#because she is so caught up in the imaginary fantasy world that she and dan created

[gossipgirls]

do you think serena loved nate pre-pilot

okay, so gonna go back here to what i said in an ask last week about like... the Serenate Mythology file in my brain vs. actual cold, hard canon. in canon, i don’t know that the writers of the show believed serena loved nate pre-pilot and i don’t know that they were writing s1 serenate’s dynamic with that intention. i just don’t know.

HOWEVER, it’s at the very least canon that she had a crush on him, big enough for lily, a rather absent mother at the time, to pick up on it. i personally love to think that she loved him pre-pilot and just didn’t have the frame of reference or vocabulary or understanding of herself yet to know that it was love. that she held it all back because she didn’t want to hurt blair, but she knew on some level that it was there. again, given the relatively small amount of objective canon material on serenate, i feel there really is space for me to believe this is true lol.

like do i think she loved him more than she loved dan? no. and there was some strange whitewashing of serenate’s history throughout s1, e.g. serena being like “nobody’s ever looked at me the way you just did” to dan (like... YES SOMEONE DID MA’AM), when their dynamic realllllyyyy should have been explored further. but the particular way in which serena loved dan was sooo tied up with her hatred of herself, and ultimately so different from the love that she felt for nate. so there is a real capacity for her to love nate more in the future after some... self-actualization (lol) in which she realizes what love really is and isn’t... and perhaps realizing then that she has always loved nate but it was overshadowed by her other less healthy wants and needs. does this make any sense at all.

tldr; no but yes. yes, in my heart. 🖤

#serena x nate #answered #anonymous #i've always been obsessed with the serenate pain of 'i love you but you can never love me' #and 'wanting was enough' (folklore 2020) #but lately i've been more like... huh... considering the nature of derena... idk #it feels to me more like she loves nate more than she ever knew and that it's all just very scary to her #and she perhaps never really saw just how real it all was #because she is so caught up in the imaginary fantasy world that she and dan created #i don't know what i'm saying now so tags finished