#5 Fandoms 5 Ships

[ms-moonlight-inn]

5 Fandoms, 5 'Ships

Tagged by the talented @energievie to do this one. Vie, the can of worms you've just opened.

Let's go...

🛥️🛥️🛥️(get it, ships) lol

1) Jack & Sally (The Nightmare Before Christmas)

That's right, y'all the Pumpkin King himself and Sally the Ragdoll. If ever there were two more perfectly combined characters, these two are it. The arrogance of Jack, and the meekness of Sally –both seeking to break away from their circumstances. By the end of the movie they both have grown. Jack learns to be proud of who he is; Sally learns to speak her mind and be brave. And they do it all said to music!

2) Sgt. Milton Warden/Karen Holmes (From Here to Eternity)

I will never shut up about these two. Their love story is the epitome of hurt/no comfort, but in the best way ever. The story is set in World War II, in the weeks before Pearl Harbor. Not only do you have soulmates who have met each other at the most inconvenient possible time in their lives, But Karen comes from such a tragic backstory that you just have to wonder how she survived as much as she did. And the best part about this fucking movie, is that there is an additional side ship to swoon over. If you love tragic love stories, this is the movie for you.

3) Ian/ Mickey (Shameless)

Jesus, what can I say about these two that I haven't already said. I mean, I've written for these two more than I have anybody else and I think that's always going to be true. Gallavich has my whole heart. Period.

4) Prince Henry & Alex Díaz (RWRB)

Holy crap the first time I read this book, and the second time, and the third time... I can't even tell you how many times I read this book. And then when the movie came out? Mmm mmm mmm. Gay heaven, I tell you. Fun fact: the very first piece of fanfiction I ever wrote was for firstprince. Crazy, right? The absolute stupidity and assholeness of Alex, coupled with Henry's tendency to keep his feelings close to the chest makes for an explosive combination.

5) Catwin or Payneland (Dead Boy Detectives)

Ok, this is a new one for me, so I'm still exploring the dynamics. Right now I'm leaning towards a Cat King/Edwin as the OTP. Why? Oh man, I just don't have the bandwidth to put all my thoughts on paper, but it just seems to make sense to me. Especially when I saw that scene with the white lily.

Also, Edwin's friendship with Charles would be that much more special & important™ if he they are "best mates." Queer platonic friendships (or queer/het platonic friendships) are rarely shown in media, it'd be kinda nice see that.

🛥️🛥️🛥️

There are, of course, so many more 'ships I've shipped. So many beautiful love stories out there. But I'm sticking to talking about these 5 today. ☺️

Tagging, with no pressure to play, @stillbeatingheart @notherenewjersey @glitteryolks @wildxwired & anyone else who wants to play.

[eclipsedrawsthings]

5 fandoms, 5 ships!

Thanks for the tag, @edwardslostalchemy!

1. BNHA—Fuyukoto

Look, Fran basically already covered Tddk, and while they’re my OTP, this is the kayak I have built with my own two hands and I WILL get more people on board it if it’s the last thing I do. Have they met in canon? No! Do I still have shit to talk about? YOU FUCKING BET.

First off, they have the same goals for a relationship—on Fuyumi’s end, I think it’s pretty clear that what she wants is domestic stability. Makoto, meanwhile, has explicitly stated that her ideal partner is someone “ordinary”—someone down-to-earth and steady to balance out the glitz, glamour, and chaos of her professional life.

She’s also extremely assertive in a way that I think Fuyumi needs in her life—someone like Makoto backing her up would probably do her wonders. Plus, giving Endeavor a daughter-in-law who has blackmailed a pro hero and gotten away with it would simply be excellent.

Speaking of in-laws, this ship would also make Naomasa and Touya in-laws. This is objectively funny.

Come. Join me. Let’s create a future where I am not the only author to have written in this Ao3 tag.

2. Free!—Reigisa

I have such a soft spot for these silly little guys. You know that one post about being a sitcom b-plot character? These two are the fun little b-plot romance to Makoharu’s pining and drama. I love how ridiculously persistent Nagisa was in getting Rei to join the swim club, and I love the scene where Rei scoffs at the idea of him being affected by “something as illogical as love” like it didn’t WORK.

They’re hilarious, they’re adorable, they’re opposites attract, they’re absolutely whipped for each other. I love them.

Also, the water gun fight. The fact that Nagisa successfully ambushed Rei, then proceeded to walk into the trap he’d set earlier, was comedy gold.

3. Lego Monkie Kid—Dragonfruit

I was on the fence about this one until the Samhedi Fire scene. Look, I’ve spent five years and counting in the Tddk community—you give me fire and an “It’s your power!” and I’m gone.

