#marking my return from vacay with this doozy of a post

[mscaseys]

Can you elaborate on your thoughts about the mark/gemma/hellyna love triangle?

i think everyone knows i prefer markgemma and it's not really because of any moral stance i have wrt innies' rights or anything, their story and writing is just the most compelling to me in the entire show and they evoke the most emotional response out of me when i'm watching. i also love gemma so much like an inexplainable amount and while i was already rooting for them before, 2x07 really solidified them as one of my favorite fictional romances.

that being said, i think where i'm mostly annoyed at the love triangle is how the writers have equated markhelly's romance to innies' autonomy and rights, so if one does not 'ship' them then it opens up floodgates for people to be like 'oh so you hate the innies?'... which is really reductive imo. and while i'm not necessarily saying that using romance as a conduit for one's autonomy is a weak writing choice, it would be more effective if they didn't complicate things further by making imark complicit in creating 25 gemma innies and also recontextualising omark severing as him being a victim of lumon who faked his wife's death and sold him a quick fix. i think the show's unwillingness for there to be a clear antagonist makes it interesting, but also generates a lot of odd takes because people simply need someone to blame.

i also think the writing is really clunky in the finale, where imark is fighting for innies' rights, but then in the same episode he makes ms casey walk through the door into non-existence without explaining anything to her. and i'm sorry but the argument that ms casey's life is somehow 'less' than imark's because of how little she's lived doesn't work in a show about how the innies deserve to live just like the outies no matter the length of their life experiences. imark treats ms casey the exact same way omark treats him, and not only that but he also created 25 separate innies for gemma just like how omark created imark. and if you think that imark had no choice but to make ms casey leave because staying would mean gemma's death, i can make the exact argument for imark choosing to stay in lumon (drummond willing to kill him in the very same episode, cobel saying how it is very much his last day at lumon).

no matter how you spin it, imark is to ms casey what omark is to imark, so i find it ridiculous whenever i see people say that shipping markgemma means you don't support innies rights, or that omark doesn't deserve to be reunited with gemma because he was mean to imark. it's my main frustration with the love triangle discourse because it's always brought up as some kind of moral stance for why shipping markgemma is bad. i could go more in depth about my reasoning for liking mark and gemma but that would probably be a 100k word essay because there is sooo much to say, but yeah those are my main thoughts on the love triangle of it all.