A Brief Defense of Flash Sentry · 9:06pm Aug 31st, 2014
Lauren Faust, according to many accounts, wanted to keep all romance out of My Little Pony because of the possibility that one or more of the major characters might become thoroughly absorbed with the subject and concerned with nothing else, something she says has happened in other cartoons.
Sometimes, with both this and her stated life's goal of eliminating people's idea of girls' cartoons as "cheap," I suspect she's boxing with shadows, much like the authors who claim their work is unique because it contains "strong female characters," even though we've had almost nothing else for the last few decades. Nonetheless, I must allow that Faust knows more about the industry than I do; I watch a fair number of girls' cartoons, and I see plenty of them that don't look cheap and in which the characters aren't defined entirely by romance, but I also import almost all of my girls' cartoons from Japan.
But even if excessive romance is a real problem, Faust's solution appears extreme. If a writer doesn't want characters to be defined by romance—allowing, for the sake of argument, that that is really such a bad thing—the obvious solution would be simply to ensure that the characters have other traits or preoccupations.
The franchise has now, of course, moved well beyond Faust's intentions (it was never her solo project to begin with), and more than one of the characters has had a love interest. Frankly, I think this was inevitable and probably would have happened even if Faust had remained on the staff, because the decision to keep all romance out is an unnatural way to truncate a story. It is fitting that the tales we tell ourselves are, as a rule, preoccupied with finding a mate and bearing the next generation; that is a subject that colors much of real life, so it is a natural topic for our fiction.
A reader recently commented on the matter of Twilight Sparkle's admittedly perfunctory love story with Flash Sentry,
Hadn´t we left behind the time when every Barbie needed her Ken?
I'm not completely sure what he means by that, but if he means what I think he means, the answer is no. Hell no. Oh hell no. That is not a time we can leave behind, unless perhaps romance utterly dies or the human race goes extinct. We do seem to have people working hard to bring about the former, but I don't expect them to succeed, so I am not too worried about the latter.
To begin with, on the matter of Ken and Barbie, Barbie does indeed still need her Ken. In fact, everybody needs a Ken:
The reason why should be obvious. It is a fact both biological and psychological that the male and female are incomplete by themselves. Regarding the biological side, I assume I need not explain (though readers sometimes surprise me). Regarding the psychological side, I shouldn't need to explain, but probably do, because young people today get taught a lot of nonsense unrelated to reality, such as that men and women are identical in every respect except plumbing. Masculinity and femininity, by which I mean the traits that are fitting and comely for men and women respectively, are not opposite or opposed to each other, but complementary, so men and women complete each other by their characters. Thus those who fittingly exhibit the one set of traits are naturally drawn to those who fittingly exhibit the other.
That is why, incidentally, you have a peripheral male fandom for My Little Pony and why the fans, at least for a while, had a hard time explaining the show's appeal, coming up with excuses such as "the writing is top-notch" (it isn't) or "the animation is great" (it really isn't). In fact, the reason for the fandom is not mysterious at all; My Little Pony has a peripheral male fandom for the same reason the magical girl genre has one (one that has nearly corrupted the genre entirely): because these fans, being male, are drawn to the hyper-feminine characters. The allure that the fairer sex (I mean the female) has for the weaker sex (I mean the male) is not limited to crude physical markers, and thus the male viewers can be allured by these characters even though they've been stripped of all sexual characteristics, primary and secondary.
Many of these fans are blithely or perhaps willfully unaware of this, so they themselves box at shadows and give the show credit for things it doesn't do. After I first began exploring this fandom, I was quite aggravated with essays claiming, as if their writers had been dropped off on Planet Earth just yesterday, or had never watched another TV show or read a book, that My Little Pony is unique and different because each of its main female characters has a different personality, or because it doesn't suggest that every girl is supposed to come out of an identical cookie-cutter mold.
That's about as "unique" and "different" as those aforementioned "strong female characters." That is to say, it dates back to Homer, who may not have been the world's kindest writer to female characters, but at least created Nausicaä and Penelope and Calypso.
We are taught in the schools and in the media—or, I should say, by the Ministry of Truth—to reject with scorn most everything I have just written, and no doubt nonsense words like "sexist," neologisms without meaning designed to halt thought rather than advance it, have already appeared in your mind. But as Tom Simon, one of the Internet's greatest essayists, once quipped, what we reject with the cerebellum we still crave down in the limbic system or thereabouts. We secretly yearn for romance, real romance with masculine men and feminine women who are faithful to each other, even as we turn up our noses at it and claim we've grown beyond that.
