Anghraine

I've got a lot of P&P hills to die on, but two ideas I will absolutely reject to the end of time:

1. Darcy or Elizabeth has a redemption arc.

Character growth is not redemption. Even while depicting their parallel character arcs, Austen emphasizes the extent to which they remain essentially the same people in terms of their basic flaws (e.g. Elizabeth's continued misjudgments via reductive schemas, Darcy's cold standoffishness upon his return to Hertfordshire), but also that they were always unusually good people despite their fuck-ups and overall arcs of improvement.

2. Darcy/Elizabeth is enemies to lovers.

There's a window of time when Elizabeth genuinely hates Darcy, though even then I don't think she regards him as her enemy. Darcy does not ever hate her or regard her as an enemy, he just initially doesn't like her or find her attractive. One-sided veiled hostility towards a social acquaintance is not enemies to lovers material, sorry.

I reblogged a post about how redemption arcs are not equivalent to "having a character arc," like a basically good person becoming an even better one, or whatever the fandom purity brigade was going on about. I tagged it:

#thiiiis #if they haven't done anything all that bad it ISN'T REDEMPTION #and it is fine to dislike redemption arcs as a trope! but i reallyyyy wish people would just say so #instead of trying to twist the term beyond all recognition #like... people who think darcy has a redemption arc or whatever the fuck