I love Annie & Abed.

I want to start off by saying I actually think Abed is genuinely a little bit crazy. Yes, he might be on the spectrum or have some disorder but the show is so loose with that it never really confirms it, so I’m not going to confirm it either, I just think there’s something-something-spectrum there but I’m not educated enough to understand exactly what they’re communicating he has or is dealing with. I think the safest thing to assume is indeed that he’s insane (he said it himself; he saw literal lava when Troy was leaving) but in a small, functional, unique way that doesn’t make him dangerous except when he wants to cut people’s arms off because “Evil Abed has taken over” hello someone do something about that –

Anyway. It’s super difficult for me to understand what goes on in his head episode-to-episode, but with Annie it’s actually easier? Abed has such a specific set of needs when it comes to relationships that it’s a miracle he found the study group at all. He’s so smart and creative and he’s actually very empathetic and sweet but he doesn’t always seem to know how to express things.

Annie is clearly Abed’s second-best friend in the show (it helps that the actor/actress are best friends too). When he can’t turn to Troy, he can always turn to Annie. She understands him and there’s never been a point where we see that start or end—it just naturally happened and they’re both used to it. Abed is always touching her, always sitting by her, always making eye contact with her, and if you pay close attention to even background scenes, he’s measuring her reactions to things more often than anyone else’s. If I had to guess, I think she’s the group member he understood faster than any of the others. Abed (this is, from what I’m told, part of being on the spectrum? but like I said I am uneducated and don’t want to definitively say something the show decided not to be clear about) needs certain things to be a certain way, or he can’t operate normally. He panics, or gets angry, or tries to mutilate Jeff Wingers. He genuinely thinks he is crazy, and he genuinely thinks no one he meets will be able to deal with him for an extended amount of time. (Let’s begin at the beginning from his POV.) Abed meets Annie (and the group), and she seems like the typical Molly Ringwald girl-next-door; pretty, smart, wants popularity, ambitious. That’s why he chose her when he created the study group. Annie is all of these cliched things, but hey, quickly it’s pretty clear Annie needs things to be a certain way. Annie needs structure and lists and good grades. So she gets it when Abed needs that, what a pleasant surprise! And part of that is that Annie empathizes with everyone around her, without even trying, so much so that she’s depicted often as the heart of the whole study group. She gets Abed, both because they’re the same in lots of ways and they’re the opposite. She can crush easily, explode easily, cry easily, laugh easily. Everything Abed has no idea how to emote. Annie is a volcano of emotions, and they’re triggered most when she’s feeling because of or on behalf of other people.

So here’s this girl near his own age who is orderly and structured, and knows how other people feel and can enter in with them emotionally, including Abed. She’s so nice, and tries so hard. She’s even good at playing pretend (Mixology Certification, party of one?). What a perfect leading lady for the life-movie Abed sees everywhere he goes (because that’s how he makes sense of the world). Annie is the ideal female star he’d want in any story: the girl full of passion and drive.

But then there’s Jeff—the study group’s Judd Nelson—presumably the perfect leading man. When Abed first handpicks the group in the pilot and first season, Jeff wants Britta. Hey, that makes sense, Britta seems to be the leading lady type, actually! She’s nice, she’s strong, she’s beautiful. Works perfectly. And look, Annie wants Troy—the brainy bubbly girl wants the dumb jock, that makes sense too. Everything works. Then things start changing within the dynamic. Troy is actually not that dumb, and not that sports-obsessed—he’s fun, and he’s the ideal bro for Abed, but he doesn’t work with Annie. Britta is not that nice, and not that strong—she’s bad at everything, and she doesn’t understand people, she just wants to and is constantly trying to portray (and then hopefully become) the kind of person that does. And Jeff is a stunted jerk who needs reformation.

