possibly I'm overthinking this

[pellucid]

Recently I decided that as something of a fic writing experiment, I should break out of my habitual mold and try to write a sort of fic I usually do not write: fluffy ship fic. The idea was spurred primarily by running into a couple of pairings that I wanted to read fic about but whose fandoms had a dearth of the sort of thing I wanted to read. If

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[pellucid]

John/Aeryn would fit into my "exception" category, along with Booth/Brennan and probably most other couples that have a canonical relationship (assuming said canonical relationship isn't so screwed up and/or angsty that it allows for no fluff at all--but that would be sad, really!). Though I didn't really specify it, I'm really talking about a fairly narrow subset of pairings and fics that push particular buttons. We'll call them the "angsty cop partner buttons," in the model of Mulder and Scully (before Mulder and Scully actually got together). Said pairing is not in a canonical romantic relationship, but there's a close friendship and lots of sparkly chemistry. They're attracted to one another but can't/don't act on it for any number of reasons--because they work together, because they're afraid of ruining the friendship, because they've got various issues from other relationships or other things in their lives, etc. If there's a bit of codependency involved, all the better. It's all very cookie-cutter--so much so that Bones can build an entire show around knowingly playing with the tropes--but what can I say, I'm a sucker for that kind of thing. Blame it on my having been a hardcore Mulder/Scully shipper in my formative years!

Even within that subset of similar pairings (and the similar fic written about them: I'm a particular fan of the shippy post-ep scene after an episode that's had one or both members of the pairing in mortal peril, which is similar to what I'm trying to write for Mac and Stella), I'm sure there are plenty of people who would argue hard for the individuality of each particular pairing. But I think for myself the pleasure of viewing and of reading within that genre is actually the repetition of the trope: its reliability and sameness is sort of comforting, I guess. It's probably not a coincidence that most of the pairings that I fall for in this way are from procedural shows--also a genre with a certain comfortable reliability to its repetitive narrative tropes.