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ruwithmeguys · 6 years ago

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Hey it’s the twitter user who just asked for S1&2 arrow reviews. So I just finished rewatching S1 and I’ve been curious about why Oliver went back to Laurel even though he didn’t love her. Did Laurel really understand Oliver? Because I’ve always thought Felicity was the one who understood him

Hithere! WELCOME TO THE REST OF YOUR EXISTENCE.

No,seriously; good luck ever leaving this ship! (Join us, we have all the OTP cookies - hah, I never even used to know what OTP meant)

I’msure there are other people who can answer this better, who won’t do it at workwhen I’m supposed to be, you know, WORKING (I am not a role model). But I wanted to give you a response pronto!

Here we go: Oliver… Laurel… Tommy.

Here’s the thing. There areall kinds of love. Oliver, laurel and Tommy were friends first before any ofthem slept together. The love Oliver had for LL was predicated upon thatfoundation of friendship. They’d been attracted to each other so they decidedto do the natural thing: date.

Now, just because two friendsare attracted to each other, doesn’t make the relationship this amazingshowcase of love or the perfect ship or the forever one and only. Chandler andMonica they aren’t.

They weren’t even Ross andRachel, not even close. And Ross had sex with another women four hours after their ‘break’. What aguy.

Did we see even THIS level of intensity from either side? Nu uh. And I tell you,if I start a show like Arrow and I’m supposed to be sold on their romance because where there’s a hero, there’s always a romance, then I want at LEAST angst.

What I believe - and have beengiven proof from Stephen and from others - is that when Ollie - which wasexactly who he was before the Gambit sank - was with LL, she brought out thegood stuff. But the goodness inside him was coated by his greed, vanity andselfishness. He was a dick who LL thought that simply by being with her, would not be a dick…

Wishful thinking to the tenthdegree.

She was head over heels and deluded by it (that gif is really creepy - he was sleeping with them both there. Laurel was oblivious. Sara was besotted. Three people and not one understood the other).

But Oliver has felt attractionbefore for many other women and continued to not only feel said attraction, butto act on it; she was just one in the herd. Oblivious to the other sheep. From my count, Oliver slept with Sara, Samantha, Max Fuller’s fiance and, two women he went on a joy ride with whilst dating Laurel. Possibly more. Thedifference being that he and laurel held a history of friendship and care together -that he should have given a shit about - so it deepened the relationship fromsex buddies to boyfriend/girlfriend.

But he still cheated on herbecause it wasn’t this special thing that she thought it was. And he was withoutmuch of an ethics base or conscience back then. I’m pretty sure Oliver knew howmuch of an ass he was; in fact I think he thought he was a worthless pretty boywith mountains of cash, which he used to get his way. Deep down, Oliver was,is, a very good person. But ego, money and pleasure soaked up his view and hemade the worst decisions. Just because he started dating one of his closestfriends, didn’t mean he was going to stop partying and cheating and being said ass.

The fact that LL saw this as agiven is one of her many displays of wilful tunnel vision. She was the star ofher own story and the star doesn’t get treated that way. She was at the top ofOllie’s and Tommy’s and daddy’s and mommy’s priority list: she was a betterdaughter than Sara, Ollie would never chase skirts behind her back - they weregoing to get married and be rich socialites together after all as her originalendgame (S3) was to become a wealthy DA who’s clients were the rich criminalsOliver faces in S1 - Tommy would always be there, and daddy would always beproud.

She had a skewed perception asmany people often do when they’re young, inexperienced, ridiculous and lofty.

She’s allowed to be this way. Oliver was allowed to be a disaster boyfriend.

Your first love is rarely yourlast.

But LL didn’t just see Ollieas her first love: she saw him as her last.

Ollie couldn’t look that farinto the future, as evidenced by how he treated his education, by how hetreated women, by how he played around with Sara, by how he tried hard to bethis constant failure.

