#its all been discourse talk in my inbox today LOL

[qoldenskies]

ask me some cc questions im in a cc mood

[wild-aloof-rebel]

By no means do I want to invite discourse onto your blog, so please do not feel at all obligated to answer, but I was wondering what you thought of the titular happy ending. Obviously, it's sparked a lot of debate, and your takes are always so compassionate and articulate and insightful. Have a lovely evening regardless, and thank you for everything you've contributed to this fandom!

a few things to start… first of all, thank you for asking this in such a non-confrontational way. i haven’t seen much of whatever debates are happening as most of it has managed to stay out of my inbox this time thankfully (i hope i’m not jinxing myself by responding to this lol), though i feel like i can assume the shape of some of the broad strokes of it. i say that just to mean that this shouldn’t be taken in any way as a response to any particular posts/people but just as my general thoughts on the ep. and of course, as i always try to remind everyone, my opinion certainly isn’t the only one that matters, and everyone is entitled to feel however they feel about this (or any other) plot line on the show. i’m certainly not the be-all, end-all of schitt’s creek opinions, nor do i want to be.

anyway, let’s talk about the happy ending…

the first thing i do any time that there’s something on the show that seems to throw people off in some way is to take a step back and try to think about what that particular scene/plot was trying to accomplish. and honestly, the first goal of the show is always that it wants to make you laugh. it’s a comedy. while it means a lot to those of us who love it so deeply and have watched it so carefully, and while there are certainly moments–more and more frequently throughout the years–of great depth and heart and drama, it is still at its core a comedy, and some scenes are really just meant to be a laugh and not hold some kind of earth-shatteringly deep revelation, and i honestly think this is one of them. 

i mentioned in some of my speculation earlier this season that i thought we (def including myself there) were in danger of trying to connect too many plots in a way that the show historically hasn’t really done, and i think that some of the negative reactions to this may be the same kind of thing, that we sometimes take things too seriously on a show where historically most of the plots of most of the eps aren’t really meant to be that serious. think about “love letters” for instance. so many people were (and still are) upset about how patrick reacts to the robbery, and sure, i get that he could have been nicer and considered that david and stevie didn’t know the robber didn’t actually have a weapon and that they were frightened, etc etc etc. but also, it’s a comedy. it wasn’t supposed to be some kind of treatise on the right and wrong ways to respond to traumatic situations; it was supposed to be funny and that’s that. the characters clearly have moved on by the next time we see them–david doesn’t seem to be harboring some kind of resentment for the way that patrick responded–and we shouldn’t take it any more seriously than they do. 

the show is actually really good at telling us what’s serious and what isn’t, if we just listen to it, and it’s definitely telling us this particular plot isn’t meant to be That Serious. patrick, despite having his understandable initial wtf kind of moment about it, has already by the end of the scene accepted that it was a miscommunication (and one of his own making at that–i mean he does leave the cash and the note, plus he tells david specifically before he leaves that “it’s all taken care of and i’ve told them we need you calm today, so just let them do their job,” so he recognizes once he starts thinking about it just how david could have thought this was what he intended to happen), and he’s already thinking about how some day down the road it’s just going to be yet another story that’s part of their history. he’s clearly still excited and happy when we get to the wedding. he obviously still chooses to marry david that day. so while any of us personally may have reacted differently in this situation, the show is telling us that patrick ultimately isn’t particularly bothered by what happened, that this isn’t supposed to be taken as some kind of serious, make-or-break moment in their relationship. it’s really just supposed to be funny–something to help break up the heavier emotions of the episode. now we may personally disagree on whether or not we actually find it funny, but that seems to be most of the intent either way.

if you do want to take it somewhat more seriously though (because i mean that’s what we do in fandom right? lolol), i think you have to look at it in the context of what this season has been trying to accomplish with their relationship. season 4 is all about those tentative first steps of falling in love. season 5 builds on that to give us all these hallmark relationship moments. season 6 then lets us see what life looks like when the romance isn’t quite as new, when you’ve found enough safety in each other to allow yourself to be seen at less than your best, to make mistakes, to disagree, to explore, to fight when you need to, to know that you can get it wrong sometimes because your partner will always be there to catch you if you fall, because you’ll fall together and pick each other back up, again and again. that’s what love looks like long-term. that’s what marriage looks like. and that’s what this season has given us a taste of.

for example, david, though he’s embarrassed by The Incident, still comes back to patrick’s apartment at the end of the day, allowing himself to be more fully seen (and thus more fully loved) in the light of patrick’s understanding. patrick, who we know has struggled with always trying to make himself be the person other people want him to be–the perfect boyfriend, the perfect son–lets himself crack open a bit, allowing those truer, messier emotions to spill out, letting david actually see his frustration about the spray tan because he knows by now that it won’t scare him away. in these ways and more, season 6 is about how love goes beyond romance, how it builds a space where we can be our true selves, how there’s a stability in that which takes time for you to build together. if something like this had happened earlier on in their relationship, i could see it being A Big Obstacle for them, but at this point, it’s barely even a bump in the road, already well on its way to being a funny anecdote they’ll trot out years on down the road, when they’ve both had a bit too much wine at one of their monthly dinner parties with their friends, the two of them talking over each other as they compete to tell it better. they’re solid enough that a miscommunication like this isn’t going to derail them. 

like dan said to entertainment weekly, their relationship is “founded on something much deeper, much more substantial, much more respectful… their sex life [is not] something that is always what’s defining loyalty in their lives.” and while that may not be how some of us feel about our own sex lives and the role of sex as it relates to loyalty or intimacy within our own relationships, it is pretty clear at this point that for david and patrick, sex can just be sex sometimes. they were obviously interested in entertaining the possibility of a threesome with jake earlier this season, and as david points out in that episode, jake is the perfect candidate for something like that because there will be no emotional intimacy tied to it with him. the same thing goes here. there is no threat to the intimacy and stability of david and patrick’s relationship because of this mishap, so ultimately it’s something that’s easy for both of them to just wave away.

and that’s really what i feel like a lot of the disagreement probably comes down to at the end of the day, too–for a lot of us, this wouldn’t be so easy to wave away. we all have our own lenses through which we view the world, which means that when we see other people’s relationships, fictional or not, we tend to judge them based on our own standards. and while that certainly might mean that whatever is happening may not be something we want in our own relationships, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily wrong for whomever is actually in them. it’s tempting to put our own views of sexuality, loyalty, monogamy, happiness, whatever onto david and patrick’s relationship, but at the end of the day, what actually matters is how they view their own relationship, and the show is telling us that they’re both happy with exactly where they are. so many of us see something of ourselves in one or both of them, and so seeing them make a choice that we ourselves might not make can be a hard thing to reconcile, but it still doesn’t make it the wrong choice for them. 

ultimately if david and patrick both are clearly happy in their relationship and don’t view this as a big deal, who am i to say otherwise?