( Meh. )Now, any Smallville viewer who’s had to suffer from the endless dance of Clark and Lana will tell you the dangers of a creator shipping their own creations, but I think it provides a necessary function that’s missing from Whedon’s works. He sees characters cynically, as puppets that are moved around to create Good Drama. We’re not supposed to root for couples or feel sorry when they split up. We’re supposed to applaud the Good Drama, the labyrinthine workings of this colossal machine built from secrets and characterization and continuity. It whirls and winds and grinds and eventually arrives at a Tragic Conclusion, while we applaud politely and observe that yes, truly, Joss Whedon is our master.
When TPTB have a canon ship, it at least provides a sort of loyal opposition for fans who ship something else. There’s a plan they can oppose, instead of this irrelevant miasma of pairings that are all just as meaningless as the other. It kind of makes you suspicious of all the time spent on relationships in BtVS when by the end of the show, pretty much everyone was either single or widowed (except for the eleventh-hour lesbian relationship, because killing off Tara was politically incorrect). It’s like going into a romantic comedy and being told beforehand that the star couple won’t get together. Joss Whedon always ends his pairings with a tragedy, so what does it matter?
Worse yet, this attitude has spread through the television world much like herpes at a convention in Vegas. Somehow, no relationship, platonic or otherwise, can be complete unless there’s a tragic ending. It makes things… ‘profound.’ Which is why every series of Doctor Who has to end with some tragedy befalling the Companion du jour, despite the chest-thumping proclamation of DW as a humanistic, positive show. Personally, I think the nadir of this kind of thinking was the Enterprise finale, where they leapt ahead several years just to show that nothing had come of the flirtation between the only two likeable characters with chemistry, indeed, killing off one of them to lend the series finale some unearned ‘oomph.’
Of course, this is because the conventional wisdom says that Moonlighting started to suck when David and Maddie got together.
That was over twenty years ago.
Think about this. Imagine you’re writing a story, and someone comes up to you and says you shouldn’t go in X direction with the plot because another story did something similar twenty years ago and people didn’t like it. What would you say? “Well, maybe they didn’t do it right, but I’m going to do better!” “But here it fits the characters, and lets me tell all kinds of new story!”
Apparently, a lot of people say “Righty-o, more of the same old, same old then!”
They didn’t want Clark Kent and Lois Lane to be married. They don’t want Peter Parker and Mary-Jane to be married. They just want this eternal circle-jerk of sexual tension, as if this is the grand poombah of storytelling greatness. Sexual tension.
Unresolved sexual tension.
For some reason, romantic love is always a mirage on the horizon, never something tangible, consummated, treated maturely. Which is pretty dang weird. We don’t have this problem with platonic love. Dean and Sam go through most episodes with their brotherly love never in doubt, sometimes going out of their way to affirming it, sometimes having it threatened by fighting, but it’s always in evidence. It’s the backbone of the whole goddamn show. Imagine how silly it would be if every episode ended with them WANTING to play two-player on their X-Box or catch a midnight showing of Star Wars, but getting tongue-tied at the last minute. Or if the sweep week episode of Stargate Atlantis had Rodney and Shepherd giving each other high-fives, then never talking about it again and getting sheepish every time it was brought up.
Yet, the idea of treating romantic love with the same kind of consistent dignity is never broached. For some reason, heterosexual monogamy is a taboo. It’s not just outrageous, it’s NUTRAGEOUS.
( The thing is (and bringing it back around to Dr. Horrible)... ) ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
