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brigdh · 7 years

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Reading Wednesday

In the Name of the Family by Sarah Dunant. Dunant's second novel about the Borgias, a sequel to Blood & Beauty. Well, at least I liked this book better than the first one. It benefits from several structural choices, the most important of which is that it only covers about two years compared to Blood & Beauty's decade-plus timeline. It's still hard to give a description of the plot, since like much of actual history, it's a bit random and episodic, without the nice arc of fiction. The Borgias continue to gather power in Renaissance Italy, before finally meeting their downfall. Lucrezia once more is the closest thing the book has to a protagonist, and she is served well both by the fact that she's primarily seen from her own viewpoint and that she's dealing with a comparatively small-scale plot: the relationship with her new husband, her third, and finding her place within his court. Cesare, in contrast, is conquering half of Italy (including numerous city-states whose names I did not even attempt to keep track of), outmaneuvering a rebellion among his followers (in which at least one particular city-state switches hands at least four times), ingratiating himself to the French king before switching sides to ally with the Spanish, and fighting with his father; it's so much plot that the cumulative effect is deafening. Cesare doesn't get his own POV in this novel, but is seen only through outsiders: primarily one of his generals, his doctor, and the Florentine ambassador, Niccolo Machiavelli. (Machiavelli actually gets an oddly large amount of page time in this novel given his relatively small overlap with the Borgias, but I understand Dunant's impulse to include him. Who wouldn't want to include Machiavelli?) All of these outside POVs only succeed in distancing the reader from Cesare, but on the other hand, he spends at least half the book going insane from late-stage syphilis, so I'm not sure his own POV would have been an improvement. Rodrigo Borgia aka Alexander VI is relegated to the role of a side character, appearing only to react to Cesare or Lucrezia's actions. Nonetheless the book ends abruptly with his death; this is fairly historically accurate – the Borgia family pretty much crashed and burned immediately without his assistance – but it reads like Dunant forgot to finish the story. As a minor note, I found the descriptions of Catrinella, Lucrezia's servant (or slave? I wasn't entirely clear on what category she'd fit into, though to be fair in the 1490s there probably wasn't a well-defined distinction between the two) off-putting. She's the only black character in the novel, and there are a lot of words spent dwelling on how dark her skin is and how bright her teeth are against it. On the other hand, at least Catrinella is slightly more three-dimensional than most of the hundreds of background characters, so it could be worse. Overall the two books remain not terrible, but not nearly as wonderful as they could have been. I'd recommend Dunant's other historical fiction instead. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley. Murder on Black Swan Lane by Andrea Penrose. A murder mystery set in Regency London, the first in a new series. The notorious Earl of Wrexford has been engaged in a long-running, very public argument with Reverend Josiah Holworthy, mostly conducted in letters published in various newspapers, over the role of science and religion. So when Holworthy is found murdered, Wrexford is the obvious first suspect – particularly since it turns out that the murder was committed by throwing acid in Holworthy's face, and chemistry in Wrexford's particular interest. To prove his innocence, Wrexford sets out to find the real murderer, which leads him to A.J. Quill, a satirical cartoonist who seems to know every secret in London. Quill is actually Charlotte Sloane, a hard-working widow using her husband's penname to preserve the last vestiges of her respectability. When her husband's death also seems to be connected to the conspiracy surrounding Holworthy, they become equally passionately committed to solving the mystery. This is a fun premise, and I admittedly was very interested in a book about the scientific circle of Regency London, but it didn't live up to my expectations. There's nothing wrong with it, exactly; it's just that everything here is such a cliche. We have the adorable street urchins with Cockney accents, the feisty heroine who nonetheless is impressed by the hero's power and honor, the grumpy Scottish doctor, devious French spies (even when their motivation is explicitly to support France's revolutionary society over Britain's classist aristocratic system, the French are always devious in a novel about how sexy and awesome the Regency was) and, of course, Wrexford himself: the hero who's just so smart that all of society bores him and so of course he's a jerk with a reputation for cynicism and 'biting wit'. The writing itself isn't much better. Charlotte and Wrexford supposedly represent a clash of passion vs logic, but since Wrexford loses his temper and Charlotte hides her emotions just as often as the opposite, we're told this by the narrative rather than it arising naturally from the characters. For example: “Mrs. Sloane?” Shadows tangled with the strands of black hair curling, making his face as shapeless as his rag market hat. “No protest? No demand to charge in where angels fear to tread?” Charlotte wished she could see his expression. There was an undertone to his question that she couldn’t quite identify. “I know you think me ruled by impulse rather than logic—” “Intuition, not impulse,” he corrected. “Which I’ve learned to respect. If you have an objection, I am willing to listen.” “And I, sir, have learned to respect the way you use reason to attack a problem.” So subtle! So natural! So not how human beings speak! The writing in scenes between Charlotte and Wrexford often descends to trashy romance level (note: good romance writing also exists! But it generally avoids tired cliches like this), despite it not actually being a romance. Though I wouldn't be surprised if the series goes there in the future. More examples, from their first meeting: A gentleman, not a ruffian from the stews. She jerked her gaze upward. Well-tailored wool, burnished ebony buttons. Shoulder capes that accentuated the breadth of his shoulders. She took an involuntary step back. He pulled off his hat and slapped it against his thigh, sending more drops of water flying through the air. Wind-whipped hair, dark as coal, tangled around his face. At first, all Charlotte could make out was a prominent nose, long and with an arrogant flare to its tip. But as he took another stride closer, the rest of his features snapped into sharper focus. A sensuous mouth, high cheekbones, green eyes, darkened with an undertone of gunmetal grey. [...] For a big man, he moved with feral quickness. A blur of wolf black, leaving the sensation of predatory muscle and primitive power pricking against her skin. [...] The earl’s face might well have been carved of granite. Not a muscle twitched. Shadows danced, dark on dark, through his long, curling hair. He appeared implacable, impervious to any appeal for mercy. Charlotte knew she should have been repelled, but something about the hard-edged planes and sculpted contours of his features held her in thrall. There was a cold beauty to him, and she felt her fingers itch to take up her paintbrush and capture that chilling aura of a man in supreme command of his emotions. And so on and so forth. Alas, I can't even say that I got much out of the scientific side of the book, since the mystery ultimately turns out to revolve around alchemy – also interesting, to be fair, but not what I came here for. It's not a bad book, but with a thousand other mystery series out there, this one just isn't captivating enough to be worth more of my time. I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.

