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Shipping meme 12, 21
Was seriously worried for a second that this was about the CWC stuff lmaoooooo
12. What drives you away from a ship?
That's a good question! This answer got long because I thought about LHA and saw red, so I'm putting it all under a readmore.
My immediate thought would be "that's not enemies-to-lovers, that's just being a cunt (and not even the fun kind)." A good example would be The Impossible Knife of Memory by Laurie Halse Anderson, which I literally had to ragequit several years ago because all the relationship development up to that point had just been the main guy ignoring the narrator's obvious distress and repeated attempts to tell him to fuck off so that he could disrespect her boundaries, physically grab her, and then trick her into going on a first date with him. After all these years, I have no goddamn tolerance left for shitty, one-sided relationships in YA. Maybe the book got better and deconstructed his behavior later on, maybe I just missed something, I don't care to find out because YA Books Cannot Be Trusted Like That. Far as I'm concerned Wintergirls is the only book Anderson's written that's worth a damn, anyway.
And this might seem like a weird thing to be upset over considering I literally just recommended a fic where Hermione has her body and life literally torn apart by Lucius Malfoy, but I think it's important to note that Eden holds Lucius accountable and never, ever pretends the relationship could truly work.
(A quote from the epilogue: "Can you imagine Lucius and Hermione being together in the outside world? Buying a house together, having children, and getting a dog? Lucius making Hermione breakfast in bed? Arguing about the mortgage and sitting in the garden drinking tea? It would never have worked.")
It's because the narratives truly recognize the fucked-up nature of their characters that these relationships can even be interesting. Imagine Hannigram if everyone on the show just acted like murder and cannibalism were completely fine. It would certainly be funny, but not nearly as interesting. (This is also why I prefer YinxYuck over Yoop even though both involving teenage boys violating a teenage girl's consent/trust. The fact that Yin was so quick to forgive Coop but not Yuck could have been interesting, but because that double standard is seemingly not recognized by the narrative, I'm pushed into the less charitable reading that it was just a lazy, off-screen redemption to force the ship to work. Yoop is also just a far less interesting ship for a myriad of other small reasons, but I hope you see where I'm coming from here.)
This also, to a lesser degree, applies to ship fandoms-- there have been plenty of ships where I could see myself liking it, ways it could be interesting, but everyone who's already into it is just there for the fetish porn. Cool for you. But no thanks.
(Completely one-sided power dynamics are also a turn-off-- if I'm gonna be in this for the long haul, then one character needs to eventually get some level of (at least) emotional power to wield against their lover/captor, even if physically they're completely at the lover's mercy. Will manipulating both Rat Boy Whose Name I Can't Remember Right Now and Hannibal while in jail. Yin outsmarting Yuck time and again even though he's physically and magically stronger than her, to the point that he doesn't even seem to really notice that Yang's there most of the time. Stuff like that.)
While we could further dive into genre and the different levels of realism within these stories, the more important element is just the fact that Knife guy had no personality outside of harassing her. Deadass that is all he did in the book. Where's the flavor. This tastes like fucking sand.
[I should probably also note that "stuff I write content for" and "stuff I ship" can be two different things-- I wrote a Ren/Strade ficlet once, but I don't really ship it, and I think Ren's a much better character in BTD 2 explicitly because Strade's dead. When it comes to stuff like BTD or even some of my old Tordtryck stuff, it's more about inhabiting the perspective of an abuse victim rather than shipping, if that makes sense.]
21. Have you ever received hate for a ship you liked?
Directly? Technically yes, once, but it was only a young kid bringing up Ye Olde Paultryck discourse to me, and I just tried to politely explain that I wasn't interested in rehashing that drama. Because I get it! There's a lot of context that's been lost here, and if you're just a young tween getting into this show, the accusations being made against shippers are quite upsetting! But that wasn't so much hate as concern.
There's also of course the indirect "paul and pat both hate the ship," "you're shipping real people," "you're shipping a dead man's oc" kinda hate that most every shipper in the EW fandom's seen at least once.
I think I've largely avoided hate by a) being irrelevant lmao and b) most of my ships being acceptable enough within their own fandoms. (Catradora is a five-season nightmare and YinxYuck is arguably incest, but both are so popular within their respective communities that sending someone hate for them is gonna get you laughed out of the room.)
I hope that all made sense, lol. Thank you for the ask!
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