statsgirl

Willa's purse looks like a feather dusters. Or a small ostrich. But I like it more than the suit, which looks kind of weird. I like the jacket/cape thingy Emily had on in the picture with JB more than just the dress itself. The men have it easy. All they have to do is show up not looking like they just rolled out of bed and grabbed the first thing they found on the floor. David could have found something better than running shoes though, but point for having them in black and white. Speaking of which, did they get together beforehand and decide they're all going in black and white so we know who is on which show? Willa's in a greeny grey but the purse is black.

Also, Sara was a popular character and having her on the spin-off gives people who aren't there because of comics a reason to watch the show. Ray hasn't been that much of a draw yet, Robbie Amell is mostly eyecandy, and Wentworth Miller's character (if I can even remember his name) isn't that good to watch the spin-off for. With Grant Gustin, Barry was well-liked and you wanted to tune in to see what's going to happen with him. I don't get that vibe for Ray or Ronnie.

In terms of who the character is on the show, it would be appropriate for the on-screen characters to mourn her. Even Felicity mourned when Moira died. The audience, however, is another question. It was a shock and a sadness when Sara died, and the ratings and number of viewers went down for the next two weeks as the audience mourned. I don't think that would be the same for Laurel, and LPing Laurel wouldn't meet with universal joy. I knew there was a reason I liked Malcolm. Those are good ideas about Ra's and the Lazarus Pit, SleepDeprived. It feels like this season, they've wasted both the LP and Ra's as a villain.

You know she's never going to not say anything and to stay in the background. And even if she did, her fans would be deluging MG with hate mail about it. I just want her to go to the new show. Oliver, Diggle Felicity and Roy work with a certain dynamic. If Laurel stays on Arrow, she's going to completely change the tone of it, as she has this season. There's now way they can put Baby in the corner. Without doubt, he will love writing Laurel a hero and Team Arrow doing anything they can to get her back. I really think it would be shooting themselves in the foot though. Laurel is still a divisive character (one of the male reviewers last week referred to her as the most hated character on Arrow), and with a part of the audience already not liking this season, it would be a mistake of Sleepy Hollow proportions to LP her so she can come back when they didn't Sara. And don't forget, Sara has to come back for the spin-off and LPing her would be the easiest.

It's a popularity thing though. And as we've just found out to our sorrow, the OUaT fandom is a lot bigger than the Arrow one. And Regina fans can be very fanatical.

I think Roy fit into Team Arrow pretty seamlessly in the early episodes this season. It's moving beyond him that's the problem. Even when Sara was there last season, it was imbalanced. Any chance MG will leave the Team at four? Yeah, I know.... comics.

So it probably will be 60% Flash, 20% the new spin-off, and maybe 20% Arrow.

Maybe it's my European background but I don't have a problem with the age difference. My mother once told me that she didn't seriously consider my father as a partner because he was only four years older than she was and therefore too young. I married a man 13 years older than me, and my friend had one of those amazing True Love marriages for 40 years with a man 17 years older than she was, until he died last year. There's lots of fMRI data to show that female brains mature earlier. Jungians are willing to do analysis on women 5 or 10 years before they consider a man ready. Or as Frank Capra said "Women mature earlier. And prettier."

Felicity tried fighting for Oliver, or more specifically for Oliver's soul in the laneway conversation and look where it got her -- shut out of Team Arrow's inner circle. I'd say Felicity has had a great deal of trouble moving on. Oliver told her he can't be with her in 3x01 but she was still hoping he would open up to her after Sara died. He didn't, instead he told her that he was just waiting to lie on the slab himself so she went to Ray for a job but she still went back to the lair the next morning and tried to jolly Oliver out of his angst. And in the next Flash episode, she told Barry she still had quiet dreams about being with Oliver. After she wanted Oliver to tell her not to go to the dinner with Ray, even after the speech to Carrie when Oliver said he couldn't be with someone, when he went off to kill himself, she continued to hope that he would come back and they could be together, as she told him in 3x12. But he shut her out again, and yet she still waiting for him. It wasn't until both Oliver and Diggle shut her out of the discussions in Nanda Parbat that she went to Ray to see if she could save him because she couldn't save Oliver and she kissed Ray. That was all she did until he lunged at her and took her to bed. So I'd say Felicity has had a great deal of trouble moving on from Oliver, and I doubt she really has yet. It doesn't make sense for Oliver to take a date to Diggle's wedding since the whole point of this "identity crisis" is because he believes he can't be in a relationship with a woman because it distracts him from being The Arrow. Why take someone who is looking for a relationship (because you know any woman he invited would be thinking it) when he's already got someone who was more than willing but he felt he couldn't be there for any woman?

