Hear me out. Brad and Janet, and Tom and Shiv— two failmarriages who may have more in common than you’d think:
inversion / parody of gender roles hetero romance
they are trying SOOOOOOO hard to be a normal married couple and it is just Not Working Out
very very hot sex symbol girlboss woman obsessed with another more powerful guy (Logan, Frank) and extremely unreliable but sometimes present sense of self-awareness and craves independence
dorky asshole malewife bottom trying desperately not to be a malewife as hard as he can for the entire media but yet the malewife genes overcome his efforts valiantly again and again and aGAIN
they cheat on each other a bunch of times (but they don't mean it guyssss 😩)
YES. they cheat on each other. BUT it's made known to the audience that they feel really bad abt it Imao
a premature WEIRD proposal done in a close-proximity-to-death situation yet they’re still like “okay 😊!” like would you rather I propose to you in the hospital while your dad is in intensive care from his brain hemorrhage OR in a graveyard after another person’s wedding while a funeral goes on right next to us featuring a suspiciously child-sized casket? romance central am I right
dedicated loving relationship struggling to survive in a crazy environment that is directly corrosive to dedicated loving relationships
horrible communication where the lack of communication in their marriage is kind of essential to the plot in and of itself
a threesome kinda happens in canon (more an orgy. this is abt rhps obviously) vs they almost had a threesome and then didnt... basically a threesome could've fixed all of them
"yes I cheated on you. Yes I still love you and would protect you as best I can in a traumatizing situation where a key extremely complex and kinda shitty person we both kinda love dies in front of us. We exist."
protection motif is a huge thing for both of them and in the end it's pretty clear that delusion is really what's actually been protecting them
most importantly: getting into marriage and being like "wow bitch!!! you are not who I thought you were"
they both end up in this really subjective completely destroyed irrevocably changed and entirely mortifyingly known position in their relationship like "who knows if we even love each other anymore"
"lol we both betrayed the other's trust beyond repair. does the love matter anymore lol Imao"
way too many people rightfully think there's no way to work their issues out but I am so delusional I don't give a shit <3
married couple that gets pitted against each other and have all these reasons to hate each other but you can tell that all of the love can’t be gone and like the evolution somehow emphasizes the love that was there before = PEAK ROMANCE. TO ME
