#And secondly. Mostly because i find them such beautiful interesting pics

[jokerownsmysoul]

[notbecauseofvictories]

Hey there! First of all, your philly pics are dope. never stop w those. secondly, you’ll probably have already received at least 10 iterations of this ask, but as I can’t find one in your ask tag I guess I’ll just go along and message you. Three (or five, or whatever, you decide) favorite ships and why? I adore angst and I’m super 👀 to know your list

The….problem is that I don’t technically have singular ships I like? Both because I’m an avowed rarepair and multi-shipper and because I tend to have specific character dynamics I like, and then hone in those dynamics in the things I watch like a Type™-seeking missile.

So with that in mind:

1. I’m Just A Girl, Standing In Front Of A Monster, Asking It To Love Her (Because I Am Also Monstrous)

The Ur-ship. My One True Love. Every single story where there is a girl on the fringes of her world and a decidedly non-human thing that loves her, I am there. With bells on. Possibly also carrying sparklers and singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” I’m very near unreasonable when it comes to this trope, and my ability to determine objective quality and respond appropriately takes a sharpish nosedive as soon as you introduce it.

It comes in lots of different flavors, from the original (Beauty and the Beast, Tam Lin, even Bluebeard, though that’s a different ending) to the Gothic (Jane Eyre and Rochester were the only goths at their respective high schools and bonded over reading Anne Rice, fight me) to the supernatural (Dracula, Phantom of the Opera, our post-modern vampire craze) and all the way up to filmic (Edward Scissorhands, The Shape of Water, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir). I can opine at great length as to the many and varied reasons we continue to tell these stories, but honestly? I just love them. 

Examples: I’ve already brought up a lot of my favorites, so I’m going to leave you with a scene that was deeply formative and refuses to be sorted into any other category. You know in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, when after a whole movie of back-and-forth seduction, Elizabeth kisses Jack Sparrow and at the same moment, chains him to the mast with the intent to leave him for dead? 

He grins and hisses, “Pirate,” like he’s glad about it, that’s she’s a monster like him, and short of the scene in The Shape of Water where Eliza talks about how The Asset doesn’t see her as deficient……that’s the most clear and straightforward expression of what I’m talking about here.

2. Signs He Likes You More Than The Disembodied Ideal You Represent, Page Seven

Listen. Catholicism and the medieval High Romance of the chivalric code got me when I was positively formative, I’m always going to be weak for loving a person who is also some shining ideal that you hope to attain but can never touch. (Bonus points if you can and even do attain it, but don’t realize that, because self-loathing.) There’s just something about the King and the Knight, the Queen and Thief, the Saint and Sinner, the Devil and Johnny the Angel that’s always going to get me exactly where I live.  

I also love it because of the way one character’s relationship to the person can be complicated by the ideal; the more the lover has to grapple with their concept of chivalry, the kingdom, morality, heaven or hell, the more interesting the relationship itself gets. And c’mon, who doesn’t want to make out with the embodied concept of morality?

Examples: Arthur/Guinevere/Lancelot (and its various permutations), Mordred/Galahad, Han/Leia, T’Challa/W’Kabi, Cyrano/Christian/Roxane, also Eleanor/Michael from The Good Place has found its way to this and it’s personally devastating to me sorry

3. Defying Gravity Explanation

The thing about emotions is that they are terrible, and complicated, and no language humanity has managed to invent encompasses them completely. Consequently, I’m a sucker for a dynamic that simply defies any attempt to inscribe it with words, and so can only be shown through the gestures and unspoken intimacy of the people who are part of it. Siblings that overshoot the reasonable ambit of brotherly love, friends whose investment in one another’s lives is weird when considered from the outside, enemies who “hate” each other but mostly “think about each other all the time and remember one another’s birthdays and maybe sometimes sit on the edge of a roof somewhere and talk about personal philosophies and then lay awake that night thinking about kissing each other.” That’s the kind of stuff I mean. 

I do not think that each of us only gets One Person (that’s ridiculous) but I understand the appeal. And intimacy so profound it overwhelms language, and becomes something unique to the people inside it? I love that, as a concept, as a story.

And of course, just. Truly, uniquely, devastatingly epic amounts of pining. No matter what.

Examples: T’Challa/Erik, Luke/Leia, Anakin/Obi-wan, Rei/Tak, etc.