Source
And thus cheesy Harlequin covers will always have a certain appeal.
The young girls at whom My Little Pony is primarily aimed haven't had time to fully imbibe the teachings of the Ministry of Truth. They are still innocent, and so they have the dreams, however nascent, of innocent romance—as anyone who has spent sufficient time around them can attest. They daydream of the things we are taught to sneer at, such as being swept off their feet by a gallant knight in shining armor astride a white charger. Someone at Hasbro knows where the money comes from and is aware of this, which is why they shoehorned into My Little Pony a love story between a princess and a white charger named Shining Armor.
I'm still not sure kids should be seeing this.
Other love stories, or at least jokes thereon, must inevitably crop up. Thus we have the comic book arc focused on Big Macintosh's search for a box of nails. Big Mac, in this comic, is depicted as the desire of every maiden. No explanation for this is given and none is needed: the reader already knows, whether he can vocalize it, that Big Mac is desirable because he is über-masculine just as the mares of the My Little Pony universe are hyper-feminine. Big Mac is the epitome of the strong silent type.
Note romance imagery.
In time, even Princess Celestia is wooed by a hunk in a story that follows a straight-up tragic romance formula. Celestia is of course the most powerful pony in Equestria, so if a love story featuring her is to be successful, she must have a stallion who can match her, and thus we get the Mirrorverse King Sombra, the benevolent sovereign ruler of all he surveys, who is gorgeous, kind, and a really good dancer. He also sacrifices himself to save the heroine and the world, which is the manly thing to do.
Statistically, one out of two pony princesses will travel to an alternate universe for a furtive rendezvous with an otherworldly boyfriend sometime this year.
It's nine o'clock. Do you know where your pony princess is?
Naturally, when My Little Pony shifts into teen drama mode in order to attract more of the tween girl crowd (whether it is actually successful at this, I know not), it adds in some teen romance. The nature of the romance shifts somewhat from what we get in the other media noted above. The male character in this case is a "bad boy" type, except, because this is My Little Pony, without the bad. Thus he wears slashed jeans and ragged T-shirts, plays guitar and drives a custom hotrod, but is still, like the other male good guy characters, a gentleman. So Flash Sentry stands up for Twilight Sparkle when she is falsely accused, and he asks her to the dance in polite and gallant fashion, using enough persistence to show he's not a weakling but not so much as to be obnoxious.
He's also, like, totally hawt. Did I mention that?
Why exactly this tends to garner distaste, so that Bronies have by and large treated Cadance and Shining Armor with suspicion, studiously ignored Celestia's classically tragic romance with King Sombra, or wailed and gnashed their teeth at Twilight Sparkle's bubblegum teen romance with Flash Sentry, is because these things embody, or at least point toward, all we've been taught to scorn—healthy, normal, and seemly courtships and marriages.
I happened last night to be re-reading Awake in the Night Land, and in the foreword in which he offers some defense for the original Night Land on which his book is based, John C. Wright summarizes the matter better than I could:
The Victorianisms other readers find galling, I find as refreshing as an oasis in a wasteland of ash. The way sex is handled in Stranger in a Strange Land or even The Left Hand of Darkness is the norm I was to meet, over and over again, unchanged, unchallenged, unquestioned, in every story I found in my childhood. The casual fornications of James Bond and Captain Kirk were presented as normal, their penismanship praiseworthy. Self-control, chastity, romance, marriage, family, even though they are the most normal things in the world (I am tempted to say, the only normal things in the world) were dismissed by all modern writers as psychopathologies of the Dark Ages.
Perhaps when Heinlein first wrote the idea of having a sloppy sex-life seemed boldy non-conformist, and shocking. Now it is the conformity, and the only way boldly to shock the new conformists is to suggest that some sort of self-discipline in the sexual appetites might be useful, wise, and comely.
I'm not the sort of guy this article was aimed at, because I agree with most of what you say above, but I should point out that there is a very good reason to think that Flash Sentry is a horrible match for Twilight Sparkle: He's a normal kid.[1] Nicer and handsomer than most maybe, but nothing extraordinary.
Twilight is extraordinary. She a scholar, a genius, and a polymath, and before she even ascended, one of the most powerfully magical unicorns Celestia had ever known. Flash Sentry would be a terrible partner for her because of the inequality of the match. I've seen many such unequal relationships (and marriages) and none of them have been happy for long. A lot of them have been outright disastrous.
