A Mini-Rant about "Romantic" Behaviour

[rj_anderson]

I probably shouldn't be writing this because I have a killer headache and I have just tried to take a nap with no success, which means I am Crankypants. However, I think the point stands regardless of my frame of mind:

Fictional romances which involve two people being so absorbed in each other that they end up being indifferent, insensitive or downright cruel to the other people around them are, IMO, not romantic at all. They are obsessive, unhealthy, co-dependent relationships and make me want to smack both the lovers upside the head.

This is why I started getting very unsettled by Nine/Rose after "The Long Game". It's also why I found the behaviour of Ten/Rose in episodes like "Tooth and Claw" deeply problematic and upsetting, and why Ten's pillow talk to Martha in "The Shakespeare Code" made me grind my teeth.

Similarly, there are a number of popular "oh-so-romantic!" novels I've read where the love interests are all gropey and kissy in front of friends who are single and/or suffering from unrequited feelings and/or going through tough times in their own relationships, and I couldn't buy into the romance or sympathize with those characters at all.

(And IMO Wuthering Heights takes the absolute cake for non-romances, because not only are Heathcliff and Cathy cruel to everybody around them, they're also cruel to each other. As a novel about massively dysfunctional characters involved in a gothic tragedy it's superb; but anybody who interprets WH as a great romance has, to my mind, a highly suspect idea of love.)

Full disclosure: I'm not even going to pretend that this view of mine isn't rooted in personal experience. When I was young and single I had a friend who constantly macked on her boyfriends in front of me, making me feel completely unwanted and intrusive. After one particularly cringeworthy display in the middle of a shopping center I took her aside and quietly asked if she and her boyfriend could reserve the passionate kisses and lingering embraces for times when I was not present, and her response was a plaintive "But we love each other!"

I'm sure she felt very strongly about her feelings of passion for her boyfriend being bigger and more important than anyone else's feelings, and how this demonstrated the Epic Quality of Their Love. But I'm also sure, to this day, that she was wrong. (Not least because she and that boyfriend broke up a few weeks later.)

Or to use a non-physical example, in my single days I once got a letter from a recently-married cousin saying, "Marriage is fantastic! I highly recommend it, you should try it sometime!" Which made me want to HULK SMASH because at that point I'd never even been on a date, and not for lack of wanting or trying either. But I swallowed my bitterness and wrote her a polite response saying that I would dearly love to meet a wonderful person and get married, but this was really not in my control, and that I was happy for her contentment in her marriage, but perhaps she might consider not saying such things to other single people in future because they could be quite painful and upsetting.

(Perhaps not surprisingly, she never wrote to me again.)

Anyway, I have now been happily married for fourteen years and have three children, but my feelings about this matter have not changed a whit, and I'm certain that I'm not alone. So to my fellow writers in the process of trying to create truly swoonworthy romances, may I suggest that before your characters rush into a clinch or share a sly in-joke or otherwise engage in exclusionary behaviour in front of others, you and they should stop and think a little about how those other people might feel.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

Yes. This.
I can't rewatch "Tooth and Claw" without fast-forwarding through the Doctor/Rose bits. It's just sickening.

[rj_anderson]

I hate "The Idiot's Lantern" for similar reasons. The scene where Ten gets furious because Rose's face has been stolen is written in such a way as to make it seem like the other people simply don't matter by comparison, and that he wouldn't have taken drastic action if it hadn't been Rose at stake. UGH. That is not my Doctor, thank you very much.

[kerravonsen]

I think "Tooth and Claw" frustrates me more because Queen Victoria was so AWESOME in it. The juxtaposition of the awesome and the awful makes the awful so much worse in comparison. Whereas "The Idiot's Lantern" had other problems besides the Ten/Rose stuff so it was only one problem amidst others.

I prefer Nine/Rose to Ten/Rose not necessarily because I dislike Ten (though I do love Nine more) but because I dislike what Rose became with Ten; so much less than she used to be.

Do you realize that it's because of you that I can even conceive of someone being romantically involved with the Doctor? Two words: "Touching Indigo".

Actually, now that I think of it, you're responsible for me shipping Snape with people, too. If it hadn't been for your Snape/Maud, I would never have thought of him as a romantic figure. You're corrupting my gen-loving soul! (smirk)

Oh, and as I meant to say before: you're crossposting! Yay!
Can I make a request? Can you turn on the link to LJ in your crossposting? It makes it easier to follow the discussion on both sites. This is how you do it:
1. Go to Account Settings on Dreamwidth
2. Go to Other Sites
3. Look at the "Accounts" section for the LJ account.
4. Click on "Display Crosspost Link" to enable it.

Thanks.

[rj_anderson]

I prefer Nine/Rose to Ten/Rose not necessarily because I dislike Ten (though I do love Nine more) but because I dislike what Rose became with Ten; so much less than she used to be.

This. Although I do love Ten more, or at least I love David Tennant more for being such a fanboy at heart, and trying so incredibly hard to make a silk purse out of a lot of painfully sow's eared scripts and dialogue. I don't know that anybody else could have kept me watching Ten as long as I did. But even so there were an ever-increasing number of moments when I wanted to drop-kick Ten through the goalposts of the universe, and by the end I simply couldn't take any more and stopped watching. (Not that I have any regrets about missing "Last of the Time Lords", mind you.) I didn't have that trouble with Eccleston's Nine, but on the other hand I feel no particular desire to re-watch any of the Nine episodes either, whereas I've re-watched quite a few of Ten's.

