on shipping, canon and end of romance.
So, while writing this Bones fic titled "10 Kisses & Endings Booth and Brennan Could've Had, But Didn't" (so far I only have 6 bits written, if I can't finish it, I'll just post it as such) I kept thinking about the madcrazy B/B shippers of the fandom and how they might react to the fic. Basically the whole fic is just a way for me to make them make out as much as possible, and play with AU, and to justify to myself and perhaps to the fandom why they haven't kissed yet.
Why? Because that's what you hear a certain portion of the fandom complaining about. "Why haven't they kissed? Why can't they get together?! OH GOD JUST SEX ALREADY!" and so on. I personally embrace them not kissing because I'm enjoying the UST so much and don't think they're ready to deal with the whole "we might like each other a lot" scenario, and I love the way it's all developing sloooowly.
Another thing that I kept wondering about was how I basically get B/B together in the fic, just to break them apart and how this might not sit well with some shippers. It's pretty funny how certain ships form into these Ultimate Love/Romance type of ideals for their shippers so breaking up the OTP is a bad, bad thing and should never, under any circumstances be done. Like Harry/Hermione, but that's too obvious an example. I got some slag in the FF7 fandom in a form of an e-mail from an angry Cloud/Tifa fangirl who'd read my fic where the two break up. I don't understand why she read it, I warned in the header and everything.
Of course it's also all about how you break up a pairing in a fic. I for example have written break-up fics for some pairings I ship, that don't end happily. Okay, only one, but damn if I don't love that pairing. But even as I wrote them breaking up, the fic was basically showing how much they loved each other and how sad it was they just couldn't make it work. A pet peeve of mine is when a pairing is broken up to get some other pairing together. Especially when the fic's tone is all "this pairing is wrongwrongwrong, and this other one is Ultimate Love".
I'm rambling. This Bones fic of mine is not either of the above mentioned break up fic formats, it's kind of "realistic" in that way that people broke up, even if they had fun together, and maybe under some circumstances, Brennan and Booth just wouldn't be good together. Like, they wouldn't understand each other and that wouldn't bode well for the relationship, no matter how much hot sex they had.
But to go back to the whole "end of romance" thing, I think that's kind of a problem with fandoms that aren't pairing-focused (I'd argue Bones is a pairing-focused fandom) where there's no specific OTP everybody technically should get behind. If you pair something enthusiastically in a non-pairing-focused fandom, you can risk building expectations for a pairing you love that the canon will just never ever live up to. And that's going to feel harsh if you build up ideals for the pairing, as well, like to think they're what love is all about, romance culminates in their possible romance and so on.
With Bones, if they let down the shippers, they let down 97% of their audience and one could say they've failed in what they tried to achieve but for a non-pairing-focused fandom it's different. Then the people getting hopelessly upset over a pairing are mostly just taking shipping too seriously. I suppose that's really one of the main things on how to know whether something is a pairing-focused fandom or not. If shippers are important in the general crowd of fans and pleasing shippers is extremely important to the makers of canon then I suppose it's fair to say the fandom is pairing-focused.
I don't know where I was going with this, just had to get some of these things down. Might as well leave it unlocked though I'll totally admit none of my fandom theories ever stand much discussion so feel free to prove me wrong or whatever. :)