ren (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
necessarian) wrote2019-04-25 08:02 pm
necessarian) wrote2019-04-25 08:02 pm
Entry tags:
meditations on "endgame"
though if you were expecting this to be about the avengers movie, i'll put you off now: this is about the concept of a ship being endgame. it's just bad timing.
a cool thing that's happened on game of thrones recently is that jaime and brienne started interacting again. i don't watch game of thrones anymore, i haven't since the end of season 5 (i think?) when i decided sansa had been abused too many times for me to keep putting that in my eyeballs. (and then some poor authorial decisions regarding some of my other faves nailed the coffin shut.) (see also, my previous post on the "drop point.") but, i love the books, and to those of you who are new around here, i was deep into the fandom in 2013-14. particularly the jaime/brienne corner of the fandom. i read every single fic. i was active in the community (and on the forums - whew, throwback!) i wrote a few fics, and i even wrote a big one - a 102k regency era pride and prejudice au, called Before Destruction. it's now been bumped off the first page if you sort the ship by kudos, which means i can boast about how it used to be 5th or 6th, and on the first page when you sorted the entire fandom by kudos.
anyway, there's been a lot of renewed interest in the ship - despite it no longer being the most popular asoiaf pairing on ao3, sigh - so i've been getting a lot of comments and kudos on my j/b fics lately, especially BD. naturally since the fic is not one of the super popular ones these days i was curious to see if it had been rec'd. i'm still on tumblr, though in hiding. i went into the jaime/brienne tag to search for rec posts - didn't find any, though i didn't look too hard. it was sweet & kind of reassuring to see a bunch of usernames i recognised from back in the day. asoiaf isn't a Forever Fandom for me (mine is hp), but i certainly did invest a lot of love into it, and so it's nice to see that reflected in people who're still there. the other thing i saw, though, were a lot of posts about how people are dreading the prospect of j/b not being endgame.
(sorry for the self-aggrandising anecdote. now we get to the meat of the post.)
we here define endgame (adj): describing a ship, both parties end the series alive and happily in a relationship; and endgame (n): the state of all the characters at the completion of the series. i hope this dual usage doesn't get too confusing.
my first reaction to the fervent desire for j/b to be endgame was like - okay, weird. because it's not like GoT is a franchise that prides itself on killing off popular characters in new and exciting ways each season, or anything. and i also think we can totally connect this to a broader shift in media consumers' attitudes, where fandom and normal viewership have started to blur together and people have started to conflate the sentences "i ship it" and "i want this to be exactly how the story goes." for the record, i don't necessarily think that's a bad shift, especially wrt pushing media towards better representation and away from a homogeneous landscape of unhappy endings for marginalised characters. it's not like j/b is a super groundbreaking ship. i mean, i think it's definitely important within the corpus of white cishet couples - blah blah inverse beauty and the beast, "unattractive" (this is clearly not true in the show but whatever) woman ends up with hunky dude - but i really don't think you can say it's either shocking or radical for them to end up together. in fact, as many shippers have clearly noted, it's kind of expected at this point.
what kind of interests me though is the lack of critical thought about wanting one ship to be endgame vs another. like, do i think jaime and brienne are going to kiss before GoT/asoiaf is done? in both canons? well, definitely in the show. the books may be more cruel but somehow i think we'll at least get an acknowledgement of their love. do i think one or both of them is going to die horribly before the end? absolutely yes, also. that would not negate the fact that the ship is canon in any way. i mean... there's sexual tension, which is more than i can say for a fair few other things i've shipped. (waves longingly but from a distance at the haikyuu fandom...) and like, the ship is framed as a romance. so it's not like, unreasonable to want it to be endgame, not in the least - but i also think it's kind of weird to sit there crossing your fingers and hoping for a happy ending, and gearing up to send angry tweets at the showrunners when one or both of them are killed off.
compare this to the magicians. if you'd asked me at any point before 4x05, i would have given you the same answer. i considered 3x05 an outlier, and i thought there would be no return to quentin and eliot as a couple. i was also fine with that. as someone who's been around slash fandom for a significant amount of time, i'm used to subtext and unhappy endings. unlike jaime/brienne, queliot being endgame actually would be a little radical: how often do we see (mentally ill) men in fulfilling relationships with one another on screen? especially in sff shows?? well, the good news is - the magicians kicked the shit out of my complacency, at least. they threw us a bone, and then they revealed that bone was tied to piano wire all along and yanked it back in the cruellest way possible, cackling like cartoon supervillains. and this was one thing where i was really sitting here thinking, wow, i would really fucking love it if this was endgame. alright, fellas, i got my hopes up, and now i'm ready to be a bitch about it for the rest of my life. (this post does not even begin to touch on everything else wrong with quetin's death, but believe me, i am ready to bitch about that too. at the drop of a hat.)
