a fwudge of housekeeping

The lack of blog death continues! For I would like to point out and test the functionality of a new account because I changed e-mail addresses and therefore had to open up a whole new bloggermajig username 'n' everything. If you would like, you can now call me the blogger formerly known as j9‽. Though I really, really hope you won't.

So like I said a coupla posts ago with my dear friend ThaReeza, we're going to try to blog more - often I have ideas for hypothetical posts that never make it on the internet because I never know what to do here - and we both decided to make this a little less pure random (it'll still be there, not to worry) but with other stuff too. Here we go.

I call it "Prince Charming Syndrome." It is a simple principle - Love Interest is in horrific need of a personality, and the generally otherwise interesting main character can't seem to get over the pheromones that Love Interest douses themselves with to remedy this problem. What ensues is a "love story" that nobody cares about or can believe in during its formulaic formation or the sugary sweet stereotypical situation that results. So Love Interest is more of an ideal than anything because they have to be perfect, and you can't realistically portray anybody prominently without a few flaws.

Damage control damage control damage control - of course it isn't always this way, and of course there are always big exceptions to the observations, but this , and it's fun to write about!

In the meantime, there is often Secondary Interest - another love interest, a job, or maybe a possessive possessive dog. They (Secondary Interest, not the dog) are interesting because there is more wiggle room to play around with their character - flaws can be rampant because they are invariably going to be dumped. However! In order to make them a "believable" contender for the main character, they need to be at least a little bit appealing. So now we have boring with no screen time vs. interesting, flawed, and lots of screen time. (Or page time if it's in a book, brain time if it's a hallucination, etc.)

SOUND EFFECT! In comes valiant Love Interest in the light of one thing that Secondary Interest does wrong, and Main Character is swayed by the pheromones and runs off with Love Interest and ostensibly goes and has 50% bland babies with them. (Side note: googling "50% bland babies" turns up no results, but Google does take the liberty of suggesting "50% blind babies." Also, in its listing for "50% bland babies" without quotes, the word "folktronic" pops up. The internet: an interesting, if not sometimes horrible, place.) So now we can't believe in anything the main character does or has done because we're sitting there gaping at how stupid they can be. (If we're that emotionally invested in the first place.) Gah! All that flimsy fake character development for nothing, and a plot that just seems to have fallen apart.

Sometimes this is okay - case in point, Disney movies - but dare I say more of the time it is frustrating - case in point, what I was watching when I thought of this, The Phantom of the Opera. (Which was still great, I have to say, because I saw it on Broadway with the positively fanmazingtasticstupenulousedible Howard McGillin as the Phantom and the standing room only tickets were cheap, but during the walk to the bus station and the subsequent ride back to New Jersey, where the hotel happened to be located, the conversation between my dad and I consisted of the following: the shoes he bought out of boredom (he is awesome), the idiotic bratty teenage girls I stood beside (read this like a vapid whiny valley girl, please: "why did that lady kick those people out of the aisle? She said it was a fire hazard? It sooooo wasn't a fire hazaaaard. If I ever become an 80-year-old bag that works in a theatre and yells at people, just shoot me okay just shoot me." It was only a fire hazard to people trying to get out of the building, I was only a few people away and couldn't hear the "yelling," possibly due to its absence, and the usherette was maybe 50...but I digress), my sister getting sick and having to go home early so I couldn't get my Playbill signed (we all got sick during the trip, but I was the first and worst - and getting autographs was just squee for the whole thing), and my griping about the love story having an insufferable ending, which was in a word exasperating after hype that refuses to die after 21 years and all that setup and...well, anyways.) What character depth is there in choosing the perfect, bland one instead of the flawed, interesting one?

What's even worse is when the timing is all wrong and they end up getting together and breaking up and getting together and breaking up and getting together and cheating and getting together and one announcing to the other that they are leaving for a Bavarian fish trainer and getting together and the expense of said Bavarian fish trainer and running out of screen time/pages/duration of hallucination.

So! The love story being a staple in everything for centuries upon centuries, I guess it kind of fits if you really have to look for the good ones - or at least the ones that don't make you want to puke from the stupidity of the development (unless love stories already do make you puke).

With that, something that I've been thinking about for a while is vented, conveniently coinciding with the promise that I would write something on the beloved bloggy blog when I had time - and here we are. Have a glorious Easter, whether you celebrate it in the religious or commercialized bunny candy manner (I'm in the former category, ThaReeza in the latter, but Flooflesquee is an open-minded place, so no worries), and I hope you enjoyed this post - if not, tell me why; I'm still in the process of honing the blog abilities. Thank you for reading!