Oh, Annie is Abed’s friend now too. She said it herself, and that’s rare in Abed’s life. She called them really good friends, and that’s so important to him that he’ll sit in a room for 26 straight hours with nothing to do because Annie asked him to do it. Troy is not the only character Abed would give up control for. There’s one other from the start, because the moment she told him with all her earnest doe-eyedness they were friends, she had him hook line and sinker.

Season 1 progresses. Jeff and Britta might still work, and Abed seems mildly interested in that if only for the cliches—maybe Britta can make him better. No, wait, Britta is bad at that too. Actually, they’re not good for each other. Actually, they’re bad for each other—they’re bad for everyone. But they have similar terrible flaws and habits, so maybe they do make a good pair. Still fine leads. Still works. And besides, Annie has filled in the place of Troy with hippie Vaughn, which is also fine. Doesn’t really work long-term, but Jeff and Britta drive the plot forward more anyway, so the focus should be on them, right? The group is working. The group is thriving. The TV of life moves along.

(Except Jeff kissed Annie to win the Man Is Good/Evil debate. And Abed predicted it. Which means he was thinking about that as a possibility, because he operates on variables and tries to understand outcomes so that he’s not surprised by anything and can keep his friends for longer by relating to and reacting to them better. Jeff has leading man vibes, Annie has leading lady vibes, that’s one potential outcome. And though he insists he’s just making hypotheses based on what he’s learned about his friends so far, when it does happen right in front of them in real life, they kiss, Abed is just as shocked as the others—he literally can’t take his eyes off them until the debate is won. Then afterward, he tells Shirley he can’t predict the future and uses his plans for Pierce being discovered as a genius next in his home-movies as an example, which he believes would never happen—then Britta calls Pierce a genius right in front of him and Abed looks visibly concerned. Maybe what he predicts about his friends will keep happening, even the things he thinks are the least likely of the potential outcomes. Maybe even Jeff and Annie as the two leads. But that doesn’t make sense, does it? Jeff and Britta are endgame, aren’t they? Annie is too young for a leading man like Jeff. Annie is too nice; Jeff is too selfish. Annie is gorgeous and driven, Jeff is handsome and needs fixing, that would work, no, it would change things too much, it’s too unlikely, back to Jeff and Britta, back to playing with Troy and studying film, don’t give it a second thought—)

Transfer dance happens. Annie is going away for the summer with Vaughn. Classic Annie, has his back, always doing the better thing for the plot, bringing a good end-of-Season twist, but it’s okay, as far as he knows she’ll be back in the fall and besides, Abed’s got to-roomie-or-not-roomie with Troy issues to deal with.

And then the new semester starts after the transfer dance. And Anthropology 101 happens (again, one of my favorite episodes for the group fight at the end when it comes to my lil ships). I’M GONNA TALK ABOUT ANTHROPOLOGY 101 NOW. For A CHUNK of time. Jeff and Britta are doing relationship-drama stuff Abed doesn’t quite care about, until Shirley suggests he’s being selfish and that a real friend would enter into Jeff and Britta’s [incredibly fake and nasty] “happiness” and Abed thinks that could work. Actually, progressing Jeff and Britta’s relationship is a goal he can definitely work with. In fact, if you pay attention to the show, whenever there is an opportunity to advance or out Jeff/Britta, Abed takes that opportunity. And whenever there is an opportunity to put JeffAnnie in an uncomfortable or inevitable, c’est la vie light (which two independence-heavy freaks like Jeff and Annie would consider negatively) he takes that too.

Abed urges Jeff/Britta to get married right there in the library before the fight, gives them the ring, because he thinks that’s the next logical step in their grossness. Special episode, all about Jeff/Britta, endgame endgame endgame! He can work with that. In fact, he’s happy to control that. He leaves the room to inexplicably get an Irish singer, dead-ringer Clooney, and a transportable wedding set.

