So here’s my take on the Oliver/Felicity tension.
This particular conflict isn’t/wasn’t about Oliver. It was about Felicity and her fear of abandonment.
Felicity feels like she’s changed into a new person (I would say this is an exaggeration because her fears and all her other complicated feelings are amplifying the differences rather than showing her what was already there and what remains that is the same). Felicity has had a fear of abandonment, coupled with the typical gifted child pressure to be ‘perfect’. This drive for perfectionism makes her push herself to always be the smartest, to always dress immaculately, to be the moral center for the team, to cover her emotions with humor and only let them out in private etc. But “new” Felicity bucks some of those habits, particularly the last two. This Felicity is angry, and hurt, and afraid and she’s showing it and acting on it. She’s taking steps that don’t befit the “good girl” “light” of the team. And so, in a sense, it could be considered growth because she’s allowing herself to be less than perfect.
But doing so is throwing her fear of abandonment into overdrive. There’s a little voice in her head saying, “if you’re not perfect they won’t love you. If you’re not perfect they’ll leave you. And you’re not perfect anymore.” But, at the same time, the anger and the fear and the hurt are pushing her to stay on this path. So she gets defensive of the New Felicity. Whether it’s with Diggle, or Laurel, or Rene, if anyone brought it up she’d snap at them a little and push back, and adopt a general demeanor of not caring what they think. And with them she didn’t try to hide it. Partly because I think she already felt a little bit abandoned by Diggle (and maybe the rest of the team, though I’d have to rewatch her interactions with Rene, because he was pretty on the same page with her) and with Laurel the footing was unequal enough that she still felt she had the moral high ground.
With Oliver though, she hides it. Just at first. And it may not be intentional, more just trying to assume old patterns. But the idea is also present, Oliver is the one she can’t lose, so he’s the one she sort of tries to be Old Felicity for, the one she’s afraid to show New Felicity. Then danger comes into their home and she responds, as New Felicity. She can’t hide it anymore. And Oliver reacts negatively.
I’d contend that Oliver reaction is mostly the result of him being surprised, and him disliking the idea that Felicity had to become harder and darker because he never wanted her to go through anything like the things he’s been through. But what Felicity sees is rejection. Especially when he says that Old Felicity “was the woman [he] fell in love with” it sounds to her like he’s saying “I loved the old you, not this new you” (when really Oliver was responding to her saying negative things about her old self and trying to reassure her that there was nothing wrong with the old her).
To Felicity, Oliver’s reaction paints this picture: she can go back to who she was, and he’ll love her still/again. Or she can stay as she is and it’ll drive him away. He’ll leave. Like her father. Going back feels like an impossibility. What she went through was too much to allow for that. So it seems like an inevitability that, even if he’s not leaving now, Oliver was going to walk away. So she gets defensive and puts up walls and pushes him away. Because better to push him away then for him to leave. At least then she has some control.
When she talks to Caitlin, she claims that Oliver doesn’t trust or respect her but that’s not true. That’s just the voice of her fears. That voice is telling her that Oliver doesn’t love her anymore because she’s changed; that a person that’s less than perfect can’t be trusted, can’t be respected. It’s telling her that if she was still perfect, then she would have sensed that it wasn’t really Oliver, the same way that Iris did. Perfect wives get a love strong enough to see past these things; broken angry wives can’t tell the difference between their husband and their ex because neither really loves them. But admitting those fears, even to herself, isn’t easy so she falls back on old issues of trust that they dealt with before and tries to convince herself that what the voice says isn’t true– that if Oliver doesn’t trust her it’s his problem, not because she is unworthy. As she tries to convince herself of that, she can’t see the real explanation: that she didn’t notice because she doesn’t have experience with other worlds like Iris does, and because she’d been pushing Oliver away even before the switch.
But when Oliver finally does come to her, it’s with the perfect words.
“We’re gonna be okay. People change, Felicity. It means we’re growing. It means we’re evolving. Except for one thing, one thing that will not change is how I feel about you. ‘Love’ is too small a word. And no matter who you are, or what you become– no matter who I am, or what I become– you will always be… you will always be the love of my life. People change. That never will.”
That speech touches all her fears and melts them away. He is not rejecting her– the new her, the old her– and never will. If she is different, he will love her. If she evolves, he will love her. If she is broken, he will love her. No perfection required. It’s a promise to be her constant, her always, the way he asked to be years ago. No possibility of abandonment. Just the certainty of an unconditional love.
I don’t know whether this will be the complete resolution of this problem. It seems more likely that there will be a learning curve as they establish new routines and relearn each other. But Oliver stood firm through her attempts to push him away, the same way she has done for him so many times. And now they’re back, headed in the same direction, even if it takes some time to reach smooth sailing.
