Whether this is truly the end or not, one question refuses to stay quiet: how can two grown adults wake up after twenty years and suddenly decide they belong to each other?
Twenty years changes everything. People change. Lives take shape, break apart, rebuild. Love if it ever existed should have changed too. And yet, after all that time, after countless casual relationships and missed chances, they only arrive at this realization because jo stepped in and pushed them there. It feels less like fate⦠and more like convenience. Or worse, exaggeration.
And then thereās TJ.
I canāt understand how anyone looks at what heās done and calls it love. Is that really what love is supposed to be? Someone who quietly builds walls around you, closing in from every direction, making sure you never drift too far⦠until one day, twenty years later, he finally says, āI love youā?
Does that sound romantic or suffocating?
What makes it even more unsettling is this: he didnāt even say it first. YW did. After everything, after all those years of silent control and unspoken intent, the confession didnāt come from him.
And yet, people defend it. They praise it. They call it devotion.
But letās be honest would anyone truly want this kind of love in real life? To be watched, guided, cornered into someone elseās orbit for decades, only to have it labeled as destiny in the end?
Thereās a contradiction there thatās hard to ignore. People celebrate it in fiction, but reject it in reality.
And if this really is the ending, then thereās only one undeniable truth:
TJ wins.
Because in the end, he gets exactly what heās always wanted.
TJ didnāt even say āI love youā tho, only Ian did :-l now some people will argue and say that the bs he spewed in the chapter where Ian got shot instead or TJ was his ādeclaration of loveā but that wasnāt it for me. What Jo said and did (letting him go) to Ian at the gas station, that however was and is true love to me.
Looking back at it now... my God! I can't believe all the hype surrounding TJ and Ian's relationship; in reality, half of it was built on nothing. They slept together for the first time right after Ian killed David his very first murder so just imagine the shock he must have felt. Yet, people describe it as "romantic"!
Tj's behavior was toxic and entirely selfish right up until the very end. Even in his final confession, he didnāt prioritize Ian's well being; instead, he demanded that Ian stay by his side, completely disregarding whether Ian actually reciprocated his feelings. It took TJ an entire decade to realize he wanted Ian, yet during that whole time, he treated Ian as personal property simply because he was obsessed with him.
We need to stop confusing toxic obsession with love. In the finale of wet sand, TJ's actions aren't a romantic breakthrough they are an act of emotional pressure. While other characters choose Ianās freedom, TJ chooses control. He spent years treating Ian like an object he owned, and his final "confession" was just the ultimate extension of that lifetime of possessiveness.
And blaming the circumstances or other characters for what happened between Tj and Ian doesnāt change the fact that both of them were cowards; they couldnāt have one proper conversation without turning it into sex
they were still repeating the same pattern. At some point, circumstances stop being an excuse you have to admit that they themselves kept choosing not to confront their problems honestly.
TJ claiming he āunderstandsā Ian while joining a gang to impress him and building a mansion for them to live in together is honestly proof that he understood Ian the least. Even the other characters understood Ian better than he did.
Their relationship gets described as this great passionate love story, but if it actually had the kind of passion people claim it did, they wouldnāt have treated each other the way they did.
Their feelings also didnāt stay frozen in time. Tj eventually grew to genuinely love the gang and made it a priority, while Ian fell in love with Jo.
In the end, they chose each other because Tj was obsessed with Ian, while Ian came back acting like it was his responsibility to āfixā everything. He literally built a house and opened a restaurant for TJ to work in. Itās basically the story of someone finding a perfectly good partner and then going back to the toxic one because they think they can āfixā him.
And Jo? Be serious. Denying that Ian loved Jo is genuinely absurd. Ian knew how to set boundaries with people interested in him, yet he let those barriers down for Jo. He respected Joās preferences, opened himself up emotionally, and wept bitterly when they broke up. That wasnāt some meaningless fling
And most importantly? It was Ian who chose to leave Jo. He was fully aware of the value of what he had and what he was walking away from, yet he ended the relationship knowing for certain that he had squandered the opportunity of a lifetime. He didnāt leave because Jo meant nothing to him; rather, he left despite knowing full well how much he meant to him. In my opinion, it is Ian not Jo who will never truly get over that relationship; after all, he was the one who ended it while fully realizing he had thrown away the chance of a lifetime. And now, here he is applying what he learned from Jo to his relationship with Tj a fact that is, in itself, deeply significant.
Letās be honest the absolute denial surrounding Tjās actions is exhausting. The man is actively destructive, and Ian is facing the consequences of that behavior. It is absurd to watch a community demand a toxic story and then panic when the characters actually act toxic. And youāre not too young to distinguish between right and wrong actions
I have never believed TJ loved Ian. Iām not the kind of person who believes toxic relationships canāt involve love, or who dismisses someoneās feelings as ājust obsession.ā Obsession and love can obviously coexist. You can even end up hurting your partner despite genuinely being in love with them. But TJ is one of the few characters where I can clearly see that his feelings for Ian can never be described as ālove.ā
Like, sorry⦠but dragging the man you claim to love into a gang despite knowing his history with drugs and rape, and putting him in an environment where he could be raped again or killed? Weāve seen Ian almost get killed and raped several times, while TJ was nowhere around to protect him. Luckily, Ian knows how to fight and defend himself, so he was able to survive for 16 years.
Then, when the man you claim to love starts feeling suicidal and canāt take it anymore, you have no empathy for him. Instead, you scheme behind his back to trap him in the same environment that made him want to kill himself in the first place. You ruin his motorcycle career, send him to jail, make it difficult for him to find a job and earn clean money afterward, put him in huge debt, and make him deliver drugs despite knowing his history with drugs, all because you want him to feel tempted and relapse again so you can play the savior like you did in the old days.
But who the fuck sends their partner to jail and is perfectly fine with being separated from them for two whole years?
And TJās abusive behavior was completely downplayed by the narrative because we never got to see Ianās POV about what TJ did. We didnāt see him suffering because of it, we didnāt see how he suffered in jail, and we didnāt see how he suffered because of the debt.
Iāve always considered TJ to be a badly written character because his behavior doesnāt align with his trauma. He supposedly has a fear of abandonment because he lost his family in a car crash, yet his behavior later is to drag Ian, the man he loves and calls āmy only familyā into a dangerous environment full of crime where Ian could have died at any moment. And even when he sees Ian being miserable because of it, he still ruins his chances at having a normal life.
The way TJ treated Ian never aligned with his trauma. Itās because TJ is written based on an archetype rather than from a psychological standpoint. His actions donāt feel like theyāre being driven by his psychology, they feel like theyāre being driven by the archetype he was written to fit.