Every Time I Watch Saltburn, I Swear I Cannot Tell That The Eggs Oliver Is Served During That First Breakfast

Every time I watch Saltburn, I swear I cannot tell that the eggs Oliver is served during that first breakfast are even cooked. Other people have said the eggs are sunny-side-up, though, so I'll assume that's correct.

It still means that Oliver was served the wrong eggs. He asked for over easy, which the eggs he got were definitely not. The whites were still clear on top, which is both a different taste and a different texture than over easy eggs.

It also means that the Cattons' personal cook(s) not only made Oliver the wrong eggs, but that Duncan then brought those eggs out to Oliver with no comment.

The Cattons are absolutely rich enough to hire cooks who know the difference between sunny-side-up eggs and over easy eggs, though. Even if the cook messed it up, Duncan as the family's Butler should have caught it before the plate reached the table.

I've seen people interpret this scene as Oliver making an early power play with the staff, seeing if he can get away with ordering eggs and then sending it back, but that only works if he was given the right eggs in the first place.

He wasn't.

The staff gave Oliver the wrong food.

Oliver wasn't making a power play with the Saltburn staff.

The eggs scene is the staff testing Oliver, to see if he'll roll over and not make trouble, in order to keep his wealthy hosts happy.

It's the staff treating Oliver like his (supposed) poverty makes him a gold digger who is reaching above his station and needs to be knocked down a peg, all for having the sheer audacity to try and eat breakfast with his friend, at his friend's house that he was invited to, when he wasn't told what to expect in advance and while being treated like a zoo animal by his friend's family without a single peep from his supposed friend while all this happens.

Oliver just wanted to eat some fuckin' breakfast with his friend, though.

Once again thinking about how much I love Oliver's ending monologue in Saltburn.

It is the perfect culmination of his character arc, even as Oliver tries to sell it as a shocking reveal of his movie-long character flatline.

The boy who always wanted to please everyone and never felt like he could please anyone until he resorted to lies, left with only himself as his last audience to lie to for their (his) happiness.

And maybe this time it'll work out like he wanted.

Maybe now he can finally be happy, if he can convince himself he means it when he tells himself he is.

I don’t know how to say this in a way that doesn’t sound like I’m advocating for casual cruelty or whatever but something that grates so much about this current social moment is how many people are incapable of saying they dislike something or someone without cooking up some higher morally correct reason for their dislike. Sometimes you just disliked a book. Sometimes you don’t “get” an actor or a musician. There’s nothing morally wrong with your girl’s fuckass boyfriend he’s literally just annoying and you’re annoyed that you have to pretend you like him when you know he’ll be history in six months. It’s fine. You don’t need to justify your dislike.

Saw a post going around recently about fanfiction as a community activity and how that relates to people's desire for engagement and interaction with their work, and it finally dawned one of the major reasons I've been bugged by a lot of the discourse around engagement vs. hits on fanfic these days as compared to the past.

In the past, fanfiction and fandom often by necessity existed in a lot of disparate spaces - websites hosted by individuals with specific fandom interests, livejournal communities and yahoo groups, physical mailing lists if you go way back - that were often limited to specific fandoms and even specific fic types/ships/etc within those fandoms. They were typically composed primarily of people who were actively engaged in the same fandom and all contributing content to some degree that other users had a decent likelihood of being interested in.

Nowadays, I'd wager most fanfic writers use ao3 as their primary platform for sharing fanfiction. Unlike those older communities, ao3 is a massive, easily accessible repository of fanworks that spans a huge array of potential fandoms.

This means that also unlike many of those older, more heavily currated and sometimes not even publically accessible fandom spaces, ao3 will always have a decent percentage of users who exist primarily as readers who are not interested in creating their own content.

If you are a fanfic writer looking for engagement, these readers are not your community.

Your community is still other fanfiction writers.

Readers can create their own communities; for example, I've seen some people talk about fanfic readers making discord channels to discuss fanfics that multiple people are reading together. Just like a bookclub for published books is a separate community from the author of said book, though, these readers make their own community.

Since fanfiction is also a hobby activity produced for free, those readers do not owe fanfiction writers anything when they read content posted freely to a publically available website.

The most those readers owe to any given fanfic author is the polite courtesy of putting their own discussions in a forum where the author doesn't have to see it, particularly when they're interested in engaging in the kind of critical story analysis that a significant number of fanfic authors have actively and repeatedly said they Do Not Want in their comments on ao3.

If you're a fanfiction writer looking for engagement and comments from your community of fellow fan writers, then, the size of your fandom - particularly the number of people who seem to share similar interests within that fandom - will be a much better indicator of the size of your fanfiction community and thus the level of engagement you can reasonably hope for on that story, than will be the number of hits on any given story.

it's ok to be horny! it's good to be perverted! your sexuality isn't shameful and the things that turn you on are good and should be celebrated!!! even if its weird!!!! especially if it's weird and fucked up!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK!

As someone who grew up with "I'm not going to praise you for doing what's expected of you; that's not being good, that's doing the bare minimum" I want to encourage you to celebrate every little thing you can. Everything that takes energy and effort should be appreciated and you're allowed to be happy about trying.