Consistent Relations

I warn you all now, this is planned to be a very meta journal, purely because I'm looking into relationships and their peculiarities, how they appear in reality and fictional worlds, and what makes one good or bad.

For those who know me on a more personal level, you'll know I've been involved - and am currently involved in - relationships of differing qualities. For the rest of you that know me via other means or purely by way of deviantART, you'll know that relationships often do feature to some degree in all my writings, from collabs to solos with the exception of minor pieces such as Ol' Hapshant. As such, what makes a good relationship and what just makes a relationship are very important things for me to know about in terms of functions, chemistry and emotions. I don't know how long this is going to be, but there is a lot to cover including examples of relationships that are well-calculated and ones that aren't.

One ground rule I should perhaps lay down right now is that relationships, as many should know, are grossly misrepresented in the media because most people only derive pleasure from conflict generated in a poor partnership , completely failing to grasp the concept that if a scenario is built solely on romantic interests then a story is going to be about a shallow relationship because that is all that there is going to be. Like any other factor that makes a good story, the fewer concepts you introduce the shallower each of those concepts are going to be, because piece by piece you remove the various connections and allusions present in the life of anyone who may live through these scenarios. In a quasi-fictional story, a romance will be incomplete without familial issues with other relatives, home living, jobs, illnesses, holidays, rational thought, and a whole plethora of other weird and wonderful things that make up what a real life story is. In one delving more into fantastical realms, as most of you will be familiar with reading, you also have to take into account any science and technology or magic that affects society as a whole, from the metal slaves in Isaac Asimov's i, Robot to the magical guilds of Fairy Tail. You need to account for government, racism, sexism and the ratios of these in accepted norms. You need to understand how conflict, politically or physically between two factions unrelated to the relationship could come into play and how this will affect things. In fact, the vast majority of these can also be applied to every single romantic partnership, or even platonic relationship, in a story.

Of course, it is quite understandable that many people don't have the time or the will or even just the patience to grasp all these concepts at the level necessary, so some may be omitted. While I don't necessarily condone the complete removal of such things, it is perfectly acceptable for a person to show the effects of such things on a relationship, without delving into the precise details that have brought such an event about. "A new law is passed that means interracial marriage is now illegal, making life for our mixed race of protagonists much more difficult. Never mind that the reason for this law was because a recent string of terrorists attacks have been purported to be carried out by black people, even though many responsible were white, and the person who suggested the law is a closet xenophobe." In this scenario law comes into it, but really only the first sentence would be necessary if the author wasn't interested in getting involved with racial politics. It may overcomplicate his/her story, or may simply be a division of life that they're not interested in exploring. Whatever the case may be, this is a reasonable way to perform. Personally I'm of the mind that I should include as much as possible, so I habitually get very integrated into many echelons of reality when writing for the sake of providing as complete a picture as possible. I like to expand on as much as possible for the audience, but I'm well aware different effects can be achieved by omitting the fullness of certain things provided you still take them into account.

The example I gave in the previous paragraph is, however, not the sort of thing people usually read. Why? Because it's the wrong sort of conflict. Many people who consume media products that involve romance and conflict usually do so for the contrasts and struggles present in the romance itself, not the surrounding friction with the world itself that slows the couple or even generates its own problems. It's painfully clear that the place of romance in a story is completely misinterpreted, as the sole focus of everything rather than another part of a character's lifetime just as everything else is.

I suppose a good example to provide of a successfully-written romantic relationship is that of the protagonists in the book Perdido Street Station. As a book, it's of a quality that is hard to describe, due to the way it's written, being more like a less bloody Game of Thrones theme of characters being mind-raped or ended in various ways. The main problem with the book itself was that it ended in much the same way as About A Boy, with life going on albeit in a modified way. The romance, however, is a well-executed companionship between two different species, marred by dodgy but lucrative job offers, the racism of the place they live in, and one of them getting half of her memories drained near the end of the novel. The relationship is well written because honestly, the two aren't actually feuding in any way; life is the way it is and it's other things that make the book good rather than just 'oh my god, more unrealistic marital problems".

Now consider this; I know for a fact that a good relationship is not built on miscommunication, wilful ignorance and hubris. The first time I tried that it ended with a breakup still filled with lies and difficult moments. From this we can extrapolate that one of the things most needed for any good relationship is quite obvious - honesty and frequent communication, and this for once the media gets right. It is important, they just completely forget that when they come to perform it. So, based on this, what do many relationships we see or read about seem to lack? Come on, I don't really need to repeat myself. Therefore we can imagine that the majority of media relationships and written relationships, both fictional and biographical, are usually ones that are doomed to fail because they have been chosen for their instability.

To move onto another point that this communication issue brings up, this does not necessarily mean arguments should be occluded. An argument, against common belief, does not imply a lack of cooperation. While arguments can be born out of lies and deceit and wilfully avoiding interaction or sharing of knowledge, a good relationship can still have arguments born out of two people discovering something they have differing opinions on. Once again I can speak from personal experience, and I know that a relationship without even so much as a debate can be obscenely bad because it usually points to underlying issues that a lack of communication is only helping exacerbate. My first relationship was going to end anyway, but it ended immeasurably badly because we never got things sorted properly between us. In contrast, in my current relationships we argue more often, quite frequently, but we tend to come back afterwards or having settled things in some capacity during the debate. Arguments are only bad if you're refusing to listen to the other side or you're simply electing to not settle the point like adults.