So when LL started pushing forfurther commitment - for living together like their other friends and being an‘us’ - Oliver made a run for it and grabbed some TNT along the way. Nothingbreaks up a relationship quite like sleeping with the sibling of yourboy/girlfriend. This way, he could be in a far off land when LL realised hersister wasn’t at college, when one of her friends blab about her, because Sarasaid it herself on the Gambit: she was going to be in so much trouble, whichOliver was counting on.

He wouldn’t have to do any ofthe work.

A real shining example ofboyfriend of the year.

But then the Queen’s Gambitexplodes, Ollie looses Sara and hisfather whilst bobbing around for days at sea and by the time he reaches LianYu… Ollie’s not really there anymore; he’s already altered.

The good in him, the strengthhe didn’t know he had comes out, alongside a heavy coating of self-loathing,violent tendencies and a consideration of turpitude.

There’s a scene that perfectlyencapsulates how Oliver feels for LL in those S1 flashbacks: he’s in the cavewith Shao Fei and he’s staring at her picture. He looks so sad and so guiltyand he says ‘I’m so sorry LL’.

He’s not sorry because heloves and misses her. He’s sorry because he fucked up.

And Oliver had no idea what hehad until he lost it, but it’s made all the worse because he feels like Saradied because of his selfishness. Without that guilt I’m not entirely certainhe’d have been so obsessed with the idea of making it up to her, but yes; ahuge part of wanting to return home was about fixing what he broke. Making upfor his mistakes. Gaining a reprieve from years of suffering.

He’s dangerously close tokilling himself in that first year: sometimes believing you’re at the root ofall evil can help you prioritise. He needed to live to make it up to LL.

He needed to survive.

It’s a defence mechanism. Helatched onto those feelings to keep going. THAT and he isn’t scum: he wanted tobe better. He denied the hope inside him but it was still there, waiting for the right time.

The right person.

Notice he never once tells LLor says to anyone after his return, that he wants to be with her. He’s only ever said that to one woman on the show.Word for word. Not an insinuation: a flat out factoid.

The very few things Oliversays in regards to LL and their former relationship after his return in S1, isthat a) thinking about her helped him survive in that first year, b) that hecouldn’t say he didn’t love her, c) he was genuinely happy that she and Tommywere together, d) he would never ever reveal to her who and what he really iswhich means he’d always be lying to her and finally e) that he was sorry andthat it would never be enough.

Romantic stuff it is not.

Even with that crappy list,there are more holes.

A) He admits in the S4 and S5 flashbacks that,since he was so changed, he knew the person who he’d become could never returnto LL because he wasn’t the same guy. He said that he kept her picture as areminder of everything he’d done.

Her picture was a source ofshame: his self-inflicted punishment. She would always remind him of hisselfishness. ROMANTIC RIGHT?

B) Saying that you can’t say you don’t lovesomeone isn’t telling them you do love them. It’s useless after the fact.When Oliver realised he was in love with Felicity he declared it several timesto her even though he thought he couldn’t be with her! The one time Oliver tells LL that he loves her is after her death, in ahallucination in 5.08 where he’s very literally apologising for lying to herand for not being the man she loved. He tells her that they could never have been, because who she loved died and he wasn’t that man.

He couldn’t love her the wayshe’d clearly loved him. He was finally given the chance to gainclosure by telling her ghost what he should have told the woman before shedied. She’d deserved to hear the truth years ago. Case in point, on herdeathbed he could only stare at her when she told him that he’d always be thelove of her life. Loving someone? It is FAR different to being the love oftheir life.

Do you know what being thelove of someone’s life is? It’s being at the source of the most powerful,profound and influential love a lucky person feels in their lifetime. The WHOLEof their lifetime. The person who is the love of someone’s life is the person whothat someone loves the absolute most, the person who changed their lives themost. No other love will come close. Oliver was that for LL. She knew she was not that for him.

