Page: In Defense of Kel/Neal

I reread Page over Christmas break, and then didn't post about it because things got busy, and also because it is my favorite book with my favorite Tamora Pierce heroine, so there's not much to write about it except SQUEE!

Hooray for Kel! And her epic hard work (she's always squeezing more time to practice into her ridiculously busy days), and her grim determination to overcome her fear of heights, and her delicious crush on Neal...

I am still sad that Kel and Neal never get together in the later books. The argument seems to be that it would send a bad message to have Kel get together with her first crush, because...presumably there's an epidemic of American schoolgirls who refuse to date anyone who wasn't their very first crush? "We can never be together! I gave my heart to Tony in the fifth grade!"

Yeah, that's not a thing. Marrying one's first crush/first love/high school sweetheart is very much not an ideal. One of the few things that Bella is absolutely right about in the Twilight books is that people are going to be just horrified if she marries her high school sweetheart just out of high school.

I had a friend who got married when she was, let's see, nineteen or twenty? And everyone, but everyone thought this was the worst thing ever. That sort of thing is considered lower-class and stupid and doomed to failure.

So no, the fact that this happens all the time in books is not a sign of a deep-seated American belief that everyone should marry young to their first love. Rather, it reflects the fact that it's narratively very unsatisfying to spend three hundred pages getting invested in a couple of crazy kids and their relationship, only to have the book end "And then they didn't get together! PSYCH! HA, they all married people who aren't even in the book!"

This reflects actual marriage patterns, but for goodness' sake, this is fiction. The mere fact that something is "realistic" doesn't mean that it's a satisfying plot for a novel.

Besides, if you want to write a book about how your first crush is not necessarily going to be your One True Love, probably the heroine's first crush should not be on someone as awesomely snarky as Neal. Couldn't Kel have gotten a hopeless crush on Cleon or Roald, and then grown out of it to realize that Neal was must better suited to her?

People tend to grow out of first crushes because their first crush is on someone unsuitable. If a first crush does happen to alight on someone who would be a good match, then it's silly to say "Well, you should get over it anyway, because after all you first started feeling this way when you were twelve, and obviously that means your feelings don't count. Because...because... twelve-year-olds don't have real feelings! And it's Bad to marry your first crush. Just on general principles!"

Sentimentalism etc.

I had a presentation today! About sentimentalism and how unfairly maligned it is, because it was in its time a radical doctrine: it's insistence, in the first place, that slaves had feelings, and furthermore that their feelings were as strong and deep as free white people's, and therefore it was not only possible but right and moral to sympathize with those feelings, and to be moved to action by that sympathy.

Of course this is in some ways a limiting doctrine. But at the time, when the foremost scientist in the US argued for separate lines of descent for the black and white races (arguing, essentially, that black people were literally not human), and when slavery apologists popularly argued that slaves didn't really have family feeling and therefore didn't suffer lastingly when their families were sold apart -

In that context, sentimentalist sympathy was a radical departure, and we should respect for that.

Also, my presentation was amazing. Everyone clapped!

We were out of time, afterward, for the last presentation, and the professor apologized to my classmate who was supposed to give it.

"That's fine," quoth the classmate. "I don't want to follow that."