Narrative relationship continuity

[sholio]

This is a terrible subject line, but I can't think of a better one that describes this concept.

sheron and I had a conversation about this awhile back, and I meant to write it up into a post, then forgot about it for awhile, but I was thinking about that conversation tonight and figured I'd go ahead and do that before I forget it all completely.

We were talking about how satisfying it is when serial-type fiction (TV shows, books, movies in a series) have the characters referring to each other or thinking about each other when the other one is not actually involved in the current storyline, or is elsewhere. Like, it's satisfying and happymaking all out of proportion to the actual amount of screentime it gets. Just a few offhand references can make it feel like the other character is present when they're actually not - it gives a tremendous amount of relationship continuity and emotional "weight", I guess, to the relationship, by suggesting that the characters think about each other even when they're not present.

We were kicking around the idea that this is actually one reason why fans sometimes come away shipping something completely different than the narrative actually wanted them to ship, or feeling like certain pairings just "have no chemistry". And it's really easy to do by accident if you're largely focused on the plot, I think, because some character relationships are more tightly plot-connected than others, so you have to keep referring back to them in the characters' thoughts and having that relationship come up in the narrative - whereas some of the side relationships don't necessarily have that, so if the writers don't make the effort to keep them in mind, they just sort of ... vanish except when the other person is onscreen.

And it doesn't even have to be much! Like, Sheron used the example of Steve/Sharon in Civil War - I don't dislike that pairing, but I agree with her that it would've given that relationship a lot more weight if we'd had a few instances of the two of them thinking about or referencing each other when they're not in the same scene together - like Steve stopping to consider the effect that him going on the run might have on Sharon, or a brief scene with her getting a text message letting her know he's okay at the end. It can be absolutely miniscule - just 10 seconds or 20 seconds here or there. The thing is that not having it in there might be part of why so many people came away feeling cold towards that relationship - because it gives the subconscious impression that they're just not that important in each other's lives.

It's not even necessarily romantic - I mean, it doesn't have to be. If someone is important to you, platonically or otherwise, you tend to do that kind of thing ALL THE TIME in real life. You think about your friend; you see things that remind you of your friend; you think "oh, so & so would like this" or you're reminded of an in-joke or something you once did together. In fiction, a little goes a long way, so it doesn't take much to give the impression that the characters' relationship extends beyond their actual scenes together onscreen. If you have 2 hours of a movie, then you really only need a couple of instances of that sort of thing to cement the idea that the two characters are important in each other's lives.

And if you DO get that with some relationships (even if it's literally just because they are both important in the plot and you have to keep having the two of them reference what the other one is up to) and you DON'T get that with others, it's going to leave a subconscious impression that some of the relationships are more important in the characters' lives than others, even if there are actually legit plot reasons why some of them have to be referenced more often. It STILL gives that impression (and might actually be a giveaway that the writers haven't necessarily thought through some of the characters' roles in the story to the point where they ought to have).

The OTHER thing we talked about in the same conversation, which also ties into the above, is how much the characters appear to care about the effect that their actions have on specific people around them, things like: will this make Character X view me differently? Will this hurt Character X? And this is another place where you can end up running headlong into unintentional consequences with the characters' relative importance in the narrative, or even the relative fraught-ness of the relationships. For example: if your character spends a lot of time thinking about their rival (getting stronger! trying to beat them!) but they're happy and secure in their relationship with their love interest so they rarely have to think or worry about it, you're going to end up giving the overall impression that their connection to their rival is actually more emotionally charged than the romantic one! (See also: one possible reason why people so often ship enemies/rivals/uneasy-allies over best friends, e.g. Harry/Draco vs. Harry/Ron, or Derek/Stiles vs. Scott/Stiles.

I kinda hate bringing up too many specific examples because I know some people are going to disagree - we're all watching different shows, etc - but since Sheron and I are both in Agent Carter fandom, we talked fairly extensively about Peggy & Angie vs. Peggy & the guys at the SSR. I'll just go ahead and put this under a cut because it's getting long and is also kind of spoilery for AC.

