#none of the characters in the post were MEANT to be canon aa characters | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

scarlettlawyer · 5 years ago

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Next attempt: Shelly de Killer and Pearl Fey!

Shelly de Killer:

- I hate them / I don’t like them / I’m neutral / I’m ok with them / I like them / I love them / I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

- favorite thing about them: THE PERFECT COMBINATION OF ELEGANCE AND MURDER. HE’S JUST SO GREAT!!! I love the aura of absolute calm and aesthetic interlaced with imminent threat. Well, not absolute calm. He can certainly lose his patience. But he's not really one to raise his voice. It’s a quiet and terrifying anger if invoked. The veneer of calm is part of the gentleman aesthetic; the hint of anger is the imminent threat. Outside of his being angry, however, it’s still the same: even if he’s not angry at you, his mere job makes him intimidating. That’s inescapable. But his polite demeanour is still there. The combination of those things is fantastic. He will kill you if he must but damn if he isn’t going to do it in style.

- least favorite thing about them: I actually did have a reply to this come to mind, possibly connected to AAI2, and yet it slipped away shortly thereafter and now I cannot recall it, and after losing the actual reply I had I’ve honestly sat here struggling to come up with something. Like there were moments when I enjoyed his character a bit less, but... Hard to just list off a least favourite thing from that.

- ship(s): ...Oldbag. You have done this; you have planted this idea in the mind of my friend and I. Like okay I don’t actually ship it in canon OR in your fic, but the thought of it is so out there, and therefore amusing. And then my friend came up with this amazing JFA au running with the idea so, I do “ship” it specifically in the context of her au ahahaha. I love my friend’s idea of... him liking her and her not really being aware of it? Because it’s a reversal of what’s usually the case in canon. Let a guy be interested in her for once and have her be unaware of it. XD

Also just gonna tack this fic-related message(s) on randomly too but FOR CONTEXT TO BE FAIR THIS WAS before I read the ending which actually does address the death of Wendy’s husband and before the actual dynamic between Oldbag, Shelly and Benny had been elaborated on by the story:

(I ACTUALLY MEANT IN THE SENSE OF HAVING BEEN HIRED BY SOMEONE TO KILL MR OLDBAG BUT THEN MY FRIEND WAS LIKE “HOW DO I MAKE THIS ABOUT THE SHIP” LOL). Okay but maybe Mr Oldbag could have been an important figure in an au that someone would have reason to assassinate 🤔 :P

- BROTP(s): I guess Sirhan Dogen is the main candidate for this, although I haven’t thought about their interactions too much!

- NOTP(s): I don’t think I’ve really seen any Shelly shipping haha...

- Game/case where I like them more: Gonna go with standard JFA case for this one, but AAI2 case 1 is also just really awesome. Particularly the whole hostage thing to help Edgeworth’s investigation out.

- Random headcanon: Not headcanons about the character himself but rather in relation to him; I like to imagine how scandalised Phoenix would be if he heard that yes, Shelly de Killer, that guy Edgeworth and law enforcement at large are so intent on apprehending? The guy who kidnapped Maya? Edgeworth totally spoke kinda casually with the guy a bunch of times, and was even assisted by Shelly (you could even stretch this to perhaps argue that he COOPERATED with Shelly). Even saw Shelly face to face during AAI2 and had a chat with him. Well, yes, context, but... :P Especially without context, Phoenix would not be pleased. Not that Edgeworth would readily offer up this information to him. I think Edgeworth is in a slightly awkward position with regards to Shelly post-AAI2, at least slightly more than before, given how much help Shelly was and now having actually interacted with him in person.

