yes i'm rooting for m*leven breakup because byler is neat but mostly? i'm rooting for m*leven breakup for the sake of el and mike.
to me, their romance was always a puppy love born out of a combination of social pressures, naïve curiosity, and a lack of true understanding regarding intimacy and romantic love and what it really is. it was real in that they do truly, deeply care about each other and they are close friends, maybe even shared an attraction, but a maturing romance is so much more than that. they've grown up and out of being boyfriend/girlfriend, and that's okay! i think television/film needs to show more often that most of us don't have definite "soulmates" or first childhood loves that we spend our whole lives with. it doesn't mean these relationships meant nothing and didn't impact us, it just means they've run their course and that something else is in the cards, and this is part of life!
i've always felt el was at her best and most confident self when broken up with mike, discovering who she was and what she liked alongside another girl her age instead of just relying on mike for mentorship on how to live in the real world. she deserves more of an opportunity to find herself, her autonomy, and her independence, and to love who she is, and she's made it clear she's felt insecure in the relationship with mike because she isn't being loved and understood the way she wants, needs, and deserves from someone who is her partner.
also, it's okay if mike doesn't love her in "the way he should". he is not obligated to love her romantically and stay in a relationship with her just because she's a girl, because she "needed someone", or because he cares about her a lot. he shouldn't be pressured into a romance if it's not truly coming from his heart. he deserves freedom to find out and honour who he is, too, instead of just staying in his non-functional first relationship — one he got into as a child, essentially — and defining himself that way because it's what's expected when a boy and a girl are close. he loves her in some way, yes, but it's okay if he doesn't feel comfortable or secure being her boyfriend anymore, for whatever reason that is. he's felt insecure too, and that's valid and it matters.
they are their own people and are steadily growing and changing every day. they need time to figure out who those people are, and it's become clear (at least in my opinion) that those people aren't meant to be a couple at this stage.
they deserve freedom. they deserve to grow up and be authentic to themselves and not feel like they need to lie for the sake of a relationship. they deserve to move on from this version of their relationship that isn't making them happy and rekindle the best part of their bond: their strong, beautiful friendship. they don't have to be a couple if it doesn't make them stronger and better and happier people.
i think it would be healthy and wonderful for a show, especially one consumed frequently by young adults, to show a relationship starting, progressing, and ending on good terms in this way. sometimes things don't work out, and that is okay.
whenever people say that satine made a huge critical mistake/moral failure by not "compromising" with militant mandalorians i wonder if i was the only person who heard satine say the words "even extremists can be reasoned with" or "concordia is under independent rule and we need to talk to the governor" or "there was a time we weren't enemies, perhaps that time has come again" or "there will be no bloodshed" when she literally surrenders to death watch (a terrorist group btw) because she knows she's lost popular support to them
idk i think there's sort of a satine horseshoe theory going on where people who hate her and people who Nuance Like(TM) her both have selective amnesia about how compassionate, observant, and willing to compromise satine actually is so they can paint her as either a genocidal dictator or an overly-idealistic stubborn bitch #GirlBoss with good intentions and in the end they're 3 centimeters away from each other in terms of how rancid i find their opinion to be
i feel like gen z need to be sat down and explicitly told it is ABSOLUTELY OK to say the wrong thing and do the wrong thing sometimes. growing up actually means fucking up, and if you spend your whole life paranoid of being ‘problematic’ then you are legitimately going to drive yourself into an anxiety induced meltdown. watching or reading ‘problematic’ media does not make you a bad person, and tbfh sometimes watching or reading said media (provided you keep your analytical brain switched on) is a good thing to do. because just as we learn by seeing what’s right to do, we also learn by seeing what’s not right to do.
and without wishing to sound horrendously horrendously ‘i am in my mid twenties’, you don’t need to let the entire world know what you’re watching and reading. you actually don’t need to let the entire world know a damn thing about you, and i feel like a lot of the anxiety i see from gen-z online is this terror of being called problematic precisely because the boundaries for oversharing are next to non-existent. growing and changing and learning are a fundamental part of being a teenager, and you will say and do ‘problematic’ shit which will make you cringe in your twenties, and that’s absolutely ok because you will have learned from it.
heyo this is your resident rambler bringing you updates from sapphic filipino twitter: darlentina has been featured on the "for sapphics" twitter account twice and both posts are racking up a lot of views and likes. it's been a week filled with a rollercoaster of darlentina content and we're already breaching the international sapphic stage that is the "for sapphics" twitter account. even more clips and shitpost edits outside of that are amassing hundreds of thousands of views. everyone, this is our pinoy queerbaiting era ala supercorp except that through the power of sheer gay spite, we are very rapidly pushing the production crew to a corner in the hopes that international queer pressure will make them drop the dude cop love interest in favor of what could be one of the most revolutionary twists in philippine mainstream media: making darna and valentina, canonical archenemies, the main romantic pairing and partners in crime in fighting against very thinly-veiled allegories to philippine political corruption
"Oddly enough, no," Dorian admitted, as he helped himself to a cup of tea, giving it a cursory blow to cool it down before he took a sip, saying, "I thought I would be, especially as we come down to the wire, but...I just can't say that I am. Call me an optimist, but...I just have a feeling that there's nothing to worry about."
All throughout these weeks of planning, of playing at being the happy couple with Emily, of scheming behind their families backs, of all the preparations being made, he was waiting for the proverbial shoe to drop, for the nervousness to kick in...and yet, it never did. He felt strangely calm about the proceedings, like something in his bones assured him that everything was going to be alright, and he was inclined to believe that. After all, Nicholas had been removed from the picture entirely, all of New Orleans was eating up everything they'd seen and heard about the young couple, and both their families were none the wiser to the plan. Everything was going off without a hitch, and he was glad for it.
That being said, he didn't miss the way Emily fidgeted with her sleeve, and he knew she wasn't feeling quite as calm as he was. Setting down his cup, he asked her gently, "I...take it you don't feel the same?" Perhaps if they talked it out together, she'd feel a bit better?