organized mess

Audrey is a great character, and it makes perfect sense for her to be intrigued by/attracted to a kind, handsome older man. She’s also badly neglected, and models the ways of gaining power + autonomy + attention that she sees in front of her, something that puts her in danger and is in no way a good thing. I get that all the characters’ ages/the timelines are fucked so there’s some ambiguous wiggle room, but she’s a kid. A very smart and resourceful one who wants to be the mysterious and competent adult that others see as a person, but still.

She wants Coop something fierce, and gets herself into intense peril pursuing that. She's tenacious and smart and badly damaged, and a teenage girl who's ignored + allowed to do whatever she wants, which is a very potent combination.

And Coop is textually attracted to her: I think that that’s very important to understanding a lot of his character, and ignoring it does a disservice to a lot of what the show is saying. MLMT does a lot of heavy lifting to explain and explore a history of childhood sexual misuse + hypersexuality with him, but even in just the show canon I think it’s very apparent and easy to understand that he’s grappling with his attitudes and attraction towards women, and especially with his own past and traumas.

The scene where Audrey surprises him naked in bed had the potential to be the fulcrum moment in their relationship, imo. Cooper is visibly wrestling with his attraction to her— something he knows and expresses aloud would be very wrong to act on— and Audrey is in an extremely fragile state, for all that she was trying to be assertive and take control in a relationship with an older man (a cop, even).

When Cooper lets her down gently and says that what she needs is a friend, that’s a very powerful moment. This is the “adult men sexually abuse young girls” show, but their relationship in particular has been set up to be interesting and alluring— I don’t think that people are nuts for picking up on the very intentional tension. It’s there, you’re supposed to see it.

So when Cooper says that she needs a friend, he makes the right choice, something that he doesn’t have a great track record of doing.

It’s a really powerful thing, that surrounded by all of these men who choose wrongly, and do wrong intentionally, Cooper is maybe the only adult man in Audrey’s life who makes the choice to respect and protect her, and that’s profoundly compelling. Like, I get it if someone wants to take that in another direction.

(There’s a more specific point to be made about Audrey’s father very nearly sexually assaulting her, and another, older man who is into her consciously deciding not to act on that, but I’ll toss it around and try to express it later)

You can debate it all day— which can be interesting and enriching— but for him to enter into a relationship with her would have been a clear, gross abuse of his power, and followed the pattern set by all of the other monstrous men in the show.

TP makes its stance on adult men sleeping with teenage girls crystal clear, there’s no way that they would have had their main character— morally iffy though he can be sometimes— go to bed with the teenage peer of a murder victim and then be like “awesome!” Cooper would be a very different man if he acted on it.

Which, I think is one of those moments where you as the viewer are supposed to look past the aesthetics and how pretty both adult actors are, the same way we all need to look past the quality of the coffee to understand what happened to Laura: a federal agent in his 30s who picks up a rural, neglected teenage lover in the wake of a grisly sex crime + said teenager’s father is a major player in the crime ring that allowed that to happen, is not a good man. That is a real-life horror that follows the framework of the show, and I think that part of the original intention was to leave that avenue open for later in the series, but more on that later.

All that being said, he absolutely thinks about it. He’s very tempted. That’s something that I feel like a lot of people don’t want to admit, but he’s explicitly attracted to her. It’s a testament to his character, and an interesting mirror to his ultimate failure of courage, that he, mister "Give Yourself a Present," was able to recognize a desire as harmful and squash it.

He’s less interesting if you just wave your hand and say “oh, he never even thought about it!” He did. He totally thought about it, he considered it, and wrestled with it, and ultimately came out on top. That’s infinitely more interesting— and IMO fits in better with the backstory established for him— than the idea that he’s just too morally pure and untouchable.

Even so, he elects not to do something that will harm her, and chooses to be her friend instead, something that she badly needs. That scene easily could have transitioned them from a very unequal “will-she-won’t-he” to a friendship that would benefit both of them, and give the characters some more room to flex + explore the facets of their similarities/their links to Laura and what they share with her.

Cooper sees Audrey, instead of blindly buying into her adolescent facade, or just looking past her. Even many of the angles their scenes are shot with reinforce that. He doesn’t ignore her.

I think that all of that goes into making their relationship extremely compelling, and, in my opinion, totally dropping that relationship after a point was just shitty writing. The whole weight of his choice to be her friend and to do right by her + her choice to accept that disappears when the show just truncates that entire plot line and dynamic. She needed that friend, needed and accepted what he was willing to offer her! Not to get shuffled off to the side and into a somewhat baffling plot line

(And if the show had gone on longer, or gone a different direction, I think that that would have been the avenue they chose to hammer in to viewers that as sexy as it sounded to a teenager, this is a bad thing, and that Coop was letting hangovers from past trauma/abuse get the better of him— something that is also very thematically appropriate. In a S3 that never was, I think it’s likely that possessed Coop/his doppelgänger/whatever direction they would have gone in the 90s would have attacked or initiated a relationship with her. TPTR alludes to this, I think, with Mr. C’s fathering Richard.)

I understand that there were tensions on set, and actors/execs had very strong opinions, but I do think that the “okay ew that’s over now” way that the show chops off a major undercurrent is badly done, and that the show is poorer for it.

Anyway, that relationship is one that really bugs me in how it developed in the show. Let me be clear that this is absolutely not an anti-ship post: do as thou wilt, have fun whatever I’m not here to pick a fight, and I really don’t care what other people ship. What strangers want to do with two fictional characters isn’t really my business.

But I don’t think that people are making something out of nothing, there, even if I have a much different stance on it. I think I’ve made my opinion of that relationship as romantic pretty clear at this point, but I have eyes and understand when you’re supposed to pick up on tension between characters.

I think that many people try far too hard to pretend that something very explicitly onscreen isn’t there, because they don’t want to wrestle with the thornier parts of it. (For a show that centers around a child being raped and murdered by her father, a great many watchers get surprisingly precious about unpleasant or even gray subjects, it seems to me.)

But I think it’s a shame that one of the most interesting relationships in the show got cut off so severely, and it’s really interesting to think of how they might have followed through on the punch, had there been fewer disasters surrounding the series.

I went on a little longer than I meant to about the idea of the pair of them as a romantic item, and that’s not the major point of this. Really, it’s that I think both characters lost out on that could have developed into something really compelling, because the bones were there. The setup was very strong, and the scene I talked about above absolutely could have transitioned those two into something, anything, more narratively satisfying and interesting than what we got.

I really like both of them, and I think that there’s a tendency to swing wildly one way or the other with Audrey. She’s much more nuanced than I think a lot of people give her credit for (which in fairness is something that afflicts basically all of the teenage characters, not to mention dear Dale), and there’s a place to think about her in-between outright fetishism a la coquette blogs, and pretending like she has no agency or desire/that her neglect has no impact on what she wants and how badly she’s willing to fight to get it.

She’s a major character in the show for a while, and I don’t like it that A) her character gets sidelined so abruptly B) many people in fandom go out of their way to minimize her role in the story. She’s not even one of my big favorites, I just think that she gets a raw deal.