Another thing I was thinking of recently is that... I think that there could be a very secretive and select group of individuals working for law enforcement SPECIFICALLY dedicated to trying to arrest Shelly and gathering as much info as possible. A highly skilled and dedicated team of say 5-10 people, and all of the information they deal with, and about them, is absolutely top secret. The group itself is secret, even, because this is dangerous work. They’re all about trying to track him down, analysing all the data they’ve gathered, you name it. Not that they have much success. But they would also over time probably veer more towards less conventional methods. Delving deeper into the criminal underworld for information, going undercover... Honestly? The closest they might come to actually getting a hold of the guy in person... is to go undercover as a client. Finding out how to hire him. It’s an awfully dangerous game they would be playing and their covers would have to be airtight.

- Unpopular opinion: I wasn’t sure how I felt about him sparing Simon. I really gotta replay AAI2, get my thoughts in order. This ties in with the “least favourite” question but I wasn’t too sure about the whole thing where Simon was considered to have broken the bond of trust for not saying it was a double and yeah I just gotta, replay the game haha. But... if a client normally recounts the ENTIRETY of the circumstances to him, expected not to leave anything out, as opposed to a simple “I want this person dead”, then I suppose that makes sense....Actually, wrong question for this but I’ll add it as a headcanon anyway: when Shelly meets with a client, part of establishing that bond of trust is kind of like the client “confiding” everything thoroughly to him, like telling a story of everything connected to, and culminating in the assassination request. He wants to know not only the who, but the why. What’s the client’s connection to and history with the target? Was there a time when they got along, were they always enemies? Is it just a political or corporate matter? It’s not about justification - Shelly doesn’t care how “justified” a client is and he certainly doesn’t judge. He just listens. None of the added information is necessary to complete the job, but divulging so much information is a demonstration of trust and helps make it clear this person is real with motivations and not an undercover person trying to arrest him or something like that. It’s also kind of an added bonus to get to hear some of the tales of intrigue that result from such meetings with clients. In the context of something like this, omitting the fact that the “president” was a double is a very serious offense.

I was gonna go on another tangent but this is already long enough lol.

----

Pearl Fey

- I hate them / I don’t like them / I’m neutral / I’m ok with them / I like them / I love them / I LOVE THEM SO MUCH

(I do love her! Just not with as much intensity as some of the other characters this series has).

- favorite thing about them: She is adorable incarnate, she is strong, and very cute

- least favorite thing about them: The fact that she was not allowed to grow as a character at all post-timeskip. I have so many complaints about older!Pearl. They took a ~17 year old character and forced her into the exact same role and characterisation as a ~nine year old! She is restricted and kept the same, and it feels deeply unnatural and kind of uncomfortable to me. The whole thing around her height too, like... why did they go out of their way to make her so short and tiny? To reinforce that we are still supposed to see her as a 9 year old? I love trilogy Pearl, I love her so much, but I find older Pearl so boring and so uninspired on top of that undercurrent of discomfort. They did nothing new with her, but in a uniquely and unnaturally limiting way in the sense that she is trapped as her trilogy self. After the timeskip the games appear to have a weird preoccupation with infantilising her because I guess they think connecting back to the trilogy (instead of doing something new) is the only way to keep us caring about her??

And like... Yes, Pearl embodies and encapsulates the cuteness and innocence of children. That’s a big part of her character and I love her for it, and I would therefore be reluctant to let that go. There’s nothing wrong with preserving stuff like that when she’s older. All I’m asking is for the games to actually put at least one new spin on her; SOMETHING that can distinguish her from her younger self so I’m not left feeling like she did not change at all in nearly ten years. A slightly different design, one (1) distinct new and different thing that sets her apart from (and potentially at odds with) her younger self, and I’d probably be happy. I don’t like what they did with her hair either. It sucks. Should’ve gone with the gorgeous inverted pretzel style.

Anyway I want to be given a reason to care about and be invested in older Pearl, an older Pearl trait that I can love older Pearl for...

- ship(s): Trupearl can be cute, but I don’t think about shipping much at all seeing as I vastly prefer her younger self, haha.

- BROTP(s): General “Pearl getting along with the gang” type dynamics haha.