When he comes back and tries to prep the group for the special wedding episode, everyone is tense and Jeff is bleeding from the nose, and Abed does not notice; he’s intent on advancing the plot and the endgame. Then Troy says, “Abed. Jeff made out with Annie.” And Abed’s immediate reaction is “What? Where? When?” And he looks unhappy, like the rest of them. Jeff made out with Annie, and that means everything Abed thought he understood is incorrect. (And I think it bothers the crap out of him and he doesn’t have the ability to unpack why that is the way most people do because he’s different. Surely he’s just angry for the same reasons the rest of the group is? That must be it. That must be why he’s angry specifically with Jeff, not Britta in any tangible way, or even Annie in a tangible way—until later, which I’ll talk about eventually.) Annie tells him they kissed after the transfer dance in a guilty voice, which is a sheepishness she does not respond with to any of the other members of the group. It’s almost like she’s picking up on Abed’s emotion specifically this time. And while everyone else in the group explodes, and Jeff reduces his kiss with Annie to something he should be ashamed of (accurate) because men are monsters who crave young flesh and Annie looks absolutely crushed like a deer in the headlights, Abed starts packing up to leave. And we only see how angry he is right then—he doesn’t enter into anyone else’s problems. We see him react to “Jeff made out with Annie”, and then this is the next time we see him react. Jeff asks where he’s going and Abed throws out a quippy “I now pronounce you cancelled” with a bounce of his eyebrows in an angry way, at Jeff, and when he tries to leave Jeff hurls insults at his back and Abed stops in the doorway, in a normal-person—again, angry—way and turns around and drops one of the sickest burns of the whole show, that TV makes sense and has “likeable leading men”, and says “In life, we have this. We have you.” And walks out. His anger is not directed at anybody else. He doesn’t help Troy with the Pierce situation. He doesn’t try to fix any of it. It’s like he heard “Jeff made out with Annie”, learned the specifics, and was standing there reeling until eventually he decided he couldn’t deal and went to leave, and wouldn’t have shown just how angry he was with Jeff unless Jeff had provoked him, which he did.

IT'S ALMOST LIKE HE’S MAD JEFF KISSED ANNIE, JUSSAYIN’-

let me pretend I’m a 14-year-old shippy fangirl in my reasoning, okay-

Abed likes logic, and as Season 2 continues, Jeff/Annie gets more and more logical. In fact, even though he has noticed that Jeff and Britta are secretly hooking up in the background of the Season, he is not surprised in Paradigms of Human Memory when Annie calls Jeff out for the will-they-won’t-they he’s been enacting with her, and even says there is something between the two of them, matter-of-factly, which Jeff refuses to own up to. But Abed and Annie are getting closer and closer, too. It’s subtle, but it’s clear they’re 100% comfortable around each other. That becomes super clear by Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas, when, besides Troy, Annie is the only other character to enter into Abed’s way of thinking and play with him, because it’s genuinely important to him and she recognizes that this is what he needs, when everyone else kind of drops off. She helps Abed and Troy stop Duncan from dealing with Abed in a practical, normal way, because she sees that Abed is dealing with something and can only deal with it his way to get through it. That’s incredibly rare for Abed, we see. He’s very attached to her—like I said, often touching her, often sitting by her, often reacting to her.

(I mean hi, in English As A Second Language, Abed thinks he won’t be affected by Annie’s Disney Face; when everyone else obeys Jeff in closing their eyes to it, Abed doesn’t. “Oh don’t worry about me, I can only connect to people through...movies...” literally stops in his tracks when he sees her Disney Face with the cutest wistful twitch of a smile. Jeff has to Indiana-Jones-reference him to make him look away. He doesn’t only connect to people through movies—at least, Annie can get through to him without the need of movies; he’s not a quirky lil robot, he can have normal feelings, but boy does it seem like Annie is the one bringing them out of him more often than most. she gets under his skin ajhzsdkejdb-)

Abed definitely has a crush on Annie. But he doesn’t know how to deal with that or portray it. To his mind, Annie should be with a leading man. Any time he flirts with her, he is pretending to be a leading man from a movie or show. (For a Few Paintballs More, anyone?) Because that’s who she should be paired off with. And that’s what she wants, right? She loooves Jeff Winger now. Britta’s not the leading lady, she never was, that role was always Annie’s, and it makes sense she wants Jeff, and it makes even more sense that Abed is observing the love story, not part of it. Abed is not the leading man, he’s the computer. He watches, analyzes, does not get involved or get the girl.

