#literally 1 like and i will get started on the electra complex

[batbusiness-schooldropout]

I really hate the Oedipus complex. For a lot of reasons but I'll focus on its name today. Oedipus DIDN'T KNOW he was sleeping with his birth mother and when he found out he GOUGED OUT HIS OWN EYES. And you want to name a made-up complex about fantasizing about your mother after that? Ridiculous.

Don't even get me started on the Electra complex

[cogentranting]

Hey just saw the final episode of the defenders and I'm confused with this incessant need for matt to save Electra. I understand and I'm glad that the defenders didn't go into detail or resolved Matt/Karen so I get them delving into Electra, her connection to matt but what baffles me was that final kiss. Was it closure? A last kiss? The dialogue before was them talking about how they wouldn't work and why they never did. Sorry for increasing ur inbox with questions. DD seems to be a quiet fandom

I think part of it has to do with at the end of season 2 of DD, Matt made this decision to be with Elektra, to run away with her. He had, in that moment, committed to a life with her. And then, immediately after that she died in his arms. So it was this unfinished thing between them, a promise they never got to make good on, a life they never got to have even a tiny taste of. You know how when you have a song stuck in your head the best way to get it out is by listening to the song all the way through so that it finishes? I think to some degree it was that way with Matt, the song got turned off too soon so it got stuck in his head. 

So I think there’s a need for resolution in a certain sense. And on top of that you have Matt’s martyr complex. So not only is he stuck on this idea of the what they could have had (what he thinks they could have had) but also this sort of survivor’s guilt. So you have these things piling on to his very real grief over someone he does love, dying and he can’t move on. So when she pops back up at the start of Defenders, alive and not very well, and it manifests into this desperate desire to fix those things. Not only is alive so he can stop grieving, but maybe this time they can be together and maybe this time he can save her. 

And Matt spends most of Defenders trying to save her (from the Hand and from herself). But when in the end she kills Alexandra and starts running things herself even while seemingly fully remembering her old life, it becomes pretty apparent that Elektra is choosing not to be saved. Her arc is kind of about her determining for herself who she will be- and in the end she shrugs off the attempts to shape her from Alexandra, Stick and Matt. To some extent Matt understands this and I think it finally helps him accept that Elektra isn’t going to be the person he needs her to be to share a life with her, and its acceptable in that it’s not because she was trapped by the expectations others put on her (because that’s what she was fighting in DD2, the idea that she couldn’t be good. now it’s just that she is choosing not to.). And so with the realization that she’s never going to be a good person but it’s by her choice he can see that they have never really worked and never could work. So the second aspect of why he couldn’t move on fades away- no potential life together left unlived. Because the potential never really existed. 

But there still remains the fact that he loves her a lot and feels the need to save her. So the ending is kind of four things:

1. The last moment together, a chance to have something and feel that love for each other one last time. And besides, this moment half fighting half flirting, in imminent danger- this has always been the one thing they were good at. They could never have a life together but they can certainly die together. 

2. Not letting Elektra die alone. 

3. Giving himself to the effort of saving her even if he knows it’s doomed to fail. No survivor’s guilt this time. No letting her die for him (as was his perspective the first time). because he knows that this time he literally gave everything to try to save her. 

4. Staying to fight Elektra to keep her from escaping and killing more people, doing more damage. 

And I think, that it will give Matt the closure he needs and he’ll be able to move on this time. If she’s actually dead. Because that’s the big question that influences how much of this is accurate. Is. Elektra. Dead. Because if there’s more to the story then who knows. 

Send all the asks you like! I enjoy them even, if I take a while to answer them!