Booster Gold #10
WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHH!!
I knew they were going to play it this way. It's the way they always play it in time travel stories. You can do anything you want with time travel except prevent the Holocaust and save your true love. It's a rule.
But, still. Teary? Why, yes.
It's the incredible love between the two of them that really makes me tear up, because there's no way not to realize that Booster could live a thousand years, and this would still be the greatest loss of his life. They're really pushing the subtext into outright text here.
"I just wanted us to be together again, Ted. I'm sorry."
"When you think of me, please remember to smile."
And the moment at the very end, when they both press their hands against the window of the timesphere...
I'm really not sure there's any way for this not to be read as True Love. You can read it as True Love without sex, which I don't really mind, but emotionally this is the most important relationship of either of their lives, and I'm not sure there's any getting around that. I can't really see them having something as deep and powerful with anyone else. If this isn't True Love, what is?
I am of course assisted in my OTPing by the fact that neither of them have real love interests, or have had for a while. Certainly no love interest as constant as their friendship. There's no relationship the writers are trying to sell as equally important. This is part of what leads me to suspect that someone involved knows and intends this. Unless the rock they've been living under is particularly dank and heavy, they have to know what we're reading into this. So when they don't take the traditional and obvious out of shoving in a designated love interest for one or both of the guys, I feel like it's intentional.
Yeah, yeah, 'just friends', whatever. For one thing, there's no 'just' about friends. I'm fine with interpreting them as being everything to each others except lovers, and I don't think that reduces their relationship in any way. Love is the important thing. Sex is an optional extra. A really nice extra, I grant you, but still an extra. From my point of view, if Ted and Michael started having sex, it wouldn't really change their relationship.
Wah. I wants my Ted back.
It is just a wee bit open-ended--where does the time sphere go, how does it actually work (shouldn't Ted have to derail Booster from setting off after him?), what about the Black Beetle (oh, look, spare body!), and so on. It's possible we're going to get Ted back. But I don't think it's likely. *bitter* That would give us happiness and friendship and laughter, and we can't have that, now can we? */bitter*
I'm not really that angry about this. The way it was set up, Ted had to either choose to die or allow people, his friends and teammates, maybe even Michael, to die instead. He can't do that. It's not a choice, or if it is, it's what I call a Night Watch choice: there is no universe, anywhere, where he would choose otherwise, because if he did he wouldn't be himself any more. Ted is a hero, not just a superhero but an all-around good guy. The Ted I love as a character can't let people die to save him if he can possibly prevent it, even if that means dying. If he did, he wouldn't be the character I fell in love with.
I don't know how they're planning on writing Booster after this. He's just lost his best friend, the person he loved most in the world, for the second time, and this time he has no hope of saving him. That has to be reflected in the writing somehow, even if it's just him promising to make the world a happier, more amusing place in Ted's memory. Which would be kind of awesome, and enable "Fanfic Mission: Booster Gold Saves The Dead Cheerful Characters".