SO I wrote this massive post in the BCB discord explaining why I still like Paulo/Lucy, and at some urging I’ve edited it for tumblr!
Now, I could start off with a lot of talking about Paulo and Lucy’s personalities and why I think they’d mesh well together, but you’ve probably read the comic. You know the characters. I don’t think the argument “they don’t have chemistry” is even on the table. Instead, I feel like most people’s arguments about the ship are either “there are healthier/better ships for both of them” or “the Ferris Wheel scene and chapter 100 sink it.” So let’s talk about these arguments.
I am not going to be able to convince anyone who thinks that their ship is “better” than paulucy to switch sides, so let’s talk about healthier for a second. Paulo’s relationship with Daisy as it stands at the moment would doubtless get mired down by Daisy’s jealousy of Lucy. I’m not saying it couldn’t be good in the future, and both of them are developing in the directions that would make that easier, but at the moment I don’t think it’d be good. And as for Lucy? The number of healthy ships for Lucy is vanishingly small. I think it’s possible that her relationship with Paulo, if it started in the next chapter, would be healthy, but I also think they both need a little more work— and I think that they’re more likely to develop in positive ways together than apart!
Now, as for their recent arguments. I do not think Lucy is telling the truth during After You on the Ferris Wheel— at least, not the whole truth. She doesn’t feel like she can do a relationship at the moment, and she’s tired of watching Paulo (who she cares about deeply) hurt himself by waiting for her. This is compounded by the things she’s internalized from December and after: she feels like all she CAN do is hurt Paulo more, and that even if she starts dating him he’s only going to be doing it because he likes her appearance. Paulo might have proved MULTIPLE times that this isn’t the case, but she’s dealing with quite a bit right now and it’s very hard for her to see the positives in any of her relationships— Augustus excluded.
During the Ferris wheel ride she never actually can bring herself to tell Paulo outright that she doesn’t love him and that she’s incapable of loving him in the future. She does say that she’s sorry they couldn’t have been more in the past, but that’s because of her crush on Mike, a crush she’s slowly getting over. When he flat out asks her if there’s no way for her to love him she gives a non-answer and then changes the subject to the time they slept together, which she argues she only did because she thought she’d never see him again. I think this is true (and it was kind of a shitty thing to do), but Lucy isn’t giving herself enough credit OR Paulo enough agency here. Her goal during this whole conversation is to convince Paulo to move on from her, so she says a LOT of stuff that’s fairly hurtful. From her own admission, though, the reason she’s saying it all is because she thinks Paulo should move on, and that she’s not worth waiting for. That’s not her call to make. Unfortunately, as we see from their next conversation, all she really accomplished was ruining Paulo’s evening.
So now the big one, High Expectations. Paulo absolutely BLOWS UP at Lucy here, and a lot of people signaled it as the death knell for the ship. It definitely wasn’t our finest hour, but I maintain that there’s a couple little things in the scene that show that it’s still got stuff going for it. FIRST of all, Paulo flat-out says he loves Lucy. This one should’ve put the nail in the coffin of “ah Paulo doesn’t care about her because of the fair” argument, but on the NEXT page we get to the big one. Lucy says she didn’t come back for any of them, and Paulo asks the armor-piercing question: “Then why the fuck did you come back?”
This scene, this panel, is the FIRST time since Love Again that we see Lucy taken off guard by one of the members of the gang. It’s the only time her “I’m a cold hearted bitch now and I hate all of you” act really drops before she has her conversation with Sue a couple chapters later (It’s All in the Mind).
Paulo is the first person to REALLY get under her skin after she returns, and it’s pretty clear the things he says in this chapter stick with her. I could talk more about that, but for now let’s talk about Paulo and why he doesn’t mean the shit he says right here about how he’s Done With Lucy for real this time™️. First of all, Paulo is right up there with Mike and Lucy in terms of emotional outbursts— the main difference is that when he attacks people he just straight-up physically attacks them instead of tearing them down emotionally, and that it’s a coin flip whether he’s going to get angry with someone else or burst into emotional tears and start hating himself (because he’s one of the most empathetic emotional characters in the comic but I digress). He’s just seen Lucy, who’s keeping up the “I actually hate ALL of you now” act, with AUGUSTUS, who to his knowledge is the guy who tried to molest Daisy and nothing else. Robbed of the context of the situation, he feels like Lucy really hates them all so much that she’d rather hang out with the creep than them— than HIM— and that shit hurts. Why? Because he absolutely still loves her.
Paulo has also had an EXTREMELY rough day. One of his best friends just slammed his face into a lunch table. He’s still on rough terms with Abbey, even if Daisy’s party has assuaged some of these fears. He’s ALREADY ready to fall apart, and then THIS hits him like a train. It HURTS, so he lashes out and storms off.
Lucy realizes that she’s hurt him, bad, and that hurts her— but we don’t get to see that because Paulo and Mike are the focus of the chapter so we’re MOVING ON now, I’ll explain in a minute.
SO! During All in the Mind Lucy has another confrontation with her friends, leading to her blow-up with Daisy. BUT CRUCIALLY she’s on good terms with Sue again, and she starts to realize that she can’t keep hurting her old friends like this. This leads directly into her behavior in Witch Hunt, which is the next time we see the two of them interact. All she does is apologize to Paulo for potentially hurting him again with the dress— but this is a bigger moment than it might seem. In the earlier chapters after her return, Lucy would’ve pretended not to care that her actions could have hurt Paulo, but this time things are different! This is her reaching the olive branch out to him, as well as her genuine fear that she’s just hurt him again. Paulo assures her it’s no big deal, and then resumes casually flirting with her (in a friendly way!), something that she laughs with and clearly enjoys. When Daisy interrupts them they BOTH start blushing.
SINCE THAT POINT, the only chapter to feature the two of them significantly interacting is Unwanted Gift. Paulo happily takes part in the celebrations of Lucy’s birthday, which he DEFINITELY would not have done if he was still in the same mindset from High Expectations. Now, I can’t claim to know what’s going to happen after the most recent emotional missile salvo of a chapter, but I truly do believe the two of them are in a much better place than when Lucy first returned.
NOW, what evidence do I have that they really do still love each other? Admittedly, some of it is just my own gut feeling about the characters. Lucy leaving for the better part of a year didn’t put a damper on Paulo’s feelings. Being told “stop caring about me before you get hurt,” ESPECIALLY since Lucy can’t (or won’t) say “I don’t love you,” is not going to stop him.
As for Lucy? Well, there’s the inherent fact that Lucy didn’t just come out and say she didn’t like him and he had no chance. Lucy is often brutally honest, and she still chose to dodge the question when he asked. But Lucy still can’t bring herself to say she does love him, so if she’s so brutally honest, she must not, right? Well, no! One of Lucy’s major character flaws is that she can’t be fully honest with people, even when it would benefit them both. Admitting her true feelings is a specific area where that’s a problem— Lucy confessed she loves someone once before, and look how THAT went. Also on the BCB ship chart she’s still listed as having a crush on him and the chart came out in *checks notes* after Lucy came back so I’m hanging onto that for dear life
So, there you have it! My overdrawn explanation of why paulucy good, actually. Thank you so much for reading if you got this far! God I really love this comic waaay too much.
