Why Skate would never have worked
I must confess, I have never been a Skater. Nor did I think Sawyer and Kate were even remotely interesting together.
I've been watching the show since the beginning. I'll put aside my obvious dislike of Kate (because quite frankly, it's not relevent to this discussion).
When the two were first introduced, I was confused. Honestly, I thought they were pushing Kate and Sayid at first, and that intrigued me heavily. I thought they had a subtle chemistry, a little spark that I would have loved if they had explored further.
But then of course, the charming Mr. Ford oozed charisma and his gosh-darn good looks all over the damn television screen, and instead of the writers going for what was interesting, they went for what was easy (a sign of things to come? Perhaps).
It's easy to put your lead female in a pseudo-romantic (yes, pseudo - I'll touch on that later) relationship with one of the most attractive men there - a man to whom chemistry comes easily with just about any other character in that entire cast. I once heard someone say that they could have made Sawyer wine and dine a ROCK, and he has enough natural chemistry with just about anything that there would be legions of people screaming "SOCK ROCKS!!" and getting into message-board debates about the purity of their love.
So yes, Kate and Sawyer had chemistry. On a very basic level, were they pleasing to the eye? Hell yes, they were. Two gorgeous people going at it? Sure! Sign me up and let me shut my brain off.
But therein lies one of the problems - they were two pretty people going at it. At least for me personally, there was never any real substance to their relationship. It felt like, at any moment, you could tug at a bothersome thread and it would all become unraveled.
An example of a bothersome thread: Kate openly admitted that Sawyer reminded her of her abusive father. That in itself is probably one of the most troublesome aspects of Skate, one that I find doesn't get talked about very often. Whatever Kate was trying to prove to herself by attempting a relationship with this man, there's no way it was healthy for either of them. How could you possibly sustain a stable, loving, longterm partnership with the man who reminds you of the man who abused you and your mother? The man you KILLED?
And speaking of partnership - it wasn't one. The two were constantly at odds. Rarely did they find ways to compromise with each other, instead choosing to argue it out, or even worse, solve things by having sex. And while that might be "tv-sexy", I can assure you - constant bickering with a partner does not a good relationship make.
In many ways, Kate and Sawyer are cut from the same cloth. They're two people who came to that Island broken, and worse yet, believing themselves past fixing. They were each so wrapped up in their past that they saw in each other a kindred spirit, a like-minded person that they believed would understand them. And to a certain extent? They did! They did understand each other! It's the exact reason I like them more as friends than I ever would as romantic partners. They WORK as friends. They DO share a bond, they share similarities in their personality. There's nothing wrong with a friendship between these two. Hell, I encourage it.
But when two people who are so fractured in so many similar ways attempt to engage in anything beyond a friendship, that relationship will adopt all the same hang-ups and hurts. It's inevitable. Yes, Kate did try to push Sawyer into "being better", but he rebelled at every step of the way. And I think it's because Kate didn't necessarily encourage him out of love and a belief that he could be better. Indeed, whenever he did screw up, she showed nothing but irritation - and she never seemed altogether that surprised.
Do you ever notice that they rarely called each other by their real names - and even then, it was typically when they were angry at one another? "Freckles" and "Sawyer" - sure, it seemed cute and harmless, until you remember that these are two people who have spent their entire lives building shields around themselves. "Freckles" and "Sawyer" became just that. They never really felt that they could be "Kate" and "James". Not together.
And you know what? At the time, in those circumstances? Maybe it's what they needed for those three months. Certainly, on Sawyer's end, I think there was a dawning realization that he didn't WANT this. Sure, he had feelings for Kate, maybe feelings he'd never had for anyone before. But he saw her indecision. Saw that she used him for comfort, more than she actually wanted to be in a real, honest to goodness relationship with James Ford. He could see that she was using him, to a certain extent. And truth be told, I think he could acknowledge that he was using her, too.
And then Juliet came along. He was never Sawyer to her, only ever James. This was a woman who saw everything he was, acknowledged it, and then told him, simply with the use of his real name, "To me, you're James." Where Kate would attempt to push Sawyer to be something he didn't believe he could be, Juliet stepped back and gave him room, all the while gently beckoning him to step up, to be better on his own time. And eventually came a love, a deep love for him - something unconditional. Something new to the boy that grew up without a family, that, for all we knew, never had a woman, hell, another person, love him like this before. He was finally able to let his shield down, finally able to let go of "Sawyer".
He would always be James, to Juliet. And because of her, he wanted to be better, instead of being dragged tooth and nail to a higher pedestal, only to jump down the first chance he got. She expected great things of him, and he wanted to BE great because now he could.
And for Juliet he became a rock, that person that Juliet had always deserved but had never gotten. He could be strong for her, now, and was ready to love her with all of his worth, because he finally believed he had it.
It's what makes them beautiful, to me. They were precisely what the other needed, but never what the other expected.
It's why I can't understand why someone would, to this day, ship Skate. If you're a fan of either Sawyer OR Kate, how can you want either of them in a relationship that was doomed from the start? How could you not love the way they grew when they were finally apart?
Wow, that was a long damn rant. Uh... anything else to add, anyone?