- NOTP(s): Well, I do not like any implication that she has a crush on Marlon or vice versa. I really don’t like that.

- Game/case where I like them more: I’m not sure ahah. Good thing I’m trying to work through the games in Chinese on youtube so maybe I can brush up on my AA knowledge a bit.

- Random headcanon: Ok made this one up just now: When she’s slightly older she adopts the term “Narumayo” for her shipping of Phoenix and Maya. At least, the Japanese version of her where the characters have their Japanese names... lol. I guess her English-speaking self tried but failed to come up with a good name as the counterpart headcanon. Mayanix?

Actually, I guess another headcanon would be her being a hardcore shipper for any media she’s invested in. She moves away from shipping real people and onto characters, channelling all that energy elsewhere.

Or honestly, she could stick with real people and either become an Ace Matchmaker or overall consistently terrible matchmaker. Either’s good. If you combine the two, she could try to matchmake what seems to be an absolutely horrendous pair/combination of people, only for it to actually work.

- Unpopular opinion: Well, I think I already got quite opinionated above, and nothing really comes to mind to reply to this with. I might have been too harsh on older Pearl, but everything I wrote is what I genuinely felt and the impression that I was left with. That impression may be false, I’m not sure, but yeah.

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prixmiumarchive · 7 years ago

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The thing about Black Canary

I’m a couple weeks behind on Season 6, but I’ve been watching. However, I’m also a recently-returned fan who stopped watching Arrow (and lots of things at the same time) mid-S3. I have absorbed a lot of things through osmosis and gifs and reading wikis and so on, because sometimes I need spoilers for fannish activities, and it’s more about the journey it most cases. I’m disclosing this to let you know where I’m coming from, but anyway...

A lot of the time I see some ~discourse~ about how Sara is the true Black Canary because per Arrow she was the first. I also see a lot of posts that complain that Laurel’s becoming a superhero arc was really unconvincing and that they didn’t like it and wanted Sara to stay and so on... There seems to be a lot of “haha, in your face!” kind of victory dance goings-on when Sara gets used as the face of the Black Canary (there was some mobile app; there have also been other promotional materials that are not directly connected to the CW’s DCTV set that seem to use Caity Lotz’s likeness as a model). I think a lot of this is unnecessary, and since I am way more familiar with the front end of Arrow than the current back end of it, even though I’m closing the gap, I just felt like making a post sort of addressing this weird, competitive viewpoint that almost views Laurel as having foisted the Black Canary title upon herself, stealing it from Sara or something, when I just don’t think it’s a fair take on it.

Another disclaimer: this post has fuck-all to do with shipping, so check those counterclaims at the door, thanks.

So here are some things that are true in my view that tend to be used as things to back up the claim that Sara is the proper or true Black Canary and that we don’t need or want another one and that Laurel should’ve been removed because no one liked her or that this was a character development for Laurel that was never meant to happen and... so... on:

Per Arrow, Sara was the first Black Canary.

Laurel began the show as a very slightly more competent than typical in self-defense normal.

Both Oliver and Sara had five years of lived experience combat training while Laurel had none to speak of except becoming increasingly more familiar with needing to defend her immediate self from constant threat of danger over the course of the show. Laurel was often sort of presented as a damsel in distress for both Oliver and Sara.

Laurel’s initial attempts at becoming the Black Canary were extremely ill-advised.

The fact that she was allowed out into the field with the rest of Team Arrow as a fully-participant superhero in her own right when she was is a really questionable in-universe decision even if they were going to allow her to become a part of their superhero team due to her relative lack of experience.

This lack of experience is one of the reasons she died, in-universe, possibly.

However, I think that the conclusions that some people draw from this about narrative direction are simply unfair, and I wanted to point out a couple of things that I think tend to show that Laurel was meant to become the Black Canary all along.

See below for a surprisingly humongous post in sections.

