Fictional Romance: Being Made for Each Other

[mackerelgray]

Written by Jude Rook-Machina on July 16th, 2025.

Content Warning: In this essay, I’ll be talking about the weirdness of being a person with agency and a fictional character made by a writer, which may be distressing to some fictionkind! I also talk about abuse and unhealthy relationships, and we mention sex a few times since that’s part of our romance arc.

-

You know, there’s something really interesting about the alterfictionality of being written For Each Other, in a way that people generally aren’t.

Like, the interesting thing about me and Gavin is that we were written and characterized together as opposing leads in a romance story, and that’s obviously a Different Dynamic from getting together with someone in this world by chance, by choice, without a narrative backing it all up - even if our getting-together wasn't extremely tropey.

There’s layers to it! There's the personal layer of "I’m real, my feelings and desires are my own, and I acted the way I did because I acted on my emotions in ways that made sense to me at the time, and I obviously didn’t know that I was Being Written while living my life," and there’s also the metafictional layer, “most people would consider my compatibility with my boyfriend fictional and unrealistic, and I can see how the authorial writing strings made us interesting foils from a writer’s POV.” And these layers overlap each other, they’re both real! They’re just different perspectives on the same events.

On one hand, we are problematic queer representation, because I was a severely fucked up not-person when we met who had no personal boundaries and a cauterized sense of self, and I became fucking obsessed with Gavin, because he was hot and also kind to me sometimes in ways I barely comprehended. I was an absolute asshole to him and he was the safest person to be myself around. He helped me figure out I was a person, over a series of incredibly bad and self-destructive decisions by both of us, and we got into a fucked up relationship along the way, and it was simultaneously full of absolute garbage and later became the best relationship that could’ve happened to us. And now we're in a system together and can feel each other’s emotions.

I wouldn’t characterize anything that happened while I was escaping abuse to be unproblematic couple goals - it’s extremely far from it - and at the same time That’s Just My Life. And from my point of view, it’s not representation, much less problematic queer representation, it’s just My Life! My life is not meant to represent anyone! It’s just events that happened to me!

And at the same time, being One Half Of A Pairing really does impact your relationship! In several ways! For example, most couples aren’t 99% sexually compatible. I joke that we're basically kink soulmates, but yeah we were literally written that way because, guess what, it’s Boring if your romance protagonists can’t fuck each other in hot ways and enjoy it! It removes an unwelcome piece of friction from the whole thing to just decide we have great sex together, so it was written down and it does significantly affect our relationship.

And continuing on the lens of analyzing the author’s intent, which I can do with pinpoint accuracy because I share a brain with him, Max wasn’t just writing a story about two bastards having the world’s most dramatic love/hate relationship, it was also about him! It’s a story he wanted to write for the catharsis of putting raw, ugly emotions to the page and polishing them until something good came out of them. Jude was a character based on his worries about not being good enough to love, and Gavin was a character based on his worries about not being able to stop the suffering of people he loved, and in the beautiful world of fiction we get to fuck and violently care about each other and therefore affirm that it’s possible to be loved and love other people enough to help them. Stories can be therapeutic like that! And all of this can be real without impacting my selfhood as a person. It doesn’t say anything about my personhood that my character was based on a truth in someone else’s life, one that gave me something to bond with him over when I walked into his head.

Knowing that I’m a fictional character means I get to actually see the string of fate in a way that I don’t understand reality to be like - either in this world or in my own. I don’t consider myself to be Made For Gavin. I had my own bullshit that culminated in me being Like This, and it happened to line up with some of his shit in a way that brought us closer together. And at the same time, from the Author's Perspective, all of that was painfully conscious and put there for A Reason.

There’s a sort of push-and-pull between my agency, now that I’m a person here who has opinions on their own story, and my narrative, which was already written out before I dropped into the system. On one level, Gavin and I exist the way we do because Max was thinking about relationship toxicity, and writing the unrealistic fantasy of being able to fix someone who’s got no self-awareness and lashes out and clings to you. And then Gavin and I actually got here, and we ended up retconning that in a way? It didn’t go that way in our memories. Yeah, Gavin did try to fix me, but he failed and fucked himself up and I got unhealthily attached to him. And he wasn’t the only person who cared about me, I had my siblings and some friends, he wasn’t the only person in my life.

