caution...?

We're talking exhibitionism, free use, squirtin', bondage, Daddy Bucky and all his pals 🤭🤭🤭🤭

Eeep

I wanna do it, shall I do it???

I'm already melting 😩😩😩

I was rewatching YJ and just noticed the face Artimis makes when Jace and Jeff hint at them sleeping together and, like, Arty, Sis, Queen Sovereign of my Heart, fucking s a m e.

No, I wouldn't say that at all. Actually, I fully believe that if Wally or Artemis had had a chance with M'gann or Conner, it wouldn't have worked out anyway, and I'm not sure that either of them would have expected it to. You know when you walk into the first day of school and you go around deciding who your crush is going to be for the year? That's how I interpreted their crushes on M'gann and Conner. It wasn't serious, and very clearly wasn't reciprocated by either of them, which is exactly why Wally and Artemis chose to pursue them because it ran no real risk of being fulfilled.

In Wally's case, we watched him spend the entire first season flirting with practically every single woman he came into contact with, regardless of their age/availability/lack of interest in him. Wally's flirtatious behavior wasn't out of genuine attraction or any expectation of his advances being accepted, but was rather a habit he'd developed as a method of covering up his own insecurities. We know Wally was impulsive and often immature, and he played that persona up purposefully throughout the entire first season. He encouraged people to view him as the flirt and the class clown because it was easier than letting them in on his true feelings. Wally lacked confidence in himself and felt constantly overshadowed by everyone around him, hence him taking on the role of the easygoing jokester in the group so everyone would be too distracted to notice how insecure he really was. It's literally said in the show multiple times that a big part of Wally's personality is his denial in anything he doesn't want to confront.

Wally's crush on M'gann, just like his thing for Black Canary and every other woman he meets, is just a front for him. The only reason M'gann was the main target for his flirting was because she was the only girl on the team for a while, and because she was nice enough to not have a real problem with it or tell him to stop. She never took it seriously, and I don't think Wally wanted her to. If M'gann and Conner had never gotten together, that wouldn't have given Wally any more of a chance with her because his "feelings" for M'gann were more of a habit he'd developed than any kind of genuine romantic feelings. (Not to suggest that they aren't close and don't love each other as friends, because they definitely do, but that's as far as it goes.) Wally's crush on M'gann was all about Wally putting up a facade to cover up his inner insecurities and had very little to do with M'gann herself.

In that same vein, Artemis' crush on Conner was never fully about Conner, but more about Artemis' own (surprise, surprise) insecurities during her first few months on the team. When Artemis first encountered the team, it was because she saw Superboy get smashed through a window in the fight against Amazo and followed him to discover the rest of the team. That was Artemis' first interaction with them, being led in by her "white rabbit," so from the beginning she had a connection with Conner in particular. She viewed the encounter as her way out of her old life and into her new one as a proper hero.

Like Wally, Artemis spent the entire first season covering up her real self with a "badass cool girl"-type persona, both to hide the secret about who she really was, and to keep the others from getting a whiff of how insecure she felt about her place on the team. These are teenagers we're talking about, after all. Everything is about convincing the people around you that you belong. During Artemis' very first mission with the team, she came off as brash and overly confident, and she purposely made a remark about Conner's attractiveness through the mind link where everybody could hear it. She wanted them to see the connection she'd made, as if it would cement her place as part of the group. She and Wally have the exact same coping mechanisms, and Artemis spends all that time criticizing Wally for it without realizing that she has been doing the same thing to Conner that he does to M'gann.

It's also made clear to the audience even before Conner and M'gann are established as a couple that Wally and Artemis had developed feelings for each other that were stronger than their crushes on M'gann and Conner. The obvious example would be in "Bereft" when Wally and Artemis had chemistry and showed genuine attraction to each other straight from the get-go once they didn't have the baggage of their old memories forcing them to hide behind their respective personas. When they met M'gann, Wally didn't show an ounce of interest in her until he'd regained his memories and began to act accordingly again. Then "Failsafe" happened, and Wally revealed how deeply he cared for Artemis after her death, becoming more fixated on saving her over anyone else who had been killed. Artemis showed signs of attraction towards Wally early on as well, as shown in her reactions to Wally flirting with M'gann in "Denial," and her jealousy when M'gann kissed Wally on his birthday. In the comics, she even got back at Wally for flirting with M'gann by asking out Conner right in front of him:

And a good amount of these incidents happened before either of them knew about M'gann and Conner becoming a couple; the ball was already rolling whether their crushes were available or not.