[Finnegan]

A thread for appreciation of the ostensible "lead couple"
of Steven Antin's Young Americans:

Scout Calhoun (played by Mark Famiglietti)
&
Bella Banks (played by Kate Bosworth).

Someday we'll know if love can move a mountain. Someday we'll know why the sky is blue. Someday we'll know why I wasn't meant for you. --"Someday we'll know," The New Radicals (1999), final song in the unaired pilot of Young Americans, played after Charlie Banks tells Scout and Bella that they were both fathered by the same man -- information shown to be false in the eighth and last episode of the series. (Other verses of the same song say "someday you'll know that I was the one for you," but those verses are not played in YA's unaired pilot.)

Shipper list
wolkenfuehlen
loganandroryforever
Gynge

SCOUT: I thought of a good one the other day. It was um, bell bottoms to straight leg and back to bells again. BELLA: Oh, um, 30 years? SCOUT: Maybe. BELLA: Civilization? SCOUT: Uh, 500 years. BELLA: Overcoming the loss of a true love? -- Young Americans, episode 1

The Scout and Bella thing is just a twist on 'Romeo and Juliet.' How do I take two people who are totally and madly in love and what can I put between them to push them apart? -- Steven Antin, cited by Susan King, "A Closer Look," Los Angeles Times, July 9, 2000

Antin says "Young Americans" is staying true to classic storytelling and compares the relationship between Scout and Bella to Romeo and Juliet. "I always wanted to tell that story," Antin says. "But how do I reinvent this for 2000?" -- Richard Huff, "Young Americans: Gas, Food, Longing," N.Y. Daily News, July 9, 2000

Links to this board's:

Mark Famiglietti (Scout Calhoun) appreciation thread

Kate Bosworth (Bella Banks) appreciation thread

[s e r e n i t y]

Thanks for starting the thread

ooh yay you used my favorite gif, the one of them sitting by the window is my favorite such a pretty scene

I'm not too sure about Antins comment on them being truly and madly in love but I will admit they have cute scenes

[wolkenfuehlen]

Thanks for the thread! such a pretty OP.

Originally Posted by s e r e n i t y (View Post) I'm not too sure about Antins comment on them being truly and madly in love but I will admit they have cute scenes

Hm, well, Scout seemed to be?

[Finnegan]

Originally Posted by s e r e n i t y (View Post) I'm not too sure about Antin's comment on them being truly and madly in love ...

Sheida,

Everyone whose posts I can recall reading on this subject (including Anja and I) agrees that Scout and Bella are not "true love." Neither of them loves the other enough to risk angering his or her father, enough to risk losing what he or she has. Bella's remark at the end of YA 1, that she and Scout have suffered "the loss of a true love," seems totally ironic. YA does have a true love story, and true love is the core theme of YA, but the show's sole use of the phrase "true love" is a claim to have experienced it by a character who hasn't experienced it. So much of YA is like that, for example, episode 4, which talks about princesses and princes and fairy tales but is titled "Cinderbella" ... with no explicit reference to the fairy tale that it so brilliantly updates by using cross-dressing rather than magic to pose a "test of true love," namely, "The Frog Prince." Antin, I suspect, may have been, in 2000, a compulsive ironist.

Antin's whole shtick about "YA draws on Shakepeare" in his press interviews in the summer of 2000 is a half-truth. Yes, it does draw on Twelfth Night and Romeo and Juliet heavily. But it draws even more heavily and centrally on myths far older than Shakespeare ... as Krudski's relation of the Orpheus myth in Dawson's Creek 3/20 foreshadows.

Antin simply didn't want to make it easy to understand YA. That's crystal clear. He wanted to make us dig for the meaning, as Krudski tells Caroline to do in YA 7. That's why we learn for sure that the incest allegation is illusory, and that Krudski is narrating from the future, not the present, only at the end of the last episode.

But I think that the Scout-Bella story-line is best described as the story, not of a "true love," but of a "true illusion," in the sense of truth set forth in the Rawley motto: Truth Is Virtue (not descriptive accuracy). Charlie Banks' allegation that Scout and Bella are half-siblings is not "true" in the sense of being descriptively accurate. The incest allegation is an illusion. But it is "true" in the sense of the Rawley motto. It enables Scout and Bella to find out that they are not in "true love," that they don't love each other enough to risk what they have. Why they don't is less certain, and something we might discuss. But the Providence of Rawley gives Scout and Bella a "true illusion" that saves them from wasting who knows how many months or years of their lives -- it saves them time, which in YA, is our real wealth, as Finn makes clear in his catechism on the lake in YA 1.

"Someday we'll know why I wasn't meant for you." Antin's choice of that song by The New Radicals to be played as Scout and Bella discuss Charlie's incest allegation in the unaired pilot captures the matter perfectly. Scout and Bella aren't meant for each other. Not because they're half-siblings -- they aren't. But the illusion, the falsehood, that they are, enables them to understand that they aren't -- albeit for very reasons very different from consanguinity.

