#im not saying they’re bad in s4. im just saying I had less awkward moments in s1-3 LMAO

[reikunrei]

I find it very funny how much charm stranger things loses for me when the kids stop being kids. like s1 and s2 are so good to me bc the kids are all still babies. s3 is still pretty charming in that regard bc they all look 16 at most, so they’re still very steeped in baby. s4, while good, just so does not feel the same because they’ve all grown out of their baby faces :( why couldn’t they be baby forever :(

[therewas-a-girl]

so - i got this amazing ask some days ago, and then like an idiot, accidentally deleted it. thankfully for me, outlook saved the copy from the notifications, so here it is

How do you see the Laurel/Oliver relationship? Otp? Notp? Brotp? More than friends, less than lovers? I always thought that their relationship was somehow complicated. Did you think that 5x08 showed that Laurel was really the love of Oliver's life, not Felicity? I love both ladies, but I kinda see Olicity as Otp and Lauriver as, actually I'm not sure what I see them as. They love each other, not romantically, but they're not exactly friends?

anon im so sorry for my carelessness, and for the late reply - free time is scarce for me these days. 

i wouldn’t say complicated - though they sure are! - it’s just that that is not the very first word i would pick for them. laurel and oliver’s story is just really long lol. it spans something around two decades, it has changed so much - just as they have, as people naturally do - so of course, it’s going to be complicated. it’s a really layered relationship - that’s the word i like for them. maybe it should be analysed by ‘historical period’ the way i study political systems in different countries lmao.

they’re not otp for me (though they’re not a notp either), because the way canon built their relationship, the dynamics of it and the dynamics between them, has some really ‘nope’ moments. i dont ship characters where one treats the other like shit. (i dont ship ships where the story treats one character like shit for the sake of another, either)

I do think that through the course of 4 years they finally made it to ‘friends’ status, yeah. in season 4 i really thought their friendship was cemented, because in season 2-3 they felt more like... acquaintances with a dangerous history. they had too much conflict between them to really earn a friend status to each other. (not to mention the way oliver failed time and time again to be what a friend should have been to laurel. and vice versa, ofc. tho i dont think in laurel’s case it’s as flagrant as oliver, but at this point im basing my opinion on general impressions cause i haven’t seen s3 in a while.) but, despite that, many times they protected each other, and supported each other throughout the show, even when they didn't seem to like each other much. 

in season 1, their relationship felt kind of muddy, to me because there is so much going on there. i mean these two used to be childhood friends at some point. then they got together and i think... i kid of think they weren’t friends anymore. i think oliver didn’t see it that way anyway. laurel was in the girlfriend category. and laurel was really young and, i believe, really idealistic, trying to fit into all these ideas that she believes a girl is, and a girlfriend is, and what love means. it’s everywhere in film and our culture that ‘complicated love’ is great and romantic when in most cases it just bad for your health. but we’re not trained to think of it that way. and that may be easy to see when you’re 26 y.o. but it wasn't when i was 17, and i imagine it wasn't for laurel either. i imagine she thought that hear-breaking and intense and painful is the way love is supposed to fee. all movies say so. 

[in parenthesis here, i don’t think oliver cheated on her as much as fandom likes to think he did. there are other ways to make sense of their relationship than to pretend laurel was an idiot or spineless or a ‘stupid girl’. 

he either got with other people when they were in their ‘off’ periods, which we know they had, because everyone says they were the kind of couple that was on-again off-again. or he cheated and she did not know about it. i tend to think it’s the first, from the interaction in the flashbacks between sara and laurel - when sara says ‘we both know at leas 10 girls he’s slept with.’ *slept with* , not *cheated on you with*. and i think this is the case also because it fits with my idea of the rest of laurel’s characterization: an idealistic girl who is so enamored with the idea of love, as well as her boyfriend, that she can’t really see the cracks. someone like that wouldn’t forgive cheating so easily, BUT it is entirely within this laurel’s character to believe she can help people change, and take oliver on also as a sort of project. 

