#if I think too hard about s5 I break down fr

[butterflyscribbles]

“Just like your dad…so eager to serve others as the soup has only just begun to simmer…

Give it time.”

AU where someone very different was waiting for MK after he stepped into the pillar🐷💜

[saltyaos]

lillysbitchfest

replied to your post

“a loooong meta about lots of things I hated about 5x14 and what...”

This explains well what I've been seeing... since season 2. I've desperate to ship Jemma with someone else because... she needs a person to be there for her when the team, and the whole universe, obviously isn't. It breaks my heart watching her get guilt-ed into this relationships, which with how the love triangle ended and how everyone we saw talk about it was saying "Team Fitz!" it's always going to feel like Jemma is with him romantically because she was told if she-

cared about him at all she HAD to be. Now with season 5 it's just even more abusive and painful. People call Jemma a bad friend to Daisy because of the Fitz thing but... Daisy pushed Jemma into believing she HAD to take care of Fitz above everything just as much as anyone else did. Feeling it now... no wonder I've been mad at Daisy, for all people are calling it a betrayal it just feels like those "you two are meant for each other!" chickens came home to roost... :(

oh look, this is one of those things in which I half respectfully disagree and half agree so much and it’s a very complicate place for me to be in lol 

I’ll explain: 

I believe Jemma is in love with Fitz, and that s2 represented a person who is demiromantic/almost aromantic (possibly because I’m aro) who has a hard time distinguishing the enormous love felt for a friend from the loving love felt for a potential boyfriend, and that in the end she was able to sort it out. Even just because Jemma is a character of those writers who say they are in love, but generally speaking, I can totally go for that. Like, when they made up at the end of s2 and Jemma brought up what he said at the bottom of the ocean, he told her they didn’t need to talk about that, he was going to be her friend and that’s it. And she insisted, because she felt it. And in Maveth she made herself go on talking about the date, fantasizing, hoping she’d be home soon. 

Later, they were back to being just friends in season 3b, she could have kept things that way, but she once again started asking for more because she was ready, with Fitz not being sure if it was a good idea or not, but then she assured him they had waited long enough. 

(You don’t see it that way and that’s totally fine, just a reminder that I’m not going to fight you on it, just express my opinion lol)

BUT. But that makes things so much worse to me. 

Because if you look at it from my point of view, the point of view of Jemma being in love with him, this is... literally what happened to many women I know. They are/were in love, and their boyfriend loved them, but in some cases they didn’t get along that well or the boyfriend did something not okay or the women were simply in need of a break for some reason, or actually weren’t happy, and the fact that they were ‘in love’ felt reason enough to NOT ever take breaks or put themselves first, not ever give up (because if you are in love you gotta stick with him even when you are breaking down too, apparently) so for me, in this context, even without the constant cheerleaders of the ship reminding her they belong together, if Jemma had needed a break in s5 or after s4... she wouldn’t have been able to take it, because she also feels extreme guilt in general, and s2 did happen with her ‘leaving’ and Fitz ‘breaking’, so in good conscience how can she leave him? If you love someone you are supposed to put aside your ‘less painful’ problems to focus on theirs (I disagree with that but that’s what the world often says), and Jemma, who always minimizes her problem and has a boyfriend who just went through brainwashing, a fake life in which he was turned into a sociopath, his brain damage, the depression and guilt he had from before, and now a psychic split and his in a cell, has no real choice but to put aside all the violence that has been inflicted on her because she has a better handle on it, and just make sure he’s okay. That’s what ‘people in love do’. If she needs to go, it’s abandonment.  

But THEN you add the fact that while she was at least TRYING to think about how she felt, for once in her life, and she had 2 different people remind her she can make Fitz happy, they are in love and they should stick together, and BYE to the chance for her to take a break. 

It hit home for me. Because I don’t know people who were pushed into a relationship by friends, but I definitely know people who are in love with someone and they reached all a point in which they needed a break but didn’t feel it was even an option because they are in love with them (in Jemma’s case a break would be needed because she’s incredibly traumatized too, and because hey, maybe she also needs to feel safe until his mental illness gets treated because 1) he can’t be responsible for his actions, he could think he’s saving her life while violating her body autonomy next, it’s not because he’s evil, but his morality has changed and he’s hearing voices and the show decided to portray it as the kind of mental illness that brings you to do things like tying your friend to a table and cutting her neck, without even trying to discuss with her about the fact that her inhibitor could lead to the end of the world - which btw thank you for portraying a mental illness as a reason for someone to be that dangerous and threatening. As if real life people don’t have enough problems with their mental illnesses being used to villainize them 2) Jemma has seen herself get physically harmed by TWO Fitzes: a LMD one, and her brainwashed real one. And then saw real Fitz operate on Daisy. It would be okay to feel unsafe. Especially since he was very detached from reality when he was doing it. It’s not about love or not love if she decides not to walk in his room, he can think he’s in control and not be, he’s not getting any professional help, no therapy, no meds. He’s trapped in a room.  so yes, it would be okay if Jemma wanted a break from Fitz because she has all kinds of reasons

