One day imma stop with this ship…just not today
You know, every so often I go into the tag and there’s always someone new subscribing to the flaw of female. And by that I mean there’s always someone trying to call out the show for its lack of presentation in its female character when really if people stop being so worried about shallow surface perspectives, they’d understand what the writer(s) were really going for.
It seems like every other month there’s some new complaint about Alisha and the Relationship between her and Simon. People who claim that the show didnher a disservice by painting him a hero and she the one who needs to be saved. In their eyes her gender identity of female and her need to be ‘saved’ automatically slots her as a damsel in distress.
I only have two problems with such claims - The arc isn’t about saving Alisha, and Simon doesn’t actually save her - it’s Her who saves him.
I think that’s my problem about PSA’s in the entertainment because usually people are so focused on the bullshit surface that they don’t try to even understand the story itself and the messages that are trying to be given.
Is Simon slotted as a hero? Yes
Is her safety used as cover? Yes
Does his heroship erase her own? No
I’m going to break this down and try to make it real simple because people use this to pretend like the relationship between Simon and Alisha is toxic and he brings her down 🙄.
On the surface the Simon and Alisha arc was the story about a boy who wanted to save the girl he loved. And that’s if you miss a lot of points. In reality the arc was about a love he was willing to die for just to experience it.
People tend to not realize that Alisha and Simon were much different sides of the same coin. They needed people who could see them for what they could be not what it was easy to perceive them as. On the surface, Alisha was shallow and mean spirited, these things hid how she viewed herself and her battles of insecurities. On the surface, Simon was a weirdo on the verge, but this too hid his deep loyalty and his overly kind nature.
Simon loves Alisha because despite all when she could just turned her back and not dealt with it…she chose to actually look at him and discover who he was and to love that person. She became more than his love, she was his family, his best friend, his protector. This was both physical and verbal - people seem to forget she had to save him a time or two and there was no one who could bad mouth him without her coming to his defense. He was happy. She made him happy. Life for him, was finally worth something.
Simons hero card - is debatable. I say this because he goes through the trails with the desire of wanting to save a life, yes, but he doesn’t go to the past to save lives…he doesn’t become superhoodie to save lives. He can’t save Alisha (he knows that) and everyone else he saves is just a byproduct of the loop - the need to keep things the same (which is why he doesn’t save them from anything later. Prime example Curtis future girlfriend).
The only real difference between the past Simon and future Simon is confidence. One of the main reasons they token the term 'it’s you falling in love with him that makes him become me" is because it’s Alisha’s love that creates this change in him. It’s her who makes him feel like he’s not just some weird guy, it’s her love that brings out the Simon we all know and love. It’s the acceptance. The togetherness. The being loved, and loving and knowing that shit is for a fact. There’s no guess work in his relationship with Alisha. Her love learned to be more unconditional than his own damn parents. This breeds a confidence in him. A certainty of undeniablity.
So no, their arc isn’t much about a guy saving the girl, but more so about the girl who altered the life of a boy just by choosing to love.
That was their delivery. What if people could look past the surface. What if we could see what someone was capable of being and then love them for who they are. Those are the questions invoked.
Simon and Alisha were a lot of things, you can even say they were codependent in their need for one another, but you can never say they were actually toxic in their love towards one another. I think it’s important to stop believing the flaws we imagine in the characters lie in the blame of the writer.
The reason the couple is so powerful is because they brought the power out of one another by just NOT being judgmental.
That’s what the Alisha and Curtis relationship lacked. He’d already judged her before she even wronged him. I find it funny that the same people who call out Alisha’s relationship with Simon say they prefer her with Curtis whose relations does put her in a lowered status. Where he is her savior who taught her how to be a 'good’ girl. For those who don’t understand why they bring up Alisha history when she’s with Simon after supposedly dealing with it through Curtis - this is why. Because the accidental offsets that come with that arc. It seems like Alisha is put in the bad not just because of the consent issue but her over excessive sexual nature. Her no touch policy seems to play as a form of punishment and Curtis is her teacher into the paths of being reborn as something good. With the Simon relationship they erased this belief. They push the issue that her loving sex is not bad - she loves sex, her sex life with Simon is amazing. They highlight that it’s not her sex behavior that’s the problems but her addictive nature to the power she wills over her partner during those old times. Simon does not judge on on any level of her sexual nature or her past. He does not stand as her teacher. He accepts her for all of her, and then she herself deals with her past and with the guy she use to deal with.
People’s need to crucify female characters, or blame the writers when they themselves are putting faults into these characters is crazy to me. You still have people hating Alisha because of the whole touch aspect. Demeaning the relationship and claiming her unworthy because his ability to touch her brought upon interest. They confuse interest with reason. His ability to touch her intrigued her, yes, it made him interesting but it is not the reason she loves Simon. We all start off with an interest or intrigue - something that makes us look at a person twice.
I said this before - touch is an important feature in the Simon x Alisha relationship because it’s a big factor of Alisha herself. She was someone who used the physical - sex - to deal with her own insecurities and cover the parts of her she felt were lacking. Her power of men during the physical clipped who she was and how she dealt with things. It was her center so to speak. All the characters had them in their own form (Simon with his invisibility, Curtis and his ego). All humans have these things that help them deal with feelings they want to suppress, little addictions that can be bad. But once Alisha gets this power and her little drug for sex kicks into overdrive she finds herself deeper into this hole and not liking who she is even more - kinda like a real drug. You use it to escape but once you become too dependent upon it, it overpowers you and makes you weaker than the version of yourself you were trying to escape in the first place. So she has to go completely cold turkey not just because of her own weakness but because she’s truly taking other people’s consent away with her touch (layers!).
Then Future Simon shows up and someone can touch her again, of their own vitality. Touch is an undeniable part of her. It’s Simon’s ability to do this act that first moves her. But it’s how he touched her that moves her. He touches her not like a man interested in sex. He touches her like a man whose already in love. He touches her with the hands of familiarity, not the touch of a stranger.
Can you imagine - he’s watched the love of his life die a short while ago and yet she’s there, very much alive, he must have been greedy with it but instead of presenting that his touches are the softest. He cradled her cheek and drinks her in but goes no further until she gives the sign that she’s ready and interested in more.
The show intentionally highlights their touching moments. These moments aren’t about sex, they have good sex, great sex - amazing sex even but touching for them is about a right. It’s about intimacy on every level. Most often if Alisha and Simon are in shots together they’re touching - no matter if it’s leaning on eachother, holding hands, soft kisses in the background. They even die in each other’s arms. They soak up this ability to touch because before it hasn’t been something they were allowed. They soak it up because it’s how they show their love. The physical is no longer about sex for Alisha - as it had been even in her relationship with Curtis who she could not touch. Her addiction was no longer a bad thing but manifested itself into a healthy outlet because its very foundation had changed.
Touch was always gonna be a part of Alisha - it may have brought her to her lowest point but it also brought her to her highest.
There’s nothing wrong with the Simon x Alisha relationship. Just because you deny the power in the woman doesn’t mean the writing itself did.
