Many endings can be happy, you know?
Jan. 9th, 2020 09:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
breathedoutI've been ruminating over the past few days about the current state of, hm—narratives around queerness, traditional romance, and happy endings, I guess? Particularly vis-a-vis (1) the section of greywash's year-in-review writing post where she talks about procreation and the institution of marriage in post-S4 Magicians fandom, and (2) this making-of video in which some of the stars of Schitt's Creek discuss, among other things, Dan Levy's personal relationship to marriage. (At least... I think that's what they're discussing.)
My TL;DR here is: I desperately crave a paradigm shift toward a greater diversity in what we as a culture consider "happy" endings, queer and otherwise; and the continued forcible emphasis on traditional romantic relationships (+ weddings, sometimes + kids) as the only acceptable marker of happy endings makes me sad and alienated. None of which is exactly breaking news, ahahaha, but I'm still going to go on about it! At some length! So. Buckle up, if that's your thing.
So in Greywash's post, she talks about her frustration with the way the Magicians showrunners manipulated their post-Season-4 viewership into basically ONLY being able to "fix" the irresponsible and traumatic killing-off-by-suicide of their mentally ill main character Quentin, by giving him a traditional marriage-and-kids ending with his would-be partner Eliot—thereby negating or sidelining the (to Gins, and also to me) much more interesting, rare, and liminal queer dynamics that drew her to the show in the first place. She writes:
I share this resentment. Less so, in my case, because I was particularly attached to a different/less traditional version of Eliot and Quentin's dynamic (I don't hate the pairing or anything, and will obviously read it when written by authors I love, but I was never, and am not now, very drawn to it or interested by it on its own merits), and more because:
(1) post-S4 I feel like it's basically impossible to write about, for example, Eliot and Margo's relationship, which I always found WAY more interesting and personally meaningful, without either also centering Quentin or else coming off as an asshole who approves of suicide-baiting; and
(2) the forcible refocusing of the fandom onto Traditional Romance and Kids makes it even easier and more... understandable? meta-textually excusable? for fix-it fanworks to sideline Margo in favor of Quentin in a way that's really personally painful to me for a whole bunch of reasons, part of which have to do with being a woman who dislikes kids/marriage and yet who must still live in a misogynist society; and part of which have to do with being a lesbian or near-lesbian who has intentionally organized her life around women and is yet still routinely asked to empathize with, cater to, and be generally fascinated by, men*; and part of which have to do with being a human whose primary, life-organizing relationship does not center around romance; and part of which I don't really totally understand; I just know it hurts and I don't want to read it.
(As a side-note: one of the many, many things I appreciated aboutgreywash's MHHE novel, our place in the family of things, is that it does a tremendous amount of work to actually depict and negotiate an ongoing central place for Margo in Eliot's life, even as Eliot is entering into a kind of settled domesticity with Quentin that Margo wants no part of. That is QUITE the balancing act, and Gins pulled it off impressively. It made the novel much less painful and erasing for me to read—and, I imagine, for her to write! But it is also one of the factors that led to the 200k+ word count. Understandably, not everyone will have that level of commitment.)
I mean, whatever; my personal relationship to The Magicians fandom and source material is its own whole long post that will probably never be written. But I'm bringing it up here because, as Gins points out, it's an especially stark and clear-cut example of the ways in which narrative shaping can force us back into frameworks that don't necessarily serve us. Because we're given these impossible choices where either Part A of our selves can be seen and validated and recognized, or Part B of our selves can be seen and validated and recognized, but even though those two parts aren't inherently in conflict, the narrative paints them as a mutually exclusive either/or choice. In the case of The Magicians, that forcing of viewers' hands was done through trauma which also denied the traumatized characters a very specific thing: of course, in this scenario, people want to fix it by giving the characters that specific thing instead. That specific thing didn't have to be the narrative carrot being dangled in front of the characters, but it was; and the trauma certainly didn't have to be inflicted, but it was; and here we are.
