that post about how Bones and Danno are kind of the same.
jehane18 and I were talking yesterday about how ships can be the same, that what drew you into one ship can draw you into some other one because it pings the same little place in your heart, and that reminded me that I hadn't written that Danno-is-sort-of-Bones thing. It's become more than that in the thinking about it!
When I was a kid, I watched a lot of classic movies. Old movies are pretty much what I consumed as a child--big colorful MGM musicals and little snarky RKO ones; noir films where you can never trust a dame and cynical Billy Wilder movies where you shouldn't but you do anyway and sometimes it actually turns out okay; and lots, and lots, and lots of romantic comedies. When I was eight, my two favorite movies were An American in Paris and His Girl Friday.
I really wanted to be Hildy.
What I realize now about these movies and how they shaped what I look for in romances and romantic pairings is: I love dialogue. I love movies where most of what happens is that people talk to each other. I love romances where the sex is just an extention of a really good conversation. And I also love a real equality, two people trying not so much for the upper hand but to keep the see-saw in balance, for whom the back and forth is part of the larger dance they're doing.
It shouldn't be surprising that, given this background, I love Ryan/Simon because all they do is banter and get under each others skin and then laugh because doing that is the best thing ever. And the het couples that I love--most of which are canon, so I don't often get into fic/fandom for them because I have the canon--are also pretty talkative, like Castle and Beckett on Castle or Peter and Harriet from the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries or Laura and Mr. Steele on Remington Steele or Chandler and Monica on Friends.
I love characters that can't stop talking, that can't quite make themselves shut up even though they really should, and I love when they get involved with someone else who either talks as much as they do, or talks back in the right moments but mostly loves listening to them blither on. I love characters that make themselves known through conversation, which is something I see in the canon moments of Harry and Hermione. Hermione talks a LOT, and while Harry sometimes wishes she'd stop he rarely actually says anything or does anything about it. Her criticisms roll off his back. And yet he always has his eye on her--their coded conversation after the Quidditch tryouts in HBP, when Harry makes it clear that he knows how Hermione helped Ron, is one of my favorite of their interactions.
Jim and Bones are banterers and talkers too, both in the reboot and in the original series. They have nicknames for each other and almost never call each other anything else, and there's a sense you get in the show (and in the shuttle scene in the movie) that when Bones really gets going on a tear, it's music to Jim's ears, like there's little he'd rather listen to than Bones going off on some thing or another.
Seamus and Dean are kind of like that too, in that Seamus has a great deal to say and Dean lets him talk, and Seamus is a bit more hyper than Dean, and Dean watches him flying around and is more than happy to do so. And coming back to canon, there's the Peter/El/Neal thing happening on White Collar--what I love about them, or really about the entire show, is that it's mostly about the dialogue, about what people say to each other.
Which brings me back around to Steve and Danny from Hawaii Five-O. There are many things I could say about this fandom, and might at some point, and I wouldn't say that this is a post to try to get folks into Steve/Danny because honestly, there are a lot of those, and they usually have more pictures. One of those things I could say is that the place has recently become kind of flooded by the folks who were shipping McShep back in SGA days, which is vaguely interesting though I don't find these characters to be particularly similar, mostly because McKay is that ever-popular slash fandom type, the Misanthropic Genius, where Danny Williams decidedly is not.
No, Danny Williams is emotionally volitile, incredibly ethical, dedicated to helping other people, and when pushed by people who take a few too many risks for his comfort, will give chapter and verse as to how and when risks should and should not be taken, Steven. And Steve will stand there, nodding, ask him if he's finished, and then do whatever he was probably going to do anyway. Oh, and did I mention that Danny's a divorced father of a little girl, who moved from New Jersey to Hawaii so he could still be in her daily life, and who isn't shy about telling people that he doesn't much like living in Hawaii?
Sound like anyone we know? Oh, plus? It's exec produced by our friends O&K. So there's that.
tl;dr: I've realized that I'm drawn to hyper verbal emotionally volitile characters, over and over again, and it doesn't matter all that much what they look like or what gender they are. It's much more about how they are able to put words together to describe exactly how they are feeling at that moment, because they have MANY FEELINGS, and how the people around them react either by talking right back to them, or by letting their words flow over them like a comforting rain. Give me that, and you'll get a shipper.
(I've attempted to talk about my personal tastes and preferences without apologizing for them or defending them against disparaging remarks that are often made, and instead presented them as something that is actually awesome because you know? They totally are! But that doesn't mean that other tastes aren't actually awesome, too.)
crossposted from Dreamwidth |
comments | comment at Dreamwidth