(DW link for easier commenting)

#books #book reviews #sarah dunant #andrea penrose #netgalley

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randomguywholikesstuff · 7 years

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Quotes from Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. “Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.”

“Black Swan Management 101: nature (and nature-like systems) likes diversity between organisms rather than diversity within an immortal organism, unless you consider nature itself the immortal organism”

“So, in a way, while hormesis corresponds to situations by which the individual organism benefits from direct harm to itself, evolution occurs when harm makes the individual organism perish and the benefits are transferred to others, the surviving ones, and future generations”

“This is the central illusion in life: that randomness is risky, that it is a bad thing—and that eliminating randomness is done by eliminating randomness.”

“Artisans, say, taxi drivers, prostitutes (a very, very old profession), carpenters, plumbers, tailors, and dentists, have some volatility in their income but they are rather robust to a minor professional Black Swan, one that would bring their income to a complete halt. Their risks are visible. Not so with employees, who have no volatility, but can be surprised to see their income going to zero after a phone call from the personnel department. Employees’ risks are hidden. Thanks to variability, these artisanal careers harbor a bit of antifragility: small variations make them adapt and change continuously by learning from the environment and being, sort of, continuously under pressure to be fit. Remember that stressors are information; these careers face a continuous supply of these stressors that make them adjust opportunistically. In addition, they are open to gifts and positive surprises, free options—the hallmark of antifragility”

“The difference between the two volatilities in income applies to political systems—and, as we will see in the next two chapters, to about everything in life. Man-made smoothing of randomness produces the equivalent of John’s income: smooth, steady, but fragile. Such income is more vulnerable to large shocks that can make it go to zero (plus some unemployment benefits if he resides in one of the few welfare states). Natural randomness presents itself more like George’s income: smaller role for very large shocks, but daily variability. Further, such variability helps improve the system (hence the antifragility). A week with declining earnings for a taxi driver or a prostitute provides information concerning the environment and intimates the need to find a new part of town where clients hang around; a month or so without earnings drives them to revise their skills.

Further, for a self-employed person, a small (nonterminal) mistake is information, valuable information, one that directs him in his adaptive approach; for someone employed like John, a mistake is something that goes into his permanent record, filed in the personnel department.”

