{cat}alina

Ok but what if they had a happy ending

so i don’t think i fully disliked her, but her scenes were just difficult for me to see for some reason. i did understand a lot of her motives though, and maybe that’s why i found it so hard.

however, no matter how i felt about her, the first time i watched shameless i was LIVID about what happened with the baby. i was sitting there so confused at lip because she NEVER said the baby was his. she never even implied it. she just didn’t say the baby *wasnt* his because she genuinely didn’t know. it made me mad when people were telling her to keep the kid. that was her baby, if she wanted to give it up for adoption she could - remember she is a teenager with not much money and a mother who couldn’t support karen, never mind a baby (ik sheila did a good job in the end, but it’s reasonable to have thought she wouldn’t). karen also knows that she’s got problems herself, and shouldn’t be responsible for another person.

what makes me mad about karen hate is that it’s similar but opposite to debbie hate. let me explain. people will say debbie was wrong for having her baby at all, that she was stupid and should’ve listened to fiona and shouldn’t have expected any help from her family, forgetting she was a teenager who made a similar ‘mistake’ (depending on how u look at it) that many real life teenagers make. however, when karen is very against having the baby at all, when she wants nothing to do with her teenage pregnancy, basically doing what everyone wanted debbie to do, she gets hate. she gets told she was being horrible to lip, that it was his baby too.

the reason i think this is is because debbie’s baby daddy ran off, but karen’s (if the baby had been lip’s) baby daddy was willing to stick around. the moment a man is involved, the baby is no longer the woman’s according to some. it drives me crazy. it’s SEXISM. pure sexism.

and one of the things i will never ever understand about the people who love Shameless is how most people (especially Sheila lovers) completely miss the thematic point of Karen's household.

Because we have 3 different households we focus on in the show (not including Kev and V) The Gallagher's, The Milkovichs, and The Jacksons.

The Milkovich's are the extreme end of abuse and neglect in the home the worst of the worst violence. The Gallagher's are the middle ground. Their shit is rough as hell but there's still a cohesive structure to their household despite the poverty and chaos. And then you have the Jackson house. They are, for all intents and purposes, the dream the white picket fence two parents, etc. But Karen is still routinely neglected because of both her mother's illness and her father's misogyny and abandonment. And it's so overlooked because everyone loves to baby sheila because of her mental illness. But the mental illness does not remove the neglect Karen experiences. Which is why Karen continuously acts out for attention. The show is trying to show you three different lenses of abuse and neglect but everyone denies Karen's at every turn because her's is hidden under the veneer of the american dream. (at least the veneer of the american dream is the only thing that differentiates her from all our other characters who are imperfect victims as well.)

Like it literally makes no sense to have only 2 out of 3 houses they focus on be neglectful and abusive. Unless Karen's household was supposed to be a foil, but the differences aren't stark enough and they have too many overlapping elements to have Karen's house as the foil.

“Buffy Summers, Class Protector”.

BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER (1997-2003)

& there’s something really meaningful about the line, “soon it will be just rose”

this is her response to pearl using the term “my,” a term for superiors on homeworld. rose doesn’t want pearl to use that term for her, she hates it just like she hated “that dumb salute.” she doesn’t want pearl to call her “my rose,” she simply wants her to call her just rose.

and yet, she calls pearl “my pearl”

we kind of don’t need the direct sugar quotes from interviews and end of an era to know that rose looked up to pearl and she loved her. in a gem sense (and in a more human way), she said that she belonged to pearl. & around the same time, she said that she never wanted to have the type of relationship with pearl in which pearl belonged to her the way that gems belong to superiors on homeworld. and remember: sugar said that pearl fell in love with pink only after she was rose on earth. considering everything i’ve mentioned above, that’s definitely one positive thing about their inevitability complicated relationship.

My contribution to this heartbreaking twitter/x trend. I think this pic summarizes their lore quite well actually.