Random blog post time, because I had some thoughts about a thing
I'm currently reading this not very good at all teenage drama book series. A library girl finds out she has magic, the kind no one's seen in a century and half, and she falls in love with the dark and brooding and misunderstood crown prince, and there's a war for the future of the empire. You know how it goes.
While talking about the books I it was argued to me that stories, be it books or tv or whatever, of gay drama are just better than straight drama. Not good, necessarily, but better. I tried to argue that gay drama is just as dumb as straight drama (I mean forgodssakes just. talk. to. him.) and that the goodness of a story isn't in any way connected to whether the main couple is gay or straight. Because either can be written well or badly, and both can be just as much nonsense.
And yet. I was inclined to agree. And I couldn't quite figure out why, because as I said, the quality of the writing is in no way connected to the gayness or the straightness of the characters.
So I spent a good chunk of my time over multiple days thinking about it. And here's what I think it might be.
It's about gender role expectations in a relationship (and also outside of them, to some extent). When there's a straight couple, when there is a guy and a girl, the relationship comes with certain social expectations about roles, and how the characters exist within the relationship. I'm not saying the characters fill these roles. In a lot of cases they don't, and they don't need to. But that's not the point. It's not about whether the expectations are filled, or if they even should be filled. I think the characters who don't fill the expectations are the most praised ones nowadays. You know, the strong female leads and all that.
It's that the expectation is there at all, and everything the characters do is compared to that expectation. They fill the expectation, or they don't fill the expectation, or they fill some of it but not all. But either way, there is always a relationship, often an intentional one, between the expectation and the way the characters are. Their actions are always compared to the expectation. The point isn't that there is a strong female lead in the story. The point is that a strong female lead is a thing people say at all.
But when there's a gay couple, an underlying expectation simply doesn't exist. There's nothing to compare them and their behavior to. There is no expectation to fill, or to not fill. Their existence, their places in the relationship, isn't a comment on the expected roles of the girl and the guy, because there isn't a girl and a guy. There's just the two of them. And I think that, in a way, gives them the freedom to just be together.
Of course the existence of the couple is a comment on heteronormativity, but that's a whole different thing. The dynamic within the relationship is free of what people think their roles should or shouldn't be. They exist on a more, or maybe a different kind of, equal footing than a straight couple ever can, now matter now equal and even their relationship is. (And yes, obviously there can be other things in the story that have a huge affect on the equal footing, but those power dynamics are independent of gender.)
And there is something about that, no matter how dumb the drama itself is, speaks to me, at least. And if I'm honest, I think this kind of might apply to the real world too. Not just stories.
Or maybe it's just that I'm bi, and way overthinking this, and it's all nonsense. I don't know. But I've now spent enough time thinking about it that I wanted to write the thoughts down somewhere. Also to maybe see if anyone else thinks any of this makes sense at all, so that I may understand stories a little better.