C) Do youknow the most revealing way of being in love with a person who is unavailableto you? Jealousy. Oliver never showed an ounce of it for LL and Tommy. In facthe cheered them on, waving them off with a smile because he was HAPPY for them;as if he was saying, all is well and all is good now. Hot stuff right; it really makes you want to watch thislacklustre rickety canoe progress…

D) Wantingsomeone in your life means revealing yourself to them. It means sharing thingsyou’re too embarrassed, ashamed or afraid to do otherwise. It takes a lot ofcourage and we know Oliver possesses that trait in spades. And yet, he neverwants her to know his secret - the other half of him - and what plays a big part inthis is her initial reaction to his rage in 1.04. He scares her and she’s not shy in showing just how much. Her back and forth after that fact wouldn’t instil confidence either, never mind that Oliver already knew a relationship between them with the hood in the middle was doomed to failure.

Trust me, ifthe show hadn’t been brave and we’d been forced to watch a relationship thatmade little sense, we’d have gotten a good 12 episodes of LL being afraid ofOliver and overcoming her fear to a manageable basis. THANK CHRIST.

There was never anything to fear with Oliver: Felicity knew that immediately.The hood, the man under it – it didn’t matter. LL didn’t see what was therepast the scary skills and bloody arrows. Under the hood was the man she repeatedly claimed, she knew down to his bones. And yet… she didn’t see him there.

E) A love powered by guilt is no love at all.There is a difference between the love you have for the people you care for andbeing in love.

Oliver did love LL. But he wasnever in love with her. UntilFelicity, Oliver had never fallen inlove before and it was vastly different to anything he’d felt, thank you WendyMericle.

He even behaves differently once we see it. Falling in love withFelicity made him a better, more hopeful person.

Loving LL in any capacity wasa constant reminder of his ‘sin’.

So when you say that you don’tunderstand why Oliver went back to LL in 1.21… well, wouldn’t you want to beabsolved?

Oliver wanted- desperately needed to hear one thing from all thewomen in his life who have had some sort of emotional sway in it.

Moira Queen: I’m proud of you(who you are and who you’ll become)

Thea Queen: Thank you (forbeing who you are and for doing what you do)

Laurel Lance: I forgive you(so let go of the past, I have: I hope you find happiness)

Sara Lance: It wasn’t yourfault (and what happened gave me purpose)

Shado: you didn’t kill me (amad man trying to hurt you did: let me go)

Felicity Smoak: I love youOliver Queen (I always have and always will be yours)

Being the boyfriend he shouldhave been, being given a chance do it again and do it right – sort of liketurning back the clock – must have felt like a massive relief to Oliver who, inS1, was clueless about what made a relationship work. Relationships based onthe past, don’t last. There’s nothing there to help grow and like the once wiseJohn Diggle once said:

Itisn’t about changing or saving a person: it’s about being with someone who’sthe right fit.

The aim, the goal line whenyou want a relationship with the one you love, is simply to be withthem. To grow with them. Not to makeup for being a jackass in the past. You do that by being a decent person. Not by doing this:

HelloLL, I want to be with you to make up for betraying you! The making of a dream ship, I swear.

If they’d gotten back togetherafter 1.23, the following would have happened:

1. Oliverwould have been forced to see that they couldn’t hack it as a couple. Friendsand allies yes but not as a couple. It takes complete trust to share your lifewith a person and Oliver has never trusted LL to that degree and there isoodles of proof. He’s admitted to it; in fact he’s alluded to never being ableto do that with anyone other than a certain beautiful IT girl.

2. Wewould have had to put up with a solid season of a force-fed, lacklustre romanceand then we would have had the dreaded love triangle once Sara showed up whichwould have been so much worse to watch than what actually happened.

3. OnceLL discovers his secret, and it wouldn’t be because he tells her, he’d break upwith her on the principal that it was the last straw: his last lie to thiswoman who didn’t deserve it and she would vow to prove him otherwise. She’dreach to become BC and they’d have an off again, on again tedious thing thatwould have killed the show in a final, ten episode long, S5.

