what does it mean to be loved by death?

hi im bowie im 29 and i love orphans. they/them.

i blog about romance novels, framing devices, death, cycles, identity, and zines+book arts. this is my ao3. this is my lbxd.

i come as a matched set with @obeetlebeetle.

Since you don’t think Reid is drawing from Regency romance patterns of resolving barriers to romance, I am curious to hear you talk more about why the HEA in TLG is set up the way it is? And interested in sports romance conventions in general. Do you think the “move to the same team, suburban house+dog combo” comes from sports subgenre or just romance more generally?

hi thank you for the ask! sorry it took me a million years to get to it. i cant speak much to sports romance conventions because i havent read anything else in that genre, but in romance in general the HEA is almost always explicitly tied to a heteronormative ideal of house/marriage/kids. i think its an extremely legible fantasy to use as shorthand, ie all of those things indicate a settled, uncomplicated future. obviously in real life that could not be further from the truth, many people (including myself) experience upset and difficulty in their relationships after "getting settled". but as part of the language of the genre, yes, this fantasy is absolutely par for the HEA course.

i think it is interesting that reid chooses to end HR on a HFN (happy for now) and then come back to their story later. it's certainly a contrast to the other game changers books, which afaik all end with a standard HEA. comparing episodes 5+6 of the show, which follow the book pretty closely, it is very useful that there is a direct comparison for shilya. they see the big gesture HEA ending from afar, and even though they know it can't be for them right now, it gives them the courage to pursue their HFN. i really liked the way jacob+hudson framed it in interviews, that the drive into the sunset is not a resolution of all the problems, but rather a decision to be in it together. but then, yes, TLG extends that, semi-successfully imo, into the pursuit of a typical marriage+house+kids HEA.

for more on hr+houses as a theme, see my house tour post. i think TLG's take on marriage is sweet (if insane) bc it is directly figured as an achievement of their coming out + everyone supporting them. of course that is drawn from an extremely heterosexual idea of an HEA, but that is the water they're swimming in. my general impression of gay tradpub romance (again, i havent read that widely) is that most of it hews pretty closely to the expectations of straight tradpub romance. tradpub romance is, in general, sort of a hilariously restrictive genre; you can do whatever you want as long as there's a HEA (it's on the RWA's description of the genre page). which, like, that dictates the whole story, lol. there are other options, ie the queer throuple of the lyonesse trilogy, who do still end the series (spoilers) in a version of married+house+dog, but at least they kill the literal pope first.

the specter of children has been removed from the show pretty neatly, thank god, but its present in the books. ilya and shane talk about kids at the cottage; hayden's kids are much more present in TLG and hayden serves to nudge shane repeatedly into a legible kind of settling. i lowkey despise kids-as-future coming up in romance (and it almost always does) because it underlines the patriarchal ideal that the point of romance is reproduction AND because it figures future children as a mark of success in romance, which, like, dont make me laugh. the most in-love couple in the world can (and often will!!!!!!) be horrible parents lol. but even aside from the realism, the figuring of "wow hes so good with kids thats so sexy bc he will be a good dad" (real shanethought from tlg) is SO ANNOYINGGGG to me. i am wondering how the show will handle this/if it will come up, especially bc we know hayden's children will be in s2 for their diy wedding.