and It’s not like Fitz, in the middle of, you know, hallucinating and having facial expressions that didn’t match his feelings, which is also a very big sign of not being Okay, wasn’t chill about the gun pointed at Jemma by the robot, assuming she wouldn’t move, and while she didn’t because hey, how would that help Daisy? She’d need to be dragged out and patched up immediately, a bullet in the leg is not a joke. She could still have snapped, as a former torture victim, and jerked forward and gotten herself shot and then what) 

so like i said, for me it hits home more to think that she’s in love, and that she WANTS to be there for him and she’s been taught by the world that when you love someone you absolutely can’t leave them even if your mental health is going to hell, and that is exactly what I see happening to women I know

and having 45 friends tell her that she can help him, that she has to understand him, that in a potential future she DID help him, and that is a direct response to her expressing distress too, not even to her asking for advice, sure as hell didn’t help her make any other decision. 

so while for you it’s a situation of: she was already pushed to be with him and to be responsible for him, and she’ll never be free, for me it’s a she loves him, feels responsible and has the whole world confirm to her that it’s her responsibility and in her abilities to make him okay. In both cases, instead of a ‘well, it sucks that you were physically and emotionally tortured, gaslighted, traumatized, enslaved, and all that, but instead of telling you that you should try to take a break as soon as the end of the world doesn’t happen and get some therapy and time for yourself while he does too, and then you can both decide if you two can be together, and you can also support him from afar and he’ll support you, we will help him too so you don’t have to worry about him, and we will help you too, so don’t worry about that now’ we get a ‘well, it sucks that you were physically and emotionally tortured, gaslighted, traumatized, enslaved, but don’t worry, you can help Fitz anyway so find your happiness in the fact that you two love each other and can conquer everything’. 

as for Daisy, here’s the other thing: the ONLY acceptable and vaguely normal option for me would have been Jemma feeling torn between the two and yes, ultimately she’d have wanted to get Fitz out of his cell and have his help when they went to destroy the particle accelerator, she did disagree with Daisy’s sole focus on Coulson. Because Daisy IS her friend, because what happened WAS traumatizing to see too, hell, it was traumatizing for viewers, and it was just weird that Jemma wasn’t shown empathetic at all. That’s what makes me angry at her. The complete lack of softness when dealing with Daisy. Daisy is the only person who always checked on Jemma, at least once a season, even if Jemma never really answered to her ‘are you okay’s in a truthful way except maybe in the deleted s2 scene. 

However, the complete lack of care in that direction can also be read as Jemma being so broken and desperate that she had to choose one way to go (be on Fitz’s side) and be blind to everything else because if she doubts herself, if she lets herself be unsure of what to do for a second, she will fall apart completely. She had to give full focus to Fitz, and ignore Daisy’s pain because in her head they’d have to eventually be okay again, all of them, and recognizing how Daisy felt would mean also recognizing how fucked up it all was, and how fucked up she is and Fitz is. So it’s also a sign of unhealthy response and not just bad friendship (except that the writers didn’t think of it so deeply, in the writers’ mind it was just a woman in love choosing her husband because she did think they had no other choice and Daisy had to eventually accept that it was either that or the fear dimension taking over the world. Nothing else. If I think the way the writers did, it is bad friendship. Because as an aro person -but there are plenty non aro people who feel the same - a best friend can be just as important as your husband and you can be torn between them). 

Daisy did, often, brought up how Jemma can be Fitz’s salvation though. So while she didn’t in season 5... it is also a fruit of Daisy’s labor if Jemma feels like she can make Fitz feel better out of her sheer stubbornness. To be fair, when Daisy reassures Jemma that she and Fitz belong together, it’s because Jemma is spiraling down thinking Fitz is dead or gone for good. I would have done the same. But it wouldn’t cross my mind to bring that up when Jemma doesn’t know what to do about her relationship after 5x14 because she’s not thinking Fitz is dead and because?? it’s not good for her??? 

so... summing it up:

