🫀🪼Angel Wing🪽🫀

Mike struggles with a victim mentality and an inability to effectively advocate for his needs; Lucy is brash and "high maintenance" in ways that amplify his weaknesses.

Lucy, meanwhile... where do I even begin?

Given her fast friendship with Augustus in her sophomore year, I'd argue she thrives in relationships that are actually kind of vicious, in a performative tsundere "I only called you pathetic and worthless or either Abbey or a rapist because I love you" way. And that's fine! That's not a character flaw. I'd argue her friendship with Paulo was built on a variation of this dynamic. (If a weird unhealthy variation.)

But this isn't a dynamic Mike likes. When she tried to spin it with him, half the time it devolved into her mistreating her best friend.

I concede that it wasn't always this way. When they were kids, Lucy desperately needed someone who wouldn't reject or want to change her for being a girl with masculine interests, or try to shove her into boxes like "girl with feminine interests" or "boy with masculine interests." Mike was the only person in her life who accepted her tomboyish nature at face value.

But that was a long time ago.

Nowadays she has Paulo and Sue and Daisy and Amaya and David and Abbey and even James.

At a time when Mike and Lucy each harbor doubts that no one can love them without wanting them, doubts that the other embodies far too perfectly.