youwillcallher:

hey guys ever just casually think about always sunny and the characters and realize how little they’ve grown and changed from the beginning of the show, the beginning of their lives, and feel something heavy settle in your stomach because they’re all just as miserable and unhappy and repressed as they were when they were thirty, when they were twenty, when they were high schoolers? there’s just something so profoundly heartbreaking about how they all age but are still the same – they never figure out how to cope, or get better, they stay just as deeply unsatisfied, paralyzed by trauma, and incapable of moving forwards as they’ve always been. they’re forty (forty!) and they’re still struggling with the same shit they were when they were teenagers. that’s just so terrifying to me and strikes such a chord within me and i know it’s not the point of the show but their lack of development is just so depressingly realistic – we see so many stories of success, of people working through their shit and getting better, and here we see people staying just as unhappy as they’ve always been with no sign of a better future in sight. and they’re forty, and even if  miraculously, something changes soon, the period of exploration and hope and everything that your twenties and thirties are supposed to be, all of that is gone for good. they’re just so suspended in their emotional development, trapped in their high school mindset, drowning in their individualized brands of fear and shame. and the pain of that comes not just from these characters that we love and their solitude and unhappiness, but more importantly, from the realism of that kind of future, from the idea that we, like them, might never work through our shit and stay exactly who we are, never coming close to who we wanted to be, who we needed to be. and that’s terrifying.