I was still kind of mulling all this over when I happened to watch this video featuring four Schitt's Creek actors charmingly drinking Champagne and discussing some behind-the-scenes snippets from the first episode of their sixth and final season. The segment I'm going to refer to is toward the end, and if you don't want to watch the whole thing or are trying to avoid minor spoilers, here's a transcript whose accuracy I can't guarantee but I did my best. (In case you don't watch this delightful show, the relevant details are that one of the main characters, David, who is played by one of the show's writer-directors, Dan Levy, got engaged to his boyfriend Patrick in the previous season, and they are now planning their wedding.)
So: I don't know anything about Dan Levy's personal marriage politics beyond the fact that he's an out gay man who has never been married. Nor, for that matter, do I know anything about about Emily Hampshire's marriage politics beyond the fact that, according to Wikipedia, she identifies as pansexual and has been married once to a man and engaged once to a woman. So I'm not... totally sure exactly what constitutes, for Hampshire, the "moment" which she doesn't envision either Levy or herself as ever having (and which he implicitly agrees with her that he will not have, via cracking up when she says it). I'm also pretty curious about what Levy would have gone on to say in his compare/contrast of himself with his character David: how does having clarity to know what one wants, for Levy, relate to not being like David, relate to not getting married or being a "bride"? There's definitely some ambiguity here that could be fruitfully unpacked in a format longer than a short segment of a 2-minute promo video.
But I do definitely—see myself in those 30 seconds of Dan Levy and Emily Hampshire, in a way that I don't necessarily see myself in David Rose or Patrick Brewer. I was linked to this video from the Instagram story of a self-identified spinster friend of mine (the fabulous rare.device, for those who don't already follow her) who captioned it "Queer people talking about not being interested in getting married gives me some feelings, wow," and I have to say: I hardcore relate to that read on this interaction. Levy's sort of amused and bemused contemplation of himself "as a bride" being "a foreign concept"; Hampshire's recognition of David's envisioning-the-wedding "moment" as one that neither she nor he are likely to share; his riotous face-covering laughter at her articulation of that trait they share: all of these things reflect my feelings about weddings, too.
(Full disclosure, Levy's bemusement reflects the, uh... kind-and-gentle border, I guess I'll say, of the country that is my feelings on the cultural omnipresence of marriage. I go further and think it's a pretty toxic institution overall, both for the way it's been used over and over again to divide acceptable relationships from illegal ones along lines of race, class, sexual orientation, exclusivity, and so on, and then enforce that dividing line by denying cultural benefits to people on the wrong side of said line; and also for the way it's been dangled in front of women as a necessity for happiness and respectability, encouraging them/us to shame and look down on other women who haven't attained it while at the same time often severely limiting our control of our own finances once we have attained the married state; and also for the way that the obsession with the nuclear married family since the 50s has isolated us from our larger social support systems; and also for its status as the ONLY routine and affordable way that people can protect each other's status as long-term life partners, co-parents, medical decision-makers, insurance-policy-sharers, and next-of-kin for estate purposes—not to mention that it automatically bundles those five functions into one all-purpose category, when very often an individual would be better served having multiple people filling multiple roles. So, yeah, my dislike is larger than Dan Levy saying, essentially, "wow, it's such a foreign concept to think about ME getting MARRIED"—yet that two-second statement STILL constitutes more up-front expression of those feelings than I almost ever get in mainstream media.)
But so—all that's interesting, though. Because Schitt's Creek is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a replay of the Magicians clusterfuck. Dan Levy, the (again) out gay man who plays David, is one of the co-creators and co-directors of the show. David is identified as pansexual on-screen, USING THAT WORD, way back in Season 1 (by another character, but with the simultaneous textual reinforcement of an explanation from David that makes it clear the word comes from his self-identification); and his relationship with Patrick is an explicit focus of the show from Season 3 on. No one is downplaying or backtracking on David and Patrick's queerness on Schitt's Creek. David's and Patrick's prospects of happiness are not being yanked away like Quentin's and Eliot's were; the show is being rightly celebrated for their genuinely intensely endearing dynamic.
