#nick (of)

[everytimeigetmoody]

fucking chekhov's threesome. ray has got to have one with sand at some point in this show. they can't keep mentioning it casually

[everytimeigetmoody]

this is my new favorite dynamic. taking each other off the dating market so no one has to deal with them again

[everytimeigetmoody]

couples that shift blame together, stay together <33333 bostonnick forever

[everytimeigetmoody]

in boston' defense, "i never love you" is the proper response to a guy you've been fucking who wire tapped your car when he says i love you. like, bro, i can't feel bad for you when you are an actual stalker. obviously boston shifting blame was bad but him saying he could never love nick was kinda the move.

[chalkrevelations]

And another thing. I know I've mostly talked about Boston since I finished watching the finale, but the more I think about the absolute character assassination Only Friends did on Nick in that last conversation with Boston, the more pissed off I get.

To have the one man who actually sees Boston as fully human and complex, who's been given access to a side of Boston that's normally protected behind so much armor no one sees it, who's literally been told by Boston that Boston can do care and sweetness, not just sex, and that he wants a chance to have that in some way - to have that man look Boston in the face and say "No, you're lying to yourself when you say you want sweetness and romance, you should just be lonely" is like - what the actual fuck did I just watch? Nick would never.

That last conversation is infuriating. And not because Nick's saying, we want different things and we aren't going to work together as a couple, although I've seen plenty of people try to flatten dissatisfaction about Boston's ending and the BostonNick ending into simple unhappiness about the pair not ending up together. No, it's because Nick utterly discounts and ignores what Boston has said he wants for himself, just like other people have repeatedly done when Boston's tried to delineate his boundaries, just like Nick himself did before he had 9 episodes of a growth arc, in whatever little snips of time the show begrudgingly gave these two characters. It's Nick telling Boston not to even try finding what he needs and wants with someone else, that he should lock himself back into a loveless existence, in his darkroom, without light and air, making no more intimate connection with the men he fucks than looking at them through his camera lens, a connection that's not even real enough to make the photo he took of Nick worth keeping. It's Nick gaslighting him by telling him he'd be happier that way, in spite of Boston's expressed desires.

And it's Nick - the only person who's ever expressed any appreciation for his art - discounting that art.

Boston takes off some of his armor for Nick, and the show hands Nick a knife and has him stab Boston in the soft places that are subsequently exposed.

It's not as ham-handed a character assassination as Boston literally leaving Nick on the dancefloor and two drinks on the bar to go fuck in an alley because he's so instantly dickmatized by a random guy and then having him lie about it, in the face of 11.5 episodes of being the one character who'll always throw the truth in your face whether you want it or not, because apparently he's panting after dick so bad - because he's a slut, ya know - that he can't keep a promise to Nick for a week, let alone four months the show needed some excuse to set this relationship and Boston's character in particular on fire. But it is almost as egregious.

And it's Nick being used as a mouthpiece for the show's shockingly moralistic agenda about casual sex, how it's bad, how those who do it are bad, and how it's apparently antithetical to care and romance and love. Boston is lying to himself when he says emotional commitment and physical sex are different things, Nick and the show say here. Anything other than monogamous, heteronormative relationships mean that you're supposed to be forever alone, this supposedly queer show about queers tells me, through Nick's mouth.

They might as well have just reached out of the screen and stabbed me.

[chalkrevelations]

I've been trying to put my finger on why I'm resistant to the idea of BostonNick as representative of this whole idea of ephemerality that's been floating around about Only Friends, and the beauty of relationships that change us even though they're temporary, and this couple in particular being "ok" to end apart, and why I've been so gd melancholy this week about the fact that logic and branding practically dictate that this is the couple who ends the show separately, and I think I've finally figured it out: It's because that's all Boston has ever been allowed to have, both metatextually and within the narrative.

Ephemerality in his relationships isn't new - until Nick, it defines his relationships. All he has left of any of his relationships are the photographs that - until Nick - he's only ever hidden in his darkroom/closet. And as much as he's framed that for himself and others as being about NYC, it's also the reality of a life in the closet, of not being able to let himself be known, of not being allowed to let anyone know him, of having to hide who he really is. So it doesn't feel deep and meaningful for this to be just one more fleeting relationship, to be more of the same, it feels sad. It makes me wonder if Boston ever gets to keep anything or anyone, even now - especially now - that he's living this relationship with Nick out in the open, colored by blues and greens, on rooftops surrounded by growing things under the wide-open sky, instead of in his closed, windowless red-lit darkroom with its little locked boxes where he keeps the mementos of all his dead-end, ephemeral relationships. Does he ever get to even try out what it would be like to keep someone or something?

And tbh, I feel the same way about the idea of an open relationship and Boston's promiscuity, even though I suspect that's not a popular opinion. No, I don't like what it says if all of our openly promiscuous characters find love and happiness and fulfillment by finding monogamy, but at the same time, I don't know that we have any real indication that Boston actually is naturally - rather than situationally - non-monogamous and promiscuous. When does he get the chance to try something he hasn't been forced into?

[chalkrevelations]

Well, having finally watched all of Ep 10 of OF, here's what I have to say about that:

The BostonNick shop scene is the SandRay rehab therapy session scene is the BostonNick shop scene. They're not simply parallels, they're the same scene in different fonts. Everything Ray is saying via messy emotional breakdown is the same thing Boston was saying via carefully coded message while he cringed internally at the mortifying ordeal of being known.

From what I understand, TopMew and BostonNick were based on real couples, while SandRay are completely fictional, and I almost wonder if they decided to create SandRay as a way to externalize a lot of the stuff that's also been going on with BostonNick but is so deeply repressed and buried in the closet - lit. and fig., if we accept the darkroom as Boston's functional closet - that it's almost subtextual on-screen. You can't get this kind of messy emotional breakdown from Boston because he'd crawl into a corner of his darkroom and die before he'd be that obvious about what's going on with him, so instead, we get Ray to snot it out everywhere.

SandRay is the live theater version, with everything big enough to be seen in the back rows. BostonNick is the indie arthouse movie version, with every twitch of an eyebrow set full-frame and carrying three different meanings.

Fundamentally, though, it's the same scene.