fear of a direct hit

[heartsuits]

[lizclimo]

[zinesbycee]

(nods sagely) (nods basily) (nods rosemarily) (nods saltly) (nods star anisely)

[rikutaa]

I made new marvey acrylic stand♡ And I went on a trip with them♡

This acrylic stand is printed on both sides. SO cute!

[marshmellowed]

every time.

[futileexercise]

[statusquoergo]

Mike: Quit changing the subject. How do you feel about me right now? Harvey: Well, I love you, of course. But a lot of things you do still drive me crazy. Mike: So you mean our whole marriage you've been resenting me behind my back? Harvey: Harvey: A little bit, yeah.

[statusquoergo]

I love your blog so much and suits content so much!!!!

My question to you is do you feel the writers were afraid of making Harvey unlikeable?

thank you so much!!!! 💖💖💖 that's very kind of you to say, i'm so glad you like it here.

hm... at first, i doubt that it even occurred to them that harvey might come off as unlikeable. for the first couple of seasons, he's portrayed as so suave and cool and powerful and in-control; if you're invested enough to watch the show, chances are you're a fan of his, too. not to mention mike is bringing out the humanity in him, showing us glimpses of the fragile soul hidden way, way deep underneath his facade; what's not to like?

later on, though, once mike started to fade out and their companionship was less the focal point of the narrative, yes, i do think they went out of their way to keep him in viewers' good graces. two examples come immediately to mind to illustrate this point, the first being here:

even if you're on mike's side with this one, harvey is giving such kicked puppy energy here that it's hard not to at least feel a little bad for him. he is trying so, so hard, and mike is throwing all of that back in his face with zero reservation; harvey might not be going about this in the right way, but he's not the bad guy, certainly. he's just playing too far out of his own league. whether it's because you want them to be on the same side again or you just want harvey to stop being so downtrodden, it's basically impossible to hate him (even though he is arguably in the wrong by trying to fix mike's life for him ("fix" in harvey's view, anyway) more or less in secret).

the second is this:

this is considerably after the writers (as far as i'm concerned) gave up on keeping harvey consistent with his established characterization and had reduced him to basically "donna's arm candy who occasionally has a sad/mad that his boyfriend abandoned him but has given up on actually doing anything about it." setting that aside, though, the whole subject of family is undeniably a running theme in the land of suits, whether it's motivating action or just wrapping up an emotional arc (see: "you gave me a family"). viewers have been trained to view family as the be-all and end-all, the "ultimate goal," if you will.

i bring this up because i think the resolution to lily's infidelity plotline was handled very, very poorly; specifically, very, very cheaply, cutting basically all of the corners. harvey's long-held resentment toward his mother has been built up and up and up for the entire series, but rather than go to the trouble of unpacking it and working through it with any real vulnerability and/or catharsis, harvey gets to be the bigger man by simply choosing to forgive her because family. not only that, it's wrapped neatly in the sentimentality of his one true love convincing him it was the right thing to do, so we get to be happy for him on that front, too, since he's finally got someone to tell him how to be vulnerable and have emotions since he's so bad at that and stuff.

i guess this one kind of worked, though, if their goal is to make harvey likeable? or at least not un-likeable. that is, i personally wasn't mad at harvey himself so much as i was mad at the writers for doing him dirty.

going back to what i was saying earlier, though, once mike left, harvey was basically the main character of the show, and therefore the one viewers were meant to identify with the most, or at least root for the most often. again, i don't know that it particularly crossed the writers' minds to go out of their way to make him likeable, but i do think they spent the most time trying to paint him as the one either in the right, or who learns his lesson and comes around to the "right" side at the end of the day (or at least what is portrayed as the right side, according to the narrative).

to be fair, though, trying to analyze the writers' motivations or thought processes in the later seasons is a bit of a fool's errand, i think, in that i have my doubts that even they knew what the hell they were doing.

oh also here's this thing that i'll just leave here for no reason:

not because i think anything about these circumstances lead to harvey being at his most likeable or anything, no sir.

[minimalistquotes]

The older I get, the more I understand why people disappear into gardening baking, reading, and long walks. Not because life got boring. Because peace became valuable.

