Let’s begin with a disclaimer: I love Marshall Erikson and I only want good things for him.
You can’t discount Marshall Erikson and Lily Aldrin’s two decades of history with a simple handwave when it comes to the How I Met Your Mother-verse. They have one of the healthier, happier marriages currently airing on television. They’re best friends. There’s tons of love, support, and respect between them. Their fights run the full spectrum from hilarious to heartrending. They’re basically the sitcom equivalent of Eric and Tami Taylor.
However.
This isn’t about Marshall. This is about how there’s another fact that cannot be handwaved away, and that, my friends, is a little something I like to call The Canonical Bisexuality of Lily Aldrin.
Lily’s bisexuality is handled in a cool, subversive way that you wouldn’t normally expect from a gentle CBS Monday night sitcom. It’s never been explicitly articulated, but it’s more than just a long-running gag. Her husband is aware of it, unthreatened by it, and it’s generally unremarked upon by the rest of the characters. There’s been no Very Special Episode where Lily slaps on an LGTBQ button and the whole gang runs through all possible reactions to her news. It’s simply woven into the character’s DNA, as much a part of who she is as her red hair or her shopping addiction, and none of her friends – even hyper-insensitive Barney – comment on it, because to them, it’s un-extraordinary enough to be worth a discussion.
Granted, some of that can be attributed to the fact that Lily’s been married to a dude since the second season, and that affords her a certain amount of passable straight-girl cred. Lily met her husband on the first day of college, back when they were both pretty much fetuses. They fell hard for each other and never looked back, so dating girls – dating anyone besides Marshall – was never a thing she had a whole lot of time to explore. And yet the creative team behind HIMYM, in a marked contrast all those dramatic series writing in hints of homoeroticism to queerbait the fans without ever intending to follow through (yes, Sherlock. Yes, buddy, I’m looking right at you.), never shy away from Lily’s reality.
HIMYM understands that even if it’s being played for laughs, you cannot have a woman constantly discuss how much she wants to fuck her best friend without having that desire be an actual component of her sexual identity.
The first hints of Lily/Robin were planted all the way back in the late season one episode “Best Prom Ever.” Lily and Marshall are deep into wedding plans, and they’ve dragged the whole gang to a prom in order to check out a band they’re thinking of hiring for the reception. As the night goes on, Lily is plagued more and more by doubts about her impending marriage. None about Marshall, she’s quick to remind herself, but about the life she’s about to disappear into.
Finally, she makes her escape to the bathroom. And Robin Scherbatsky, eternal object of Ted’s desire and Lily’s newly minted best female friend, follows after her. She’s noticed that Lily’s been off all night. She’s noticed that every time the wedding plans come up, Lily becomes just a little bit more unhinged than is really reasonable.
Robin visibly screws up her courage and asks – the way that only your very best friend can ask a hard, terrible question when you both know the answer, an answer that she knows you still need to say out loud – “Are you having second thoughts?”
“Yeah,” Lily says.
So quiet, so reluctant, but this is Robin, and Robin is the one person in her life who won’t judge her for this. Robin, still unsure herself if she ever wants a husband, is the only person who’s going to understand.
There were things Lily wanted to do before she got married. Live in Europe! Be a painter! And, she adds, have a lesbian relationship. She’s hit that particular regret twice already, in this one episode.
Robin counsels her through it all, assures her it’s normal, promises her that some of those things are still on the table, and that she’s still ended up somewhere really good.
“And,” she adds, “as far as your lesbian experience…”
She leans in and gives Lily a sweet, brief kiss on the mouth.
You get the sense that this pretty chaste encounter has been played out in Lily’s fantasy file a lot over the next nine years. To wit:
“Robin Scherbatsky,” she says dreamily. “Star of some confusing dreams that remind me a woman’s sexuality is a moving target.”
To Barney, defensively: “I mean, she’s great. Sweet. I’m not going to pretend that I haven’t noticed her body.”
To her husband, when he says he was thinking about Robin as they’re about to start having sex: “Oh, I’ve done that a few times. Just lean into it. Let it fuel things.”
To their male friends, while drinking: “I dare you guys to dare us to make out. Wouldn’t that be hilarious? Wouldn’t that be sooooo stupid? If we made out?”
So stupid.
Lily’s life is no great tragedy: she simply took one of two paths, and the path that she took has been, for the most part, richly fulfilling for her. But there’s this whole other part of herself that she always wanted to explore, the road she glimpsed but never traveled, and I want that chance for her.
