Medliwaith

🗣🗣🗣 free youtube premiere of the national theatre the importance of being ernest announced!

Up the stakes! Have them get drunk and married in, like, Moosejaw! By the only legal authority who was awake at the time, a very drunk tour guide!

Honest answer is because legally valid accidental marriage in vegas IS the existing trope (in mainstream media & across fandoms including ones set outside the US, to my chagrin lmao). and i was playing with subverting that particular trope directly.

I personally like subverting the trope, as opposed to reimagining it in a different space, for multiple reasons. including that i actually think it would be interesting to poke fun at how often accidental marriage plotlines are written by people who have no idea the bureaucratic nightmare legal marriage is. and also largely because i am quite critical of marriage as an institution. you could say i study the cultural history of gender and sexuality in america & anglophone west, which may shed some light on why i might fantasize about writing a fic that doesn’t, for once, dependant on a politics of inclusion in a deeply, deeply flawed system of hegemonic normativity in order to engineer its primary romantic plotline.

some more ranting about marriage here, feel free to skip. same sex marriage is not marriage equality. there is no such thing as marriage equality. first of all, there are many other groups who are not or even cannot or should not get their legal protections through the legal framework of marriage. (disabled people often cannot access this institution, so we do not have marriage equality. children should not be able to get married, but they still deserve some of the rights and privileges you can often only get through marriage. and the limits on how many marriages you can have keeps many many people from being able to sign contracts to protect themselves and their assets) marriage is inherently a system about deciding who has power and what they can do with it. it is not, historically, a declaration of love. it is maybe a declaration of commitment. but more decidedly it is a binding contract that has legal, economic, and biological implications for (usually two) people, their relations, and their community/ies. historically and in the present, one of those people is subjugated to the other. we can try to rewrite our laws all we want but the foundation of the system is rotted. the only reason not to burn it down is because too often marriage is the core of the legal framework for some of the most basic protections and privileges.

so thats why i was interested in the idea of a fic about a “false scare” of a marriage.

i think it would be really fun to have a fic that grapples with some of these real issues with that institution, while also playing with the established tropes that tend to reinforce the institution’s hegemonic presence. honestly i think part of the joke would even be like, bro, you thought you Accidentally successfully completed a bureaucratic process in a country you dont reside in? and you were too busy angsting to double check on the likelihood of this fanfic trope scenario happens?

which is to say, i understand that it is fun to subvert things. i also realize its really annoying that the default culture for everything is US/american culture and half of all tropes come from hollywood romcoms and sitcoms. i’m not against your idea at all. I honestly think you should write it!!!!

and normally i would never put an anti marriage rant under a post that says x character and y character should get for real married. you can say that all you want and i celebrate it. i actually love marriage and wedding fics, they are fun. (and honestly i disagree with op. i dont mind fantasy worlds where like, two men who teleported from england with absolutely nothing in the way of pesky “identification” can randomly and accidentally get married in 2009!!! thats fun and i like it!)

I just got mildly, mildly annoyed because, of all the fandoms used as an example of how recent American gay marriage is, they picked a series that's actually Canadian, and gay marriage happened a decade earlier here.

I know, I know!! They fly all over the place and you can easily be writing them in a place like Vegas!

I'm just being slightly peeved in Canadian, pay me no mind, pay me no mind!! I try to be a better person, I really do 🤦‍♀️ It's the accidentally being erased that's a button my mind can't resist for some reason. It makes me go all patriotic which is really embarrassing. I even made a map. :: shrivels in embarrassment ::

Anyway I agree with your analysis of marriage! And it's a great fic idea. I love the segway. You are absolutely right I betrayed the rules of improv and fic brainstorming. My apologies.

I haven't read that trope so I didn't recognize the subversion but actually the Canadian gay marriage being a fact of life for Shane would mean he might be more likely to think it's possible in Vegas in 2009!.

& yeah, I squinted at that a bit too. Probably just because HR is The collective yaoi fandom right now. It’s nice to all be into something good.

Now that I think about it, it would actually be more historically accurate to write USAmericans crossing the border to get married in Canada. You obviously lose the easy possibility of accidental hijinks element because it’s Such a process. But it was absolutely part of expanding marriage access here.

To be fair, I think Vegas is pretty unique in terms of how it does genuinely have a famous industry based around tacky, cheap, potentially drunken weddings. Even that is exaggerated in media, because of how bad of an idea it is to get married on a whim. (Eg i think in a lot of those chapels they wont let people get married if they are too intoxicated). I think people get really intrigued by the concept of doing it on accident and run with that. There was a Friends episode and a Katy Perry music video which are what I think of first, lol.

Up the stakes! Have them get drunk and married in, like, Moosejaw! By the only legal authority who was awake at the time, a very drunk tour guide!

Honest answer is because legally valid accidental marriage in vegas IS the existing trope (in mainstream media & across fandoms including ones set outside the US, to my chagrin lmao). and i was playing with subverting that particular trope directly.

I personally like subverting the trope, as opposed to reimagining it in a different space, for multiple reasons. including that i actually think it would be interesting to poke fun at how often accidental marriage plotlines are written by people who have no idea the bureaucratic nightmare legal marriage is. and also largely because i am quite critical of marriage as an institution. you could say i study the cultural history of gender and sexuality in america & anglophone west, which may shed some light on why i might fantasize about writing a fic that doesn’t, for once, dependant on a politics of inclusion in a deeply, deeply flawed system of hegemonic normativity in order to engineer its primary romantic plotline.

some more ranting about marriage here, feel free to skip. same sex marriage is not marriage equality. there is no such thing as marriage equality. first of all, there are many other groups who are not or even cannot or should not get their legal protections through the legal framework of marriage. (disabled people often cannot access this institution, so we do not have marriage equality. children should not be able to get married, but they still deserve some of the rights and privileges you can often only get through marriage. and the limits on how many marriages you can have keeps many many people from being able to sign contracts to protect themselves and their assets) marriage is inherently a system about deciding who has power and what they can do with it. it is not, historically, a declaration of love. it is maybe a declaration of commitment. but more decidedly it is a binding contract that has legal, economic, and biological implications for (usually two) people, their relations, and their community/ies. historically and in the present, one of those people is subjugated to the other. we can try to rewrite our laws all we want but the foundation of the system is rotted. the only reason not to burn it down is because too often marriage is the core of the legal framework for some of the most basic protections and privileges.

so thats why i was interested in the idea of a fic about a “false scare” of a marriage.

i think it would be really fun to have a fic that grapples with some of these real issues with that institution, while also playing with the established tropes that tend to reinforce the institution’s hegemonic presence. honestly i think part of the joke would even be like, bro, you thought you Accidentally successfully completed a bureaucratic process in a country you dont reside in? and you were too busy angsting to double check on the likelihood of this fanfic trope scenario happens?

which is to say, i understand that it is fun to subvert things. i also realize its really annoying that the default culture for everything is US/american culture and half of all tropes come from hollywood romcoms and sitcoms. i’m not against your idea at all. I honestly think you should write it!!!!

and normally i would never put an anti marriage rant under a post that says x character and y character should get for real married. you can say that all you want and i celebrate it. i actually love marriage and wedding fics, they are fun. (and honestly i disagree with op. i dont mind fantasy worlds where like, two men who teleported from england with absolutely nothing in the way of pesky “identification” can randomly and accidentally get married in 2009!!! thats fun and i like it!)