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Oh my goodness, you read my mind! I recently read a horror short story and okay, it's horror, bad things are going to happen, but the main couple were so horrible. I asked myself "why doesn't anyone write people who are married who actually like each other?" She was awful, he was awful, I had no idea why they got married or stayed married and I didn't care by the time the bad things happened because frankly they both deserved it.
Is it because marriage is supposed to be one of the Bad Patriarchal Things? Is the influence of literary fiction still casting a shadow over the entire topic? I know the general idea is that tragedies are more interesting and if you are going to have horrible things happen to your characters, they should deserve those things, but for once I'd really like to read "married couple who are decent people and like each other and aren't secretly hating and despising their spouse".
Emperor's New Groove?
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In the preface to Speaker for the Dead Orson Scott Card writes about "adolescent" vs "adult" main characters. He doesn't deal with it in those terms, but in effect what he is saying is that the Campbellian hero can't be someone who is already playing a fully realised adult role in his community (in his worldview as well as mine, this is approximately synonymous with "married with kids") because the hero arc doesn't make sense. So to write a heroic story with "adult" main characters (OSC's goal in Speaker/Xenocide/Children of the Mind) you have to do something else.
In my view, OSC fails - but I still love the books for HFY/superversive type reasons. Speaker and Children are both carried off by "adolescent" heroes - the still-single Ender in Speaker with a number of pequinino "brother" pigs (who we later learn are literal adolescents when the pequinino life-cycle is revealed) as supporting characters; and young Peter, Si Wang-Mu and Jane-as-young-Val in Children. Xenocide is a relative stinker because it doesn't have this - the central plot conceit is that Ender's struggle to bring harmony to the Ribiera family as stepfather turns into a metaphor for the broader struggle to restore harmony on Lusitania and in the wider galaxy. It almost, but not quite, works.
As a separate point, in last week's thread we had the Barbie discourse which talked about the idea of the fundamental male (hero's journey) and female (abandon your demons and embrace your inner fabulousness) character development arcs as being about SMV increase. A happily married man who goes on a hero's journey is not going to develop into a man who gets the girl, he is going to develop into a man whose wife loves him less than the man she married. This works well as the apotheosis arc where the hero who we saw complete the journey and get the girl in series 1 is called away from "happily ever after" to perform one last act of heroism to pull out the good guys win in series 2, and normally gets himself killed in the process. (Think Tony Stark in *Avengers: Endgame). But it doesn't work well as a regular hero story.
Funnily enough, that reminds me of the Druss the Legend stories. A happily married man has his village invaded and his wife captured by slavers, so he goes off to rescue her and in the process changes so drastically from who he used to be, that when he finally finds his wife again (who has since remarried to a guy who treats her decently), the story doesn't give us a simple resolution to this.
I was more impressed by the series than I expected to be; I read the first book looking for something fun but stupid, just popcorn entertainment, and it sounded like it would fit the bill, but then the characters insisted on having (at least a little) depth!
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The best part about How I Met Your Mother was Lily and Marshall's relationship, for this exact reason. Barney was funny, but he was a one-joke character that you couldn't actually invest in or care about (and the show's efforts right at the end to turn him into an actual person were just awkward and bad). Ted and Robin's endless strings of failed romances deadened the viewer to the point that by the time they finally end up together as the happily ever after, all you can do is roll your eyes and say "yeah, I give it 3 months". Lily and Marshall, just by being a couple that fell in love, got married, and stayed together, felt fresh and exciting even though this is one of the most well travelled storylines in real life history.
Lily and marshall are in a long term relationship at the start of the show, and they still have a whole thing where Lily bails on marshal to run away to the west coast to do art. Sure, she regrets it. But the show still uses breaking them up as a source of drama.
Not as bad as the endless on again off again thing done by most sitcoms (and done in HImYm with ted and robin) but not as good as Parks and rec where the couples that the writers actually want to have be together never have temporary break ups used as a cheap source of drama.
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Way of the Househusband has a very happy marriage, for one. And many of the couples in Lark Rise to Candleford, for all their arguments, genuinely care for and love each other. I'm sure I know other properties, but not off the top of my head.
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It wasn't by Laird Barron was it?
How did you guess? Is this a trope of his, because these were anthologies and there were a couple of his stories in them and one of them had me going "yeah, congratulations, I know this is meant to be a shitty world but you just couldn't resist giving that tiny little extra tweak to make it even shittier, even though it doesn't do anything for the story, could you?"
Lol no, Barron does rely heavily on the crapsack world trope, but the reason I guessed is because I remember thinking the same thing after reading that story - as soon as you said "She was awful, he was awful, I had no idea why they got married or stayed married and I didn't care by the time the bad things happened because frankly they both deserved it." I thought of that short story, it encapsulates it perfectly.
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I was talking with my wife about this a few nights ago. I literally strain to remember the last bit of pop culture I consumed with a happy married couple raising children. The most recent I could come up with was Jim and Pam from The Office.
Anyone who thinks being happily married and raising children has no interesting fodder for story telling has clearly never been meaningfully involved in the effort. I think most of the writers, editors and producers of our pop culture are still exorcising their trauma over their own parents bitter divorce. And it shows in how they depict very nearly every "traditional" man/woman relationship as ending in profound existential tragedy.
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Allegedly they were going to push the Jim & Pam marital troubles even further, realized nobody wanted that, and backtracked hard. At least, I saw that once in a youtube video.
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Looking at Schur's other shows, he has a pattern.
Leslie and Ben, and April and Andy, from Parks and Recreation.
Terry and Sharon, then Jake and Amy from Brooklyn 99.
Happy couples that get together and stay together for the duration of the show.
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I would guess it’s because we already have a stable of tropes ready to go for dysfunctional marriages. It’s not like Gone With the Wind was fighting the Patriarchy.
All the most fundamental conflicts are internecine. Cain and Abel, Kronos eating his children, Oedipus Rex.
I wonder if it's because the traditional tropes were the 'happily married couple raising a family' or at least the social pressure was the perception of such, so to depict unhappy marriages or divorces or single parenthood was fresh and daring and revolutionary. And then critiquing mainstream society and the model of marriage and family got taken up in the 70s political struggles of feminism and gay rights and the rest of it, so deconstructing marriage as "that 50s model of Mom in heels and pearls as the happy homemaker is wrong, in fact it was Mom zoned out on legal drugs hating her life" was the new paradigm.
Then they got stuck in the rut of "of course all marriages are awful, with people ending up hating each other, women being trapped and men being exploitative" and that was the pattern set, so that now "happy couple" is the fresh and revolutionary concept.
I think part of the issue is that SJ to a fair degree hasn't actually realised that it isn't a counterculture anymore, so it still thinks SJ is fresh/daring/revolutionary.
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