Since you're writing a long form romance centered on Dan/Amy, do you think that they're a couple for whom a conventional Happily Ever After sort of ending is viable? Tbf they are married with a kid to begin with in BMTL, so an emotional resolution is the only kind of conclusion that makes sense, but is that realistic for the characters you've written?
Also great job on the fic, as ever. Chef's kiss world building
Hi! This is such a great question and I’m sorry it took me so long to get around to answering it! I wanted to give it the attention it deserves…it’s a surprisingly complex subject. And thanks so much for the kind words about Bring Me to Light. I hope you enjoyed the latest chapter!
The way I look at Dan and Amy vis à vis a conventional happily ever after—whether in my own fic or just as a viewer pre S7—is that it was something they were going to back into without really looking too closely at it, by virtue of their attraction to one another and because of the political and professional benefits they derive from their closeness. Living together or getting married is something they choose because the alternative—not being together—is no longer viable for either of them, but they can’t express that so they have to justify it in terms of work and ambition. “Well we’re working together all the time so it just makes sense for me to move in…” The way Dan and Amy’s relationship is presented by Iannucci in the first four years of the show, I think that emotional pathway seems pretty plausible for both of them.
In the BMTL prequel that exists in my head, and that I’ve alluded to in the fic with a few flashback scenes, that’s how I’ve imagined their relationship developing…Dan unofficially moving in, deciding they need a bigger place for “reasons”, giving Amy a ring not in a formal proposal because that will make them seem more attractive as potential home owners…he does all those things because he doesn’t want to be without Amy (or their daughter) but he’s much more comfortable talking about all of it as decisions that make them both look good professionally and socially, keeping the feelings out of it.
This raises the question though of what is a “conventional” happily ever after? And can such a thing exist in the Veep universe? I’m assuming what you meant in your ask is something not far from what BMTL is exploring—Dan and Amy married with a house and a kid and joint bank accounts and all the social pressures and benefits that accrue to them because of those things. I think what’s interesting is that both Iannucci and Mandel’s versions of Veep actually kind of confront this question where Dan and Amy are concerned, but in different ways. Iannucci’s Veep, much more so than Mandel’s, it is actually concerned with social convention and the unspoken rules of polite society that bind its characters, including what young, ambitious men and women like Dan and Amy “should” want. He presents Dan and Amy as both largely uninterested in the social conventions of patriarchal normalcy, albeit for different reasons, and then implies that this is what draws them to one another. But also because his version of Veep is much more grounded in the humdrum minutiae of everyday life—and because there are multiple jokes around Dan and Amy involving parenting and babies and what it means to have a personal life in DC—it’s not hard to envision Dan and Amy trying to navigate some version of social domesticity in the background of the show, whether that’s in the form of an accidental pregnancy or a reveal that they’re sleeping together and Dan’s basically moved in. That’s their version of a happily ever after—it might be “conventional” from the outside, sure, but on the inside they are still very much Dan and Amy, pushing against those parameters even as they are also drawn to one another.
Meanwhile Mandel basically made the white picket fence happily ever after concept explicit within the world of the show, by having Amy basically propose such a future to Dan once she becomes accidentally pregnant with his child. In Mandel’s view, however, this is the only way a couple can be “together”, because I guess he’s still stuck in the 1950’s, and Dan’s rejection of that idea is framed as a judgment on Amy’s value as a woman. Now, if Amy in Iannucci Veep ever seriously suggested to Dan that they settle down in a nice house and make raising their baby their first priority and start taking multivitamins every day I guarantee that version of Dan would have equally run for the door (although he would not have slept with a nineteen year old on the way out). But he would have done so for very different reasons than Mandel’s sex-psychopath version of the character, and I also think he would also make his way back to Amy eventually. Of course Iannucci-Amy would never have suggested such a thing, so it’s kind of a moot point. But I do think it’s interesting how both versions of the show actually do engage with the idea of a “conventional” happy ever after via Dan and Amy, just in very different ways.
In some ways BMTL is my response to both versions of the show, where (I hope) Dan and Amy resemble their S1-S4 characters much more but the story builds off plot developments from the Mandel era of the show and a lot of the action does take in place in these very intimate domestic spaces that Mandel claimed Amy wanted with Dan. I guess my answer to your question (after all this rambling!) is that yes, I do see a conventional happily ever after as a possibility, but only on the outside, because those conventions bring a lot of professional/political benefits that Dan and Amy (especially Dan) would be attuned to. The actual romantic “happy” part doesn’t register with either of them.
(And it goes without saying, if any readers out there have asks about Dan and Amy (and Cassie’s) journey before BMTL, please feel free to send them in!)