There's a modern belief that smart/talented women are only really happy with "real" men (i.e. Joe Sixpack), but it just isn't true. The best partners for them are smart/talented men. Shining Armor and Cadence are a great pair because they are well matched. Both seem to be very kind, decent ponies who are just a bit... dim.
You mentioned how appropriate a match Good Sombra and Celestia made, and I agree with that, because they are both intelligent, caring monarchs who have a lot in common.
So who would be a good romantic partner for Twilight? I'd vote for a young Starswirl back when he only had a soul patch. Maybe there was a reason he came up with those time travel spells?
In any case, once the new-romance glow wore off, Flash and Twilight wouldn't have much that could sustain a lasting relationship.[2] Whoever it is, she needs a more appropriate partner.
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[1] If you ignore the blue hair and jaundiced skin.
[2] Put down the saddle and bridle, I'm not going there!
2417476
That's what the Ministry of Truth wants you to think!
Real Men are actually paragons of virtue and self restraint, never mind the fact that in common usage such a term has become synonymous with philanderer!
Faust's distaste is very simple:
If Celestia were to spend all her onscreen time talking about or chasing after her lover, then it shows that the motherfucking goddess of the sun is still ultimately defined by her man. That can't happen to Rainbow Dash, Applejack, or Rarity either. It really, really can't.
It's obviously possible to be more nuanced than that with a romance. But when she says that she sees a romance story completely absorbing a character, that's what she means.
2417562 Only if you assume Flash is actually a normal kid. We really know nothing about him, either of him. Hims?
2417593
In a way, Faust got exactly what she wanted: None of the romances in the show have subsumed the characters, which is a real contrast with many other shows (and fanfics.)
Anyway, now I want to write my fic about how the pony version of Flash Sentry starts to become jumpy and paranoid because he keeps walking smack into Princess Twilight.
2417677
Unless you count the absolutely glorious episode where Rarity tries to change everything about herself to appeal to a man.
2417681
The entire point of the episode was that changing yourself to appeal to someone else usually doesn't work well. Most of the time you see romance in young girl's cartoons, the character's personality is completely replaced with an obsessive creature devoid of individuality. The episode is consciously, uh, subverting it and stuff.
2417691
Yes of course.
If it wasn't clear I loved that episode holy shit sorry my irony gland hasn't been working very well lately
2417593 nails it, but I think xe doesn't elucidate enough. A character defined primarily or exclusively through their romantic relationships is a weak character. Sure it's possible to avoid falling into that trap, but it's hard.
If you ban romantic relationships altogether, you eliminate the possibility of falling into that particular trap. Of course, you also loose some other things, including some good ones. Like many things, it's a trade-off.
(Almost certainly the same principle applies to any character trait, which I think is one of the things MLP managed to do well.)
"All the Mares Want Him" applying to Big Mac has been a fandom trope for a long time, from what I can tell, so I'm not surprised the comic did it.
Maybe I'm just philosophy-starved, but I find that awesome. And, like, liberating. Meeting-of-minds type thing.
I ignore CelestiaXSombra because it's from the comics. (Not everyone follows those things, y'know.) Sorry.
I studiously hold no opinion on Twilight/Flash Sentry because I haven't met it yet, so am not in position to comment.
2417476
Is that one of the Green brothers?
(I forget which one. Whoever's the writer.)
I would argue that Faust's original desire to avoid romantic relationships on the show, coupled with the narrative's natural tendency to grow romantic relationships, worked well. The result was that the characters wound up becoming strong and well-rounded before they acquired romantic relationships by which to be solely defined
Part of the hatedom for Flash is entirely unhealthy -- it's bronies who like to yearn for Twilight Sparkle being miffed that she got a Love Interest. Part of it is understandable -- Flash is not that well-defined a character himself. Now mind you -- if he gets enough development iin Rainbow Rocks, that second criticism might no longer apply.
Unless the writers forget that the characters are not quite the same as their analogues, there'll be an obvious problem, though -- Twilight lives on one side of the portal, Flash the other. I also really do think they're setting up an obvious triangle with Sunset Shimmer.
("Sure, it's okay. I was just using him (*sniff*) as a tool to manipulate others. I never (*sob*) liked him at all. Not a bit!")
Yeah, right. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you. Barely used.
