#markgemma and markhelly both welcome

[akii-bratva]

im assuming season 3 will have another banger of an ending song, so here's one I see being used:

If I May -Mel Tormé

works for ANY ENDING

if anyone has other guesses/suggestions i'd love to hear them (the playlist will be fire)

[gemmasdeadwife]

Pre-post disclaimer that I’m absolutely not someone who ships either markgemma or markhelly to the exclusion of the other, or wants one out of the way. I hate that shit and both relationships are extremely important. I do like to speculate about them without that burden of being pressured to pick one and shit on the other.

A lot of people are talking about how Mark and Gemma are now too different for their marriage to ever work again. Which is totally valid and makes sense, and something I’ve thought about a lot myself. It’s such a normal, everyday tragedy for relationships to be broken by trauma, distance, change. But… what if it’s actually the opposite…?

Which I know is a mega fucked thing to say about endless torture! But idk… I think for Mark it could put their struggles with infertility into perspective. Obviously that was huge and traumatic, but maybe there was no need for it to eclipse their marriage- there was so much more to it than that. And I think he’s learning (VERY SLOWLY) to confront his obstacles head-on instead of running away and lashing out at his loved ones. I think it would be hard for him to ever take her for granted again, and if he started to slip that way, it wouldn’t take a lot of reminding for him to shape up.

Gemma of course didn’t really need to change- that’s the bigger part of the problem here to me. Maybe she was a little naïve for getting into the Lumon stuff that she did, but how could she have possibly known? She was just analyzing interesting little puzzles, a welcome distraction from feeling so hopeless. If she did display any naïveté, I think there’s pretty much zero chance of that ever cropping up again after what she’s been through.

The biggest issues still are the trauma and how much they’ve each changed. Is their trauma around each other, and their pedestalization of each other while they were apart, too great for them to have a relationship again? I think it could go either way. For one thing, the trauma is going to be difficult with all of their relationships going forward, including Mark and Helly too. I don’t believe that the deeply traumatized can’t love properly- it just takes a fuckton of work.

Changing over time is also a problem in any long term relationship, though it’s harder when you’re not together through the change, and this is more unusual and fucked up than being apart during a deployment or something. I think they will have to get to know each other all over again very carefully, gently and gradually. It’s natural if there are some missteps along the way. They aren’t the same people they were before the “death,” and they aren’t the idolized versions of each other they pined over through separation, either. And that will either result in falling in love in a whole new way, or else realizing romance doesn’t make sense between them anymore, but remaining family- I think that bond between them is too strong to become nothing, but it could transform.