To be clear, when I say “on the fence” I mean I was deciding whether or not I shipped them—they were luring me in, that just sealed the deal. I love the scene were Red returns Mei’s dragon plushie, I love their dynamic in general, and the fact that they were cuddling after the battle got me in the heart.

I’m not as deep in this particular fandom, so I’ll leave it at that—they’re cute, they got me in my weak spot, I like them!

4. Fairy Tail—Nalu

Is it even really a meet-cute if you don’t end up running from the cops?

These two actually hold the honor of being my first anime ship—Fairy Tail was my gateway anime, and Nalu was my first ship from it (thanks, Faun on both counts!)

I like how there’s hints that they could be a couple right off the bat, like Natsu’s arrival snapping Lucy out of the love spell when none of the other girls under it were affected, but that it isn’t fully a romantic subplot immediately. The focus is more on developing their friendship, and even though they’re not together by the end of the original manga, there’s not any question of why they WOULD fall for each other at some point in the future. Time and time again, they’ve saved each other, been there for each other, and just enjoyed each other’s company. I like a good friends-to-lovers, what can I say.

Also: THE FUCKING TREE. NATSU UPROOTED A GIANT RAINBOW CHERRY TREE AND FLOATED IT DOWN THE RIVER JUST SO LUCY COULD SEE IT. THAT’S REALLY FUCKING CUTE OKAY. Especially because, for those unfamiliar, he did in fact put the tree back afterwards.

And finally:

5. Superwomen in Love—Honey Trap and Rapid Rabbit

This is mostly an excuse to talk about this manga, because it is a LESBIAN SUPERHERO ROMCOM and more people need to read it.

Honey Trap, a villain, defeats Rapid Rabit, the heroine, in battle, gleefully removes the helmet of her costume… and is immediately smitten. As a result, she lets her get away, gets kicked out of her villain org, and ends up as Rabbit’s roommate, because Rabbit is the sweetest person in existence.

Fun superhero battles ensue as they try to take down the villain organization Honey used to be part of, while meanwhile Honey tries her hardest to get Rabbit to fall for her, and there’s a healthy dose of “and they were ROOMMATES,” which is always a fun time! Plus, one thing I specifically like about this manga is that the fact that they’re gay is a complete non-issue—the only “how can two women—?” of any kind is when Rabbit is (understandably I think) baffled by a different lesbian couple in the story having what’s essentially a biological daughter.

Superwomen in Love!!! Go read it, it’s fun!!!

Tagging @helpilostmygender, @snazzy-hats-and-adhd, @unreemarkable, @r4inwing-pride-parade, and @idkwatthehec! No pressure though!!!

[paperlignes]

guillermo and nandor what we do in the shadows season 5, episode 3: pride parade

[riptidelover]

Percy telling Annabeth “it’s okay” to comfort her while holding back tears bc his fatal flaw is loyalty. IM SO SICK

[astridianmayfly]

all I'm going to say to the collective TMA fandom tonight is a large, unironic THANK YOU for being normal about Jon's asexuality. By "normal" I mean openly portraying and embracing ace-ness in each and every flavor. Creator after creator in this fandom has their own unique interpretation of Jon's sexuality, and I truly, legitimately feel that this group has created one of the most nuanced and healthy environments for discussing different kinds of attraction

[feliformiaboy]

[pep-rambles]

While I can't speak for other Alastor ships (but I'll tag you all and you can weigh in). But in the RadioApple/DuckieDeer fandom a lot of those making fanwork, including the smuttier stuff, are acespec/arospec themselves so maybe learn what is actually going on in these fandoms before try to gatekeep in their tags

[happypeachsludgeflower]

Okay, but like, were the gods watching on that tv show of theirs while Percy and Annabeth went through the tunnel of love?

[rawrlands]

Cupid’s Love

[turtleblogatlast]

You know I stated it before as a response to this ask, and I know a lot of people hate it, but Kendratello is unironically a fantastic ship imo.

Kendra is Donnie’s type to a T and then some. She’s “cute, but mean”. Her color scheme is purple. She’s into tech. She’s cool and is a “bad girl.”

Like it works way too well for there to not be something there. Whatever it is, it’s chaotic as all hell and at least pseudo toxic, but it works for them.

[conundrumoftime]

Fandom grandma tales: how I survived canon ruining two of the ships I liked.

(Written after a discussion with some of my TROP fan pals about how canon can break your heart re: shipping, and how fandom manages. There are spoilers here for the entire run of Babylon 5, and for one story JMS wrote after it. yes, that story. sorry.)

