Your Guide To Fandom Ships and New Characters That Interfere With Them

[obsession_inc]

Some times, when one main character and another main character keep looking at each other intensely, and get scared for each other's safety, and each finds the other's company and opinions more valuable than anyone else's, and both main characters are pretty hot and they have chemistry like WHOA, a ship is born.  And shippers board this ship and

Comments

[sophia_helix]

A small weird backlash will occur in which it is "edgy" to write fic about that female minor character. Most of these fics are kind of self-conscious and weird.Grr, this is true, and I always feel that it's because these stories come from a different place than stories about the het OTP. I know this because it always happens when I try to write a story about this type of character -- I do it because I feel like she is getting a bad rap (see icon), but because the purpose isn't to explore the squee or emotional connection I've made to the other two characters, the stories get talky and message-y and dull. (I have a lot of bad half-written Karen Filipelli stories on my HD.) I think the other thing that happens is that people are writing the story because they genuinely do love and connect with the character -- but because those characters are almost always way more 2D than Our Heroes, the writers have to make up a whole lot more and as a result don't feel quite as hooked into canon and can be stilted in a different way. Rarely is the

[lyssie]

I've always thought it was also sort of a "look, see, we really like this female character, now stop bothering us so we can get back to our ship and bashing of her now!" thing, too.

It's partly why, while I love things like halfamoon, I feel like we shouldn't have to force people to write about the minor characters. Which ends up being a catch-22. If we don't force them, no one will write about them.

[ellen_fremedon]

And when the canon het ship is threatened by a same-sex love interest... she's Tara on Buffy, because I can't think of a single other time that's happened.

[havocthecat]

OH, TARA. I loved her so. (I know this is totally OT, but still, it had to be said.)

There wasn't that much vitriol directed at Oz for getting in the way of Tara/Willow, IIRC. Or am I misremembering?

[telepresence]

By the time Tara/Willow was happening Seth Green was basically off of the show, so Oz wasn't really around to interfere or be hated.

[havocthecat]

Being off the show really hasn't stopped the hatred with some female characters who got in the way of other pairings, though.

[wemblee]

I <3 this post.

[korilian]

I see you're point and second it. From my own experiences I don't think the response to M/M+F is that different from what you described for M/F+F though.
In SGA fandom the female 'interloper' Keller gets A LOT of scorn (I suspect she would have been universally popular if the writers had shipped her with Ronon like they seemed to be planning...), but on the pit of voles she and her canon partner are being shipped like Woah.

Actually that might be telling in itself. On LJ the different ships tend to be segregated into their own comms a lot. I guess we might be seeing the downside to that in the way people cling to their ships.

[tokenblkgirl]

I feel like I can't adequately describe how wonderful this post is and I won't even try. But I will say AMEN to everything you've said here and thank you for posting thoughts I've had for ages now. These describe pretty much every fandom in at the moment.