The thing about Peggy/Angie as a ship is that it's always left me cold but I was never sure exactly why. Clearly a lot of people DO ship it, but I never did and could never really figure out why not, but talking this over with Sheron helped me clarify what it is that might not work about that ship for me.

(Obligatory disclaimer that OF COURSE it's not inherently a bad ship, it's totally fine if you ship it, etc.)

... because Peggy doesn't ever really do either of these things with Angie: a) she doesn't think about her much when Angie isn't around (not never, certainly, but not a lot) and b) beyond the first episode or two, she doesn't worry much about what Angie thinks of her. Ironically I think that the second one might be (mostly) unavoidable on a narrative level in any relationship in which the participants are fairly solid with each other. The first one could certainly be handled by just giving her more time to think about Angie (and in fact I really wish there had been more than just one or two instances of Peggy thinking about Angie in season two), but it's made harder because Angie's not a big part of the main plot, so Peggy is necessarily going to be thinking about the SSR a lot when she's not there, but she's not necessarily going to do the reverse. Plus, she's actively trying to keep Angie out of her work life, and if at work she's completely focused on work - well, you see the problem.

As for the second one ... that's even harder and maybe unavoidable, because the whole point to her relationship with Angie is that it's a lot more solid and less charged than anything she has at the SSR, whereas her situation at the SSR is extremely fraught and unstable. Unfortunately, therefore, what you then get is a lot of Peggy worrying about trying to prove herself at the SSR, trying to get her male co-workers to accept her (it's reciprocal, too - even outside the romance in season 2, they care a lot about what she thinks of them - it's a major part of her friendship with Jack, especially) and essentially spending a ton of time thinking about how to present herself with them, and very rarely doing this with Angie.

I liked a lot that Angie in season one is basically in the typical role of The Love Interest in this kind of show, but ultimately she ends up falling into the exact same trap that The Love Interest often does: she's peripheral to the main plot and doesn't really have relationships with anyone other than the protagonist, so she doesn't get referenced much when she's not onscreen.

That being said, there's also a certain confirmation bias with this kind of thing. I think you tend to notice those offhand mentions more when you're already invested in the relationship. And especially if you are invested, it's like a lovely little Easter egg, and it makes the relationships feel so much deeper and the world so much richer. (I love how Hambly does this in the Ben January books, for example. Ben thinks about his friends a lot when they're not around. The overall impression is that he's a guy who really gets attached to people, and it makes the other characters feel present even in books in which they don't appear.) I think if you never have characters do this, they come across cold - which might be what you're going for, but might not be. And if you only have them do it with certain other characters, it's going to seem like they spend more time thinking about those characters than anybody else, even if it's literally because it's a murder mystery and they're wondering if the other character committed the murder, but it'll STILL come across that way a little bit if it's not balanced by other instances of thinking/worrying about other people in their lives.

I never considered this at all before having that conversation with Sheron, and now I think about it a lot, in my own writing as well.

tl;dr - enhance your characters' relationships by have your characters think about the other one when they're not onstage!

Discuss?

Comments

[thawrecka]

This is really interesting (though reminds me that I shipped Harry/Ron partly because it was, occasionally, kind of fraught as in book 4). Even beyond shipping, I like seeing characters have an effect on each other, even when they're not around each other. There's that fun when another character mentions your favourite!

I thought about something similar a lot when I did LJ RP, which taught me a surprising amount about interesting serial narrative.

[sholio]

I'm glad it was interesting! Yeah, I've found myself suddenly becoming interesting in a pairing when they developed fraught aspects. I know some people do 100% ship sympatico BFFs, but I honestly think they're in the minority as an overall fandom phenomenon, which might explain why some pairings never take off even when the characters spend a ton of time together on the show.

[rydra_wong]

In Black Sails fandom, someone invented the "Silver Bechdel test" -- can Silver have a conversation which is not either a) with Flint or b) about Flint?

