My Meta Musings on Marian

[Do you ever experience the utter inability to properly organize your thoughts and transcribe them into words? I actually tried writing most of this post several days ago, but for some reason my brain kept short-circuiting. Ugh. I hope the end result is here is relatively coherent.]

As most of you probably noticed, there were several new pieces of Oz fic posted at hardtime100 last week! Yay!

Interestingly, a couple of them focused on Toby's relationship with post-parole "girlfriend" Marian (and a third one invoked the infamous Socks Visit). Although Marian is a never-seen character who's mentioned only a couple of times (and only once by name), her mere existence has always rubbed me wrong way. So, when trillingstar's story portrayed her in a relatively sympathetic light, I commented on how unnatural it was for me to be feeling sorry for her given how much I hate her. To which she replied:

What did Marian do that was hateworthy? Like I know some people think that she gets in the way of an OTP. But was she actually, actively horrible in some way?

Which got me thinking (probably a little too much)... Why DO I hate Marian? What exactly DID she do that was so hateworthy?

( ramblings behind the cut... )