But he still wants her around, and he can have that much—in fact, when he moves in with Troy and Annie tells him she loves their place, Abed instantly suggests she move in. Not Abed and Troy. Just Abed, and he does not discuss it with his roommate. And Troy seems confused and surprised and gives Abed such an interesting look right after. Annie moves in, Abed agrees to sacrifice some of his routine for her (blanket fort for he and Troy, full bedroom for Annie), things are happy. Things are fine. She puts away his buttered noodles when he’s not finished with them, but she adapts to his needs when he expresses he doesn’t want her to do that; she breaks his Batman DVD but he adapts by forgiving her in a role he can express that in—Batman himself, plus, bonus, he gets to flirt with her as that leading man—and things are better. But then Annie starts trying to control things. Annie starts trying to make life go according to the movie in her head. She tries to get Britta and Troy together, which not only robs Abed of his best friend for a day and disrupts his routine, it makes him angry with Annie. And not just because she tampered with the group’s dynamic, which he doesn’t want anyone else but him to do. okay we’re caught up NOW I get to talk about Virtual Systems Analysis, which is my FAVORITE COMMUNITY EPISODE-

Throughout that episode, Annie is trying to speak in Abed’s language in the Dreamatorium in order to teach him empathy. In the past, she’s had success in communicating with him on his level, but this seems extra hard for some reason. She sees somehow through his expressionless face right away and sees he is angry with her, and though he tries to deflect by saying she’s going to ruin the group by meddling, she eventually does recognize what the problem is. At first she’s convinced Abed just wants Abed’s way and that he needs to be taught how to think of others first (she’s right), but he hears her say that to Troy and it spirals him right into the worry he always has—that he’s crazy, that he’s a problem, that he’ll never fit in because of that, and that when Annie (and anyone else) tries to deal with or fix him, they will get sick of it, give up, and toss him aside. He was already angry with her for a different reason, not just wanting his way again—but now he’s sure she’s done with Abed, too. So he becomes someone else, everyone else, to make his point: that she’s just messing with Britta and Troy so that nothing will stand in the way of her and Jeff.

DO YOU KNOW WHAT HE SAYS WHEN HE IS PRETENDING TO BE JEFF TO HER? He says, “With Abed gone, and Troy and Britta together, there’s nothing standing in the way of us.” With Abed gone. Why did he say that? Because with Abed gone, Annie gets to be in control of everyone? Obviously not. Or is it because out of everyone, every variable, the only other match that makes sense for Britta is Troy and the only other match that makes sense for Annie is-

Oops, Freudian slip. Oh, she’s not falling for it. And Abed is mad at her because he thinks she set up Britta and Troy so she could be with Jeff. Abed is mad that that’s what she wants. And when she tries to argue it’s not, he literally pretends he is her, logicking it out at her, trying to convince her that that is what she wants, because that’s what he thinks she wants, and her controlling things to cause JeffAnnie makes him mad. But c’est la vie, it’s inevitable anyway, right? Why isn’t she seeing that? Why is she trying to talk about him, he doesn’t want to talk about him, especially not after what she said about him— Then she fights back and tells him that she does not love Jeff, she loves the idea of being loved and if she can teach a guy like Jeff to love her, she’ll never be alone. And then she finds out that’s what Abed is afraid of, too. No—that’s what Abed is used to. “I’ve run the simulations, Annie. I don’t get married. [Why is that the first thing he said?] I don’t etc. etc.”