OTP meme
Apparently memes are another one of those things you don't do unless you have time to burn: from sockkpuppett, I think, this is the explicate your ship/OTP paradigm one, only it really did turned out as more of a panegyric, despite my best effort at quelling.
The obvious thing is I love partner-based ships -- detectives or crime-fighters of some stripe, usually. There's something about the combination of forced reluctant intimacy, repressed intensity, compartmentalization and strict formal boundaries that just slays me: friendships that are complicated by a vital professional relationship, and love that complicates and is complicated by both. And I like the accidental quality -- deep, powerful, life-defining relationships founded on some bureaucratic pen-stroke; the fact that these people weren't looking for this, for each other, and that there is always nearly as much pushing them apart as drawing them together. These are chance connections that become strong, known, tested, but remain delicate, simultaneously as thoughtless and unexamined as an intake of breath, yet suffused with tension, circling a central ambivalence.
But being built on friendship makes my ships all very vanilla: calm, caring, heading towards the prosaic. (Sex is an afterthought, if it happens at all.) Paperwork shows up a lot. Killing time. Stake-outs and long stretches of empty highway. Bad coffee. But that's the charm. Instead of epic romance and violent passions, you have to work within an emotional range that's quiet, ordinary and understated. These people may be heroes and idealists, righting wrongs, saving people, but the view from the trenches is decidedly unromantic. Grand angst, the kind you carry around in slop buckets and wallow in is inessential, verging on out of place. (Not that writers don't go there anyway, but melodrama and big scale angst aren't inherent in the dynamic.) These relationships are like vast, deep lakes, with the mundane surface agitation always most apparent and only the barest hint of the huge, sightless forces moving in the depths.
Happiness in these ships tends to be closer to contentment, warm and comfortable and nearly invisible (at least until it's gone) -- sinking into attachment, lines blurring, all the while lit up with the unacknowledged buzz of attraction and possibility. And when pain comes it's more aches or the tug of scar tissue than bright hot agony -- the gaps between what you want and what you have; the sour taste of longing and frustration; the slow accumulation of mistakes and misunderstandings and tiny betrayals that makes people drift apart or fall out of love by imperceptible degrees; the pitiless, irreversible march of time; the way anything lived-in and familiar eventually grows dog-eared and too well known, taken for granted; learning to settle and letting dreams and fantasies go. Or, above all, being perpetually arrested just short, no matter how far you move forward, all those possibilities and how you thought it would be forever receding, mirage-like, intangible, reality never matching the vivid, depthless scope of imagination. But nothing real or external or concrete, nothing you can point to or delineate or understand.
Nothing you can't live with.
Tragedy in the ships I love best is never what happens; it's the long, slow grind of living with it afterward. Life rolls on, unconnected to the all little dramas playing out, hardly visible, inside minds and hearts. Instead you get more cups of bad coffee, stacks of paperwork and a job that needs doing world without end.
The obvious thing is I love partner-based ships -- detectives or crime-fighters of some stripe, usually. There's something about the combination of forced reluctant intimacy, repressed intensity, compartmentalization and strict formal boundaries that just slays me: friendships that are complicated by a vital professional relationship, and love that complicates and is complicated by both. And I like the accidental quality -- deep, powerful, life-defining relationships founded on some bureaucratic pen-stroke; the fact that these people weren't looking for this, for each other, and that there is always nearly as much pushing them apart as drawing them together. These are chance connections that become strong, known, tested, but remain delicate, simultaneously as thoughtless and unexamined as an intake of breath, yet suffused with tension, circling a central ambivalence.
But being built on friendship makes my ships all very vanilla: calm, caring, heading towards the prosaic. (Sex is an afterthought, if it happens at all.) Paperwork shows up a lot. Killing time. Stake-outs and long stretches of empty highway. Bad coffee. But that's the charm. Instead of epic romance and violent passions, you have to work within an emotional range that's quiet, ordinary and understated. These people may be heroes and idealists, righting wrongs, saving people, but the view from the trenches is decidedly unromantic. Grand angst, the kind you carry around in slop buckets and wallow in is inessential, verging on out of place. (Not that writers don't go there anyway, but melodrama and big scale angst aren't inherent in the dynamic.) These relationships are like vast, deep lakes, with the mundane surface agitation always most apparent and only the barest hint of the huge, sightless forces moving in the depths.
Happiness in these ships tends to be closer to contentment, warm and comfortable and nearly invisible (at least until it's gone) -- sinking into attachment, lines blurring, all the while lit up with the unacknowledged buzz of attraction and possibility. And when pain comes it's more aches or the tug of scar tissue than bright hot agony -- the gaps between what you want and what you have; the sour taste of longing and frustration; the slow accumulation of mistakes and misunderstandings and tiny betrayals that makes people drift apart or fall out of love by imperceptible degrees; the pitiless, irreversible march of time; the way anything lived-in and familiar eventually grows dog-eared and too well known, taken for granted; learning to settle and letting dreams and fantasies go. Or, above all, being perpetually arrested just short, no matter how far you move forward, all those possibilities and how you thought it would be forever receding, mirage-like, intangible, reality never matching the vivid, depthless scope of imagination. But nothing real or external or concrete, nothing you can point to or delineate or understand.
Nothing you can't live with.
Tragedy in the ships I love best is never what happens; it's the long, slow grind of living with it afterward. Life rolls on, unconnected to the all little dramas playing out, hardly visible, inside minds and hearts. Instead you get more cups of bad coffee, stacks of paperwork and a job that needs doing world without end.