intimate

sevendeadlyfun:

teastaindiary:

girlinplaits:

stagecoachjessi:

You can actually see the moment when his heart breaks in two

“He’s pretty cool once you get to know him”

Oh like how you two found that out about each other?

I realise this is either more Rae trying to jibe Finn or her being oblivious to just how much this knocked him, but I definitely can’t help but feel this was quite ironic. That this phrase reflected their relationship so much - The two of them being so stubborn and closed off at first, until they realised just how “sound” and “quiet, kind and special” each other were. It frustrates me to no end that she did say this about Liam, but at this point I’ve kind of tried to forget he ever existed. 
This whole conversation was really her talking about Finn - his love for music, being a good laugh and being a great guy when you get to know the real him. That is why it was such a low blow and a punch in the stomach for Finn. 

Alll of this ^^^

Sometimes I think that Rae was missing Finn [not just his body but him] that she projected the qualities and traits that she saw in Finn to Liam. Rae filtered Liam’s personality until she found Finn perhaps in her mind she saw Liam as a Finn who would understand, who was mad like her! In Liam I think she was desperate to find Finn but a Finn who didn’t embody outward perfection.Failing to realise that the Finn who understood her the Finn who got her was standing right in front of her. I think that the quick turn around in Liam’s character after this scene from hero in Rae’s eyes to a cowardly douche could be Rae’s realisation that Liam couldn’t be Finn

I’m going to butt in to someone else’s conversation because reading this whole thing gave me feelings. So - sorry in advance for the spew that’s about to happen.

I don’t think Rae was ever unclear about who Liam was, really. I don’t think she thought he was like Finn or that he had anything in common with Finn at all. I think Rae’s opinion of and attachment to Liam has everything to do with her feelings about herself.

As a social work grad student I spend a lot of my adulting time helping people learn how to communicate. One of the most important things I can ever teach them is that message is about sender and not receiver - what we say has more to do with us than with the people we say it to and vice versa. This is true of Rae’s relationships - they have more to do with how she feels about and views herself rather than how she feels about the other person.

I’ve talked before about Rae’s unreliability as a narrator and this is one more example of how we can’t take Rae perceptions as gospel - she is our window into this world but she is an unreliable window, only showing us tiny slices of what she sees, heavily filtered via her self-hate and insecurity. She breaks up with Finn not because she doesn’t care about him but because she feels unworthy. When they argue in the bathroom (You’re an 11 and I’m a 4) it isn’t because of Rae’s feelings about Finn, it’s about Rae’s feelings about Rae - she feels unlovable, so she doesn’t understood how Finn can love her. When they break up, it isn’t because she doesn’t love him. In fact, she tells us that she cares about him so much that she doesn’t want him to suffer by being with her. Her relationship with Finn is therefore demonstrably not about her feelings for him but her feelings for and about herself.

Her relationship with Liam is the same way. She tells us that they’re alike and that being with him is easier - again, her feelings for him aren’t the issue her, it’s her feelings for herself. Walking outside with Liam, who is larger than Rae both physically and verbally, feels safer to her because it allows her to hide what she dislikes about herself (her size and her mouth - or as she references herself, the “blob with a gob”). It’s only as we see her starting to heal some of that self-hate, and to progress past some of her insecurities, that we begin to see the change in her relationship with Liam - again, because how she feels about herself changes, how she feels about others changes as well.

It’s frustrating for the viewer to have so much of what we know coming directly from Rae because her self-hate and insecurity does tend to obscure the objective realities of these relationships. But Rae really does show us exactly what we need to know about her and her relationships with both boys if we take in to account that these messages are all about the sender (Rae) and not the receiver (Finn/Liam). This scene is about her feelings about Rae - that being hidden is being than being seen - and not about Finn or Liam.

/feels.

No seriously guys, all of this ^