I am thinking a lot lately about how most of the media I've sincerely enjoyed over the past couple years has centered the belief that providing emotional satisfaction to your audience is a fundamental good, rather than something the Cool Kids deliberately avoid.

I don't think it's a coincidence that most of those creators tend to be either:

A) people who come from fandom, and therefore have a deep and sincere understanding of the emotional relationship between fan and character, so they actually respect that and take it seriously;

and/or

B) people from marginalized communities writing #ownvoices stories (from queer romance with happy endings, to SFF informed by nonwhite, non-Western cultures) who are exhausted by only seeing ourselves on page and screen as cautionary tales or in struggle narratives.

it's interesting to go back and revisit some of the books, movies and TV shows i've loved in the past, from creators who DIDN'T prioritize emotional resolution for audiences, and to realize how much of the meaning I gave those narratives came from me and not from the work itself.

sometimes creators truly do not give a shit about their audience, and everything meaningful in the work itself comes from what we, the audience, bring to it ourselves, and that's good because that means it can't be taken away if it turns out later that the creator is an asshole

but a lot of the books I've read over the past few months that really stuck with me were written by people who came up in the world of fandom/fanfic and I don't think that's a coincidence

fic writers fill in the emotional blanks we're used to other writers leaving out

i'm just more and more grateful for creators who have a sense of who they're writing for and what those fans want, and take a real pleasure and delight in GIVING it to them, instead of taking pleasure and delight in WITHHOLDING it

"SORRY, NO HAPPINESS OR JOY OR HOPE OR ROMANCE OR OPTIMISM, IT ROTS YOUR TEETH, SIT HERE AND EAT YOUR VEGETABLES OF MISERY BECAUSE IT'S GOOD FOR YOU"

and i mean, there's a hundred other tangential conversations here about patriarchy that we could be having, from the notion that putting a woman through torture is the best way to show she's "strong" to the idea that healthy, lasting relationships aren't narratively interesting

but fundamentally I think my frustration is that when media is created by powerful white men who don't actually have any real problems, they're making theatre out of the trauma of our real lives and watching them revel in it is at best tiring, at worst menacing or even triggering

and while this was always true, I think post-2016 I've just entirely lost any interest in putting up with it quietly

it's already quite interesting, I think, to look at TV shows which began in the Obama era and just are not equipped to make the jump to the new world we're in now

Game of Thrones is truly I think the peak example of this

by the time it got to the end, the fandom was so sick of the entitled white dude showrunners, and the showrunners were so sick of not receiving the praise they believed they were due, that they just phoned in the finale

but a whole lot of shows trying to be the next Game of Thrones i think also fell into this trap, and the world just totally changed on them, and now nobody has time for grimdark white male cynicism anymore

i could write a whole essay just on the revolutionary act of mainstreaming queer joy ("Schitt's Creek," "She-Ra and the Princesses of Power," "Pose," "Red White and Royal Blue," "One Day at a Time," etc etc etc) and how urgently necessary all those stories feel now

i think there's also a thing sometimes where creators get . . . JEALOUS of their own characters??? like, "no, you weren't supposed to be watching because of this one character, you were supposed to be watching to ADMIRE MY GENIUS WORLDBUILDING HANDIWORK" https://twitter.com/truebeliever67/status/1281344894146052096?s=20

there are several shows I could think of who tend to bump off any character, or stomp down any blossoming ship, that really starts to develop a breakaway fan base which they feel distracts from people watching the show the "correct" way

fans also police each other this way, like you see this a lot in the curative fandom vs. transformative fandom for big mega-franchises like Marvel and Star Trek

if you haven't read certain comics or you don't see TOS as gospel, you're literally consuming media wrong

the funniest and also most depressing thing about this thread is that y'all keep weighing in by naming other shows and showrunners i hadn't even thought of yet

THIS IS EVERYWHERE AND IT HAPPENS ALWAYS AND WE'RE ALL SO GODDAMN TIRED OF IT

BSG is a great example, to me, of a show that took emotion and relationships and human connection and audience satisfaction really seriously (finale controversy aside!) without sacrificing any depth or complexity. stories can be dark but still resolve! https://twitter.com/analuisafm1412/status/1281350485308575744?s=20

I also feel this way about "La Casa de Papel," one of my more recent TV obsessions, a Spanish crime show which manages to be both an absolute rollercoaster of action/suspense/drama, AND 100% centered on love and relationships and human connection. it's dark but it's not grim.

i also want to clarify, because I'm already seeing this pop up in my mentions, that this is not about dividing everything into "dark" vs. "fluff" (a term which often gets used in ways that are maddeningly sexist)

something can be emotionally satisfying and still dark

i bitch a lot on here about character deaths that get handled poorly, but that's not because i have a hard-and-fast-law that no one is ever allowed to die in any book, movie or TV show i enjoy or else i will CANCEL IT FOREVER

it's just, like . . . does the death MEAN anything

this is, again, how you suss out writers who've never had any real problems and for whom this is all theoretical: the ones who kill off, say, a protagonist's mother (a trope we see all the time) and handwave it away as a mere blip instead of a fundamentally transformative trauma

my go-to example, and sorry it's gonna be a spoiler but watch the show anyway, is "Halt and Catch Fire," which made the BREATHTAKINGLY bold choice to kill off one of its protagonists right before the series finale, leading to hands-down the best episodes of the whole run

because in REAL LIFE, deaths have stakes. it can fundamentally shake up your whole life like nothing else can.