The real problem with Flash Sentry is the same problem all the characters in the first Equestria Girls movie had. The movie was laser-focused on Twilight, so the other characters were only define within context to Twilight. We never see Flash do anything unrelated to Twilight just like we don't get to see the alternate Mane 5 do anything unrelated to Twilight.
If we had a chance to see Flash Sentry do something without Twilight as context to define him as a person and not what he means to Twilight, I personally wouldn't have any problem with him. Twilight took notice of a good looking boy her apparent age, it happens to the best of us. It doesn't make her any less of a person or character.
This discussion actually reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend about Pokemon fanfiction and how critics within that community treat it. They seem to demand contrarian stunts as if they should be normal operating procedure. Similarly, I think critics of media expect contrarian stunts when it comes the roles of the sexes. It kind of removes the uniqueness of a character who legitimately violates expectations and is therefore unique and adds flavor to the narrative.
This blog post is genius.
2417562
(*nods*) I can see exactly how it would go. Twilight would utterly outshine Flash, and because she would almost by definition love him if she got into the relationship to begin with, she would be massively denying the reality of the situation and trying to get him to do things beyond his capabilities. Flash would simultaneously worship and resent her. He'd probably wind up cheating on her within a couple of years of the wedding, probably with a rather simple-minded mare who was highly submissive to him. Twilight and Flash would make each other miserable, and with the best and most idealisitc of intentions going in to it.
They're not dim. They just look dim next to Twilight Sparkle. But then so does everypony, save maybe Celestia and Luna. The evidence is that Shining and Cadance are strong, brave, kind and decent ponies who keep their calm in a crisis and do what they need to do to save those they loved. Heroes, in short. Note their behavior in all the episodes in which they've played important roles, particularly Royal Wedding, Crystal Empire and "Three's a Crowd" (Cadance, with Shining absent).
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Granted, we haven't seen much of him, but we still don't have a single iota of evidence that Brad is anything but a normal kid.[1] But if subsequent movies show him to be a brilliant, magical prodigy or suchlike, then of course my opinion will change.[2]
But saying that we don't know he isn't an incredible person is not only no evidence at at, it is actually a logical fallacy. If all the evidence (screen time) we have points to him being normal, then presuming there is some as yet undiscovered evidence that will outweigh everything we've seen until now is merely improbable wishful thinking.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to buy a lottery ticket that nobody has yet proven will not win me millions of dollars.[3]
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[1] Or that the pony version of him is anything but a grunt with a rather casual attitude toward royalty.
[2] I still think adventures in early Equestria with young Starswirl would make a far better spin-off with romantic overtones for Twilight. But I know that ain't gonna happen.
[3] If I win, I'll split it with you guys.
2417932
Your prediction of the Flashlight relationship matches several real-world couples I have known, unfortunately.
And yes, you're right about Shining Armor and Cadance not being dim. Apologies to the royal couple.
2418003
I'm just going by what I've seen so far. I don't want Brad to be any one thing or the other,[1] I'm just evaluating him based on what's been shown to us. I will watch the second movie, and adjust my assessment of the situation based on that.
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[1] Actually I would love it if he was shown to be a great fit for Twilight and there was some mention of the happiest sort of couples being ones who shared interests and capabilities, but that is so antithetical to current romantic superstitions that it has almost no chance of happening.
2417764
2417980 It's only a logical fallacy if I'm ignoring odds that are strongly in your favor, and I am not willing to concede that they are.
Statistically speaking, we have actual statistics for your chance of a lottery ticket winning you anything. Flash, on the other hand, is a mostly blank slate in a show where a name and multiple appearances probably means you are significant in some fashion.
Admittedly, his eventual significant detail might be that he is the adult version of Snips or Snails, remarkable in being kind of dumb. I'd be pretty shocked if that's the eventual development he gets, though. Hell, he's the love interest being established for a Princess, given classical storytelling tropes it's fairly likely that he is dashing and heroic and not just some random dumb grunt.
(Assuming the mobile game means anything, he apparently has the description: Flash Sentry is a high-ranking Pegasus pony in the Crystal Empire Royal Guard. He is kind, gentle and caring, and always offers help when needed.)
Also, I am so tired of people claiming that Flash didn't get any characterization in the first movie. We saw him be kind and supportive to a brand new very out of place student. We saw him take a stand about the wrecked gymnasium in presenting proof to Principle Celestia that Twilight wasn't at fault. We even saw him be willing to 'dance' with Twilight in front of all of his classmates:
img4.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130725235340/mlp/images/e/e0/Twilight_pony_dancing_with_Flash_Sentry_EG.png
It's not a lot, but it's not nothing.
