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I just love the green coming through in this scene. This whole arc, painted in the colors of spring! How pleasant that it’s rerunning in April. So here’s another breakup to bookend the story, a Mature break-up, a break-up between Adults who’ve been here before, who know the excuses and the hidden meaning behind every word. At time of writing one of my friends had dumped a girl he probably should’ve never been dating, and allowed her to rail on him for it, which she did for a long time and in a monstrous way. There’s a lot of debate about what you’re owed in a breakup, and nobody in the first wave of comments really reached a consensus about Aimee. She never really got her own arc, she was only seen through the lens of Will’s own struggles, so it seemed fitting to have her go out with a monologue that was reasoned but cruel. I don’t think there was much more to be said about her; she’s a pretty girl who’s restless, who would like a portable version of “settled down”, and Will couldn’t see his place in that. There’s no argument of fairness to be made about the circumstances – that’s just what they are. The only thing to debate is each party’s performance in the breakup itself, a traumatic event that, whether we like it or not, becomes irrelevant over time. |
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man, i love that foreboding white sky.
Is this the weed lady?
Renaissance Faire gf
Oh yeah…in retrospect that should've been obvious.
I kinda get what she's saying. It's easy to 'be the asshole' in a situation because then you can just look at the whole thing and go 'yep, i was an asshole' and not have to do the work of picking it apart to see what you can learn from. you brand the whole thing as Just Asshole Things and shrug and move on with your life. it's a lot harder to find the mistakes and things to learn from and ways to be a better person.
Wait… Is Will only the asshole because he's breaking up with her?? I assumed it was because his sleeping with Eve broke one of their esoteric and way-too-complicated rules!
Okay, new take: She isn't owed anything! She's allowed to be mad, like we all are, she's allowed to process her own feelings and there's an expectation that Will has to be somewhat patient with that process but at the age they're both at, they should both be very cognizant of the fact that neither position in this situation is desirable or easy. It's a crazy imposition if you feel entitled to be cruel to your ex, to break them down for having the audacity to feel differently than you'd like them to.
in the past I've been both the self-righteous punchbag and the luxuriantly disappointed party, and this scene just feels… so perfect. I can remember gleefully discovering new depths of cold insight that felt calm and incisive then, childish and petty a few months later. Or feeling myself to be a generous and long-suffering martyr who's kindly taking on the sacrificial role to protect my ex from the realisation that they are, in fact, also the asshole. It's unfortunate that science has determined that there are no other ways available to us.
The thing that's always confused me here is Aimee's "You never took the terms of our relationship seriously" – not because she's wrong, but because I don't _know_ if she's wrong, because we don't really know what they are other than what we can glean from the "dick pulp" comic (and the one before it) – here http://www.octopuspie.com/2013-03-27/592-an-unwri… and here http://www.octopuspie.com/2013-03-29/593-dick-pul…
Which to me read like they had a "you can bang whoever you want when we're not in town together" relationship, which means Will sleeping with Eve isn't the issue … but again, we're only getting this from Will's side, both now and in those other comics, so it's hard to be sure what "rights" Aimee does and doesn't have, here.
In the end it doesn't really matter – in two or three more pages, we'll never see her again, and that's fine. She'll go on to be the protagonist in her own story. 🙂