Oh sister. Of all the times that Housewives He has put me in a terrible situation, and this situation feels like the most terrible situation ever. Who is lying? Who remembers what? Did we really see what we saw? Can we take women at their word when the shots are so slim? And of all the things we’re here to discuss, of all the battles to fight on this silly little show, we have to discuss sexual assault?
I strongly stress that these shows are not designed to address serious topics. Yes, Erin did an amazing job Earlier in the season Opening up about her miscarriage (and almost making me not hate her), we dealt with things like Taylor Armstrong’s abuse and her husband’s eventual suicide, two Housewives getting arrested for fraud, and that time Shannon Beador got an enema stuck up her ass. They were all very difficult topics, but we persevered. But now we’re suing whether Aoba knew that Brain was sexually assaulted, and by extension, everything that Brain is about to go through has people wondering if that assault was true.
Before we get into it, let’s set some ground rules. I firmly believe, as do all members of the cast, that Brynn was sexually assaulted. I don’t think this should be in question, although given the story of whether Brienne can be believed, it certainly will be believed. Brienne had been through enough already; Let’s not engage in this kind of speculation. I always believe women. I believe women so much that I believe Selena Gomez when she says she can act, and I’ve seen every murder in that building and Emilia Perez twice. So, yes, we’ll believe Brin.
But, as all the women say, I also don’t think Aoba knew that Brienne was being raped. Maybe Bryn brought it up on the phone and he didn’t record it, or maybe Bryn made up that whole story in the heat of the moment to get her point across. I don’t know. We will never know. However, the show and the ladies make a very good case that this is the pattern for Brienne. It takes things that happen off camera and turns them the way you need to so you can benefit. Examples the show gave us were when she said Erin said Cy thought her cheese was weird, when she said Buffett wasn’t wearing his wedding ring, when she said Erin said Jenna was poor, and when she said Erin told her she was at Boring Becky’s Boring Baby Bump Prankapolooza.
This all makes perfect sense. All the women know that Brienne has a tenuous relationship with the truth, and frankly, I think that’s a good quality in a friend. I have a close friend I know who has been making up silly things for years. It doesn’t make me think differently about them; It makes me check everything they say. However, this is something else; This is something bigger that can really speak to Aoba’s character.
The whole story plays out in the craziest way, to say the least Housewives Fans. We have many fights breaking out around the house. We then witness a big fight between Aoba and Brain as Aoba refuses to apologize for saying that Brain slept with someone to get her job. Brain then tearfully told the rest of the cast that Aoba kept saying that after she found out that Brain had been raped. But the narrative is not linear; The ladies decide to go to sleep and the cameras roll. That’s when Aoba was terrified by this news and started screaming. We couldn’t see it all, just one crappy camera set up at the end of the hallway. Not sure if you’re aware of this, but this is the same camera that was on the porch and was still filming the night Polo party on the The Real Housewives of Atlanta. Get that camera an extra annuity and let it retire. Its service is done.
Aoba is so upset that she and Giselle leave the house to stay at a hotel. The rest of the women gather in Jenna’s room to hear Brynn talk about sexually assaulting her. At the end of that conversation, she said, according to Erin, “Now that I think about it, you might not have recorded it.” That’s when all the women said it changed for them, and that they reevaluated Brienne and everything she said over the two seasons. I get it. It makes perfect sense. It was strange to them all that in the morning Brienne was acting as if nothing had happened.
The rest of the episode revolves around the photo shoot for the show’s opening titles, which I love because it brings the fact that it’s a reality show back to the center. They are no longer a group of friends, but are now co-workers who have to deal with it and apples to apples with a known liar. (Also, the way the editors combined shots of each woman doing her little introduction with the title cards we usually get in the season finale was amazing.) All we got was them being wary of Brienne, afraid of her, and trying to hold her accountable.
You must be held accountable. Sure, I have a friend who is a liar, but it’s one thing to have a liar on reality TV, who publicly spreads false stories about everyone on screen. It’s hard for producers to craft a story for anyone, especially Brynn, when fans can never be completely clear on whether the details are accurate. It’s also difficult for viewers to believe anything Brynn says. When so much of the fun of these shows is determining who’s right and who’s wrong, how do you prove those cases when one of our key witnesses loses his credibility forever?