No matter how much she loves her husband, it’s always been clear that Lily wants that chance, too – and she wants it very specifically with Robin. Sexy, sharp, confident Robin Scherbatsky, a lady more than worthy of inducing a sexual identity crisis in straight women and gay men alike.
And while I love Lily’s marriage and will speak of it with respect, I feel in no way obligated to do the same for Robin’s absurd relationship with Barney. Look, Neil Patrick Harris is a human woven out of sunlight and clovers and leftover magic Pixar dust. We’re all in agreement on that, but Barney Stinson is a human bag of rotting trash. Occasionally, I’ll enjoy the delightfulness that NPH somehow manages to imbue him with, but mostly, I spend a lot of time wanting him to shut his garbage mouth.
We’re getting down to the roots here, and at the very core of Barney Stinson, no matter how much the writers have tried to flesh him out, there’s nothing but a man-child who is totally emotionally unprepared and ill-suited to marriage. Especially marriage to someone as balls-to-the-wall awesome as Robin.
He constantly talks about the desire to fuck other women, oftentimes directly in front of her. Articulated, detailed fantasies, not the idle comments that any reasonable significant other would let slide. He continually goes against Robin’s explicit requests, occasionally to pull off a large-scale romantic gesture, which doesn’t really make up for how he went against her explicit requests. His marriage proposal, which the audience was clearly supposed to see as one of those romantic gestures, was so sociopathically manipulative on every level that Robin’s acceptance came as an actual shock.
Honestly, Robin has to be genuinely concerned on the weekend of her wedding that her fiancée may have booked a grizzly bear to walk down the aisle.
All of those things combined with the years and years of blatant misogyny? NPH may be a national treasure, but I have no problem shoving Barney out of the picture, preferably off a cliff, washing my hands of the whole mess, and gently swiveling Robin in Lily’s direction.
Before Lily, Robin had never had a girl for a friend before. She’d never opened up to anyone else, never trusted another person with the full depth of her rages or the extent of her sorrows. She’d always been reluctant to articulate her real feelings on anything, but from the moment they met, Robin was somehow always able to talk to her. Even when it makes her uncomfortable to do it, even when it’s hard, she loves Lily enough to get there in the end.
When Lily became incredibly preoccupied with wanting a baby, Robin started pulling away from their friendship gradually. She didn’t tell Lily why, hoping she could slip out of Lily’s life unnoticed, and finally the two of them have a brutal blow-up. There were fair points on both sides: Lily was annoyingly obsessed with impending pregnancy, Robin was uninterested to the point of rudeness, and finally, they declared that they were in two different places in their lives and might as well call it quits on their friendship.
Robin didn’t know how to fight for it. She’s too good at pushing aside her feelings, and she couldn’t figure out how to tell her best friend that she loves her and it’s terrifying to think that when the baby comes, Lily could forget all about her.
But Lily didn’t let her get away with that. How do you survive the transition when one of you wants desperately to become a mother and the other is totally uninterested in children? It’s hard, it’s messy, and watching them fight there way through it, well, there was nothing to call that but absolute love.
Lily’s one of the few people in Robin’s life who won’t let her off the hook, who reels her back to earth every time her emotional barricades have sent her spiraling out, away from the people who love her. Lily brings her back every time, and every time, Robin lets her do it.
Isn’t falling in love with your best friend the dream? Somebody who’s always had your back, who always takes up for you in arguments with your significant other, who helps you move and puts up with your quirks and loves you for being an emotionally closed off mess because they’re the only person who can coax the feelings out of you when it’s time to spill?
It’s been years and years of ping-ponging back and forth between Barney and Ted, Ted and Barney. Lily’s just about the only person in Robin’s life who’s never put any demands on her. Robin is the best, and therefore I want her coupled up with the best. For Robin, that’s Lily. That’s her best friend, who loves her like crazy exactly as she is, who’s supported her through crappy jobs and crappier boyfriends, and who’s already wildly, insanely attracted to her.
I also want to believe in a utopian society where, if Lily told Marshall she and Robin had fallen madly in love, Marshall would be totally at peace with it and give them both his blessing.
He’s a perfectly nice dude. Maybe he’d surprise us all.
Tags: canonical bisexuality, everyone loves cobie smulders, femslash friday, making people lesbians by argument, recurring series about lesbians, remember when cobie was on the l word
Related Posts
As anyone who has ever read or written fanfiction can tell you: threesomes solve everything.