“Nature loves small errors (without which genetic variations are impossible), humans don’t—hence when you rely on human judgment you are at the mercy of a mental bias that disfavors antifragility. So, alas, we humans are afraid of the second type of variability and naively fragilize systems—or prevent their antifragility—by protecting them. In other words, a point worth repeating every time it applies, this avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.”

“What I call bottom-up variations—or noise—is the type of political volatility that takes place within a municipality, the petty fights and frictions in the running of regular affairs. It is not scalable (or what is called invariant under scale transformation): in other words, if you increase the size, say, multiply the number of people in a community by a hundred, you will have markedly different dynamics. A large state does not behave at all like a gigantic municipality, much as a baby human does not resemble a smaller adult. The difference is qualitative: the increase in the number of persons in a given community alters the quality of the relationship between parties. Recall the nonlinearity description from the Prologue. If you multiply by ten the number of persons in a given entity, you do not preserve the properties: there is a transformation. Here conversations switch from the mundane—but effective—to abstract numbers, more interesting, more academic perhaps, but, alas, less effective.”

“The media make things worse as they play on our infatuation with anecdotes, our thirst for the sensational, and they cause a great deal of unfairness that way. At the present time, one person is dying of diabetes every seven seconds, but the news can only talk about victims of hurricanes with houses flying in the air. The problem is that by creating bureaucracies, we put civil servants in a position to make decisions based on abstract and theoretical matters, with the illusion that they will be making them in a rational, accountable way.”

“I use the example of Switzerland to show the natural antifragility of political systems and how stability is achieved by managing noise, having a mechanism for letting it run its natural course, not by minimizing it. Note another element of Switzerland: it is perhaps the most successful country in history, yet it has traditionally had a very low level of university education compared to the rest of the rich nations. Its system, even in banking during my days, was based on apprenticeship models, nearly vocational rather than the theoretical ones. In other words, on techne (crafts and know how), not episteme (book knowledge, know what).”

“Let us now examine the technical aspects of the process, a more statistical view of the effect of human intervention on the volatility of affairs. There is a certain mathematical property to this bottom-up volatility, and to the volatility of natural systems. It generates the kind of randomness I call Mediocristan—plenty of variations that might be scary, but tend to cancel out in the aggregate (over time, or over the collection of municipalities that constitute the larger confederation or entity)—rather than the unruly one called Extremistan, in which you have mostly stability and occasionally large chaos—errors there have large consequences. One fluctuates, the other jumps. One has a lot of small variations, the other varies in lumps. Just like the income of the driver compared to that of bank employee. The two types of randomness are qualitatively distinct.”

“mother of all harmful mistakes: mistaking absence of evidence (of harm) for evidence of absence, a mistake that we will see tends to prevail in intellectual circles and one that is grounded in the social sciences.”

“Time for American policy makers to understand that the more they intervene in other countries for the sake of stability, the more they bring instability (except for emergency-room-style cases). Or perhaps time to reduce the role of policy makers in policy affairs. One of life’s packages: no stability without volatility.”

“My definition of modernity is humans’ large-scale domination of the environment, the systematic smoothing of the world’s jaggedness, and the stifling of volatility and stressors. Modernity corresponds to the systematic extraction of humans from their randomness-laden ecology—physical and social, even epistemological. Modernity is not just the postmedieval, postagrarian, and postfeudal historical period as defined in sociology textbooks. It is rather the spirit of an age marked by rationalization (naive rationalism), the idea that society is understandable, hence must be designed, by humans. With it was born statistical theory, hence the beastly bell curve. So was linear science. So was the notion of “efficiency”—or optimization. Modernity is a Procrustean bed, good or bad—a reduction of humans to what appears to be efficient and useful. Some aspects of it work: Procrustean beds are not all negative reductions. Some may be beneficial, though these are rare.”

“Violence is transferred from individuals to states. So is financial indiscipline. At the center of all this is the denial of antifragility.

“There is a dependence on narratives, an intellectualization of actions and ventures. Public enterprises and functionaries—even employees of large corporations—can only do things that seem to fit some narrative, unlike businesses that can just follow profits, with or without a good-sounding story. Remember that you need a name for the color blue when you build a narrative, but not in action—the thinker lacking a word for “blue” is handicapped; not the doer. (I’ve had a hard time conveying to intellectuals the intellectual superiority of practice.) Modernity widened the difference between the sensational and the relevant—in a natural environment the sensational is, well, sensational for a reason; today we depend on the press for such essentially human things as gossip and anecdotes and we care about the private lives of people in very remote places. Indeed, in the past, when we were not fully aware of antifragility and self-organization and spontaneous healing, we managed to respect these properties by constructing beliefs that served the purpose of managing and surviving uncertainty. We imparted improvements to the agency of god(s). We may have denied that things can take care of themselves without some agency. But it was the gods that were the agents, not Harvard-educated captains of the ship. So the emergence of the nation-state falls squarely into this pro-gression—the transfer of agency to mere humans. The story of the nation-state is that of the concentration and magnification of human errors. Modernity starts with the state monopoly on violence, and ends with the state’s monopoly on fiscal irresponsibility.”