Off the top of my head, I think he passes a few times in season 1, but in the last two seasons of the show, possibly not at all.

[sholio]

HAHAHA. Yeah, it was interesting thinking about this because in a lot of cases it's a total narrative accident due to the plot, but the general effect you get is that one character spends all their waking moments thinking about another character, which makes it wholly unsurprising when fandom ends up shipping them a lot. XD

[selenak]

...maayyybe the conversation with Max on the beach in s4? And even that one is Flint-related because that's when it first occurs to him (and the audience knows it) that Thomas Hamilton could still be alive. :)

[selenak]

Agreed with many of your points, though of course on the other end of the scale you have phenomena like the Clint/Coulson 'ship, which has no shared screen time at all, no references to each other other than Coulson's "he's been compromised" (to Natasha) in "Avengers" in any canon, and about 60 seconds conversation over the radio about some other guy in Thor (which, if anything, demonstrated Clint could be interested in Thor). Or shows like The West Wing, where is off the show, they're suddenly not referenced anymore at all, no matter how close th earlier relationships were depicted.

Or, you know, Torchwood, where there is massive emotional continuity and plenty of canon material, but for the wrong (from the audience pov) 'ship. To wit: Gwen/Jack vs Jack/Ianto. Gwen's relationship with Jack, from the show pilot to the end of Torchwood: Miracle Day, was arguably the central relationship. It got plenty of tension, and I don't mean just UST (Gwen and Jack argue over issues), it was consistently displayed from beginning till the end, there were references when it wasn't important to the plot du jour, and these were the two characters the audience saw and learned the most about. Whereas Jack/Ianto not only had far less screen time, but if it wasn't plot relevant, you could miss there were an item altogether; it wasn Ianto who was treated like the traditional love interest (not much screen time or relationships with non-Jack people, either, until Children of Earth where we met his sister and her family). And other than the immediate aftermath of Ianto's death, which then was swallowed up in the larger catastrophe of Jack having to kill his own grandson, we did not see him thinking about Ianto, or bringing him up etc. Now I'm not saying this wasn done well, or that it was unproblamatic, but it definitely was a case of the audience latching on the less developed, less fraught relationship and hating the one with the emotional consistency.

[sholio]

Hahaha, yeah, shippers gonna ship, and there are plenty of exceptions. It's not so much a Grand Unified Theory of all fandoms as yeet another factor in the complicated calculus that goes into whatever makes some ships take off and others flop. (Clint/Coulson is especially weird because it's so completely out of nowhere and it blew up so huge. Coulson/Thor would have made so much more sense if people needed a Coulson ship! The fact that the fandom built this entire fanonical history around the two of them was fascinating to me. Also annoying given how inescapable that ship was for awhile ...)

Re: West Wing - I think long-running TV shows are a particularly interesting situation because the writers don't really want to confuse new or casual viewers by referring to characters who are gone and will never be on the show again. But for long-time, dedicated viewers, it makes the characters appear mildly sociopathic if they never think about or refer to their friends and family members who are dead or moved away. I guess this is why we so often try to fix this in fanfic with tags and missing scenes that make a bigger deal than the show does out of the characters' network of connections to other, vanished characters.

[sartorias]

I love that. I CRAVED it in my entertainment as a kid.

But editors don't. One of my books, the editor took all those references out, saying that marketing needed the word count down.

I want to get the rights back and put them back in.

[sholio]

Awww man, that sucks a lot! I expect that this kind of scene gets cut in media for those reasons all the time - to an editor's eyes, it probably looks extraneous. But readers LOVE it! I know I do.

I hope you're able someday to put it all back.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

That's awful! I love this in books; it makes the characters real. Now I'm mad at your editor and I don't even know you or your editor!

