Green Flags and Fade-to-Blacks

Teal Deer (TL; DR)

Green Flags and Fade-to-Blacks

“I can’t be rough with you” and “I’m still here” are how you say “I love you” without saying “I love you.” Hulu’s eight-part drama Furious is a show full of horrible people and so much pain, which is why I’m so glad we got this depiction in the first season finale of how to be a light in someone’s darkness—courtesy of creator and writer Liz Meriwether, director Cory Finley, and stars Emmy Rossum and Scoot McNairy.

Okay, to be fair, the excellent depiction is actually consistent across the entire season. But I keep coming back to those specific lines of dialogue, and Danny and Alice, in the context of the perpetual discourse about whether sex scenes add to or detract from a story. There’s a really good craft lesson to be learned from how the pair is written. During some key scenes in the finale, I thought “Oh god, please don’t let them have sex onscreen.” Yes. Me. A huge proponent of boning. I didn’t want to see it. Why? Because the intimacy the writers have built between them doesn’t need to be explicit. Danny gives that credence when he murmurs “Al, we don’t have to do anything.”

What Danny feels for Alice is quiet and understated, never pushing or pressuring. So when she takes the lead—unbuttoning his shirt, pressing her lips to that patch of bared skin at the base of his throat—it’s achingly perfect. It’s simultaneously sweet and hot and theirs. We see later just how many times Alice has been put on display for titillation without her consent. This is something that belongs to just the two of them. The audience doesn’t get access to more, and it’s completely okay for what follows to be fade to black. Not to mention that a passionate culmination with clothes being tossed every which way would be out of character and wouldn’t reflect how their bond has evolved across eight episodes. When Danny says “I can’t be rough with you,” it’s both a confirmation that he’s not capable of hurting Alice and a fear that he can’t give her what she needs sexually. But Alice does have what she needs. Him. He doesn’t need to be anything else. (I almost paraphrased Gavin DeGraw there. Please applaud my restraint.)

Scoot McNairy’s Danny Kelly is a perfect antidote to the morally grey shadow daddy archetype. You could even say that it’s written on his tin: Kelly is a shade of green rooted in Irish heritage and he’s a green-flag male character. Coincidence? Probably. (Alice’s last name is Black and Catherine goes by Grace, which are also thematically significant, so…you know.) But, hey, I’ll take the metaphor as far as I can! Because Danny’s a good man. He’s more on the Steve Buscemi “weird little guy” spectrum of appeal than a traditional hottie—and he is mind-blowingly sexy. Because care and consideration are sexy. Years of quiet devotion are sexy. He’s assertive but not dominant. He’s not possessive, but he loves Alice fiercely. The same way Steve Way’s brilliantly portrayed scene-stealer Alden loves Lola Petticrew’s Catherine. Alden actually provides Danny with the blueprint for how to love someone who doesn’t always do the right thing. He doesn’t just give him a flash drive. He gives him the tools to continue loving Alice while knowing everything he knows. The bar is in hell, considering how shitty every other man on canvas is, but it’s so refreshing to see these two shine brightly for the women they care about.

I’ve written about it before, but many authors don’t consider their characters’ individual personalities while penning the sex scenes—be it the foreplay, the sex itself, or the moments after. They often focus on what the characters are doing instead, prioritizing reader expectations for smut and arousing material. And it shows. It feels tonally different from the rest of the book. Imagine if Danny had suddenly called Alice a “good girl” while he’s sitting sideways on the toilet, keeping watch as she showers after their offscreen lovemaking. It would jerk us right out of the narrative. He’s not the type to bust out with that sort of thing, and Alice definitely doesn’t have a praise kink. That’s not who they are! It’s not the time or place for it! That’s not what their particular form of intimacy requires. So, what he does say is “I’m still here.” Not kinky praise, but much-needed gentle reassurance.

I feel kind of validated for this entire mini-obsession with Danny and Alice’s dynamic, because McNairy addressed the nuts and bolts of it in a recent interview with Collider’s Carly Lane-Perry. “What Alice needs in her life right now is stability,” he said of the shower scene (which is also a callback to earlier in the season when Danny insisted an unraveling Alice get cleaned up and sat vigil on the floor as she did so). “Here’s somebody who’s stable, who loves you, and cares about you, who is going to show up for you. It’s in your ballpark now. You make the move. You tell me what you want.”

Not gonna lie, that’s a pretty swoon-worthy interpretation of his character and of a powerful moment—and McNairy fully credited showrunner Liz Meriwether for it all. “What I love that Liz has done is taken societal norms and flipped them,” he told Lane-Perry. “Women in society are seen as caregivers, but yet Danny is the caregiver in this. All those juxtapositions and taking norms and turning them upside down has been what's been really fun—to be a part of a show like this and also to play a character that's not a toxic masculine detective.”

So why are we, as romance authors, constantly recycling the same tired sexual scripts and toxic archetypes? Why are we reinforcing societal norms? Where is the specificity? Sometimes characters need a closed door. Sometimes people are vanilla. Sometimes male characters are nurturing and it’s the women with a hard shell, and that can and should carry over to the bedroom. Because why is a cinnamon roll suddenly a dirty-talking Dom in the sack and an expert in multiple sexual positions? Is that about getting their love interest off, or about satisfying a hypothetical reader and checking off items on a list? When it’s not organic, just orgasmic, it’s pretty glaringly obvious.

As with Alice and Danny, sometimes the gentle pressure of lips against a throat and a jawline is more than enough. A tiny gesture can say “I want to fuck you” more effectively than saying “I want to fuck you.” And sometimes just parking a character atop a closed toilet can speak volumes about the depth of their love.