The times that 'fate' works for me are mostly only in retrospect. Sort of like "Wow, we got through all of that. Must be fate." I don't buy into characters prattling about "Fate brings us together!" That's B.S. It doesn't sell me on a relationship. In fact it often does the reverse. I tend to be the kind to suspect that when people say "Fate" that "fate" is usually just what their own head is telling them.
It's like the Farscape quote with Aeryn and Crichton where she says if fate means them to be together, they'll come back together again, and John yells at her "Running away is not fate. It's just running away!"
And I am a bit curious about the Once set up of Regina being told that Robin Hood was her fated true love and she, turned and walked the other way and hasn't looked for him since.
Mostly, though, I tend to view 'soul mates' in stories to be a cop out by writers. It's like they're trying to browbeat an audience into shipping the 'right' ship. It feels like an 'unfair advantage' especially in things like the Vampire Diaries where what makes Stefan the 'better' one is actually the same stuff that makes him worse. It's the Angel effect. Because evil-Stefan is more terrible than Damon (and Angelus is more terrible than Spike) then somehow it's just infinitely more noble when he's not being evil. (It sort of goes with a thought I had the other day re: BtVS. I don't actually have a huge problem with someone who thinks Spike is 'beneath' Buffy. I have issues with that sort of view of relationships and history, but it's okay to say that generally morally speaking Buffy is far less compromised than Spike. That said, no way in hell is Spike 'beneath' Angel. He isn't. He flat-out isn't. Anything Spike has done, Angel has done twice over, and yet SOMEHOW Angel gets the Stefan bonus-points where he's 'better' because somehow that got written down somewhere as a 'fact' when it is not remotely related to what we've actually seen. If we were actually judging them on actions rather than caveot of style-points, yes, Spike is incredibly compromised, but stacked up side-by-side against Angel, he's a better man-pire (even if no character at any time ever recognizes that fact.)
And, yeah, Damon is quite a jackass and never reaches all that high on the morality scale, but as far as I'm concerned, at least he's not a perpetual hypocrit with a madonna/whore complex. I like the actor playing Stefan just fine, but at some point Stefan became rather insufferable where Elena is concerned.
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The times that 'fate' works for me are mostly only in retrospect. Sort of like "Wow, we got through all of that. Must be fate." I don't buy into characters prattling about "Fate brings us together!" That's B.S. It doesn't sell me on a relationship. In fact it often does the reverse. I tend to be the kind to suspect that when people say "Fate" that "fate" is usually just what their own head is telling them.
It's like the Farscape quote with Aeryn and Crichton where she says if fate means them to be together, they'll come back together again, and John yells at her "Running away is not fate. It's just running away!"
And I am a bit curious about the Once set up of Regina being told that Robin Hood was her fated true love and she, turned and walked the other way and hasn't looked for him since.
Mostly, though, I tend to view 'soul mates' in stories to be a cop out by writers. It's like they're trying to browbeat an audience into shipping the 'right' ship. It feels like an 'unfair advantage' especially in things like the Vampire Diaries where what makes Stefan the 'better' one is actually the same stuff that makes him worse. It's the Angel effect. Because evil-Stefan is more terrible than Damon (and Angelus is more terrible than Spike) then somehow it's just infinitely more noble when he's not being evil. (It sort of goes with a thought I had the other day re: BtVS. I don't actually have a huge problem with someone who thinks Spike is 'beneath' Buffy. I have issues with that sort of view of relationships and history, but it's okay to say that generally morally speaking Buffy is far less compromised than Spike. That said, no way in hell is Spike 'beneath' Angel. He isn't. He flat-out isn't. Anything Spike has done, Angel has done twice over, and yet SOMEHOW Angel gets the Stefan bonus-points where he's 'better' because somehow that got written down somewhere as a 'fact' when it is not remotely related to what we've actually seen. If we were actually judging them on actions rather than caveot of style-points, yes, Spike is incredibly compromised, but stacked up side-by-side against Angel, he's a better man-pire (even if no character at any time ever recognizes that fact.)
And, yeah, Damon is quite a jackass and never reaches all that high on the morality scale, but as far as I'm concerned, at least he's not a perpetual hypocrit with a madonna/whore complex. I like the actor playing Stefan just fine, but at some point Stefan became rather insufferable where Elena is concerned.