[heartsuits]

[statusquoergo]

I feel so sorry for everyone trying to make sense of all the cancerous canon suits LA introduced because none of it is compatible with the real show canon no matter how hard you try. I always knew they were going to only bring in Harvey to look into the camera and deliver a monologue how cool and much better at everything than Harvey at everything the new main character is.

The child idea is laughable because Donna was basically 50 at the time which is deeply menopausal (35 is a geriatric pregancy and anyone 45+ trying with ivf has a 3% chance to deliver a healthy baby). You can be sure the writers never gave a single thought to canon or respected the old, discarded characters writing this slop.

This always happens when a character leaves and comes back or does an appearamce on a spinoff: even if they have only been gone for 3 months, you can bet The Wife is pregnant. It doesn't matter if it makes sense — when writers don't have to be in the head of a character anymore they lose all memories of what their personality was or how time or biology works.

I really wish people would stop stressing themselves out, the writers didn't waste any time thinking about this before putting it in and they certainly haven't thought about it after. It's just us, the fans who even remember.

it's a challenge, there's no denying that. since harvey's eventual cameo was teased as early as the first episode, and korsh made no secret that it was coming up eventually, i have to imagine it was mostly a ploy to rack up viewership numbers (how'd that work out, guys), but then to have him put on display as the sheepish guy whose carelessness is responsible for ted black's mortal enemy getting out of prison in 15 years instead of serving a life sentence is just plain disrespectful. i've bitched before about how harvey's present-day behavior is also so, so out of character, but like what is even the point of having him on if he's just going to act like s1!harvey and i guess we're supposed to pretend mike never existed?

i mean...maybe they adopted? no, i know they didn't (i could see harvey adopting under the right circumstances, but lbr donna would never), and you're totally right, it makes no sense. even setting aside the entire issue of whether harvey wanted a kid, or whether donna wanted a kid, or whether harvey and donna wanted a kid, my money's on the writers mentally de-aging both harvey and donna the moment they got together in the og series. or who knows, maybe they imagined them in stasis the entire run of the show; "suits takes place in a timeless universe," after all. they both hit 40 in the pilot and immediately stopped aging.

i've always thought of it as a shortcut for "this character you knew and loved it still doing well." they can't just say outright that they're still happily married, or talk about how much fun they had on their recent vacation to indonesia or ecuador or finland or wherever; the fastest, most obvious, most effective way to convey that the couple whose love you watched evolve over however many seasons is still going strong is to further their family. is it practical for them to have kids? do they want kids? is it even possible for them to have kids? don't ask stupid questions, we're not in the business of breaking the laws of television.

fr the writers sure as hell didn't put any thought into timeline or continuity for the original run; to start with all that for this nonsense would just be silly.

but also i mean come on. we all know who this message is really from.

[depsidase]

[statusquoergo]

not that anyone asked but ive figured out why i prefer s1 harvey hair. if you look at it from the front; the sides of his hair comes away slightly from his head and that slims his jawline, makes his entire head look more rectangular. in later seasons his hair tapers off too much at the top, shorter sides, and that exaggerates the shape of his jaw as well as his neck, the style of it (the spikes) also doesnt help with the overall shape, again not that anyone asked but its important™️ to me lol

i have never given any thought to why harvey's s1 hair is more aesthetically pleasing than his later seasons hair beyond "he looked like a gangster." granted, to each his own, but i definitely agree with you that those spikes aren't doing him any favors.

thank you for this thoughtful analysis!

