#anyway it was about queerness and loss and what loss means thematically in queer narratives

[dallonwrites]

okay actually looked at the lover boy wip intro again and this has me crazy because the grief in this was meant to all be about bobby but "remember that his favourite fruit was peaches and try not to cry over it" got me because felix's favourite fruit being peaches is like. a recent but definitive part of his character. and i can't remember if i just used peaches as a placeholder for bobby's favourite fruit (he does not give peach to me) and if i first wrote this before or after i decided peaches were felix's BUT now i'm like. what if this passage is him grieving bobby but it spirals around his grief for his relationship with felix??? find a lover the way you found felix and don't lose him this time but also find a lover because you're trying to find a connection as deep as the one you had with your best friend even though you know it can never be replicated. you can never find a lover that will love you like bobby (platonic, to be clear) loved you. find a lover in the fact you are alive even though it makes you nauseous because it just reminds you that your best friend isn't. how do you grieve someone who's still alive whilst simultaneously grieve someone who isnt? trying to grieve two people in two different ways and you feel guilty at the way they blend and blur because it feels like you lose your separate grips on both of them and you don't feel like you have space in you to accommodate all this ache. and like what if i edited all this to make that parallel more clear?? that his primary grief is bobby because he's the one who's dead but he's also grieving felix and probably doesn't even realise it?? and then the two become blurred?? and if he realised this he would actually feel fucking awful about it and like a bad friend?? haha just kidding unless??

[countingnothings]

i loved the magicians trilogy, but the books had problems (pacing; treatment of the female characters; treatment of sexual violence), and i was really, really happy with how the first seasons of the show worked hard (and worked smart) to fix those, to keep the core of the story and to refine it. i loved particularly the decision to build up eliot’s and quentin’s relationship - it worked on so many levels, and gave an emotional depth to the story as a whole that i think was missing in the novels. to have it end on the show with a “bury your gays” moment, though - what a betrayal. what a betrayal of two profoundly unhappy characters whose eventually-finding-meaning in the novels is satisfying only to a certain extent. what a betrayal of the nature of this adaptation as a transformative work undoing many of the shitty things about the trilogy. what a betrayal of us, too - like, meditations on the nature of grief and loss, yes, that’s awesome, i’m here for it, it’s one of the central preoccupations of the speculative fiction i love the most. but this media property exists in the context of other media properties, and in this greater context queer love stories are overwhelmingly centred on grief and loss. the magicians as a narrative whole in both book and show form is a story about acknowledging and moving through and even living into our traumas, and killing off your queer lead is thematically in line with that, but it misses the point that speculative fiction, more so than other types of fiction, exists to show us the possible. and in a possible world, you come out on the other side of trauma and discover that, as you moved through it, you built a love. this bury your gays moment is predicated on the idea that love and trauma cannot coexist, and that for dramatic tension we need only the latter. and that’s lazy storytelling, and it’s also, i think, a misunderstanding of the nature of both love and trauma.

anyway! i have feelings about this! showrunners: you aren’t creating in a vacuum when you write queer romance plots. pay attention.