Sara

The first thing has to do with Sara’s journey as the Canary/Yellow Bird/Black Canary. All of this had to do with very brutal survival for her, and when she finally did become a hero, it was a journey similar to Oliver’s only with an even more deep and dark background. I do not know when plans for Legends of Tomorrow to exist came into play, and I know that there are critiques that they whitewashed “White Canary” because the White Canary from the comics was an entirely other character who was an Asian woman, but that critique aside what we have in this canon is that Sara was on her way to becoming White Canary. Laurel actually is given a very beautiful line about this when she and Sara are discussing Rip Hunter’s offer to her. She shows Sara the white uniform/costume and Sara asks where the mask is. Laurel tells her she doesn’t need one because it’s time for her to step out of the shadows and into the light. This seems like a very cogent progression of Sara’s character arc.

Sara ran away from the League of Assassins because she finally got to a point where she couldn’t take being a murderer anymore. She came back to Starling City to see that her family was alive after the Undertaking. She had no intentions of staying or of rejoining normal life because she had already become so dangerous and put herself in so much danger that she saw no way out. Then, through staying, she found friends and family and a support system again. This allowed her to begin to step out of mere survival mode. One of the differences for Sara and Oliver in this respect is that Oliver had the respite of a lot more experiences where people were not behaving toward him with ulterior, cruel, or evil motives. Sure, it was punctuated by trauma and needing to do awful things to survive all the time and every time right up until the end, but Oliver’s humanity was not quite so thoroughly eroded as Sara needed to make hers. It isn’t until she returns to Starling that she even begins to unravel that for herself. So when she ultimately passes on the mantel of Black Canary for good, rather than there being two, rather than anything else, this is an evolution for her character and self-perception and a continuing search for more of that becoming more human-again -- not a necessary scramble for a new moniker for her because someone stole hers. It didn’t come out of nowhere.

Had Legends of Tomorrow never come into existence, I’m not sure what they would have done with Sara’s character, but I still don’t think her end goal ever would have been to remain Black Canary forever. For her, it was intimately connected with her chosen name for the League of Assassins and the terrible things she had done to survive. First, she needed to take her identity as it was and use it for good, but then she needed some new dimension to herself, and so I don’t know why people insist that Sara needed to stay the one, the only Black Canary forever. It wasn’t what she wanted.

Laurel

Then, there’s Laurel. I will agree forever with some meta I read several years ago, around the time when I was still eagerly watching S3 before I just rage-quit-because-of-fandom everything I was keeping up with episode-by-episode at the winter hiatus, about comparing the way The Flash was handling Iris in S1 and comparing it to the way Arrow handled Laurel in S1. I think maybe it was in a post that was still defending the possibility of endgame Laurive/r which I don’t really care one way or the other about -- I’m a multishipper; I always shipped Olicit/y; I never didn’t-ship Laurive/r but I also never OTPed it. Anyway, it said something about how making Laurel an “intrepid normal” or “intrepid civilian” at the beginning of Arrow was a serious mistake for her entire character arc.

I’ll admit that I still don’t know why they made her a lawyer unless it was simply to give her a job within the legal system that was different from her father’s. I don’t really know if she has ever had a consistent civilian occupation in the comics - the wiki entry I found said “florist” (lol). I know in Young Justice that she shows some skills for counseling that seem to indicate a background in it, but that could even be a getting-things-past-the-radar allusion to her being in AA for a kids’ show. However, it is still beyond me that they went so far as to make her a very normal, typical noncombatant even though they do give her basic self defense class skills from the very beginning. For example, I’ll never understand, now that we have Dinah Drake, why Laurel couldn’t have been a rookie police officer or something except that they wanted to present a contrast between her and Quentin. But also -- her father in the comics is Larry Lance. Her mother is Dinah Drake. There are all kinds of allusions to the comics layered into Arrow and the CW’s DCTV or “Arrowverse,” even in really unexpected places, but they are not meant to be direct ports. Arrow is, in terms of itself, on its own Earth-1 and it is canonically a distinct reality from many others.

