Roy and Thea
Arrow
I do like Roy and Thea individually, but they’re at their best when they’re involved romantically. I mean it might be cliche, to have the rebellious rich girl hook up with the boy from the wrong side of the tracks, but somehow I still enjoy their scenes. The writers’ were saved by the fact that Haynes and Holland’s chemistry is comparable to that of Amell and Bett Rickards’.
The fact that they meet because Roy steals Thea’s handbag, gives Holland the opportunity to show how determined she is, and how much she’s evidently learnt about tracking someone electronically through her work at CNRI.
It was a nice contrast, and good to see Thea taking a interest in helping someone, the connection between the two of them developing and establishing the two characters as being something more than the stereotypes that they could so easily have been.
The scene between them on the stairs, when Thea says ‘it means the world to you, and you mean the world to me,’ and they decide to hunt the vigilante, is one of the better moments of season one in terms of character development. It’s the moment that I first saw Thea acknowledge that she cared deeply about someone outside of her immediate family.
Up until then, although she clearly was deeply attached to her brother, she had tended to be rather stereotypically a teenager, when it came to her emotions.
The pairing of Thea and Roy, also helped Roy’s likeability. It turned him from a ‘street thug with a heart’ into someone that could be part of Team Arrow. Admittedly it took a while, the storyline only coming to fruition around the mid way point of the season.
I did hold out hope that Thea and Roy would reconnect, in a more permanent way at some point during the third season. Although I understood why the writers had decided to have Thea distance herself from him in the second season finale, giving her a proper space to become ‘Speedy’. The scenes that they did share, regardless of the fact that they weren’t officially a couple, during the episode in which Roy took the blame for being the Arrow were some of the best emotional work that both Haynes and Holland had done together.
I look forward to seeing how the pair interact when Haynes makes his rumoured return during the fourth season.
Musings of a thirtysomething woman 