“this idea of replacing God and the gods running future events with something even more religiously fundamentalist: the unconditional belief in the idea of scientific prediction regardless of the domain, the aim to squeeze the future into numerical reductions whether reliable or unreliable. For we have managed to transfer religious belief into gullibility for whatever can masquerade as science.”

“probabilistic homicide at work. Every child who undergoes an unnecessary operation has a shortening of her life expectancy. This example not only gives us an idea of harm done by those who intervene, but, worse, it illustrates the lack of awareness of the need to look for a break-even point between benefits and harm. Let us call this urge to help “naive interventionism.”

“Perhaps the idea behind capitalism is an inverse-iatrogenic effect, the unintended-but-not-so-unintended consequences: the system facilitates the conversion of selfish aims (or, to be correct, not necessarily benevolent ones) at the individual level into beneficial results for the collective.”

“What scientists call phenomenology is the observation of an empirical regularity without a visible theory for it. ”

“An ethical problem arises when someone is put in charge. Greenspan’s actions were harmful, but even if he knew that, it would have taken a bit of heroic courage to justify inaction in a democracy where the incentive is to always promise a better outcome than the other guy, regardless of the actual, delayed cost. Ingenuous interventionism is very pervasive across professions.”

“The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition—or a bonus—for it.”

“A friend who writes books remarked that painters like painting but authors like “having written.” I suggested he stop writing, for his sake and the sake of his readers.”

“This idea of “naturalistic” has led to confusion. Philosophers refer to an error called the naturalistic fallacy, implying that what is natural is not necessarily morally right—something I subscribe to, as we saw in... in the discussion of the problem of applying Darwinian selection to modern society and the need to protect those who fail, something counter to nature. (The problem is that some people misuse the naturalistic fallacy outside the moral domain and misapply it to this idea of reliance on naturalistic instinct when one is in doubt.) However one slices it, it is not a fallacy when it comes to risk considerations. Time is the best test of fragility—it encompasses high doses of disorder—and nature is the only system that has been stamped “robust” by time. But some philosophasters fail to understand the primacy of risk and survival over philosophizing, and those should eventually exit the gene pool—true philosophers would agree with my statement. There is a worse fallacy: people making the opposite mistake and considering that what is naturalistic is a fallacy.”

“In business and economic decision making, reliance on data causes severe side effects—data is now plentiful thanks to connectivity, and the proportion of spuriousness in the data increases as one gets more immersed in it. A very rarely discussed property of data: it is toxic in large quantities—even in moderate quantities. The previous two chapters showed how you can use and take advantage of noise and randomness; but noise and randomness can also use and take advantage of you, particularly when totally unnatural, as with the data you get on the Web or through the media. The more frequently you look at data, the more noise you are disproportionally likely to get (rather than the valuable part, called the signal); hence the higher the noise-to-signal ratio.”

“There is so much noise coming from the media’s glorification of the anecdote. Thanks to this, we are living more and more in virtual reality, separated from the real world, a little bit more every day while realizing it less and less. Consider that every day, 6,200 persons die in the United States, many of preventable causes. But the media only report the most anecdotal and sensational cases (hurricanes, freak accidents, small plane crashes), giving us a more and more distorted map of real risks. In an ancestral environment, the anecdote, the “interesting,” is information; today, no longer. Likewise, by presenting us with explanations and theories, the media induce an illusion of understanding the world. And the understanding of events (and risks) on the part of members of the press is so retrospective that they would put the security checks after the plane ride, or what the ancients call post bellum auxilium, sending troops after the battle. Owing to domain dependence, we forget the need to check our map of the world against reality. So we are living in a more and more fragile world, while thinking it is more and more understandable. To conclude, the best way to mitigate interventionism is to ration the supply of information, as naturalistically as possible. This is hard to accept in the age of the Internet. It has been very hard for me to explain that the more data you get, the less you know what’s going on, and the more iatrogenics you will cause. People are still under the illusion that “science” means more data.”

