Monique Ocampo Writes
To paraphrase a well-known quote, if love was rain, Storge or Affection would be drizzle and Eros would be a hurricane. But what’s so wrong with a drizzle? Drizzles are a manageable kind of rain, the kind of rain that helps the flowers grow instead of flooding cities. In a similar way, affection and familial love are such a part of everyday life, that it’s often overshadowed in the hurricane that is Eros. As I said before, romantic love is not the end-all, be-all of life, nor should it be. Like Eros before it, Affection has a lot of misconceptions.
Lewis says that Affection is different from the love we have for our pets or to put things in modern day terms, the love a fandom has for a certain show, movie, book, or celebrity. Affection is something that grows over time, can be mixed with the other three forms of love, and produces appreciation for the recipients of said affection. What sets Affection apart from the other three loves is that it can love things that some may not see as loveable. I’ll go into detail on how affection works by combining it with what I wanted to write for True Love Tuesday, but got delayed to to my being ill at the time.
There are examples of Affection seen throughout media, but it’s rarely the central focus of the show. TV shows like Charmed and Gilmore Girls have Affection as the premise and theme, but a lot of plot points in those shows tend to move towards romantic love. So instead, I’ll look into three examples of Affection from some more recent works. BE WARNED! SPOILERS AHEAD!
1st Example: Elsa and Anna’s sisterly bond in Frozen.
Believe me when I say that Frozen deserves all the hype it’s getting and I really hope it wins an Oscar. The central focus of the movie is about Elsa and Anna’s sisterly bond. The two sisters spend the time between the prologue and the first act isolated from each other and they cope in different ways. The entire plot is moved forward by Anna’s desire to be close to her sister again and Elsa’s fear of hurting Anna. Distracted by the expectation that the movie would follow Anna as she falls in love with Hans and the expectation that either Hans or Kristoff would be the one to save Anna via True Love’s Kiss, it comes as a shocking and refreshing surprise that Anna and Elsa end up saving each other in the end. Anna saves Elsa from Hans by throwing herself between them, even though it came at the cost of her entire body becoming frozen due to Elsa accidentally freezing Anna’s heart. However, that selfless act of bravery made Elsa realize how much Anna really meant to her and the mistake she made of isolating and hurting the only person she wanted to protect.
In true Disney fashion, Anna’s heart thaws Anna herself and Elsa realizes, through Olaf’s words and Anna’s sacrifice, how she can control her powers: her love. In the best example of showing-not-telling, Elsa channels the Affection she has for her sister and her kingdom to end the endless winter she inadvertently caused.
Other examples of Affection in Frozen can be seen in Olaf’s affection for Anna and Elsa. Before Anna sacrifices herself for her sister, Olaf creates a fire for Anna and tells her that “some people are worth melting for.” He also helps Elsa to see that her ice powers aren’t a curse if she could create life from it. In the end, Olaf is rewarded for his Affection by getting an affectionate gift from Elsa: the ability to enjoy summer with a personal little flurry over his head.
2nd Example
The True Love that I wanted to write about on Tuesday was the Affection between Henry and his birth mother, Emma as well as with his adopted mother, Regina. In the first season, Henry is what motivates Emma to stay in Storybrooke and what leads the major characters to go to Neverland when Henry gets taken there in the Season 2 finale. Season 3, so far, had Henry at the center of the plot, with Affection being played against Pan’s manipulations.
And no matter the ship wars in the Once Upon a Time fandom, the one thing fans can agree on is that Emma will always put Henry first before anyone else. Henry was willing to eat the poisoned apple turnover for Emma to prove to her that magic existed. By the time of the Season 3 mid-season “finale,” Emma and Regina have put their differences aside to save their son from Pan and Henry considers both women to be his mother. Lesbian undertones aside, the interactions between Emma and Regina in Season 3 were seriously awesome and there is at least a form of platonic affection developing between the two of them. Whether the affection leads to friendship or a romantic relationship is up to the writers.
3rd Example
In this world of new media, it’s amazing how far YouTube has come from the everday cat videos. Some content creators have taken the risk towards adapting literature into a series of YouTube videos. What started this trend? The Lizzie Bennet Diaries. An Emmy-award series created by Hank Green and Bernie Su, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries took Pride and Prejudice and turned it into a series of video blogs by modern day 24-year-old Lizzie Bennet. Pride and Prejudice is famous for the love story between Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, but what makes this adaptation just as good as the book, if not better, is that it focuses on the relationship between Lizzie Bennet, her sisters (Jane and Lydia), and her best friend, Charlotte.
The romantic leads of the story (as well as the romantic rival) don’t appear in the videos until certain episodes, so events in the novel that are usually seen through a third-person narrator are often re-enacted with “costume theatre.” The majority of the action in these videos isn’t on the romantic plotlines, but on how Lizzie, Jane, Lydia, and Charlotte feel and react to the things that are happening and the things they decide to do become major plot twists.
The best example of how Affection is more prominent is shown in Episode 15: Lizzie Bennet is in Denial. In this episode, Charlotte and Jane give a different point of view to an event that Lizzie would rather dismiss out of her own negative bias. Their affection for Lizzie doesn’t blind either of them to the fact that Lizzie has a lot of personal prejudices to get over. And eventually, lack of Affection leads to a major important plot point that I won’t spoil here.
So for this Valentine’s Day Weekend, think about the people you feel Affection towards. See how you can show them how much you love them. After all, hurricanes aren’t for everyone.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In