Even more on LOVE! Will/Tessa mostly.

Eek! Okay, okay. You don’t have to like what happens in CP, or agree with the story decisions I made. All I can do is explain to you my reasoning, and you can feel free to disagree.

I think that, given the circumstances, Tessa telling Will she loves him  would have been a selfish and unfeeling thing to do. What Tessa does in her scene with Will is take the burden of the knowledge of Will’s feelings for her, and her own feelings for Will (confused as they are) onto herself. Certainly she understands that telling Will that she loves him would make him happy for that fleeting moment. But over a longer period it would be a horrible poisonous thing to know, and here is why:

It would transform what is now only Tessa’s secret into a secret shared between Will and Tessa, that they were deliberately keeping from Jem. They would both hate that. It would prevent Will from ever moving on or trying to find happiness elsewhere. That is cruel and selfish; it’s trying to keep the love of both boys, even though she can’t return Will’s in any productive way, instead of cutting one of them free even at cost to herself. And worst of all worst things, it means that Will knows that if Jem dies, he could perhaps be with Tessa. It would put him into the hideous position of wishing Jem would die, something so catastrophically awful that though I do not think of Will as the suicidal type, I think might more than anything else drive him to either run away or kill himself.

So no, I don’t think Will “deserves that.” I would have to hate him to think that, and I don’t hate Will — I love Will.

[This is, in essence, a “Spiderman moment” — I think we can all remember the end of the first Spiderman movie when Mary Jane, who Peter Parker has loved his whole life, comes up to tell him she cares about him too. And he tells her he only likes her as a friend, because he has to — because he knows that if anyone knows about his feelings for her, she will be a target, and that she has to believe it too, or it’ll never work. If she knows he loves her, she can’t ever move on, and she’ll always be in danger. So he does it — the short sharp cruel shock of momentary pain for her, and a lifetime of agony for himself. With great power comes great responsibility. That kind of self-sacrifice is something we see a lot in heroes. I think perhaps we’re not used to seeing it enacted by girls.]