i’m always gonna be one of the first to talk about how mike and el’s relationship is genuinely horrific but god will have to strike me down before i ever believe that mike doesn’t see el as a person and that he doesn’t love her. he doesn’t know much about her but he still sees her as a human being. he was the first person to see her as a human being. benny was her first experience with the real world, but he didn’t even know her name. he fed and sheltered her, but there was no real connection that solidified el’s humanity

viewing her as a superhero isn’t meant to deny her status as a human being but to show that mike’s natural tendency to put the people he cares about on pedestals is something that is completely counterintuitive to what el needs in order to progress as a person. that doesn’t mean mike doesn’t see her as a person. he sees her as special and due to the circumstance of their relationship he doesn’t have anything else to view her as, but that doesn’t disregard that he was the first person to ever acknowledge her as a person with traits of strength and loyalty. he was the first person to recognize her as special because he was the first person to recognize her as human, as more than a kid who can be trained to fight and search. he saw the rare traits of kindness and determination in el and her abilities, how she used them to protect people, and realized she was special. a superhero. their potential as friends was evident in s1 before mike felt like viewing el as special had to mean he liked her because everyone told him to, even if he didn’t really understand why.

there is a lot of nuance in their relationship but mike viewing el as a human being and caring about her is undeniable. they are fundamentally different people who love in different ways and need different types of support that the other person cannot give. they’re both faced with immense societal pressures to conform (el’s through media like the romance movies and mike’s through his friends/family) and it’s led to a fear of communicating and some underlying resentment, which is an inevitable part of being forced to do something you don’t want to, but at the very core of their relationship is familial and protective love. they are bonded by their trauma and they also cared about each other, so even if they can’t function well together right now because they haven’t built a genuine relationship, they’re never gonna be able to stop caring and wanting to keep each other safe