#S2 carmy will hopefully be reminded that Mikey is not the only person who knew and loved him

[bartonbones]

also i understand ppl will have their ship wars ive been in fandom for a decade i know but like what compels me abt the idea of the new girl being an ex or at least someone who knew carmy and mikey well is that i think it is exactly what carmy needs …put down pitchforks and hear me out I couldn’t care less if carmy dates or fucks bc what he DOES do is uses his grief as an excuse not to be known or understood. no one knows or needs to know him deeply because the only person he remembers knowing him was mikey, who isn’t there anymore. from his perspective he’s done the work! he’s not hiding!! he WAS known and then the person that knew him died and that’s the end of it.

i think grief has a very insidious way of changing your beliefs about everyone—yourself, the person you’re grieving, and anyone else around you. it’s something that fundamentally warps every way you understand the world and how to interact with it. even just the grief from mikey freezing him out had convinced carmy that there was no point in pursuing any kind of intimacy with another person because it’d ended so terribly with mikey. to carmy mikey is the only person who ever got that close and the only person who ever would …so i think it is really smart and meaningful to carmy to have someone from his past step in to be like; other people knew you, even the the things you thought only mikey knew, other people did too. and other people will continue to know you whether you can get comfortable with that or not, and that this intimacy you think you’ve completely lost when mikey died is not only something you can find again it’s something you never even really lost !! carmy, even at the end of season 1, was saved only by his brother’s love…i think we did need someone else to convince him that there’s more to his life than mikey and that there always has been