#i dont think hed conflate love with wanting to be her like how he did for aranea tho. i think he wohld suffer in silence | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

wickedpact · 3 years

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I ordered The Old Guard books and they have arrived today which in a small way makes up for the stress I’m having planning a wedding in 2021 (that is already planning take two because it got postponed from last year)

Do you think Joe and Nicky are actually married?

- the annoying Anon but you can call me AA if that’s better

its funny you ask bc i do have an opinion on that and the opinion is: no

im not like... sure, but i have two reasons why i dont think theyre married / why they dont think of themselves as married

1.) if they did think of themselves as married, the answer to the question ‘what, is he your boyfriend?’ would just be 'no dickhead hes my fucking husband’

1b.) i mean, in the comics speech, joe says ‘He is not my ‘boyfriend’. He is not my 'lover', nor is he my 'partner’. He is all and more. He is my everything.”

so if joe dislikes labels like ‘partner’ or ‘lover’ because theyre not, idk, expansive enough to describe their relationship, (and he doesnt even mention 'husband’!) i cant imagine hed give a shit about marriage one way or another either. i made a post about it a while ago but theyve been together so long i doubt marriage is any more significant to them as a ~symbol of dedication~ than a couple of plastic promise rings two teenagers would buy at walmart. you know, like... theyre so beyond that

2.) im not an expert at queer history and im definitely making a lot of generalizations here that would make a historian flinch, but whenever i look at like,, historical queer media (poems, mostly, i read a lot of poetry for someone who doesnt like poetry) you dont really see gay people Yearn For Marriage like we do in more modern times; i mean, im not an expert on sappho’s writings, but she was kind of [waggles hand] mehhhh abt marriage, while also talking abt how great ‘’‘‘female companionship’’’‘ is. het marriage, and consummation, are often compared to theft and violence in her poems (albeit subtly) while the relationships between women who were...... involved were seen as erotic and comforting.

the two are never conflated, you know, she never talks about maidens marrying each other or wishing that they could, despite talking about marriage pretty frequently. m/f relationships and f/f relationships, which we would both define modernly as the same thing (just plain old love) are shown to be separate things from sappho’s perspective.

i mean, you see more recent stuff about gay people wanting to be married, but like, thats usually within the last couple hundred years. idk what the cultures joe and nicky grew up in taught on marriage, but a lot of Ye Olde people didnt expect to love the people they married (& of course these things depend on where youre from, era, class, gender, etc)

i mean, i imagine that joe, as the heir of his family’s business, probably had to dodge arranged (economic) marriages, and nicky, well-- there are tons of ‘gay person becomes priest to avoid het marriage’ stories out there. joe and nicky honestly for a good majority of their lives probably saw marriage as an unfortunate inevitability that they luckily got to avoid. and i imagine its likely that they didnt associate love with marriage-- or at least, they saw it as a social or economic thing?

i mean, women being married off to create children and be ‘provided for’, or men getting married to create heirs and for.. sexual satisfaction (i guess).... where does what joe and nicky had comply with that kind of relationship, you know? neither of them was a woman who needed to be economically provided for, neither of them needed or wanted heirs-- just nothing about that specific type of social contract would appeal to them. they probably just saw their relationship with each other as something entirely different than the relationship of a marriage

and by the time the concept of marriage more or less began to change, they were in a relationship for so long that getting married wouldve probably be seen as silly to them

(but again like i said im probably generalizing a lot here)

#good luck with ur wedding omg #now is a pretty bad time to be trying to put together a wedding i imagine #also have fun w/ the books theyre a wild ride #AA #Anonymous #normally im that person Gayly Yearning For Marriage like everyone else #but i really like the idea of joe and nicky's relationship being so BIG that marriage doesnt even begin to cover it

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