“When constrained systems, those hungry for natural disorder, collapse, as they are eventually bound to, since they are fragile, failure is never seen as the result of fragility. Rather, such failure is interpreted as the product of poor forecasting. As with a crumbling sand pile, it would be unintelligent to attribute the collapse of a fragile bridge to the last truck that crossed it, and even more foolish to try to predict in advance which truck might bring it down. Yet it is done all too often.”

“We can’t put all false predictors in jail; we can’t stop people from asking for predictions; we can’t tell people not to hire the next person who makes promises about the future. “All I want is to live in a world in which predictions such as those by Mr. Kato do not harm you. And such a world has unique attributes: robustness.” The idea of proposing the Triad was born there and then as an answer to my frustration: Fragility-Robustness-Antifragility as a replacement for predictive methods.”

“Further, after the occurrence of an event, we need to switch the blame from the inability to see an event coming (say a tsunami, an Arabo-Semitic spring or similar riots, an earthquake, a war, or a financial crisis) to the failure to understand (anti)fragility, namely, “why did we build something so fragile to these types of events?” Not seeing a tsunami or an economic event coming is excusable; building something fragile to them is not. Also, as to the naive type of utopianism, that is, blindness to history, we cannot afford to rely on the rationalistic elimination of greed and other human defects that fragilize society. Humanity has been trying to do so for thousands of years and humans remain the same, plus or minus bad teeth, so the last thing we need is even more dangerous moralizers (those who look in a permanent state of gastrointestinal distress). Rather, the more intelligent (and practical) action is to make the world greed-proof, or even hopefully make society benefit from the greed and other perceived defects of the human race.”

“There are two different domains, one in which we can predict (to some extent), the other—the Black Swan domain—in which we should only let turkeys and turkified people operate. And the demarcation is as visible (to non-turkeys) as the one between the cat and the washing machine. Social, economic, and cultural life lie in the Black Swan domain, physical life much less so. Further, the idea is to separate domains into those in which these Black Swans are both unpredictable and consequential, and those in which rare events are of no serious concern, either because they are predictable or because they are inconsequential. I mentioned in the Prologue that randomness in the Black Swan domain is intractable. I will repeat it till I get hoarse. The limit is mathematical, period, and there is no way around it on this planet. What is nonmeasurable and nonpredictable will remain nonmeasurable and nonpredictable, no matter how many PhDs with Russian and Indian names you put on the job—and no matter how much hate mail I get. There is, in the Black Swan zone, a limit to knowledge that can never be reached, no matter how sophisticated statistical and risk management science ever gets.”

“Now, what is worse, because of modernity, the share of Extremistan is increasing. Winner-take-all effects are worsening: success for an author, a company, an idea, a musician, an athlete is planetary, or nothing. These worsen predictability since almost everything in socioeconomic life now is dominated by Black Swans. Our sophistication continuously puts us ahead of ourselves, creating things we are less and less capable of understanding.”

“The traditional understanding of Stoicism in the literature is of some indifference to fate—among other ideas of harmony with the cosmos that I will skip here. It is about continuously degrading the value of earthly possessions. When Zeno of Kition, the founder of the school of Stoicism, suffered a shipwreck (a lot of shipwrecks in ancient texts), he declared himself lucky to be unburdened so he could now do philosophy. And the key phrase reverberating in Seneca’s oeuvre is nihil perditi, “I lost nothing,” after an adverse event. Stoicism makes you desire the challenge of a calamity. And Stoics look down on luxury: about a fellow who led a lavish life, Seneca wrote: “He is in debt, whether he borrowed from another person or from fortune.”1 Stoicism, seen this way, becomes pure robustness—for the attainment of a state of immunity from one’s external circumstances, good or bad, and an absence of fragility to decisions made by fate, is robustness. Random events won’t affect us either way (we are too strong to lose, and not greedy to enjoy the upside), so we stay in the middle column of the Triad. What we learn from reading Seneca directly rather than through the commentators, is a different story. Seneca’s version of that Stoicism is antifragility from fate. No downside from Lady Fortuna, plenty of upside. True, Seneca’s aim on paper was philosophical, trying to stick to the Stoic tradition as described above: Stoicism was not supposed to be about gains and benefits, so on paper it was not at the level of antifragility, just about a sense level of antifragility, just about a sense of control over one’s fate and the reduction of psychological fragility. But there is something that commentators have completely missed. If wealth is so much of a burden, while unnecessary, what’s the point of having it? Why did Seneca keep it?”

