What are your feelings/thoughts on Sawyer/Juliet?

Complicated.

I love Sawyer/Juliet.  I was not expecting them to happen and had this hilarious notion of them in my head and then they did and it was beautiful.  I do believe I was watching La Fleur with @crackly and lost control of my hands.  I love them, I do, they fill me with sunshine and kittens.  But at the same time, I would have really appreciated it if it didn’t coincide with the rather speedy sidelining of Juliet Burke.  I just feel like she sort of falls off the map of narrative agency the more Sawyer/Juliet goes on, and then The Incident happens and there is little more egregious.  I (unsurprisingly) wrote a mini-essay of sorts about the way Lost reduces women to wife/mother roles, and this is part of what I said about Juliet:

When she, Sawyer, and the boaties are left on the island, Juliet has the opportunity to become a true leader. Sawyer somehow takes that position, but Juliet does get a sort of second-in-command, the position of the great woman behind the great man that women have theoretically occupied for centuries. Sawyer goes out to negotiate with Richard; Sawyer concocts lies to protect them in the Dharma camp; Sawyer becomes head of security while Juliet becomes a mechanic, which, given her response to Amy’s labor in ‘La Fleur,’ seems to be almost a sense of self-imposed purgatory for her failure to save pregnant women. Thus, her inability to perform her functional role as protector of women’s reproductive capabilities constitutes punishable behavior.

To a large extent, ‘La Fleur’ is the last time we experience Juliet’s power. The rest of the season she largely functions as an emotional support system for Sawyer, and the finale presents her as an irrational woman acting under jealousy rather than a rational actor with agency. She goes along with Jack’s plan because she is jealous of Kate and suddenly insecure in her relationship with Sawyer. Juliet Burke doesn’t decide to try and blow up an island so she doesn’t have to lose her boyfriend. Juliet Burke doesn’t act irrationally — everything she does is rational, almost too rational, since getting to that island. But the Juliet we see in the finale prior to her final act is one we are meant to read as both irrational and hyper-emotional. This is not to discount Juliet’s strength or sacrifice in detonating that bomb. What it does say, though, is that even in Juliet’s arguably bravest moment, the motivations for her actions are a response to Sawyer, not to her own rational decision-making (to be certain, Jack does quite a lot of irrational thinking in this episode as well). Even when the finale attempts to retcon Juliet’s actions as not born out of jealousy, she says she wanted it to work to get Sawyer off the island. This particular aspect I can respect. People in love should want the best for the one they love, though generally killing oneself for that goal isn’t the best decision. Her name is Juliet, after all. But Sawyer’s all-encompassing grief in season six seems to place Juliet’s death as a plot point on the path of a somehow more vital male character, rather than the loss of a powerful, strong woman in her own right.

So, complicated.  I love them.  Please do not misunderstand.  They make faces and I love faces.  But they also end up sidelining Juliet sometimes and I hate when ships do that, when they shove women to the side.  Lost loves to do that, and Elizabeth was leaving so they had to pull stuff together quickly.  Further, Sawyer/Juliet is hardly the only example.  Lost doesn’t like its women; it is known.  But I am left ultimately with very complicated feelings, the predominant one of which is love!  But then there’s also the other stuff, which I feel compelled to talk about as well.