#anti tedbecca

[saywhatyouwillbut]

i’ve been trying to put my finger on why idea of sydney and carmy never becoming canon rubs me so wrong where ted and rebecca never becoming canon felt like breath of fresh air, and i gotta say, i think it has a lot to do with how played out the whole white man x white woman coworkers-to-friends-to-lovers / will-they-won’t-they thing is. i didn’t want to see hannah waddingham and jason sudeikis do it, but yes, actually, i would like to see heartthrob-of-my-childhood jeremy allen white play a pathetic little man who makes the most insane puppy eyes at ayo edibiri please

[church-of-lilith]

You shouldn’t compare Hannah Waddingham’s cruelty towards tedbeccas to James Lance’s statement in that interview. Hannah was unfairly cruel and that’s not something to celebrate

in all seriousness please miss me with this bullshit. i’m not trying to start ship wars in the year of our lord 2023, i’m just celebrating a very rare W for the tedtrent shippers.

[saltyoaktree]

honestly I might make theories and joke around, but at this point the thing I want the most from Ted Lasso regarding relationships isn't even tedtrent. It's platonic tedbecca! Like I respect the ship, but I think they work so much better as besties. I can't see a semblance of romantic chemistry

[brookezilla]

Lmao the jokes on you because it's not gonna be Tedbecca endgame either. Your boring, uninspired, cishet ship isn't gonna be canon. You're just as delusional as you think we are. And you're a total fucking condescending bitch.

Good morning Anon! Did someone wake up on the wrong side of the bed today?

Hun, I genuinely couldn’t care less whether you agree with Tedbecca or not. I also never once criticised another ship, so someone is //projecting//.

In fact, if you looked at my posts, you’d note that I’ve frequently commented about agreeing with other ships!! So if you’re a tedtrent shipper then you’re way out of line when I’ve often commented about liking their dynamic.

You also realise you are being a hypocrite right? Calling me a “total fucking condescending bitch” while also saying Tedbecca is a “boring, uninspired cishet ship”.

Literally what is wrong with it being a heterosexual ship? And baby I’m QUEER so this isn’t even about being homophobic.

Aggressive, petty and frankly immature comments like this is what gives shippers a bad name.

Next time, don’t hide behind being Anonymous. You’re just being a pathetic bully, ruining a positive debate within the fandom.

[roughroadhaley]

the September 13th thing is kind of how I feel about the whole "oklahoma" thing. Like didn't that start out as a negative thing with him and his wife? And why would Rebecca say it ESPECIALLY now that she knows Ted is dealing with said therapist in his personal life again? IDK. felt kind of off.

the oklahoma thing was cute in s1 because it was just in a scene for a comedic reason. it never should’ve become ~their thing~

i have alot of mixed feelings about Ted and Rebecca’s relationship looking back tbh. Like it was so great in s1, no matter how you like them, and then it gets super confusing as the show goes on. they barely interact or share plotlines anymore but somehow they’re supposed to be cosmically tied and be the person that changed the others life. I can see completely how Ted changed Rebecca’s life because Rebecca has an arc. Ted unfortunately doesn’t really have much of an arc so it’s hard to say Rebecca changed anything for him. Considering how pathetic he was about Michele in season 3 it also completely removes the positive changes Rebecca did help Ted accomplish at one point.

[lunar-years]

💛

💛: What is a popular ship you just can't get behind, and why?

I'm kind of permanently baffled that Ted is this fandom's Most Shippable Guy and is one half of 2 of the top 3 TL ships on ao3 (and before r/j took off in s3 the leap in numbers between ted ships and everything else was even more egregious, lol). I simply...do not think about him like that and do not want to, lol.

So... TedRebecca & TedTrent. and pretty much any other Ted ship, though none of the others are very popular. all the love to tedtrenters though who are by and large super lovely people :) glad you guys are having fun

Unpopular Opinion Asks

[goldfish-or-smthing]

tedbecca makes no sense to me. like i understand that they have chemistry but i really cant see the show going that way. it's cliche and exactly what everyone expects- the main man and main woman always get together, right? but tl is a show that usually avoids cliches like this. the writers obviously know this is what people expect, especially w/ their hinting in S2 that ted was who rebecca was texting on bantr.

speaking of bantr... sam? although i dont think theyre gonna end up together the writers wouldnt put that in and leave it open ended if tedbecca was going to happen. it would seem weird for rebecca to date sam then move on to date ted.

ted and rebecca have such a valuable platonic relationship that is so rarely seen between men and women on tv, and i think the writers understand the value behind that too.

to be clear- if tedbecca does end up happening in s3, i wont be upset bcs i trust that theyll be able to do it well. i just dont think its likely to happen. feel free to debate w/ me/ refute my points btw!