Back to my point, I can see why the fact that she was so deeply entrenched as a civilian at the beginning might make people be suspect of the idea that she was ever “meant to be” Black Canary. That doesn’t mean there weren’t signs though. They go to the trouble to establish in the second episode that Laurel has some self defense skills. “Cop dad, remember?” she reminds Oliver when he seems confused.

Furthermore, choosing a profession for her in the legal system shows us that she already has an investment in her own view of justice. When she finally does try becoming Black Canary, she uses the line, “I'm the justice you can’t run from,” representing a resolution of a very long character arc she had grappling with the morality and necessity of vigilantism. She went from being reluctantly enamored by it in Season 1 to violently opposed to it in Season 2 to finally realizing a need for it and being tempted into trying it out in Season 3. That is a progression of character, not wild inconsistency.

Now I want to talk a little bit about Laurel’s characterization and the way it is characterized by the fandom. There is a lot of mental retconning that goes on for a lot of people. I’m not necessarily blaming anyone; I view fandom as an experience to engage in, and if your fanon is what you prefer, go right ahead. But I think that the writing of Laurel’s character suffered from them keeping her in the dark and clueless for as long as she was about what was going on around her. In Season 2, Laurel is really struggling with what she does know about her life. She has abandonment issues. She is grieving very deeply. She feels guilty. She is developing a substance abuse problem and generally freaking out about her own life while trying to keep an adult and professional face on it.

... And people hated her for it. This was the time when I was most-active in an Arrow fandom that hadn’t splintered off into this faction and that faction at that point. Olicit/y headcanoning and campaigning and wishing was alive and well but hadn’t created its own whole side-fandom. People still watched it weekly and regularly and blogged about it on tumblr without it being justification to judge the viewer. What halcyon tumblr times those were. But anyway. So many people despised Laurel back then. I don’t know if newer fans (uh, are there newer fans?) would even remember.

Most recently, Laurel has been a justification for people to hate Arrow because she’s gone. #NoLaurelNoArrow was a tag protesting her death. Again, I think as with Olicit/y, there’s probably a chicken and egg argument about whether or not the writers responded to fandom outcry to keep Laurel’s character on in some form or if they were already planning to do that. If you know I wouldn’t mind being enlightened. But back in, like, early 2014, “no one” liked Laurel. (’Cept me~)

The main reason they didn’t like Laurel was because she “whined” all the time or was a “bitch” for prioritizing her own emotional angst over the plethora of other problems that were actually far more immediate, pressing, deadly, and overall traumatic. But the thing that people don’t get is that she doesn’t have a bird’s eye view (pun?) on everything going on around her, and the narrative deliberately kept her in the dark for a year longer than it should have.

Wouldn’t it have been more interesting if she’d realized that Oliver was the Hood in the Season 1 finale and then her drinking and vendetta and upset over Tommy and the Hood and everything had an even more personal, complicated edge to it? That’s one retcon/AU headcanon suggestion, but don’t mind me.

Anyway, all of these acknowledged critiques doesn’t mean that there wasn’t always a general direction they were headed with all of this. Laurel and Sara’s gradual reconciliation over the course of the season, culminating in Sara giving Laurel her black leather jacket was character development. The passing of the jacket was foreshadowing. And everyone knew it and made an outcry about how they-could-not-possibly-be-considering-doing-this-this-sucks-so-much because, again, no one liked Laurel. Fast forward two years and many of those same people were quitting the show because Laurel died, but I digress. It was foreshadowing at the end of S2, even when the audience didn’t want it to be.

The Crucible(s)

There’s also the matter of a theme that Arrow has carried around with it literally since the very beginning: the Crucible.

Lian Yu literally means “purgatory.” Oliver constantly describes it and his experiences on “the island” as hellish. We know that he was not always on Lian Yu during those five years, but he was always on “the island” in a metaphorical sense and going through hell. The same was true for Sara. She faced her own trial of fire which made her into a henchmen, a murderer, an antihero-at-best, and finally a hero who operates in the light.

