In Defense of Marissa Cooper, The O.C.'s Tragic Teen Heroine

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https://www.pastemagazine.com/tv/str...ooper-defense/

The O.C. desperately tried to paint Marissa as a lonely damsel in distress, when in reality she remains one of the kindest and most resilient characters on the show. Despite suffering from depression and isolation driven by her chaotic home life, Marissa continuously went out of her way for the people she cared about, even when she shouldn’t have. As much as she needed people to come in and save her, she was doing much of the saving, as well. Though some may criticize her actions as being that of naivete or even a savior complex, it was really more of an indication of her unwavering loyalty. When Ryan returns to Chino to tie up his brother’s loose ends, Marissa follows him in secret and provides him with the necessary getaway right in time. She embraces his past with open arms, wanting nothing more than to be a partner he can share his skeletons with.

Marissa’s good intentions were constantly being taken advantage of by troubled guys unable to distinguish her compassion as anything other than an advance of her romantic feelings. In Season 1, she continued to help the unstable Oliver Trask (Taylor Handley), even through his frustrating red flags, out of genuine concern for his well-being. She was manipulated into isolation as Oliver obsessively inserted himself into her life and threatened to kill himself with a gun if she tried to abandon him. In Season 2, we see Marissa accompany Ryan’s brother, Trey (Logan Marshall-Green) in finding a job, keeping him company while Ryan was out of town. Instead of being thanked for her friendliness, Trey, in a drug-induced state, misconstrues her kindness and attacks her when she rejects him. In Season 3, when her close friend Johnny (Ryan Donowho) breaks his leg, Marissa generously nurses him as she feels slightly guilty for his accident. Time after time again, she finds herself in a cycle of betrayal and blame when her kindness is misinterpreted by the people around her.

If the first two seasons were brutal towards Marissa, it’s nothing compared with the unreasonably cruel treatment by the show’s writers in Season 3. We see her spiral more hopelessly than ever as she deals with the aftermath of shooting Trey in order to protect Ryan, as well as her PTSD from Trey’s attempted sexual assault. Meanwhile, her father abandons her again after promising to reunite with the family, and the Coopers are broke and forced to live in a trailer park. If that wasn’t enough, she witnesses Johnny’s death and endures a final break-up with Ryan, driving her to the lowest of points.

Even as the writers continued to torture Marissa with never-ending tragedy, she was still able, in the midst of it all, to pick herself back up and resolve to be better. When she receives a note from Jimmy asking her to work with him for a year, she’s finally offered an out. It’s a chance at a new beginning, a break from the pain that has plagued her for the past three years. But instead of giving Marissa a chance to start over, we’re forced to watch her die a tragic heroine, as if she was doomed from the start. The fatal car accident in the Season 3 finale is devastating, to say the least, as we watch her hopelessly die in Ryan’s arms.

Killing off Marissa provided the show with an easy way out after they exhausted every possible plotline they could with her character. The O.C. creator Josh Schwartz even admitted that the decision was “born out of feeling creatively like it was the direction the show needed to head and also, quite frankly, a function of needing to do something big to shake up the show.” But it is this careless mishandling of Marissa’s arc that did such a deep disservice to her character.

Marissa Cooper’s biggest crime was being an emotional teenage girl, and she was unreasonably punished for it. She was messy, flawed, and hopelessly tortured with an unseemly amount of trauma during some of the most sensitive years of her life, and yet throughout her hardships remained compassionate and determined to see things through to the end. To reduce her entire journey into one destined for failure completely disregards her innate capacity for growth beyond Orange County, because who knows what kind of beautiful life she could have led had she been given a chance to explore it?