I took a pen in my own hand and wrote you a hundred tunes.
OMG, you guys, the intense discussions I have with grammar_glamour and deathscytheheck about fandom. There's so much overthinking possibly, and a lot of it is just conjecture based on the existing fanon, but shit, it's always fascinating to try to deconstruct characters and then put them back together.
I think deathscytheheck raised a really good question, which is: do any of the Basterds actually think they're going to make it out alive?
It sounds like we came to the conclusion that Smitty does and Omar does, at least for a while, based on their kneejerk "WTF" reactions to being intimately involved in Operation Kino, though Donny definitely doesn't. He knows he's not going to make it. I want to say I wrote that a while ago, but I can't recall where.
Also, the whole fanon concept of monogamy is really interesting to me, especially the tendency to write Donny/Smitty as something that would be continued after the war. My theory is that both of them would see it as happening, but they would never explicitly talk about it with one another. But Smitty totally rants to Gerold about it occasionally, while Gerold rolls his eyes and tries to process/repress his own feelings.
Donny obviously has his own aspirations about what he's going to do and how he's going to open his own salon, that much has been stated by Eli Roth and B. J. Novak, but in starting on his own, he would need some sort of familial anchor. His persona in Boston is so defined by his blood relations, I think it would be difficult for him to make this independent venture without envisioning at least somebody there, waiting for him. He totally sees Smitty as fitting into the typical wife role, and I don't think he would expect a real sense of autonomy from him. In his view, Smitty's not going to go back to being a journalist; he's going to be a fucking housefrau. Smitty would be helping Donny out in the shop, doing the odds-and-ends sort of things, and then on weekends, they'd go to Sox games, because even if they are falling into the traditional male and female roles, they're still men, and men like baseball.
Smitty would totally view post-war commitment as the natural extension of their relationship. As deathscytheheck put it, he would reach a point where he realized he'd been fucking the same guy for a long time, and it wasn't just out of desperation. I see his monogamy as an extension of that straight-A student persona B. J. Novak describes. It's not his natural state, but if he does it, he's gonna do it all the way. So yes, he would definitely envision a marriage-type relationship afterward, and I don't think he would be opposed to being the wife. The simple act of him joining up is, in canon, a sort of rebellion from the disillusionment of being the abused journalist and realizing that real life isn't the way he'd pictured. For him to go to Boston with Donny and to play the wife role, it's just another form of rebellion against the monotony of what normal guys do after school.
Whereas I think that Smitty would naively view that option as what was going to happen (and be aware of the silliness of it, but also secretly hope for it), Donny would definitely need to hold onto that vision for what it was. Like, if he knows they're not really going to make it, he needs to picture what happens next even more, if only to keep himself going.
I don't know, it's sort of muddled in my head, but I definitely believe it, and it makes me think of this Magnetic Fields song that I used for a ficmix that I totally think applies, especially in terms of our discussion of Donny needing to do something pre-Operation Kino in order to make Smitty despise him, but I think it speaks to the optimistic delusion in general of a life after the war:
I pretended you were Jesus
You were just dying to save me
I stood beneath your window with my ukelele
I made my yard a playground just in case we had a baby
Just, like, FUCK. This song tears me up. First, the Jesus imagery. Oh my god. And the whole concept of romantic delusion, of changing your persona and expectations as a result of a relationship. Plus, Smitty = wife.
I treated you like radium
I treated you like God
You were my glass menagerie
Did you not find that odd?
I dwelt within and went without and broke my virgin flesh
It totally feeds into this idea of Smitty, like, hating Donny eventually, and being incredibly resentful of the concept that he felt he'd been cuckolded in some way, and the notion that Smitty ultimately views himself in this pseudo-innocent light, like he's still that kid who gets hurt in school and Donny's this corrupting influence, even though fanon-Smitty was fucking guys way before he got involved with the Basterds.
Oh, we have thought about this so much, and I am sure there are way more hours to come in which we try to explain why they are the way they are.
I think deathscytheheck raised a really good question, which is: do any of the Basterds actually think they're going to make it out alive?
It sounds like we came to the conclusion that Smitty does and Omar does, at least for a while, based on their kneejerk "WTF" reactions to being intimately involved in Operation Kino, though Donny definitely doesn't. He knows he's not going to make it. I want to say I wrote that a while ago, but I can't recall where.
Also, the whole fanon concept of monogamy is really interesting to me, especially the tendency to write Donny/Smitty as something that would be continued after the war. My theory is that both of them would see it as happening, but they would never explicitly talk about it with one another. But Smitty totally rants to Gerold about it occasionally, while Gerold rolls his eyes and tries to process/repress his own feelings.
Donny obviously has his own aspirations about what he's going to do and how he's going to open his own salon, that much has been stated by Eli Roth and B. J. Novak, but in starting on his own, he would need some sort of familial anchor. His persona in Boston is so defined by his blood relations, I think it would be difficult for him to make this independent venture without envisioning at least somebody there, waiting for him. He totally sees Smitty as fitting into the typical wife role, and I don't think he would expect a real sense of autonomy from him. In his view, Smitty's not going to go back to being a journalist; he's going to be a fucking housefrau. Smitty would be helping Donny out in the shop, doing the odds-and-ends sort of things, and then on weekends, they'd go to Sox games, because even if they are falling into the traditional male and female roles, they're still men, and men like baseball.
Smitty would totally view post-war commitment as the natural extension of their relationship. As deathscytheheck put it, he would reach a point where he realized he'd been fucking the same guy for a long time, and it wasn't just out of desperation. I see his monogamy as an extension of that straight-A student persona B. J. Novak describes. It's not his natural state, but if he does it, he's gonna do it all the way. So yes, he would definitely envision a marriage-type relationship afterward, and I don't think he would be opposed to being the wife. The simple act of him joining up is, in canon, a sort of rebellion from the disillusionment of being the abused journalist and realizing that real life isn't the way he'd pictured. For him to go to Boston with Donny and to play the wife role, it's just another form of rebellion against the monotony of what normal guys do after school.
Whereas I think that Smitty would naively view that option as what was going to happen (and be aware of the silliness of it, but also secretly hope for it), Donny would definitely need to hold onto that vision for what it was. Like, if he knows they're not really going to make it, he needs to picture what happens next even more, if only to keep himself going.
I don't know, it's sort of muddled in my head, but I definitely believe it, and it makes me think of this Magnetic Fields song that I used for a ficmix that I totally think applies, especially in terms of our discussion of Donny needing to do something pre-Operation Kino in order to make Smitty despise him, but I think it speaks to the optimistic delusion in general of a life after the war:
I pretended you were Jesus
You were just dying to save me
I stood beneath your window with my ukelele
I made my yard a playground just in case we had a baby
Just, like, FUCK. This song tears me up. First, the Jesus imagery. Oh my god. And the whole concept of romantic delusion, of changing your persona and expectations as a result of a relationship. Plus, Smitty = wife.
I treated you like radium
I treated you like God
You were my glass menagerie
Did you not find that odd?
I dwelt within and went without and broke my virgin flesh
It totally feeds into this idea of Smitty, like, hating Donny eventually, and being incredibly resentful of the concept that he felt he'd been cuckolded in some way, and the notion that Smitty ultimately views himself in this pseudo-innocent light, like he's still that kid who gets hurt in school and Donny's this corrupting influence, even though fanon-Smitty was fucking guys way before he got involved with the Basterds.
Oh, we have thought about this so much, and I am sure there are way more hours to come in which we try to explain why they are the way they are.