And, to be clear: I'm not criticizing Schitt's Creek for having its MC queer male couple get married. There are distinct yet equally central elements of both Patrick and David's characters and personal histories that make it very believable to me that traditional, probably-monogamous marriage would be incredibly meaningful to both of them. So it works on a characterization level as well as on the give-queers-happy-endings political meta level which is obviously important to the Levys as well as to many people who watch the show, me included. I want David and Patrick to be happy, and the show has done the work to make me believe that this is an overall happy-making decision for both of these particular characters.
But I do think it's interesting that, over and over, whether they're provided onscreen or just hinted at and then jerked away, "happy endings" remain synonymous with "traditional romances resolving in marriage." And that's apparently true even for queer show-runners who don't personally relate to marriage as a life goal. Which—as a queer person and art-maker who doesn't personally relate to marriage as a life goal, either, and who certainly doesn't relate to being married as the marker of whether or not I'm living a happy or successful life—that makes me feel... some feelings. Some not-great, kind of sad feelings, tbh.
I understand the desire for queer access to Traditional Happy Endings. And I understand that traditionally, that means a wedding or a married-happy-ever-after-with-kids. But as a real-life Queer who actively does not want a wedding—or even necessarily Traditional Romance at all!—to be part of her happy ending, and has been clear since age five that she DEFINITELY doesn't want kids, EVER, it feels pretty fucking shitty to me that recognizably happy queer endings that involve DIFFERENT metrics of happiness and success are apparently still so hard to find.
I'm not interested in holding queer creators—or the sub-set of queer creators who don't want their own lives to include marriage—to a higher standard than those exploitative Magicians assholes and others like them. And I do recognize that what I'm about to say is quite the extrapolation to make off 30 seconds of video. But assuming my read on it has any merit, I do wonder how many people like Dan Levy are out there making wedding stories because our cultural frameworks have forced them to work within a false dichotomy—or because weddings are happiness shorthand—when the feelings that weddings actually evoke in that individual person are more along the lines of neutrality, or bemused ambivalence, or worse. Speaking personally: whereas the concept of a wedding, or being called a wife, makes me feel suffocated and erased, there are other things that do give me that feeling of generative connection with the people and communities I love. I just wish we had more queer happy endings focusing on those instead.
*This is a problem I'm having with fannish engagement more generally at the moment, on which: possibly more later? Possibly not. Who knows! Life is wild.
greywash's year-in-review writing post where she talks about procreation and the institution of marriage in post-S4 Magicians fandom, and (2) this making-of video in which some of the stars of Schitt's Creek discuss, among other things, Dan Levy's personal relationship to marriage. (At least... I think that's what they're discussing.) My TL;DR here is: I desperately crave a paradigm shift toward a greater diversity in what we as a culture consider "happy" endings, queer and otherwise; and the continued forcible emphasis on traditional romantic relationships (+ weddings, sometimes + kids) as the only acceptable marker of happy endings makes me sad and alienated. None of which is exactly breaking news, ahahaha, but I'm still going to go on about it! At some length! So. Buckle up, if that's your thing.
So in Greywash's post, she talks about her frustration with the way the Magicians showrunners manipulated their post-Season-4 viewership into basically ONLY being able to "fix" the irresponsible and traumatic killing-off-by-suicide of their mentally ill main character Quentin, by giving him a traditional marriage-and-kids ending with his would-be partner Eliot—thereby negating or sidelining the (to Gins, and also to me) much more interesting, rare, and liminal queer dynamics that drew her to the show in the first place. She writes:
I really resent this meta effect where, because they set up the idea that Quentin and Eliot might with at least part of themselves want something that looked like A Traditional Romance, then so directly demolished the chance of that ever happening, fix-its (to what was already canonically a rich and complex queer relationship) will, inevitably, naturally cluster on exactly A Traditional Romance, which is, like, fine, that's a thing lots of people do actually want, but it's also just way less narratively interesting. I'm fucking furious that they set it up so that the weight of our Thwarted Narrative Desire, as consumers of this source, will almost have to settle on Quentin and Eliot falling into A Traditional Romance, because the showrunners aligned the narrative with that as the characters' proximate end goal, right before taking any hope of it actually happening away.
