Unpopular Fandom Opinion (again)

[krpalmer]

Four years ago, I decided to mark the leap day by expressing an "unpopular fandom opinion." With the three hundred and sixty-sixth day of the year rolling around again, the thought of indulging myself again returned, but it took a little while to sort through a few possibilities. In the end, I'm stepping away from any specific fandom to say "I just don't seem as interested in 'shipping' as lots of other people."

By "shipping," I would say "interpreting all interaction between two fictional characters as preliminaries to them winding up in a romantic relationship." That might, of course, leave me open to the rejoinder "ah, you don't understand the term at all," but I'm still going to try and push on anyway. It doesn't seem a matter of not being interested in romance at all: I can get squishy and sentimental over "official" romances in action-oriented stories, exactly the ones that seem to get dismissed by those delving into subtext as "distraction from the real connections" or just "not well done." The way "shipping" blends into "slash" does seem to open up another potential criticism, but I have been interested in at least some "girls' love" anime and manga, and I can find mixed-sex declarations as tedious as same-sex ones.

If there's an explanation, I suppose it might have to do with a mixture of "looking at what you want something to be as opposed to what it is seems a recipe for disillusionment" and "can't there be such a thing as 'friendship' (or even 'rivalry') without it winding up sexualised?" Maybe there's the feeling that the potential relationships seem so all-consuming to those promoting them that they seem to overshadow all other connections.

Comments

[ladyaeryn.livejournal.com]

Most of the time, I'm like you: on the whole pretty neutral. I have a very small handful of couples that I currently outright "ship" - which I define in the sense that I get utterly fannish about the relationship: reading/writing fic, engaging in discussions, etc. On the whole, though, with most series I get into, I find myself going "oh, that's the coupling they're going for. Okay, neat/meh, I'll deal." Or, in a handful of cases, I'll simply find a dynamic interesting, regardless of whether it's the romantic pairing or not. However, I do tend to inwardly roll my eyes at the tendency to want to romanticize every interaction between character A/character B: relationships can be just as - if not moreso - compelling if they're not romantic. For example, Anakin/Obi-Wan. To me, their relationship is already compelling and tragic without a romantic component. Ditto Anakin/Ahsoka, where my eye-rolling was more blatant, as right at the beginning there was a media bandwagon of "Ooh, male teacher + cute new female student = romance!" I did verbally snarl at a couple of points "can't a male/female relationship be NON-romantic?"

Unless it's a series like Twilight, where romance is unequivocally the focus of the narrative (and usually not my taste), most of the time I don't see the point in getting worked up over pairings going a certain way, to the extreme point of going "screw this, I'm done with this series," like I saw many do with Harry Potter. (HP was one of the few cases I bucked the canon norm re: ships, but even with my disappointment, I still continued with the series and appreciated the canon nature of my favored relationships as they were and still do favor even those friendships over the canon romances.) Again, unless it's a romance-based series... most of the time, the romantic outcomes were NOT why most were hooked by the series. Now, there are cases like Anakin/Padmé in the Clone Wars series where the handling irritates me, because I believe it IS an important part of the SW narrative - but I've tried to bide my patience because even as important as it is, I know it's not the WHOLE story.

[krpalmer.livejournal.com]

Looking at your comment, I realised there's a useful distinction between "several possibilities, and one does get picked" and "it's all just 'subtext' to string people along" (which I suppose was on my mind given my own personal interests, and which selenak just happened (http://selenak.livejournal.com/766152.html) to say something along those lines)... I understand your point about Clone Wars too, although there I may still be able to "take it all in all" (including the little scraps of relationship... although I'm far from sure it could be said "it's not the focus of the series, but it gets covered elsewhere" at all.)