[statusquoergo]

is it possible that Harvey had a kid because Marcus died just like he settled for Donna because his mom did too? it would certainly make sense

that is such an interesting take that i never would have considered on my own. in all seriousness, thank you for bringing it up.

to no one's surprise, i'm sure, i always took for granted that harvey settled for donna because mike was out of the picture and he had no real means of support left (jessica being gone as well couldn't have helped), but certainly his mother's death could be viewed as a motivating factor. at the very least, donna being the one literally delivering the news and the only person around for him to lean on in that moment lays the foundation for it. taking the heavy-handedness of the analogy a step further, sheila going into labor at the altar puts the life-death parallel right at the forefront of the narrative at that time, and harvey just so happening to have his mother's ring with him complements the picture with all the subtlety of a monkey with a hand grenade, if you will.

the timeline for the post-suits era isn't made explicitly clear, so all we know is that marcus died "a few years" before "bat signal" (s01e09), which i'll assume takes place in 2025 (the year it aired), and that harvey and donna have a son who's old enough to have the wherewithal to ask when his dad's going to call (not confirmed whether he's old enough to have the grammatical, spelling, and proofreading knowledge and patience to type out the sentence "Daddy, when are you going to call?" or donna did it for him, but given that suits ended in 2019, the kid is five, six years old at the absolute most, and that's only if donna got pregnant like, the day that they moved across the country). that is to say, purely logistically, yes, it's possible in that there's nothing to specifically disprove it.

as for that being the reason that harvey would have had a child... you know, i don't think it would be the only reason, but i can definitely see it being a big part of harvey's decision, and potentially a rather small part of donna's. rather, i should say i can see donna thinking it's a nice idea, but primarily a good tactic by which to convince harvey to have a kid with her, since as i've said before, i don't particularly think he'd be the driving force behind that life choice. that said, harvey does have something of a track record of wallowing in despair after a life upheaval until he can find something to fill that void (basically his entire career is a distraction from his disastrous upbringing, and we all saw how broken he was after mike left the firm, or went to prison, or moved to seattle, or...); i don't think he's a particularly religious person, especially compared to mike's oft-cited catholic upbringing, but if life in seattle isn't everything he hoped and dreamed it would be (and given how blindly optimistic he and mike were when mike "interviewed" him for the job, i have to imagine it's not), yes, i could absolutely see grief at marcus's death being part of his choice to bring a new life into the world.

and it's my understanding that the larger fandom has more or less decided that the kid's name is gordon, in case you were looking for yet another way to tie him to harvey trying to compensate for a tragic loss in his life without processing it fully.

[russiawave]

[statusquoergo]

mike and harvey being the only relationship in suits that doesn't involve cheating this means they are soulmates

solid

[statusquoergo]

reading through your blog (eek hope you don’t mind!!) and adding on to the donna thing - the way she acted during the machel cheating arc pissed me clean off because how are you going to tell harvey to forget about his issues with infidelity for rachel’s sake!!! when you know rachel is in the wrong!!! she’s known him forever why would she say something like that!!!

oh my god of course not, please do trawl to your heart's content! 💖

nooooothing about that arc makes sense. even setting aside the fairly minor issue of "if this show was made in the modern day rachel and logan 100% would have full-on fucked" (given that the show treated it as though they had done so anyway), when exactly did donna's allegiance shift from harvey to...anyone? much less rachel. i get that they've apparently been friends since before mike ever showed up (i...think?), but donna's whole thing is that she's harvey's perfect missing piece partner soulmate whatever. where does she get off telling him to ignore literally the bedrock of his entire structure of personal relations and socialization because rachel made a stupid impulsive decision that badly hurt harvey's most precious friend/protege/etc.?

i hate to bring it back around to this, but the only possible reason i can think of where this even kind of has an explanation is if donna is trying to get mike out of the way. i don't know if she thinks he's a romantic rival or just a distraction for harvey's attention or what, but i have no earthly idea why she would spend a single second insisting to harvey that infidelity is suddenly not a big deal if not because she sees it as her only, or at least most expeditious, means of getting mike out of her way.

the biggest and most obvious downside of this, of course, is that it explicitly turns her from a fun, cool, kind-of-overbearing-but-in-a-well-meaning-way bestie into literally the exact mischaracterization fujoshi have traditionally vilified solely for the purpose of clearing the way for their otp. and on top of that, it makes harvey into a spineless yes-man, which...does unfortunately track with his donna-related behavior in s8/9 after mike leaves, and if i didn't know better, i'd say the writers were doing a bang-up job with the foreshadowing, but. i do know better, so. not that.

but i mean come on, we don't even get marvey out of this! all that defamation for nothing!