#Antifragile

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tortoisesforhire · 5 years

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Shipping!! And couple dynamics in fiction

So I’ve been looking a lot at like, specifically the couples that I ship and support in various media and the couples who I absolutely abhor and want to die in a fiery fire of fire, and I started asking myself...why? Why Alex? Why do you hate them so? Oh I’m so glad you asked self! I shall tell you!

Let’s look at a case study for What I Absolutely Hate OMG Why; Buffy and Angel from Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Muahahahaa!! Yes, I know, How DArE I betray the Ultimate Ship! But see, I don’t really care.) I haaaaate BuffyxAngel, I hate them in the beginning of Buffy, I hate them in Angel and I hate them in the comics. They are a garbage couple of garbage-ness. (sorry not sorry)

I’ll explain; so Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a fifteen year old girl gifted with Chosen Magical Girl powers to save the universe from monsters, she and her loyal scoobies go on to slay, smash and otherwise pwn the dark forces of the night. Horay! Only alas! Here comes Angel, he’s Dark and Spooky and Filled with Self Loathing! What is a poor girl to do? He’s chiseled and mysterious with a wounded heart of gold all wrapped up nicely for Buffy to save. With her ‘love’. Ahem.

From the get-go this relationship is Hella toxic, Angel’s entire arc when involved with Buffy revolved around Buffy; whether its Buffy saving the day or Buffy saving him. Saving him from himself, from his past, from his evil-sex-curse (don’t even get me started on that little bit of writing I mean wtf Joss?) all the while Angel is over a hundred years old and Buffy is sixteen. She is a baby! Infant little slayer tasked with saving (and often dying) for the world, and here comes this wounded heart vampire boy who leeches off of her goodness. All they do is take from one another, but the narrative is set up so that we believe their soulmates, doomed to be apart for all time. It’s gross.

And they represent a very prevalent relationship archetype in fiction; Doomed Soulmates. This idea that an innocent badass naive teen girl gets swooped off her feet by a wounded hero with a dark past and the two prance off into the sunset in all their fractured glory. (Hello Twilight, Vampire Diaries, Shadowhunters etc etc) It simultaneously manages to cast the female in the role of both victim and savior while the man is reduced to Sexy Fallen Angel who serves only to further her story.

Now, let’s flip this and look at some relationships that are Wonderful. Since I started picking on Buffy I’ll stick with that theme for a bit and talk about one of my Favorite Couples (srsly I love them) Buffy x Spike. (I bet you thought I was gonna talk about Willow x Tara, don’t worry, I’ll get there.) I adore Buffy and Spike’s relationship for several reasons but one of which was because it wasn’t planned. Buffy and Angel were very obviously a part of the story plot from the get go, their narrative beats were very expected and typical. Buffy and Spike? They were so organic. They were allowed to develop and grow and change as time went on. A big problem I have with the aformentioned horrible relationship is the age difference, it’s a weirdly common thing in fantasy fiction where the guy is like a hundred years old and the girl is like, a baby. And yeah, Spike is also like a hundred years old with a dark past, but at the point where they start their relationship Buffy is an adult, she’s been through some shit, they’re both wounded and fractured and their respective experienced place them on equal footing.

Honestly, there’s so much in their relationship dynamic that I love and idk if I have the space to put it all here so I’ll just cover the highlights. So a) their beginning is very unhealthy and it is allowed to be unhealthy. It’s not framed as innocently romantic or pure or whatever. It’s rough and sharp edged and exactly what you would expect from two people as damaged as they are. They hurt each other, and then save each other and hate each other, but love each other. And this is allowed to be unhealthy to the point where both of them say it and try and untangle themselves from it. B) They get each other, Angel was always trying to subtly control Buffy. To pull or push her into something else, he saw her as this pure righteous savior figure, so she felt she had to be that. Spike see’s her as a warrior, someone who has died multiple times and isn’t okay, someone who has killed and learned to live with the scars. Someone like him. He accepts her exactly as she is, and she learns from this to see him as he is and accept him (and herself) more fully. C) They act like a real couple acts. Real couples don’t just wrap themselves around one another and coo and sigh about how in love they are 24/7. Real couples hang out, real couples don’t live in this extreme hot/cold dynamic, they just interact normally. And Buffy and Spike, no matter where they are in their relationship have that dynamic, that easy camaraderie where they can just exist with one another. They’ve seen each others absolute worst and love each other in spite of it. They’re complex and they grow together, into and around one another. It’s great, it’s beautiful, I have a lot of feelings.