I share this resentment. Less so, in my case, because I was particularly attached to a different/less traditional version of Eliot and Quentin's dynamic (I don't hate the pairing or anything, and will obviously read it when written by authors I love, but I was never, and am not now, very drawn to it or interested by it on its own merits), and more because:
(1) post-S4 I feel like it's basically impossible to write about, for example, Eliot and Margo's relationship, which I always found WAY more interesting and personally meaningful, without either also centering Quentin or else coming off as an asshole who approves of suicide-baiting; and
(2) the forcible refocusing of the fandom onto Traditional Romance and Kids makes it even easier and more... understandable? meta-textually excusable? for fix-it fanworks to sideline Margo in favor of Quentin in a way that's really personally painful to me for a whole bunch of reasons, part of which have to do with being a woman who dislikes kids/marriage and yet who must still live in a misogynist society; and part of which have to do with being a lesbian or near-lesbian who has intentionally organized her life around women and is yet still routinely asked to empathize with, cater to, and be generally fascinated by, men*; and part of which have to do with being a human whose primary, life-organizing relationship does not center around romance; and part of which I don't really totally understand; I just know it hurts and I don't want to read it.
(As a side-note: one of the many, many things I appreciated about
greywash's MHHE novel, our place in the family of things, is that it does a tremendous amount of work to actually depict and negotiate an ongoing central place for Margo in Eliot's life, even as Eliot is entering into a kind of settled domesticity with Quentin that Margo wants no part of. That is QUITE the balancing act, and Gins pulled it off impressively. It made the novel much less painful and erasing for me to read—and, I imagine, for her to write! But it is also one of the factors that led to the 200k+ word count. Understandably, not everyone will have that level of commitment.)I mean, whatever; my personal relationship to The Magicians fandom and source material is its own whole long post that will probably never be written. But I'm bringing it up here because, as Gins points out, it's an especially stark and clear-cut example of the ways in which narrative shaping can force us back into frameworks that don't necessarily serve us. Because we're given these impossible choices where either Part A of our selves can be seen and validated and recognized, or Part B of our selves can be seen and validated and recognized, but even though those two parts aren't inherently in conflict, the narrative paints them as a mutually exclusive either/or choice. In the case of The Magicians, that forcing of viewers' hands was done through trauma which also denied the traumatized characters a very specific thing: of course, in this scenario, people want to fix it by giving the characters that specific thing instead. That specific thing didn't have to be the narrative carrot being dangled in front of the characters, but it was; and the trauma certainly didn't have to be inflicted, but it was; and here we are.
I was still kind of mulling all this over when I happened to watch this video featuring four Schitt's Creek actors charmingly drinking Champagne and discussing some behind-the-scenes snippets from the first episode of their sixth and final season. The segment I'm going to refer to is toward the end, and if you don't want to watch the whole thing or are trying to avoid minor spoilers, here's a transcript whose accuracy I can't guarantee but I did my best. (In case you don't watch this delightful show, the relevant details are that one of the main characters, David, who is played by one of the show's writer-directors, Dan Levy, got engaged to his boyfriend Patrick in the previous season, and they are now planning their wedding.)