[tippergreen]

I completely agree with this. I've had this conversation with my friends over the years as well, about just how frustrating it is when you imagine that a simple reference could solve this problem (that somehow the characters aren't quite real because they feel disconnected). I even recall discussing this in some Atlantis episodes. But, I also understand the issue with time (especially in TV shows, movies, and even books, if you're trying to keep under the standard length). One of the glories of fanfic is that you get to put all that in, to make these relationships feel more real and more connected because there is no word limit. So, here's a question, would you be willing to give up that character relationship moment in favor of something else - some delicious description, or a tine plot twist, or, most likely, a peripheral character arc? If you had to choose, what would you do? (By the by, I'd be interested to know if you've seen Crimes of Grindlewald in large part because it's a movie with almost too much relationship building and, simultaneously, not enough, and I can't help but think it's fascinating about why it doesn't really work from a story telling perspective.)

[sholio]

Tipper!! Hi! :D

Yeah, I expect it's probably one of the first things to go on the cutting room floor when they're cutting for issues of timing and relevance. But it just adds so much, and it doesn't even need much time to do it in. I mean, it's like, on the one hand I can see how it looks irrelevant from an editorial standpoint to spend 30 seconds checking in with a character who doesn't even appear in this episode. But on the other hand, I would very happily sacrifice 30 seconds of a gunfight for more of that kind of thing. XD (I remember in SGA, watching the deleted scenes and getting terribly frustrated that they'd keep space battles going on for several minutes and yet cut some of the best character scenes that would've only added a minute or two of running time! I love me some space battle, but I want the character scene, damn it!)

I haven't seen Crimes of Grindelwald, but I don't mind being spoiled for it if you want to talk about it more; I haven't seen the first one either and I don't know when I'll get around to watching them, so I'd rather talk about them now if you want to. Because yeah, this kind of thing is really fascinating to look at storytelling-wise. I know I've seen media that goes too far to the opposite extreme as well, though I'm having trouble thinking of good examples off the top of my head.

So, here's a question, would you be willing to give up that character relationship moment in favor of something else - some delicious description, or a tine plot twist, or, most likely, a peripheral character arc? If you had to choose, what would you do?

Well, we know what the SGA writers would do. ;D

But ohhhh man, that IS a good question. Because yeah, you don't have room for everything, especially with the constraints of TV episode length, so something has to go. (And even in books, even in self-published books, you don't want to go overboard with stuff that's irrelevant to the main plot.)

I think it'd totally depend on the rest of it, honestly - on the pacing, on what else was in there, etc. I mean, I don't think I could say across the board "yes, I would always sacrifice a relationship scene for better pacing on a really dramatic scene elsewhere in the episode" but there are times when that is what you need. Or, as you pointed out, giving more screen time to a minor character. There are a lot of times when TV leaves me feeling frustrated that they focused on the "wrong" things (from my point of view) but it's really just that I'd give more weight to different aspects of the episode than they did, and I expect other viewers would want the episode weighted differently than I'd want it, so I don't even know! It is a really hard decision to have to make.

[schneefink]

I never thought about it like this before, but this explains really well why some relationships in canon seem like an afterthought. Steve and Sharon are a great example.

[sholio]

Yeah, and sheron pointed out that at the same time, Steve and Tony's relationship in Infinity War feels very central even though they never actually share screen time, just with a handful of references at key emotional moments. It's really fascinating to me, thinking about it, how much you can do with some well placed references ... or not do, if those references aren't there.

[xparrot]

This is one of those things that I wonder if there's a difference between how fans think of things vs "casual viewers". Because fans are much more primed to focus on details like this -- to get super-excited about references to the chars/relationships we love, as you say. While as a casual viewer might not even pick up on a reference if it's more subtle, and and aren't likely to remember them later, so they're not a significant part of casual shipping?

It's interesting, too, how this works in the opposite direction as well for fans -- a fan of ship A/B is very likely to interpret lots of things A or B says or does when separate as being about B or A, even when it's likely not intended by the creators.

When it comes to the series I fan on, I definitely enjoy this kind of relationship continuity -- I want relationships (romantic and platonic) to mean something to characters, to have impact on them, and evidence of this is delightful.

