Ye olde pairing meme
I'll do the questions at the end later, if they haven't been covered yet by my extensive rambling. :P
SIX PAIRINGS I LIKE
Pretty much selected at random:
1. Ban/Ginji. CRAP I CAN'T TALK ABOUT GETBACKSUBROSA SUBMISSIONS YET. I've been reading some of the recent fic on the regular comm, though, and finding that I agree with the approach if not necessarily the execution - which kind of blows my theory out of the water that I'm the only one who's really interested in what takes place when Ban and Ginji get it on, as opposed to just finding them unbearably cute. XD I don't mean everyone else pulls a FTB, just that what drives me in this case is taking the lid off an intimate relationship and looking at what the characters don't show other people, or each other in public. Swordspoint fic often takes this angle. As opposed to--
2. Hikaru/Akira. Not that the obsession isn't there, but you know, if you really gave them the choice between making out and playing go... And just think, it's a choice that repeats itself. EVERY NIGHT. We could do something else, or... yes. We could, in fact, play go. I can't even think of a fic in the fandom in which Hikaru and Akira have sex and nothing else in particular happens, so for the hell of it I'm going to write one. There, I've spoilered the next round of blind_go and everything.
3. Clark/Lex. I got this meme most recently off bravecows, who listed this as The Ultimate Slash Ship, and it really is - for all the reasons she stated. Honestly though I've never even watched a full episode of Smallville all the way through, I just feel like I have. I used to watch Lois & Clark pretty religiously but I don't remember much of it. XD; And every time I mention this I feel obliged to try to explain how the original Superman movie was the first foreign film I ever watched, and what I took away from it (I was three and it TOTALLY messed with my head), but it's just too much work.
4. Kurogane/Fai. DAER CLAMP if you don't mind I'll just, like, steal them for my origfic, kthx. Was talking with sub_divided about how Fai (and to an extent Shaoran and Sakura) solves Kurogane's issues, because faced with that he basically went, you know what, I am actually a well-adjusted person! Kind of lost sight of it for a while there, ha ha!
5. Dorian/Klaus. Another one I was talking about with sub_divided. It was either going to be this or Richard/Alec; there's only one real point of analogy, that being you can make a good case for both characters being total assholes. YES, DORIAN TOO. Yet despite that they're likeable, or at any rate liked, by most everyone. I sort of went on a bit confusedly about (what I saw as) the use of satire and Jungian shadow figures in the manga, and also that IMO the relationship should never be consummated, ever, that was the point that made it transcendant. Ask me for a real essay one of these days ok.
6. Ryousuke/Keisuke/Takumi, which I usually just write out like this because it's easier than listing the permutations. I was - I shouldn't admit this - I was having this weird fantasy about Ryousuke today in Operations Management class. We were doing process flowcharting of a hospital emergency room, and I was thinking, Ryousuke come audit this class with me. McGill actually has this program called MBA-MD, where you do 45 credits of the MBA programme between undergrad and med school, then you go to med school and take the remaining MBA classes on the side. And then presumably you become a big-shot hospital director. It's exactly as insane as it sounds. There are only two people in the programme this year, a guy and a girl, and the guy is 21. Other people in my class have kids who're 21. Said MBA-MDer, not!Sai, and I are doing a team business simulation for L'Oreal that's kind of like Rome: Total War, only with face creams in lieu of centurions. I live in terror that it's like Ender's Game and the team that wins the competition will turn out to have been running L'Oreal's marketing department all along. THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH INID PAIRINGS DID IT, SORRY FOR THE REAL LIFE INTRUSION. I guess at some point I had the epiphany that Ryousuke would probably be more at home doing an MBA than he would be in Med, which... means he'd be a great hospital director. SHIT.
Anyway it's not like he's my imaginary boyfriend or anything, because I think he's gay.
THREE SHIPS I'VE ABANDONED
7. Naoe/Kagetora. BOLD STATEMENT AMIRITE. The thing with my so-called abandoned ships is I usually feel like XYZ could never be relevant to my interests again, ever, but when push comes to shove it always comes back full force. You could find me a, a, I dunno, a really great Kurama x Hiei fic right now and I'd still sit there and read it. (Actually, hell yeah if you could find me a KxH fic that's really great by today's exalted standards.) So this column is more like INTENTIONALLY ON ICE, because I value my sanity.
8. Tezuka/Fuji. I had to think for a second before I remembered there was such a thing as the PoT fandom in my life once. XD This was a weird one anyway, I couldn't fathom why I liked it even when I was writing it. I never want to read fic for it anymore but I still get these weird flashes of wanting to write it, or AUs of it, whereas it's usually the other way around.
9. Sirius/Remus. One of those cases where you can't tell what happened to you until you see it in the rear view mirror. I'd been a hardcore lurker in HP but after book 5 I stopped reading the fic, cold turkey, and it took me ages even to get around to seeing the third movie. I got back into the saddle with book 6 but the whole thing had sort of reconfigured itself in my head in the interim.
