HOW DO YOU KILL A FEELING: AN EARNEST CHAIR V. DAIR EXAMINATION

friedectoplasm:

I’ve never done this before; when I love a love-story, it’s usually down to gut-feelings and I never look back, giving instead a reaction cold-shoulder to any second efforts in the same arena. Sometimes I commit to first encounters too much. With the recent turns in Season 5, the mantra ‘chair is endgame’ has seemed less and less unshakably true, and besides, ‘end game’: what does that mean? In terms of OTP’s, I think it means that every movement in the story has contributed to the finality of their romance. A checkmate. A chair-mate, here. That’s rarely true in television, at least, in terms of conscientious intentionality on the part of writers – seems more often to be a process of stitching it together. So I did what any rational girl who wails watching the latest episode every Monday would do: I put my love on the line, because if Chuck and Blair really are Chuck-and-Blair, Blair-and-Chuck, it wouldn’t change a damn thing. I want to compare the love stories being told, Chair versus Dair, by being as charitable as possible in my reading of the narrative and the spin it puts on the characters involved, and answering a few possible criticisms of the respective stories in the interests of fairness. It’s going to be a doozy in length, so my apologies for that.

Cards on the table? Chair is endgame, sugar. (But maybe not in the sense of being foretold through narrative bread crumbs, maybe not in the sense that it will happen, as a prediction of the twists and turns of Gossip Girl. Only that it ought to, I think.) Which is why I won’t be sticking this into the #dair tag, but if some ‘shipper from the other side does find it, and would like to respond, I’d welcome it! Because frankly, that’s what makes it fun, yeah? We’ve all begun to treat a television program as if it had something to say about the world, as if it bears a harpoon in hand, and must be dealt with – ‘shippers don’t consume, they invest, they put their hearts into it, and that means we’ve got common (masochistic) ground. So if I’ve been unfair to the unfolding Humpdorf tale, do let me know, because my hope here is to give both sides their best shot. Same goes to my strong sisters in the chairleader section.

Read More