Is anyone good enough for Veronica Mars?
As advertised, I trooped downtown in below freezing weather (because, again, winter will never actually end) to see the 11:00am showing of the Veronica Mars movie on Sunday. The theatre was packed, which was a little surprising for an early morning showing of a limited release movie that was funded by a Kickstarter campaign. Then again - maybe we shouldn’t underestimate the power of fandom.
In any case, it was amazing. A lot of the problem late in the series (season three on) was because Veronica was no longer in high school, and Rob Thomas hadn’t quite figured out how to transcend that. That problem’s taken care of in the movie by taking place nine years later. Veronica is a graduate of Columbia Law and left Neptune behind long ago. She has a long-term picture perfect boyfriend in Piz, who was Wallace’s roommate at Hearst College in season three (and unrelatedly, the character I got in a What Veronica Mars Character Are You? quiz). Then Logan Echolls calls, accused of murdering his pop singer girlfriend, and Veronica is right back in the thick of it in the seedy beach town she escaped from.
It was everything I wanted and it actually had my brain back in that giddy, buzzy, fangirl-y place all over again.
There’s been some online discussion recently about whether there was ever any boy in the original series who was really worthy of Veronica. It’s had me thinking for the last couple of days, and I think that person who said it is right. I don’t think any of the boys in Neptune were good enough for a girl and then woman of Veronica Mars’ caliber. But that was then, and this is now. Nine years have passed, and a lot of growing up has happened.
The big aircraft carrier sized ship in the Veronica Mars fandom has always been Veronica and Logan Echolls, who hooked up at the end of season one and lived a tumultuous, fiery existence through the rest of the series. It was a classic case of two people who couldn’t stay away from each other, and that fact remains true even nine years later - ultimately, after all, it’s Logan who manages to get Veronica back home again. I never shipped it. I was actually steadfastly resistant to shipping it. I wrote fanfic pairing them with pretty much every other potential significant other, and that was largely because, as much as I loved Logan, I thought Veronica deserved better.
Fast forward. Nine years have passed in radio silence, as Logan himself puts it, and Veronica has packed her previous life away into boxes and plowed through Stanford and Columbia. She’s on the verge of embarking on a big New York law career. She’s in a steady relationship with a charming, understanding, seriously nice adult man who almost certainly doesn’t regularly go into rages and get into fights. Life should be perfect, but you immediately don’t get the feeling that Veronica is happy.
And then there’s Logan. Logan himself has gone through a lot of changes. He’s a Navy pilot, for one, which isn’t a career I would have ever imagined for him. He describes his relationship with his dead former girlfriend as more akin to being a sponsor than a boyfriend, and - most stunningly - he has a firm grip on his temper. Logan has a lot of shit on his plate during the entire movie, and somehow gets through it while instigating only one fistfight (tellingly, this is over the sex tape that ended Veronica’s sojourn in Neptune nine years before). He takes responsibility for his actions and takes his actual responsibilities seriously. Veronica herself spends a lot of the movie dodging calls from the law firm where she’s accepted a job, but Logan, in contrast, is pretty firm about adhering to his responsibilities to the Navy. He’s grown up, and he’s grown up better than you might have expected him to.
For the first time, after watching this movie, I really did ship this pairing. No, it’s not going to be dramatic and romantic and the stuff of William Shakespeare. But it’s going to be good, and Logan Echolls is finally a man good enough for Veronica Mars. Enough so that, unlike Lindsey Bahr at EW, the movie was enough to switch me to Team Logan.
But let’s be realistic: the only real team anyone should be on is Team Veronica.
Mirrored from zonkered.net.