THREE FOUR A NUMBER OF SHIPS I'VE NEVER LIKED
10. Sydney/Hardin. This is not like #11 where I honestly feel like the people who ship it have a vastly different interpretation of canon than what I see happening, it's more like... he screws him over so badly, people. SO BADLY. Sydney's got his reasons but it's not a stellar manifestation of humanity's potential for goodness and light. If you have the gumption to explore that then more power to you. Historically I've waffled back and forth on liking the characters to begin with; it's one of those where articulating what rubs me wrong goes a good way toward defusing the sentiment (cf. 58). But still.
* Gojyo/Hakkai has been taken off this list as I have revised my feelings regarding it. Some of you know the low-down, if not, feel free to ask.
11. Aizen/Momo. I DUNNO DO YOU SEE A PATTERN. It really is about the power dynamic and not the stabbity, I have nothing against Drace/Gabranth for instance (fandom writes that one exactly as I like reading it, i.e. as if it were an AU of Motoko/Batou). I even like Aizen/Gin. But Gin knows exactly what is up, and therein lies the difference.
12. Aya/Ken. I'm sorry, this is coming out of nowhere and dumping on something (some of) you don't even remember was there to be dumped on, but I've always found the idea so desperately boring. XD;
** Tsuzuki/Hisoka. That just puts it over, the defriending queue starts to the left. Probably this will be taken off the list as well once I figure out what my beef is (at a guess: a total inability to identify with Hisoka's emotional responses, which I think is the selling point for people who do ship the pairing).
*** I think I could actually go on listing. I never do this and it's sort of freeing. XD Roy/Lisa? No, I'll stop.
TWO SHIPS THAT HAVE PIQUED MY INTEREST
This is harder than all the rest put together, because I cursorily read a metric ton of pairings.
13. Ed/Al, but not really as a pairing ship, like all my other brotherly ships. Fuji/Yuuta etc. Thing is I don't read Ed/Al fic, but I read Supernatural fic (because I read everything), and it just comes across as a re-build of Ed/Al. XD;;; Does anyone else get this, or am I a special snowflake?
14. Owen Pallett/Zach Condon, ahahaha omg. Just because subterrain writes it - I only need one person to write any pairing well. I wouldn't be able to deliver it the way she does, though, at any rate not naturalistically (though I've done bits of RPS on request before). Metaphorically, perhaps. By which I mean a high school AU. In the mode of Scott Pilgrim. I'm seriously considering this for SSBB - I mean, given what else people turn in by way of thinly-disguised etc. - but I can't figure out what else to name them.
SIX PAIRINGS I LIKE
Pretty much selected at random:
1. Ban/Ginji. CRAP I CAN'T TALK ABOUT GETBACKSUBROSA SUBMISSIONS YET. I've been reading some of the recent fic on the regular comm, though, and finding that I agree with the approach if not necessarily the execution - which kind of blows my theory out of the water that I'm the only one who's really interested in what takes place when Ban and Ginji get it on, as opposed to just finding them unbearably cute. XD I don't mean everyone else pulls a FTB, just that what drives me in this case is taking the lid off an intimate relationship and looking at what the characters don't show other people, or each other in public. Swordspoint fic often takes this angle. As opposed to--
2. Hikaru/Akira. Not that the obsession isn't there, but you know, if you really gave them the choice between making out and playing go... And just think, it's a choice that repeats itself. EVERY NIGHT. We could do something else, or... yes. We could, in fact, play go. I can't even think of a fic in the fandom in which Hikaru and Akira have sex and nothing else in particular happens, so for the hell of it I'm going to write one. There, I've spoilered the next round of blind_go and everything.
3. Clark/Lex. I got this meme most recently off bravecows, who listed this as The Ultimate Slash Ship, and it really is - for all the reasons she stated. Honestly though I've never even watched a full episode of Smallville all the way through, I just feel like I have. I used to watch Lois & Clark pretty religiously but I don't remember much of it. XD; And every time I mention this I feel obliged to try to explain how the original Superman movie was the first foreign film I ever watched, and what I took away from it (I was three and it TOTALLY messed with my head), but it's just too much work.
4. Kurogane/Fai. DAER CLAMP if you don't mind I'll just, like, steal them for my origfic, kthx. Was talking with sub_divided about how Fai (and to an extent Shaoran and Sakura) solves Kurogane's issues, because faced with that he basically went, you know what, I am actually a well-adjusted person! Kind of lost sight of it for a while there, ha ha!
5. Dorian/Klaus. Another one I was talking about with sub_divided. It was either going to be this or Richard/Alec; there's only one real point of analogy, that being you can make a good case for both characters being total assholes. YES, DORIAN TOO. Yet despite that they're likeable, or at any rate liked, by most everyone. I sort of went on a bit confusedly about (what I saw as) the use of satire and Jungian shadow figures in the manga, and also that IMO the relationship should never be consummated, ever, that was the point that made it transcendant. Ask me for a real essay one of these days ok.