Dan Levy (David): "Me as a bride is such a foreign concept just generally speaking, that this is such a hypothetical situation. I am not like David—" [Annie Murphy makes a doubtful face into the camera] "—in that capacity. I would have the clarity to know what I want—"
Emily Hampshire (Stevie): "Well I did see you looking out [over the grounds of the venue David and Patrick are considering for their wedding]—and I felt like, seeing in your eyes, this—and I was like, you're never gonna have this moment." [Dan Levy starts cracking up]. "You're never gonna have this moment, and it seemed like it was the perfect moment for you if you were ever gonna have it."
Annie Murphy (Alexis): "WOW." [Helps Dan to chug his Champagne]
Emily Hampshire: "Hey, I'm never gonna have it either! I'm never gonna have it either!"
So: I don't know anything about Dan Levy's personal marriage politics beyond the fact that he's an out gay man who has never been married. Nor, for that matter, do I know anything about about Emily Hampshire's marriage politics beyond the fact that, according to Wikipedia, she identifies as pansexual and has been married once to a man and engaged once to a woman. So I'm not... totally sure exactly what constitutes, for Hampshire, the "moment" which she doesn't envision either Levy or herself as ever having (and which he implicitly agrees with her that he will not have, via cracking up when she says it). I'm also pretty curious about what Levy would have gone on to say in his compare/contrast of himself with his character David: how does having clarity to know what one wants, for Levy, relate to not being like David, relate to not getting married or being a "bride"? There's definitely some ambiguity here that could be fruitfully unpacked in a format longer than a short segment of a 2-minute promo video.
But I do definitely—see myself in those 30 seconds of Dan Levy and Emily Hampshire, in a way that I don't necessarily see myself in David Rose or Patrick Brewer. I was linked to this video from the Instagram story of a self-identified spinster friend of mine (the fabulous rare.device, for those who don't already follow her) who captioned it "Queer people talking about not being interested in getting married gives me some feelings, wow," and I have to say: I hardcore relate to that read on this interaction. Levy's sort of amused and bemused contemplation of himself "as a bride" being "a foreign concept"; Hampshire's recognition of David's envisioning-the-wedding "moment" as one that neither she nor he are likely to share; his riotous face-covering laughter at her articulation of that trait they share: all of these things reflect my feelings about weddings, too.
(Full disclosure, Levy's bemusement reflects the, uh... kind-and-gentle border, I guess I'll say, of the country that is my feelings on the cultural omnipresence of marriage. I go further and think it's a pretty toxic institution overall, both for the way it's been used over and over again to divide acceptable relationships from illegal ones along lines of race, class, sexual orientation, exclusivity, and so on, and then enforce that dividing line by denying cultural benefits to people on the wrong side of said line; and also for the way it's been dangled in front of women as a necessity for happiness and respectability, encouraging them/us to shame and look down on other women who haven't attained it while at the same time often severely limiting our control of our own finances once we have attained the married state; and also for the way that the obsession with the nuclear married family since the 50s has isolated us from our larger social support systems; and also for its status as the ONLY routine and affordable way that people can protect each other's status as long-term life partners, co-parents, medical decision-makers, insurance-policy-sharers, and next-of-kin for estate purposes—not to mention that it automatically bundles those five functions into one all-purpose category, when very often an individual would be better served having multiple people filling multiple roles. So, yeah, my dislike is larger than Dan Levy saying, essentially, "wow, it's such a foreign concept to think about ME getting MARRIED"—yet that two-second statement STILL constitutes more up-front expression of those feelings than I almost ever get in mainstream media.)
But so—all that's interesting, though. Because Schitt's Creek is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a replay of the Magicians clusterfuck. Dan Levy, the (again) out gay man who plays David, is one of the co-creators and co-directors of the show. David is identified as pansexual on-screen, USING THAT WORD, way back in Season 1 (by another character, but with the simultaneous textual reinforcement of an explanation from David that makes it clear the word comes from his self-identification); and his relationship with Patrick is an explicit focus of the show from Season 3 on. No one is downplaying or backtracking on David and Patrick's queerness on Schitt's Creek. David's and Patrick's prospects of happiness are not being yanked away like Quentin's and Eliot's were; the show is being rightly celebrated for their genuinely intensely endearing dynamic.