(and when i see people sneering at this, and at laurel for having this idea, i remember, absolutely drowning in irony, about how many fanfics there are out there where ‘felicity changes oliver’ and ‘is oliver’s light’ or just the general romanticising of this idea that love is ‘a woman changing a man’ and being responsible for his ‘goodness’. like, it’s everywhere, so criticizing a girl for having this idea, any girl, feels a little hypocritical, because we all have to work to drain this kind of shit from out psyche.)]

and then the gambit happens and their relationship in s1 is just really heavy with the history of 5 years of accumulated emotion on both sides. not all good kind of emotion. laurel was all about “life, interrupted” and ‘what could have been’ and the possibilities of sth that never was. oliver was all about guilt and pursuit of laurel, the person, in order to find in her what had been keeping him alive - laurel, the idea, aka home, aka the end of all the violent fuckery, a time when things were simpler - throughout the five years he was away. s1 is such a mess of regrets, and broken hopes, of ‘you were mine once how dare you see/try to be happy with- other people’ kind of jealousy, on both oliver and laurel’s parts, and fear of attachment on laurel’s part - being afraid of getting with tommy after how she was betrayed the last time she let herself love someone. being left by tommy too, falling back in oliver. 

there is this poem by warsan shire that always makes me think of s1 laurel and her decision to sleep with oliver right after tommy refuses her again at Merlyn Global, after she tells him she loves him: 

when the one i wanted, did not want me.

I was almost rabid for love. Would’ve lunged at anything thrown my way carcass, shadow, memory, promise shell of a man. I thought it was better to be loved by a dead thing than to be left alone. Then I loved a dead thing and was completely alone

at some point in s1, i do think they were tentatively trying to be friends again, but there was a lot of shit that remained unresolved between them and that stuff doesnt just, go away if you ignore it because its awkward af. 

i dont even know if i take that s4 episode and the whole ‘love of my life’ seriously, to be honest with you. it’s not that it contradicts my idea of laurel’s development as a character. i can very well imagine that after seeing who oliver had become , how much he had changed, laurel might very well fallen back in love with him. laurel loves and admires strength and goodness. she falls in love with potential, as much as with the actual people. so no, it’s not impossible to me that she might have, during the course of season 4, fallen in love with oliver. again. if it were not for one detail. 

oliver didn’t tell her about the pit. laurel believes that for all that happened , he STILL does not see her as an equal. and i cannot believe that someone who has gone through the things laurel has gone through, can love someone who sees her as beneath himself. it’s just not realistic to me. her character would require a deep respect of her person, to allow herself even the smallest possibility of opening her heart again. 

5x08... i honestly only have my own idea of what that episode was. i rationalized it like this: oliver has a serious difficulty letting go of guilt. when laurel told him that she’d loved him all the while, that really cemented oliver’s regret after her death. canon hasn’t given us any hints on the fact that oliver might still be in love with her, romantically. but he does love her, she is a friend. she is someone important in his life. and knowing that she is dead , that kind of pain is deepened by the knowledge of how unhappy she must have been. specifically, how unhappy he made her. this combines with the trait oliver has that, whenever he regrets something, whenever he feels he has wronged someone he loves, that guilt pulls really heavily on his judgement. and he has this compulsion to give people what they want, what they might need from him. 

and that’s how i saw oliver’s dream world. a sort of tiny little prison he and the others were trapped in, where to get out they had to face their enemies and fears. and my idea was that, after defeating deathstroke and merlyn, the real test of strength was saying goodbye to an alive and happy laurel, for both sara and oliver. because in that moment of their lives, laurel - alive and happy and getting everything she had ever wanted, according to what oliver and sara thought she’d wanted - was their deepest wish, their latest and freshest regret. (this totally fails to account for  William in oliver’s life, and how that is also a big regret for him. but that’s details) 

so, yeah that’s how i think about it. basically, they’re friends with a fucked up childhood lmao