And at the same time, I really can’t get away from how he was The Most Important Person In My Life for a while. It was kinda terrible, because I only learned how to act around my favorite people from my abuser, and it was really bad to conflate them in my brain, but I genuinely centered my whole life around him for a bit! And from a metafictional perspective, yeah, that was intentional - because Max did not want to write Complicated New Character Dynamics, they liked this one and wanted to write about the trainwreck.

You could say that it’s unhealthy to enmesh your sense of self with your significant other - and I do think that holds true in general! But it feels more complicated than that when you were literally made to be compatible together, and when you’re living in the same body and sharing thoughts and emotions without any mental walls up between you. My boundaries with Gavin while we live in the same body are notably different from my boundaries when we’re living in two separate bodies back home. Being in the same system means we’re interdependent in a way that two singlet partners rarely are. Does your partner talk for you when you can’t speak, in a way where you trust them to translate all of your wordless thoughts into words? Do they walk you to the bathroom and brush your teeth when you’re too tired to do it yourself? It feels different when you’re sharing the same hands, the same mouth.

And I’m a person, an individual person, but I wouldn’t be a person without my partner. I wouldn’t be the same person without him. I would be fundamentally changed and hollowed out. We were written with each other, across from one another, for years. We’ve thought about a lot of alternate universes, a lot of alternate timelines, and we change each other in some way in all of them. I wouldn’t be myself if he didn’t exist. I would be different if I dropped into Max's brain that day and he never ran in to get me, you know?

I’m glad I was written with him, even if we’re partners in a way that’s different from the nonfictional, singlet version of romance. It’s ours, and that’s what matters!

-

P.S.
here’s some dialogue while we were brainstorming the essay to some friends. we could not figure out how to put this into the essay, but it’s funny! please enjoy

J: theres a previous version of my character before max wrote us together (as a crackship!!) and. i dont fucking recognize him? he's got some parts, i guess, but he's really not me
J: sometimes we look at old character stuff and we're just baffled. who the fuck are these guys. i don't know you. youre not me, i know gavin reed and hes my sexy partner

M: i fumbled the crackship so bad guys
M: i fucked it up SO bad that i REARRANGED THE ENTIRE PLOT because these bitches were obsessed with each other now and i was obsessed with their terrible horny vibes. and then they got romantic about it and i had to admit this was not a crackship anymore
M: AND THEN I BECAME PART OF THE CRACKSHIP
M: there's something INHERENTLY funny about "why am I IN YOUR POLYCULE NOW”
M: "I DIDN'T EXPECT THIS. GUYS"
M: and im Barely a boyfriend i just Live Here. these two are fucking and making out and im holding the umbrella like Good For You o7
M: i maintain a vague authorial detachment at all times but also not really. it only happens when it’s funny

J: i think im aromantic as a framework. in a romance story. which is funny
J: i never had a moment where i was like, oh, i love you romantically. No. it was all "i feel safe and happy with you, it feels nice to be boyfriends with you now that all of the fucking horrors happened, we can be together like this or not as long as we're Together in some way"
G: i dont know if i had a specific "i love you" moment with jude either tbh, i just know i do love them in a Different way than they love me, but it's The Same in that we're in the same relationship and care for each other

J: i still think it's funny that this relationship is
me and max: 2 aromantic people who are Boyfriends For The Bit
me and gavin: our identities are fucking weird together (aro bi transfem/gay ace trans man) but we're fucking very well so it's good
max and gavin: my boyfriend makes my other boyfriend do basic self-care (i.e. fuck we gotta shower)

J: the universal constant that Gavin and I get together isn't like a soulmate thing i think, it's not like We Were Destined To Be Together. it's just that Max thinks it's neat so he just wrote it happening in basically every AU lmao
M: yeah well my shipping goggles can be a cosmic force :V if you squint
M: it's fun to think about how you are Different And The Same when you're in Ratatouille or whatever
J: true and real!