[sholio]

Yeah, I think you're totally right on both points. Heh, casual/new viewers might even be annoyed or bored by references to characters who don't even show up in this particular installment of canon.

... but I love it so much, though! Platonic or romantic, like you said. I just want to see those glimpses of the characters thinking about each other, and it is such a delight when it happens. I will in fact obsessively rewatch those scenes over and over again; even when my fave is somewhere else entirely, I will still be delighted with 5 seconds of the other characters talking about him. xD

[sheron]

I think there's a difference between 'fans of a ship or character' vs 'fans of a show's lore/world-building/etc' and 'casual fans'.

The first group will over-focus on every tidbit as you say, and even twist unrelated stuff into shippiness (also how I stopped watching some stuff because the constant shippiness from the fandom turned me off canon).

The casual fans don't care who that character B is and why they're getting a mention. They'll watch it once and forget about it. They are not engaged for whatever reason.

But the third group, somewhere in between casual and diehard fan are those people who I think would still care about references like this. They are an engaged audience. The story is interesting to them.

For example, one of the things that makes Pride & Prejudice work is the way that Elizabeth ends up thinking of Darcy's regard for her, even when she shouldn't. His refusal to dance with her bothers and offends her (whereas she only draws amusement from other encounters), and later the idea that he would think ill of her bothers her. Both of those reactions are the foundation of the pairing from her side, and obviously intentional. But I think you don't have to be a die-hard P&P fan to pick up on this! You don't have to write fanfic or ship them. The very first time you watch a good romantic movie you're going to be picking up these clues that they are thinking about each other even if you only see the movie once.

So I think this still works, as long as the audience is engaged.

[yalumesse]

This makes a lot of sense. The snippets of their lives we see on screen is a proportionately tiny amount, could be the same as a random extra they bump into on the street, but a mention of them in another scene at a different time suggests that the relationship is not only in both those times but spans the time between them, giving us a sense of continuity.

And I think you nailed why I never got very interested in Angie, either in a ship or the character on her own. She's awesome when she's on screen but, most of the time, she's an obstacle Peggy has to work around to get her job done.

[sholio]

...suggests that the relationship is not only in both those times but spans the time between them, giving us a sense of continuity.

Yes, exactly!! I think it's one of those things like, say, only using a character's nickname once or twice (any more than that starts to feel overdone) which still gives the impression that the other characters call them that all the time. Viewers fill in the gaps and just a few little references gives the impression of an entire relationship happening in the background, between the lines so to speak.

She's awesome when she's on screen but, most of the time, she's an obstacle Peggy has to work around to get her job done.

Yeah, or maybe not even that so much as, Peggy just doesn't seem to spent a lot of mental real estate on Angie when they're not actually in the same scene. And even when they are in the same scene and Peggy is hiding things from her, it's sort of like ... idk, she's really worried about the guys finding out about her side investigation and thinking badly of her, but with Angie, she's just sort of ... not? She's trying to keep her double life a secret, but it never really felt (to me anyway) like she was equally worried about the effect on her relationship with Angie if Angie finds out her secrets. And that last one, at least, I think is a sort of unintended-consequences thing, where the point is that she's more secure in her friendship with Angie than with the guys, but it creates an accidental impression that it doesn't matter as much to her.

[alessandriana]

Very interesting meta-- thanks for sharing! It fits in with some things I've been noodling on lately, about how to enhance worldbuilding and character development using small moments like these.

[sholio]

Glad you enjoyed it! It was such a lightbulb moment when sheron & I had the original conversation, because I've always loved those little side references/touchstone moments but I had never quite realized why they mean so much to me.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

Wow! Your post came as a revelation to me. (I first read it at LJ and then saw that all the comments were here, so I came here so I could see everyone's comments.) A lot of shipping has never made much sense to me—why would you pair those characters? I chalked it up to being primarily a gen fan; I'll read some ship (and here I mean both het and slash), but that's not what I'm looking for; when I read it, it's because I think the fic has other things that I want.