Babylon 5 was a sci-fi space opera show that ran from 1993 to 1998. It is sci-fi of the era of 22-episode seasons, of huge ensemble casts with characters who get their own B- and C-plots, with an effects and casting budget that doesn’t always match its ambition, and - something it was quite pioneering in, at the time - grand pre-planned story arcs. 

It’s the first fandom that I was involved with in internet spaces as it was running, or at least when its final season was (there’s Discourse and drama from earlier years that I missed). Its showrunner, J. Michael Straczynski - ‘JMS’ - was very active in (non-fanfic) fan community spaces, and you always knew exactly what he was thinking about things because he was part of the discussion around them. There was also fanfic, which he didn’t stop but didn’t go near on the grounds of legal liability for story ideas. 

Most of the fanfic in the early days as the show was airing was focused around two big ships, of which one was canon endgame (Delenn/Sheridan) and one was canon all-ends-in-despair (Marcus/Ivanova). I, as a teenager discovering a developing online fandom for the first time with all the overwhelm and excitement that causes (ask me anything about what reading fic was like before the days of tags/ratings/warnings!) got into Marcus/Ivanova and also into one of the minor ships, Delenn/Lennier.

Delenn/Lennier was never, ever going to happen in canon. This is obvious; it clashes with Delenn/Sheridan which was JMS’s baby darling OTP, the show’s big love story. Delenn is married for the later part of the show. Lennier is her diplomatic aide, is absolutely devoted to her, and they have a very intense mentor/student relationship, which it seems is kind of standard in their culture (when Delenn’s own mentor died she went briefly insane with grief and started a genocidal war over it) but is still Very Intense. He is canonically in love with her, but that’s as far as the explicit canon statements go.

However. HowEVER. Canon also gives us, for that relationship, some wonderful ship fuel. Lennier knows about every bad thing Delenn has done, including all the stuff she doesn’t/can’t tell her husband. He’s her link to her previous world and culture and stands by her even when they kick her out. She says at one point, “without him, I would stumble and fall and never get up again.” 

And then… we had Season 5, the final season.

Season 5, for various complicated production reasons, was operating a little outside of pre-planned story arcs and in this season the Delenn/Lennier stuff ramped up about three gears in one go. It was still very obviously never, ever going to be canon, and was almost certainly not intended by the creator (who wrote most of the episodes himself) to look like there was even anything there. At this point Delenn is married; any relationship with her aide would not only be going against the show’s OTP, but going against it in the sense where she’s cheating on her husband, and there is Just No Way JMS would have gone there. And yet! Season 5 gave us:

A scene where Lennier says he can’t stay, it’s too painful to be around her now she’s married, and she’s devastated and has the following conversation with her husband about it:

S: I got your message about Lennier. Is there anything I can do?

D [snapping]: Almost certainly not.

S: Is it because of me?

D: In part, I think so.

S: Yeah, I was afraid of that. Well, as we say back on Earth, three’s a crowd.

D: On Minbar, three is sacred.

S [slightly uncomfortable laugh]: Well, I don’t think I’m ready to handle that one, Delenn.

Delenn then calling Lennier back to the station to do some secret mission thing for her, which involves her sneaking out of her bed while her husband sleeps to meet Lennier in a darkened alley behind a bar, where she tenderly strokes his face and they have a whole conversation about whether her husband understands her or not.

A scene where Lennier comes back from his secret mission to meet both Delenn and Sheridan, Delenn goes to greet him with a hug, and Lennier does this very pointed step back and nod in the direction of her husband, and she pulls back and just sort of pats him on the arms instead. 

I MEAN.

But, the issue here is not what fans did about it but what canon did about it. Canon did the canon equivalent of dragging that ship outside and shooting it in the head. 

In the final few episodes of the entire series, Lennier tries to kill Sheridan, runs away in shame, and then someone finds his diary in which he’d been writing for ages about what a bad decision he thought Delenn had made and how her whole marriage was an awful idea. Even to this day, it’s fun/awful watching people go through a first-time watch when they get to season 5 and hit that. ‘Character assassination in the form of a diary’ was a whole thing for a while. It’s been 20+ years and the actor who played Lennier is stilll mad about it (not because of shippy stuff, but because he - correctly! - thinks Lennier absolutely would not have done that). 

What *fandom* did, on the other hand, was Fixed The Problem.

