Miscalleneous having mostly to do with agape vs. eros

[abigailnus <abigailnus@yahoo.com>]

You know, my plan for this afternoon was to check in only with 
OT-Chatter, because I haven't had time to check in on the main 
group over the weekend and if I do that now I'll never get started 
on my homework.  It's quite a monkey wrench in my plans to 
discover that OTC seems to have become as busy as the main 
group!  Anyway, there are a few rather disjointed comments I 
thought I'd throw out and then get to work (yeah, right).

There have been several very interesting arguments about 
couplehood, couplethink, and the romantic paradigm.  I am 
supremely unqualified to offer thought on romance, but Tabouli 
seemed to be speaking my thoughts when she wrote:
>>I ran a series of workshops for international students (mostly 
from Asia) and got them to speculate about what various items 
said about Australian society.  One of the things I gave them was 
a page from the lonely hearts column in the local paper, and a Thai 
(or was he Indonesian?) man said something quite interesting.  He 
said that Westerners seem to be obsessed with "finding love" and 
"soulmates" and so on in a way people in his country aren't.  In his 
country, you (hopefully) get that sort of feeling of belonging and 
intimacy from your extended family, and it's not so crucial to find a 
spouse to complete you and fulfil all your emotional needs, there's 
a much stronger element of social obligation.>>

Not only do I have very little romantic experience, I've also had only 
limited encounters with the romantic paradigm.  My father died when 
I was young, and since then the most important relationship(s) in my 
life has been with my mother and younger brother.  I feel no 
compunction about using the word 'we' to describe us, our thoughts 
and activities.  We understand each other, we enjoy similar things, 
and enjoy doing them together.  Most importantly, we make each 
other laugh.  I have relationships outside my family that are important 
to me, and the older I get the less I feel like spending all my time at 
home (in the living at home sense, not in the never going out sense), 
but the place where I feel most comfortable, most understood, is with 
my family.  So what I want from a future relationship is not necessarily 
eros, although that would be good.  I want a family in my future - people 
who make me feel safe and wanted.  This family can include one person 
or two or twelve, they may be my relatives or my spouse or my friends 
- the composition, in my opinion, is less important than the effect.    

Dicentra, a fellow X-Files refugee, lamented:
>>But there was still a percentage of people--it felt like the
majority--that wanted them to "get together" because it would be *so
cuuuute!* Or they figured something was already going on. Or that
something was simmering under the surface. But it wasn't. And it
bugged me no end because I was so afraid Chris Carter would give in to
them and change the dynamic, thereby ruining the show. <sigh> He did.
When Scully's gratuitous baby turned out to be Mulder's (I think. I
stopped watching.) the show jumped the shark big time. I'll never
forgive them for doing that.>>

I think I've mentioned before that my only major involvement with 
fanfic was with X-Files fanfic about 5 years ago, and the experience 
has turned me off the genre completely.  Not that X-Files fanfic was 
bad - there was the normal ratio of utter dreck to absolute gems.  
My problem with fanfic was that I felt it polluted my perception of the 
show - what we call 'fanon', I guess - so that by the time I'd been 
reading for two or three years I was a confirmed shipper even though 
I normally hate that sort of thing.  Having said that, I don't think Mulder 
and Scully are a good example of agape needlessly being turned into 
eros.  By the time the series was a few years into its run, it was utterly 
impossible for me to imagine Mulder and Scully with other people, and 
I don't think I was alone in that. Their relationship was so consuming, 
so all-encompassing, that it was inconceivable that anyone else would 
be able to breach it and become important enough to either of them to 
be loved.  Sex, at this point, was a side issue, a matter of convenience 
- they were already a couple, a glaring example of couplethink, in fact, 
long before they became romantically involved.  (And I think it's a bit 
inaccurate to say that X-Files jumped the shark when Mulder and Scully 
became involved - the last season of the show I could even bear to 
watch all the way through was the sixth, and the actual romance didn't 
come until the end of the seventh.)

Melody and Tabouli, about Peter Jackson's Frodo and Sam:
>>Tabouli again:
>It's very pervasive, this one. All the jokes about the LOTR
>characters, for example. (Sam loves Frodo so much there just *has*
>to be sex involved, right?) Not that I don't find some of them
>funny, I just think they're a reflection of this eros obsession.

I could not agree *more* Tabouli. I am greatly, greatly disturbed by
the number of people that do not get that friendship. They just
cannot imagine being that close to someone and not completely jumping
them. It is sad. For humanity and that confused person. What a
lonely existence where one stops all friendship before they get good
because they cannot understand agape does not mean eros. Nor do they
want to go on for fear someone else, who is just *observing* the
friendship, will confuse the agape for eros.>>

I frankly can't blame the people who see sexual undertones to the 
relationship between Frodo and Sam in Jackson's version of FoTR.  On 
the other hand, I can't really blame Jackson for opening the text up to 
that interpretation (or at least strengthening the arguments for it).  A 
homosexual relationship between the two, overt or suggested, is still 
more acceptable than the relationship as it is presented in the book - 
master and servant, lieutenant and man.  I've been rereading LoTR 
recently, and have just read a passage in which Sam *curls up and goes 
to sleep at Frodo's feet*.  What is he, a dog?  (yes, I knew this stuff was 
there, but every time I reread the book it becomes harder to stomach).  
Jackson has worked to eliminate that aspect of the relationship and who 
can blame him, but in his choice to make Frodo young and fey (when the 
book's Frodo is supposed to be a grown man, relatively comfortable in 
his own skin) he also eliminated the possibility of reading that relationship 
as agape - deep, enduring love between two men that comes of 
friendship and camaraderie.  Oh, well.

Abigail
Really off to do homework now.