One of the first times we hear Oliver get to talk about his Crucible and the nature of personal crucibles such as they are, the first time that word ‘crucible’ is used, is when he meets and befriends/catches-feelings-for Helena Bertinelli. Helena is convinced that her experience of losing her fiance is the same as whatever crucible Oliver has faced. She has hurt so much that there is no way anyone can outdo her suffering after all. I don’t think Oliver ever thought it was a contest per se, but he tries to convince her that even after all he went through that there has to be another way than being a cold-blooded serial killer, y’know.

Helena refuses to learn that lesson. Nevertheless, she plays a role in showing that many people go through crucibles but not all of them come out changed for the better. We’re not meant to especially like Helena on a narrative level, but she isn’t a filler character necessarily. She’s a minor character, sure, but that’s not the same as filler. She had this purpose -- to tell us about the nature of this kind of suffering and what it can do to people. That is literally the entire Symbol of her character. She recurs because she is that theme recurring.

One of the time she recurs is in the Season 2 episode “Birds of Prey” -- another comic book allusion to the group for which Dinah Laurel Lance is best known. There is no new superhero team formed in that episode, but it is an episode that is making that titular illusion for a reason no less. This episode has Laurel and Helena having several conversations while she is holding Laurel hostage. The actual plot of the episode is, you know, an episode plot, but it shows us how Laurel has grown in her survival skills and in her view of her own survival. Laurel uses her words to communicate with Helena about Tommy’s death and her descent into addiction. Helena tells her “Once you let the darkness inside, it never comes out.”

Laurel adopts and thinks about these words even after this ordeal. She is in a very dark place, and she has been trying to deal with it. Her story actually parallels Helena’s in many ways. Tommy was not her fiance, but there is a sense in which Tommy died in Laurel’s place when she was the person who was at “fault” doing what she believed to be the right thing at the time... just like Helena. I don’t think that this parallel is a totally accidental coincidence. Laurel is being given the opportunity to go through something similar and to use that darkness, that ordeal in a different way than Helena did.

As mentioned above with Sara, it seems that this story uses the mantel of the Black Canary as a sort of place where women who have been through something very dark, very terrible go to make peace and amends. This has been true for Sara, it was why Laurel became the Black Canary, and it remains true through Dinah Drake of Arrow acting as the Black Canary. When Laurel had this thought put in her head by Helena, that was a step closer to doing something like becoming the Black Canary. Sara giving Laurel that jacket was also a symbolic signal and a step closer. Sara’s death was yet another part of that crucible Laurel was being put through. Just because her Crucible didn’t happen somewhere remote and primal doesn’t mean it isn’t a crucible, and I think that is one of the things they were always trying to do with her and it may be why she was still “normal” when the show began. Laurel was meant to go through her own Crucible and to come out the other side as the Black Canary.

Felicity (and Serendipity)

I would be remiss not to at least address Felicity here. I know that I’ve seen photo manipulations and speculation in the past that maybe someday Felicity would become the next Black Canary. Even back when it was being foreshadowed that Laurel one day would take up the mantel (maybe especially then?), people would suggest that Felicity would be a better and more logical choice. I mean, sure 2/3 Black Canaries have been blonde when they were running around in the leather, but other than that, this was a nonsense kind of suggestion. Honestly, too, I think many fans’ desire to see Felicity promoted rather than Laurel was a shipping competition as much as it was anything else.

Felicity is also a good person to bring up here because of her character arc always being one of ascendancy to something no one ever expected her to become on meta and in-universe levels. From my understanding, Felicity was originally intended to be a minor, supporting, comic relief character to give a face to the employees of Queen Consolidated and to have her subplot with Walter and the Hamlet-esque Queen family drama. However, with whomever they Test things with to get reaction, Felicity Tested very well. She was well-received and well-liked and people wanted more of her, and so she kept staying on.

