Went on a bit of a Brandy/Lee rant on twitter and wanted to translate it over to tumblr so I can keep it in my Detentionaire tag:
It started with me stating that their relationship obviously doesn’t start out great, with Brandy blackmailing Lee into dating her, but also Lee kind of leads Brandy on and is shitty to her in other ways, but both characters grow a lot throughout the series and end up having one of my favourite platonic relationships by the end. While I love their platonic relationship I absolutely would have loved to see a second chance romance between them (even though I adore Cam and Brandy but also this just illustrates why I’m writing a polyamorous college fic for this series)
Then I decided I wanted to talk a little more about Lee and Brandy, specifically how there’s always so much focus on Brandy being the “bad” one in the relationship (blackmailing Lee into dating her, for example) but how she really highlights how Lee interacts negatively with a lot of the people in his life.
Generally, Lee is seen as the kind of every-man that fits into every clique but actively chooses to join none of them. He’s close with Cam and Holger, he crushes on Tina from a distance, and eventually becomes close with Biffy and Jenny.
Lee dismisses Brandy from the get go. Yes, she tells him that they’re dating know because of popularity reasons which is shallow and silly, but other than that he ignores her. Unless he needs something.
Brandy is not worth arguing with or event acknowledging if what she’s doing doesn’t directly affect him.
Whether it’s intentional or not, Lee has this superiority about him that is especially obvious when he interacts with Brandy and Irwin because they actively challenge him. Even with the other cliques we watch him routinely become buddy-buddy with the members in order to get info or get something done, and the he immediately drops them, only interacting with them again to call in a favour here and there. Cam and Holger are the only people we see Lee go out of his way to check on outside of conspiracy things. He often forgets to check in one Tina and we see multiple examples where he only checks on Biffy because he needs Biffy to do something for him. Even in the pilot Lee gets surprisingly upset and frustrated when he thinks Biffy is leading him into a trap or when he thinks Biffy bailed.
Is Lee justified in being paranoid/demanding/stressed since he’s in the middle of/investigating a major conspiracy? I think that allows him some leeway (ha) for sure, but still he’s running the risk of alienating not only the people who care about him but allies who have actively helped him find as much information as he has.
I also don’t think Lee intentionally thinks he’s better than everyone else; he just lacks awareness of other people’s thoughts and feelings. He gets caught up in his own problems and ends up ignoring everyone else.
Brandy actively challenges this behaviour of his. Maybe the relationship started out as shallow, but Double Date is especially effective at showing us that she is actually paying attention, despite her brusque exterior. She respects Lee enough to put some effort in, so it’s only fair that she would expect the same treatment back, but Lee just doesn’t give that.
gracieabrams
turnnoffyourmind
blakekathryn
titsay
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romaincrisis
