here.