It’s hard to even imagine now because Felicity and the Original Team Arrow feel so deep and integral to the show and its developed mythos at this point. However, I want to point out that Felicity did not actually learn the truth about Oliver and join the original Team Arrow until after the midseason finale of Season 1. Now, again, I don’t actually have my finger on the pulse of the writing staff because I’m just not that kind of fan -- that stuff wears me out -- but that midseason finale thing might be important because it might indicate renegotiation and rewriting of a sort in order to make sure Felicity slotted into the space they’d sort of made for her through experimentation with her interaction with Oliver and John. Before that, “Team Arrow” was literally just Oliver and his “bodyguard.”

Anyway, Felicity was a new cog in the machine. She is and was an original character, as John is and was, and she was not originally intended to stick around. You know, cue the started-from-the-bottom-now-we-here meme. Given that Olicit/y might be a serendipitous thing, but it was completely and totally unplanned until it just started happening and they rolled with it -- if you write fic you know that feeling where your characters just start telling you what to do? I imagine professional writers are a little more shrewd and resistant to their own impulses when they think they could make more money by doing it another way, but Olicit/y is literally one of those “oops my hand slipped and now I have what is (arguably) a masterpiece!” things and people seem to forget that or make it into a point for arrogance when really you should just take the win if you like it.

The Interruption of Laurel’s Destiny

Now, the fact that Felicity was never a planned-on character meant that prior to knowing that Felicity was gonna be there for the long-haul, the writers... did.. have a plan. I am not sure when the various parts of the Arrowverse went into production conceptually, but Arrow was the cornerstone. Whether or not it had been successful enough to spawn its universe of shows, I heard somewhere once that the writers had a plan for six years of the show. (I’m wondering if this will end up voluntarily being the last season, but who knows at this point. More recently I read this sort of platitude-like statement that was like they know how Arrow is gonna end but they can take as long as they want to get there which scares me a lot because i can imagine what I bet it’s gonna be but that is a different and terrible point for another day.) And yeah, the six years thing makes sense. They wanted to do the parallel plots of the present and the “island” flashbacks for five seasons, and then they wanted at least a season for epilogue -- fair enough. And for so long, I’d thought that maybe they’d abandoned that plan altogether, but whatever this was I was told my best friend had read included allusions to a lot of the things such as William’s current role and so on. So basically, I don’t think they ever abandoned or changed their plan; they adapted it.

They adapted it to include Felicity, yes. However, they also didn’t adapt it to include Laurel in a new way but still chose not to get rid of her. Now, I’m glad they didn’t do that. I liked-Laurel-before-it-was-cool and everything. But the issue was not that they never had a plan for Laurel or that they changed it in terms of her becoming Black Canary. What happened was that she was clearly originally intended to be Oliver’s endgame love interest. But they fumbled it. Even before they decided to do anything with Felicity that we know of, they fumbled it.

They fumbled it by giving them such a big thing as what happened to Sara to be their big obstacle to overcome. It’s too big. They fumbled it by going to the trouble of almost bypassing the typical love triangle bullshit until right at the end of Season 1 to keep you guessing. They fumbled it by making Tommy ultimately still extremely-admirable. They fumbled it by writing the fact that Tommy, Laurel, and Oliver all cared really deeply about each other actually really well. They fumbled it by giving us the one really actually-moving and not just sentimental, confused soup of nostalgia (which was fine but like y’know not convincing romantic development) moment between Oliver and Laurel happen right before Oliver was about to go tank it forever by “getting Tommy killed” backlit by that stupid sunlight framing thing they do. I say that moment is the Moment because before that we were literally given nothing but the most oblique allusions for what on earth Laurel and Oliver saw in each other apart from “bad boy I can fix because he’s not an irredeemable monster” and “pretty girl who never stops giving me chances.” They did a very good job of early and often letting us know why Tommy and Laurel liked each other and did nothing to give us a convincing love triangle (thank God, but also, it make this thing Not Work). They fumbled it by making Tommy and Laurel’s relationship so precious that Laurive/r looked pale and sad and like people trying to cling desperately to something lost and miserable in comparison. I’ve heard people say that Green Arrow/Black Canary is kind of supposed to be two human disasters who keep staying together or ending up back together over and over again even though it’s a mess, but they got... almost there... but never had the stomach for it, and the obstacles and comparisons they gave us were just too much for them to ever move past it unless they’d gone a far grittier place with it than they were ever willing to go. They gave it the old college try, but they backpedaled because they knew they fucked up.

