long gone

i'm bored of the scriptwriters digging through decade old lines to reuse them, i'm bored of all the characters going on about how grand their love is. yeah we get it! we're being hit over the head repeatedly on how aaron and robert is endgame. the audience is treated like they can retain memories for all of 5 seconds.

i'm bored of them projecting the past instead of writing a story in the present. they could have gone with a lot here, aaron should be having an incredible amount of ptsd due to being gaslighted for a year, and then getting back with someone who then proceeds to continue gaslighting him.

and all we get is 5 seconds of anger and "your love is like from a fairytale! you belong together! star crossed lovers!"

they don't even have chemistry together anymore. the soap's not giving them a lot to work with tbh. aaron gets angry and gets over it as magically as mack gets over his bunker ptsd, and then it's all just verbalising how much they love each other, and how magical their love is blah blah blah

ouch ouch ouch. can't escape the broader insinuations of him saying that. ig we can sit back and cross off aaron's SA off the (short) list of trauma that robert hasn't thrown back at him in anger

i see some more off-the-rails happening in the very near future, perhaps when kev joins the village again

i'm enjoying robert shitting himself by the hour in this farce of his own doing. barely gone are the brother husbands, and in is the cheating on the boyfriend while you cheat on the husband. forget cheating 1+1=2, this is cheating in m³

have robert hound relentlessly on aaron to get back together ✅ traumatize aaron ✅ have aaron vulnerable ✅ have aaron try to get back with robert instead ✅ have robert deny his advances because now he has the power in the situation and obviously he's such a good person that he won't take advantage of aaron's vulnerability ✅

or will this just stay a very intentional gorlodge parallel that longtime viewers can notice. it is rather on the nose, and would make sense for aaron's character to be triggered to remember it

it's been refreshing and something that makes me vaguely (lol I know I know it's emmerdale) hopeful that they won't re-establish that same old toxic codependency between him and robert

but it was really pretty mature of aaron to read cain correctly and not take his guilt-tripping and victim blaming, which is something aaron would have definitely folded under before

and he read robert as well and said no, i'm not playing that game. you had good instincts about john, but you barging in, thinking you always know best, was not good

i love it that so far they're not framing robert as the hero, that would've been so boring. i much prefer him doing his farming stuff with vic

but like did aaron go to therapy bts or something??

i do love a good soap cliché, but even more than that i do love it when they don't do all the expected, boring routines

i do wonder how they'll get robert out of the clink, since even though obviously mack/aaron will eventually clear his name, there is still hard evidence of him committing GBH with intent. like, video evidence. will the soap soapily sweep that under the rug

or possibly if they have it tied as evidence for the other crimes which will get dropped eventually, then? maybe in soap logic they can't try him for that afterwards, who knows

but i enjoy how much it makes sense for all the characters that robert is the culprit in all of this. his entire history, his violence, manslaughters, narcissistic personality, obsession with aaron, all those things that are central to him as a character, all working against him. like no, this time he didn't try to kill john and aaron, but he did try to kill x y and z. robert the boy who cried manslaughter

and i love how they've brought up the history of the soap. katie and jackson both being mentioned in back-to-back episodes!!! the way john left mack with the means to die of suicide and how he said aaron should understand because of jackson--all a warped nod to the very starts of aaron's run on the soap. and katie not being forgotten!! i will never forgive robert for katie. loved her so much

i am really glad that they didn't go the way of hauling robert as the hero savior of aaron

i mean robert was there to egg john on. it is entertaining when they don't go the boring route

obviously i don't believe that aaron will die nor that mack will die, either. i'm speculating that aaron will be in a coma or unconscious for a while and it'll take til nick of time til mack is found, so that robert will be investigated for john and aaron

it is really quite clever how robert's been digging his grave the whole time, just through who he is and how he reacts to things. for the villagers, it sure looks like robert went over in a jealous rage what with paired together with that phone call to the police and the video evidence of his earlier attack on john.

i've been enjoying john's soap villainery, it feels a bit anticlimactic for him to die. so we'll see