Movies are the greatest culprits usually when it comes to lack of communication, primarily due to the time restrictions. While television series can be stretched over a period of time to allow for problems to be mended and discussed in various settings, and most books can be spread out over even longer to once again allow any romantic partners involved to have their feuds and come to terms with them, movies honestly just don't have the time to do so. Even trilogy plus movies such as the Lord of the Rings series and the Twilight series usually fail to adequately represent relationships, because of the timescale of each showing. it's essentially a requirement that movies focus on an event in a place or surrounding a person or persons, and only having a maximum of approximately three hours at any given time to show something means the emphasis needs to be on that event taking place lest you get sidetracked and then have to rush the cornerstone of the movie. This restriction therefore means that any difficulties generated within the relationship must be for the purpose of progressing the event, rather than solely for developing the relationship.

Movies are also generally the worst when it comes to shallow and oversimplified relationships. How often have you seen a couple get together in the movie without any development other than working together at one point or even saving each others' lives at some juncture? How often do these relationships receive no development - or at least no on-screen advancement - and yet still somehow claim to be more than a lustful friendship? Half the time there isn't even any obvious physical attraction, the two characters coming together and then just shagging at every available opportunity because the director is a bit lecherous. These relationships should suffer from the same problem as any other impulsively-formed loves in the real-world and fall apart after a few weeks, but of course they don't because there's no time for depth in a movie. That's not to say all other mediums are exempt from such things - The High Lord, a book by Trudi Canavan, features a love interest that springs out of nowhere even when the protagonist already has a potential love interest with plenty of development and history already waiting. The actual love interest subsequently ends up being little more than a last-minute idea on the behalf of the writer as a desperate way to try and make the end of the book make more sense, rather than working on the plotline overall to make it persistently sensible. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo on the other hand is an example of a movie where the relationships are, by and large, displayed properly on-screen, but perhaps by virtue of the movie being slow and measured chronologically.

Going back to the relationship I briefly alluded to from The High Lord, I should talk about one form of relationship that is unfortunately evident in every single genre of of storytelling, and is as common as death and taxes; it's the sue pairing. I don't know if it has any specific trope related to it, but it seems to be a term given to any OC - or Original Character - having a relationship with a pre-established canon story character. Case in point for this, My Immortal, widely regarded, if the name is right, as the worst fanfiction written in the history of fanfiction. It features an ostentatiously-named 'original' character known by most as Ebony, or Enoby due to a spelling mistake on the part of the writer, and a string of various horribly-executed relationships with various Harry Potter characters without any decent basis or even the most fundamental of human attachments. Despite its status as the most infamous fanfiction ever written, the horrible portrayal of fan-character in a relationship with canon character(s) has led to a stigma attached to the subject, and every subsequent written relationship of such a kind following in these footsteps blindly, leading to a similar - if less violent - reaction.

For some mad reason, I viewed this as a crackpot challenge. Completely inadvertently in the All's End story I'm writing I ended up pairing together Therix, a character of my own creation, and Eleanor Lamb, the young woman from Bioshock 2. So, in the eyes of the fanfiction world, there was so much wrong with this pairing - first, the obvious relationship between an established character and one of my own design, and then the exacerbation of the issue with Therix being a quasi-insert of myself, to some limited degree. And yet, this pairing has met with success thus far, barring initial trepidation surrounding the topic as a whole. So, I am going to risk a complete misrepresentation of my own work and attempt to analyse why this may be working:

I think the first major component, as pointed out to me by Vorahk295 stating that Eleanor in the games didn't have an established love interest. Looking back on it, that does make plenty of sense - if a character already has a romantic partner then it's nonsensical to put them with someone else, and the generally-accepted method is to either have them with that person, or with no one at all. Seems reasonable to me. When compared to many canonxOC pairings, I think I simply struck lucky here and dodged the bullet with the choice i made. However, that would not explain how the relationship itself worked. This, I believe, was by the fortune of having experienced what it means to have an unsuccessful relationship, and what it means to have a - thus far - successful one. It helped me understand how two people really should interact for love to stick around for more than just the atmosphere, and so when I chose to link Eleanor and Therix together it was because their mindsets, ideologies and personalities were compatible in some ways and complimentary in others, along with some necessary clashes of identity that provided the flavour and the debates that persisted throughout the time they're together and even as the story continues now. To this end, I think I was partially aided by the nature of Bioshock 2's story formula, with the multiple endings giving me some flexibility with who Eleanor is.

And so I think, on that note of which I know plenty about, I think it's time to end this journal here. Mostly it was here to give you all something to think about, and I hope it helps you in the future understanding how relationships work a little more. I did consider including lesbian and homosexual relationships in this journal as another topic of discussion, but having no genuine experience in such things myself I thought it best to not try and be too imperious about it.