daaetales:

Alright, anyone who knows me knows that I like to joke around a lot about ships, but if I’m being perfectly honest, the kind of love I adore most in fiction is the love that isn’t romantic. Platonic love is great, but I also really, really love familial love, particularly found familial love.

I saw a comment somewhere that said Cosette was “the love of Valjean’s life,” and…it’s true. “Love of my life” is a term that’s usually used for romantic purposes, but when you think about it, it’s absolutely the term you would use to describe Valjean and Cosette. Cosette shaped Valjean and taught him the meaning of love in ways no one else had done before. Yes, the Bishop taught him virtue and compassion, and he felt genuine compassion and sympathy for Fantine and her situation, but true, deep love for another person was entirely alien to Valjean until he encountered Cosette. And Cosette, on the other hand, needed desperately to have a positive parental figure in her life, someone to love and cherish and protect her. The two became so very important in each other’s lives, and I’d argue that their love for each other was at the very heart of Les Mis as a story. Everything surrounding Fantine’s plight and Valjean’s suffering through prison led up to him encountering Cosette, and everything that followed was relevant to Valjean’s story because it involved Cosette in some way. Most things happened because Valjean and Cosette were destined to find each other, and then continued to happen because Valjean loved Cosette and wanted to make her happy.

And it’s beautiful, because their “love story” isn’t romantic, and the central “love story” didn’t have to be romantic in order for it to be powerful and beautiful. You can absolutely get meaningful, emotional stories from non-romantic love. It can be between two friends, it can be love between siblings, it can be a loving and doting father/daughter relationship. I don’t feel like media focuses a lot on deep yet non-romantic relationships as “love stories,” and it’s a shame, because there’s just so much more that can be explored outside of romance.