Again we find ourselves at the doorsteps of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There are just so many reasons to come back to this show. As this is another edition of Shipping Confessions, we are looking at yet another non-canon ship from this masterpiece of a television series.
I say that I like femslash because I find myself attracted to femslash pairings easier than slash or heterosexual ships. I don't mean that I have more femslash pairings than any other kind of pairing, just that there is something special I feel towards femslash pairings. I don't fetishize these kinds of pairings to the point it affects my perception of real people, like some others do.
I never bought into the relationship between Jesse Flores and Derek Reese. The pairing made Derek dumber just so the pairing would work. However, I can't deny that it's a canon ship. But who I pair Jesse with in the show is not canon and yet works so much better.
I pair Jesse up with Riley Dawson. Not because they are two girls but because they fit so nicely together.
This is a ship in which only one of the pairing holds any real power. Jesse Flores is that person. She is a conniving woman that isn't afraid to do the darkest things in order to see her plan completed. Jesse decides to go back in time with Riley Dawson in a plot to have John Connor kill/destroy Cameron.
While Jesse x Derek is canon I believe she does not really love the older Reese boy. I think it is the fact that she is using him that she gets worried about him not being with her. Any feelings she had for her Derek (Jesse and Derek are from two different timelines, long story short) were lost when she decided to enact her plan.
Jesse has a great hatred for Terminators and so didn't like how close Cameron got to John Connor in her future. So destroying an influence that pushed the Resistance in the wrong direction was something Jesse didn't mind doing. However, she forgot that Cameron and John were both close and the Terminator put John in the center of her universe.
Riley Dawson was basically a nobody in the Resistance and Jesse chose her. It would seem that Jesse chose Riley for no other reason than she thought the girl would be attractive to John and didn't question authority.
In other words: it would seem as though Jesse thought of Riley as nothing more than a weakling.
However, there is some part of Jesse that wants to drop the facade and abandon her plan. There was something else to her choosing Riley to be part of her plan than just to be attractive to John. She chose Riley because the girl was also attractive to her.
Riley Dawson is a pitiful character. She is one that doesn't seem to fit in with the rest of the Terminator Universe. I think this makes her unlikable to a lot of the Terminator fanbase as well as to the Jameron (John Connor x Cameron) Shippers.
To me, though, I just she her as pitiful. I think she accepted not because she's a weak character, but because she felt attracted to Jesse. Here's a good looking woman telling Riley she wants the girl to come with her. So Riley follows.
Riley stays with Jesse partly because she is weak and being abused by the older woman, but also because she loves Jesse. Riley must sense that Jesse isn't as open to a relationship as she is, so she acts like a good little girl. She follows the plan.
Riley never loves John, but pretends to because she loves Jesse. She believes that if she follows the plan Jesse will love her. There is at least one point where she was physically abused and another point where she just loses it. But she handles it all because she loves Jesse and believes there is no one else that can love her.
The scene where Jesse kills Riley is just full of tension. Riley has found out that Jesse's plan revolves around Cameron killing Riley. So Riley goes to Jesse because she feels betrayed. Riley feels so betrayed and so lost that death is the only way out.
The woman she loved was willing to sacrifice her. Riley had also been thinking of suicide (including one scene where she cut herself in the bathroom) because she just could not handle there being a Judgement Day. That what she had seen in the future was going to happen again.
So when Jesse killed her she was happy. Because if she couldn't have Jesse, at least she didn't have to live in a world that she was terrified of.
Jesse didn't like killing Riley. She only did it because of her warped sense of duty. She had to kill Riley or the girl would tell John about the plan. After she kills Riley, Jesse pauses before she takes the body out. Jesse knows she loves Riley and is disgusted at herself for what she did.
Jesse even swims at the pool her and Riley used to go to. While this may seem cruel, it is probably Jesse's way of dealing with the guilt. She recalls why she did what she did and feels close to Riley.
Jesse and Riley don't have a perfect relationship by any stretch of the imagination. Both have faults that ultimately destroyed both of them, but they did love each other. They both cared about each other. It's just neither could do what was necessary for them to find peace with each other.
Jesse is my least favorite TSCC character and Riley is despised by most of the fandom. However, I like Jesse only as she relates to this ship and believe Riley is given much more hate than she deserves.
What is up for the next Shipping Confessions? We go into the show Revolution and explore a type of pairing that some people might consider "gross" and "perverted". But I consider okay since it's in the realm of fiction.
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