Tommy’s death led Oliver’s hearttowards the light.

Tommy wasn’t supposed to die. He was a good guy trapped between opposing forces and in love with a woman who didn’t love him back. When he died, Oliver’s world changed perspective. he saw what should have happened as opposed to what they thought should have happened.

The love Oliver and Ll thought they had didn’t culminate in this victory the audience probably expected it to be.It was both reborn superfast only to perish in betrayal. Now, LL and Tommy wereover and Tommy had pushed them both away… so why did both LL and Oliver laterfeel like that was exactly what they did? You only feel this, if deep downinside, there’s something wrong, something you haven’t admitted. LL didn’t feelit until after Oliver runs away again,which meant she’d been swept away by another lie once more only to realise, it was another rinse repeat.

Oliver felt it immediately.

Being with LL wasn’t worthbetraying Tommy, wasn’t worth his death. It wasn’t, because his love for herdidn’t match Tommy’s and he flipping knew it. It tainted anything that could have been past the point of noreturn and suddenly Oliver didn’t want to live in the past anymore because whenhe’d tried, he’d screwed things up further and the boy deserved not to want tokill himself so much. The past includes LL, which is why they barely spend timetogether afterwards and it lasts right up to her death.

Because what else do theyhave, except the past?

If their love had been more,then maybe… after time, they could have gotten past this.

It wasn’t.

Oliver didn’t go back to Laurel. He and Laurel tried topick up again right where they left off, withoutfacing what had happened which is what you do when you decide to re-writehistory, which is of course impossible. It’s just another lie. It’s the easyway out.

Let’spretend you never cheated on me!

Goodidea! Let’s also pretend my alter ego doesn’t scare you shitless and that you don’t secretly hate me for Sara!

Awesome!

LL didn’t want to face thefact that the best time in her life was over before it even started because shecouldn’t move on from the loss of it. Oliver didn’t want to face the idea thathe couldn’t fix his mistakes because it meant acknowledging what he’s alwaysbelieved: that everything that happened after the sinking of the Gambit, was because he’d lived as others died.

You know what the best exampleof being in love is on a TV show?

What it does to the character.

There is never one singlemoment where LL and Oliver make each other better. They don’t ever help eachother in any positive way. He gives her one half hearted lie in 1.21 whichflatters her ego and lights up her libido for cardboard sex and puts women everywherewith two brain cells to string together and a modicum of self-respect, to shame.

This is what happens betweentwo people who never got closure. Once the sex is over, the appeal wears offand reality sinks in and it flat lines.

The exact opposite of what happens when Oliver and Felicity sleep together,just in case you’re wondering what a successful TV romance looks like.

Stephen stated something oncewhen he was asked about his favourite moments in S1. He said that he reallyliked the moment where Felicity said, ‘if you’re not leaving, I’m not leaving’.

He said it stayed with Oliverin a profound way because, deep down, Oliver has always craved that. Havingsomeone who he could lace 100% of his trust in and who would never leave, despite the times he screws up- and screws up hedoes.

And stay Felicity does.

Every single time, even when they’re not together.

We know Felicity saw the realhim. He saw her. There was animmediate connection that neither understands at first because it’s too big.

Patience is required.

I firmly believe there was no romance in S1; but anyonewho watches S1 – particularly 1.03, 1.12, 1.15, 1.17, 1.21, 1.22 and 1.23 – can’t possiblybe blind to all the tiny details of building of trust, reliance and connectionbetween two people who no one saw coming.

There is no build betweenOliver and LL in the season which is shocking and it makes you question thesanity of her fans: the sole season that includes romance between the two and it’s barely even played with. The writers didn’t even try to do it the justice it supposedly deserved. No matter how many complaints the fandom has about the writers, they are not THAT obtuse. It was deliberate.

Why try when it’s not worth trying for?

Lastly, remember that Oliver wasso fucking lonely in S1, especially after the five years of hell. The kind of lonely you couldn’t possibly understand. There isn’treally a way to measure that.