Delenn/Lennier was not at all a big ship when the series was airing, and for a few years after. Then the fandom dynamics started to change. With less pressure on what canon was going to do, it felt like fandom had more space to play around with things it didn’t do. Fanfic got less interested in trying to fit within the overall story being told and started spinning off in all its own directions. And *this* ship started getting bigger and bigger. People did really interesting things with it, canon divergence went in all directions, everyone wrote a fix-it story of some variety, some authors did a great series of connected stories based on an idea that Minbari have three genders, the quality of the writing has been brilliant. And I think without that absolute whiplash feeling of what happened in canon, there would never have been this feeling of “well I’m not having THAT” which led to all this.

We did not need canon! Canon had done its thing. And canon had broken our hearts enough ways with many of the other stories it told (entirely on purpose) and we weren’t just going to sit back and let it ruin us forever.

By comparison, the other ship I was into was Marcus/Ivanova. This is entirely doomed. Susan Ivanova’s love life is just perpetually doomed. The first partner of hers we meet is an ex who’s interested in getting back together, but then it turns out he’s just using her to infiltrate the station for the fascist terrorist group he’s secretly joined. Then she falls for an archrival of hers, Talia, who works for Psi Corps, the organisation she loathes most of all things - but it’s okay because it turns out Talia is starting to question them too! Maybe these crazy kids can make it work! They have one night together and then OOPS turns out Talia was being secretly controlled by a sleeper personality implanted in her by Psi Corps the whole time. Ivanova’s love life is doomed. 

So for two seasons, she has this sort-of-flirty, sort-of-bickery, sort-of-friendship going with Marcus, who is on the surface of it very much “why not fall in love at first sight like a true romantic, YOLO!” but it turns out is actually deeply messed up himself and full of survivor’s guilt and pain and, you get the clear impression, would have died of shock if she’d actually called his bluff on the OTT flirting and said “yeah, let’s go for it”. And then he sacrifices himself to save her life. It is a very tragic ending, it is absolutely the way he would have wanted to go, she wakes up both furious and absolutely distraught, says that the last thing she heard was him saying “I love you”, says she wishes she’d at least slept with him once, and says that in a way all love is unrequited. PAIN. 

So, lots of fix-it fanfic, lots of ‘Marcus comes back to life’, lots of canon divergence AUs where he doesn’t die and they live happily ever after and both get over their huge levels of unresolved pain. Pretty standard for that kind of pairing. And as a pairing it doesn’t get in the way of any big canon pairings, it doesn’t imply anything icky like mentor/student power imbalances or adultery. And JMS clearly quite liked it. So that’s better, right?

NO. It was WORSE.

JMS wrote an Marcus/Ivanova story himself, published in one of the sci-fi magazines, to try to give them a happy ending. This happy ending involves Marcus, many many years in the future, waking up from the cryogenic suspension he’s in (it’s sci-fi, keep up, keep up). Ivanova is long dead, but he isn’t about to let this get in the way, so what he does is to *create a new Ivanova* by getting some kind of DNA + computerised memory/personality bank thing, finding a doctor who will clone her, putting himself back into animated sleep until the clone reaches the age Ivanova was when she died, then - THEN, I’M STILL GOING - takes her to a distant planet where, with her memories wiped and their spaceship having deliberately been crashed BY HIM so there’s no way back, they live out their lives in peace.

WHAT.

That pairing still does okay in fandom but it’s not really taken on a post-show world of headcanons and riffing on other people’s ideas and tropes in the way that Delenn/Lennier has (and we all just pretend that story never existed). 

So! This has been my experiences in the field of What We Do When The Show Has Thoughts On That Non-Endgame Ship We’re Into. Fandom manages. Fandom will see you through. And in the words of Susan Ivanova:

Babylon Five was the last of the Babylon stations; there would never be another. It changed the future, and it changed us. It taught us that we have to create the future, or others will do it for us. It showed us that we have to care for one another, for if we don’t, who will? And that true strength sometimes comes from the most unlikely places. Mostly though, I think it gave us hope that there can always be new beginnings - even for people like us.

[d0ttt]

Some gen2 doodles~

-DOT

[paperlignes]

GUILLERMO AND NANDOR WHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS (2019-) SEASON 5, EPISODE 8: THE ROAST

[riptidelover]

This scene literally changed the chemicals in my brain like there’s now 2 eras of my life before this and after this.

[relicofkorax]

[icespur]

Ann: If I fall…

Ryuji : I’ll be there to catch you.

Haru: *looks at Makoto* What if I fall?

Makoto: Then I’ll fall with you, never leaving your side.

Akiren: *watches these two interactions*

Akiren, to Akechi: And if I fall?

Akechi: I’ll be the one who pushed you.