I think Sara would still be dead. It's worth noting that Oliver went to get Thea after Felicity walked out, saying she didn't want to stay down there waiting for him to die. That's an example of Felicity influencing a decision that Oliver makes. Would Laurel be in the lair? That's debatable. She's down there because Oliver protected Malcolm and so Laurel felt she had to go out and fight on her own. If Oliver had been talking to Felicity in The Magician and she had told him to take a step back and think about the situation and realize that Ra's was after Malcolm not because of Sara's death but because of his actions in The Undertaking, Oliver might have decided not to put Malcolm under his protection but to let Malcolm deal with the consequences of his own actions himself. In that case, Malcolm would have gone on the run again, Laurel might have been satisfied that Sara was avenged, and Oliver could rebuild his relationship with Thea without Malcolm's interference and without the need to fight Ra's. Thea would have Oliver and Roy as her family, lessening her obsession with keeping Malcolm close to her. And everyone would live happily ever after, Oliver and Thea in their apartment, Oliver, Diggle, Felicity and Roy in the lair, and Laurel working as an ADA. Well, she'd still have to tell her father one day that Sara was killed, but she wouldn't necessarily have to beat up people to make herself feel better and she wouldn't be in the lair because she'd let Oliver and the team handle things. Because he was walking away, possibly to die. Oliver only tells her he loves her when she can't have him. If there was the slightest chance they could be together, he wouldn't be telling her he loves her. And of course, when he did come back, the first words out of his mouth killed the possibility of a relationship between them. Even after she said she couldn't understand how he could ally himself with MM, he deflected and said it was all about her disappointment that they couldn't be together. Oliver only tells Felicity he loves her when he's also telling her they can't be together. As a member of the audience, I understand how mixed up he is, but wow, is it ever manipulative.

I think what Felicity was saying was that "the way you treat the women you claim to love sucks", not that she was actually rejecting him. It was more in the nature of "Will you please actually listen to me so we can talk this out?" Of course, Oliver would hear it as a rejection because that's the show's contrivance to keep them apart. I think she would have in 3x12 when he first came back. Now she's going to have serious second thoughts because after his decisions on Merlyn, he isn't the man she thought he was any more.

I'd hazard a guess it's because he can't shrink and he can't really fight so he needs to protect himself somehow. They probably thought they were doing Felicity favors in giving her a grand romance apart from Oliver, but it ended up hurting both Ray and Felicity a lot. Folie a quatorze, for the eleven writers plus 3 EPs.

I really want Arrow: The Musical now. Seeing as how they want to stretch beyond what was on season 2 and all.

I'm amazed at how much work goes into each picture, I liked him for the ideas but watching that with all the shading and details, I'm blown away.

This is the season of Oliver's identity crisis in which he decides he can't be Oliver Queen, he must be The Arrow. Granted, they've screwed it up because in order to make the Thea plot work, which causes the Malcolm and Ra's plots, he has to love her and act as her brother, but as far as we the audience have been told, he's decided to be The Arrow and not Oliver Queen and that means not getting distracted by personal relationships. His identity crisis is all about hurting himself by being celibate and cutting himself off from a woman who loves him. If he can't be with the woman he loves for identity crisis reasons (it takes his focus off being The Arrow), he can't get into a relationship with anyone else either, not McKenna or Helena or some random woman he meets this season because the same reasoning applies -- being with her would take his focus off him job. And to take some woman that he just met to Diggle's wedding would be rude and also problematic because 1) where is is going to meet someone, he never goes out; 2) how is she going to feel if he runs off to do Arrow things in the middle of the event? and 3) she might get ideas about being in a relationship with him and that would cause a lot of complications. Also, I would really hope that there would be some sort of distaste for dating and sleeping with another woman when he's in love with Felicity. Even James Bond was faithful that brief time he was in love. It's not about torturing Oliver because he has to prove himself worthy of Felicity, it's about Oliver torturing himself because he's an idiot.

It does make sense that it would be officiating because that is part of his real life. The EPs would say "oh, it would be so cool" but I can see why it's important to keep his real life separate from his role as Oliver Queen. A whole bunch of new spoilers but I can't get excited about any of them. It's amazing how this show can take what people like (Donna Smoak and the possibility of SmoaknLance), and completely waste it. Didn't one of the EPs say that we would get a story of Nyssa being in Starling City and learning what it's like to be loved, something she never got from her father? Of course, knowing this show, that's going to last a whole two scenes. Oliver would be sleeping with Felicity right now if he weren't such an idiot. While I'd be thrilled if he suffers seeing her with Ray, I don't want to see it on my screen.

