[quote] The timing of him asking for permission to kiss her was indeed off, but I'm more pissed at that poster saying that this was Mike White taking a shot at "wokeness." I think he's taking a shot at fake nice guys and potential incels.
I don't think White's writing is about 'taking shots,' and I think that that is where the divide lies between people who hate his work and people who love it. I love it.
Someone way up in the thread said White's writing is amoral, and that is how I see it, as well. It seems like most people are preprogrammed to read everything as some kind of condemning judgment. What I see is that White puts characters who have different perspectives and traits and levels of power together and shows how those factors affect how they interact.
Tolstoy said Shakespeare was a terrible writer because Shakespeare was amoral, showing how human beings behave without moralizing how they behave, and Tolstoy thought the entire point of writing was to impart morality and to teach people how being unvirtuous will get you punished.
I don't see any basis for seeing Albie as a condemnable 'incel' in the writing, nor do I see him as being overly 'woke' in the sense that he talks obsessively about sociopolitical issues and annoys everyone. What I saw is that he explicitly considers himself a 'nice guy' in reaction to seeing his father and grandfather as creeps, and he feels like women weirdly prefer creeps, and he's into this girl who basically told him she is into what he perceives to be creepy male behavior. He's a bit clueless, so far exactly the nice guy he described, and she's exactly the type of girl he described who doesn't get turned on by nice guys. She told him so, that she 'just wants to have fun' and do wild things, and in the preview for next week she says he's nice but he doesn't get her juices flowing. Albie's a romantic and the assistant girl wants to be tied to the headboard and banged mercilessly—or something. In short, they are incompatible.
All the couples are incompatible based on what we have been shown except the one with kids, and something is obviously amiss in their relationship.
But I really don't think this is about good guys vs. bad guys and good guys winning and bad guys losing. In the last season, what we saw was that everyone, rich and poor, was an opportunist who tried to take advantage of what they could with whatever power they could get, and the poor people (who most would see as 'the good guys') lost out in the end while the rich people mostly got their ways and remained miserable.
White is an 'everything is relative' writer, not a 'here's how to be a good person and why it'll pay off for you' writer.
