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?"
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 12:56 am (UTC)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.