[bisexualshakespeare]

I think I just realized why i dont really ship ted and rebecca and it's because they drew away from being vulnerable with each other. Like I could totally see it in season one. Rebecca cries to Ted about Rupert and Rebecca comforts Ted when he has a panic attack. The whole theme of the season really is these two growing closer.

And then in season 2 we have a scene that's just "do you have anything you want to be vulnerable about?" "Nope" "me neither" and they had other moments of closeness like the xmas episode and the funeral sure. But idk they felt different. They didn't really talk to each other they were just around, which was a comfort they both needed but not the same thing as being vulnerable.

I get that Ted was bottling up his feelings that season and that was actually a cause for a lot of problems. It was a solid character choice but it made me lose interest in their romantic potential

[tedtrentconspiracy]

turns out the secret third option was worse than anyone expected

[ceruleanwhore]

In my soul, I feel disgusted and betrayed by this finale and I am shocked that the same writers who were able to give us such a truly wonderful show somehow came up with such a terrible ending for it. This episode directly opposes the very nature of the show more than any other episode in such a way that then calls into question the rest of the series. This episode feels every bit as hollow and sad as Ted himself seems to be throughout the finale and makes me wonder if we ever were actually supposed to believe and to hope at all in the first place, even though I thought that was the point of the series. 

The first of many issues I have with the episode is how they handled Rupert. The whole show is about belief, but specifically believing in others’ capacity for good and ability to change for the better. It’s about believing in redemption and reconciliation, which they actually could have done for Rupert even this late in the show. The scene in episode 10 where we get a glimpse of the inner child that’s still tucked away somewhere inside him showed us that even he still had this potential, up until they did what they did for the finale. While I, personally, tend to be more like Sassy was in that scene — gleefully cheering for the downfall of an odious scoundrel — it felt completely wrong for this show in particular to include that kind of public humiliation, which we the audience are all supposed to be cheering for, and in the middle of Ted’s last game ever with Richmond.

Where we actually could have used a side bit about a scoundrel getting his comeuppance is with Ted’s ex wife and their ex therapist. I think it’s absolutely terrible that they went and set up Rupert’s downfall the way they did while Jake apparently gets off scot free and never gets his license revoked or anything. There also is never really any acknowledgement of just how wrong what he did was, how he should have his license revoked, and how his actions call into question every bit of therapy Ted and Michelle got from him. No one ever questions ‘Oklahoma,’ never mind the entire divorce, relative to this man’s breach of ethics and it bothers me to no end that the most we get is his absence at the end from scenes with Ted, Michelle, and their son. We didn’t need Rupert dressing up like Darth Vader and physically assaulting someone, we needed Michelle realizing how completely wrong her whole relationship with Jake is, dumping him, and reporting him.

The next issue is Ted himself. Obviously, he was in a gloomy sort of mood throughout the whole episode, but I think it’s really important to point out how that didn’t actually clear up once he got home. I do believe he was happy to see his son but, from the plane ride onward, it’s like he’s just hollow. We see him coaching little league soccer for his kid and yet there isn’t any of the heart and soul in it that we’ve seen him put into his other coaching. It’s like he’s depressed, which is understandable because he just left a whole incredible, supportive community to come to Kansas where, like Odysseus at the end of the Oddyssey, he’s a stranger in his own home. He goes from having a whole city around him to support him to seemingly having nothing and not even being a welcome member of his own family since he’s still divorced. Also, as others have pointed out, that montage that seems to be a dream sequence when he’s on the plane ride home is all about him writing himself out of the lives of everyone he just left behind. He’s decided that it’s better for everyone there to just forget about him and move on with their lives as though he was never there and he’s literally dreaming about how happy they’ll be to do that. 

This is a major thematic issue for this series because one of the main points of the series is the idea that everyone can change for the better and, more importantly, just about every character does. Ted spends all that time in England working on his own shit like everyone else, and even gets over his aversion to therapy in order to seek help for the first time ever, just to throw all of that away at the very end because apparently he’s just back on his bs and that’s it. This is where it would maybe be alright if there were another season after this one to address and fix this, but there isn’t. In the very last episode of the whole thing he’s throwing away his entire community, dreaming about how happy they’ll be without him, and there’s nothing and no one there correcting that. To me, this is like if right at the end of the last episode with no room left to fix it, they just had Beard go steal another car and then act like the audience is supposed to be okay with it.

