#but then they play dumb about how dark storylines function in Legacies and act like the show was just everyone attacking Lizzie constantly

[unsiredtribrid]

I hate this take so bad

like. 😭 Idk, man, I love the dark sides of Hope and Josie as much as the next person but Lizzie fans always make it about how she’s 100% the victim even when it’s kind of a reach? Josie only became infected with dark magic (that we saw canonically took over her actions, because Hope literally went into her subconscious to help her overcome the magic's control) because she broke the sandclock to save her AND her entire family from the prison world. Yes, her going dark is a result of her poor actions like breaking Ethan’s arm and things like that that led to her even needing the mora miserium, but there’s also something to be said about how an adult figure (it was actually Clarke but she didn’t know that at the time) groomed her along to do the magic on purpose. And then she did dark magic specifically to save Lizzie from the oni 💀 The whole reason why she put the dark magic into the mora miserium was because she saved Lizzie from the oni (as she should, that’s her twin).

And then she had to break it to save her family again? 😭 Like yes, she’s still a witch and something that comes along with that is things like this that happen and are totally fucked up and dark. Characters will react to that with anger/sadness/fear and everything they're entitled to with their trauma. Alyssa hating Josie makes complete sense. If Lizzie hated Josie for the trauma then that would also be fair. Josie's not exempt from consequences even if she wasn't in control, which is why I think the characters still should’ve been more upset with her afterwards. But saying that Josie killed Lizzie because she wanted to and just using this black and white way of looking at it is weird to me because it’s omitting the entire way they got there. This isn’t like a Klaus thing where he consciously is torturing or ‘killing’/daggering his sibling. Lizzie isn't being targeted in that way. For all intents and purposes, Legacies was extremely sanitized and a lot of the characters acted pretty safely and without as much toxicity as other characters in tvdu. Josie wound up there after a chain of events that make sense and are specifically supposed to be somewhat sympathetic.

If the script was flipped and it was Lizzie’s plot, these people would not act like Josie was the ultimate victim of the series when dark Lizzie tried to merge with her 😭 Hell, people don’t even act like that about the alternate universe where Lizzie DID kill Josie and it’s not even specified there that she merged with her. They just said she got paranoid and lashed out and killed her. The audience is meant to feel sympathy for both twins here, but mainly Lizzie, and most of us do when watching that episode. So why is the same energy not held for Josie? I’ll tell you why, and it’s h1zz1e ship wars 💀

Much like when Elena's humanity was forced off against her will (and the show also neglected to address how traumatic that is), Hope's also flipped off against her will because she killed her significant other to save her friends from an apocalypse. No one was there with her when she got kidnapped or while she was killing Landon and none of them even had good excuses for being missing (Josie included), despite promising they would help her through this. She didn't want her humanity off and it's stated multiple times it was not her choice. She tried not to harm any of the students or her friends (minus Ric, who has quite literally groomed her for most of her life so it's completely understandable and I'm absolutely not sorry for saying this, especially considering how he treated the children at his supernatural school, from Hope to Alyssa) even with her humanity off. Despite that, Lizzie wanted to kill her. Which, okay, if someone beats your dad into a coma, fair enough. But considering Hope's humanity is off and Lizzie KEPT pressing the issue and trying to kill her, it makes complete sense that Hope gave up and killed her first. Her humanity is OFF. Lizzie also knows exactly what that means and has a mother who has gone through the same thing. Caroline's actions during tvd when her humanity was off literally made my stomach churn. She had Elena's boyfriend perform surgery on Stefan's relative. 😭 The only part of this situation between Hope and Lizzie that you could say 'oh no poor Lizzie' 100% is the fact that killing Lizzie did not flip Hope's switch back on, despite that we've seen in the past in tvd that someone important dying does flip switches for people. Matt died and Elena's came back on. Caroline's flipped back on at the loss of her mother (her mother's letter, but still?). It seems like laziness or an oversight for the writers to not have that flip Hope's humanity, and clearly they just wanted an easy way to turn Lizzie into a heretic before the show's run was over. But still, looking at canon, it does make it seem like Hope doesn't care about her because of it and THAT would be enough for me to say 'poor Lizzie'.

But as far as Lizzie TRYING to kill Hope, the playing field was pretty even there? Hope had tried to fuck off and leave her alone. Ric was hospitalized and not dead yet (and as we see, he did recover). Lizzie was taking the risk herself when she hunted her down with a weapon to kill her. It doesn't matter if she chickened out at the last second or that she said there's still good in Hope literally UNDER DURESS because Hope is about to kill her and she's backed into a corner. It still was her choice to 1v1 Hope to begin with, even knowing her humanity was off against her will. Again, the ONLY thing here that's a 'poor Lizzie' to me is that Hope's humanity didn't flip on when she killed Lizzie.

I think one of my biggest disconnects with how h1zz1e fans enjoy the ship is they’ll act like Lizzie is just constantly a victim and not that both Hope and Lizzie were both killing/trying to kill each other at that point. It’s fine to enjoy the angsty parts of Lizzie still clearly caring about Hope, of course. Those characters both love each other, despite poor writing. But there’s this attempt to only frame them as like Lizzie being a victim when in reality that whole arc of Lizzie trying to kill her and then them fighting afterwards, even when Hope’s humanity was returning, would be (if they were romantic in canon which they were not) more of a mutual toxic yuri situation than a ‘Lizzie is just a victim of Hope’ situation. Hope never would’ve left Lizzie sire bonded to her without her humanity switch having been forced off. Both characters have inherent darkness from their supernatural sides and Legacies was honestly, again, pretty sanitized as far as how toxic the characters could get? It’s not just Hope and Josie getting together and killing Lizzie. 😭 Like we missed the entire journey of those plots and are just saying nonsense atp