your posts introduced me to olliehal and i’m currently 😵💫 do you have any thoughts on their dynamic and why you like their relationship?
ahhhh i'm glad to hear that! in all honesty, i'm very picky about what versions of hal & ollie i actually like and the characterisation i go for tends to be exclusively 1966 - 2001 and 1969 - 1995 respectively because it's only until then that they were written as complex & compelling characters. most of my thoughts on their dynamic can honestly be summarized by denny o'neil's intro to gl/ga or my own impromptu analysis of the way class dynamics play into their relationship but if i really had to put a name to it i think what appeals to me is the recurring motif of the good old days
halollie isn't a matter of what is but What Could Have Been and all the friendship fallen to the wayside & missed opportunities housed in those couple words. they shared the unrepeatable experience of having been young together and while i don't think ollie necessarily opened hal's eyes to the injustice of the world (see: above. he's well aware), i think he did make hal aware of certain things about himself that he'd never considered before and it's precisely the personal nature of this revelation that ultimately led to the two of them never being on the same page past the road trip -- hal is always trying to recapture some shade of those days together & ollie thinks there's nothing at all that warrants going back to
in the nineties, the tragedy even deepens! throughout mike grell's green arrow it's alluded to or we're outright told that hal's just a phone call away but ollie never makes the leap and beyond a half-hearted camping trip that's much more about dealing with ollie's alcoholism than anything else (ga #20), the next time they see each other hal's already lost everything and ollie fails to care right up until he finds himself to be the one that has to kill hal & all those years apart come crashing down on him
this isn't to say it's all doom & gloom, i firmly believe something happened between them on that initial road trip and when it was good it was really good but it's the culmination of all this and just how often hal acts like he's lived through brokeback mountain while it was just business as usual for ollie that really makes it for me
(acw #635)
even dinah thinks so!














