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Felicity Smoak Is One Brave Precious Badass Cupcake! #27

As we all know Felicity is a precious badass cupcake! I figure it can’t hurt to look at the many acts of bravery she has performed because let’s face it - our girl rocks!

Arrow 4x10 - Felicity giving Oliver an out, saying he doesn’t need to stay with her after her accident. Our girl was so scared. This of course was never a possibility.

Arrow 4x10 - Oliver telling Laurel that Felicity is the strongest of them all

Arrow 4x11 - Felicity slays her own hallucinations!

Arrow 4x11 - Felicity punches the vigilante - the girl has no fear

FELICITY SMOAK IS AMAZING.

Thanks to those who made the gifs.

#felicity smoak #felicity smoak is my hero #precious badass cupcake #arrow 4x10 #arrow 4x11

Wait- did you skip 410? I'm curious about your views on abandoning Felicity in the hospital have changed

I watched it but didn’t end up blogging anything for some reason or other (probably just wasn’t feeling super analytical at the time). But I’m more than happy to comment! I can’t speak too much to how my view of it might have changed, largely because I don’t totally remember my initial reaction to it. But I can give you my current interpretation.

Short answer: Oliver is clearly wrong for not being with her but the reaction is perfectly in character, as is Felicity’s reaction to it.

When Oliver is angry or afraid he has a very strong fight reflex- hence becoming an awesome warrior who shoots people with arrows and routinely slams people face first into tables. But when it comes to grief and guilt and interpersonal issues, he’s flight all the way. Flight when Laurel wanted to move in together and he wasn’t ready. Flight when he feels guilt over his actions in Hong Kong and he decides not to go home. Flight when he fails to stop the Undertaking. Flight when his mother dies. Even leaving town at the end of season 3 could be considered flight- he doesn’t know how to balance his life as the Arrow, or how to deal with the Arrow identity being taken away, so he just drops everything except Felicity and leaves. So you have the flight instinct working here with him not knowing how to deal with his grief over what’s happened, and feeling guilty over the accident. The flight in response to guilt also has an aspect of self-inflicted punishment. After Hong Kong and after the Undertaking, he feels guilty so he exiles himself. Here, he feels guilty that he got Felicity hurt so there is a subconscious part of him saying he should be punished and his punishment is not getting to be near her.

But the fight instinct is there as well. Oliver is very very action oriented. When something is wrong he wants to fix it. He wants to do something. Especially when he’s afraid for someone he cares about. He’s terrified by what’s happening to Felicity. And waiting at the hospital his fear is telling him to do something, to fight. And there’s nothing there for him to fight. So he channels his fear into finding something to fight and he goes out looking to find Darhk. It’s less about revenge than it is about Oliver trying desperately to fix the situation in the only way he knows how. It gets him in trouble here and it’s gotten him in trouble before- in 1x07 its this impulse that Thea yells at him for when Moira is hurt and he leaves her to chase down the shooter; it’s seen again at the end of season 3 when he leaves Maseo and Tatsu who are grieving Akio, in order to go torture Shrieve; and it’s seen when he ends up leaving Thea in the hospital in 3x20 in order to go deal with the League.

What’s also important is that in Oliver’s mindset, this leaving to go fight, is helping the person he cares about more than his being there could (sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s not- in Thea’s case, saving her life is more important than sitting beside her while she’s unconscious). In this case with Felicity, he’s very wrong. And that is partly because of Oliver’s horribly broken self-concept. Felicity says in 3x19 something along the lines of “you get so focused on protecting the people you love that you forget there are people who love you too”. His sense of self-worth is very low a lot of the times (especially when he’s feeling guilty) and it leads to this not realizing fully that people love him and want him around. He knows he loves Felicity, but that stops short of knowing that Felicity loves him (cognitively he knows, but emotionally) and wants him around. the idea that him being there for her is more important than catching Darhk doesn’t fully make sense to him, because in his mind his presence and support aren’t worth much. Dinah calls him on this in 5x12 when she gives him a speech about how he is more than a weapon and valued for more than his fists.

Felicity for her part is very understanding. And I think some people thought she was too understanding. And I think this comes from two parts.

First, Felicity is having her own issues of self-esteem because she’s wondering if maybe she is broken and Oliver no longer wants to be with her but doesn’t know how to tell her. And to her, at this time, this makes sense and is something she would accept “if he no longer wants to be with me that’s his right, he didn’t sign up for this, I don’t want to burden him” type of thing where she’d be devastated but wouldn’t blame him. And so she feels she doesn’t have the right to ask Oliver to be there with her. Now, clearly everything about this is incorrect. She’s not a burden, she’s not broken, Oliver should absolutely be there for her, Oliver does want to be with her, but in her current emotional state it makes sense to her. Oliver, for his part, doesn’t do anything to assuage her fears until he’s sitting there and having her voice these fears, because they never occurred to him. It would never occur to Oliver to view Felicity as broken, it would never occur to him to leave her. So he doesn’t sooth her fears because he doesn’t realize they exist (it’s also tied to his low sense of self-worth, she couldn’t possibly be worried about him not wanting her because clearly she is always more than he deserves, type mindset).

And secondly, Felicity knows Oliver very well. She understands the way that he reacts to things. She knows that in his own misguided way he was trying to help her and she insisted on telling the team that what Oliver was doing was important because she believes that Darhk needs to be caught as soon as possible (she’d insist that her feelings were not as important as the people who might get hurt with him loose) and because she wants them to see how Oliver is viewing things. She knows Oliver’s fears and impulses, she knows the kind of environment that has conditioned him for so long to put fighting (literally) for survival ahead of everything else so that that’s the only way he knows how to deal with this. She knows Oliver better than almost anyone and is understanding of the challenges it sometimes presents to being with him. Her being understanding and forgiving of that (especially when Oliver comes to her remorseful and apologetic) is not her settling for less or letting him mistreat her, it’s her showing tremendous strength and love.

And ultimately that’s what this episode shows between them, Felicity being gracious and self-sacrificing, Oliver being desperately afraid, angry and in love and not knowing how to deal with it but putting everything he has into trying to fix the situation, and both of them being understanding of each other and doing what they can to assuage the self-doubt the other feels and reassure each other of their love.

#arrow #olicity #olicity meta #arrow 4x10 #chronological arrow #cogent metas #askbox