(Side note: I would remind current fans that the Arrow school of writing romance seems to have a steep learning curve in this regard because when they canonized Olicit/y it became such a soup of crying and high romance there for a little while that it broke the fandom in half or more pieces and that they literally broke Olicit/y up for a while so as to get the show back on track before they touched it again. I’m happy with Olicit/y now, but this is not a Laurel-problem it’s a what-do-you-think-romance-IS thing @ the Writers. I bring this up as a defense of her but also because it’s also unclear if the beginning of Season 2 Oliver and Laurel interaction was a backpedal from which they intended to consider recovering from or if they had already decided against it but were keeping Laurel on as an important character anyway. Either might be true, but a part of me is scared that it was the former.)

When the dust settled and by the time Laurel was finally ready to begin taking her place in the narrative as Black Canary, Olicit/y had already started taking root. It was not to spite Laurel, but it also kind of didn’t help her. I still think you need to see Olicit/y as an independent development for the most part. The problem was and still is that they failed to figure out what they were going to do with Laurel instead. Laurel had one of the most richly developed background lives and jobs of any of the characters. She had friends who were minor supporting characters off and on. Her job impacted plots on the show. Her relationship to her job drove some of her own philosophical self-searching. Overall, she had a lot to work with, but they... didn’t work with it.

Anytime she had a love interest, he died (Tommy), was fundamentally too broken and misaligned with her to make it work whatever he wanted (Oliver), was evil (Sebastian Blood), and so on. Within the show, they never gave her anything that would work for her. A girl doesn’t need a love interest to be on a show, as we should all know, but this is a branch of a root problem with how they handled Laurel after Olicit/y started to develop. There was nothing wrong with Laurel no longer being Oliver’s planned endgame love interest. In fact, I find their dynamic as people who cared about each other and stayed-friends-anyway in the end interesting (which is why I hate her last words even though they could have so easily acknowledged that dynamic without Laurel throwing herself under the bus while praising Olicit/y when no one thought she had a problem with them in the first place but yeah).

The writers followed through on what appears to be their whole plan with her becoming Black Canary. Right down to her also responding to domestic violence suffered by another to initially motivate her the way Sara protected women down in the Glades. Laurel being intended to be the Black Canary was never the failure; it was the fact that Laurel was no longer intended to be the love interest and they didn’t know what to do with her on a personal level. I can think of suggestions that would have made me happy, but that’s for fic and another time and place. Laurel died for the in-universe reasons they give us, but on a meta level she didn’t die because she was a shitty superhero or because she wasn’t meant to be one. She died because we’re still living with her ghost today in the ways in which that six-year plan didn’t conform and adjust to make room for a personal life for Laurel Lance after Felicity joined the cast. I wouldn’t trade Felicity for anything, but I’d trade a lot of unnecessary subplots to give Laurel her life back.

(Final note: You want to come at us with the Laurel had no training and should never have been out in the field and blahblahblah but I just point you to Roy Harper and Thea Queen. Laurel is not the only offender.)

#Laurel Lance #arrowmeta #arrow meta #arrow #dctvmeta #dctv #dctv meta #Sara Lance #Felicity Smoak #Oliver Queen #Helena Bertinelli #mine #long post

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