*nods* Healthy polyamory is a much happier alternative to unresolved love triangles, regardless of their relative level of angst.
Why is “Cobie Smulders feet” a top suggested search on Google? I’m scared to find out.
Almost any actresses name will come up paired with “feet” on the top suggested searches. Apparently foot fetishists are powerfully influential.
That is the most fascinating thing I’ve learned this week.
NEVER THE LOVE TRIANGLE, ALWAYS THE THREESOME.
(also yes Barney is the absolute worst)
The tricycle.
Yes, a nice happy triad with Lilly in the center. I think Marshall would go for it.
>> I also want to believe in a utopian society where, if Lily told Marshall she and Robin had fallen madly in love, Marshall would be totally at peace with it and give them both his blessing.
I like everything about this article except this last line. A man being cool with his partner having a girlfriend isn’t “utopian” or “nice” – either you’re OK with open or poly relationships or you’re not. But it’s not so much about society or being nice. Wanting to be in a monogamous relationship isn’t not-nice or dystopian!
I didn’t get the sense that it was a diss on monogamy so much as a comment that if she left hom for another woman, while he would be sad, he would respect her sexuality and wouldn’t lash out or take it as an affront to his manhood.
Orrrrr she’s talking about her own personal mind utopia which would allow her to keep the positives of Lily and Marshall’s relationship together as well as getting to enjoy the wonder of what Lily and Robin would be together
This was exactly what I meant, thank you for the clarification!
I dislike Robin/Barney only slightly less than I dislike Robin/Ted.
But that’s really the show’s fault, because about the 6th season they forgot the character traits they spent years building up.
I would be happy for Ted to die alone like he keeps being melodramatic about if it wouldn’t leave so many threads untied. The man has dated a huge number of incredible women, lived in beautiful apartments, and has a fulfilling job, and all he can do is whine and shoot himself in the foot. Robin far outshines him. Robin far outshines everyone.
I wish they had never brought Victoria back. WHHHHHY, SHOW, WHYYYY
When I watched the first episode I got to the end as was like: “but, wait, I thought this was about how he met his wife, what?” and went on-line and realized that actually he NEVER meets the mother and I felt really cheated. But kept watching anyway. I haven’t watched in years and I still want to know who the damn mother is.
We know now. The show told us. Go watch!
To be fair, Ted is the worst. If Barney is a caricature of misogyny, Ted is the caricature of the Nice Guy ™.
I’m not sure if I agree with that. My take on the Nice Guy is the guy who bitches about being friendzoned and thinks he’s entitled to your sex or your affection regardless of your feelings on the matter. I didn’t get that impression from Ted – I just got the impression of a neurotic guy who can’t be satisfied by the women he dates. That doesn’t quite feel Nice Guy to me.
Don’t get me wrong, I like him I think least on the series.
Oh, sure, I can see that. Mostly, I get the Nice Guy vibes from him because he constantly thinks he deserves more and better than his already pretty cool life, just because the universe owes him. (I’ve thought about Ted for too long. We hates him.)
I feel like I’m arguing the wrong side of things since I actively dislike Ted but… is it wrong to think you deserve more or better? If it was a woman who was dating a series of men (assuming a heterosexual woman, naturally) and she just wasn’t satisfied, would we be saying she thinks the universe owes her?
I still don’t like Ted, I swear!
Yeah, I’d probably still find her annoying and cloying if she were to be like, “I’ve had all these great men and jobs and life, but I still believe I deserve more!” Maybe Ted isn’t the Nice Guy caricature, but I can’t think of a different way to put it. Be my guest!
Hmmm… I may have to mull this one over.
CASE IN POINT: Carrie Bradshaw!
Is there anyone on the planet who could still tolerate her after she dumped Aiden? You know, the steady, loving, attractive guy who got her a new computer when her laptop crashed and who sanded the floors in her apartment?
When she dumped him – for BIG, who is a twat – because she “didn’t like him doing things for her(wtf?)”, I stopped caring about her entirely.
AMEN. Carrie drove me crazy, especially because she never realized just what an entitled bitch she really was. She always made my slap-upside-the-head hand twitch.
His interactions with Robin throughout the series (particularly the first several seasons) are at minimum Nice Guy-esque.
OH my god, yes. Frigging Ted. At least Barney would be an entertaining friend, if a shitty one. Ted would just be your friend who is 100% problems.