the clock's ticking, life's too short, take the risk, say "i love you," call the person you haven't talked to in years . . . there's so much emotional richness to mine

so in saying that I want to be watching and reading and consuming media that prioritizes emotional resolution and satisfaction, that doesn't mean it's all "fluff", and that also doesn't mean that "fluff" is actually a negative

"happy" isn't the opposite of "smart", guys

for example, i'm sure some folks would dismiss "Red White and Royal Blue" as "fluff", because it has a pink cover & is unapologetically a romance, but it is also a savvy political drama and a bold declaration of the power of queerness, so like, what do we mean when we say "fluff"

just a gentle suggestion to interrogate your own assumptions that things which are coded "feminine" (romance, emotions, joy, hope) must inherently be intellectually inferior to/less substantive than things we code as masculine (violence, cynicism, dominance, power, control)

and on that note, back i go to working on my sci-fi trilogy about time travel and found families and love and moms and emotional resilience after trauma and confronting the darkness of history and heroes driven by hope for the possibility of building a better world

https://www.amazon.com/Rewind-Files-Complete-Novel-ebook/dp/B014VMIVDU i cannot promise to be perfect but i CAN promise never to fuck with readers' hopes purely for sport and that over here on planet claire we don't do gender-based violence, shock deaths, grimdark cynicism or trauma-as-entertainment

would love to hear others' suggestions, but things I've enjoyed over the last year include:

The Good Place
Schitt's Creek
She-Ra
One Day at a Time
La Casa de Papel
Call the Midwife
Halt and Catch Fire
Pose
Nailed It
Star Trek: Discovery
Picard https://twitter.com/Twondling/status/1281362012111548416?s=20

in terms of books, i have been reading a lot of fantasy lately and would recommend

Spinning Silver
The Priory of the Orange Tree
City of Brass
Children of Blood and Bone

all big, sweeping, epic stories with drama and darkness and suspense, but centering diverse women's stories

i will say that the first two are stand-alone stories, and the 3rd and 4th are series i haven't finished yet so i can only speak to where i am so far, but with that caveat, all four are powerfully focused on young women protagonists who get to struggle, fight, triumph and WIN

okay now i really do have to go write but i'm glad this has touched a nerve so we all feel less alone and i hope y'all will shout out some book, movie or TV show that has given you joy this year (any genre) so we can all add them to our lists.

LOVE YOU ALL

obviously anyone gets to have an opinion about anything on this here bird app, but it has been very interesting to see that the women I’ve seen mocking this thread are bringing a lot of “I’m Not Like Other Girls” energy, which sort of proves this point

https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1281358921639161856?s=21 https://twitter.com/clairewillett/status/1281358921639161856

there’s a real “THAT woman was just not smart enough to GET why the cynical grimdark thing is cool! I get it, therefore I am smarter, therefore men will accept me because I like all the masculine-coded things” vibe which is, I mean, certainly a way to live!

and this is not to say that no women anywhere on earth genuinely enjoy, like, “Fight Club”

but if you’re talking up your love of “Fight Club” in a thread full of men so you can all bond over making fun of women who don’t like “Fight Club,” you know, maybe give that some thought

I’m also frustrated at the weird puritanical notion that anything good for you must involve suffering

I’ve seen a lot of frustrating “oh, she just wants to be coddled,” and first of all comfort food media is perfectly valid so shut up

but second of all, why do you think that an emotionally satisfying resolution is INCOMPATIBLE with being challenged along the way? what kinds of books are you reading? do you think there are literally only two types of story, Brussels sprouts and cotton candy? HELLO, STEAK EXISTS

anyway it’s been fascinating to see that like 99.99% of the comments in my mentions are from people who are exasperated by the same things I am, and then the other .01% is just literally people doing the exact kind of fan policing I mentioned

you can just. let people like things

and if I seem defensive, it’s because I took so much shit from the Nihilist Bros when I was first starting out as a playwright - because they did not feel there was any room for the kinds of stories I wanted to tell - that I finally just .... gave up writing.

The problem isn’t that these voices are a handful of twitter assholes who gave me a minor headache yesterday. The problem is that they’re the gatekeepers. The definers of genre. The people who tell aspiring playwrights, “no, that’s not the kind of thing you write plays about.”

The hardest part of becoming a professional writer, for me, wasn’t the work of writing.

It was the work of reminding myself, “you have just as much a right to be here as anybody else, and you get to write whatever the fuck you want.”

Which is still hard sometimes!