I've always been confused about the fight between Annie and Ruby about her not being "blood". It seemed very unrealistic to get so protective of Beth when they've known each other for over 20 years and Ruby is basically a sister to them. Do you have an opinion about why it went down like that? Sorry if you've already answered this, I didn't find it among your posts.
No need to apologize! I haven’t answered it, and even if I had, you’d probably have to dig through quite a few posts to find it!
I have a few theories, but they’re pretty much just conjecture?
One, I’m not sure what they’d established as the girls’ backstory during 1.07, and whether they’d decided the depth and scope of their friendship. If I recall correctly, we don’t get references to their twenty year friendship until season 2 when Ruby is talking to Agent Turner and defending her indecision about turning Beth in to Stan, which is more clearly fleshed out in 2.08 when we get the flashback. It’s interesting to me that in this fight, Ruby brings up that she held Annie’s hand through her divorce—which has never been clearly slotted into the timeline, but which doesn’t stretch quite as far back to Ruby pointing out her role in their childhood.
Because of that, I wonder if it was sort of a shorthand, easy thing for them to have Annie say in the fight because they didn’t necessarily have that history decided? I think the scene is an attempt at fleshing out the individual dynamics within the group dynamic because up to that point, the series seems to have mostly looked at them as a unit with some Beth/Annie scenes on the side? I think from this point on, they do lean in a bit more to exploring both Beth & Ruby’s dynamic and Annie and Ruby’s. I think season 2 is when we really feel that Annie and Ruby have an individual friendship outside of their relationship to Beth.
In a completely separate vein (which completely contradicts my first theory), I’ve started to wonder if Annie’s reaction could be viewed through a lens of Annie reacting to the words “crazy” and “evil” because of their mother’s history of a vague, indeterminate possible mental illness—or even Beth’s postpartum. I’m not entirely sure they would’ve had those pieces of backstory decided if they also don’t pop up distinctly until season 2, but it did seem like Annie was particularly sensitive to Ruby using those words against Beth.
However, the trigger point for Annie drawing the line in the sand between “blood” and “not” seems to be when Ruby points out to Annie that Annie comes after Beth all the time—and it’s true! At that point in the series, we’d seen Annie criticize Beth for her lifestyle, for her choice in husband, and for her lack of sex life. She makes fun of Beth’s interests and predilections, and she well... hasn’t been all that supportive (although she did have that scene where she consoled Beth in bed).
It’s possible the words just came out in the heat of the moment as Annie scrambled to deflect from the validity of Ruby’s criticism, and she latched onto the first thing that she could think of—an attempt at justifying why it’s okay for her to do that when... well, I think Annie sort of knows in that moment that it’s probably not. That could be why her argument was so weak and why I think Annie instantly regrets it (I also saw @misshazelevers20 suggest that Annie might’ve jumped to Beth’s defense because of the freshness of their recent fights, which I think makes a lot of sense).
Mostly I think it was relying on some pretty basic clichés and tropes and was teasing at the idea of a conflict they never fully developed from there, which I do sometimes think is a shame! They tease and hint a lot at inter-conflicts between the girls and then seem to shy away from it a lot of the time? And they have a lot of the makeup scenes (especially between Beth and Annie) happen off-screen? I actually do wish they leaned into exploring some of those fights a bit more, as I think it actually would underscore the depth of their love and commitment to each other if we also saw that they had to work hard to fight for their friendships. I also think it would be a pretty interesting counterbalance to the ways we see the girls fight with the men in their lives—from the way Beth stops fighting with Dean, to the way she and Rio are both unable to put their ego aside to make up from a fight, to the way that Annie and Greg don’t fight for each other, etc. I was really interested when I thought season 3 was going to explore the girls’ different views and opinions on staying in crime, and I was mildly disappointed that that didn’t really seem to be touched on much at all.
