META: My OTPs and me
Since the summer, I’ve gotten into two of (what I consider) the oldest fandoms around: Star Trek and Sherlock Holmes. I pretty much discovered media fandom when we got our first internet hookup-dialup-when I was about 11 years old. I was never picky. I read FF.net for hours, just digging through page after page in any category I recognized and following any link that seemed remotely interesting. After a year of being scared to click on “yes” when asked “are you 18?”-I’m pretty sure I thought that lying on those things meant the FBI was instantly going to break down your door-I discovered PWP and, of course, slash and femslash. As a young fan, this startled me. My household isn’t what you’d call conservative. I got the sex talk in first grade, I started reading early and I read well above my grade level all through school. My parents never checked out what I was reading, so I got away with a lot. But their attitudes toward homosexuality were unexamined at best and politely creeped out at worst, and that’s what I internalized. My forays into anime and my attendance at an all-girls Catholic high school (the rumors are greatly exaggerated, but schoolgirl crushes and exploration were definitely there) changed my attitudes drastically, and I started reading and writing slash around my freshman year. This sense of having grown up in fandom, which I mentioned in my last post, makes me find the fact that I’m only just now getting into ST and Holmes kind of funny. Believe me, my 11-year-old self knew that ST fic was out there, and she thought it was gross. Those guys were old, right? Now, I’m becoming really interested in the sense of history that a lot of fen have, and the etiquette, jargon, and culture that hold fandom together. With that interest in fannish history in general, I’m more interested in my own fannish history, and so I bring you my list of OTPs in chronological order.
Mulder/Scully (The X-Files) Without a doubt, this is my first and forever OTP. TXF first aired in 1993. I was way too young to watch, but my dad used to. I remember hearing the theme music wafting up the stairs into my bedroom and being scared out of my mind by it at the time. But a scant two years later, my dad was vetting episodes for me (making sure they weren’t too gory or scary) and letting me join him in watching the taped versions. The first one I ever saw was “D.P.O.” and then, what are still my favorites today, “Szyzgy” and “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space.” And the show itself was clever, witty, scary, and told a damn good story. It was like the SF&F novels I was starting to discover. To this day we still talk about it together. I came across the concept of “shipping” (which actually came from XF fandom) in an issue of Entertainment Weekly that profiled all the episodes up to that point. Aha, I thought. Of course they were in love. I was a “Relationshipper.” And finding internet fanfiction a few years later just solidified it. When the show was in its death-throes, I was a persistent lurker at TWoP for the recaps and Fametracker, and I discovered snark, and just how hard a TV show can eventually break your heart. But the MSR is still one of my all-time favorites. It has just the right balance of sexual tension, banter, and the sense that both Mulder and Scully are complete people who just happen to fit together perfectly. Love them.
In between my XF phase and my anime phase, I was into Animorphs and Harry Potter above anything else. These were the two series I most often read fic for in middle school, but oddly enough, I didn’t really ship anyone in particular. I’d read anything, even though I found the popularity of Harry/Draco baffling, and I’d halfheartedly ship Harry/Ron if asked, since my best friend was an H/D fan and I felt like I had to balance out her love of foe-yay with my love of friends becoming something more. With Animorphs, I supported the canon relationships, but I didn’t really care one way or the other when there were alien battles to be had. Today, if I read HP fic at all, I enjoy Harry/Luna and Harry/Ron/Hermione.
I discovered anime through a friend in high school. For a few short years, I was obsessed. This is when I found about about conventions, yaoi/yuri, fangirl Japanese, vidding, MSTing, and fanwank. There are other shows and mangas that I really enjoyed then, and read fic for (Trigun, Cowboy Bebop, Gravitation, FAKE) but my OTPs from this time are:
Hisoka Kurosaki/Tsuzuki Asato (Yami no Matseui/Descendants of Darkness): Okay, the anime isn’t great, and I never got my hands on the manga because they only started translating it at the end of my anime fannishness, but I just loved this relationship dynamic. It didn’t hurt that they fit the “at first unwilling partners with dark pasts who come to totally rely on each other” mold that M/S had introduced me to, but they were also both very pretty. Hisoka was a world-weary snarky sort with a dark past who had empathic powers and a soft spot for Tsuzuki, Tsuzuki was a manic, happy, silly guy with a dark past and elemental powers. I loved the idea of the two of them being the only ones to understand each other, and I loved the idea of telepathic sex.
