Your Guide To Fandom Ships and New Characters That Interfere With Them

[obsession_inc]

Some times, when one main character and another main character keep looking at each other intensely, and get scared for each other's safety, and each finds the other's company and opinions more valuable than anyone else's, and both main characters are pretty hot and they have chemistry like WHOA, a ship is born.  And shippers board this ship and

Comments

[sophia_helix]

A small weird backlash will occur in which it is "edgy" to write fic about that female minor character. Most of these fics are kind of self-conscious and weird.

Grr, this is true, and I always feel that it's because these stories come from a different place than stories about the het OTP. I know this because it always happens when I try to write a story about this type of character -- I do it because I feel like she is getting a bad rap (see icon), but because the purpose isn't to explore the squee or emotional connection I've made to the other two characters, the stories get talky and message-y and dull. (I have a lot of bad half-written Karen Filipelli stories on my HD.) I think the other thing that happens is that people are writing the story because they genuinely do love and connect with the character -- but because those characters are almost always way more 2D than Our Heroes, the writers have to make up a whole lot more and as a result don't feel quite as hooked into canon and can be stilted in a different way. Rarely is the Threatening Female actually a rounded character whom people can genuinely explore.

[lyssie]

I've always thought it was also sort of a "look, see, we really like this female character, now stop bothering us so we can get back to our ship and bashing of her now!" thing, too.

It's partly why, while I love things like halfamoon, I feel like we shouldn't have to force people to write about the minor characters. Which ends up being a catch-22. If we don't force them, no one will write about them.