same with the Angela and Brian dynamic

I'm realizing more and more that I read that dynamic in a very different way than lots of other people. In my brain, they would've eventually ended up together -- with no guarantee of it working long-term, and definitely not because she was rewarding his devotional pining or realizing how perfect he'd always been, because he was never, ever perfect. Perfect wasn't the point. The close/warring relationship between Angela and Brian and Angela and Jordan seemed to me to be a distorted echo of Patty's relationships with Graham and with her long-lost rebel boyfriend.

The wild, hurting, wounded and physically outrageously attractive bad/good boy with the crazy love can be intoxicating and addictive, and the real person underneath all those signs and signifiers may actually be truly decent and worthwhile (as, IMO, Jordan is); but what Patty realized she wanted was to build a cluttered, mundane, 3-D earthbound life with someone, and the crazy boy and the crazy love were damned hard to build it on. Patty loved her crazy boy but also truly loves, in a non-settling and non-compromised way (though, in the setting of the show, still beginning to unravel from completely other causes). She didn't give in to Graham because he'd been pining after her so faithfully through her beauty queen and his pizza face days, but because as she grew older and knew herself better what she valued and what she wanted changed, and he turned out to be the person who had those qualities. He was her long-haul guy.

And there were hints that Brian, or someone like him, might have eventually been Angela's long-haul guy. She's not just more literate than Jordan, but more intellectually hungry than him; he's bright but lazy, and his functional illiteracy is partly a function of his having slipped through the cracks of the system and partly a function of his not having cared to kick and protest as he slipped. He's interested enough to get by, and he's passionate about the people and things (Angela, music, his car) he truly cares about, but his hunger for the world isn't voracious. Hers is. And he acknowledges it, after his halting Krakow-cued apology, when he says "It's like she was hungry for something." She devoured his words, was desperate for more, said "Now we can finally begin to talk" at just the point when Jordan had run out of steam.

And there were little hints and flashes that Angela has a Krakow-shaped blind spot; he's been the annoying kid across the street for so long that she is brought up short and knocked speechless every time she catches a glimpse of the bits of him that have nothing to do with that annoying kid. And in the end she's stunned entirely speechless because she recognizes that the language, not just the depth of feeling but the eloquence and grace of its expression, that so seduced her in Jordan's letter came out of this person she'd dismissed and written off long ago. She's miles from loving him, but when the show ended she was in a place where it was no longer a total impossibility, where she could see that some of what she valued and craved was in fact in him.

A "Look how faithful he was, and now finally he gets to nail her!" storyline would have been vile (and, actually, I'm not sure S7 Buffy could have pulled off B/X without slipping into that trap), but I don't think that's what MSCL was going for.

t /Angela likes carrots

I think I agree with JZ. But I'd probably use less words than that.

A "Look how faithful he was, and now finally he gets to nail her!" storyline would have been vile (and, actually, I'm not sure S7 Buffy could have pulled off B/X without slipping into that trap), but I don't think that's what MSCL was going for.

Yes, it would have been vile and would have been vile for B/X, too. When I want B/X, that's not what I want. I consider the early X--->B cravings over. This would have been something new, that grew as they grew, and as they realized they really didn't want monster in their (wo)man.

I think part of my general resistance to the friends-becoming-lovers dynamic is that I read it as often coming from a viewpoint that regards being paired up as an absolute necessity, as if single people are worthless and should take any opportunity, no matter how unsuitable, to avoid the grisly and horrible fate of not being part of a couple. Frankly, I run into that enough in real life between matchmaking-obsessed friends, nosey relatives, and a society that's generally so couplecentric that I can't go out to eat without a host or hostess saying "Oh...only ONE for dinner?" in a tone of voice better suited as the reply to an announcement of some debillitating illness. I think platonic cross-gender friendships are too rare and precious on television to be casually traded in for romances when the latter are so much easier to establish.

Aside from the shallow, I saw in Krakow someone who looked in the mirror and thought the world was wrong and unfair and he was RIGHT, dammit.

Jordan? Just realised there was a mirror.

It may turn out that I need to smack him for being needlessly smug and self-satisfied, but at least there'd be a delay. Brian inspires that now.

eta:

I think platonic cross-gender friendships are too rare and precious on television to be casually traded in for romances when the latter are so much easier to establish.

Oh, yeah.

I can't disagree with anything Matt said. Even as somebody who occasionally loves the friends into romance thing.ETA: ita, I do that, that's why I can't hate Brian for it. But I am older and have learned to keep it to myself for the most part.

And there were hints that Brian, or someone like him, might have eventually been Angela's long-haul guy

JZ, I agree with you that Angela is more like Patti than she realizes -- that's one of the things I noticed when I rewatched the series last year. That said, i think the "or someone like him" in this sentence is key. She wouldn't have ended up with Brian because of her blind spot, because she had been that annoying kid across the street for so long, and also because I think it qwill be hard for her to forgive him for his role in the letter debacle at the end of the series.

But I do think someday, possibly a day long after college, they might sit down and say, "what if?".

Catching up late, but I know that, for me, the timing becomes a big issue (in large part, though not entirely, due to where the characters are at different times). I agree that, in S7, B/X would have been very wrong, but at the top of S4, I think I could have gone for it. With neither of them fitting in their new worlds, and their previous SOs out of the picture (to a lesser, but still present extent, including Willow), I could see it being kinda messy and working really well, story-wise.

I don't have a problem with the friends become lovers storyline, in theory, mostly because all of my own (few) relationships have been with women I was friends with first and continued to be friends with afterwards. However, it does need to be written well and not come out of nowhere.

I do agree that friends of different genders that are strictly platonic are fairly rare in fiction and they should be represented more often.

So B/X wouldn't have bothered me, though I would have rather seen Xander/Willow. But I realize that would have opened up a whole other can of worms in light of the dead lesbian cliche brouhaha.

They were so sweet in s3. Aww.