#caroldaryl

oh no don't get mad!!! just bask in all the caryl love.

this is so funny though because all of those people strengthened caryl in my eyes. the only one that even makes me angry is leah but it's not for caryl reasons. like tobin was just a role carol was playing and i'm sure she cared about him as much as she cared about any of the people at alexandria but it wasn't exactly a romance for the ages. he was just some dude and she was just playing a part. she would've sacrificed him for any one of her people at any given moment lol

and while i do believe she loved ezekiel, it was never fully real to her. it was a fantasy, like she said. she wanted to pretend it was happily ever after but in the end, he wasn't her person, and she wasn't the person she was trying to be when she was with him. i think all of that is really important character work for carol but even if it wasn't, their relationship was worth watching just to see ezekiel ask daryl to stay out of their marriage (despite daryl not doing anything other than existing) because ezekiel Knew.

the connie thing was cute and daryl deserves to have friends but like. it wasn't exactly romantic. every time it felt like the show was about to go there, daryl was like HEY LOOK IT'S MY BEST FRIEND CAROL WHO IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN THE WORLD TO ME DO YOU GUYS KNOW ABOUT CAROL HAVE YOU MET CAROL I LOVE CAROL.

and leah. well. daryl wasn't even willing to choose her over negan lmao and i think it's telling that the only time during the course of eleven seasons that he has something even close to a romantic or sexual relationship with someone is when his best dude friend is missing/presumed dead and the love of his life is married to someone else.

the leah thing does bother me though because it served no purpose other than what feels like the shittiest fan service in existence. like, she did not need to be daryl's ex-lover for that storyline to play out, especially given that in the end neither of them chose each other and neither seemed to have a particularly difficult time not choosing each other. she could've just been some woman he came to care about and check in on because that's who he is and then one day she was just gone.

anyway, i assume leah was a bone the show threw at all the norman reedus girlies but like... those people want to see him fuck and/or be romantic or whatever. they want to be able to imagine that they're the love interest and the show depicted exactly zero of that so what even was the point lol

but mostly i dislike the existence of leah because she was the most boring possible option. ten seasons into this show and you already have queer!daryl (whether that means some version of asexual or gay or both) laid out in front of you and this is what you do? you were so perfectly set up for literally anything else and you decided that what people really needed to see was the fan favorite character with a conventionally attractive blonde woman who nobody cares about and who has zero impact on the narrative? cool. definitely not a waste of an episode.

i have no idea. the extent of my knowledge about the spinoff is pretty much just that it exists and it's french. so yeah sure maybe?

as for when i would have wanted it to go canon? that's a more difficult question to answer because i don't necessarily care if it ever does. my only real canonical wishes for caryl are that 1. their relationship, in whatever form it takes, is always central to their characters and 2. that daryl does not end up with anybody else (and really that's more about daryl as a character than it is about the ship). the flagship show grants both of those wishes, more or less, so i'm already pretty happy with caryl as is.

but if i could have made it explicitly canonically romantic at some point in time, i know for sure i wouldn't have wanted it to happen any time before the saviors. maybe not even before the time jump and carol marrying ezekiel. i love angst and i love quiet pining, but more importantly, i love the foundation of their friendship and the reasons they developed a bond in the first place.

when they met, they were two people who were in no place to begin a relationship (romantic or sexual) with anyone. they were both hurting and neither of them really knew who they were yet. carol thought she was a mousy housewife, nothing more than dead weight, too weak to leave an abusive husband and definitely too weak to save her daughter. daryl thought he was an angry and violent waste of space, with no value outside of his ability to provide (food, protection, the return of sophia, etc).

and then they changed each other. carol kissed daryl on the head and told him that his value was not in whether or not he was able to bring sophia home. his value was that he cared enough to look in the first place. that he was "every bit as good as [rick]." and daryl told carol that she was stronger than she thought she was and that she was worth saving, worth cherishing, even.

and the beauty of their friendship was that it was simple. especially in those early days when they were still trying to figure out how to be people (without merle and without ed). it's so so important to me that there was no pressure on either side to move it somewhere else. it was a safe space. carol jokingly flirted with daryl because it was safe to do so. he wasn't going to take it seriously. he wasn't going to make a move. she could try on her own sexuality again without having to give up anything to do so.

and the thing about daryl is that i read him as ace (probably more demi than flat out ace but on the ace spectrum somewhere) and from that perspective, his relationship with carol has to be such a fucking relief because she isn't expecting anything from him. she doesn't want him to make a move and so he doesn't have to. he doesn't have to feel like he's failed to live up to some imaginary idea of what masculinity is. he can be around an ~available~ woman without it being a Thing. like, i don't think he was out picking up woman regularly before all this but i think every single time he failed to do so, he heard about it from merle or his father or whoever else was around.

so they build this beautiful friendship and then somewhere along the way, it shifts. personally, i think it shifted for daryl pretty early on (sometime in s3-4) but it took awhile for carol to get there. not necessarily because she didn't feel it, but because she refused to acknowledge it. it was a boundary she didn't want to cross. i think it's part of why she agreed to marry ezekiel. that life was a role she was playing so it wouln't matter if she lost it (at least she thought it wouldn't. but she was wrong). i think she finally admitted how she feels about daryl when she realized he was mad at her over the whole alpha thing.

(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDspQhMSHfIから)

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