#basically vera is bitey

[rxttenfish]

Damien x Liam

&

Zoe x Vera

Shipping meme.

oh, damien and liam is one of those classic monprom ships! i think the very first ship art i saw from monprom was damien and liam? it sounds right, though it has been over five years since i first joined, so that could just be my memory not serving me well. point goes is that it's a prominent one and gotta be one of the most popular of the RO x RO ships, and definitely one that's the most alluded to in canon.

the issue is just... i still don't like it very much. to be fair i like very few m/m ships, and i know this is such a popular dynamic that from the offset it just automatically felt the most like a ship that would get popular, but it's a popular dynamic that i hate a lot. i don't really care for the bully/nerd dynamic nor the things it sets up, and especially with things like it highlighting damien's toxic masculinity combining less than favorably with how much liam openly and directly talks about things like sexism within the game itself. it's just... unfortunate, i think.

it feels like everything just conspired to make me hate this ship. it's liam, one of my favorite characters, with damien, one of my least favorite characters. most of the events with these two involve damien beating liam up or beating him down, and while i would agree that the two are still friends from the events that are exceptions to this rule and how it just plays out when it does happen (liam is... very directly the masochistic type, so it doesn't necessarily strike me as out of character or even a badly thought out part of the dynamic if this is part of the selling point on a friendship with damien for liam), it always feels weird and off-putting to me. i think this probably works best, and i prefer it best, as them being occasional fuckbuddies on top of friends, less as a proper romantic relationship.

zoe and vera is another ship that i've seen before, and i can definitely see it more than liam and damien. though i'm notoriously known for not really caring all that much for zoe as a character, thinking of her as kinda weakly written in comparison to some of the others on top of including tropes i hate, which also makes this complicated for me.

i think vera's also always an odd one to ship with, because there's a duality between her constructed image and how she allows people to approach her, and what she actually wants and needs in a relationship for emotional fulfillment. she needs someone who can make her relax and slow down, provide a way to remove her from her whole constructed image to let her be a person again, but they cannot simply disregard that image and what it means, cannot wholly discard her interests and ambitions and all that she's put work into attaining. there's a careful dance that has to be done to disarm her suspicions and her harshness before she lets someone in, but once they're in they need to be loving and fond and safe in a simple way, an easy way that vera otherwise would deny herself.

it's not that i don't think zoe could do it, could be that person. rather, zoe isn't very careful at much of anything that she does, and she's so overt and sometimes even pushy that i worry more about all of it making vera freeze up, shut down, lock zoe out. vera in comparison is... harsh and blunt, yes, but her personality is multi-layered and multi-faceted where what you see is not always what you are going to get, and being able to navigate the complexities of her moods and emotions are needed. she can be quick to punish and quick to say the exact kind of nasty things upon the slightest infraction that could all too easily hurt zoe. being overtly affectionate and positive can work, as we've seen with her friendship with scott, but it also needs an ability to take the punishment she can dole out, either just not getting it or not taking offense in either manner. this can also certainly be done if the other character is person-smart enough to realize what's going on beneath the surface, like polly. this doesn't feel, to me, like something that zoe can do, rather being more the type to take the first time vera lashes out as deep personal offense and either not recovering from it or taking a much longer time to recover from it.

which, again, isn't to say this can't work! i think it certainly could work well, especially if you're fleshing out a timeline or plotting this out more thoroughly, and after this specific period i could see them being very good for each other, but it's also something that is enough to make me skeptical.