#but just something i wanted to say jskwnejd

[lupeloto]

monica gallagher meta

—

listen i hate frank gallagher as much as the next person but… sometimes i remember just how much frank loved monica and get a little too emotional. they were messy and toxic and terrible for each other but he truly truly did love her with everything he had. the show would be seriously lacking if it weren’t for the complexities of the relationships that monica has with frank and everyone else. for example, her relationship with ian especially in season 5 is one of the most well-written parts of the entire show in my opinion.

Monica and Ian’s relationship is one of the things/dynamics that makes the show truly as emotional as it is. It is really fucking good. The exploration of that made Ian’s character so goddamn complex and interesting. When he was imprisoned in the military base, he was at his most vulnerable that he had ever been. He is in an extreme depressive episode and feels like everyone around him that he loves is treating him like some object in need of fixing. He doesn’t see this as their desire to help but rather their desire to change him and “fix” parts of him that he cannot help. Monica swoops in, a person who he never received adequate love from his entire life, and changed shit for him. I truly believe that what she is saying in that moment, she truly believes is good for him. After spending time with her, he adopts this mentality that he is “not broken” and that there is nothing wrong with him, despite believing that there was something seriously wrong with him only a few episodes prior. I do not think she had ill intentions going to see him and talking to him, she genuinely believed that what she was saying was helpful. He was extremely vulnerable at this time and already has a complicated history with her and, although we know he so deeply fears becoming his mother, he still completely lets his walls down when she begins showing him love. He felt so misunderstood by everyone and she showed him that she gets what he is going through and he immediately attached himself to that. It is genuinely heartbreaking and beautiful and catastrophic all in one.

She went to him at his most powerless and made him think that he could reply on her in a way to feel understood and "protected" from the people who just wanted the best for him. She didn't have malicious intentions, she just genuinely thought that the way she lived and rejected help was the best way.