#i love writing 700 word deep dives into a fictional relationship

[meredithstanien]

jazzalil is a GOOD COUPLE

they’re not poorly written you guys are just mean!

thesis: they were written specifically to compliment each other!

zazzalil is very inventive but overly reckless and doesn’t consider the consequences of her actions. jemilla is caring but overly cautious and worries a lot about everyone’s safety. they both care about the betterment of the tribe. zazzalil says “i just wanted to make life better” after getting yelled at for putting them in danger, and jemilla tells everyone that they have to be working to “get ahead” and make the tribe better. however, they go about achieving this goal in very different ways. jemilla feels responsible for the tribe (as she should, that’s why she’s a good leader) so she doesn’t want to put them in danger, thus she has them doing safe “research” even though it ends up being basically useless in terms of making their lives better. zazzalil has none of that feeling of responsibility, so she can do essentially whatever she wants. she can see the things that will truly make the tribe better, but she doesn’t understand consequences and ends up putting herself and others in danger with things like hunting snarl.

jemilla obviously cares very much about zazzalil! she continuously warns her about the danger of her actions and stops her from hurting herself and others (ex. she stops her from stabbing keeri and tries to keep her from going after snarl). she ran out into a dark stormy night to stop her! that’s a lot for any person to do! jemilla is doing this out of concern for zazz’s best interests. she very clearly expresses this when she says “i did it for you, zazzalil” in jemilla’s lament. zazzalil just doesn’t see that all of this is meant to keep her safe, she just thinks that jemilla is trying to smother her. zazzalil doesn’t realize until jemilla is gone and everything comes crashing down. she can’t see the disaster that jemilla prevented until she wasn’t there to stop her from making bad decisions! after she realizes that, she goes out to find jemilla, begs her to come back, and literally offers to marry her. that is pretty gay! it took awhile for zazz to realize that she cares about jemilla and that jemilla is an important person in her life, but she got there eventually.

when people write things, everything is there for a reason, and jemilla and zazzalil were written to compliment each other. jemilla is cautious enough to keep zazzalil from doing dumb and dangerous things, and zazzalil is adventurous enough to get jemilla to take risks and try new things. the show demonstrates that neither of them are super effective leaders on their own (although jemilla is admittedly the better of the two) but when they’re working together they can solve difficult problems. under jemilla, the tribe is safe but makes little to no real progress towards a better life, and under zazzalil, the tribe briefly has a better life, but eventually ends up destroying themselves. however, when they’re together, they can defeat snarl and save everyone. there’s a whole song about how amazing they are together!

i know the biggest problem everyone has with jazzalil is how rushed it seems. they don’t actually get together and become a couple until the last 20-30 minutes of the show. but in a 2 hour show, that’s a good 25% of the time. but everything is going to feel a little rushed when you have to fit a whole story into a 2 hour period (that’s why plays in the 1800s were like, 3+ hours long). they’re also basically enemies for a good portion of the show and seem like they hate each other. however, they clearly cared for each other (ex. all of the second paragraph) and their character arcs and love story focused on their realizations that they need each other. as they realize that they care about each other and work better together, they develop as characters, with their eventual resolution being marriage. if you look at it on the surface, it does look like both of them did a total 180 and switched from hating each other to loving each other, but the clues were written in along the way in order to set up for their eventual relationship.

TLDR; jazzalil is actually a really well written relationship and they compliment each other as people! it was set up along the way, and not just a random twist that was used as a plot point!

((please be nice i’m basically rambling because i love jazzalil so much, i have not proofread this at all. i am simply putting this out into the world because i love firebringer and jazzalil))