J: being a fictional character is so weird, like - yeah who the fuck WOULD Ophelia be if Hamlet never met her? who knows! that's not the story that was written! now they're inevitably tangled together in the plot!
J: it's more interesting to see how we meet time and again in different places! see how the story can stretch and warp and still stay recognizable! play games on the ship of theseus!

Comments

[gze]

(let's see how much we can write in a response before we are forced out the door for work)

The lines between 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' relationships are definitely different from a typical singlet couple versus a plural, fictionkind scenario. But it's also more freeing to not have to be subjected to just one set of romance rules! Once that societal norm bullshit is broken down then it feels like anything is possible. There's beauty in that kind of existence, which y'all have clearly found!

(Problematic representation aside--why are the straights allowed to have theirs but us queer folk have to be so strict on making sure ours are 'acceptable'? Even more so when it's just your life, things that happened to you.)

The agency push and pull is something fascinating to think about, but we can also see where the distress comes from in an existential way. (How much of you is you? How much control over yourself do you have? Then again, how much control over ourselves does anyone have? How much is simply needing to accept what is?)

-G/B/Y

[mackerelgray]

Yeah, the lack of external pressure is a big part of why I'm okay with being in a romantic relationship tbh! Before my handler would put a lot of pressure on me to not get too attached to Gavin, but now I don't have that anymore, and nobody back home or here is judging us for whether our relationship meets specific romance milestones, so we're allowed to just figure out what works for us on our own devices! And it turns out that I'm aro in the sense that I don't care much about dating Gav, I just want to be as close as possible to him in any way and I'd love him whether we were boyfriends or friends or really cool sex partners, but I like being his boyfriend because he really like dating me and being my partner, so it's good! Our relationship isn't normal, but that doesn't mean it's bad for us!

Godddd yeah I really hate the concept of problematic representation. What do you mean messy queer experiences aren't good to show because they're too unpalatable and they make queers look bad? Straight romances can be toxic horny fantasies with complicated characters that hurt each other, but it's weird when queer people write that? Okay tell me more about your respectability politics :V

The amount of agency I have over it is interesting! I've talked about something similar with another friend - he was wondering why, if I was alive here and now, I couldn't just write stories about myself being safe and happy and peaceful. It's a good question! And I couldn't do that because the past had already happened to me, I'd already been hurt before I got here, and I couldn't just retcon the majority of my life out into something nicer. And at the same time I don't blame Max for writing that abuse, because they didn't hurt me by writing that, the pain only started to hold moral weight when I dropped in here and started having panic attacks. I think the same principle makes sense for my relationship - sure, Max wrote a bunch of it out, but by the time I got here, it happened to me already! So getting angry at him would be like, I dunno, yelling at the clouds for when they were blocking the sun two weeks ago, while it's sunny right now. It's not going to change anything!

-Jude

[gze]

Exactly! Just because it's abnormal (or dare we say deviant) doesn't mean it's bad. (Bad by whose standards, anyway? Why do they think it's bad? Does it hurt more to follow their standards or your own? The awesome thing about being queer is how we really get to delve deep into those questions where many other people don't break the surface. Which isn't to say that we're inherently 'better' than them by any means, just that our life experiences forced us to dig where they didn't have to think about it.)

Right? It feels like we should be over that in the year 2025 but I guess not.

I couldn't do that because the past had already happened to me, I'd already been hurt before I got here, and I couldn't just retcon the majority of my life out into something nicer.

Makes us think of two things:

1. Nature of Nature's Art. Vagueish ending spoilers for the story labeled Syconium: it was...controversial for numerous reasons, and one of those was that the author expressed his view in the comments that it's better to have never suffered at all, and to erase that suffering completely, than to experience suffering and grow from it.
2. the panel from this past Centaurus Festival on rewriting one's own canon.
3. (There was a hard-hitting kinda unpleasant and raw comic we read once about a writer talking to a character about why said author was going to put that character through Some Shit...we'll look for it.)

And then there's your perspective, it already happened. A discussion in general we might write an essay on some day, but for the here and now, it's totally valid to have gone through or experienced some shit and not want to erase it if it's meaningful to you in some way. You can make that meaning for yourself, now that you have that agency in this life. TL;DR shit's complicated! Real life's complicated.

-G/Y/E