so, does the fact that i really expected some kind of continuation of queliot put me on the same level as these poor souls who really think jaime and brienne will have a happy ending? i don't think so. my point is that our discussion of ships being "endgame" needs to take all this into account: canon context, cultural context, etc etc. i don't think it's out of line to expect a ship to become canon if there is sufficient on-screen sexual tension - as there is(/was hahaha fuck) in both cases i've highlighted here. i do think - and this may be a grinch opinion - that fandom needs to be a little more reasonable about what it expects from endgame. in the case of j/b, because it's game of thrones, it's loosely moralistic, and i really don't see many characters getting a happy ending, especially not the dude who pushed a kid out a window to facilitate twincest. (i have my own theory about how this will go down in the books, lol.) in the case of queliot, it's because i think we were all so caught up that we forgot that television hates gay people, actually. but - this is not to say we should accept our lot. i wish i hadn't got so emotionally involved, because i opened myself up to a whole lot of general melancholy when i really couldn't afford to waste time being sad, but i also think if i'd been less sad i might have been more prepared, and been able to channel my anger in more sensible and productive ways.
i think we should stop putting so much weight on this stuff, i don't think we should pin our investment in a fandom on how its endgame pans out. i know i keep banging on about this, but fanfiction is a culture. maybe if i hadn't got invested in the idea of queliot as "endgame" i'd still be happily reading queliot fic right now. (as it is, i'm having myself a merry little break from it all.) and what do i value more: watching a tv show that is frequently mediocre in the hopes that they'll throw me a bone, or engaging in an offbeat online community with a plethora of weird and wonderful content floating around? at the end of the day, i know which i'd choose. i already made this choice with the harry potter fandom when i decided not to engage with cursed child or fantastic beasts in any way, and just to continue doing my thing as i always did. i don't think i'm in a position in fandom where i can encourage this kind of cultural change, that people to get less invested in how their canons turn out and go back to being more invested in doing their own thing with the canon - which is how fandom used to be before "endgame culture" became a thing - but... i don't know. i'll just sit here in my corner and cross my fingers. ha ha.
a cool thing that's happened on game of thrones recently is that jaime and brienne started interacting again. i don't watch game of thrones anymore, i haven't since the end of season 5 (i think?) when i decided sansa had been abused too many times for me to keep putting that in my eyeballs. (and then some poor authorial decisions regarding some of my other faves nailed the coffin shut.) (see also, my previous post on the "drop point.") but, i love the books, and to those of you who are new around here, i was deep into the fandom in 2013-14. particularly the jaime/brienne corner of the fandom. i read every single fic. i was active in the community (and on the forums - whew, throwback!) i wrote a few fics, and i even wrote a big one - a 102k regency era pride and prejudice au, called Before Destruction. it's now been bumped off the first page if you sort the ship by kudos, which means i can boast about how it used to be 5th or 6th, and on the first page when you sorted the entire fandom by kudos.
anyway, there's been a lot of renewed interest in the ship - despite it no longer being the most popular asoiaf pairing on ao3, sigh - so i've been getting a lot of comments and kudos on my j/b fics lately, especially BD. naturally since the fic is not one of the super popular ones these days i was curious to see if it had been rec'd. i'm still on tumblr, though in hiding. i went into the jaime/brienne tag to search for rec posts - didn't find any, though i didn't look too hard. it was sweet & kind of reassuring to see a bunch of usernames i recognised from back in the day. asoiaf isn't a Forever Fandom for me (mine is hp), but i certainly did invest a lot of love into it, and so it's nice to see that reflected in people who're still there. the other thing i saw, though, were a lot of posts about how people are dreading the prospect of j/b not being endgame.
(sorry for the self-aggrandising anecdote. now we get to the meat of the post.)
we here define endgame (adj): describing a ship, both parties end the series alive and happily in a relationship; and endgame (n): the state of all the characters at the completion of the series. i hope this dual usage doesn't get too confusing.
my first reaction to the fervent desire for j/b to be endgame was like - okay, weird. because it's not like GoT is a franchise that prides itself on killing off popular characters in new and exciting ways each season, or anything. and i also think we can totally connect this to a broader shift in media consumers' attitudes, where fandom and normal viewership have started to blur together and people have started to conflate the sentences "i ship it" and "i want this to be exactly how the story goes." for the record, i don't necessarily think that's a bad shift, especially wrt pushing media towards better representation and away from a homogeneous landscape of unhappy endings for marginalised characters. it's not like j/b is a super groundbreaking ship. i mean, i think it's definitely important within the corpus of white cishet couples - blah blah inverse beauty and the beast, "unattractive" (this is clearly not true in the show but whatever) woman ends up with hunky dude - but i really don't think you can say it's either shocking or radical for them to end up together. in fact, as many shippers have clearly noted, it's kind of expected at this point.
