'shipping ambivalently

[pellucid]

The TV Meme got me thinking a bit about X-Files again, and yesterday I went poking on youtube for old XF clips. I didn't necessarily find what I was looking for, but at one point I noticed that one of the fanvids in the sidebar had had over 45,000 hits. What kind of vid, I thought, gets THAT many hits??? (It could go either way, you know...) A

Comments

[pellucid]

I'm not sure I'll ever rewatch the series straight through--part of me wants to, and part of me really doesn't--but I'd be interested to see what my reaction to the development of their relationship from FTF through IWTB would be now. Because when I was watching it as it aired, I was still absolutely watching through ship-colored glasses, and by the time I got so ambivalent about things, it was mostly in retrospect.

By the end, they'd both given up nearly everything, as their world became more and more claustrophobic. I guess what with the ending we were given, I wanted them to be together because (1.) they clearly loved one another (2.) if they weren't together, I couldn't see them being happy with anyone else, and I thought by that point they deserved some happiness. Hell, they were owed some happiness.

I absolutely agree with you here. The thing, though, that I find both compelling and devastatingly sad about them, is that I don't see any space for that happiness--and not just because the writers are stupid (though that too). They'll never be happy without each other, but could they really be happy with each other, either? There's such a strong element in which they ruined each other's lives--Mulder ruined Scully's most obviously, but it works the other way, too, in the sense that Scully, for the first time, gave Mulder something to lose. And when I look back and try to locate a time before it was too late for them--a time when they might have had some space for happiness, either with or without each other--and it's hard to find.

As for DS9, the politics and religion are far and away the best parts and the reason I'm watching. And I wouldn't say that I ship Odo and Kira in the sense that I want to draw hearts and flowers around them and read shippy fic about them. But right from the beginning I've been most drawn to both of them as individuals, and I find their relationship fascinating, and there is a certain part of me that is inclined to squee a little bit over them, even while I have various reservations about the wisdom of the pairing. But I don't ship anyone else and don't ship Kira and Odo all that emphatically (at least in a romantic sense; I always, however, want as much as I can get about the full, complicated nature of their relationship, most of which is not romantic). Mostly I'm in it for the Bajorans and Cardassians and all the post-occupation stuff.