No story, just analyses on my favorite fictional characters (plus the occasional real person). Will also feature song lyrics I think fit them because music is my life and there's a song for everything. Multi fandom (duh) Will feature all manner of m...
"She is messy, but she's kind. She is lonely most of the time. She is all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie. She is gone but she used to be mine."
-She Used to be Mine, Waitress
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
I adore everything about Juliet Burke. Her intelligence. Her toughness. Her compassion. Her beauty. (Yes, I a probably heterosexual f, can comfortably acknowledge that this girl is a knockout) Elizabeth Mitchell's stunning performance. Her relationship with Sawyer. In fact, she's my favorite character in LOST, and, along with Hermione Granger, my favorite female character of all time. And I think television would be a much more interesting and compelling place for women if we had more characters like her.
To start, Juliet is a goshdang genius, probably putting Jack and Ben to shame (love you two, but the girl who discovered a way to impregnate her sterile, cancer ridden sister wins). And she kicks butt, in a grounded way. There aren't any wow-she-makes-men-look-pathetic montages of Juliet kicking down ten or so male mercenaries or something. She's got great physical prowess and can hold her own, but it's believable and not idealized or sexualized. She kicks butt with her words. One of my favorite moments of hers is in the episode "One of Us" (brilliant and a personal favorite of mine), when she gives Sawyer and Sayid perhaps the show's most epic verbal roast ever and, when she has their attention, tells them she WILL get the medicine that Claire needs. YES GIRL. SLAY.
But for all her apparent togetherness, it's Juliet's vulnerability and fragility that ultimately drew me to her. Beneath her confident, stoic expression, she is a woman continually used and forcefully defined by those around her, including her ex-husband Edmund, Ben (again, love you Ben, but you needed to do some soul searching before you could be worthy of any woman's affections), and to a certain degree, Jack. The only man who loves her for who she is and not because she looks like someone else or because her innovations can make them money is Sawyer, which is what makes their relationship so wonderful to watch.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Just look at the poor girl, desperately trying to hold back her tears with a smile like so many women are forced to do. This side of Juliet that see are in her flashbacks is so raw and relatable and believable, and it instantly endeared me to her. And it adds an extra layer to the hardened version of herself we see in the present.
Television and film don't necessarily need more female villains. What we need are more women who are ambiguous. More women who keep you guessing, who aren't clearly painted in black or white *cough wE nEeD a fEmAle bEn LiNuS cOuGh* The men always get to have these complex antiheroes that all the media critics think are the greatest thing ever. Where's the female Dexter Morgan or Walter White?
What I love about Juliet more than just about anything else is that, while she eventually joins the side of the heroes, we initially didn't know what to make of her. She was on the side of the people we were supposed to be rooting against, and seemed to be an active participant in their crimes. And yet...we wanted to like her. At this point in the story, I couldn't label Juliet as good or evil. She was just...human. We need more female characters like this.
Juliet was ultimately a good person trapped in the role of an antagonist. Because, despite what she may seem to be, she is revealed to be a compassionate, loving and nurturing woman who only wants to get off the island, find her sister, and for once to not be used. She is one of the strongest, best written, and above all, most human women in television history, and I am proud to call her my favorite character from LOST.
