i am once again thinking about the ending of final resting place and how it really sold me on juno as a character and the series as a whole and its ability to tackle complex ideas.... like "makes quips about hating their life" and "has big self-sacrificing moment" are both pretty par for the course when it comes to archetypally "brooding" protagonists with tragic pasts but juno walking out felt so novel to me???
i just feel like it represents an aspect of mental illness and trauma that often goes unrepresented in media, which is that they have a tendency to make you act in ways that are irrational or difficult to understand from an outside pov—something that's exemplified by how angry and confused some first-time listeners get when that scene happens, asking how/why juno could do such a thing... it's relatively easy to understand a character Being Sad, it's harder to understand them intentionally denying themself good things for seemingly no reason.
and you can rationalize his decision in retrospect, say juno wouldn't have fared well if he HAD left with nureyev so he made the right choice, and that might be true (hell i wrote a whole fic about it) but i don't believe that's what juno was thinking in that moment.
and the funny thing is.... we never really do learn what he was thinking then?? his monologue at the end of the episode and his snippets of dialogue to dream!nureyev and hanataba!ben etc give some clues, but not a full picture. which, again, i kind of love. it'd be very easy to have a big reveal moment where juno gives a concrete explanation—that it's because he was certain nureyev would get tired of him, because he thought he would hurt nureyev or wasn't good enough for him, because he couldn't leave rita behind, etc....
all of those things are probably part of it, but i like that they're not outright said, bc tbh i think the important thing about juno's decision then is that it WASN'T rational. deciding not to immediately abandon everything he knows and leave for the stars might have ultimately been a good decision, but walking out on the man he loves in the middle of the night without so much as a note objectively was not a rational thing to do. it was fueled by trauma and mental illness and the feelings those things create can't always be rationalized!
and idk i just felt like it was a very honest portrayal of that and made me really believe in juno as a complex and thoughtful depiction of a traumatized/mentally ill person. no real point to this post i just still love final resting place so much and recently realized that this is one of the main reasons why.