The other thing, going off of that, is how they handled some of the relationships, and I specifically want to start off by talking about Ted and Rebecca. They have the distinction of being the only ship to truly be baited, more than once, and very unnecessarily so. The bait scene at the start of the final episode contributes nothing to the plot, the characters, or their relationship with each other — all it does is mock the members of the audience who were foolish enough to believe they ever could have been together. This, to me, also goes against the core values and themes of the show, because ship baiting like that is inherently mean-spirited and Ted Lasso at its core is meant to be kind. There is nothing kind about essentially dangling something over someone’s head, playing keep away with it, until you finally just chuck it in the river and laugh at the person for being so foolish as to think they were ever going to get it. It’s mean for the sake of being mean and again, for the umpteenth time, it contributes nothing.

So then let’s get to Roy, Jamie, and Keeley. Jamie and Roy are another example of a strong relationship that’s developed beautifully over the course of three seasons regressing at the very end because oh no, people ship it and we can’t have that. I do think that Keeley turning both of them down was necessary but Roy and Jamie literally getting into a fistfight over her was completely unnecessary and detrimental to their individual characters. By this point, they both are mature enough and respect Keeley enough that it’s genuinely ooc for them to be fighting each other about who gets to date her while she’s not even there. Season 3 Jamie and Roy would’ve been leaving the decision to her without reverting back to macho Neanderthal crap. 

To me, this is also about the creators recognizing that people in the fandom have ships and, for whatever reason, feeling the need to try and shut that down rather than just leaving well alone. If, instead of getting in a fight like they did, Roy and Jamie had a conversation about their shared experiences of wanting to be with Keeley but not knowing where they stand with her and recognizing how hard it is for each other, then it could end up contributing to the further growth of their relationship and, along with it, shipping and oh no, we can’t have that. Just like with Avatar: the Last Airbender, the presence or lack of romantic relationships is not the issue here, the problem is with writers accidentally setting up an incredibly compelling ship and then being like “oops, we didn’t mean to do that,” and trying to ctrl z it in the finale, at the detriment of the whole story. Why oh why do writers keep feeling the need to sacrifice the quality of their whole story for the sake of trying to get people to stop having opinions?

So then last up is Ted and Trent. As many others have pointed out, that bit where Ted’s reading the book and makes that comment about the ‘laugh police’ in response to Trent’s excitement and anxiety is extremely out of character. Ted “but he’s our dork” Lasso would never say that and I was horrified to hear those words come out of his mouth. However, this goes in with the destruction of his entire character arc and every bit of growth he’s done throughout the past three seasons all in this one episode, because that was him actively pushing Trent away because, as previously acknowledged, he’s back on his bs.

One issue with this is that Ted then never has a proper goodbye with Trent and the closest thing to that is the note he left asking Trent to change the title of the book. It’s not that I necessarily think he needed individual goodbyes on screen with every other character but Trent in particular was hugely important for Ted, like how Rebecca was. Do you really mean to tell me that Ted wouldn’t actually say goodbye to the journalist who wrote what, coming from him at the time, was essentially a glowing review when he was actually hired with the intention of destroying Ted’s career? Do you mean to say he wouldn’t get a proper goodbye with the man who threw away his whole career over him? The man who then decided the first thing he wanted to do after leaving said career was to write a book about him and his team? Seriously?

The other thing with Trent is that, where Ted’s ex wife and even Rebecca have felt the need to use ‘Oklahoma’ with him to get him to tell the truth, Trent has a talent for discerning the exact truth from Ted regardless of what he does or does not say. It would have been perfectly in character for him to go talk to Ted like Rebecca tried to but then actually succeed where she failed because he would be able to clearly read Ted’s signals and throw that all back at him. Unlike Rebecca, he could directly call out how much Ted didn’t actually want to leave.

