SUITS 1.01

"Shave."

thinking about that post of people assuming ao3 has an algorithm and also about how bonkers persistent the view is that ao3 is social media lite. like with startling regularity I get comments saying something along the lines of "it's probably weird to comment on a fic this old--" no it isn't!!!! this is an archive I am literally just assuming you searched for a selection of specific tags or sorted by kudos or looked back on my pseud or any other number of completely normal ways to use an archive site ?? kill the tiktok ghost in your brain and comment on old stuff it's NOT weird

the world is not scary plus im strong as hell

“how did you get into writing” girl nobody gets into writing. writing shows up one day at your door and gets into you

#personal space? they don't know her

girl help they are making me do my job at work

i'd say there's about a 95% chance harvey didn't even know who rachel was before mike started becoming friendly with her. in all likelihood, he'd had some encounters with her due to the nature of their jobs, but it's not as though she's the only paralegal at the firm; the same way he couldn't name a single associate other than mike, i suspect he identified her by her function as opposed to her name or personality or any such thing. hell, he may even have outsourced all his potential interactions with her to donna; "get one of the paralegals to take care of this for me," as it were. he might not even have been able to pick her out of a lineup.

that is, it's pretty much required that they dislike each other because their entire relationship hinges on their respective relationships with mike. yeah, obviously it's possible for two people to come to know each other by virtue of a third party and become friends in their own right, but harvey and rachel are both such territorial and self-centered personalities, they both consider mike to be their most important person and want (need) him to reciprocate that feeling.

one of the problems with this is that none of them are too good at compartmentalizing. rachel doesn't just want to be mike's girlfriend; she wants to be his work confidant as well. she doesn't just want to be the person he can rely on the most, she wants to be the only person he relies on, for everything. if he needs help from someone else, he has to have her permission first to seek it out. harvey doesn't just want to be mike's boss; he wants to be (and arguably is) mike's best friend. of course a person can and should still have other friends while in a romantic relationship, but because mike and harvey have such a close relationship outside of work, and because of the way rachel tries to insert herself into every single aspect of mike's life, she and harvey end up secondhand butting heads a lot of the time, effectively forcing mike to choose one of them over the other and establishing basically a scoreboard between the two of them.

it also doesn't help that while they both claim to have mike's best interests at heart at all times and in all things, they have opposite ways of going about trying to help him. rachel is very upfront and in mike's face with her opinions, whereas harvey very much prefers to go behind mike's back and try to help him without his necessarily knowing about it. interesting that they're both forcing themselves on him, in a way; they both think they know better than him what's best for him and get angry and/or hurt if he disagrees, but since they do it so differently, they never clash directly, only after their efforts are already underway and mike has to pick a side.

it's a bit of tragic irony that every time there's some strife between harvey and rachel, the loser is going to be...mike.

No because Harvey and Rachel's relationship on the show is honestly so... interesting? The weird tension and the condecending, passive aggressive quips? Because on one hand you have Rachel constantly fighting with Mike over him choosing and valuing Harvey's opinions over hers (rightfully so, tbh. I understand where she's coming from) like prison and leaving the firm for example. And on the other hand, you have Harvey who never seemed to like Rachel especially since they were together (ex. Harvey getting mad at Mike for telling her "their secret"). Like both of them showing up at the apartment right after Mike went to prison and both of them saying they miss him? I believe there's a good amount of evidence to confirm my suspicions that they didn't like each other because of what each of them meant individually to Mike.

SUITS 2.10 | HIGH NOON

Happy 4/20! 🍃💨

what's a tumblr influencer? what am i influencing? my mental illness? 😭

just abruptly remembered that one of my friends had the absolute best college job, which I am still envious of. If it paid more I would quit lawyering right this minute and go get this job; it didn't pay enough to live on, but the temptation remains.

She was on call 24/7 as an operator for the Grammar Hotline.

Which is, yes, a phone line that you could call at any hour of the day or night to have your emergency grammar questions answered.

Literally none of her calls were boring. It was like 80% writers who had worked their way into a grammatical corner and 20% people having the pettiest arguments who needed an arbiter to decide who was right, and 100% of the time she got to be the platonic ideal of a stuffy librarian. Best job ever.