(spoilers: finale of You’re The Worst, CW: reference to suicide, general mental illness)
You’re The Worst is a five season anti-romcom. Everyone is in love, and everyone is horrible, and everyone is ludicrous. It’s a show that nervous reviewers say “tackles the struggle with depression,” by which they mean that Gretchen has clinical depression (or, as we’d say in my house, she gets that sweet clin D). Less nervous reviewers— queer, mostly— say that it’s the most accurate depiction of depression they’ve ever seen.
The depression plot started airing pretty soon after I went through a breakup with someone who, like Gretchen’s boyfriend Jimmy, believed that she could fix me. At the time, I found the plot very moving. In retrospect, having a partner who tries to fix your mental illnesses is maybe not so great. I put off watching the final season for years. Before I started, I asked a friend how intense the depression plotline got. They said it was addressed, but it wasn’t a huge thing.
The final season was fucking fantastic. It was mean, it was funny, it was innovative, it had an episode with a B-plot about a straight dude accepting a high-stakes dare to suck a dick— excuse me, to “ess a dee,” he wanted to be classy about it— that somehow wasn’t gay panic-y. Towards the end of the finale, Jimmy and Gretchen flee their own (very fancy, very expensive) wedding to go hang out at a diner. It goes like this:
GRETCHEN: So we're not getting married.
JIMMY: No.
GRETCHEN: But we're not breaking up.
JIMMY: No.
GRETCHEN: So what are we going to do?
JIMMY: Every day we choose.
GRETCHEN: Huh?
JIMMY: I don't want to be with you because I made a promise to be with you. I want to be with you because I want to be with you. So every day we wake up, we look at each other and say, "Today, again, I choose you. " Until maybe one day we don’t.
GRETCHEN: You know I love the idea of always having one foot out the door.
JIMMY: We don't declare anything. Except this. Gretchen, every day I will make the choice to love you. And love you I will. Wholeheartedly. That one day. Because I choose to.
GRETCHEN: I really like it.
JIMMY: Me, too.
They do a few more jokes— Gretchen regrets that they didn’t take the presents, Jimmy reveals that he’s smuggled them away, Gretchen declares her love— and then we get a beautiful montage of the future. Everyone is dancing at someone else’s wedding, singing and laughing with people they used to hate. The music shifts. If you already know “No Children” by The Mountain Goats, your whole body shifts, too. And I hope when you think of me years down the line/ You can't find one good thing to say/ And I'd hope that if I found the strength to walk out/ You’d stay the hell out of my way. We see a more expansive future now. Characters propose and move and run medical businesses out of former food trucks. Jimmy and Gretchen have a baby. We see an ultrasound, the two of them looking terrified while holding the newborn, Jimmy reading horror books to Gretchen and the baby. As the song ends— I hope you die/ I hope we both die— we pan across their bed. Jimmy is dead asleep, the baby is screeching, and Gretchen is crying hysterically. We cut back to Jimmy and Gretchen in the diner.
GRETCHEN: Hey. You know that there's always a possibility that some day I might leave my phone and keys at home and step in front of a train. You know that, right?
JIMMY: [pause] Yeah. But I'll move on really quickly. Like, record-setting.
Gretchen smiles. So does Jimmy. She says, “okay.” The two of them start eating. The show is over.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted— no, needed— the crying to have come earlier in the montage. I needed something else to have come after the last lines. I didn’t know how to talk about it, let alone to whom. Did everybody feel the same way as my friend who didn’t think mental illness was bedrock to the season? Did no one else want to scream for a promise that romance would be something different?
The King of Swords is a provider. His job is to make sure that you have your basic needs met. He should not have to use a sword to do this, but he does, at least here and now. You’re The Worst is a vision of how severe mental illness affects romantic relationships. It had never been done before, not on network TV, not in a comedy, not like this. The King of Swords cut through decades of stigma and ableism and shame to give us a world where we could have this. It wasn’t a smooth cut. She had to hack and saw and sharpen, and to do it again and again. But she did it. And he did it for us.
Xe gave us a world, but xe did not give us Gretchen and Jimmy. Specifics aren’t Kings’ domains. If the King of Swords tried to create something more specific, she’d trip. Even if she managed to not fall on her own sword, the blade would be dulled, and it would be that much harder for him to keep making a world, and we need him to keep going. Stagnation isn’t safe, not with the world as it is now.
I had been so focused on those few lines that I had missed that the previous scene is the only thing I’ve ever seen on TV that approximates how I think about romantic relationships. I want something like that for a lot of reasons, some of them directly related to mental illness. It’s not that the King of Swords gave me what I needed in the finale. She very much did not. But ze built a world where I could have a show that pushed me and challenged me and made me laugh. I’m not comfortable with the King of Swords, but I can’t imagine a world without him.
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I love this exploration of the King of Swords, it's making me think a lot (as your posts normally do!!) but today I just wanna drop my appreciation for the diversity of pronouns in your post. It's small but it's also big? And I love it.