#so they can get an understanding of how Calcifer is with other people cause they're all important in Cal's life

[settinqsuns]

back down to 6 drafts. will do more when i get home from work and hopefully finish Oswin's bio page so i can get that up and work on Iris's.

[otdderamin]

How Spoiler Alert and Bros Challenge Romance Movie Norms

Spoilers for Spoiler Alert (2022) and Bros (2022)

Thinking about how the romanticized cultural narrative we have about love is that two people meet, some spark connects them, and once they have the courage to let themselves be together, everything is just good forever.

And obviously that's bullshit or there wouldn't be so many breakups and divorces. But we rarely write stories about those. We want our stories to live in the limerence of new relationships where anything seems possible before the complexity of reality sets in.

The audience for allocishet normative media has very strict and often formulaic expectations for romance films. Guy meets girl, they fall in love, all obstacles are overcome through the power of love, and they live happily ever after. That audience really only supports that story.

Queer media comes from a vastly different and more complex tradition of romance. There is almost always a backdrop of the world trying to intervene. Even Big Eden (2000) in all its softness had this. There's a much greater love of messy relationships. There are no guarantees.

Bros flouted the heteronormative love story formula by being about two guys with commitment issues who often project their fears on each other and are sometimes even right. Bobby and Aaron have ideas about what they need to prove in life to show they're fulfilled & can't see past that.

It's a complicated journey to figuring out if they even want to be together. If all the baggage they're carrying can fit with them. And the end, parodying Hallmark endings, is simply an attempt, and not an answer. No pressure that it has to last forever.

Spoiler Alert is about a 13 year relationship that was an audience know from the begging will end in loss. The first act is short. They find each other, they connect, sometimes it's weird and awkward but they know very quickly they want to be together.

It's the middle that makes it profound. Where we flash forward and see the relationship after more than a decade. The complacency, the repeated mistakes, the hurt they've caused each other. Wondering if things have run their course.

And then the illness. The realization that they may not get to choose the end. That under the calcification of little built up resentments are all the reasons they still loved each other. Letting go is also no longer getting in your own way.

There was a realness to that. Things weren't just magically fixed. In many ways it's not sentimental. It's built on all the small moments that make you understand that you are alive in three constant presence of someone else because they've overall made your life better.

Both these films are about love without certainty that doesn't have to last forever to mean everything in its time. They are so deeply, inherently queer beyond being about gay men. They're about deeper realities in relationships normativity pushes aside but we need to talk about.

Either one of these films coming out this year would have been a good year in queer cinema. Both together—the spectrum of romcom and sentimental tragedy—are a landmark distillation of the last century of our media culture. I think both will join the canon of must see queer films.

Before I got into queer media, I would have told you I hated romance movies (even when I thought I was allocishet). If always felt forced worth nothing new to say. Turns out it's because allocishet media is culturally invested in saying nothing new about relationships and love.

But queer media inherently is about love that challenges norms. Love that has to be meaningful enough to risk loss for it. Love that's truely freeing instead of conforming to stale expectations. And so the stories we get to tell are far more interesting and real.