I don't know what to think
Jan. 11th, 2020 10:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitSpoilers for TMA through episode 154, "Bloody Mary," .
This episode, for me, moved the show from "painful in a good ouchy powerful storytelling sort of way" to "so painful I'm not sure I can bear it."
It's probably ridiculous that, with an apocalypse threatening and more and more characters facing a choice between monstrosity and death, what's hurting me most is the frustrated romance between Jon and Martin. But it hurts so. fucking. much. And, I mean, it's no small thing when a fictional universe is so bleak that "let's blind ourselves and probably die, because it may be the best escape we're going to get and at least we'd be together" would be a happy ending.
Could they please just have a little goddamn happiness before whatever awful doom is coming arrives? Other characters get some consolation: Basira and Daisy have each other, Melanie is piecing herself together and has her friendship or romance or whatever it is with Georgie. Meanwhile, Jon is alone and scared and hating himself for various reasons (including not having the courage, as Martin ruthlessly but accurately pointed out, to do what it takes to get free), and he's discovered love just in time to learn what it means to have your love refused. And Martin has literally dedicated himself to loneliness, but still has love and feeling enough for it to make him suffer.
It's starting to make me angry again. I've been angry at this show before, and then various developments soothed it, but now it's back.
My feeling is, there is tragedy, and then there is "these characters that we have made you care deeply about will be progressively lonelier and more unhappy until they die, and they may not even stop the apocalypse in the process. Or maybe the apocalypse doesn't actually need stopping, maybe it would've just fizzled out on its own, and all that pain won't even have been necessary." I . . . don't actually care for storytelling in bitterly ironic mode.
As the famous, apparently ubiquitous political graffiti asks, "Is there life before death?" I want Jon and Martin to have life before death, preferably together.
A lot of the recent statements have been about love in its various forms. My hopes were raised by "Cul-de-Sac," but subsequent episodes have been grinding them down again. Things we know to be true in this universe include: that people can be one another's anchors, and their selves can be entwined on some cosmic level, and that love can sometimes save you. Just the tiniest bit of love can be enough to stop an apocalypse. Things we also know to be true: love doesn't always make a difference. And sometimes it's what ruins you. And monsters can love and still be monsters.
*sigh* What I guess, ultimately, I'm afraid of here is the feeling of a storyteller mocking me. I've felt it before in other canons: in Sherlock, for instance, where Moffat seemed to take a positive pleasure in frustrating the audience, or in various works by Joss Whedon, who infamously bragged about giving audiences the story they needed rather than the story they wanted. And that story was: don't hope. You are stupid and wrong to hope, and what you need is for smarter, more sophisticated me to teach you that.
I'm hoping (ha!) that Jonny Sims' gleeful tweet about how he keeps finding ways to layer more tragedy into TMA's conclusion doesn't mean he's mocking us. (If you're thinking that I am suspicious of creators to the point of near-paranoia . . . you're not wrong. I've been in fandom a long time, enduring many disappointments, and I have come to expect them without them ever becoming less painful. And the more viscerally and overwhelmingly a story moves me, the more suspicious and fearful of disappointment I become.)
I accept that TMA is going to be tragic. I knew that going in, or soon after. But tragedy doesn't have to mean endless unmitigated suffering for the story's two central characters.
There can be life before death.
(A final note: This has a lot to do with what queer male characters mean to me. I identify/overidentify with them so much, and their unhappiness resonates for me in ways I can't be entirely rational about. I do not have detachment. And . . . I get that this makes me not the ideal audience in certain ways, but I also think creators should know, when they choose to tell queer stories, that they're taking on a kind of responsibility. Even now, with so many more queer stories to choose from, each one carries some folks' hearts and hopes with it in a way that goes beyond entertainment. We still have to struggle so hard to imagine ourselves being happy, even for a moment, in a world that is indeed growing darker all the time.)
This episode, for me, moved the show from "painful in a good ouchy powerful storytelling sort of way" to "so painful I'm not sure I can bear it."
It's probably ridiculous that, with an apocalypse threatening and more and more characters facing a choice between monstrosity and death, what's hurting me most is the frustrated romance between Jon and Martin. But it hurts so. fucking. much. And, I mean, it's no small thing when a fictional universe is so bleak that "let's blind ourselves and probably die, because it may be the best escape we're going to get and at least we'd be together" would be a happy ending.
Could they please just have a little goddamn happiness before whatever awful doom is coming arrives? Other characters get some consolation: Basira and Daisy have each other, Melanie is piecing herself together and has her friendship or romance or whatever it is with Georgie. Meanwhile, Jon is alone and scared and hating himself for various reasons (including not having the courage, as Martin ruthlessly but accurately pointed out, to do what it takes to get free), and he's discovered love just in time to learn what it means to have your love refused. And Martin has literally dedicated himself to loneliness, but still has love and feeling enough for it to make him suffer.
It's starting to make me angry again. I've been angry at this show before, and then various developments soothed it, but now it's back.
My feeling is, there is tragedy, and then there is "these characters that we have made you care deeply about will be progressively lonelier and more unhappy until they die, and they may not even stop the apocalypse in the process. Or maybe the apocalypse doesn't actually need stopping, maybe it would've just fizzled out on its own, and all that pain won't even have been necessary." I . . . don't actually care for storytelling in bitterly ironic mode.
As the famous, apparently ubiquitous political graffiti asks, "Is there life before death?" I want Jon and Martin to have life before death, preferably together.
A lot of the recent statements have been about love in its various forms. My hopes were raised by "Cul-de-Sac," but subsequent episodes have been grinding them down again. Things we know to be true in this universe include: that people can be one another's anchors, and their selves can be entwined on some cosmic level, and that love can sometimes save you. Just the tiniest bit of love can be enough to stop an apocalypse. Things we also know to be true: love doesn't always make a difference. And sometimes it's what ruins you. And monsters can love and still be monsters.
*sigh* What I guess, ultimately, I'm afraid of here is the feeling of a storyteller mocking me. I've felt it before in other canons: in Sherlock, for instance, where Moffat seemed to take a positive pleasure in frustrating the audience, or in various works by Joss Whedon, who infamously bragged about giving audiences the story they needed rather than the story they wanted. And that story was: don't hope. You are stupid and wrong to hope, and what you need is for smarter, more sophisticated me to teach you that.
I'm hoping (ha!) that Jonny Sims' gleeful tweet about how he keeps finding ways to layer more tragedy into TMA's conclusion doesn't mean he's mocking us. (If you're thinking that I am suspicious of creators to the point of near-paranoia . . . you're not wrong. I've been in fandom a long time, enduring many disappointments, and I have come to expect them without them ever becoming less painful. And the more viscerally and overwhelmingly a story moves me, the more suspicious and fearful of disappointment I become.)
I accept that TMA is going to be tragic. I knew that going in, or soon after. But tragedy doesn't have to mean endless unmitigated suffering for the story's two central characters.
There can be life before death.
(A final note: This has a lot to do with what queer male characters mean to me. I identify/overidentify with them so much, and their unhappiness resonates for me in ways I can't be entirely rational about. I do not have detachment. And . . . I get that this makes me not the ideal audience in certain ways, but I also think creators should know, when they choose to tell queer stories, that they're taking on a kind of responsibility. Even now, with so many more queer stories to choose from, each one carries some folks' hearts and hopes with it in a way that goes beyond entertainment. We still have to struggle so hard to imagine ourselves being happy, even for a moment, in a world that is indeed growing darker all the time.)