what kind of interests me though is the lack of critical thought about wanting one ship to be endgame vs another. like, do i think jaime and brienne are going to kiss before GoT/asoiaf is done? in both canons? well, definitely in the show. the books may be more cruel but somehow i think we'll at least get an acknowledgement of their love. do i think one or both of them is going to die horribly before the end? absolutely yes, also. that would not negate the fact that the ship is canon in any way. i mean... there's sexual tension, which is more than i can say for a fair few other things i've shipped. (waves longingly but from a distance at the haikyuu fandom...) and like, the ship is framed as a romance. so it's not like, unreasonable to want it to be endgame, not in the least - but i also think it's kind of weird to sit there crossing your fingers and hoping for a happy ending, and gearing up to send angry tweets at the showrunners when one or both of them are killed off.
compare this to the magicians. if you'd asked me at any point before 4x05, i would have given you the same answer. i considered 3x05 an outlier, and i thought there would be no return to quentin and eliot as a couple. i was also fine with that. as someone who's been around slash fandom for a significant amount of time, i'm used to subtext and unhappy endings. unlike jaime/brienne, queliot being endgame actually would be a little radical: how often do we see (mentally ill) men in fulfilling relationships with one another on screen? especially in sff shows?? well, the good news is - the magicians kicked the shit out of my complacency, at least. they threw us a bone, and then they revealed that bone was tied to piano wire all along and yanked it back in the cruellest way possible, cackling like cartoon supervillains. and this was one thing where i was really sitting here thinking, wow, i would really fucking love it if this was endgame. alright, fellas, i got my hopes up, and now i'm ready to be a bitch about it for the rest of my life. (this post does not even begin to touch on everything else wrong with quetin's death, but believe me, i am ready to bitch about that too. at the drop of a hat.)
so, does the fact that i really expected some kind of continuation of queliot put me on the same level as these poor souls who really think jaime and brienne will have a happy ending? i don't think so. my point is that our discussion of ships being "endgame" needs to take all this into account: canon context, cultural context, etc etc. i don't think it's out of line to expect a ship to become canon if there is sufficient on-screen sexual tension - as there is(/was hahaha fuck) in both cases i've highlighted here. i do think - and this may be a grinch opinion - that fandom needs to be a little more reasonable about what it expects from endgame. in the case of j/b, because it's game of thrones, it's loosely moralistic, and i really don't see many characters getting a happy ending, especially not the dude who pushed a kid out a window to facilitate twincest. (i have my own theory about how this will go down in the books, lol.) in the case of queliot, it's because i think we were all so caught up that we forgot that television hates gay people, actually. but - this is not to say we should accept our lot. i wish i hadn't got so emotionally involved, because i opened myself up to a whole lot of general melancholy when i really couldn't afford to waste time being sad, but i also think if i'd been less sad i might have been more prepared, and been able to channel my anger in more sensible and productive ways.
i think we should stop putting so much weight on this stuff, i don't think we should pin our investment in a fandom on how its endgame pans out. i know i keep banging on about this, but fanfiction is a culture. maybe if i hadn't got invested in the idea of queliot as "endgame" i'd still be happily reading queliot fic right now. (as it is, i'm having myself a merry little break from it all.) and what do i value more: watching a tv show that is frequently mediocre in the hopes that they'll throw me a bone, or engaging in an offbeat online community with a plethora of weird and wonderful content floating around? at the end of the day, i know which i'd choose. i already made this choice with the harry potter fandom when i decided not to engage with cursed child or fantastic beasts in any way, and just to continue doing my thing as i always did. i don't think i'm in a position in fandom where i can encourage this kind of cultural change, that people to get less invested in how their canons turn out and go back to being more invested in doing their own thing with the canon - which is how fandom used to be before "endgame culture" became a thing - but... i don't know. i'll just sit here in my corner and cross my fingers. ha ha.
no subject
But seeing where they made space for an on-screen, ongoing, in-canon relationship between Eliot and Quentin is really different from actually thinking we might get, you know, an on-screen, ongoing, in-canon relationship between Eliot and Quentin. I honestly don't—I feel like my base expectation for The Magicians was so low, that they would basically do some super compelling character work amid all the magic nonsense they wave around all over the room, that my disappointment at this point is really centered there: that they set up a bunch of compelling character work, and then just—torpedoed the fuck out of that bastard!! Why? Because—honestly I am still not fucking clear on that.
I'm mad about them dangling Eliot/Quentin from a representational perspective, sure. But I'm also just mad because it was such shitty fucking storytelling. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
no subject
and - agreed. it was very compelling character stuff! that was most of why i kept watching the show! i have no reasonable explanation for why that got torn to shreds!!! it was just, kind of, unconscionably bad storytelling, for all of that to go nowhere.