And, to be clear: I'm not criticizing Schitt's Creek for having its MC queer male couple get married. There are distinct yet equally central elements of both Patrick and David's characters and personal histories that make it very believable to me that traditional, probably-monogamous marriage would be incredibly meaningful to both of them. So it works on a characterization level as well as on the give-queers-happy-endings political meta level which is obviously important to the Levys as well as to many people who watch the show, me included. I want David and Patrick to be happy, and the show has done the work to make me believe that this is an overall happy-making decision for both of these particular characters.
But I do think it's interesting that, over and over, whether they're provided onscreen or just hinted at and then jerked away, "happy endings" remain synonymous with "traditional romances resolving in marriage." And that's apparently true even for queer show-runners who don't personally relate to marriage as a life goal. Which—as a queer person and art-maker who doesn't personally relate to marriage as a life goal, either, and who certainly doesn't relate to being married as the marker of whether or not I'm living a happy or successful life—that makes me feel... some feelings. Some not-great, kind of sad feelings, tbh.
I understand the desire for queer access to Traditional Happy Endings. And I understand that traditionally, that means a wedding or a married-happy-ever-after-with-kids. But as a real-life Queer who actively does not want a wedding—or even necessarily Traditional Romance at all!—to be part of her happy ending, and has been clear since age five that she DEFINITELY doesn't want kids, EVER, it feels pretty fucking shitty to me that recognizably happy queer endings that involve DIFFERENT metrics of happiness and success are apparently still so hard to find.
I'm not interested in holding queer creators—or the sub-set of queer creators who don't want their own lives to include marriage—to a higher standard than those exploitative Magicians assholes and others like them. And I do recognize that what I'm about to say is quite the extrapolation to make off 30 seconds of video. But assuming my read on it has any merit, I do wonder how many people like Dan Levy are out there making wedding stories because our cultural frameworks have forced them to work within a false dichotomy—or because weddings are happiness shorthand—when the feelings that weddings actually evoke in that individual person are more along the lines of neutrality, or bemused ambivalence, or worse. Speaking personally: whereas the concept of a wedding, or being called a wife, makes me feel suffocated and erased, there are other things that do give me that feeling of generative connection with the people and communities I love. I just wish we had more queer happy endings focusing on those instead.
*This is a problem I'm having with fannish engagement more generally at the moment, on which: possibly more later? Possibly not. Who knows! Life is wild.
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Date: 2020-01-10 06:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-10 06:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-10 03:12 pm (UTC)I'm grateful for your articulation of the importance/existence/possibility of more different queer happy endings. This is a frame I can use to work through at least some of my existential crisis. I haven't started dreaming of some fantasy wedding, but you've helped me recognize that most of the texts I've used to investigate this desire so far are based on that idealized HEA model, and I should be careful not to limit my exploration like that.
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Date: 2020-01-10 06:26 pm (UTC)*Romantically, in the modern sense, that is. I rarely read historical fiction of this type for various reasons, but a woman of, say, Jane Austen's era desiring to get married is a completely different kettle of fish.
(I love arranged marriage as a fic concept but the execution always makes me sigh because, like. I get that the fantasy is falling in love with that person. I get it. But what *I* want out of that trope is two people knowing what needs to be done out of duty and doing it, not resentfully, and becoming friends and partners
in crimein the process. That's the dynamic that interests me! The closest I've ever gotten to that in fiction is two characters deciding to get married because they were both unhappily in love with their siblings and figured hey, we'll never find anyone else who gets it, at least this way we'll be able to commiserate.)no subject
Date: 2020-01-10 06:50 pm (UTC)(It ends hopefully but before anyone is certain What Now, which I also love, because that is. Visibly a process that would take at least a year before anyone could BE certain.)
