When real life stinks, ponder fandom.

[ladydrace]

I've been pondering what I ship. Or rather, what tends to attract me to any sort of ship.

First of all, I'm an avid slasher, so off the bat I'm generally more enthusiastic about the male/male ships. But I think I've finally nailed my major point of attraction to any ship.

Reluctance. Be it clashing of personalities, status, race, breed, culture, whatever. If the parties involved are facing obstacles and yet gravitating towards each other, I'm almost always interested. The characters have to be really unappealing for me to not care at all. Not that I ship everything to the same degree, but my enthusiasm pretty much dies when the ship is all smooth sailing.

Occasionally there are exceptions. The most notable one being Bones/Booth. Not that I was into that fandom a lot, but when the couple became canon I quit. Despite the fact that for all appearances, the ship had anything I needed to love it. They were wildly different characters, both fairly likable, who butted heads frequently but still bonded. They should have appealed to me. But making them a couple pretty much killed the show for me. Bah.

Come to think of it, many of the couples I ship I wouldn't actually like to be canon. The premise of the shows I love aren't normally romance, so my romantic fantasies usually fit much better in fanfic, especially when the ship is between two major characters. (Let's not discuss the pairings that I ship just because they're hot. That's a whole other topic.)

This might make me seem like a bit of a hypocrite to some, but I don't care. My shipping habits are strange and unpredictable, but I have a hell of a lot of fun with them. :)

Comments

[seriesfive]

I completely agree on reluctance though I wouldn't have called it that. I call it conflict and resistance, though I think they're at least in part only different labels for the same thing.

Generally I'm drawn to the ambivalent ones. I like characters who have one or the other skeleton in the closet, it makes slashing them more interesting because it's a highway straight into conflict of course.

As to femslash - I think it's sad how little is written. I believe that to some extent it's a problem of the source material so to speak. There are still far too few credible strong and interesting women presented in contemporary shows and of course its not enough to have one - you need two and that's were the real problems start...

[ladydrace]

Yeah, conflicting circumstances is the key. Mostly just the idea that "we have something here, BUT-" Just the huge bent-in-neon BUT hovering over the ship. That's what I like.

About femmeslash, that's actually a really good point. It only occurred to me recently just how male-dominated my favorite shows are. I'd probably ship more femme-pairings if there were more female main characters.

[seriesfive]

It only occurred to me recently just how male-dominated my favorite shows are. I'd probably ship more femme-pairings if there were more female main characters.

Ha! I lament over it for years, though it's slowly getting better. Still, far too often they either present us with dumb bimbos or they create a strong and believable female character and then try everything to ruin it...that's what they did to Jadzia for instance and to a lesser degree Kira.

Of course sci-fi has such a long tradition of misogyny its really laughable sometimes.

[ladydrace]

All true. Incredibly sad, but true.