But I think you may be right about how a lot of these pairings come out of such references, whereas I don't seize on references as indicating any kind of romantic or sexual attraction; I seize on them as giving character depth or putting a current plot into a broader context. I see mentions of Stargate: Atlantis, and I was often frustrated that they didn't do more of that: the native Atlanteans went long stretches without mentions when Teyla must have been thinking of them but the team should have been, Ford was forgotten long before I wanted him to be (and then remembered when he reappears), I felt like Weir should come up a lot more than she did. . . .

But Sherlock is always thinking of Moriarty, in all versions I can call to mind, and lots of people ship them in all the iterations when most gave us little foundation for that. In my brief look around the Internet at Harry Potter fandom, I was amazed at the pairings , because it a lot of them seemed to be people who didn't even like each other! (I didn't spend a lot of time in the HP fandom, so I may be inaccurate here.)

In Agent Carter, I thought it made sense in s1 that Peggy was, as you say, secure in her friendship with Angie and so didn't need to think about her much, but she also saw her a lot. I was sad that they didn't make a point of having Peggy mention her, or write to her, or call her in s2. It would have taken just a moment to mention such a thing! "Angie says the weather is terrible and we should be glad we're here" to one of the guys. I loved their friendship, and I didn't want a romantic relationship there; I just wanted to believe that they could maintain that friendship even over distance.

Lots to mull over here.

[sholio]

Yeah, when Sheron and I first started talking about this, it was a revelation to me too, and it just makes so much sense. I mean, it doesn't explain all instances of shipping or those times when fandom gets really set against a pairing, of course. But it's certainly a useful data point, especially in cases where the canon is doing everything "right" (that is, there's nothing blatantly wrong) but fandom is getting a completely different set of vibes off the character interactions than the writers intended.

[frith_in_thorns]

Great meta! I don't really have much relevant to add, apart from that I've been watching The Good Place and all that subtle character stuff is something they do really well, so that even though it's quite a plot-heavy show the centre of it is always the four main characters and how they affect each other.

(It's slightly weird to me that my whole twitter list is endlessly discussing/debating The Good Place and I haven't seen anyone on DW talk about it at all! The locality of fandoms is very odd.)

[sholio]

Oh yeah, I love finding those canons that are really good with those subtle little things; it's delightful. ♥ (I find myself thinking of the Ben January books as a series that's particularly good at it, especially since not all the major characters appear in all the books, but their presence is felt even when they're not around).

I know a number of people I follow are watching The Good Place; musesfool posts about it, and rachelmanija and xparrot are into it though they don't post about it much. I watched the first season but am waaayyyy behind, in part because I got badly spoiled for the end of season 2 and just haven't really managed to catch up. >_>

[brightknightie]

Very late to this post! :-) Thank you for sharing these reflections and analysis, for better story-telling and story-reading!

Two things brought to mind:

1.

Just today, I happened to read a 19th-century story in which the villain is an outwardly kind, generous, amiable woman who is in fact completely incapable of caring about people when she's away from them. It's "out of sight, out of mind" to a vicious degree. When she's around someone, that someone has all her attention and caring, with not a drop to spare for the person who is away on a trip, or stuck indoors abed, or on the way from one place to another.

Of course this isn't the writing scenario you're addressing here, where the storyteller fails to sufficiently indicate the relationships' importance to the readers, at appropriate story beats! But it seemed a kind of convergence, an embodiment: the author was fully aware of this trait's affects on the other characters as well as the reader.

2.

I've been rewatching early Highlander, and I'm struck again by how often Duncan and Tessa tell each other "I love you" in so many words.

On the one hand, inside the story, it's admirable and touching how confident and free and careful they are with each other, to say that so often, so explicitly. People live whole lives without those clear-cut words, said or heard, and regret missed opportunities.

