Always the same 'ship, just with different couples...

[elisi]

I've been re-reading Gaudy Night (like you do), and one sentence suddenly stood out. Well a lot of them did, obviously, because it's a wonderful book, but I've been thinking about how Peter and Harriet are my 'shipping blueprint, and there is was, perfectly:

That, then, was what he wanted her for. For some reason, obscure to herself and probably also to him, she had the power to force him outside his defences.

Because that is it - the thing that runs through every couple I've ever shipped. Buffy/Spike (although there it is him forcing her out of her defences), Jack/Ianto, Doctor/River, and - with a slight variation, in that these couples are also very old - Spike/Angel and Doctor/Master. Heck you can add Cutter/Leetah to that list, and Howl/Sophie - or even Elizabeth/Darcy... (um, not me. The Austen version.)

To quote the book again (it makes more sense in context - there's poetry involved - but I think it works on its own):

He did not want to forget, or to be quiet, or to be spared things, or to stay put. All he wanted was some kind of central stability, and he was apparently ready to take anything that came along, so long as it stimulated him to keep that precarious balance.

It's not about the strength of their [~romantic~] feelings (how *do* you measure love, anyway?), or about making each other happy; indeed a lot of my 'ships have at various points tried to kill each other. But that connection is still there, that ability to force honesty from each other:

"And I can fool Giles, and I can fool my friends, but I can't fool myself. Or Spike, for some reason."

"It's not pretty, but it's real."

I could go on, but I think this speaks for itself pretty well. All thoughts welcome.

(promethia_tenk have you finished it yet? *looks hopeful* My ear is open like a greedy shark to catch the tunings of a voice divine...)

Comments

[promethia_tenk]

Ah now, that's a very good distinction. I shall subscribe to this newsletter.
:-) I publish bi-monthly, except when I don't feel like it, which is often. As a token of appreciation, a small introductory gift has been sent to your address, but will probably be lost in the mail.

Although I also tend to go down the road of trying to make the bad stuff make sense. :)
Frankly, I think more people need to try to do that. Ok, in literary criticism there is a concept, the term for which escapes me (which drives me nuts), but it essentially amounts to giving the writer the benefit of the doubt--have you heard of this? It's an easy thing to blame a writer and say they screwed up or were wrong or are a bad writer or whatever, but that's really a fairly unsound foundation for interpreting a creative work. The writer chooses all their words. If they wrote something, you need to assume that they mean for it to be there. And, as a reader, if something doesn't make sense or disturbs or seems incongruous or what have you, it is your job first to try to figure out why it's there and to fit it into the rest of the work in a way that makes sense, not to immediately dismiss the writer. I think often internet fan communities operate on exactly the opposite principle . . .

[elisi]

:-) I publish bi-monthly, except when I don't feel like it, which is often. As a token of appreciation, a small introductory gift has been sent to your address, but will probably be lost in the mail.
:D

If they wrote something, you need to assume that they mean for it to be there. And, as a reader, if something doesn't make sense or disturbs or seems incongruous or what have you, it is your job first to try to figure out why it's there and to fit it into the rest of the work in a way that makes sense, not to immediately dismiss the writer. I think often internet fan communities operate on exactly the opposite principle . . .
*nods a lot* I think this is because most fans (when it comes to TV shows) have an agenda - I mean, they have a particular area of investment, be it a 'ship or character (or something else) and they look out for that above all else. And because of that they're often ready to be offended. I remember reading some people complaining about Martha/Mickey somewhere - not the idea of it, but the fact that they only got a few minutes screentime, and how this obviously showed that RTD couldn't care less about Martha. When in reality of course he had wanted to include both of them in Children of Earth (including their relationship, one presumes), but it quite simply didn't work out because both actors were busy. So I am always wary of judging things on a surface level, because we never know about all the stuff behind the scenes.

OTOH you get stuff like the Buffy comics, where so many people desperately try to wring sense and purpose out of something that clearly has neither. But they refuse to consider the idea that maybe this time the writer really didn't care to craft something properly, and that the result is a confused mess. (Lord knows I've tried to look at the upsides, but that particular story has gone out of its way to be as offensive and stupid as possible. Meh. I'll shut up now...)