Too Catholic for me, thanks.
Which is to say: there is a tendency among critics of normative conceptions of gender roles to go too far, to treat the stultifying nature of blanket rules about "masculine men and feminine women courting each other in seemly ways" as being oppressive because there is something intrinsic to the roles themselves. This isn't the problem. The problem is when heteronormativity is the ONLY thing viewed as acceptable. But it's demonstrably not for everyone, and your Victorian apologetics only look more foolish by the year.
The world is changing, my Catholic friend. There is nothing wrong with your silly, restrictive conceptions of "real men" and "real women" and "real romance" but you will never again have the power to make the rest of us listen to you. I suggest you accustom yourself to the new reality.
2417932 You can be strong, brave, kind and decent, and a great hero, and also a little dim. In general, heroes are a lot more bland if they have ALL the good characteristics at once, it makes them seem more two dimensional.
On the other hand, Shining Armor is probably not THAT dim if he can handle all those statistics for his Ogres & Oubliettes campaign and was in the math club for two years, and between Cadance's penchant for carrying an abacus around everywhere she goes, and her willingness to spend a day at a Starswirl the Bearded history exhibit, I would call them both out-and-out nerds.
I love the "punching at shadows" phrase. I hate it when a new piece of art of any medium is thrillingly described as "subversive," and it garners praise from all the critics. That's an excellent example of punching at the shadows, because in this case subversive means: "pandering to the tastes of all the critics that will review the work, and the intended audience OF the work, but would be disapproved of by some mythical housewife in Iowa that will never have a chance to be exposed to this piece of art."
I think the word subversive is almost entirely used to lie. People use subversive to describe things they like, and words like stupid, offensive, just not funny, to describe things they don't like.
If you are the intended audience of a work and you enjoy the work and agree with its premise, unless there is something very exceptional about you (and trust me, there almost certainly isn't), that work is not subversive.
2418329
Yeah, your "too few data points" argument is valid, though I think it is fairly likely we could come up a pretty accurate character profile of Flash by averaging out the love-interests of all animated shows aimed at the "Monster High" demographic. Hasbro is driven by profits, not by challenging proven formulas. Flash certainly hasn't deviated from that archetype yet.
2418074
Nummy!
Mm. I wonder if this isn't a cyclical thing, where one generation it's popular to play it straight, in the next people complain about it being cliché and unrealistic and deconstructions abound, the next those get called out for being cliché and needlessly edgy and reconstructions appear, and finally those get eyes rolled at for being cliché and overly complicated so people simplify and it gets played straight again.
2418418 The world is changing, but not as drastically as you think.
The people who don't fit into the definitions Davidson gave have always been there, but it's only recently that technology and social stability have allowed their preferred lifestyles to be obtainable. The term "normal" needs not apply so much, because who's really normal? However, they remain atypical as they represent a small fraction of the human population.
Media has exaggerated the change because they think homosexuality, battle girls, and stay at home dads are cutting edge. I personally think that's an insult to the real people who are like this as they just want to live out their lives as they want to like everyone else. There's nothing cutting edge about that.
It's kind of like some statements I've seen on the gay marriage issue. The real milestone for gay rights is when a gay couple gets married, and it's not a news story.
2418418
What's the future you're envisioning, then? Test tube babies for all and romantic exclusivity for none? If the 60s and 70s couldn't erase the dynamic I don't think even elven sex robots from the future could.
I suspect that as we learn just how hard coded our DNA renders us the Jimmy Rustling might become a viable fuel source.
2417757
There is nothing wrong with saying "he" and then apologizing when you're wrong. In fact, some style guides require it.
Style guides are, granted, capable of being outdated and stupid.
I'm going to respectfully disagree on classic romance leading to knee-jerk reactions. At least, I do in my case. I objected to Shining and Cadance because they just appeared ex nihilo, no explanation, no foreshadowing, no nothing. Giving Twilight a brother and the nation another princess is not something that should be done arbitrarily. (Granted, in this, I fall into one of the other cognitive traps you mentioned, giving the show far more credit than it's due.)
My chief objection to Celestia and Good King Sombra is that the courting and romance is unhealthy. Not necessarily for the rulers themselves, but for the integrity of spacetime. I thought their scenes together were incredibly touching, but I don't like the idea that Celestia is willing to throw away the kingdom she fought so hard to build and preserve in exchange for love. It can fit her character when viewed from a certain angle, but still, integrity of spacetime!
