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Remember kids, the act of coming out may literally kill your friends. The only way they can protect themselves is to be so oblivious (or pretend to be so oblivious), that they don't recognize what you're doing.
(Having said that, this story is actually part of a series involving the same characters. It'd be good if there are consequences. However, based on the ironic ending, I doubt it. The point is that there aren't. The point is that we've reset to the situation at the beginning of the story.
The gay guy gets to do what gay guys traditionally do, suffer in silence and pretend to be straight. Yes, the story does point out that this denial of self is a Bad Thing. But what else does The Other do in fiction besides sacrifice himself for the majority? It's not tragic. It's just plain annoying and overdone.
Just to be fair, yes, the individual superhero subsuming himself for the morally ambiguous Union is a running theme of Union Dues stories. Rather than the heteronormative analysis, one can easily see this story as yet another instance of the running theme. I get that. However, the interpretations are not mutually exclusive.)
All in all, it's a decently written story. A couple of places where characters change their minds feel unmotivated to me. We never get the ramification of a few events and so they feel like intrusions whose sole purpose is to steer the plot where Jeffrey R. DeRego wanted it to go. However, TK elicited an emotional reaction from me and that's probably a good thing.
Mostly though, I knew where the story was about and where it would go the instant Johnny's "heart fluttered" when he looked at Tam. That it proceeded immediately to be about that and go there put a ceiling on how engaged I could be with the story. It doesn't really cover the territory with enough psychological depth and insight for me to care very much what happens to these people. Despite Johnny evoking the word "love," his behavior in the story doesn't really justify it. Pretty much everything in the story overwhelms that love. i.e., if you're going to do a story about a teenager coming to grips with his homosexuality, it ought to be about a teenager coming to grips with his homosexuality, not everything else that tries to distract him away from it.
Unrequited love *hurts*. In this case, it's not even that the other person doesn't love. The other person is literally incapable of loving you. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, that other person will never love you. I never get the sense he's paid any more than lip service to the word "love." The ironic ending wasn't nearly ironic enough. This is odd because usually, the very end is when the Union Dues stories suddenly get all dark. What I think of as the typical Union Dues ending would have been awesome here.
Just as a level set, I tend to be lukewarm about all the Union Dues stories, except for some reason, the first one. Maybe it's because it was the first one and so felt novel. I don't deny the skill with which they're written, but I have about the same gripes with every Union Dues story I've heard. I figure this means that they're just Not For Me. If you love the Union Dues series, and lots of people do for good reason, you'll probably like this story too. As for me, meh.
[I don't think it needs to be said, but just in case my flippant opening gives anyone the wrong impression: I don't think this story intends to discourage anyone else from coming out, nor do I think it would. The story is ultimately rather gay friendly. It just leaves me with the feeling that I've heard it already. The details that distinguish this story from another ultimately don't matter so much to me.]
(Having said that, this story is actually part of a series involving the same characters. It'd be good if there are consequences. However, based on the ironic ending, I doubt it. The point is that there aren't. The point is that we've reset to the situation at the beginning of the story.
The gay guy gets to do what gay guys traditionally do, suffer in silence and pretend to be straight. Yes, the story does point out that this denial of self is a Bad Thing. But what else does The Other do in fiction besides sacrifice himself for the majority? It's not tragic. It's just plain annoying and overdone.
Just to be fair, yes, the individual superhero subsuming himself for the morally ambiguous Union is a running theme of Union Dues stories. Rather than the heteronormative analysis, one can easily see this story as yet another instance of the running theme. I get that. However, the interpretations are not mutually exclusive.)
All in all, it's a decently written story. A couple of places where characters change their minds feel unmotivated to me. We never get the ramification of a few events and so they feel like intrusions whose sole purpose is to steer the plot where Jeffrey R. DeRego wanted it to go. However, TK elicited an emotional reaction from me and that's probably a good thing.
Mostly though, I knew where the story was about and where it would go the instant Johnny's "heart fluttered" when he looked at Tam. That it proceeded immediately to be about that and go there put a ceiling on how engaged I could be with the story. It doesn't really cover the territory with enough psychological depth and insight for me to care very much what happens to these people. Despite Johnny evoking the word "love," his behavior in the story doesn't really justify it. Pretty much everything in the story overwhelms that love. i.e., if you're going to do a story about a teenager coming to grips with his homosexuality, it ought to be about a teenager coming to grips with his homosexuality, not everything else that tries to distract him away from it.
Unrequited love *hurts*. In this case, it's not even that the other person doesn't love. The other person is literally incapable of loving you. No matter what you do, no matter what happens, that other person will never love you. I never get the sense he's paid any more than lip service to the word "love." The ironic ending wasn't nearly ironic enough. This is odd because usually, the very end is when the Union Dues stories suddenly get all dark. What I think of as the typical Union Dues ending would have been awesome here.
Just as a level set, I tend to be lukewarm about all the Union Dues stories, except for some reason, the first one. Maybe it's because it was the first one and so felt novel. I don't deny the skill with which they're written, but I have about the same gripes with every Union Dues story I've heard. I figure this means that they're just Not For Me. If you love the Union Dues series, and lots of people do for good reason, you'll probably like this story too. As for me, meh.
[I don't think it needs to be said, but just in case my flippant opening gives anyone the wrong impression: I don't think this story intends to discourage anyone else from coming out, nor do I think it would. The story is ultimately rather gay friendly. It just leaves me with the feeling that I've heard it already. The details that distinguish this story from another ultimately don't matter so much to me.]
