apinknightmare

Everything is cute. Except for that HEINOUS SHIRT

You've completely lost me. Oliver asked Felicity out on A date. One. After said date, he told her he couldn't be with her. How much he *wanted* to be with her is irrelevant, since he was unwilling to actually do it. Sometimes breakups are mutually decided, but when one person wants out, what's there to say? That was Oliver's choice to make, and he made it. Felicity went on and dated Ray. Oliver remained faithful to his feelings for Felicity, but the two of them were not in a romantic relationship-at all-until the very end of the season.

His bitter-ass rants about her are equal parts amusing and pathetic.

This is a tease from The Flash, so I'd hope that Barry and Co were there at that point. Unless this is at the very beginning of the ep.

Oh, that would make sense. Because the voice at the end really doesn't sound at all like Oliver, IMO.

If anyone calls her honey, I hope it's Oliver. I don't like that term of endearment, but it would seem super condecscending coming from anyone other than her boyfriend IMO.

Wasn't the whole reason why he didn't fight back because he couldn't? She caught him off guard by putting a knife in his back, and threatened to paralyze him IIRC. I'd make minimal movements too, haha.

Yeah, could be honey, it's just a little garbled for me. And doesn't sound at all like Oliver to me.

Yeah, I think it's Barry, and I'm not hearing "honey" either. It sounds something like, "it makes it hard to fight when you're doing that in my ear,"

I think he said that it was hard to fight with her doing that in his ear (or something along those lines?). And yeah, it sounded like Barry.

I don't get the issue with this. Two people need to be willing to enter into a relationship, and if one of them isn't ready or willing, it is absolutely okay for them to say so and put a stop to it. Another person doesn't get to have a say in what I am or am not ready for, no matter how I might feel about them. Oliver wasn't wrong for breaking things off if his heart wasn't truly in it. He was wrong for a lot of other things, like dangling those maybes and continuing to remind her how he felt about her when he was unwilling to do something about it (and all the other idiocy he engaged in), but he wasn't wrong for calling it off if he didn't feel like he was able to follow through.

Well, Oliver told Malcolm that the reason he lost was because he hesitated to kill Ra's (SURE, JAN), and he had been training with Malcolm in sword fighting. So I *think* that we were supposed to believe that Oliver's willingness to kill coupled with his newly learned LoA sword skills helped him win. Especially since Ra's was apparently a tired bastard who used the exact same moves in both fights. YMMV, of course.

What exactly does this have to do with Laurel and the discussion we were having? You wrote that people were ignoring the "years of experience" for other characters, but not Laurel. Oliver has years of experience, and took his fair share of defeats while he was still learning, so I'm not sure what your point is. Oliver shouldn't always win because he's the main character, but he's a skilled enough fighter that it's believable for him to win often.

No one is ignoring it in this argument, though? Thea couldn't beat Sara, and I don't recall Roy and Sara ever going at it when he wasn't hopped up on Mirakuru.

I can buy that years of training matches up well with years of training. At someone point, you're going to have seen pretty much everything. If you're seasoned, you're seasoned for the most part, whether it's 8 years of survival or a lifetime of training in technique. I can buy Oliver beating Nyssa, although I'd like to get her a win. Theoretically, Sara should be able to take Laurel pretty easily/quickly, since she's still very new and learning. The only way someone like Laurel should be able to beat Sara is if she used a distraction, like the straining poo shriek, or if she got the drop on Sara somehow. But last season Laurel was bested by common street thugs in one ep, and then somehow holding her own with and beating LoA people the next, so who even knows.

Most leaked episodes tend to get good buzz going. I can't think of any way a rumor about the show getting canceled generates positive buzz. Even if they were worried about viewership and wanted to put something out there, it seems like the way to do that would be to spread the word that a second season is in the bag if ratings are good. That would get people excited instead of floating that a show that hasn't even premiered yet is dead in the water due to budget issues. The EP has talked about it being an anthology though, which already puts out there that it's a limited engagement, with zero negative connotations attached.

I'm not in PR, but it seems a little counterintuitive to attempt to garner positive buzz by telling people this thing they want you to get super hyped for is probably not gonna come back. But maybe that's just me.

Seems like unsubstantiated clickbait to me.

I really don't think they *meant* for it to come off as callous as it did. Oliver seemed fairly certain throughout the episode that Slade wasn't going to hurt Laurel (or Felicity) unless he was there to witness it, but the writers manage to make that relationship shitty regardless.

My favorite part about that whole thing was when Slade called Oliver in the tunnel and was like, "I have the one you love. You're going to meet me where I say, otherwise I'm going to kill her," and Oliver replies with, "Do what you have to." LMAO, like...damn dude. DAMN.

None of these things undo anything that we were told throughout the course of the story, and there wasn't anything at all in the narrative that would lead us to believe that Laurel wasn't a petty ass as a teenager, or that Felicity didn't go through a goth phase. Just because we know the writers came up with these characteristics on the fly doesn't mean anything in terms of actual show canon unless it undoes something that was previously established. The only actual instance of retconning I can think of is something you haven't even bought up - and that's the fact that we haven't seen Laurel's picture on Oliver in the flashbacks in going on three years.

They were always kind of sketchy with Oliver and Laurel's relationship. I'm not really sure what to make of it since the video they played of Oliver on the news post-return was one of him walking down a sidewalk with at least one chick (maybe two, I can't remember), and neither one of them were Laurel. So, without saying it, I always got the sense that he was unfaithful to her at some point prior to Sara, or they were at least on-again/off-again, and not at all serious. None of it makes a whole lot of sense given Laurel's idea of their relationship, thinking they were ready to move in together.

Sorry, but I'm going to have to disagree with you. Sara's not a moron. She didn't need to know the extent of her family's tragic backstory post-Gambit to be able to suss out that inviting her sister's ex-boyfriend, a guy that Sara fucked around with while he was still dating her sister and was currently fucking around with despite their sordid history with said sister was A TERRIBLE IDEA. Literally all you need is two brain cells to rub together to figure that one out.

I mean...Laurel reacted to Sara being alive in a shitty way. And Sara, in turn, did a shitty thing by inviting Oliver of all people to their family dinner. It wasn't just shitty to Laurel - it was shitty to her terrible mother and her father, too, since a decision that Sara made with Oliver was the first in a series of awful things that led to the disintegration of their family. Laurel being shitty doesn't excuse Sara for being shitty, IMO.

I understand why Sara would want some moral support, but it was legit a terrible idea for her to ask Oliver of all people to go with her. If you want to give her a pass for emotional reasons, then it's on Oliver for being stupid enough to go. Everyone in that family is responsible for the choices they made post the sinking of The Gambit, but there's no denying that Oliver being the kind of dirtbag who would invite his girlfriend's sister on a boat, and Sara being naive/stupid enough to accept the invitation set into motion a whole lot of bad things that still needed to be dealt with by all of the Lances. Oliver being invited to their first dinner together and actually going? Absolutely stupid.