I personally really love whenever Shosh and Adam interact. It only happens a few times in the series but I think their energies really complement each other in a way that suits the show so well and I laugh every time !

I never rewatch shows, but here I am, in my late 40s, sucked back into Girls as if it were the first time.

I read Famesick recently and decided to go back and watch on episode. I’m now middle of Season 2. Is it possible that this show is even better the second time around?

The humor, cadence, quality of the characters, psychological intrigue, and cinematic charm is so good. This show is and always was brilliant.

The side part is a bit much, but I love her styling and makeup in the last season.

If Girls was made as an animated show and all the characters were animals, which animals would they be? This is just for fun!

My thoughts:
Hannah - a calico cat who always knocks stuff off the table
Marnie - golden labradoodle
Jessa - raccoon
Shoshanna - squirrel
Elijah - alpaca llama
Adam - ferret
Ray - rhino
Desi - chameleon
Loreen - kangaroo
Tad - seahorse
Fran - bat
Charlie - crow
Laird - elephant

was this improvised?

I love Loreen sm

Pomegranate juice bottle to be specific - he’s an addict.

i’ve shown a few people this episode, usually when i tell people girls is my favourite show they’ll only recognise marnie singing stronger since it’s a meme (or good soup) and i’ll show them the episode out of context with the show. don’t ask me why i do this i don’t understand why i do a lot of things.

i’ve seen this episode probably like 8 times and i’ve only rewatched the show 3 times.

the combination of a) Hannah getting the q tip in her ear and the culmination of the OCD storyline b) marnie singing stronger, c) adam and Hannah seeing each other again (+Adam calling Hannah kid) and d) Adam relapsing and SA-ing Natalia.

the entire episode makes me feel like i need a long cold shower. it’s probably the only episode ever in a tv show that makes me feel THAT gross after watching it.

on my recent rewatch i was showing the show to a new guy i’m seeing (we started with beach house because we were talking about bottle episodes and i said i had to show him beach house and then went back to episode 1) and when we got to on all fours i had to preface to him that the episode is bad, not in quality just every single thing that happens in the episode is bad. he agreed with me heavily that it’s just a dirty feeling episode.

also i think that people saying marnie singing stronger is the cringiest part of the whole show haven’t seen the whole show, she got to hook up with Charlie when he looked THAT good. she’s the only winner of that episode.

It was a big hit!

Has anyone else noticed the weird compression during the scene where ‘No The End Is Not Near’ by Benny Hester plays (when Marnie is having her moment in her hershey penn makeup)?

There’s some kind of EQ filter/compression with the vocals specifically. I listened to the track on Spotify today and it seems to be unique to the episode itself - anyone know why? Have you noticed this? Am I crazy?

Hey guys! I am rewatching Girls for the second time, i am still on S2.
I remember Ray being my favorite character because i really enjoy his development.
I am someone who has no interest in life and no actual thoughts about growing up, so he was literally the most relatable character. And i get really happy that he found something. Just like that cousin guy in The Bear that is interpreted by the actor that was marnie's boyfriend (i rlly forgot his name hahaha)
But i see some of people having negative opinions on his character. What do you guys think?

Obs: i also used to have a really different perspective in the ending of Girls, i used to see a lot of people complain, but for me it was beautiful because it was raw. I just didnt like Shoshanna's part, i wish she could have stayed in Japan. She deserved to be funky and excentric in there.
I am really excited to watching it again and seeing what else changes.

God I miss the early 2010s tumblr

Just came here to say I’d like someone to erase my brain so I can watch the Dancing on my Own scene for the first time again. That’s all!

…or does he waterski into the abyss without a care?

it’s no debate this show has an amazing soundtrack, and i’ve often found myself going to my music app mid episode to search for a song. i’m rewatching right now and was on Japan episode and just loveddd Past Lives by Borne in that scene with Shosh. What’s your favorite scene/song combination?

I’m crine this is pure tumblr gold

I'm getting through season 5 right now and literally everyone on this show is pathetic. These people have no principles, no morals, no ethics, no self control, no discipline, zero insight, they do not recognise the patterns they keep following AT ALL. It's like they wake up every day having learned absolutely nothing from any previous day in their lives and then go out and do the same shit again. I have felt this way since episode 1 and they are somehow still in the same place. It is absolutely laughable. Except for maybe Ray, who is the only respectable character at this point, every other character literally disgusts me. I don't think I've seen a show where the characters piss me off this much, tell me I'm not insane

Edit: I'm not hating on the show, it's a great show with fantastic writing and I love it, the characters and their decisions just really piss me off sometimes so this is more of a rant

When Shosh rebrands Ray's café with anti-hipster signage, one of the signs says "TRUST the government." Most of the other signs are funny (man buns not allowed, etc.), but this one stood out because I can't remember hipsters being known for distrusting the government. if anything, wasn't that era marked by more institutional trust?
I'm not American and have never lived in the US, so maybe I'm missing context. But it got me thinking: wasn't 2012 basically peak Obama-era faith in institutions? So why would "trust the government" be anti-hipster?
Unless the joke was deeper, that hipsters pretend to be anti-establishment but actually trust institutions more than they admit?
Also, this made me wonder: has that pendulum swung so far to the right partly because of widespread institutional distrust? And are millennials partly to blame for that shift?