The loveliness of their friendship aside, Lily’s specific fixation on Robin makes me a little uneasy. I wish Lily would mention crushes on other women more often. True, the way her bisexuality has been dealt with has been masterful, but if a guy repeatedly mentioned wanting to fuck his female friend who did not swing that way, his behaviour would not be ok.
You know, one of the things I ultimately excised from this essay was the 100th episode, when Lily is oogling the sexy blonde female bartender. She and Marshall have a really cute fight about it where he asks if Lily thinks that girl is hotter than him and Lily blurts “YES…uh, I mean, well, it’s like comparing apples and oranges, she’s…younger than you?” If that helps at all!
That does help, thanks for the reminder!
There’s also an episode where Marshall goes to the strip club and the stripper is Lily’s doppelganger. Lily is THRILLED and gives her ALL THE MONEY. I think she also gives other lady strippers money too?
Also, sometimes this happens IRL. Sometimes you’re a bi lady who is really interested in your lady friend and it will never happen but it doesn’t mean that you stop and it also doesn’t mean that you are being creepy on her.
Also, Robin never says she is uncomfortable? Does she? I am not a stalwart viewer of this show.
The only resolution to the wedding I will accept at this point is that Robin is marrying Barney as part of a long con to humiliate and degrade him to the degree that he has humiliated and degraded hundreds of other women. In the season finale it is revealed that she has been carefully plotting this whole scenario with a Playbook of her own. She dramatically leaves Barney at the altar, rollerblading away as the church burns around her and she shouts “THIS IS FOR WOMANKIND, ASSHOLE.”
This is the series finale I didn’t know I’d always been dreaming of.
I love this show, and I love this article.
I keep on conflating NPH (who is a national treasure and whose Instagram Margarita adventure made my whole week better) with Barney, and it makes me like Barney more than I should. He’s amusing as fuck, but as a live person I would want to slap him all the freaking time, and I love Lily for being the only one who sometimes just stands up and says, “That’s enough of you, I’m removing myself from this situation.” (Even if those parts were written in to account for her leave time for her child.)
In short, I am on board with a happy, comfortable threesome of Lily, Marshall and Robin.
It is SO DIFFICULT to marry my hatred of Barney and my love of NPH. I feel like that really speaks to what an amazingly talented actor he is, that he makes it incredibly hard to hate this 100% hateable human garbage bag.
Oh, yes! I think if the actor who plays Ted was actually the actor playing Barney, I might have lit my Kindle Fire ON FIRE in anger at the character.
Which is a shame, because being able to bring a small TV screen with me into the kitchen while I do dishes is delightful.
“You know that I’ve always reminded myself of Robin Scherbatsky.” – me
never forget that cobie smulders was on the l word
I’d never have taken you for a Canucks fan.
Threesome! Or even some kind of open relationship thing where they eventually all get a place in Brooklyn and Robin gets her five dogs back.
(This would make me especially happy because it wouldn’t be two girls there just for the statisfaction of the guy, it would be a guy and a girl there for another girl, which somehow works out better in my head.)
And Ted and Barney — they can stay at the bar and play the have you met Ted game together. Seriously, I could care less about them and their love lives, NPH’s moments of adorableness despite Barney’s … everything … not-with-standing. They couldn’t get away with most of the shit they pull with Barney if they had any other actor playing him. It’s like it’s this whole meta “but he’s NPH so it’s ok!” thing with him that worked for about five seconds for me and then got annoying fast.
Side note: Ted whining and whining and manipulating until Robin gave up her dogs was the moment that I decided not only that I disliked him, but that I was actively rooting for him to be unhappy.
I also enthusiastically endorse the rest of your comment.
THAT WAS SOCIOPATHIC
Right? A dog is not the same thing as a lamp you forgot to throw out.
I KNOW RIGHT?
I mean, five dogs, Brooklyn apartment, probably spaces issues, which makes me feel bad for the dogs, BUT SERIOUSLY, NO, TED IS THE WORST.
AND, right, it does not speak well of Robin that she would give away all her dogs for some loser attached to a dick, either.
five dogs in a one-room apartment with her job was nuts tho
I AGREE. That bothered me to no end. It would be one thing if she gave them away because she’d ALREADY been thinking about it because the apartment is small and she travels a lot and blah blah blah, so this was the catalyst, but to have that be the REASON? No. Just… NO.
I am honestly a little surprised he didn’t expect Stella to give up her CHILD. Although he did expect Stella and Lucy to leave their house, school, and all other aspects of their life besides him, so.