The craziest thing to me about this whole ordeal is that it was a tactical mistake on Brienne’s part and now she’s getting more irritation than Aoba gets. Brain did something so bad that anything bad Aoba did was completely erased. If she had just waited and let it get to Aoba, she would have been safe.
This is what stands out to me. It doesn’t matter whether Aoba knew about the sexual assault Brin suffered before she said what she did and she constantly defends it. What Aoba said was absolutely terrible, regardless. Aoba thinks it’s bad that Brienne lied about knowing about her rape on camera, but what about how bad it is that the constant insinuation that Brienne is a slut on camera is feeding a false narrative that the fandom has already exploited?
All the women tell Aoba that she needs to stop calling Brienne a “bitch,” which is something your friends shouldn’t tell you about another of your friends. (For the record, everyone is allowed to call me a bitch because that’s totally true.) When Aoba tries to apologize, Brain asks her what she’s sorry about. When Brin asks if she’s sorry for saying that she “sucked dick for a job,” Aoba says no because she didn’t say that. As Gina points out, this is a semantic argument. Yes, she didn’t say “suck your dick”, she said “fuck it”, but how is that different? If the words are not true, neither is the spirit. Oppa needs to quote her verbatim to apologize? Brynn wasn’t wrong when she described her as a six-foot-tall little girl.
Aoba also says she didn’t insinuate it because she said “maybe” Brain slept with someone to get a job. Sorry, but putting “maybe” in a quote like that doesn’t absolve her of guilt. She’s basically saying she believes it, and if that quote alone wasn’t enough, everything she said next made it worse. Brain says that Aoba said she had a penis in her mouth, but Aoba says that Brain said that first. Yes, because Brienne was repetition The gist of what Aoba was saying, and it’s something we know Aoba said because we saw it on camera. To delete the “maybe” in Aoba’s accusation, when Brain jokes that she only flies alone, Aoba says, “With someone else’s husband,” again hinting that she is either an adulterer or a prostitute, neither of which are very nice. If she was going to say so, she didn’t think “maybe” Brienne slept with someone to get a job; She definitely thinks she did it.
What I’m saying is that Aoba was acting obnoxiously, but when Brienne went and blatantly lied to her for sympathy, it erased all of Aoba’s bad behavior. Both are terrible. Yes, one was worse than the other, but that doesn’t mean Aba is absolved of everything she did all season. As the other women in the episode point out, whenever they try to talk to Aoba about something, she won’t let anyone talk, but when they have problems of their own, Aoba is always the first to speak up and dominates the world. conversation.
Where do we go from here? Well, it’s going to be one hell of a reunion, and from the preview at the end of the episode, it looks like Brienne is going to get a lot more heat than Lady Aoba herself. We’ll have to wait and see. But what about their continued work? It’s now clear that we can’t trust anything Brin says, which is sad because this show needs more motivation than kids need polio vaccines. It is also clear that Aoba cannot be argued with and will never back down. If it were up to me, I would fire them both. The show can’t go on with either or both of them because it leaves every interaction between them and the other women at a complete standstill. I don’t want a season where Brienne says things about women and they’re like, “You’re a liar,” and I don’t want (another) season of Aoba yelling at every discussion to a halt.
What does it mean for the show? Well, we finally had a good season HousewivesBut it all happened on the trip. We have resentments, we have petty disputes, we have silly rivalries, we get Jenna’s pubic attire, and we get a nice synchronized swimming number. It was fun, it was real, it was raw. This is what we expect from him HousewivesI am now more confident than ever that at least some of this group has what it takes to be great. As the moon sails over the shores of Puerto Rico, its light traveling in arcs across the ocean waves, it feels like hope rising in our hearts, carrying us into the future, past us to a time when bad behavior will stop. Being unforgivable and that’s going to be what we’re all looking forward to a little bit of: drama.
