Lockwood: You’re not Marissa Fittes.
Lucy: Why? Because you can’t handle being my Tom Rotwell?
Me, who had not read the books and had only a vague sense of who Marissa Fittes and Tom Rotwell were: Oooh, burn.
It just occurred to me that it’s not just that there are massive Lucy-Marissa parallels, especially re: their respective ghosts, but there are Lockwood-Rotwell parallels as well (their names even sound similar!). We don’t get to see Tom Rotwell in the books—the closest we get is his descendant—but it’s a good foil for the Carlyle-Lockwood relationship. They started out as colleagues and then the female listener parted ways to go with her ghost partner.
Marissa said that she outgrew Tom, but there are definite romantic undertones to her relationship with her ghost, and the cis shipper in me think that she probably had a romantic relationship with Tom as well. It could have been a romantic break.
Lucy and Lockwood had a romantic break as well—Lockwood started ignoring Lucy, sure, but ultimately she leaves because she’s afraid of hurting him. I imagine this was not Marissa’s motivation, though the result was the same. I wonder if maybe Tom saw the toll that going to the realm of the dead had on Marissa and wanted her to stop. (This makes more sense to me than professional jealousy or else he, not his grandson, would have tried to open more ghost gates much earlier.) This would parallel Lockwood wanting Lucy to stop taking so many risks, being too trusting of ghosts.
Whereas Marissa embraces the world of the dead, Lucy chooses to remain in the world of the living, as does Lockwood.
