#i wrote them like this in cicada summer. so i feel vindicated

[butchsophiewalten]

Hey, so I heard about ppl saying that there might be unhealthy,, idk undertones in jenny’s and sophie’s relationship? Like a power imbalance or something. Do you know anything about it? Thanks!

I mean, sure, maybe, there could be a power imbalance there, depending on how you choose to look at it. I don't think that's inherently a problem or anything to be upset over, it's honestly fine for that be kind of a point of contention on their relationship.

For me the Jenny Psych Major information drop slots very comfortably into my personal ideas/headcanons I already had for Jenny and her relationship with Sophie, where Jenny's been through some difficult things in her life and has persevered through them, and learning that is a big wake-up call for Sophie, who had previously sort of assumed she had just never been through anything really bad before, and that's why she's so well-adjusted compared to him. And how learning that about one of the most important people in the world to him actually made him feel really hopeful for his own future, that if Jenny could heal from something terrible and live comfortably on the other side of it, maybe he could, too.

So I've been liking the idea of Jenny studying Psychology as a way to learn about her own psyche, and better understand the problems she herself was going through. My ideal timeline for this would be that Sophie doesn't know about Jenny being a psych major for the first while that they know eachother, and maybe even for a while after their relationship sort of intensifies, (Not that Jenny keeps it a secret or anything, it just never really comes up in conversation,) and for the first while after finding out, it really freaks Sophie out. It revives in him a lot of those feelings of being under the microscope in a therapist's office, of feeling like a freak and a lab rat, of feeling like a stranger and an outsider even in his relationship with the person he trusts most in the world, and that realizing her motivations for going into psych were motivated primarily by her desire to understand her own problems serves the same kinda purpose as my other idea, helping Sophie to understand Jenny more as a person who, in a lot of meaningful ways, is a lot like him, and isn't this sort of intimidating outside force that he needs to consider himself wholly separate from, if you get what I mean.

I really don't think Jenny is like. Studying sophie, or anything. I don't think that their relationship is massively imbalanced by Jenny knowing a lot about psychology in the face of her girlfriend having mental health problems. I think it's OK.