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Is this a title you didn’t expect to see on my blog? If so, why? Did I not seem like the ‘type to like romantic comedies’? Well let’s stop right there, shall we. Since when was it OK to dismiss a whole genre? I’d struggle to find even a sub-genre that I’d feel comfortable dismissing as universally rubbish, probably Snuff, though is that a form, not a genre? Sub genre of documentary? Anyway, killing people is fucked up. Stop it.
Back to point.
I AM SO BORED of the lazy dismissal of romantic comedies. I was having a discussion on Twitter yesterday about Space Westerns, I like the genre, and I thought I might try one, probably in a comic book collaboration I’m vaguely starting. Cue much self-satisfied snarking of ‘you mean like Firefly’ as if a) I had imagined I had invented the genre (srsly) and b) Firefly was the only one of its kind (try Star Trek (‘the final frontier’?) Star Wars, Halo Jones, Mass Effect, Cowboy Beebop, and they’re only some of the good ones). I tried to put this point to someone who suggested it could be nothing but a Firefly copy, by suggesting that had I said I was going to write a Romantic Comedy, he would not have suggested it must be a ‘Singing in the Rain’ ripoff. He responded that if that had been the case he would have considered it immediately rubbish anyway.
Though this made me facepalm, I’m willing to admit that there was, many a year ago, a point at which I would have agreed with him. That was the point, probably in my early teens and recognising something in society, I was in full-blown tomboy mode. I did not like musicals and romantic comedies because they were all rubbish, weren’t they? Why? The same reason I was imitating male clothing, academic ambitions*, sporting prowess. Because I have always wanted to be good at things, score high, understand how things work, learn. And what I had learnt from society was that ‘girl’ was not as good as ‘boy’. It was an insult. ‘You throw like a girl’. I bloody well didn’t, I bowled on a par with the boys and made it onto the school cricket team, I got the highest GCSEs out of the whole school, boys included**. And I won acceptance from boys for acting as they did. And Romantic Comedies, with their ideas of love and happy endings, they were uniformly feminine. And therefore, obviously, rubbish.