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Date: 2020-01-30 01:36 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-30 02:04 pm (UTC)... the entire cast are literally each individually the worst human being in the world? (King Lear + Murdochs. Yeah. The audience is dramatically divided between people with a primary interest in entrenched familial abuse patterns and people with a primary interest in re-evaluating the guillotine as an instrument of economic regulation, but everyone ends up having both reactions simultaneously at one point or another.)
This should serve as a comprehensive reference point for how blazingly in-character that story actually is. (out to and including "of COURSE the only person Roman Roy can think of as a witness for his shotgun wedding is literally his current girlfriend who had not previously realized that he ACTUALLY has feelings about literally his dad's former work wife, he doesn't actually know anyone else who'll meet him at City Hall first thing in the morning.")
no subject
Date: 2020-01-10 07:32 pm (UTC)iawtc
the funny thing is, I think one of the reasons I started consuming queer art as a kid was because they showed an alternate path to traditional marriage. I'm still not very interested in narratives that present monogamous marriage + kids as the definition of a happy, satisfying ending, whether or not the characters are LGBTQ.
(and yes, I am aware that this probably sounds ironic coming from someone who is in a mixed-sex marriage with kids, hahaha, but part of the issue is that I have all that an yet I am not... ended? happily or otherwise. I'm still an individual human with desires and independent interests and ambitions and happy days and sad days, etc. etc.)
this was one of the issues I had with the cmbyn fandom, fwiw. it seemed to me like everyone wanted to read the book as a tragedy, because the lovers don't wind up in a longterm committed relationship with each other. But like, they had fun? They learned a lot about themselves? They had a lot of great sex? And they had a tender, bittersweet parting, after which they went on and found other things to do with their lives. (let's ignore the travesty of a sequel, lol) That, to me, is a happy ending!
I had similar thoughts about the ending of The Age of Innocence -- you mean Madame Olenska got to spend the rest of her life living independently in Paris, taking as many or as few lovers as she chose? SOUNDS GREAT. Good for her. But I know other people view it as a tragic star-crossed lovers situation.
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Date: 2020-01-11 01:15 am (UTC)This is my idea of a happy ending too.
and yes, I am aware that this probably sounds ironic coming from someone who is in a mixed-sex marriage with kids, hahaha
I'm in the same boat, but I see it as a choice for me (and it is certainly one that has come with trade-offs, is still changing and has not created insta-happiness and fulfillment all on its own). Marriage and kids is not something I prescribe for others or see as the only (or the best or the ideal) way to live.
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Date: 2020-01-11 05:11 pm (UTC)(I mean, fiction is "for" a lot of things, but surely that is one of them...)
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Date: 2020-01-10 08:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-10 10:27 pm (UTC)I dunno! I could be wrong. I keep seeking out unconventional-relationship narratives too--or, that's too active a construction; I keep hoping to find them. I feel awkward about a desire to write them for any particular fannish characters I latch onto, largely because of that marriage-is-the-happy-ending thing. Writing against the marriage plot feels like writing against everyone else's happy ending, even when the fandom hasn't been so backed into a corner as the Magicians fandom has.
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Date: 2020-01-11 01:30 am (UTC)I feel the same way, and don't often find them in fandom. When I do, it's accidental and tends to be in a fandom I am not actively in. (
no subject
Date: 2020-01-11 05:16 am (UTC)(This is one of those topics where I have so many thoughts
and loud opinionsthat trying to wrangle all of that mess into the scope of one comment feels like trying to transfer a billion-gallon aquarium into a series of...teacups? Top hats for dogs? Vintage thimbles? *shrug emoji*)Diverse, complex depictions of relationship arcs, plus how self-aware the characters are (or are not) about those specific aspects of life....are incredibly important to me.
no subject
Date: 2020-01-11 10:27 pm (UTC)Certainly when it comes to commercial narratives that have to fit into certain acceptable shapes, enweddingation is going to be a powerful shorthand. But the point of transformative fandom is supposed to be that you don’t have to do what the telly is doing… but which bits of the telly one wants to argue with are going to be shaped by what the telly is fucking up worst. That works for the question of why – other massive ructions aside – fan writers gradually seemed to stop trying to do anything IMO really interesting (read: deviant) with BBC John/Sherlock after the show itself mucked up the basic bond between those two characters. Because people were no longer building on solid ground but trying to restore the ground.
