#unfortunately paul and darry are casting a spell on me

[curtisberzattos]

watching the outsiders slime tutorial rn and the convo before ggah where theyre clowning on darry for almost going soc and he just stands there stoically and stonefaced. i think does prove that he does not care abt being in the gang/ dally liking him, but also paul rly did numbers on him that he is fine w taking all of the heat esp bc in the la jolla script darrys only comment abt soc ties is "i dont have to prove shit to u dallas!"

wait i didn't know about that from la jolla........... being friends with the socs probably meant he has to deal with so many ""friendly"" jokes and jabs about being eastside. and now that he's back with the greasers they'll never let him live the soc stuff down. he'll forever be stuck in the middle i fear.

but also if im being fr. as a twenty year old who frequently works with preteens/teenagers u Can't show any weakness when they're messing with u or else it'll get ten times worse so i Understand why he's not giving them any attention in that scene even if there's not deeper reason 😭

[areiphilos]

My TikTok feed unfortunately showed me two TikToks of people shipping movie verse Paul and Darry. I try to be live and let be but I think the musical cast needs to stop giving their fanon theories and having their fans run with it with as canon. It hurts me to say that as a typical rare pair shipper.

god tiktok is an evil place for fandom.

i def think that the fandom interaction is making things a hell of a lot worse particularly since people keep running with it as canon. canon that se hinton def wouldn't approve of and canon that really already doesn't fit the musical as presented. and the musical as presented is already a terrible version of canon. it and the tv show are ducking it out for the worst version.

i think the fact that darry is experiencing a fandom fad right now doesn't help, cause the musical fed that side of fandom so we're stuck with it for now. i would have a lot more grace for these fans if (1) it wasn't coming from the worst version of canon, (2) the woobification of darry where they behave as if he should be the main character and is the most put upon character in canon, and (3) if it weren't for the fact that the this is another case of "fans of the outsiders latch onto minor, undefined character because they're too afraid/unskilled to write the actual fleshed out characters in canon." this fandom has a long record of that [gestures to the shepards] and paul continues this tradition where they're more interested in sparsely defined characters due to lack of skill/afraid to write someone in character. (and that's without the unspoken elephant in the room of people being puritans who think you can't write about anyone not 18+).

the thing is, too, is that these versions of paul they're cranking out is bad ship fodder. they're making him out to be darry's long lost love or whatever without engaging with the fact that he's a 20/21 year old who came back to town to fist fight teenagers. he is literally in college at this time doing this but they're preoccupied with "ommgggg what if he and darry were gay together and it was TRAGIQUE?" without much more substantial to it. and again, the musical's parameters exacerbates things with the misplaced time period, it's already really bad depiction of darry (stop calling him darrel. i've seen people spelling his name daryl for fucks sake) as is, the people in the musical clearly have never even been in contact with actual canon or any research about the era and it's like all these bad things conglomerating into the biggest fandom annoyance.

and this is all without getting into how many people buy into the idea that maybe the socs weren't all that bad that's proliferated fandom in the most annoying way. like yes the socs are people too, no that doesn't mean you have to woobify them.

tl;dr: god. agree. good for them i guess but it's all annoying.