rii

the girls and the gays are fighting again

original post:

Individual drawings under the cut! :)

at the mercy of the moon

An aromantic reading of Double Life is literally about how a system built on over-reliance on a singular (romantically implied) relationship, especially one you cannot choose, leads to people being ostracised and isolated because there is no built-in community to fall back on if that relatiosnhip ever goes wrong. It's a study in how amatonormativity hurts everyone in the long run and we see it play out with MULTIPLE soulmate pairings.

The most prominent example is of course that the importance of Pearl's isolation isn't even that Scott rejected her, it's that Martyn left her too (despite the fact that Cleo and Scott clearly expected the two of them to team up), it's that nobody else would give her a hand, it's that the rest of the server came to view Pearl as scary and strange and unwanted because she didn't have a soulmate, and they did, so why would they bother to take her in? That's not how the system works, she's supposed to be with her soulmate.

Then we have further examples with how pairings like Scar and Grian, or Ren and BigB stay with each other despite being unhappy and full of conflict because That's What You're Supposed To Do. We have people reacting to Scott and Cleo's choice to live together (a sort of narrative queerness) with skepticism and disdain. There develops a classic facet of amatonormativity where endurance is a virtue, where it's better to stay in an unhappy relationship than to be alone or to go against the grain.