If you’re thinking about himand Felicity, it’s like imagining the deepening of the ocean.They both have issues the size of Godzilla; the ocean’s depths have to be at least as deep - you don’t want them together in S1.Let him go find empty sex with LL where they don’t face, fix or talk about athing. Where they just let themselves pretend for a while.

It’s easier.

Something you need to rememberabout S1: the first season is always going to be the season of trail and error.You cast your lead character in different scenarios with different people andyou see what works.

A fact for you that you mightneed to hear: roughly when they started filming 1.03, they revealed 1.01 to theexecutives at WB and so on and so forth and… let’s just say they weren’t takenwith the onscreen chemistry for the relationship between O + LL. Or with KC’s portrayal. It’s difficult to work against a constant barrage of bitterness. There are otherfactors but I’m not talking about them.

Now, the template for the show’sromance was supposed to be this epic love between the two, as it is in thecomics. Now, I have ample experience with my favourite stories being translatedonscreen. What works on a page rarely works the same way on tv and the comicbook relationship was terrible anyway; why replicate it?

Just when they were trying tofigure out what to do… Emily does onescene, lights the place up, gives Stephen the most excellent chemistry I’veseen in years to play off and suddenly they have a path to follow.

They started building Olicityin S1. They’ve admitted it, but they wanted to do it subtly and BECAUSE they didit slowly, it was believable. Between 1.01 and 1.05 – they write 5 episodesahead of filming – there’s this constant, in your face message that laurel andOliver are meant to be. Then there’s this shift. They slowly introduce this ‘behindthe scenes’ thing with Felicity and Walter, interjecting her loosely withOliver’s story at just the right moments (the end of 1.08 is a HUGE indicationof where they’re going), before the scene in 1.12.

It isn’t a coincidence thatthe scene discusses trust.

He doesn’t talk about trustwith anyone in the season, excerpt her AND… Helena.

Helena trusted him with herheart and she realised he wasn’t ready, that he was still hoping to save thepast just as he hoped to save her and his ignorance hurt her. So when Felicityshows trust in him and he in turn. Proves she can… well it’s a huge deal.

You’d think trust would pop upbetween him and Laurel given their history. The fact that it didn’t speakswonders. In fact, it’s stunning how far apart the writers keep them in S1; it’salmost unfeeling. The lead up to their love scene felt way too fast for my tastes and thereason for the sex, shallow at best.Filled with lies. Rushed.

Crappy sex. A reunion of the body but not the hearts or minds.

Not thelove scene you show for this supposed great star crossed lovers thing they weresupposed to be: it’s a massive neon sign post so I wouldn’t think about it asanything more than two people who had no idea what was good for them, doing theonly thing they knew how to do. Have sex.

Let’s face it, they both suckat relationships. Tommy, the bachelor, knew so much more. He had their futureplanned: him and LL and the white picket fence deal and LL was so clueless, shethought a rebound with ‘Ollie’ was preferable. Idiot woman.

Don’t put too much stock inseason 1: I actually love the season because you can see the narrative linesthat will propel the show towards where they are now.

You can see the prison storyin it from S7. You can see Felicity’s importance and the trust that leads to theepic romance of the show. You can see LL’s death. You can see Prometheus andSlade. John Diggle’s eventual rejection of OTA. Quentin’s death. Oliver rising as a hero.

But even in S1, it was alwaysgoing to be Oliver and Felicity. Stephen said it and he meant it and the directors/creators and writers have been backing him up since 2013.

Yet you have to make room for error and Oliverhas to be allowed to learn, even when it’s infuriating and he does senselessthings for the wrong reasons. THAT’S why he goes to LL in S1. It was unfinishedbusiness.

Sometimes you have to go back to move forwards.

Hope that helped. There wereabout a hundred different ways I could have answered this but I had to sort ofrush it out because of work and my fanfics so I hope it’s at least coherent.

(NO GIFS ARE MINE)

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