But the real difference between them is a fundamental difference in equality. The Angel/Buffy dynamic was never equal. And it frames emotional abuse tactics as romance and I find that quite creepy.

I think the real difference between Good Couples and Bad Couples is in the intentions of the writer when writing them. With Buffy/Angel we were being sold something, this Tragic Romance picture. With Ross/Rachel we’re being sold on the ultimate Will They/Won’t They (they shouldn’t), with Sam/Jack it’s the quintessential Jock/Nerd. They decided on an image before hand and then tried to tailor the narrative to suit that image. Whereas Good Couples, couples that really resonate with an audience are couples that result from the narrative itself, not the other way around.

Tara x Willow showed up out of no where and and struck deep, all of us little baby queers saw that and were like Yes! That is Me! Right there! And then they developed like a real couple would, they went through real struggles (mostly, I mean I doubt any of us have ever lost our memories due to an evil goddess from another dimension but hey, who knows) we got to bear witness to their love and cheer it on from beginning to end (the ending that shall not be named).

I’ve always loved relationships that take characters from really different places and allow them to grow and learn about one another in new and exciting ways. Monica and Chandler who are so different but who are able to appreciate and celebrate those differences with one another. Cory and Topanga who share a childhood and are one another biggest fan throughout their whole lives, growing and sharing those experiences. Mary and Matthew, Claire and Jamie, Jim and Pam, Jessica and Luke, all these couples are couples who are allowed to be broken together. Allowed to grow and change and aren’t stuck in the same stagnant place where they started.

Romance is a fun fictional genre, it’s exciting to explore and endlessly interesting when done right. But it’s easy for it to get stale. I want stories that bend the rules, who discard them altogether. I want a romance that changes, give me a story where two people love one another in continually changing ways. Don’t just tell me two people are in love, prove it. Prove to me that they are soulmates, allow them to prove it to each other.

One of my favorite stories, and I talk about it all the time, is OurImpavidHeroine’s Wuko-verse. She starts with Mako and Wu, weaving this exquisite love story between two people who could not be more different but who love one another and then make it work. They have problems and work through them. Then she introduces this third character Qi who just shoves in and makes themselves at home and now we get to explore what that is like, and how that changes things. She approaches Polyamory not as some kind of kink, it’s not about sex, she just follows these characters in their relationship and love and trust for one another and it’s so organic and beautiful that you can’t help but root for them. She takes your expectations and destroys them, disregards what you thought you were here for, well now you’re here for this! And that, I think is what romance is about. It’s not about Happily Ever After, it’s about How Do They Make It Work. How do they fight for each other, with one another, how do they grow, where do they compromise, how do they raise children, what about career, what about this or that or whatever. She allows them to be real.

Most romances, I find, don’t allow their characters to be real. To act like real people. I want to read a Cinderella story where she has to adjust and learn to be royalty, how does she go from extreme abuse and poverty to suddenly being in charge of a country? How does he help her? What about the kingdom? How do they feel about having a maid as a queen? I want that story. I’m tired of romances that only exist in the beginning of a relationship. The ‘falling in love’ part. I’m tired of ending at the first kiss. I’m tired of this whispy ‘happily ever after’ bullshit. Give me the grit! Give me the drama! Give! Me! The Meat!

In Amazon’s Mrs. Maisel, season two see’s her parents trying to reconnect. Her mother runs away to Paris because she finds she has no place or purpose with her husband or daughter anymore. She’s invisible at home so she leaves and finds herself in Paris. Remembers how to be happy and alone once more. When he shows up after he’s done throwing a fit he takes the time to live with her in Paris, to fall in love again, to fall in love with what she loves, to listen to how she feel’s. It’s this beautiful picture of two people in later years learning how to love one another again. That’s the sort of romance I’m here for, not this bubblegum high-school bullshit. Don’t give me Love At First Sight, that’s crap, give me Love After Fifty Years, Love Eventually, Love after War, Love in Spite of Everything. That’s the kind of relationship we’re missing in fiction.

#i now have a burning desire to list couples in alphabetical order #i'll try and restrain myself #i may or may not be successful #who knows

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