[fic crit, amatonormativity (blogger's own) cw]

revisited a story that i remembered really enjoying, but have had difficulty digging up for a reread because, as it turns out, it's a good 200 pages deep in the relevant pairing tag, and—

turns out that i do still really dig it, and also that the other thing i remembered about it is equally still true, which is that it totally fails to really resolve the emotional side of things! like, it's a fic full of Plot and briefly- but vividly-drawn OCs, and people from the main characters' pasts who show up in ways that work for the story but are also random enough to lend verisimilitude, and we get to see the elements of the foil's day-to-day life—what keeps them busy and burnished when they're not off Adventuring with our protagonist—in generous, engaging detail, and all of that remains really satisfying and compelling to me; but it's billed as a fic ft. a pairing, and yet all we see of that is an established, undiscussed level of ambiguous intimacy that's lovely and warm but queerplatonic at absolute most, and doesn't get tied into any sort of bow by the end, even a friendly one.

and the thing is—there's absolutely nothing wrong with that! if it weren't for the pairing tag i probably wouldn't even find it unsatisfying: it'd just be lovely warm plotty genfic, and i'd enjoy the hell out of it! but i am, for better or for worse, amatonormative enough that when i see a story with a pairing tag, i do personally expect some combination of Romance Feelings and/or sex to appear on the page, unless the author's notes inform me the relationship is queerplatonic or similarly asterisked, and having that expectation go unmet feels like a disappointment even when the fic is on all other fronts the opposite of disappointing. which i'm fully ready to accept is my own failing, rather than the story's! but. idk. pondering and processing. :)