Even without the NPH charisma Ted, for me, has been so so so so much worse than Barney. He’s like a Nice Guy tm. The whole show has been about years of him putting women he barely knows onto a pedestal only so he can knock them down when they dont match up to all of the personality quirks on his manic pixie dreamgirl list.
This also frustrates me because in the aforementioned season 6, Robin wants a dog and Ted won’t let her have one because she’s “irresponsible.” ????? SHE USED TO HAVE FIVE DOGS UNTIL YOU MADE HER GET RID OF THEM, YOU DICKWAD.
Give up her DOGS! That’s like saying, “kill your children”.
My roommate has been binge watching this show and when she got to this episode, she was FURIOUS. Every time she watches a subsequent episode, she grumbles and mutters and asks me when Robin is going to sack up and go get her dogs back.
ALSO, WILLOW IS BI.
*cough*
If HIMYM was secretly making Lily bi because they wanted to critique how Willow’s sexuality was handled on BtVS I would be 100% behind that. *conspiracy theory hands* (Which are sort of like jazz hands, but better.)
*tangent time!*
I was okay with Willow identifying herself as gay. there are probably a whole lot of lesbians who had a high school boyfriend. She never shows interest in any men after Oz, but does show interest in several women after Tara.
She was once into boys, then grew out of it, into a self-identified lesbian. There are many things about Willow’s storylines that are problematic and awful, her choosing to identify as gay rather than bi is not one of them.
I MISS ROBIN’S DOGS SO MUCH. As well as Robin’s career, Robin’s family and history being played for things other than jokes, Robin’s interests outside wrangling her Barney problems……
That ENTIRE EPISODE where she gave the dogs away was so freakishly out of character of Robin to me. The episodes up to that point never showed her giving even half of a crap about Ted’s exes (aside from Victoria, but since Ted was clearly waffling between Robin and Victoria at the time that makes at least a little bit of sense) and then suddenly there’s a full episode devoted to how insanely jealous Robin is? What? WHAT?
I’ve never seen HIMYM, but can I read and enjoy this pretending that Willow transmogrified herself into this Lily person, retaining only her sexuality and her beautiful face and body, in order to live out her life as a normal woman in a world free of the traumas of everpresent supernatural evil?
Alyson Hannigan inspired some of my earliest queer feelings before the Willow/Tara storyline on Buffy had even happened so watching that play out was like a fanfic come true and ok maybe I should just watch HIMYM already. Femslash Friday keeps making me really really want to watch shows I always thought I would find totally uninteresting (see also: the adventure time article), stoppp ittt alreadyyy
You can!
When Lilly and Marshall were having a baby and talking about names, they had Alyson Hannigan say something like, “Oh, I like ‘Tara’ if it’s a girl” with her beautiful Alyson Hannigan warmth and just the tiniest hint of a quiver in her voice. I appreciate that gift to Buffy fans very much, HIMYM writers.
If it helps (or… not) the whole series minus the current season is on Netflix streaming right now.
Watch all the way up to the current season, then save yourself the rage-fits and just read recaps until the last episode. That’s what I’m doing.
Oh, Alyson Hannigan. It’s nice to know you’re causing the feels even now.
AUGH HIMYM AUGHHHH. Robin is the BEST and I am so, so frustrated by Ted and Barney and why she is written as being interested in them and it makes my marbles rattle around a little too much. (Caveat: I have not seen an episode in…a year and a half? It’s okay, there are a million seasons and they’re all the same: Ted dating someone, being weird and fucking it up, whining; Barney being gross re: women.) I like Robin SO MUCH and I really appreciate how she’s not written as wanting the stereotypical things women want (i.e. debating getting married generally, kids/no kids, etc.). There as an Ask Polly…sometime recently-ish? in which Polly/Heather was talking about not pretending to be someone you’re not and how she had to embrace her inner anchovy vs. pretending to be a Little Debbie cupcake. I think Robin is an anchovy (she is abrasive! and mean! and determined! and not sweet! etc.), and I think that it’s just great that there’s actual an anchovy-woman on tv. (Read that last part out of context for giggles.)
I think Marshall and Lily are a great couple, and I think the answer is a poly relationship, and then they move ANYWHERE ELSE and stop hanging out with Ted and Barney. (Although I do agree that it’s a little…limiting/weird that Lily’s only lady-fantasy is about Robin…)
By “recently-ish” apparently I meant August: http://www.theawl.com/2013/08/ask-polly-i-feel-bi…
To the Robin specificity I say two things:
1) Robin is basically the only woman in Lily’s life, so it sort of makes sense that she’s the only woman Lily makes comments about.
