#this conversation was actually littered with Charlotte Ritchie appreciation too so that’s why i rewrote it instead of taking screenshots

[nicknellie]

So @ace-bookworm and I were talking last night and like so many good conversations it started with some good old-fashioned Carrie appreciation and it ended with us taking a deep dive into what motivations she may have had for leaving Julie and Flynn. None of it is justification for her actions or saying what she did was okay, but it’s always fun to get into what might have been going through her head.

If Carrie’s mum walked out on her when she was young - especially if she never really found out why - it makes a lot of sense that Rose might have become a mother figure to Carrie. Rose would have been there for her, taken her under her wing a bit, shown love to Carrie like she did with her own family. Carrie probably felt that maternal love from Rose that she couldn’t get from her own mother, and she would have loved Rose in return. So when Rose died, it would have hit her hard and she would have struggled (not necessarily in the same way as Julie, but it would have been hard for her). But she would have been aware that Rose wasn’t really her mother, in which case perhaps she thought she was being selfish by feeling upset about Rose’s death. She wouldn’t have wanted to take away from the Molinas’ grief or make it seem like it was all about her. To her, she isn’t a biological part of their family and therefore doesn’t think she deserves or needs the same support as them, even though the Molinas were and always would be accepting and accommodating. So in Carrie’s head, what was the only logical solution? Distance herself from Julie so that she wouldn’t be taking away from her pain.

She would have thought she was doing the right thing - she was letting Julie get on with her grief and not getting too involved in it, and she was working through her own grief by herself (which she probably did want to do, being the independent character that she is). What she wouldn’t have realised was that all both she and Julie needed at that point was a friend - namely each other (and Flynn). So perhaps she began being unkind to Julie and Flynn because she was trying to avoid them, thinking that was the right thing, and that cruelty became a habit that she never got out of.

We decided we can safely rule out the possibility that Carrie’s mum is dead too. After all, if that was the case we think that Rose’s death would have just drawn Julie and Carrie closer - it’s that shared pain, that shattering experience that only they would have truly understood. They would have each other if both of them had lost their mothers. But with this theory, Carrie has lost her mother, just in a different way. So consider this: in a way she couldn’t understand, Carrie was (for want of better words) angry and jealous about how this whole thing had played out. Julie was left alone knowing that her mum loved her and that she always cared; Carrie was left alone not knowing why her mother had left and feeling unloved and abandoned. She was, in a way, jealous because Julie’s mum loved her. And she knew it was an awful, dreadful thing to be jealous of because Julie had lost her mother and that was something that shouldn’t be wished upon anyone, something Carrie shouldn’t have been hoping for in any way at all. She would have felt like an awful person for feeling angry or jealous, which maybe was another reason she felt the need to separate herself from Julie - to try and make sure she didn’t start feeling jealous of this terrible thing.

And let’s not forget that as Carrie distances herself from Julie, she’s also distancing herself from Ray who was probably like a cool uncle to her (in the same way that Trevor was a cool rockstar uncle to Julie). She made the choice to leave behind that aspect of her life and family because she thought it was helping Julie and didn’t realise that it was just hurting everyone more.

Carrie also probably feels every emotion very strongly. She’s a headstrong, independent, hard-working girl, clearly passionate about everything she does, so with this barrage of emotions (sadness, grief, jealousy, anger, guilt, confusion, loneliness, etc) there’s no way she could have been thinking straight. There must have been so much going on in her head, of course she was going to act rashly. Taking it out on Julie and Flynn and being mean to them to keep them away was definitely not alright, and there’s no excuse, but it does make sense that maybe that came to mind when she was trying to work through her own grief and figure out Julie’s as well.

And on a separate note, if anyone wants to draw Carrie in Bobby’s red suspenders and/or a similar outfit to his Now or Never one then I think I can speak for both Izzy and myself when I say that’d be really cool and we’d love you forever.