Hello, welcome to a post about a topic that's been on weighing on my mind for ages. We're talking about Euphoria, specifically my favorite character Cassie!
Disclaimers and warnings in advance: I haven't actually watched the show. I've seen a frankly ridiculous number of clips and read a lot of the episode plot summaries, and also there are tons of spoilers just floating around. And also, just because someone is my favorite character doesn't mean they're my favorite person in the show. My favorite characters are the ones I think are really developed and complex, or have the potential to be so. My favorite people are the characters I think are good people. So rambling aside, let's buckle up and jump in!
So Cassie: a beautiful and mentally ill bundle of daddy issues and self-esteem issues. She's currently probably one of the most disliked characters in the show, right up there with Nate. It seems deserved: she's sleeping with and at this point probably in a relationship with her best friend's abusive ex. Not the greatest. And I'm not trying to justify what she's done, I don't think there's much I can do to justify it. But what I do want to do is discuss why she's doing all this. There's a difference between justifying and understanding a character's actions, and I'm aiming to do the latter in this article.
First, Cassie needs to be loved, or at least wanted. She's needy and constantly seeks male attention and validation. Lexi tells Cassie, "You love to be loved." Cassie's been endlessly seeking love, but just keeps getting used by guys in her life for sex and an easy relationship, so I think she just doesn't see a difference between being wanted and being loved. And she's single and drunk when Nate pays her a bit of attention. She'd already been starved for that attention, and here comes an objectively attractive, popular dude who's now paying attention to her. And then he starts being a manipulative bastard thinking he's in love with her. Of course she's going to fall. A guy says he loves her? She's gone. That's all that she's wanted.
Which leads into my next point: Nate wanted Maddy. That was undeniable throughout the entirety of their relationship. He wanted her as a possession, of course, not as an actual human being with thoughts and feelings, but he still wanted her. Cassie knows this. She's Maddy's best friend, she's been around for it all. So when Nate starts showing her attention, maybe Cassie starts thinking that now he wants her too, and he won't let her go. And I think Cassie knows it's not in a healthy way, but she still craves that feeling of being wanted. She has abandonment issues from her dad. She's scared of being left, she's scared of being alone, and she desperately wants to feel like she's wanted so she won't be abandoned. And Nate seems like he can give her that. Cassie knows that Nate has the capacity to want her obsessively, and she wants that even though she knows it's bad.
Continuing on from that, Maddy and Nate were a relatively consistent couple. Yes, they were on-and-off all the time, but they still kept going back to each other. Even after the choking incident, they were approaching something at Maddy's birthday. Cassie's never had that. She's been in relationship after relationship, always moving from guy to guy. I suspect there's a part of her that wanted, and still wants, what Maddy and Nate had. That consistency, that inability to stay away from each other. Was it born out of abuse, absolutely. I really do think Cassie knows that, in the back of her mind. But she still wants it, because even that kind of abusive, toxic need seems better than being alone.
And what a lot of people seem to be forgetting is that she's eighteen. Of course she's going to do dumb stuff. Of course she's gonna be not the greatest person. She's in high school, surrounded by drugs and sex and abuse. It's not like she's growing up with the greatest influences. And she's still a teen. She's not an adult, she's a needy, mentally-ill teen who's now caught up with an abusive monster who knows just how to get what he wants from the vulnerable women around him.
Cassie knows all of this is wrong. I really do think she knows, deep down. She's in denial about it, of course. Maybe she thinks she can fix him. Maybe she thinks he'll be different. Maybe she thinks she can take it. But when she's crying and wanting to die after all that went down, I think she knows that this is so, so bad. At the same time, I think she believes she's too far in to get out, she can't back out of this now. And she feels so, so guilty for what she's done. She's a kind, sweet person who's also a massive people pleaser, and it's going to be her downfall. She's absolutely, 100% going to face repercussions for all of this. She's already starting to feel them.
But she doesn't deserve to want to die. She doesn't deserve to be abused by Nate. Maddy has no obligations to forgive her, but we as an audience should be trying to understand her. That's what the point of Euphoria is, I think. It's an exaggerated portrayal of high school, but the characters and their struggles are absolutely correct for high school. They're played up and dramatic, but at the core of it is something a lot of us can relate to. And here, where they're just characters and not people in our own lives, we have the chance to sit and think and try to understand these incredibly flawed and incredibly human characters. I see myself in Cassie, in that girl who just wants to be loved so desperately that she'll throw away everything for the smallest scraps of it. No, I wouldn't sleep or date my best friend's ex, but I can see where Cassie's coming from, and it breaks my heart to see how many people are refusing to even try and see past what she's done into the why. These characters are complex and layered, just like people, and it's a disservice to them and to ourselves as an audience to not try to see every side of them.
So that's that! I love Cassie, and I really hope she'll get the help she needs. I suspect that there's a lot of bad in store for her, but I'm praying for a happy ending for her and all the other characters. I even hope Nate can get some help. They've all had a really rough go of it.
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