#it's a gestural mythic totally implicit romantic tragedy

[onewomancitadel]

I think what's funny about being a very dedicated romance lover is that there definitely times where I actually don't want it in the thing I'm into or at the very least I don't want it to be bland and really boring. I get it, Zelda/Link shippers go way back, but the gestural relationship was always way more interesting as a chaste knight/lady dynamic, and it's just lazy leaning into cutesy wholesome rivals-to-lovers shenanigans. (There are no intended TOTK spoilers in this post). It could not be there, and the story wouldn't really change in BOTW (or indeed even Skyward Sword); it's not achieving overly much except finally leaning into the (ostensible) inevitability of Link and Zelda getting together. Meanwhile - yeah - if I have to draw comparisons, any implicit Beauty and Beast dynamic to Link and Midna actually transforms Midna's character arc and the ultimate tragedy of her disappearance (and inability to reconcile their partner dynamic with who they both are and the nature of the Zelda myth).

Similar to that vein I really don't like companion romances in DW, which is why I feel that (even though she was polarising) someone like River Song was more interesting if the Doctor had to have a romance, but I always preferred the Doctor as a sexless figure/professor/parent type thing. Idk, the companion romances were very clumsy and uninteresting (which is why Donna remains one of the best companions - despite the fat single woman jokes, ugh, I can't believe people say only Moffat's run was misogynistic) and just obviously there to pander to a more familiar format of storytelling by the time of the reboot (self-insert Doctor with a sexpot companion). This is why I really don't like the Thirteenth Doctor's casting as an attractive (relatively) younger woman, just because it's really apparent they weren't thinking too hard about who would actually be appropriate for a Doctor. I don't know if that makes me unfeminist (I don't even like Tennant's Doctor, and Eleven works because he's unconventional) or something, I'm not sure - I think they did her wardrobe well enough but I just can't get over the casting there (and I know she has some sort of a companion romance, again, which it seems like they didn't even commit to with a female love interest, which says a lot. What I'm really getting at here with Thirteen is that I would've preferred a less conventional actress for the Doctor).

But it really comes down to motivated versus unmotivated romance, and sometimes we're not even really talking about the same thing - fluffy superficial shit (and yeah, you can definitely argue Doctor/Rose isn't superficial, but to me it does break part of the identity of DW and the Doctor's dynamic with the companions, and the characterisation of that relationship is exhausting and so fucking boring) is just fluffy and superficial, but from a storytelling perspective I want to be thinking about what these romances achieve narratively. If anything I think what is, say, critical to writing a companion romance with the Doctor is that it should by nature be fraught and taboo, and despite Rose's parallel-world disappearance the nature of them having feelings for each other is just a foregone conclusion and the will-they won't-they shit is just boring romcom bullshit. I find the Davies era mostly unwatchable because of this nonsense now (and then Martha gets saddled with that bullshit too, which brings down her entire run as companion).

I enjoy romance which is narratively justified and I find it tedious and boring when it's shoved in my face where it's inappropriate, which is fucking hilarious because that's a common detraction to the romances I enjoy. But we know it's assigned as a bad faith criticism in these circumstances and rarely do they explain why it doesn't work. But in writing romance, what I think is valuable is asking what it achieves on multiple levels - character, plot, theme - and whether it belongs there, particularly tonally.

I understand it's not a popular opinion (Zelda/Link and Doctor/Rose are huge ships in the General Audience alone, and the reason I think the former especially has been leant into is for an obvious reason) but I think it's worth considering critically for where romance does and doesn't work, because even if those ships are nominally popular, sometimes things are just popular because they hit familiar tropes and feel inevitable and cute.