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rollercoasterwords · 2 years

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cause then it’s like marlene was living all “well at least i don’t have to be there when the loml dies 🤷‍♀️”

and then you slide in with your laptop, notebook and sadism like “HA everyone point and laugh at the naive dying girl with a saviour complex”

mmm yeah that's true 🤭

but the thing about marlene in thtf is like. she's not necessarily thinking "i won't have to be there when the loml dies" bc she just. isn't actually thinking abt what will happen after she dies. like.

(ok this got long + essentially just turned into a deep-dive into marlene's psyche that contains mild spoilers for anyone who hasn't made it through the hogwarts years of thtf so i'm adding a cut)

so marlene knows, theoretically, that she's going to die relatively young. like she knows that she will likely not live to old age. but she very much just has not like...processed that or come to terms with it emotionally in any way, because where we are rn in the fic she's literally only 20. like. even though she knows, in theory, that dorcas will outlive her, she still thinks she has essentially a whole 'nother life to live, bc she thinks "hey, at least i'll probably make it to forty."

and so the cavalier attitude that marlene sometimes seems to have towards death is very much a front, bc the truth is that she's terrified of dying. and we see her forced to confront that in this scene from ch 44:

she cannot mentally or emotionally process it. she focuses so, so much on trying to do something for the "greater good" and fixates on this idea of being a hero because she is clinging to life, clinging to the idea that if her life just means enough then some part of her will "live on" after her death, the way all great heroes supposedly do. because she can't accept the idea that life just....ends, and hers will end sooner than most.

and because marlene has this mental block when it comes to her own death, we see her acting more recklessly than others, because she's telling herself, "fuck it, i'm gonna die anyway and i'd rather my life mean something before i go," but she hasn't actually let herself process the weight of what death truly means to her. death always has to be something that's going to happen later, in some nebulous future. marlene can't handle it any other way.

"but rae," u might say, "what about this scene in ch 40?"

to which i say ah yes, i can see why that would lead u to believe that marlene ponders the fact that her girlfriend will outlive her. but the thing is...even in this conversation, marlene isn't really thinking about death as like...death. she's asking dorcas these questions about marriage and children and futures the way you might ask a partner that u know ur going to break up with. seeing frank and alice get engaged made marlene ponder the subject of marriage and engagement in the abstract, and made her wonder if that's something dorcas might ever want someday. she doesn't really let herself consider those things as options in her own life, which is why she gets flustered when dorcas turns the question around on her--suddenly, marlene has to confront the thought of her own death again, and she retreats into this shell of acting like it doesn't matter

then, directly after, we see dorcas giving back the same energy, and marlene freaks out:

again, she refuses to actually confront the possibility of death--dorcas pointing out that they could both die anytime deeply, deeply upsets marlene, and she immediately demands reassurance and essentially tells dorcas to take it back.

honestly this whole scene in ch 40 is kind of like. the thesis of marlene and dorcas's relationship in this fic. dorcas views death in a much different light because of her own history with the subject, and her and marlene's different outlooks on life + death is one of the biggest issues in their relationship. it underlies many of their arguments and is this running thread of tension in the ways they both approach and handle the war. fun!

#the hand that feeds #thtf #spoilers #i'm sure u were not expecting an essay response #but at this point i've just given into the impulse to ramble abt literally whatever's on my mind #at any given moment #ask

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