›
If you have an email ending in @hotmail.com, @live.com or @outlook.com (or any other Microsoft-related domain), please consider changing it to another email provider; Microsoft decided to instantly block the server's IP, so emails can't be sent to these addresses.
If you use an @yahoo.com email or any related Yahoo services, they have blocked us also due to "user complaints"
-UE

When people are anti-romance

HatterHatter
edited 2011-08-31 13:44:08 in General
Glaives are better.
I was eating dinner with my friend 'Katie' the other day when the conversation turned to Doctor Who. I told her how awesome Rory was, mentioning how he waited for two thousand years, protecting Amy while she was frozen in the Pandorica.

"That's creepy," she said.

"What? How?"

"Waiting for someone for two thousand years is creepy as hell."

"He was protecting her," I explained. "It's romantic."

She then told me that no normal person would wait for so long for a single person unless they were creepily obsessed with them. I told her that Rory was in love, and that people do that sort of thing for love. I explained that over two thousand years, Rory had to protect Amy from barbarian hordes, invasions, natural disasters, the Blitz and many other things. If I woke up and found out that the person I loved had protected me from those sorts of dangers for so long, I'd be really touched.

"It's still creepy," she insisted. "It would be like if you woke up and saw that your boyfriend had been watching you sleep because he wanted to 'protect' you."

Then, today, I was reading an essay about Petrach - he was a High Middle Ages poet who was famous for his love poetry - and the writer declared that Petrarchian feelings were sexist and should be placed in the same category as pedophilia, bestiality and necrophilia.

What the fuck happened to romance? Why do people hate it so much?

Comments

  • MillerCrossMillerCross
    You can change. You can.
    It'd be creepy, except that Amy needed the protection and nobody else could do it. Not to mention that they were already going to marry. It's not as if it was some idiot who was two weeks together with her. This is the man who she was going to marry.
  • HatterHatter
    Glaives are better.
    I don't think it would be creepy if Amy wasn't already going to marry Rory. I just think it would have been really awkward if she didn't feel the same way.
  • MillerCrossMillerCross
    You can change. You can.
    Well, I just mentioned that as evidence that Amy loves Rory as much as Rory loves Amy.
  • MadassAlexMadassAlex
    One foot in front of the other, every day.
    It is kinda creepy, although perhaps that's the wrong word. Watching over someone like that implies emotional codependency. Either way, there's something a little unhinged about that.

    It's like the knightly concept of courtly love. A knight champions a noblewoman he barely speaks to, has seen a handful of times and isn't going to marry. That kind of devotion is Nice Guy (capital letters for clarity) levels of yuck. In fact, it's so obviously stupid and creepy that even the Arthurian tales deconstruct it via Lancelot, wherein he fucks Arthur's wife, destroying a marriage, a friendship and sending Arthur spiraling into depression. And then the kingdom kind of crumbles until the last bit. 
  • captainbrasscaptainbrass

    See also - reactions to Twilight, which also divided people on the issue of romance v. creepiness. My view would be that if you've created a world where people can live that long, there's nothing that weird about waiting for their loved one for two thousand years.


    Your friend was reacting in terms of real life, where it is pretty weird to do that. Although you do get cases of people whose fiancee went off to war, got declared missing and who then never married because they were waiting for the missing guy, there are a lot more examples of people who grieved for a while then ended up marrying someone else.


    Fictional love can be more perfect than the real stuff. That's the point, for me.

  • HatterHatter
    edited 2011-08-31 14:06:27
    Glaives are better.
    I still don't see why courtly love is bad. It's awkward for the woman if she doesn't reciprocate, but I think it's sweet. Especially if the man eventually wins over the noblewoman, and they ride off into the sunset to have sweet, consensual heterosexual sex in the missionary position for the sole purpose of procreation. 

    Anyway, it's normal for people to want things they can't have, because they can't have them.

    EDIT: ^ Twilight was creepy because the guy was controlling the woman, cut her off from everyone in her life and kept threatening to murder her. Oh, and he wanted to eat her. That's the difference, I think, between romantic love and obsession - obsession is when you value your own happiness over the happiness and comfort of the object of your affection, while with romantic love you just want to make the other person happy.
  • MadassAlexMadassAlex
    One foot in front of the other, every day.
    Except the ideal of courtly love is exactly not that. The knight and the lady don't get together, and that's why the knight's love for her is supposed to be noble; his love is supposed to go beyond the physical and into the spiritual as befitting of Christian chivalric ideals. This essentially makes it a constant quest for social validation, though.
  • HatterHatter
    Glaives are better.
    So what's so bad about that? A beautiful, high-born woman inspires a man to do good things, in the Christian tradition. Doesn't seem too objectionable.
  • GelzoGelzo
    Pony Sleuth
    "It'd be creepy, except that Amy needed the protection and nobody else could do it."

    /thread

    It wouldn't be creepy if someone did that for a very good friend or family member, would it?
  • MillerCrossMillerCross
    You can change. You can.
    Puhretty much. Sure, it's exaggerated, but that's because, well, Rory is immortal. But I don't think it'd be creepy if he did it for, say, his daughter.
  • captainbrasscaptainbrass
    edited 2011-08-31 14:17:06

    Dante and Beatrice in The Divine Comedy are also an example. In real life, Dante hardly spoke to Beatrice; in the poem, she becomes a kind of symbol of The Virgin Mary, God and Christ all rolled in to one. It's impressively romantic, but also kind of strange, especially post-Freud, when we tend to assume that love to be "healthy" has to be sexual. If it's not,  we assume it really is underneath, but in a twisted and unhealthy way.


    I don't think that bit applies to Rory and Amy.

  • MadassAlexMadassAlex
    edited 2011-08-31 14:17:24
    One foot in front of the other, every day.
    ^^^^ Because the knight seeks external validation in a mockery of sexual courtship. It's not quite religion and it's not quite romance, being an uneasy in-between when the knight should probably

    - Spend more time and effort on a woman he's actually going to be able to marry
    - Develop spiritually, or
    - Both

    Like I said above, even the Arthurian legends mock courtly love via Lancelot.

    As a side note, the Arthurian legends are deceptively clever. We consider them cliche, but they contain remarkably good commentary about life in the times they were written.
Sign In or Register to comment.