Capable of more than we know

by W.S. Merwin

So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and “found family” often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the “Only Romance Is Important” idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, and—at least in some ways—a found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.

In practice, I think that....even when we know that we don’t see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate “familial” with “important” (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least it’s a lot easier to make that case—and also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that “just friendship” might not.

...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. That’s the highest-status box there is! Don’t you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??

But Friendship—philia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses it—isn’t a weaker form or “first stage” of other loves. It’s its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to “legitimize” it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.

(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! There’s a fandom I’ve gotten into recently that—as not infrequently happens—has a central relationship you could easily consider “father-son,” “best friends,” or a mixture of the two, and there’s variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as “best friends” in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the “father-son” camp. And even though I’ve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few years—mainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions I‘ve formulated while thinking about them—I still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! They’re very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, they’re still in my brain.)

The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own right—which stinks, because it’s great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. It’s also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.

The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of “Family” so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until it’s started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when we’ve lost the verbal distinction between “relationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connection” (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the “found family” definition of “any group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and aren’t related.”

the charm of most straight dark romances is the lack of morality displayed by the male half of the couple. this appeals to people because a protagonist with no moral limit is willing to commit any type of crimes to protect or avenge his love interest. “i’ll burn the world down for you” is the most common dark romance trope. in that type of stories, the woman often functions as a moral compass and she ends up either fixing the man or being corrupted herself. while she’s inherently good, she does not have strong convictions. when the man changes, it is because he loves her, not because she’s successfully redeemed him and changed his views.

zuko and katara can never fit that archetype because zuko and katara have strong, unmovable, righteous morals. even as a villain, there are lines zuko refuses to cross. times and times again, he’s moved to act out of compassion and empathy. not for a woman, not for the Uncle he’s devoted to, but for people and creatures he barely knows. kindness is inherent to him. he’s more than willing to leave mai, the girl he canonically loves, to become a part of the anti-imperialist resistance because his conscience allows him no other path. even in a world where zutara happens, zuko’s redemption would not be kickstarted by his romantic love for katara.

Happy 100th birthday David Attenborough, you absolute bloody legend 💖💖💖💖💖

by Wendell Berry

Okay, zutara friends, sign-ups for this year's Reverse Bang are HERE and they are LIVE until MAY 2ND. Invites will be send MAY 3RD.