A tart's boudoir

Hang on.

Wait a minute.

You know what?

@therewas-a-girl

So, in summary, this happened.

And Marc made it worse.

And Emily came for his balls.

www.dewc.ca 

They are amazing and do such needed and good work. 

arrow writers: we really love felicity, everyone kind of fights to get to write her scenes, we’re really excited about the storylines we’re planning for her.

i have to believe that these ppl had deep, inescapable reasons for acting the way they did. both of them. that both made false steps that are based on character traits which inevitably lead to who they are, as people. 

Oliver lied because he was afraid he’d lose everything and presented with the choice between stalling and confronting a risk such as that, he will choose to stall ever time, hoping and planning to somehow fix the situation without further collateral damage. (no, i do not take the ‘ultimatum’ as a valid excuse. it was blatant plot device with more holes than Swiss cheese. case in point: he could have told felicity that something was wrong, sth personal, but he had made a promise to keep it a secret, until he could win this person’s trust. that it wasnt a safety issue - debatable, for william - but his hands were bound.).

Felicity left him, because despite understanding him and his reasons very well -

(i keep losing years off my life any time someone mentions ableism together with felicity here; how she didn’t of know his mental condition or wasnt understanding/tolerant of it. 

is it possible to sleep in the same bed with someone for a year and not know there?s sth wrong with them? for felicity ‘mysteries bug me’ smoak? 

despite how the show insists on it, its not felicity’s job to be oliver’s light, healing, salvation, or anything else. he has those things inside himself -  even though he needs mroe help than most, cause he’s been through more than most. but they dont live outside of him. that’s reductive to oliver and objectifying of felicity. 

and i’d rather not infantilize, simplify or insult the intelligence of these characters. to me, it’s perfectly natural that after years of working together in high-tension situations, they know and understand each other’s mental pitfalls quite well, and that their conflicts are human, not stupid cause ‘so much happened and they didn’t talk like normal people’. that’s ‘show’ logic.)  

- she felt hurt and betrayed and alone and she didn’t want to build a life with someone who could make her feel like that, after she dared to trust in ways she hadn’t before. after knowing that love was real and love could still hurt in all the ways she most fears, maybe she though love just wanst enough. she didn’t blame him for how he was or why he did what he did. it wasn’t about oliver!!! she saw her life as if would be with him and, in that moment of heartbreak, it seemed to her a lonely life. she would be unhappy and her unhappiness would make oliver unhappy. so she said no.  

and that’s the soft version. the raging angry and fucking destroyed inside version is that she doubted everything and everyone, and didnt want a single thing or person on earth to touch her anymore ever. that she saw the patterns in oliver’s behavior and decided to fall back into her own that had kept her safe and balanced until that moment, because no, the pain wasn’t worth it. just like oliver thought the risk of her leaving him wasn’t worth it - his own pattern. so felicity closed up onto herself and said fuck everything. 

so what if she did? i’d like to meet the person who loses the person they love most, their whole future, and stays gracious and accepting, graceful and giving. who is that person? not me for sure, not any real person. i dont personally thing what felicity did was selfish, but so what if it was? what is wrong with that? with watching out for herself? what’s so wrong with saying ‘fuck TLC when ppl rip you heart out but they’re sorry’ ‘fuck sacrifice and fuck the glorification of female sacrifice paving the way for the normalization of female pain’ ‘fuck giving’ ‘fuck nurturing’ ‘fuck you madonna-model, i am a person, fuck that halo you want to stick over my head, shove it where the sun don’t shine’. 

what’s so wrong with taking the breathing room to be ugly? 

any one of those reasons are valid reasons and character pitfalls. these can be places to grow from. mistakes to learn from. and if it leads them back to each other, awesome. if not, whatever.  

honestly man, i think people who think felicity wronged oliver by what she did, how she reacted, truly do not take the time to put any of her actions in any kind of emotional context. they either lack the means to do so or just dont want to because its way easier to demonize one party tahn… idk, assume both are people. oliver’s emotions are served to us on a platter, he doesnt really need that much work from us. as it should be with all characters! but felicity’s … not so much. you have to care. you have to try and empathize. and you either chose to do that, or you chose not to. 

You do a pretty good job of demonstrating that on your own.

Hahaha! Because what’s funnier that explaining yet another female character’s absence by equating her with being a sex worker. It’s even funnier when it’s a well-respected older female character, because hey that’s even grosser!

Do I need to explain why this is gross? Actually, with your tendency to dismiss everything you say with “why can’t you little ladies just take a joke?”, I’m guessing you don’t get it. 

Do your own homework on this one. Here, I’ll get you started.

I’m also thinking you were bracing yourself here for the wrong reasons. Are you familiar with the concept of agency?

Okay. Okay. I’m taking deep breaths here. Actually, no–WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU.

With apologies for getting personal, but GOD. DAMN. You have kids, right? Do you have daughters? Do you know women? Would you ever, ever, ever want to describe one of their relationships this way? Would you ever say to one of your daughters, “Hey, if you were just nice to that boy, if you just said you loved him, maybe he wouldn’t have tried to kill you?” Would you ever say that to a battered woman or the family of a murder victim?

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, MAN.

Here we have a dish of sexism, racism, and false liberalism, with an extra helping of derailing.

Enjoy.

Hey kids! It’s not stalking if it’s FOR BUSINESS REASONS!

What the fuck. Just…what the ever loving fuck were you thinking.

And now for the exemple du jour.

It would have been easy to deal with this. Say: Hey, I thought I was making a funny joke, but I see where you guys are coming from on this. It is a little dismissive toward women in fandom, who already have enough trouble being accepted and understood in media. Sorry about that, I’ll try to do better.

But nope: then came “context.”

…because repeating yourself explains it?

Nope, didn’t work. All those uppity ladies are still mad. Let’s try mansplaining, that’ll do the trick!

Ah, the pièce de résistance. The pinnacle of sexist douchebaggery. The one true sign of a problematic point. “Why can’t you girls just take a joke?”

Because it’s not a joke. Because it’s not funny. Because we’ve heard it before.

Also: because fuck you, that’s why.

Now, I know what you’re thinking! “Wow, it’s so easy to go back and find things that I willingly said on the internet and in front of people which sound legitimately bad on their own but especially bad when put together in a record!”

You know what’s easier? Listening to criticism and apologizing when you’re wrong. We call that growth.