You know the Audre Lorde poem ‘The American Cancer Society’? https://genius.com/Audre-lorde-the-american-cancer-society-or-there-is-more-than-one-way-to-skin-a-coon-annotated It’s harsh, and one can not entirely substitute the packaging of romance tropes for queer people for the packaging of consumer tat for black people… but one could a bit. Happy endings that entail conspicuous consumption.
There’s also the question of playing to the straight viewers. I suspect that the section of the straight audience that will now think ‘I’m watching and approving of gay characters! That makes me progressive, and like myself, and like this show!’ is significant enough to be worth specifically targeting, but that showrunners (with justification) won’t trust that section of the audience to venture beyond that general feelgood factor to engage with queer disruptions of conventional narrative.
… and stuff, much of which is probably me helpfully telling you what you know…
Please do write ALL THE THINGS about your fannish engagement issues. I feel I can engage with people’s fannish engagement issues. And I think I’m having a milder version of the same thing, because while obviously I’m coming from a different personal place in terms of exactly why content speaks to me and what I long for, I don’t see myself following my old friends into any new m/m gigapairings any time soon.
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Date: 2020-01-12 10:57 pm (UTC)Re: Schitt's Creek, I do think for David and Patrick marriage makes sense for their characters, and I love them, but oh boy do I hope that marriage is the extent of their traditional ending and they don't swerve into David suddenly being ok with kids and all that level of "happy ending"
I thought David and Stevie's journey has been really interesting and complex and how they navigated their sexual/romantic/maybe not romantic but something new for both of them emotions that I thought was a thing and have considered too much! Because I feel like we don't get a relationship like theirs on TV much at all but then I got into the fandom a little and I seem to be in a tiny tiny minority that didn't just take them at their words at the end of s1\beginning of s2, or that doesn't see them as being strictly platonic friends.
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Date: 2020-01-13 07:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-14 04:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-17 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-17 11:24 pm (UTC)(I don't object to or necessarily feel alienated by romantic monogamous partnership as a happy ending in fiction, but I do object to it as the happy ending in fiction, and I find the ways in which weddings specifically, and all of their related paraphernalia, are focused on as the signifier of all that baffling--though I am interested in all the things people do with/use marriage for, and my id really likes platonic-and-staying-platonic marriage-of-convenience in a way I almost never see.
And unlike someone above, I do not feel sheepish about writing it, because, well, where else am I going to find it? and I deserve to have things that make me happy in fiction too. There are loads of other fics with romantic weddings for them to read and me to not really get the point of.)
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Date: 2020-02-02 09:16 am (UTC)(I've been having similar feelings about the evolution of the bury your gays trope into surprise!unkillable/immortal gays, both in the sense that I'd prefer a move towards a midpoint called "queer people just get to have complex, dynamic lives" and because I feel like both the end of Magicians s4 and the trope-reversals of bury your gays depend on and engage (and therefore force the audience to process) the expectation of queer tragedy. But trying to make a longer-form argument about that is beyond my mental processing powers just now.)
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Date: 2020-02-27 08:45 am (UTC)so I thought I'd mention it here, if you hadn't seen it & found it valuable!
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Date: 2021-02-10 06:46 am (UTC)Yeah :( I agree that for David and Patrick it works on a characterisation level, and I like that they're not 100% monogamous in a pretty queer way, but I 100% agree with this and this is a great post. Weddings as the monolithic, only happy ending sucks, and the way it covers both Magicians and Schitt's Creek says a lot.
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Date: 2021-04-21 07:01 pm (UTC)