2) In one episode where they flashback to how Lily and Marshal met, when Lily is going around knocking on dorm doors, there is a brief, beautiful moment where Lily nearly abandons pursuing Marshal in favor of pursuing a lesbian. It would have been the same meet-cute! She could have followed the same path as she did with Marshal, but with a woman!
Fair enough, that makes sense. I totally forgot about that flashback…as mentioned, it’s been a while since I’ve seen the show.
eh it’s cool. I definitely couldn’t tell you about every single thing that’s happened on that show. That one particular scene just stuck with me for obvious ship related reasons.
Well, except that Robin works (or did, for most of the show) at an elementary school, which means that the majority of her coworkers are likely women. (And if the elementary schools I know are typical, a lot of those women are young & fairly cute.) We don’t ever see them, but they’re there.
“Barney Stinson is a human bag of rotting trash.”
I love you. I was all prepared to hate this article, as I had a horrible break up with HIMYM after Barney’s manipu-proposal and haven’t watched an episode since…but that one single line was enough to get me on your side! Lily/Robin forever! (With Marshall as occasional guest star!)
This show is VERY problematic, but Lily Aldrin is one of the best female characters on TV today.
This doesn’t feel like a slash article, so much as a straight up description of what is obviously true and right.
(Also now I want to go watch Barney’s proposal. I gave up on the show a while ago.)
Watch the proposal and you will want to LIGHT HIS WHOLE ENTIRE HEAD ON FIRE. The proposal is an explanation of all the ways he’s been subtly manipulating her for the whole entire season leading up to that moment. She should have shoved him off the roof.
Here is the link for your non-enjoyment. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXSdLMGt-7U
I'd never have taken you for a Canucks fan.
Well, I couldn’t get past the third or fourth episode a while back and did not see why everyone I knew was sooooo into this show. Perhaps I need to revisit this. If for nothing than to see this friendship between two gorgeous ladies flourish.
I don’t want to be a dick, but I am a dick, so: how do y’all maintain the “NPH is such a nice guy yay” thing next to the him once having a birthday cake shaped like the rotting corpse of Amy Winehouse thing?
Also this show makes me so melancholic because it occasionally has glimmers of that really excellent, true-to-life humour that Friends never really had, but then the rest of it is just this boring unquestioned misogyny and fat hatred and transphobia and what-have-you… It’s like they write one excellent scene then get sleepy and have to dash off the rest before they go have a sandwich and a nap.
As long as we’re slashing CBS shows, how about Max/Caroline from Two Broke Girls? I love me some Kat Dennings!
How about Kat Dennings / a better show
How about Kat Dennings / a better show
That ENTIRE EPISODE where she gave the dogs away was so freakishly out of character of Robin to me. The episodes up to that point never showed her giving even half of a crap about Ted's exes (aside from Victoria, but since Ted was clearly waffling between Robin and Victoria at the time that makes at least a little bit of sense) and then suddenly there's a full episode devoted to how insanely jealous Robin is? What? WHAT?
THIS: “His marriage proposal, which the audience was clearly supposed to see as one of those romantic gestures, was so sociopathically manipulative on every level that Robin’s acceptance came as an actual shock.”
I watched this episode with my family, and when I gagged and fumed and huffed at how ridiculously OFFENSIVE that proposal (AND ROBIN’S ACCEPTING IT) was, my parents and brother were all like, “Wow you really hate romance and weddings and people being happy,” and I got dismissed as having an overreaction. And the comments on the AV Club review, where I normally find that people have reasonable reactions to things, were all, “Wow, I cried at that so sweet!” WTF?!?!? Thank you for validating my feelings, finally.
Ugh, my pleasure. Especially because I LOVE romance! And weddings! And people being happy! I sit through a lot of shitty romantic comedies because I love the part at the end where people go rushing into each other’s arms while a Coldplay song swells in the background!
THIS WAS THE OPPOSITE OF A COLDPLAY-SCORED MONTAGE.
(A-also I am not-so-secretly a huge Ted fan and think he is a really decent person and it broke my heart to think about him alone at his party, genuinely loving Robin and really wanting what is best for her more than he wants what is best for himself and knowing that she is ACCEPTING THIS SOCIOPATH’S PROPOSAL.)