#he's not my ideal man he's my ideal chewy necklace for stimming with

[queer-cosette]

Actually, of the three I listed, The Creature is the only love interest who takes his lady's actual wants into account.

Jareth isn't a good guy either! He kidnaps Sarah's toddler half-brother and intends to turn him into a goblin! His response to Sarah begging him that she didn't actually want him to take Toby is to give her thirteen hours to solve his labyrinth, and then when she takes him up on it, he pulls every trick in the book to slow her process, up to having one of the allies she meets in the labyrinth betray her and give her a cursed fruit that traps her in an illusion the second she bites into it.

The keyword is FANTASY.

Heathers and Labyrinth are specifically about how relying too much on your fantasy can and will go horribly wrong. Heathers ends a little more on a grimdark note than Labyrinth - the message of which is it's okay to have your fantasies as long as you don't let them take over your life or interfere with reality - but what I meant by the original post is, one of the reasons JD and Jareth are such attractive fantasies to audiences is because having your love interest take your negative emotions seriously - not just your excitement or your love or your passions, although those are all important too, but your rage and your sadness and your trauma - is an important trait that rarely gets acknowledged so directly in fiction.

(Lisa Frankenstein is the odd one out, but it's not about a girl struggling with selfishness or moral greyness having it come to a head by falling for a villain, it's about a former slasher victim healing her trauma by becoming the slasher villain with help from a hot dead guy who would do anything to make her happy. Are they good people? No. Are they fun to think about? Extremely!)

The reason I didn't include a massive analysis on why "JD is bad, actually" is it wasn't my point and sometimes I like to post my thoughts about movies without a massive disclaimer about needing to remember that it's not okay to date a guy who'll kill your bullies in real life, actually, cause he might gaslight you and also murder is bad. I am aware of that and I like to assume my audience is also aware of that. Maybe I was little clumsy in my language, but sometimes you have to give up pinpoint accuracy to one point in order to cover all three.

Sorry if I come off bitchy, but I am very tired of people assuming that because I find JD to be appealing, I want a love interest in real life who is just like him in every way. I left the Heathers fandom in 2018 because of how frequently this assumption occurred.

I didn't say he was good or that his relationship with Veronica was ideal, I said he was appealing and that the dynamic is fun to think about.

It's a fantasy.

I think the appeal of the male protagonists in things like Heathers and Labyrinth and Lisa Frankenstein is partly because... they take the female characters' emotions seriously. Like I'm not saying that they always make the best decisions about helping, but they take their girls seriously. Veronica is stuck with her image as a vapid party girl when she's slowly beginning to deeply loathe herself and those surrounding her; Sarah has her privacy dismissed by her stepmother simply because she's older than her toddler half-brother and shouldn't want to be selfish for once; Lisa is expected to just stop grieving the deeply traumatic loss of her mother because it's time for her to start playing happy families as a normal sister and daughter. And JD and Jareth and the Creature all listen. JD encourages Veronica to break free from what's expected of her and stands with her when no one else will. Jareth appears and offers to fulfill Sarah's unrealistic fantasies with magic. The Creature devotedly listens to every word Lisa says and protects her from anyone who has hurt her. Yeah, JD kills three people and has Veronica forge fake suicide notes to cover it up, and Jareth kidnaps Toby with the intention of turning him into a goblin, and the Creature goes straight to murder as his method of protection (in particular using methods that might even retraumatise Lisa), but that's all for plot reasons. There wouldn't be a story if there was no conflict. The fantasy is found in the way they listen when no one else will, and how the female protagonists have their negative emotions taken seriously when everyone else dismisses them.