writing/story structure thoughts wrt romance

haha suckers made you look now you have to listen to me talk about bl again

no but in seriousness I have complained many times about how the tendency in romance is to usually have the climax/conclusion be the main couple getting together

this is obviously in no way limited to bl or to Japan or to any medium. Disney movies are practically infamous for this

furuba stacked MULTIPLE couples getting together all at the end

(although I think Yuki/Machi is a funny inclusion in that group in that it really vibed like they were already dating and they knew it but I digress) anyway this is less about that and more about an adjacent pattern that I come across particularly often with bl, which is

> the story is planned for one chapter/volume
> they get together as the climax
> the series gets extended and we get to continue to see their relationship

I like reading these series but it does often just feel like starkly apparent in the way it reads that the progression afterwards was not planned from the start and the writer just makes up new things as they go along. often a love rival is introduced to create conflict or somesuch

the story needs some kind of conflict to continue and the conflict can no longer be the fact that they're not dating so new conflicts need to be invented

there are a lot of these series I really enjoy so that's not to say I think this is bad writing by any means, and I still enjoy getting to see like, them navigate increasing domesticity which is a pretty common theme

but I cannot stop fucking thinking about The Tyrant Falls in Love now. it's funny that I had not even read it for all this time until this weekend because it's such a like iconically recognizable title but I was a hipster and wasn't really into Junjou and assumed it would be similar, especially since ppl largely said it was bad. they were right it starts bad

I cannot recommend this series to anyone because the starting premise fucking sucks

but what it did REALLY well that I am now OBSESSED WITH is that the characters' mentalities/motivations were essentially perfectly designed to near-perpetually maintain conflict 1. without it feeling contrived 2. without it feeling draining, because the characters and relationship actually consistently improve and the improvements don't conveniently vanish

this is not to say nothing in the series ever feels contrived. it definitely does. but the contrivances aren't singlehandedly driving the story,

like ok. a normal, deeply annoying, exceedingly common way to create conflict is through a misunderstanding that is like, a character mishears something and is upset because they think x happened, but actually what happened was y, and once they find out it was actually y, the misunderstanding and conflict are completely neatly resolved

and we as the audience want to stranhle everyone because it was a stupid fucking misunderstanding in the first place so anyway. in The Tyrant Falls in Love/I'm going to call it Koisuru Boukun because it's shorter to type, there are a lot of misunderstandings where one of the characters misjudges the other's meaning or feelings or intentions

and the individual misunderstandings do get cleared up more or less as they occur. but the reason they keep happening is because:
- Morinaga has rejection/abandonment traumas that give him poor self-esteem and irrational anxieties. meanwhile Souichi like actively does not want to like him romantically which obviously does not help

- Souichi has no reason to trust Morinags half the time when Morinaga says things because Morinaga LIKE CONSTANTLY LIES AND HIDES THINGS, USUALLY BECAUSE MORINAGA FEELS LIKE IF HE'S HONEST HE'LL GET REJECTED

the climax of the series is not them getting together. "them getting together" is not a singular event but a drawn out process that is still arguably ongoing even now during the slow epilogue period. the climax is just them coming to understand one another better

and everything that comes after that still continues to feel like an extension of the same story! because they are still working on their shit! SOUICHI STILL DOESN'T ACKNOWLEDGE THEY'RE DATING

and it has made me DRAMATICALLY rethink the character creation process for a story that is primarily romance-driven

cuz I would say I previously thought of it more from an angle of 1. dynamics I like 2. an arc I want to give the main character and what kind of love interest character would be suitable to compliment that arc 3. two separate character arcs and smash them together

none of which are WRONG approaches obviously but this is a new one for me

I guess actually it is kind of the low-stakes upward movement version of my Ethically Diametrically Opposed ship type (ex. nieyao, Alviss/Rolan, Luka/Hyuna in my delusions)

it's hard to get "I disagree with your ideal for the world" in a mundane context where it is easier to avoid the topic and harder to force people to somehow stay attached to people they strongly disagree with