On the other hand, outside the story, there's perhaps an undertone of clumsiness to it on the creators' parts. They were working very hard to not fall into the trap of not indicating to their audience where the characters' affections lay, but the explicitness of the "I love you"s can seem almost bland, uncrafted, uncustomized. (Duncan calling Tessa "Sweetheart" wears better. While equally ordinary, it feels more personalized; the endearment may have been selected from a menu, as it were, but it was at least selected. I wish I had a feel for romance stories, and could imagine how that endearment first rolled off his tongue and into their lives...!)

[sholio]

This is an interesting set of observations! Yeah, I think this is something that can definitely be used to good effect by a writer who knows what they're doing ... and can happen incidentally when other plot considerations interfere to the point where the writers simply don't think about itl

That's interesting with Duncan and Tessa. My first thought was that my husband and I say it all the time, too. But I think it's probably one of those things (like nicknames/pet names, or running jokes) that is really easy to do inside a text, to the point where it feels heavy-handed and clumsy. A little of that kind of thing goes a long way.

[stultiloquentia]

This is such a cool set of observations; I love it.

I don't have much to add, except that I just finished reading Jane Austen's Persuasion for a book club, and the entire book is about this. Wentworth isn't actually a wonderful romantic hero on the page -- because he's not on enough pages. He's elsewhere for big chunks of the book, and when he's present he's frequently being moderately cheerful and handsome in some other corner of the room, and he barely has any dialogue with Anne at all. And yet, Persuasion is one king hell of a romance, because of the way Wentworth dominates Anne's thoughts, and takes on status for us because of his status with her. And the way, upon careful reading, you notice all the little details that indicate she's in his thoughts as well. The POV work in this book is so great.

Now I'm thinking about it, ALL Austen's novels are obsessed with who is absent yet still thought of, aren't they?

And also, this is getting fairly tangential, but I think it accounts for part of the reason why I love outsider POVs on ships, too. Because outsider POVs are often all about noticing couples noticing, caring about, thinking about, each other, often even before the couple themselves clue in.

[sholio]

Oooh, Persuasion (incidentally the only Austen I've read all the way through and really enjoyed) is a good example of that, because you're right, the romance is drawn almost entirely through memories and outside observations and Anne's reflections on him.

Especially in a case like that (but also in general, maybe) it makes me think of the writing advice that the more you leave unsaid, the better, because fiction feels more "real" to people if their imagination is allowed to fill in the gaps.

I also think with romantic pairings, this might be part of what people are twigging on when they complain about "lack of chemistry" (I mean, other than the very subjective "it just doesn't work for me", which is probably the biggest part of it). A lot of romance in action/genre movies feels slightly pasted on because it's only present in the scenes in which the characters are together, but doesn't affect their lives in any way when they're not together.

And that's a really good point about outsider POV - which I also love. It consists entirely of those subtle little clues!

[sarahthecoat]

What an interesting discussion! I haven't watched much MCU, but i started thinking of examples from what i have watched right away. Scenes in Sherlock (ASIB, HLV, etc), that show john and sherlock thinking about each other. All the way back to the LOTR movies, how "Arwen watched over Aragorn from afar" was carried out in the two towers, and using his wearing her necklace to convey how present she is in his thoughts. ALLLL the way back to star wars a new hope, just "hey, do you think a guy like me and a girl like her?" bit, and of course luke thinks about han and leia when he's away from them in ESB & ROTJ, and they about him. I don't find it surprising that folks ship luke & han, there's plenty to go on.

OH, and who could watch or read the first five minutes of much ado about nothing, and not know that beatrice and benedick are going to end up together!

Funny thing about pride & prejudice, i somehow got through all my schooling without reading any jane austen, so my very first exposure to p&p was getting the colin firth dvd out of the library, having heard it was good. The library had boxed up the two discs separately, but i didn't know to look for a disc two. I had no idea it was a six episode miniseries or anything. So at the end of disc one when lizzie utterly rejects darcy, i knew something was wrong, this couldn't be the end of the story! Thankfully, disc 2 was on the shelf when i went back!

[alatefeline]

Good meta. Thanks for post. Bookmarking for later.