The only problem I have with Flash is that his characterization was rather flat. The latest Rainbow Rocks preview has already done a lot to mollify that opinion; he's as adorkable as Twilight at times. (Also, it supports my theory that his pony self's special talent is walking into things. Princesses, walls, alien monkey doppelgangers...)
2419508
2419498
I mean nothing more or less than that the collapse of the hegemony of the old norms allow people who were poorly served by them to build new ones.
I am fully willing to admit that humans will always create systems of norms and culture about romance, but these will vary across populations as necessary with respect to people's sexuality, gender, interest in/beliefs about sex, and so on. I don't envision a future because the future will be built by diverse people creating diverse systems on top of foundational values (communication, consent, respect).
2419759 What?
Seriously, what are you talking about? I think you're confusing sexuality and sexual attitudes with race. In that case there wouldn't be any homosexuals because they by definition don't breed. We're still not sure what determines sexuality and there probably isn't one single answer. However, homosexuality will always be a small minority, and they're not going to build a "new normal". That doesn't mean they shouldn't have a right to live their lives as they wish, but thinking they will be tearing down heterosexual romance (or that they even want to) is laughable.
How Davidson describes things will be the most common and efficient way for humans because we're adapted to it. Obviously, having the capacity for choice, we don't have to fit into cookie-cutter molds, but we shouldn't kid ourselves into thinking these cookie-cutter molds came about because of nefarious reasons. They've been calcified and deviants vilified because of nefarious reasons, but that's another discussion.
2419498
quickmeme.com/img/81/8122cd2ae24bd137fea90255b9a56fbc7c2ccb035dec34b16acd3859a41ea3ad.jpg
Regarding my commentary:
I was making emphasis in the "need" part, making romance mandatory rather than optional.
Traditionally, women were raised almost exclusively for marriage and having kids, as their only purpose and goal in life. Those who failed to accomplish it were shipped into monasteries and "married" to God (so they stopped being dead weight for their families) or similar destinies. Even today, in modern countries, many women fear passing certain age without getting a husband and at least a baby, no matter how many other personal sucessses can they have already archieved.
I have nothing against romance in fiction, but I´m tired of the cliché of the girl protagonist who always needs being paired with a boyfriend (or a love triangle) because that is how is supposed to be, specially when the relationship overshadows more important elements of the story (Yes, Korra, I point my finger at you).
2419509
I gave up on using gendered pronouns on the internet. I just haven't written the blogpost yet.
2420424
You talk as if it is somehow strange or shocking that in Christian society women were expected to be wives and mothers, or else virgins. Men were also expected to be husbands and fathers, or else virgins.
The alternative to these two choices is to be a whore or philanderer. We have always had plenty of both, of course, but no civilized man has supposed them to be respectable occupations.
Or when you say "only purpose and goal in life," are you implying that the grave and difficult duty of rearing the next generation is somehow inferior to other occupations?
Pagans also honored virgins, as Christians do. What makes the Christians different is that they honor mothers, and they commend virginity to men as well as women, and they condemn promiscuity in men as well as women (though not, admittedly, always with complete consistency, since there seems to be a natural tendency, at least among men, to tolerate men's sexual vices more than women's, but such is nonetheless the ideal).
2418418
Fads. Every generation thinks it's the future. Come talk to me in two hundred years; my Church will still be here, whereas whatever the cause celebre is this news cycle will not even be a historical footnote.
2455667 Your Church is free to do whatever it wants, including losing an entire generation of believers due to venality and irrelevance. I was confirmed, but I doubt I will ever again be a Christian. And I will certainly never be a part of a Church that views loving relationships, safe sex, bodily autonomy for women, and giving women spiritual authority as sinful. So better get working on Vatican III.
2456063
Reality does not change, even if (ahem) an "entire" generation wishes it. Since I am of the same generation, as are a lot of other faithful Catholics, I am not, as already mentioned, overly worried about various fads.
Also, the Church does not condemn "loving relationships," "giving women spiritual authority," or "bodily autonomy," and you know it. You are being disingenuous. What you really mean is that the Church continues to condemn, as she has consistently for two millennia, sodomy and child murder, and she refrains from handing Church offices to those who explicitly say that their goal is power-seeking.
Wow very well said! You just put a lot into perspective for me.