-in my case, I feel like Jemma does love Fitz, which just adds up to the narrative that she cannot put herself first in this, and it’s also the same narrative fed to people since forever and that fucks up so many real people in real life, and hurts me even more because god, she’ll never take care of herself. Never.   -She had too many people insist that she was responsible for Fitz’s mental health and happiness all by herself, in good and bad ways. It stuck.  -I can understand why Daisy would not trust her. I can understand why Mack was pissed at the very traumatic pretend-to-have-drank-acid moment, but... in Mack’s case, while he has all reason to feel betrayed, and while he was angrier at Elena and Fitz than he was at Jemma since their interactions were pretty normal after that, he DID basically tell Jemma that she had to see things from Fitz’s point of view. -Jemma’s arc could have easily been shown as Jemma losing her mind and needing to desperately focus on Fitz, unhealthily so, and it’s like a ‘remember your mental health is important too even when your loved ones aren’t feeling well or you might end up breaking yourself’ kind of story, except that’s not what the writers wanted to write  -there is NOTHING that can be done now. It’s just too late for Jemma to have an actual storyline. Anything she does has to be done keeping in mind what happened last time Fitz was stressed out. and anyway it would even be weird, she never reacted to anything because the writers didn’t care enough, it wasn’t even a thing about her being in character, it just wasn’t important enough.   -regardless of you liking her story with Will and me not liking it (but I’m not going to focus on that, i’m just bringing it up because it shows a pattern), it’s clear that the writers have a thing for Jemma having to give hope (it was supposed to be like a game between her and Will, but the writers were like ‘you know what, we’ll just keep her doing that with everybody all the time forever’), no matter what she’s going through and no matter who the boyfriend is, it’s been like that with Fitz in s2, partly, when people in shield and people in the fandom expected her to be this machine who could constantly support him, it’s been like that during her brief time in Maveth with Will in s3, four months of constant hoping while being told it couldn’t work and then, believing she was stuck there, she still tried to be super cheerful right away and see every bright side possible, then again with Fitz in s4 and s5, and she even have never-ending hope with Elena; Jemma is meant to be a woman who has to hang on and give hope, and the few times she couldn’t take it anymore, whether leaving SHIELD (to go undercover) because she thought it was best for Fitz, or leaving Will behind in Maveth, or putting herself first once and letting Lash out of his pod so she could escape, she’s been punished in and out of universe so violently that I could never blame her for going to ‘drinking acid’ levels of obsessed with ‘believing in someone’ and ‘wanting to think they are invincible’. I can pity her, and I can hate the fact that a character was changed this much because that is NOT who she was in s1, and she was also resisting it in s2, she wasn’t unnaturally hopeful, she needed Fitz to give her hope during FZZT too, she was immediately full on hating Ward and fighting the pain of his betrayal with anger, she lost hope in s2 too, she was NORMAL, realistic, but the moment the writers decided she was going to date they started making her more... typical. they also saw how much people loved Iain’s performance in s2 so they decided that he’d be constantly suffering.  If you put the character they chose to be the Hopeful one and the one they want to hurt all the time together, what’s going to happen? That he will be constantly shown hurting, have horrible things happen to him, and he’ll react like a normal person and break, and that she’ll be relegated to the role of giving him hope and being supportive, suffering over the consequences of what he’s going through too but not allowed to show it. Also perpetuating stereotypes that are especially harmful to women, since they are the ones most often expected to endure and be supportive and stay with the man they love no matter if they are suffering or not. 

Mind you, because of my... family situation and chronic illnesses and various messes, I’m very much a Hope person. Sees the bright side, laughs things off, constantly supporting my loved ones, exactly like Jemma, but 1 I break every now and then and get all kinds of support from those people 2 nobody is there telling me I have to take care of my loved ones when I clearly can’t 3 if anybody told me that someone’s health depended on me I’d have an immediate breakdown but also tell them to go to hell because that’s not how it works at all 4 I have some people who don’t need me as hope and we just have a good time together 5 I’m not violently traumatized once a month and demand time and space whenever I need it. I’m about to post the last post of my meta about how stereotypical FS became and this reply to you ended up being longer than that lmao 

(you ship WillJemma, said you were desperate to ship her with someone who is there for her, that is also why when I write with my friends I ship Jemma with Hunter instead, totally building it out of nowhere so we can do what we want lmao the one person she never had an argument with, never judged her for leaving in s2 not even behind her back, who really wanted to be there for his loved one and support her and all he asked was to be let in. But that’s in roleplaying where everything can make sense and we change the plot. But also hey, I can ship AU FS in which they actually talked about all their problems in s2 and kept supporting EACH OTHER and he adores how weird she is, which is a trait that stayed, and he gets therapy, and she gets therapy which is mentioned to have happened maybe in between seasons, and they are both equally excited to be together instead of him obsessing over her protection and them being in completely different places in their relationship, and she gets to break and to have her own arcs. Need me a ship like THAT. Where they both seem to be having fun together and TALK to each other

I need a ship where NO ONE is put on a pedestal, where he doesn’t think he’s not worthy of her and focuses on protecting her and hides things from her so she doesn’t have to worry about him, where instead they are both working on a relationship and love each other and talk to each other, and they both want the same things because otherwise Jemma is the only one working on the present happiness and alone in the relationship. They put each other first up to a certain level, but they know when they can retreat or say ‘this is too much’ and take a step back.)