The Problem of Relationship Drama

Hallo. I have needed to do my laundry for a week but have not had the opportunity. Also, NaNoWriMo is going on, and that’s not always conducive to my mental health. So that’s another little fun bit of my life going on right now!

Hooray.

But I read some Limyaael yesterday, so that was cool.

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The Problem of Relationship Drama

OR, “Where Arrow Went Wrong”

Because that’s what happened, you know? That’s what went wrong with Arrow. Mind you it’s not a terrible show, but at its weakest moments, that’s what was holding back the show. 

So let me step back a bit and talk about what I’m talking about.

[jazz hands] DRAMA

It’s got negative associations sometimes, and for good reasons, but it’s an essential part to telling a long-running story that you hope will engage audiences. How do characters interact with each other? How do they interact with the world around them? What does that say about us, the audience? In a well-written story, the infusion of drama helps keeps things fresh and keeps the viewer viewing or the reader reading: they want to know what dramatic thing is happening next to these characters.

It’s sort of an unwritten rule of television writing. It’s why shows that are mostly goofy comedies like Brooklyn 99 occasionally have episodes that deal with things like police discrimination against African-Americans or one of the detectives coming out as bisexual. That’s not a negative criticism, as I think that B99 mostly handles issues very well, but it’s a little bit odd when you think about how it’s a comedy about a detective who thinks his life is like Die Hard and hasn’t read more than fifty books in his entire life.

But the writers of that show understand that we care about these characters, and while we love watching their hilarious antics we also want to see them grow as people, and so it deals with more serious topics from time to time. Those aren’t always from-the-headlines topics either, sometimes they’re things like breakups or annoying coworkers or the like. And they’re often done with a funny twist, but it’s still drama. And it works, because it stays true to the characters, and the show doesn’t lose sight of what its viewers actually came to watch: a funny show about goofball cops.

But for some reason, some writers think that the only drama anyone cares about it romance, and that’s… pretty terrible. And that’s where we get to Arrow.

Arrow is a TV show meant to be about the DC Comics character Green Arrow told in the style of Nolan’s Batman movies. It’s also a CW show, which means it focuses very heavily on the dramas of pretty people. For whatever reason, very few people in the show can just meet and go out or something. There’s always a lot of hang wringing and drama and it’s really, really annoying. Like, insanely annoying.

Like, in season one Ollie starts dating this cop, yeah? And she asks him on their first date about his time on the Island, where he was stranded and tortured, mind you, and Ollie, quite reasonably, doesn’t want to talk about it. And his date gets upset, and both she and the show frames this as a miscommunication thing, about how Oliver Queen needs to learn to open up to people, and how pushing people away isn’t healthy in making relationships work. Except this isn’t a relationship issue. This is a basic personal boundaries issue! I’m not love guru, but if you’re on your first date with someone who has had serious trauma inflicted upon them recently, you don’t get to bring that up and then get mad that he won’t talk about it!

Fudge, and it gets so much worse. Season three--hang on.

[goes and sits at a bar in isolation for three hours sipping apple juice]

Right, so season three of Arrow tries to frame the entire story of the show as the love story of Oliver and Felicity, which is darn annoying considering she wasn’t a love interest when the show began. Its premiere has a scene where Oliver tells her that she’s the only person he really saw as a person when he got back to Starling City, and it ends with them driving off and him saying that he’s finally happy. So much of their character arcs for the next three seasons are about their relationship with each other. This “Will They/Won’t They?” that began in season two? Lasts until season six!

THAT’S FIVE YEARS!

And remember what I said about Brooklyn 99? About how no matter what serious topics or relationship drama they did, they didn’t lose sight of what the show was and what people wanted to see? Yeah, Arrow did that, because the main audience of Arrow isn’t a cluster of people hyperventilating about the idea that Oliver and his girlfriend might [gasp] kiss! It’s an action series! About a superhero! That’s the point! That’s why we’re here!

I’m not even arguing that there can’t be relationship drama in a show like this. But I’m saying that it shouldn’t be the point. If your stunt-heavy superhero action series has five whole seasons of ship tease, and takes attention away from a supervillain with nukes in order to have Felicity complain that Ollie’s keeping secrets from her (which wasn’t his fault to begin with!!) then there’s a friggin’ problem here. 

Don’t write like this. I beg you, don’t write like this.