Look as quick as I am willing to be to excuse this movie as an au, I kinda feel like the Stydia breakup feels like not nearly as out of character as I imagined it would be?? Like tbh I think Stiles getting hurt would be the only reason Lydia would ever leave him and as much as I think he would want to fight for her, I also think that he respects her enough to give her space (especially if he doesnāt know which I think is absolutely the case)
TOTALLY AGREE WITH YOU HERE. To be clear, this movie is trash and I will not be condoning its existence. With that in mind... let's talk about Lydia, shall we?
Lydia Grace Martin has spent her entire life being the one who got left instead of the one who leaves. Over the course of her life, she has watched people leave whether they wanted to or not. People being gone from her life has become familiar to her, to the point where she clearly became comfortable being lonely in s4 and s5. She watched Scott grieve Allison and probably knows, very intimately, what it was like for him to lose the person he considers to be the love of his life.
Who is the love of Lydia's life? Stiles. The girl who was constantly getting left finally found someone who wouldn't leave her, who would commit to her and stay by her side for better or worse, and when she starts having these dreams, at first they feel like nightmares. One can assume that they're years into their relationship; her fear of him leaving is gone, they're settled and everything is fine. And then these dreams start coming and they won't leave her alone, and she starts to get this itch in the back of her brain that tells her it's a premonition, and at first it doesn't even occur to her to leave because Lydia Martin does not leave. She is the one who gets left, not the one that leaves.
But the fear mounts, and it's like she's living life half frozen. She refuses to get into cars with Stiles, she feels shattered every time she wakes up from the dream, she thinks about what she can do to protect him, all that she would sacrifice, what she could do to ensure that he would be saved. And that's when she realizes that Stiles' safety, his existence, is more important than her happiness.
She knows him well enough now to know that he will never be happy without her, but he will be okay eventually. He'll be fine. He'll exist. If she leaves him, it will be the ultimate commitment to him, the ultimate act of love, because she is choosing his life over her own happiness. And Lydia has never thought of leaving being an act of love before, but as she talks herself into it, she thinks of Stiles with gray hair and wrinkles and suddenly being numb for the rest of her life feels like the best solution.
So because she loves him, she tells him that she doesn't love him anymore, and they both know she's lying but she packs up and leaves regardless. Because she loves him so, so much, she does what everyone in her life has always done to her and goes. It's because she loves him (enough to rip a hole in the fabric of space and time) that she has walk around every day knowing that her person is out there, that she's one phone call away from having him back in her life. But it's because she loves him so much that she never, ever dials.
