“i love you as i once hated you”

[taotie]

or, romantic narrative as some kind of restorative justice

Now I am not speaking of real life; we should all know the perils of entering a relationship (platonic, romantic, or otherwise) in order to “fix” someone, or accepting abusive or unhealthy dynamics in intimate settings. I like romance in fiction because the best romantic narratives take all that is thorny, tangled, dangerous, and vulnerable about love, any kind of love, and makes its characters endure what we would not want to ourselves, or are simply not ready for. I like that fiction is a safe space (much like roleplaying — sexual or otherwise) to simulate ideas, fantasies, or emotional journeys, bringing cathartic release. And as a die-hard for the trope known as the “childhood friends to enemies to lovers” dynamic, I have been thinking for years now about romantic narratives as a kind of model towards restorative justice, particularly how one could make amends and patch up a relationship once based in enmity to the extent that one would love fiercely, deeply, irrevocably, with perhaps the wound as a strange genesis for utmost trust, and pain as the catalyst for desire.

The easy answer is that love exists in the same plane as hate, and that anger is just another type of passion. But I am not so sure. As a notoriously forgiving person myself, I still would find it difficult to love someone who deeply angered me to the point of hatred. I maintain some of these emotional boundaries for my own safety. And there have been countless times while reading a romance where the main couple reconciled but I could never forgive the half who wronged, the slight too raw, too close to home, and I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough. After all, we enjoy a romance that feels earned.

I am speaking now about a specific personal preference. To me, the appeal lies in more than just the shifting growth of a relationship, more than just the amends one makes in the name of love — though of course those are vital aspects as well — I like a romance that has something to say about the world around them. I suspect many do. I suspect that the popularity of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works, for example, is precisely because her characters are indivisible from the political worlds that envelop them. The political is emotional. Political, not because her work professes to have some left-right politics legible to our contemporary world, but because her narratives are always oriented against authority, against propriety and tradition for tradition’s sake, against saving face above doing the right thing. Strip any of her works to their bare bones, and there you’ll see two characters who attempt to carve out, against the wishes of higher orders, their own sense of peace and freedom in the world. A peace that is simple and yet so vociferously denied to them. This is a metaphor for many things, but above all, it is a metaphor for queerness, woven into her works at this atomic level. In The Scum Villain’s Self-Saving System, the characters are even oriented against authorial power. The book (and the book within the book) traps Luo Binghe and Shen Qingqiu in its own designs, and part of the joy is in the meta-fiction, in your own partaking of these genre tropes and archetypes, and in the characters’ clever (intentional or unintentional) subversions of how those tropes play out. (In other words, “What if I loved you so much it changed the narrative,” type of shit).

But what does the political have to do with romance, you may ask. Or my claims about romantic narrative as a mechanism for restorative justice. Out of Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s books, there is possibly no better example than Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, its own title a clever misdirect for how we should see its main character. For Wei Wuxian does not originate nor wield demonic cultivation; “grandmaster” of such is a moniker beset upon him by the elders of the cultivation world, who wish to spoil his reputation for daring to rebel against their unfair edicts. He represents this kind of anti-authoritarian thinking, while his eventual love interest, Lan Wangji, has a “by-the-book,” traditionalist approach to life. Because he has seen and felt the consequences of his parents flouting rules for personal values (and for love), he chooses to live his life with the strictest sense of self-control. At first, he and Wei Wuxian clash, obviously at loggerheads. Critically, though, they meet as teenagers, that volatile and impressionable time of life, and as Lan Wangji comes to know Wei Wuxian as a person, comes to understand Wei Wuxian’s thoughts, feelings, and history, it changes him. Over the course of the series, sometimes unbeknownst to Wei Wuxian himself, Lan Wangji sidesteps rules or even defies orders for Wei Wuxian, at the cost of his own body. Scars and brands serve as visible reminders of the kind of safety and comfort that he, a high-ranking noble in the cultivation world, has had to give up. This is the crux of it, I think — that the same sacrifices of self you make for love are also ones you do to make amends, and to fight for another’s agency, in and of itself a political act. Even after he reunites with Wei Wuxian and they resolve some of their past misunderstandings, Lan Wangji’s goal never is to find some role or position in polite society for Wei Wuxian to step into. Their relationship (at least to me) remains evasive, out of the grasp of authority, a bit of safety eked out from living between the rules, a kind of loophole limbo.

Wei Wuxian, for his part, isn’t faultless either. A story like this resists funneling its characters into easy moralities. Wei Wuxian harms, kills, and makes mistakes that harm and kill people. But the narrative says he is redeemable because he wants to be. In The Untamed (the live-action adaptation), he says (and I’m grossly paraphrasing) to his nephew that saying “sorry” and “thank you” is the hardest thing you’ll have to learn as an adult, but it’s worth it. That sentiment has stayed with me. A character like Wei Wuxian has descended to the depths of darkness and succumbed to all of his worst impulses, but he is still ruled by the desire to do good by all the people he loves, and to apologize to those that are owed. May we all retain such nobility of heart.

The political framework of a story creates the emotional power of romance, or you could even argue for the reverse. A romance story requires two characters at its center, and when you create one, they are where you start. Politics is about power, and romance, whether we like to admit it or not, is about power — or the relinquishing of power to another, or an exchange of power, so that one can exist in equilibrium (or what comes close to it) with another. Recently I read the Captive Prince series and deposited about two weeks’ worth of brainpower into thinking only about these books, so I can say that Captive Prince, even more directly than Mo Xiang Tong Xiu’s works, is about power. The series begins with a vast imbalance of power, one character a prince, the other forced into enslavement to said prince (and is also secretly a prince; the series still centers around royalty and isn’t the most airtight interrogation of power, but I don’t think it pretends to be, either). Captive Prince is exhilarating because it starts here and asks you to imagine how true love might arise from abjection. It is about doing the worst thing imaginable to the other and still, despite that, or even because of it, finding commonality. Who but your former enemy can understand the loneliness, the anger, the hatred; there is a shared intimacy in being the only two people who know “what it’s like.” In real life, this is called a “trauma bond” and is heavily advised against, but in fiction, characters get to represent the best of our emotions. I like that Damen and Laurent don’t paper over the ways they’ve hurt each other, but it becomes part of them, their story. Things that, for better or for worse, have changed them irrevocably, and could not be this version of themselves without. They retain the best of themselves despite the abuse they’ve endured or caused each other and that is how they proceed in a trusting, romantic love, and they also try to be true, benevolent rulers. I don’t think it’s very realistic, and like I said, it doesn’t have to be. Fiction is a simulation or mirror — I can say that both characters are more than the harm they’ve caused, and then maybe I can say this about real people, too.

I think about this topic, perhaps an inordinate amount, as someone who will not forgive the people who have deeply harmed me but wishes them well. There are people I’ve reached an understanding with and remain in my life in at least a periphery sense, but there are those I do not let re-enter my life because I had done so in the past and it had cost me, again and again. People don’t change easily. I don’t either. I explained to friends recently that I can have nine out of ten relationships in my life be mutually fulfilling, but if the one goes badly and hurts me, it’s the only one I’ll remember. I try not to be like this. The trick is to remember that I’m very loved. The trick is not to listen to the lonely and vicious twelve-year-old inside me who thinks that being hated gives me latitude for my viciousness. The copious amounts of romance I read and watch, maybe, is for that kid — to remind them that after the long and painful route of being hurt, there is love at the end of it.