#lauryan

“The Lovers” actually represents balance. Balance between the masculine and the feminine (Ryan and Laura are the respective ‘leaders’), balance within your relationships, being reflective of said relationships and your place in the world… there are many meanings to “The Lovers” and most all of them apply to Laura and Ryan’s character as individuals, not necessarily them as a pairing.

For relationships, Laura and Ryan are both trying to pursue a lead about someone they care about, Max and Chris respectively. To support this even more, they also find the “Emperor” card as well, which represents masculinity, stability, and paternity, aka Chris (and to a lesser extent Max, who is Laura’s rock and her entire reason for going on). Tying into being reflective, Ryan is having an upheaval of his emotions because he’s realizing the man he cared for, his father figure, is not who he said he was and he has to reevaluate the faith he has in him and honestly his entire emotional world inside himself.

As for Laura, though it’s not stressed as much because Ryan is the main focus, she’s also going through some heavy shit not only being a werewolf but also the fact that she killed someone and both those things obviously change your place and feelings in the world. Just like she says, if Laura let her conscious get in the way everything is a lot harder. When all this is over, Laura is going to have to wrestle with all the shit she did and determine what that makes her and if it was worth it in the end.

Additionally, like Eliza says, “there is harmony in disagreement, brought to light by the sparks of passion.”

This isn’t saying Laura and Ryan are enemies to lovers, it’s saying that spurred on by their goals, they have to work together in order to accomplish their mission, which is the only reason Ryan came with Laura in the first place, to dissuade Laura from harming Chris because he’s good. They have to balance their anger and each other’s emotions in order to successfully complete their mission, otherwise if they don’t get along it could get them killed. They gotta put their shit aside and be a team, even only temporarily, because one slip up and it’s game over. And who wants to die over being petty and stupid?

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with taking the card at face value, but I personally feel that does a disservice not only to the narrative but to the developers efforts as well because you’re essentially diminishing all the thought and hard work they put into where each Tarot goes and why. It’s also not very good analysis to only go with the surface interpretation when narratively this shit runs deep.

Like I said, Tarot aren’t literal, and it’s far more enriching to really dig in deep and think of all possible meanings. It’s easy to make a quick judgement, but it’s far more rewarding when you piece it all together and realize, if even for a moment, Laura and Ryan are tied together by fate and they have to work together if they want to make it out alive, and “The Lovers” represents that perfectly.