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Good Girls + Reductress part 11

part 10 part 9 part 8 part 7 part 6 part 5 part 4 part 3 part 2 part 1

#my post #nbc good girls #goodgirlsedit #beth x rio #beth boland #rio #annie marks #ruby hill #ben marks #dean boland #to be fair she's not embarrassed she's just being a clown

Real Subtle™

#love it #all for it #nbc good girls #brio #beth x rio #rio x beth #rio #beth boland #brioedit #brioedits #mick #annie marks #ben marks #mood #everyone knows it #gif #gifs #gifset #4x12 #subtle

#annie marks #ben marks #nbc good girls #goodgirlsedit

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the situation between Ben and Annie. My best friend thinks Ben’s attitude towards Annie is unwarranted but I completely see where he’s coming from. My mom is a lot like Annie, she had me when she was young, so she was the “fun mom”. Although my mom did the best she could and I love her, she acted more like a best friend to me rather than a mom. When I was a teenager, (though I didn’t want to) I held feelings of bitterness and resentment because she refused to get her shit together, and grow up. It’s honestly frustrating when you’re more mature than your parent so I can see where the anger in Ben is coming from. Though Annie is by no means a bad mom, her refusal to seek better for herself has no doubt impacted Ben in a negative way.

I agree with you, anon, I think Ben's attitude towards Annie is pretty much always warranted, especially when you take into account her tendency to either buy him off or guilt him when he's upset with her or when he tries to confront any of her behaviour.

Ben and Annie's relationship was actually one of my favourites on the show, and I loved that the writers and Mae and Isaiah always gave it room to get a little messy. One of the things that worked best about it was the fact that the love they had for each other was never in question, so it meant there was more room for conflict around parenthood and childhood and what happens when those lines blur as they often did with Annie and Ben. After all, she was a child herself when she had him, and as s3 and s4 further explored, she was really raised by a child herself in Beth.

There's this sort of fascinating thing with the parentification of children in that sense, but interestingly I think it's Beth and Ben who bore the brunt of that, and not Annie who was the only one of the three of them who actually became a parent as a child. It places her as a character who's really arrested in her own development, but in a lot of ways, becomes a catalyst for both her sister and her son having to grow up too quickly.

In a way, Beth and Ben can feel like these parallel characters who are coming into their own identities throughout the series, albeit in very different ways, and frequently Annie becomes like a narrative elastic for them. She's a character they pull away from and snap back to and who tests the constraints of their own growth, which makes sense! Children and siblings do test parts of themselves out on their parents and siblings! It's very often how we grow as people.

I think in Ben's case with Annie, him starting to really express himself and test his autonomy and independence is something that is coloured by the sort of resentment from feeling that he's had to look after her, and that their co-dependence for much of his childhood has been something that's forced him into that role of parentified child. He's the one who has to leave the post-it notes up to remind her to pay rent, he's the one who has to help her find a therapist, he's the one caught in the middle when she and his dad behave immaturely and cheat behind his step-mom's back.

It's not deliberate on Annie's part of course, but her own arrested development has forced those closest to her to step up into adulthood before they were necessarily ready, and the see-sawing as she did try to grow up caused understandable pain on both their parts because it was not only a shake-up their established dynamic, but because it was a shake-up to their established dynamic, they were both confronted with the reality that there was something in that that was maybe a little broken.

We saw that manifest in so many ways, but especially with Annie trying to keep the fact that she was trying to get her highschool diploma again after failing the first time, and with Ben being so hurt that Annie would try and do the adult thing and keep him out of parts of her adult life. The show slipped a bit on some of that towards the end, but overall, I do think Annie and Ben had one of the most satisfying and complicated narrative arcs on the show, and I so, so wish we'd gotten his reaction and the fallout to Annie's arrest.