(no subject)

[nny]

I'm reading a fic on someone's journal right now, and it's got a header with Jack/Ennis, and the text says a love that will/never grow old. And I'm like... heh, you may be right, but it will grow a poorly judged mustache...

I dunno. Where do you stand on Happily Ever Afters? What's your ultimate one? Argument's sake, the greatest love story ever told is Romeo and Juliet, even though I hate hate hate that designation, purely because there was never time for the bloom to fade from the rose, as the clichés'd have it.

Me? I like Happily Ever Afters, so long as there's snarking. I'm a romantic of a queer sort. I like happy endings where no one admits that there're feelings involved, where there is much huffing and talk of putting up with each other, where people gravitate towards each other even if only so they can bitch. I like equality and co-dependence, I like a little uncertainty on both sides, I like bull-dozing with a layer of trepidation carefully hidden.

(Mostly, at the moment, I like John/Rodney. *grins* Also? Red wine.)

How 'bout you?

Comments

[innocentsmith.livejournal.com]

I suppose part of the real-life difficulty of Happily Ever After is that it's...well, not ever. Both partners being mortal, and all (at least, presumably). This idea, that even in the best-case scenario, living in a peaceful time and place and raising a happy family with no one getting horrible diseases or suffering violence or not having enough to eat or etc. etc. etc., you still only get about 60 years together, tops, and not all of that time is going to be happy, stems from a few years ago when my grandfather had a stroke. He and my grandmother had always been sort of a...a real world OTP, happily married according to the above description; watching all the built-up habits and rituals and deep-seated bits of co-dependency disintegrate as they both found themselves no longer able to take care of each other alone was pretty painful, and it definitely made an impression on the way I write and read love stories. It's a bit like what I think someone or other said about Arthurian myth, and why it's appropriate that Mallory's version is titled "The Death of Arthur" - the end of the hero's journey defines them almost as well as their more famous adventures.

So I guess I've started mentally categorizing favorite pairings with that in mind.

1. It'll never, ever work out but oh god we'll never get over it - in which go many of the OMGWRONG or enemy-shipping pairings I get addicted to, and also those pairings where the canons have a strong thread of pessimism (Veronica Mars comes to mind); this may bleed in to one or the other of the following:

2. It's not going to be easy and everyone dies alone, but loving you is still going to be the most important thing I did with my life; maybe we can build something together that will last, even if it's only a story. (Jeeves and Wooster for the former; also The Princess Bride, Cyrano de Bergerac, and most of Discworld.)

3. We really will live forever and we'll always be together in some sense or another. And we'll be squabbling the whole time. (Good Omens and anything which involves an immortal falling in love with a mortal - Q/Picard and David/Luke from DWJ's Eight Days of Luke come to mind.)

A movie I've always adored for being conscious of all the drawbacks and sillinesses, but still being madly in love with love is Steve Martin's L.A. Story.

Forget for this moment the smog and the cars and the restaurant and the skating and remember only this. A kiss may not be the truth, but it is what we wish were true.
(http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0102250/)