#it's got just that combination of extremely good worthwhile stuff and bad dumb stuff that makes me carazayyyyy

[mandy4ever69420]

ok actually this is fucking killing me now because with that in context + mickey's life of weird horrible pressure because of societally unconventional + "unacceptable" (read: severely punished) preferences it's kind of occurring to me that there was a pretty big opportunity to switch up the fucking order of a lot of s11 into just ian wants kids -> offhand mentioning yevgeny onscreen -> mickey's dad dies + mickey still hates talking about feelings under any circumstances -> THEN "who's the woman" as a reaction to mickey suddenly face to face with the fact that he's never getting the approval he wanted (even though he already knew that, logically, the feeling only hits with the grief) + a little backslide because of his grief, and how that comes with regret, because to me it really looks like mickey loved his dad, no matter how much he didn't want to. like it could have been a super coherent narrative. + been a part of the "show in its final season" thing that i think works best where they'll bring back, to reference or reiterate important stuff from the whole series.

they could've also made a great point about the effects of incarceration on parenthood + children's sense of safety here. i don't actually think shameless is deliberately telling an abolitionist narrative. i think their main goal is to go for realism and my instinct is to read realism as pushing abolition because of who i am as a person. but they expressed some of the indisputably some of the negative outcomes of sending someone who did, in fact, do the crime they're being punished for to prison. the fact that there are parents in prison who have no choice but to be absent and kids who miss them is a big one that is just not mentioned + as a theme it'd fit extremely well with debbie and sandy's plots as well. since debbie spent ?? time incarcerated while franny was very young. she adores that kid and it must've killed her to be away. and sandy never wanted or ever grew any attachment to her kid as misogyny would expect, the way mickey accidentally did his, as is not the stereotype given for men.

shameless lost some of its shine at balancing really intense themeing over comedy as i assume writers were slowly quitting and getting rehired but TBH ian could still be a weird dick about "hey neanderthal there's no man in our relationship" for this one - i adore ian for being a weird oblivious dickhead even when he's doing his best to be a kind and understanding little soft boy so you don't even have to nix the griping and bitching (which quarantine couldn't have helped) from your comedic repertoire.

The whole Yev situation is complicated, but I do find it a little strange how he was not mentioned in season 10 and 11 when Mickey and Ian talked about having kids. Did the writers forget about him?

ive mentioned this before. mickey was raped, he never wanted a child, yev was (presumably) happy and healthy with svetlana after her final marriage. they probably had a conversation off-screen where ian tried to talk about it or tell mickey where yev was and mickey responded "if he's with him mom and being taken care of, i don't wanna talk about this" and ian dropped it. yeah the writers probably kinda forget about his existence, but i feel there's a very simple in-character answer for why gallavich never touches the subject