That is actually the biggest issue this episode had — cowardice. The only reason I can think of why they wouldn’t even consider doing something like what I just described is because, like with Roy and Jamie, they are perfectly aware of the chemistry between those characters and how they have set them up so it reads like they’re in love with each other, and a scene like this would be just about impossible to do without coming across as romantic. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Ted and Trent would’ve already been snogging by the start of the season if one of them were a woman. This show did the thing where they’ve decided that they can have a couple gay characters, but those characters can only get with specifically devised side characters because God forbid you just have your two existing characters of the same gender kiss a bit. Between the pairings of Ted and Trent, and Roy and Jamie, there is enough textual evidence of mutual attraction and the potential for real, romantic relationships that one could write over a hundred pages about it, and that is not an exaggeration. When I look at this finale, one of the things I see is the titular character being destroyed because they decided that was better than letting people think that he could maybe not be straight.

The last issue I have here is that there really were no goodbyes. Rebecca showed up at the airport and that’s it and I thought that was very weird and, again, very much not in accordance with the entire rest of the show. Even if they didn’t have the entire team show up at the airport to say goodbye, it didn’t make sense to not even have just the Diamond Dogs show up for that. Where tf was everyone? Because just from watching the whole rest of the show, I think it would be impossible not to expect the team, the dogs, the folks from the pub and maybe also Shannon from town. It was a cold, empty departure far from fitting for the show at all and it left me coming out of that finale feeling cold and empty from the crippling disappointment. They had a whole show centered around interpersonal relationships and support and then had the coldest, loneliest ending anyone there could have devised.

My final thought here is that this is not an ending and the only way to salvage this wreckage is with another season. This feels like something they’re doing to drum up attention and interaction so that it’ll be successful when they do come in and announce that they’ve changed their minds and there will be another season, like an encore at a concert. However, if this really is the end, then I am absolutely disgusted and feel very betrayed right now because this show told me to believe and taught me that maybe hope isn’t actually a bad thing that’s out to get me, just to turn around and crap all over that. This show didn’t just apparently waste hours of my time, it was actually helping to get me to move on from past pain and start to accept hope as a good thing, until it shattered mine. They desecrated the very art they created and then expected the audience to applaud such disrespectful destruction, and I am disgusted by it.

[church-of-lilith]

have you ever experienced something so CRUEL as an actor not agreeing with your ship sdfghjklf

WHAT WORLD ARE THEY LIVING IN 😂

RIGHT?

and like I’m sorry but do NOT come for hannah waddingham because you’re upset that the writers didn’t take tedbecca the direction you wanted them to. she’s been made to feel uncomfortable by some shippers in the past and I do feel that’s part of why she spoke about tedbecca the way she did. calling her cruel is taking things much too far.

[saltyoaktree]

I agree with I want Ted and Rebecca stay platonic but everyone keep saying romance would undermine their relationship is so?? Why? Why is romance became suddenly a thing that makes relationships worse? Maybe it's me but I've been best friends for many, many years with my fiancee before we got together and I don't think for a second that romance got our relationship less meaningful.

To me personally, it would undermine their relationship because everytime I would rewatch the show and see their scenes I would be like "oh they become a couple later :/" instead of "FUCK YEAH PLATONIC SOULMATES". Just a matter of preference really

Also I'm very happy for you and your fiance. That's lovely

[k-chips]

Aaaall right

Let's add Focalette/Neuvifuri to the "Annoying toxic shippers you can't talk with" list with Sylkies and Tedbeccas

Edit: to be clear, if you’re not one of these annoying shippers, you shouldn’t feel attached or upset about this post, since I’m not shitting on the ship itself 🤷🏻‍♀️

Except for Sylki. In that case I’m also shitting on the ship, which is horrendous and disgusting :D

[roughroadhaley]

💛 ted lasso

💛What’s a popular ship you just can’t get behind? And why?

probably tedbecca. thought the idea of it was really cute but they just weren’t flirting or jealous of each other or really anything i look for when wanting a romantic plotline.

[struckbyfuckinglightning]

THE WAY I WILL FORGIVE ALL THE HORRORS OF SEASON 3 IF THEY GET RID OF BOAT GUY

[your-mums-nuts]

Me, a tedbecca shipper: aw so she doesn’t end up with Ted (I got spoiled when I started the show) I guess she’ll have some other great love interests then, right?

Ted lasso writers: oh don’t you worry, she dates an employee twenty years younger than her and there are a lot of pedo jokes😉

Me: mm okay… but at least the guy she does end up with is lovely, right?

Ted lasso writers: definitely! They meet when she’s stranded on his boat with no phone and a lot of female-violence and rape jokes ensue😉

Me: right… and why didn’t anyone consider Ted, again?

Ted lasso writers: ugh they’re friends that would’ve been so weird