#remember in Waterfalls when i wrote him comparing the end to his football career to an entire family perishing in a tragic plane crash?

[lunar-years]

I am having so many Roy Kent thoughts this morning. Like, just how deeply lonely has that man been, for a very long time probably but especially the past year? He doesn't seem to have...friends? Like, sure, he has his fellow coaches, and he has Jamie. But it's not exactly like Ted's been in the correct headspace for most of the season to be pal-ing around with Roy in his free time, and Beard is friends with everyone and I expect has a million and one social commitments at all times, dictated first and foremost by Jane. We get the sense in the Chelsea episode of the sort of easy rep Roy had with the staff and community there, but also that he's cut himself off largely from all those good parts of his former life; clean break since the day he left. So by now, Roy's social life is fully just work and his 10 yr old niece...and eventually, Jamie Tartt.

Before he started training with Jamie, though, I fully think Roy was isolated and depressed as all hell, probably much more than he realized or ever acknowledged. Yes, he had the Club, and sometimes Phoebe in the evenings, but the rest of the time? Come home alone to his empty house that wasn't anything like Keeley's, and try to read his book, and make his dinner. Maybe watch some footie on the telly. Yoga once a week, if he's even still going, but in a way even that's lost its charm, because it's not like he can tell the mums anything, they don't even know who he really is! Try not to think too hard about how much he misses Keeley. Rinse & repeat. And the cycle becomes so unbearable that god, does he welcome training Jamie.

But even training Jamie, at first, is just...a way to extend work, isn't it? Work, work, work so he doesn't have to think about anything else, or linger on his own encroaching loneliness with the world. We don't see him and Jamie do anything but train until Amsterdam, which is the start of the breakthrough, and then until the very end of the season. Because Roy very stringently doesn't let Jamie into other parts of his life, even though he maybe (definitely) wants to. Jamie is part of work, not part of his personal life, and he forces himself to keep those rigid boxes up even after they've begun to bleed through. It's Jamie who has to push through them, slowly force his way in past Roy's defenses. And it's a good thing Jamie is a persistent little fucker, or Roy would well and truly have had no one.

And the whole time this is happening, Roy is forced to live with the fact that he's brought this all upon himself. He left Chelsea. He left Keeley. He's cut himself off from nearly every good thing in his life, and the worst part of all is, he can't stop doing it, even knowing it's made him miserable! even knowing he can't go on like this! He still can't bring himself to consciously allow Jamie fully into his life even as he increasingly relies on Jamie and their time together to keep him afloat. They're together all of the time, but for a long while, Roy won't even call him his friend.

Just...god, Roy is the most insane blender of fierce love and arrogance and protectiveness and repression and rage and self-hatred and self-sabotage and isolation and, and!! all the things he won't allow himself to have and all the people he won't allow to love him!! We wasted so much time on Shandy and Zava this season when we should have been cracking Roy Kent's skull open like a nut and examining every inch of his brain, me thinks.

#i need to write a character study of him asap tbh. no one sees how dark and dangerous and mysterious and repressed he is but me! #(jokes) #remember in Waterfalls when i wrote him comparing the end to his football career to an entire family perishing in a tragic plane crash? #in full seriousness? #yeah. that's the sort of deranged thinking I feel is happening in that man's brain at any point in time #he is soooooooooo!!!!! #also I genuinely think jamie saved him this season mentally. i really truly do. #ted lasso spoilers #roy kent #ted lasso meta #ted lasso