it really is funny how. late in the game i am to enemies to lovers, because so much of my perception of enemies to lovers is folded into Belligerent Sexual Tension, which is a trope that iâve never really understood the appeal of? itâs always a weird balance where i think theyâre either too mean or not mean enough, so iâve always just associated enemies-to-lovers as having a base...pettiness to it that i donât really have the patience for. from there i assumed that i didnât like enemies to lovers because it was just. too much conflict in places i didnât care about.
and it really wasnât until THIS year that i realized that the problem wasnât too much conflict. it was not enough.
i like to say itâs an Austenian thing because Austen did it earlier and it makes me sound more pretentious, but the truth is i watched most of Lost before i read Pride and Prejudice, so Sawyer and Juliet might actually be my Ur Text for this. the thing about the two of them is it should not have worked; i was watching this show live and the amount of fan bile hurled at a) the love dodecahedron and b) any and all female character had basically reached critical mass by season 3. that Juliet was accepted (let alone appreciated) was solely due to the Miracle of Elizabeth Mitchell, but even that didnât feel like it would be enough to make up for the fact that a) Juliet had prior to the penultimate season less than five conversations with Sawyer and b) the Sawyer/Kate shippers were OUT FOR BLOOD.
then Elizabeth Mitchell was Elizabeth Mitchell, and Josh Holloway brought his A-game, and it really, really worked, to the point where Sawyer and Juliet are still the most uncontroversially beloved pair out of the dodecahedron. and a lot of it is the chemistry, and the bonded-by-trauma-stuff, and the fact that when they were together it WASNâT really about The Drama (just The Dharm--please stop throwing rocks at me)...
but when i say âSawyer/Juliet is my blueprint for enemies-to-loversâ what i think i actually mean is the Basra Conversation (ironic that i call it it that, since the Basra bit has nothing to do with Sawyer). what i mean is Juliet holding a gun to Kate and Sawyer instantly recognizing that she would have shot Kate without a second thought.
hereâs the thing that appeals to me about enemies to lovers: they have to actually be enemies. that sounds easy, but what i mean here is that they have to see each other as serious threats--if not to their actual physical wellbeing, then their ideology and worldview. Sawyer and Juliet had completely opposite goals, temperaments, and beliefs in the very beginning. they saw that very clearly about each other, and they werenât afraid to say it, to use it as leverage. i thought i didnât like enemies to lovers because i saw it as an extension of people just being. incompetent, at articulating their feelings or killing each other. what makes Sawyer and Juliet such fabulous enemies and then lovers, though, was that they were both ruthless and competent at each other, about each other, but with all that came respect. they both changed as a result of both what one got right about the other, AND what one got wrong.
he changed his name for her. she stayed for him. god.
they hurt and unsettle each other, but there was enough give in both of them to learn and grow and forgive. so in a way Sawyer and Juliet were the romantic distillation of what i loved most about Lost as a show: people ripping themselves and each other apart because of the truth of who they are, and coming together for that same reason.