Putting this here because it's not a spoiler for this show, although it is for others:

I think you see their relationship the way the EPs want the audience to. Look we pass the Bechdel test, the writers say. Not for me. Felicity telling Laurel how awesome she is doesn't make Felicity awesome, it makes her kind of stupid because while Laurel has good intentions, she shouldn't be out there with sub-par fighting skills, possibly the other members of Team Arrow into danger. For me, as others have said, it's still too one-sided. In 3x03, Laurel was still giving Felicity orders as if she were paid help. Then in 3x11 and 3x13, Laurel needs someone to tell her how wonderful she is, and Felicity gets to be the one to do it because Diggle and Roy have already had their turns. Even in 3x15, Laurel pushed Felicity aside when she was talking to Oliver because Laurel wanted to yell at him herself. Laurel has said one nice thing to Felicity (that Oliver has returned from the dead before) and hugged her when Felicity told her she was awesome. In terms of their relationship, the writing went from A to S without hitting the letters in between. I think Thea makes a more natural friend to Laurel than Felicity does. Similar backgrounds, similar attitudes, similar ego-strengths. It's going to take a lot of good writing to make me believe in that Laurel and Felicity have a true friendship.

Brandon Routh vs Grant Gustin. I'm surprised the EPs didn't get dehydrated from all the panting they must have done over BR. Isn't this the episode where Felicity and Ray hit a rough patch? I can totally understand why Felicity would have brought Ray with her as her date to the wedding. Diggle is marrying Lyla, Thea is going with Roy even if they're not dating yet and Oliver has rejected her repeatedly. Who knows, maybe he's even taking Laurel. Even at the best of times, it's nice to have a plus one for a wedding, and for this one, Felicity will want to show everyone she's not moping over being rejected by Oliver. This is continuing the mistake they've made all season with Ray, making him too perfect and pushing him into situations where he shouldn't be while keeping him out of where he normally would be. I look forward to seeing him perform open heart surgery on Sara when she swallows something she shouldn't.

There's no reason for Diggle to sudden be 100% Team Oliver though, and no reason for Felicity to suddenly not have any scenes with Roy when they were on such good terms in 3x02 and 3x06. Felicity used to have three friends in the lair and now she has none except when she's on Laurel propping duty. Even after the break-up in 3x01, she and Oliver were still talking on 3x02. And even after he shut her out in that episode, she was still down in the lair making jokes on her way to work. That's all gone now and she's being shoved out the door with Laurel and Roy to go off to sleep with Ray.

I'm one of the majority of the Arrow audience who didn't come from the comics so Ray and Barry are equally obscure to me and Iris still means little. (Personally I prefer Snowbarry to WestAllen even now.) Ray did get them a third series, but only because they threw in a bunch of other superheroes and villains. He didn't get it on his own because he wasn't popular enough. It feels like a compromise "if you buy this breadmaker, we'll throw in a knife set and chopping blades for free". Maybe if he had been integrated into the A plots like Barry and Sara were, and had a chance to integrated into the show, they wouldn't have needed to throw in the other characters like Sara. I really don't think the relationship with Felicity had that much to do with his lack of popularity. Sara was very popular in spite of sleeping with Oliver for most of her time on the show. Basically, they presented Ray as a creepy stalker and other than his tragic backstory with Anna, haven't really developed him beyond a 2 dimensional character.

While not strictly wrong that Ray is there, it's continuing this season's pattern of having Ray's existence interfere with Felicity's closeness to Team Arrow. He's the one who notices her crying and tries to help, he's the one she goes to when she's feeling upset, he's the one who gives her something beyond TA so she doesn't have to hang out with them. Still too close to her and too intimate (he's almost bending over her) considering they were just fighting in the last episode.. Let's see when the episode airs.

I hate this. Oliver is now giving the little touches to Laurel instead of Felicity. I bet Laurel is his date since Felicity is with Ray. Tell me again how they want us to like Ray? Yes. Because how else is Oliver going to suffer unless he see's them together? Way to ruin Diggle's wedding for me, MG.

But isn't Felicity going to get that great scene with Laurel coming up, when she can talk out all her feelings? I don't know how much we'll see of Felicity back with the team. She's not apart from them because she's dating Ray, she's apart because there is no one else for Ray to interact with. According to MG, Ray won't be in the Arrow lair so Felicity is still stuck with being on Team Ray since she's the whole team. I don't see Felicity breaking up with Ray when he's injured. She's not that kind of girl. If anything, seeing him injured and hurting will make her like him more.

Agreed that Ray needs more attention and treatment, but they did it wrong. They pulled Felicity out of Team Arrow stories and stuck her in a side plot with Ray Palmer, hurting both characters. If they wanted the audience to take to Ray, they should have had him interacting with more characters than just Felicity. Since he's concerned about justice in Starling City, they should have had him consulting with Captain Quentin Lance and ADA Laurel Lance (if she's working as a lawyer still); he should have met Thea at Verdant, gone looking for records of Merlyn Consolidated, maybe talked to Oliver about aspects of QC and some of its projects. As it is, with interacting only with Felicity in a romcom, what we know of him is his creepy lack of boundariesand his sudden move from doing everything for Anna to doing it for Felicity, and we're left with a resentment that he's cutting into the Team Arrow we love.