💯 This! 🙌🏼

💯 This! 🙌🏼

"liv has grown so much without elliot." this keeps coming up in the tags of my edits and in peoples asks and it's driving me a little insane. i have watched every season of this god damn show and i feel like it's such a simplistic way to look at olivia both in the classic episodes and the newer ones.

one, the idea that liv didn't grow at all in the first twelve seasons is absolute horse shit. she says this to nick because the svu writers who took over after s12 actually hate stabler. it is not true and it's unfair to her.

two, yes, she did grow a ton in the last ten seasons. a lot of things have also happened to her. a lot of traumatic and horrible things happen to her and we almost never see her actually get to process them. she just straightens her back and carries on as the strong lieutenant/captain/mother. is this growth? or is it liv repressing her feelings?

elliot, her best friend, abandons her and then liv is abducted by a serial rapist and held hostage for days, assulated, her brother dies of an overdose, her son is abducted by his biological grandmother who she had thought was a friend, barba becomes her best friend and then ALSO leaves her, tucker marries someone else and then kills himself... and when do we have an in depth exploration into any of these things? never. we scratch the surface - like we did on last weeks episode. because we have gone from "liv" to "captain benson" lately.

elliot coming back gives liv a chance to just be a person again instead of just filling a role. she deserves to face and process all of these things starting with elliot leaving her. whether or not you ship them romantically (and i DO think they have always been in love) she literally said elliot was the single most important person in her life, and she absolutely has not healed from him leaving. she could barely talk about it without her voice breaking.

her anger and hurt still exists and are being space to exist, but she knows elliot is in a very fragile state. she can't push him away because if she does and he dies she will regret it forever, like she did with simon and tucker. and elliot wants to be back in her life but he also wants to push her away so she doesn't become a target. this is painfully obvious to me and yet people somehow are missing it and acting like he's just being an asshole for the sake of it and not actually going through a major mental health crisis. elliot has definitely changed as well and become softer and less confrontational in all the ways that matter, but he is also going through something very intense. we are only four episodes into something that is really an exploration into changing this big macho, toxic persona that elliot had. it will take time.

so yes, liv has grown and changed - in a lot of ways for the better. but that doesn't mean that growth will disappear if she is there for elliot or if she lets him back into her life. maybe helping him process his ptsd will finally give is some insight into her own. their reentry into each other's orbits was bound to be rough, and it would be disservice for it not to be - but maybe they can heal and grow together into newer and better versions of themselves and come out stronger in the end. not everything has to turn out negative. let us enjoy this.