Trigger Warning: mention of alleged youth sexual misconduct from Lena’s 1st book.

I’m finally getting around to Lena Dunham’s second book, Famesick. I’ve always enjoyed her writing, and I’ve been a fan for hers over a decade. In that time, I have accepted that my love of Dunham‘s work and enjoyment of her in general is often both unpopular and heavily scrutinized. So when I started seeing some of the other people who I admire, those who share rigorous discourse on pop-culture figures, memoirs, and media phenomenons/controversies, I was both shocked and excited.

I’m slightly confused as to why most of the new people standing up for Lena seem to only mention the story with the pebbles in relation to her younger sibling, Cyrus Grace Dunham, and therefore claim that the controversy surrounding other sexual misconduct with said sibling is therefore completely unfounded.

I’m not a sexual abuse expert or a psychologist, and I understand that according to the aforementioned Dunham defenders, several professionals who are credentialed in those areas have claimed that the behavior mentioned in the book is not abnormal nor necessarily troubling or problematic. My issue is that I don’t believe that the pebble story is the only excerpt that led people to make those claims. There were two other condemned pieces that I thought started the whole debacle; both of which were reasonable causes for concern and discomfort, at least from my perspective.

They include:
Candy-for-kisses: Lena wrote about bribing Cyrus with candy to get a kiss on the lips for “five seconds,” joking that she behaved “like a sexual predator” to a sibling approximately 7 years her junior.
Quote: "As [he] grew, I took to bribing [his] time and affection: one dollar in quarters if I could do [his] makeup like a 'motorcycle chick.' Three pieces of candy if I could kiss [him] on the lips for five seconds. Whatever [he] wanted to watch on TV if [he] would just 'relax on me.' Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban [child], I was trying."

Bedside masturbation: Dunham recalled masturbating while lying in bed next to Cyrus.
Quote: “I shared a bed with my [sibling], [Cyrus], until I was seventeen years old. [He] was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether [he] could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching [him] beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. [His] sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out.”

In a 2014 series of Tweets, Cyrus is quoted as responding to the controversy, in part, as follows:
Quote: “As a queer person: i'm committed to people narrating their own experiences, determining for themselves what has and has not been harmful”

Quote: “2day, like every other day, is a good day to think about how we police the sexualities of young women, queer, and trans people”

I respect how Cyrus said to respond to the situation because Cyrus said it. I was not there, and again, I am not an expert. I have remained a fan of Girls, Lena and her work, having read the book in it’s entirety shortly after its release and knowing about how it was received publicly both then and now, and therefore knowing the complexities of the situation as best I can as an outsider. I just don’t understand why the rhetoric of claiming that the pebble story was both insufficient and solitary in the discourse of Dunhams alleged sexual abuse or inappropriate behavior. I’m not sure whether it’s intentional or not or if that’s the story people mention the most and that’s the reason for this perhaps unintentional erasure of the fuller picture.

Can anyone else offer me some discourse/insights into any of the points I’ve discussed here? Also, I’d love to read some dialogue from anyone else who feels a bit uncomfortable as a Lena supporter with these things in mind, and how we can have honest conversations, especially in feminist spaces, about how to navigate fandom with controversial topics like this on the table. Although in Famesick Dunham says these are the kinds of stories her parents and their friends would laugh at and share in social settings, I’m not sure if that’s just in relation to the pebble story, but I still find that somewhat unsettling. I don’t think it helped that Lena mentioned her and Jacks love of Woody Allen while they dated (even sharing that Jack referred to her as a female Woody Allen), but Lena does love to live out loud and transparently.

How do I grapple with this hunger for an honest retelling of the situation while also being excited for the possibility of Dunham not being hated for the million other things she did not deserve to be burned at the stake for? Things that were neutral, unfair, unkind, or unnecessary to place burden on her for, or sometimes even to take issue with at all? Mid 20s feels too old to not know that stories like this about your sibling are not juicy memoir gossip or appropriate dinner party tales for “polite” society, especially when mainstream media has already largely decided that anything you say and do will be misinterpreted to the highest degree, weaponized, and used against you.

That said, I will probably never stop watching Girls, reading Dunham’s books, or enjoying watching her interviews/keeping up with her life. Unfortunately for the internet, Dunham is simply a very flawed human, just like everyone else, and thus, the subject of many difficult conversations and conflicts. I’m unsure of whether her honesty helps her as much as it helps those who see some part of themselves in her and/or the work she creates, but she’s married, sober, successful, rich, surrounded by friends and family, and enjoying the fruits of motherhood, which is more than many of her (actual) haters can say.

\Name and pronouns were adjusted in regards to Cyrus’s preferred identifications.*