#how pat and pran contrast as characters and why their dynamic works

[jemmo]

it happened. my little sister has joined the bad buddy fandom.

we watched ep 11, we cried, then proceeded to talk for 3 hours (yes, three!) about bad buddy, im talking the fandom, the fic landscape, then nonstop just analysis, the themes present, the dynamics and relationships, the character building. basically fawning for hours about how incredibly crafted the show is. she’s an english lit major and a fic writer so she goes fucking ham on this kind of stuff, to the point where she said things that even had me shook bc like… not even to see the show through somebody else’s lens, but through someone that understands writing on an academic level and how she applies that appreciates it, it was just so interesting to see the things she picked out and how she applied them.

so yeah, she’s come out of it with a rudimentary fic idea, a dissertation’s-worth of analysis to write and a whole list of taylor swift edits to make, so get ready.

[fiercynn]

heyyy! i was wondering if you liked the os2 episodes of bbts!!! i noticed you shared some stuff regarding the first two episodes. did you enjoy eps 3 and 4 as well?

i never get asks, this is so exciting??? (probably because i don't actually spend enough time on tumblr...i was kind of starting to be on here a bit and then got depressed by a lot of the negative reactions to @end-otw-racism during their first action. but tbh getting an ask actually makes me want to engage more so THANK YOU ANON)

okay, my os2 feelings! i talked about this a bit on my twitter so i'm going to recreate some of that here, haha. but the short version is: yes, i enjoyed the whole thing! i think episode one was my favorite because i lovedddd the patpran dynamic we got there - watching pran be confident but also settled in love felt amazing to me, and i loved the little domestic notes. i think my second-favorite episode was actually the last one - not so much because i think it was a well-constructed episode (it was a little all over the place, tbh), but i ADORED the phutian ending after having felt like their relationship was getting kind of shafted for most of the special. also we got to see inkpa again!

it's hard to talk about my own feelings though about it without reflecting on the disappointment a lot of people i know have felt about the special. and i certainly understand and agree with a LOT of the critiques, they are completely valid. but i guess i'll explain a bit more about why i liked the special anyway.

firstly, i think i came into it with the feeling that because bbs is such a perfect narrative, anything we got in os2 would be a bonus, and that i could take or leave the parts i liked and didn't like to apply to my own personal love of bbs - especially since it did take place in the timeskip instead of the ending. and i especially felt this way because of knowing that there was a crossover with atots.

i think that one of the issues with crossovers in general is they force shows to draw kind of contrived parallels between characters and pairings. and similarly i think crossovers require characters to be matched up in scenes together just so you see their contrasts. so that's why we had to have two separate nights of lost in the woods, so that we could get pran & phupha as well as tian & pat. could they have done better with making parallels that made more sense for both couples? sure. but i wasn't totally surprised that the crossover parts felt clunky/over-worked. i also think crossovers prioritize humorous moments over character-building ones. they're just really not a good vehicle for storytelling imo - they're more just about seeing your faves up on screen together.

as far as patpran's conflict in these episodes - again, totally valid & understandable that people are upset & feel like it was unresolved! for me, though, it felt like a pretty natural part of their progression as a couple. my friend @/siri_dechawat on twitter has a great thread about it that i totally agree with. and also i think it's worth thinking about how long patpran's history is, how many old hurts they still have that probably aren't fully resolved. i was once in a relationship that reminds me of that, a relationship that had six years of fraught history before it got happy, and my recollection is that by the time you get to the place where you're secure in that kind of relationship, you don't always revisit those old hurts because you have the feeling that now you're happy, so why look back so much? but they can still flare up and it can be hard to talk about them, so you try to work through them yourself and that isn't always easy.

to me, the fact that patpran kept up a lot of their usual dynamic - teasing, competing, cuddling, even while they're in the middle of a fight - felt very organic. they can't always say exactly what they're feeling, but they still express affection. and for me, the fact that they were having this fight at all about pran's independence & pat's self-sacrifice wasn't at all going backwards from the original show. the second half of bbs doesn't actually have them resolving a lot of those things out loud.

at the end of the day, while this is the last time we'll see patpran onscreen (sob), it's not their ending. it's not even the ending that we see of them. we know where they end up by ep 12 and it's pretty perfect imo. and the fact that they are not always perfect at communicating along the way is okay with me. we know they end up on the same page (ha) even if these episodes had some conflict around that. we know where their love is.

okay i said all this and i stand by it, but also if you have read any of my fic you know that i LOVE writing canon-divergence AUs, so i did a series of them for os2 as well based on prompts i got on twitter! i ended up with twelve separate "what if" scenarios for how various scenes in the special could have gone differently - just episodes one through three, because i wasn't as much in a writing mood after the last one - and i collected them together in an ao3 post called in another lifetime. i think my favorite ones within there are mountain, a h/c ficlet patpran do actually make it up pha pun dao, and secrets, an extension of the last patpran scene in episode three. so if you were unsatisfied by various scenes in the special, maybe you will like these as fix-its? :D? anyway thank you again anon for the ask!!!! maybe i will try to be on tumblr more again...