Ban/Ginji (Get Backers) GB was a fun shonen/action series that had too much sexual tension between absolutely every character for its own good. Ban and Ginji were partners in a “retrieval agency” who recovered stolen or lost things for their clients. Constantly short of cash, they lived together in their tiny VW Bug. Ban was a world-weary snarky sort who had mind control powers and a soft spot for Ginji, Ginji was a manic, happy, silly guy with a dark past and electrical powers. Are we sensing a pattern here?
After high school, and for the first year or so of college, I took a mini-fandom hiatus. I didn’t really come back until a friend of mine lent me Firefly and I became a big fan of Mal/Inara, though I don’t really count it in my big list. I also ended up doing a rewatch of Buffy and becoming a Buffy/Faith and Giles/Buffy shipper. Actually, though these are the pairings I’ll seek out, I’ll read pretty much anything in either fandom.
My fannishness came back strong with the Iron Man movie. I ship the hell out of Tony/Pepper. I loved Pepper’s character in the movie, her combination of no-nonsense and snark goes beautifully with Tony’s egomania and playfulness. They have fantastic banter, and the boss/assistant/partners relationship that I so enjoy watching unfold. Tony Stark is also something of a LBD for me. I’ve read great stories paring him with Rhodey, Peter Parker, Bruce Wayne, and even Robert Downey Jr. (whoa, mindfreak!)
Since I graduated from college, fandom has been a sustaining interest for me more than ever. When you’re looking for a job and trying to find a place to live, taking a fic break every now and then makes a lot of sense. I watched the rebooted Battlestar Galactica and shipped Bill Adama and Laura Roslin more than I’ve shipped anyone in a long time. I think I actually squeed out loud when they kissed in season 2. Plus, Laura Roslin has got to be one of my favorite characters of all time. She’s just so badass and has such incredible shades of gray…she embodies devotion to an ideal and conflicting ideas of how power should be used. I know a lot of people felt that she was ill served by her season 4 plotline, but there’s very little that could ever diminish my love for her. She’s just awesome, and her relationship with Adama has a slow build and an establishment of mutual respect between equals that I’ve rarely seen in a show.
Finally, this summer I saw the Star Trek reboot…three times. What a fantastic and fun movie, and the cast is so pretty and does such a great job as an ensemble. I remembered watching some of the TOS episodes with my dad back in the day, and I checked them out online again. Two words: Amok Time. That sealed it. There is obviously a wealth of Kirk/Spock out there, and I read most of it over a span of 2 months. This pairing has everything I love: a solid partnership, a long history, sexual tension, a sense that both Kirk and Spock admire and respect each other, and telepathic bonds (you know, I blame Mercedes Lackey for that particular kink, now that I think about it). Plus, they’re always saving each other. Of course, now that the fandom has exploded again, I’ve also been shipping Spock/Uhura, Kirk/Spock/Uhura (this category has some of the hottest OT3 fic I’ve ever read in my life) and Kirk/Spock/McCoy.
And just when I thought I couldn’t get into anything older than old-school Star Trek, the new Sherlock Holmes movie comes out and proves me completely wrong. I’ve already talked about my issues with Robert Downey Jr. above, and though I’ve never seen the interest in Jude Law before, there’s something about that mustache that’s just criminally hot. Also, the banter, the partnership, the history (I’ve been working my way through the stories and novels, and I don’t think the movie is exaggerating anything pairing-wise), the living together, the Victorian repression…I’ve got to say that my newest OTP is definitely Holmes/Watson. Is it just me, or have I gone through fandoms completely backwards?
So here are some things that my OTPs have in common: partnerships/long friendships that often begin in a professional setting, often involve people who are in positions of authority or are specialists in something, often one partner is more action oriented while one is more logic/thought oriented (but they can usually both kick ass when necessary), snark/banter, a slow build of sexual tension, egalitarianism, one light-haired person/one dark-haired person (that’s weird), and sometimes a telepathic bond. I'm not quite sure what that says about me, but something tells me that no matter how GGG my eventual partner is, I'm going to have to let the telepathic bond (ha, I originally wrote "bone" oh Freudian slips) thing go.