#extra especially if they're seen as 'competing' with a white m/m ship though that's a different can of worms

[asleepinawell]

I've always felt that shoot's dynamic spoiled my expectations for patience and nuance in romantic entanglements. In their canon interactions, they really seem to accept each other "as is" and though their obviously fictional and the situational context is extreme, it's kind of #goals to just not have to hide shit and like put on a face. Their dynamic doesn't seem draining. Does that make sense? 1/2

Hey, so I actually answered an ask a while back that I think might cover some of this which you can find here. It's a brief analysis of their relationship and I think it agreed with everything in the first part of your ask.

For the other part... There's definitely some writers who write shoot in ways that don't line up at all with the way I see them. As you said, everyone has their own reasons for writing something a certain way and sees it through the lens of their own perspective. It does especially bother me to see Shaw portrayed as being cruel or abusive because it seems extremely disrespectful of her pd and everything her character tried to be, but, well, see my last sentence. If I don't like something I shut the tab and move on.

For the last bit...the link I linked above covered what I think about their dynamic, but I did want to add something about context. I think it's extremely hard to remove context from, well, just about any story. If you take away the context and rules of the world a story is written in then you've already changed the dynamic. Of course this brings up the question of fanfic and AUs. I feel like there's two main approaches to removing context in fic AUs: 1) assume the audience knows the context already and leave the dynamics intact even if they wouldn't normally fit in the setting, and 2) change certain aspects of the dynamic to make it fit the world better. I usually try for something in the middle + making my worlds somewhat compatible with the canon one. So basically I don't think you could translate them directly to a real world context.

If you want to know what a couple sort of like shoot in a real world context might look like, I'm not completely sure either. Two women who had a really hard time fitting in in the world and were different levels of jaded and who didn't think they could find happiness with another person and they just fell into each other's lives and eventually formed a partnership. And even beyond that...one of the reasons shoot resonated so deeply with me is even in the brief amount of time we get with them their relationship felt so deeply queer to me, not only because they're both women, but because everything about them and their relationship defies heteronormative standards. It felt so important to me seeing that and I really wonder if some of the interpretations of other people that I come across that don't match up with how I see them are people not having that lens to see them through.