Charlie's falsehood is a gift to Scout and Bella as much as Jake's gender deception is a gift to her and Hamilton; both are "true" illusions, falehoods that bring forth good, that give "true love" a chance to happen. Falling out of a false love is just as "good" as falling into a true one. "We aren't just given life experience -- we're given the experience of life."

Scout, who is so perfectly kind and loving, is, on one level, what Will Krudski wants to become -- just as Sean is what he has been. The point, symbolically, is that Bella must love Will as he is, warts and all -- if she is to help him become Scout. That's the way -- the only way -- that the Scout/Bella story can have a happy ending.

[Forwood4Bamon]

Add me. Thanks.

[wolkenfuehlen]

We didn't have a shipper list yet ( ), but I went ahead and made one and added you! Anyone else wanna be added?

[street serenade]

Some Scout and Bella cuteness. At least I hope it's cute, I have no idea what I'm doing so.

I have to admit I didn't care for Scout/Bella when I first watched the show. I think it was only after I read both fanfic continuations, Nicky's fic and New Beginnings, did I begin to root for them. But only after they'd given up on the idea of being together and explored other relationships and experiences beyond each other. Especially in Nicky's fic, it's like they had to get over each other to become the people they needed to be, and once they became those people...they could then walk into a possible relationship as two young adults, rather than two kids.

After I read those fics I could go back and watch the actual episodes and appreciate the Scout and Bella scenes

[wolkenfuehlen]

I missed your pretty arts! So gorgeous!

I think (it's been 10 years for me, so I don't really remember ) I didn't ship B/S when I first watched the show. It all came after some time, and yes, through fanfics and fan commentary. I think I just really appreciate Scout as a character much more now, post-fanfics, because fanfics allowed him to do things other than pine after Bella, which was refreshing, and helped his character grow a lot.

I never fully caught up with New Beginnings... I keep meaning to. But agreed about Nicky's fics. They got to explore who they were by themselves, and grow as people, to then figure out that there's still something there.

[street serenade]

Thank you. I wanted to play with pictures of Mark and decided to throw in some Kate B Bella and Scout all grown up, aww.

Yes, exactly Canon Scout and Bella are nice and all, but the continuations really developed them as characters and gave them a lot more personality. Those writers and their works really, really endeared Scout to me. I was able to go back and watch the episodes with a whole new appreciation for him because of those stories, which sounds really weird because they're not canon-canon. But still.

[wolkenfuehlen]

I think I've gone past the point where I can completely distinguish canon-canon and fanon-canon. It's especially hard with this fandom, I think, because it's always been such a tight-knit group of people (even if that group used to be significantly bigger ), and because both continuations were active for an incredibly long time. It's like...I know what plot-wise happens on the show and happened in the continuations, but, as you said, a lot of fondness for certain characters just comes from the continuations, and is then brought back to the original show, where you can suddenly appreciate characters a lot more.
For example, I don't think I ever realized how great a friend Scout is, and how much he just cares and wants to help the people he cares about just from canon-canon alone.

[Finnegan]

Originally Posted by wolkenfuehlen (View Post) I don't think I ever realized how great a friend Scout is, and how much he just cares and wants to help the people he cares about just from canon-canon alone.

Then you haven't watched episodes 1, 7 and 8 enough. Scout loses a lot of that in between, as his problems with Bella undermine his character, but he recovers it.

The work stands alone. The end is the end. And the sequels I have read (all of them) generally don't quite get it.

Estee and Harmony best expressed the nature of the Jake-Hamilton relationshiip in their "alternate" fic, "Love and War," not in their sequel. The only fanfic that gets that Krudski is a mature guy narrating what can only be a dream is the one about the gang going to London and getting kidnapped, by a British woman.

Yeh, I've written a "sequel." But it doesn't go past Thanksgiving of the same year, and it aims only to explicate what seems to me implicit in the original.

[wolkenfuehlen]

As I said, I didn't really appreciate Scot at first, especially because his whole character was 'over-shadowed' by the Bella storyline, to me. So it's nice to see him have storylines of his own in fanon-canon.

[street serenade]

Originally Posted by wolkenfuehlen (View Post) As I said, I didn't really appreciate Scout at first, especially because his whole character was 'over-shadowed' by the Bella storyline, to me. So it's nice to see him have storylines of his own in fanon-canon.

I second this

[Gynge]

"Overcoming the loss of a true love?"

Ugh, I loved Scout/Bella –*soulmates!
I'd like to added to the shipper list, this was my YA ship hands down

[wolkenfuehlen]

Heeey, welcome! I'm Anja. I added you. So glad to have a fellow Scout/Bella lover here! When did you first see YA?