Okay but since you started, to continue ar*row posting into 2024, it was blatantly obvious Quentin resented Laurel for being the one that lived when they all thought Sara died, and people still thought he was a good dad??? The whole Lance family was so fucked up and Laurel deserved a better family
oh yeah 100% both quentin and dinah thought the wrong daughter died on that boat. there is no doubt about it. they resented laurel for being alive instead of sara. they did not hide their favoritism well. with dinah, she was open about it. with quentin, it only came out in waves, usually when he was drunk but even when he was sober it still sometimes seeped out of him in these little hissed remarks.
it's one of the reasons thinking about laurel's childhood fascinates me so much. at a glance, the lance family was a normal middle class family. two beautiful, smart girls, a home, two parents with well respected careers and a loving marriage. a happy family.
but i have to wonder if it was really all that happy for laurel.
i mean. she dated oliver for years. devoted herself to him. adored him. she took him back when he made mistakes, she wanted to move in with him, she wanted to marry him, she loved him with everything the whole way through. and he treated her like trash. he cheated on her over and over and over again with her friends and her sister. he had zero respect for her. he was stupid and he was nasty and he was cruel. and it's not like the island changed him when it came to her. i'm sorry but it didn't. he was an arrow in her lung from the day she met him until the day she died. and she just. accepted that. she accepted that was all she would get and lived with it until the end. that was as far as she got in terms of believing in her own worth.
that kind of chronic, damaging low self esteem doesn't come from nowhere. laurel's canonical desperation and pleading and searching for love was one of her most devastating traits (partly because she was never able to find it) and it's something that can only come from the lack of love. and that shit starts at the top. it starts with mom and dad. they poisoned her. bit by bit until she was dead, gone, and replaced, quite literally, by a doppelganger.
no, i'll never understand why people love "papa lance." he was only a loving father to one daughter. he was an abuser to the other.
that's one of the reasons why one of the recurring characters in my laurel fics is her non canon grandmother. she needs at least one family member to love her completely and unconditionally. lord knows no one else did.