And thank you for the nice words about the fic!

As for the crossposting thing, it's a little tricky. I know how to crosspost to LJ and have the option already set up here on DW, but I don't always like to do so automatically because I f-lock fannish and/or personal stuff on LJ these days, and I can't get DW to crosspost and f-lock at the same time (or at least I don't know how to get it to do that), so I have to do the repost manually or the post will not only be public on LJ, it'll also end up on Facebook.

(Which, admittedly, is not the end of the world, but is bound to frustrate and bewilder the people who only follow me for writing-related updates, or who only know me in RL and not in a fannish capacity.)

[kerravonsen]

So have you seen Eleven or not?

As for the crossposting thing, it's a little tricky. I know how to crosspost to LJ and have the option already set up here on DW, but I don't always like to do so automatically because I f-lock fannish and/or personal stuff on LJ these days, and I can't get DW to crosspost and f-lock at the same time (or at least I don't know how to get it to do that), so I have to do the repost manually or the post will not only be public on LJ, it'll also end up on Facebook.

I'm a bit confused.
1. By default, crossposting sets the same level of privacy as on DW.
2. However, one can set the minimum privacy levels for crossposting, so you could set the minumum security to "Friends" and it would be f-locked on LJ (Account Settings -> Other Sites -> LJ -> Details -> Minimum Security)
3. One can choose, for individual posts, where you crosspost to, so you could deselect Facebook if you wanted.
4. I wasn't talking about automatic crossposting, I was talking about the link-thing. Oh. The link-thing isn't there because both posts were manually posted. Now I get it.

[rj_anderson]

Oh yes, I started watching again immediately with "The Eleventh Hour" and haven't looked back since. I adore Eleven. In fact, no lie, he is possibly my favorite Doctor ever, or at least he's closely tied with Five. (It's hard for me to make that call because I had such a huge crush on Peter Davison and I don't have a crush on Matt Smith at all, but I do think Eleven's better scripts are better than almost anything Five had to work with. Also, River.)

Re crossposting, what I want is to be able to post something publicly on DW and have it automatically crosspost to LJ as a locked post. Then LJ won't export the post to Facebook and all will be well. But I'm thinking that what I may need to do is post to DW as "Friends", let the export to LJ happen, and then unlock the DW post? I'll have to try that next time and see how it works.

[kerravonsen]

I adore Eleven. In fact, no lie, he is possibly my favorite Doctor ever, or at least he's closely tied with Five.

(grin) They're very similar in some ways. They have that dorky charm.
I haven't actually decided where I rate Eleven. Nine, Five and Eight are still my tops.

but I do think Eleven's better scripts are better than almost anything Five had to work with

True.

Re crossposting, what I want is to be able to post something publicly on DW and have it automatically crosspost to LJ as a locked post.

Yes, you can do that.
1. Account Settings
2. Other Sites
3. LJ -> Details
4. LJ-XMLRPC options Minimum Security -> set to "Friends", rather than "Public".

This will ensure that everything you crosspost from DW to LJ will be f-locked on LJ while being public on DW.

[rj_anderson]

YES! Problem solved. Thank you so much!

[msagara]

I came here from a twitter link - but have to ask a question. I do post my LJ posts to Facebook, because I don’t do anything on LJ that I don’t want public. But I can turn off the cross-posting entirely, or I can turn it off for individual posts. I don’t cross-post comments on other people’s posts to Facebook (also a setting).

Have they somehow changed it so that you can’t?

[rj_anderson]

I can turn off posting to Facebook if I post to LJ separately. But if the LJ post comes through as an auto-post from DW, I can't turn off the relay to FB manually because I didn't make the post manually and it's already created, if that makes any sense.

Kat's suggestion fixes the problem of the DW->LJ posts defaulting to public... except that I've just realized that means none of my LJ posts will go to Facebook now, even the ones I'd like to. *headdesk*

So I guess I'm just going to have to go on posting fannish stuff here, where it will go to LJ as a locked post by default, and writing stuff over on LJ, where it can flow through to Facebook as it otter. But then I'll have to come back here and manually repost the LJ-first stuff. Meh.

[allthingsholy]

That you have a Molly Hooper bitchface icon on this post is a blessed thing. But more than that: yes, to all of the above.

[rj_anderson]

I hope to see more of that face in S3, frankly. :D

[pbristow]

Amen, absolutely, and pass the popcorn! To this comment, *and* your original post. =:o}

[infiniteviking]

Word. So much. To everything here.

[goldvermilion87]

HEATHCLIFFE AND CATHERINE! URGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So everyone in the world says that Wuthering Heights is on of the best and romantic-est novel ever, and yet I've never met ANYONE who actually likes it...

The self-absorbed lovers comment makes me think of C.S. Lewis' quote that "lovers look at each other, and friends look in the same direction." I have thought of that while trying to put my finger on why so many "no ship but friendship" fics(to quote an author who occasionally drives me batty) feel like romance.

Now I'm also wondering how well pure romance ever would work... and if perhaps pure romance is ultimately too private to make interesting reading.

(As far as my own attempts at writing go, though, I've never experienced, therefore have nothing to say.)