Prepare To Be Wildly Underwhelmed

In which I discuss a potentially unpopular Downton M/M opinion:

andthenisay:

I don’t read too many non-Tumblr reviews of Downton Abbey, but there’s one blog that I do keep up with. This one. And it’s not so much that I necessarily agree with everything she has to say, but I find the reviews to be thoughtful and analytical in a way that appeals to me, and it makes me look at certain aspects of the show in ways that I hadn’t before. 

In the reviewer’s comments on 2.05, she said something that I didn’t necessarily agree with at the time, but that I’ve continued to think about. What she said was this:

There is something fascinating about the fact that Matthew’s feelings for Mary are not just being written as ambiguous but as deliberately absent, about the fact that this life-altering incident has not after all triggered any revelation for Matthew about where his heart truly lies. Because if Matthew is no longer in love with Mary, if it was so easy for him to fall out of love with her, then it casts a shadow over the legitimacy of his feelings for her from 1912-1914. […] The fact that Matthew is not in love with Mary now reads like a tacit admission of the fact that he was never in love with her, only with some idea about her which she could never live up to; — and it will be interesting to me if this is really how Julian Fellowes means to play it, if this is a story not about Mary ‘redeeming’ herself for her failure to accept him when she had the chance but about Matthew falling in love with Mary “all over again” and for the first time after being confronted with the complexity of her personhood.

Now, I’m a self-admitted Mary/Matthew shipper. In a really big and ridiculous way. Fellowes has played me like a fiddle with respect to this pairing and I don’t even hate him for it. However. I find this idea to be fascinating, and a lot more interesting than the idea that Mary and Matthew are denying themselves out of some confused idea of stubbornness or duty. It doesn’t put me off to suggest that Matthew’s feelings for Mary in S1 were lacking or superficial, because it makes sense to me. He’s immediately taken with her—of course he is. She’s Mary Crawley. But the more I watch the scenes from 1.06 & 1.07, the more I find myself wondering at the progression of their relationship and what it says about the characters, both individually and together.

 

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Great point. And I agree. Season 2 shows clearly how deep in love Mary actually is with Matthew (which makes me want to headbutt her for listening to others in regards to his proposal instead of just effing doing what her heart told her…that she actually does love him.) Also, I think its obvious that Matthew is in love with Lavinia. And I thought it was refreshing that they made her so likable - otherwise it would’ve been too easy to root for M/M again. Obstacles is what makes suspense, and suspense is what ultimately tears us viewers to pieces. I wish they’d flesh Matthew’s character more, he’s been quite one-dimensional this season, brave and honorable. I want to see him break, I want to see him struggle still with his feelings for Mary, which I believe are there, it’s just not triggering yet.

I love this show. People complain that it should be wider in scope, be more political, talk about the war in more detail. The thing is, Downton Abbey is an intimate portrayal of life during this period. Its a domestic presentation, its focus is on the personal goings-on of this family. The story is about them which is backdropped (and intensely affected) by the war - not the war itself. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s what the show wants to be, let it be. You want to know more about WWI? Read a book. Watch a documentary. I wouldn’t want everything that touches on this subject to be saturated with political idealogies and histories - much as I want to be an intellectual, that gets boring. Someone called this “fluff”, because it didn’t have enough “academic” aspirations…um, no.