#swcrit

Like, the idea that C*tra was pulling her punches on Adora throughout the first four seasons of SP0P is nonsense. It's overtly incompatible with literally every interaction the characters have between the first outright murder attempt in "The Promise" and the apology in "Corridors", in which C*tra repeatedly tries to kill Adora in painful ways, layers on the emotional cruelty with a trowel and literally tries to end the world just to hurt her*. It's brought into the show in S5 and it doesn't make much sense when it is because it meshes so poorly with what we've been shown!

But this nonsensical claim has so much traction because it would have been smart for the writers to make it true. And I don't mean in the "it doesn't make sense but S5 pretends it does" way, I mean if C*tra had been pulling her punches, had dialled back on the awfulness instead of cranking it up to maximum every time Adora entered her line of sight, the romance might actually have been good.

You get similar nonsense from R*ylo. That post about "a character who wants to be evil but inadvertently does good" does not describe Kylo Ren, whose attempts to resist "the call of the light" are entirely successful by the end of TLJ and then he's just magically saved by the power of JJ Abrams' hackery. But the romance might begin to maybe sorta make sense if he was, so obviously that must be true, and the degree to which he just sucked as a person needs to be rewritten in light of that necessary truth.

It's just...wild to me that these very good instincts about what it would be a good idea for enemies-to-lovers writers to put in are used not to identify ones that do those things, but to encrust the ones that don't in such a dense layer of fanon that the original form is entirely unrecognisable, like a dead parasite at the heart of a pearl.

Like, the enemies-to-lovers arcs that are actually, what’s the word, good like Gideon the Ninth or the Thrawn trilogy come up with reasons to show the characters onscreen as Reluctant Allies Tolerating Each Other For The Moment so that some good old-fashioned bonding and positive relationship development can actually happen. Gideon and Harrow are forced to work together to win the Goth Olympics. Luke and Mara Jade and Silverbolt and Blackarachnia both have to brave trackless jungle full of unexpected predators and dangerous enemies. Heck, even after that Mara Jade has to go back and get Luke so he can help her break her boss out of jail.

SP0P basically just goes “well, it happened at some point offscreen” but because the people writing it don’t know how to write it well, there’s really no point where it works. You could put it in their childhood friendsh oh no wait their childhood friendship was, as they went to great lengths to show us in “Corridors”, toxic as fuck. They barely encounter each other in like half the show, most of those encounters feature C*tra going out of her way to cause Adora pain and the one episode where they do team up against a hostile environment it ends with the relationship significantly worsening, a trajectory that it then holds until the Miraculous Final Act Forgiveness that the 2019-2020 ass tier denizens invariably depend on.

Impressively, in a kind of depressing way, R*ylo is even worse. They’d never fucking met before he stuffed her in a torture chamber, then he tried to murder her and failed, then he tried to murder her and failed, and then they worked together for less screentime than John Boyega got in TRoS, and that ended with Kylo deciding that deep down he actually was just a fash asshole and wanted to murder her friends for not being fash assholes. I don’t buy that Rey could See Deep Down to the Good but Troubled Soul Within when the Uber Eats they called out for at the start of their collaboration hadn’t even arrived by its end.

And that’s just frustrating to me, because the parts that these romances skip over or say happened offscreen or just don’t engage with are the romance. They’re the heart of the actual arc. I’d say they lean into the pining, but they don’t even do that! They just have one character act like an asshole for, god, anywhere up to five seasons at this point and then shrug and say it was romantic.