your ship is not canon

[fanbeatsman]

ETA: just for clarification, because the essay doesn't really make this clear: I actually wouldn't say that the kind of "ship wars" described below are particularly common within this fandom, but these are some thoughts on why they might be happening in such corners of the fandom as they are (principally, on the Court Records forums).It seems to me

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[fanbeatsman]

I ship Valant/Thalassa too, myself (and, er, possibly Zak/Thalassa/Valant, back in the day), and I'd be made up if that became canon. But I actually thought that the games themselves were hinting towards Phoenix/Thalassa - with the comment about Trucy's mother being "beautiful", and all the emphasis on how he's saved her (like Liam says below, there's a slight - not very fully developed - parallel with Edgeworth, in that respect. Nick does seem to have a bit of a saving people thing). And then the fact that they're obviously tied together through the two kids. But I could be wrong, and I'd actually be happy if I was - I'd rather see Thalassa end up with Valant, if anyone (and yes, alright, Nick with Edgeworth ¬_¬).

m/f relationships and het desire are actually denigrated or refuted in canon

I think this is really, really important, yes. The Phoenix/Maya relationship is very interesting in that respect - because it's easy to read, throughout, their repeated denial of any kind of romantic feelings as a case of the lawyer (and his assistant) doth protest too much. It's a very common trope (I just finished reading something yesterday that based the central romance on it), and I think it's reasonable to think that a reader might come to the text expecting some kind of reversal. You never get it, though - it turns out they weren't lying, there really is no romance between them. So the games (refreshingly, imo) destabilise and undermine one of the normative, and heteronormative, horizons of expectation for a text like this. And then there's what valentinite noted as well, the fact that heterosexual love (or even perhaps just sexual love in general?) is repeatedly afforded negative connotations within the canon.

I feel your pain with the het ships, heh. There's so little written, and out of that so little that I'd want to read (Valant/Thalassa, Phoenix/Mia, Apollo/Ema, is pretty much the extent of my het shipping in this fandom - beyond the canon ships, of course, but tbh I'm rarely interested in reading fic about established canon pairings), that I find myself reading pretty much exclusively slash.

Thanks for commenting :) It's been really interesting to hear your thoughts.