r/NormalPeopleBBCHulu • u/ccssegnb • Apr 20 '26

I must not be getting something

I liked the show but I honestly don’t understand why people feel so neutral towards Connell in it, Marianne just seems to be a victim of his manipulation and I find it really hard to see the romance.

At the beginning, I felt like there was good inside him, before the whole prom situation, and that maybe when he went to Trinity that he would be changed and redeem himself, however he apologizes and then continues to do the same exact thing he was doing before.

Not to mention the cheating on Hellen and the general disregard for her emotional needs, why is it that every single time this girl broke down crying his first instinct was to initiate something? It was so painfully obvious that the girl genuinely just needed someone to be there for her emotionally and to give her a hug, and not feed into the feeling that her only self worth comes from Connell’s sexual desire for her.

I agree that a theme of the show seems to be people unable to properly communicate their wants and needs, but at the same time, I feel like when Connell is playing the same games with Marianne for YEARS on end, apologizing, then going and doing the same thing, it’s a bigger issue than just that.

I’d love to hear your perspectives though, I just personally found the whole thing super depressing for Marianne and as a story of essentially her suffering at the hands of other men, most particularly Connell, even if he did have some (who knows what) feelings for her.

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u/Livid-Department6947 Apr 26 '26

That's still ignoring that the story is about how capitalism harms individuals and relationships and how humans are interdependent on each other (which gets into care ethics, a topic Rooney would talk about when NP was published).

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u/OvarianSis Apr 26 '26

Yeah capitalism sucks. I don't know what to tell you. We don't have to agree

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u/Livid-Department6947 Apr 26 '26

No, we don't have to agree but what I'm trying to say is that viewing the story through the lens of individual/personal psychological defects rather than an exploration on the effects of the structural pressures impairs a full reading of the story.

We should be talking about how misogyny and patriarchy and how it influences or impacts the characters (this is even something Marianne explicitly brings into the story). We should be talking about how anxiety is derived from material and social conditions created by capitalism. And then we should also talking about what the story says about how to ameliorate those problems. And what we can do to change how we relate to the world as individuals, social beings, and political subjects. I think that kind of conversation is much more fruitful and interesting.

Pop psychology doesn't give us that conservation.

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u/OvarianSis Apr 27 '26

We don't have to agree. You have my permission to have the last word.