A rant about EM and unrequited love… feeling extra validated she didn’t get that Emmy nom
For anyone who missed the quote (and I’ve seen it making the rounds again):
There’s a very strong Team Luke contingent, but it’s my understanding that Team Nick is definitely very strong as well. And that’s because an unrequited love story is the best one. That’s way more interesting than the solid marriage. But we knew that we had to take an entire faction of people and convince them that she should not be with this person. —Elisabeth Moss
First of all… what Team Luke contingent, may I ask? Because I’m gonna need receipts. That faction has been hanging on by a thread since Season 2, and even they knew she didn’t love him like she loved Nick. The only people convinced June should be with Luke were the writers and EM, apparently. So let’s talk about this whole “Nick and June were unrequited love” narrative EM is peddling, because the gaslight is blinding and the bar is underground.
This isn’t nuance. It’s not layered or open to interpretation. It’s PR spin. It’s a post-finale scramble to justify a love story they abandoned, flattened, and walked away from, and they’re pretending that was the plan all along. Get out of here with that garbage.
What kills me is that EM actually seems to think we bought it. Like we didn’t watch the show with our own eyes. June didn’t say “I love you” first, but when she did, she meant it. She said it on the bridge, when she couldn’t leave him without telling the truth. She said it again in Season 6, unprompted, raw, still tethered to him. And she was two seconds from running off to Paris with him, until the writers manufactured a betrayal to blow it up. Luke knew. We knew. The only people who didn’t seem to know were the writers and EM.
Because what I saw — what I still see — wasn’t the absence of love. It was fear. Guilt. A woman trying to suppress the one thing that ever felt real because it didn’t fit the version of life she was told she should rebuild. She couldn’t fully own it. But it was always there. In the way she looked at Nick. In the way she whispered to him. In the way she kept choosing him, in silence, in shadow, in spite of everything. June loved Nick. She still does. She just never got the space, from the writers, from the world around her, to love him out loud.
I still genuinely can’t believe how they framed this so called betrayal. June begged Nick to save her husband and her friend. He killed a Guardian to make it happen. Then Commander Wharton caught him in a lie, and in Gilead, that’s a death sentence. If Nick didn’t give something up, he was headed for the Wall. So no, he didn’t betray her. He survived. He did what he’s always done: protect June in the only ways he could. He’s been risking his life for her since Season 1, harboring her, lying for her, orchestrating her escape, arranging Fred’s death. Survival doesn’t equal betrayal. It’s how he’s stayed in the fight. Should he have chosen execution instead? How is that love? How is that proof he wasn’t worthy of her? In what reality, especially this one, does that justify calling their love unrequited? It makes zero sense. And the fact that EM spins it this way just proves how little they understood the story they were telling. Because it doesn’t make Nick look bad. It makes June look bad. Like she needed him to be a martyr to validate her feelings, and that’s not the June I know. I will never understand it. And you know what? The Emmy voters saw it too.
You reap what you sow, EM.
