xandromedovna | Meta: What Is a Soulmate? (TGP s3)-- DFvQ

As an aro person who is also a multishipper, I have a weird relationship with the soulmate trope. The idea of soulmates—two people who are cosmically linked in love, usually romantic—is very old, though in 2010s fandom, this usually plays out through soulmark AUs. As with any trope, the proliferation of stories about soulmates tells us that there’s important cultural work they do. While a lot of that work in this case is upholding cisheteropatriarchal monogamy, what attracts me to soulmate AUs is when the concept is used to explore amatonormativity and free will (see Kowalska 220). The fact that I don’t even have to make an AU to do that here is why TGP is one of my favourite shows.

Concerns of free will have been central to storytelling since we started telling stories: do we do the things we do because the fates/gods/destiny/nature have ordained it to be so, or do we actually have the agency to make meaningful decisions? Can one defy the gods and change their fate? Different stories will have different answers to this question; for example, tragedies such as Oedipus Rex by Sophocles or Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare argue that no matter how much one tries to escape their fate, destiny finds a way. In other stories, such as many of the shows I’m studying (which should tell you something about my own interests), destiny is an overwhelmingly powerful force, but it is never completely insurmountable. There’s always wiggle room.

If we think about TGP for example, Team Cockroach is fated to spend eternity suffering in the Bad Place. However, Michael inadvertently creates the conditions that allow the humans to fight back. As I talked about in my post about Imposter Syndrome, Eleanor is incentivized to resist her new afterlife because she can be evicted at any time, which is why she goes to Chidi for help. This spurs the humans to unite and realize they’re in the Bad Place, and when Michael tries to undo it all by rebooting them, Eleanor manages to sneak a message to herself via Janet. This small, unlikely to be successful act of defiance towards the overwhelming power Michael has over them at the time is what enables the six of them to disrupt their—and the universe’s—destiny of eternal damnation and make it to the real Good Place.

(Of course, on a meta level, Team Cockroach’s destiny is actually to reform the afterlife, and the story does not end until they have fulfilled this purpose, but as there is very little metanarrative in TGP, we can ignore that for now. Shows such as SPN or RvB make this question more complicated.)

When it comes to soulmates, these questions of free will have to do not just with things like actions but even our thoughts and feelings, which can be even more terrifying. Contemporary questions of free will get at the very core of identity: are my thoughts and feelings my own, or were they implanted there, manipulated, fated? Which me is the real me? Is there more to me than the external factors that resulted in my existence at this point of spacetime? Do I actually love you or do I just think I love you because I’m supposed to? Do you actually love me or do you have to say that? Is consent possible in a deterministic universe?

The soulmate trope allows us to ask not just these questions but also questions about love itself. The structure of soulmate bonds in a story tells us a lot about the author’s underlying assumptions and their perspective on love. Does everyone have a soulmate? Are these bonds breakable/malleable/mutable? Can you harm your soulmate? Do you only get one? Are they assigned or made? Are all soulmates romantic? For many aromantic people, these are also questions we ask in relation to a culture structured by amatonormativity, which is the bias towards viewing romantic, monogamous pairings as a desire felt by all people and as taking precedence over all other relationships and types of love. At first glance, the idea of soulmates seems inherently exclusive of the existence of aro people, and indeed some versions of the trope can be, but the types of stories that interest me are ones that use the soulmate trope to ask these difficult questions.

That’s one of the things I love about TGP; it completely deconstructs and reconstructs the trope in fascinating ways. Michael explains that the inclusion of soulmates in his neighbourhood was specifically designed to torture Chidi, and he doesn’t actually know if they’re real or not (4x9). But this doesn’t come until near the end of the series—for most of it we work (or at least Chidi does) under the assumption that Chidi and Eleanor are soulmates, slightly star-crossed but eventually they end up happy together for eternity until they walk through the Door. There is malleability to this idea of soulmates; in some of the reboots Eleanor’s soulmate is Chidi but in others it is purported to be some of the demon actors, Tahani (SHOW US ATTEMPT 218 YOU COWARDS), and even a dog. At the top of season 2 Michael explains to Jason that soulmates aren’t strictly romantic, though they’re more common. Given that Michael is basically making up the rules for soulmates as he goes, we don’t actually have to give much credence to his explanation of the mechanics, but the show deliberately makes space for non-romantic soulmates and the idea that they aren’t set in stone. Importantly, Michael muses “if soulmates do exist, they’re not found, they’re made” (4x9), which allows for both free will and a rejection of amatonormativity.

If soulmates are made, then Eleanor and Chidi really are soulmates after all. In every single reboot without exception, Chidi helps her. They escape to Mindy’s several times and hook up, and in one reboot Eleanor even tells Chidi she loves him. Eleanor is the only thing Chidi is ever sure about, best represented in his note to himself (hold on, I need a minute, I get teary thinking about these two I just love them so much): “there is no ‘answer’, but Eleanor is the answer” (4x9). And part of what makes them such good soulmates is that there was doubt the whole time. It was not in fact inevitable that they end up together, they had to choose each other every time. Chidi had to choose to consider all the versions of him to be himself. Eleanor had to choose to believe that her feelings for Chidi were her own (incidentally 3x7 is what spurred this post because that ep hurts like a bitch, I should also point out I’m using Netflix numbering for episodes, I’m referring to “The Worst Possible Use of Free Will”). They had to trust their love was strong enough to withstand memory wipes, experiments, other relationships, and cosmic interference, and it did.

And in a similar way, all six of the main cast are soulmates, to the extent Janet can be said to have a soul. The four humans always band together instead of continuing to torture each other. Michael and Janet fight for them every step of the way once they’ve joined the team. They all chose each other time and again, defying the very structure of the afterlife to be together and happy. And while we could read them as a romantic polycule because yes, we could also say that they fulfill different roles in each others’ lives, sometimes but not always romantic. And I think that’s pretty neat.

Work Cited

Kowalska, Kinga. “Embodied Soulmarks and Social Expectations: The Materialization of Romantic Love in Soulmate AU Fanfiction.” The Materiality of Love: Essays on Affection and Cultural Practice, edited by Anna Malinowska and Michael Gratzke, Routledge, 2018, pp. 211-22.