Hi Fox, David mentioned Careless Whisper on his song list, do you have any ideas how that would fit in to s3?

ahahahaha chat we're in danger

ok let's get this out of the way first: careless whisper is a song about infidelity, it is about the singer having cheated on his partner and being wracked with guilt and feeling that whether he's found out or not he has wrecked their relationship in a way he will never be able to repair. that said i do not think there's likely to be an actual infidelity plotline, for a lot of reasons the main one being that people just have a lot of really strong feelings about infidelity as a trope and so it is rare to have that plot element show up in a romance unless it's very clearly signposted as being a story about infidelity from the start.

it's conceivable we get a plotline where someone experiences the temptation to infidelity? but honestly i do not feel that's very likely either. one thing that's pretty noticeable to me about the david jenkins approach to writing romance is he seems very uninterested in love triangles. in fact he regularly sets up something that looks like it's going to be a love triangle and then refuses to actually go through with playing it that way; everyone thought stede-ed-izzy was a triangle after s1 and then s2 is very carefully constructed around avoiding even the slightest hint that ed is choosing between stede and izzy. in the bsky special djenks suggests stede might be attracted to applejack in one post but then he has stede spend the rest of the story alternating between describing applejack as a useless drunk and forgetting his entire existence, then he reveals actually applejack was the caribbean's #1 gentlebeard shipper all along. the closest ofmd has ever come to an actual love triangle is we gull way back and that's a situation where ed's motivation is more about his self-loathing than about actual attraction or attachment to jack and jack's motivation is pure lulz. honestly i think djenks might just kind of be too otp-brained to suggest ed and stede have any real rivals when it comes to each other's love. he'll fuck them up and put them into conflict in other ways.

that said though, i think people are sometimes too literal in how they assume ofmd uses song lyrics, but it is pretty unavoidable that no matter how you interpret careless whisper - even if you imagine the singer's guilt might be about something other than cheating - there's no way getting around the fact that it is a song about being worried that you have irrevocably fucked up a relationship you valued in ways you will never be able to fix. so uh most likely there's some pretty serious relationship angst there. obviously whatever happens they will in fact be able to fix it but very plausibly we're in for some pretty rough times first.

that said though i do want to raise one other possibility. don't get too excited about it. but remember this is the sax solo from careless whisper:

ofmd normally follows a pretty strict rule where even though it is a comedy it never uses the comedy to undercut the seriousness of the emotion. so i don't think they would make fun of big gentlebeard feelings or anything like that. but i still have to say i really can't imagine that sax riff being used in the 21st century as anything other than a comedy beat, so i cannot rule out the possibility that we might hear this song in a much weirder situation than anyone is currently imagining