6. Ryousuke/Keisuke/Takumi, which I usually just write out like this because it's easier than listing the permutations. I was - I shouldn't admit this - I was having this weird fantasy about Ryousuke today in Operations Management class. We were doing process flowcharting of a hospital emergency room, and I was thinking, Ryousuke come audit this class with me. McGill actually has this program called MBA-MD, where you do 45 credits of the MBA programme between undergrad and med school, then you go to med school and take the remaining MBA classes on the side. And then presumably you become a big-shot hospital director. It's exactly as insane as it sounds. There are only two people in the programme this year, a guy and a girl, and the guy is 21. Other people in my class have kids who're 21. Said MBA-MDer, not!Sai, and I are doing a team business simulation for L'Oreal that's kind of like Rome: Total War, only with face creams in lieu of centurions. I live in terror that it's like Ender's Game and the team that wins the competition will turn out to have been running L'Oreal's marketing department all along. THIS HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH INID PAIRINGS DID IT, SORRY FOR THE REAL LIFE INTRUSION. I guess at some point I had the epiphany that Ryousuke would probably be more at home doing an MBA than he would be in Med, which... means he'd be a great hospital director. SHIT.
Anyway it's not like he's my imaginary boyfriend or anything, because I think he's gay.
THREE SHIPS I'VE ABANDONED
7. Naoe/Kagetora. BOLD STATEMENT AMIRITE. The thing with my so-called abandoned ships is I usually feel like XYZ could never be relevant to my interests again, ever, but when push comes to shove it always comes back full force. You could find me a, a, I dunno, a really great Kurama x Hiei fic right now and I'd still sit there and read it. (Actually, hell yeah if you could find me a KxH fic that's really great by today's exalted standards.) So this column is more like INTENTIONALLY ON ICE, because I value my sanity.
8. Tezuka/Fuji. I had to think for a second before I remembered there was such a thing as the PoT fandom in my life once. XD This was a weird one anyway, I couldn't fathom why I liked it even when I was writing it. I never want to read fic for it anymore but I still get these weird flashes of wanting to write it, or AUs of it, whereas it's usually the other way around.
9. Sirius/Remus. One of those cases where you can't tell what happened to you until you see it in the rear view mirror. I'd been a hardcore lurker in HP but after book 5 I stopped reading the fic, cold turkey, and it took me ages even to get around to seeing the third movie. I got back into the saddle with book 6 but the whole thing had sort of reconfigured itself in my head in the interim.
THREE FOUR A NUMBER OF SHIPS I'VE NEVER LIKED
10. Sydney/Hardin. This is not like #11 where I honestly feel like the people who ship it have a vastly different interpretation of canon than what I see happening, it's more like... he screws him over so badly, people. SO BADLY. Sydney's got his reasons but it's not a stellar manifestation of humanity's potential for goodness and light. If you have the gumption to explore that then more power to you. Historically I've waffled back and forth on liking the characters to begin with; it's one of those where articulating what rubs me wrong goes a good way toward defusing the sentiment (cf. 58). But still.
* Gojyo/Hakkai has been taken off this list as I have revised my feelings regarding it. Some of you know the low-down, if not, feel free to ask.
11. Aizen/Momo. I DUNNO DO YOU SEE A PATTERN. It really is about the power dynamic and not the stabbity, I have nothing against Drace/Gabranth for instance (fandom writes that one exactly as I like reading it, i.e. as if it were an AU of Motoko/Batou). I even like Aizen/Gin. But Gin knows exactly what is up, and therein lies the difference.
12. Aya/Ken. I'm sorry, this is coming out of nowhere and dumping on something (some of) you don't even remember was there to be dumped on, but I've always found the idea so desperately boring. XD;
** Tsuzuki/Hisoka. That just puts it over, the defriending queue starts to the left. Probably this will be taken off the list as well once I figure out what my beef is (at a guess: a total inability to identify with Hisoka's emotional responses, which I think is the selling point for people who do ship the pairing).
*** I think I could actually go on listing. I never do this and it's sort of freeing. XD Roy/Lisa? No, I'll stop.
TWO SHIPS THAT HAVE PIQUED MY INTEREST
This is harder than all the rest put together, because I cursorily read a metric ton of pairings.
13. Ed/Al, but not really as a pairing ship, like all my other brotherly ships. Fuji/Yuuta etc. Thing is I don't read Ed/Al fic, but I read Supernatural fic (because I read everything), and it just comes across as a re-build of Ed/Al. XD;;; Does anyone else get this, or am I a special snowflake?
14. Owen Pallett/Zach Condon, ahahaha omg. Just because subterrain writes it - I only need one person to write any pairing well. I wouldn't be able to deliver it the way she does, though, at any rate not naturalistically (though I've done bits of RPS on request before). Metaphorically, perhaps. By which I mean a high school AU. In the mode of Scott Pilgrim. I'm seriously considering this for SSBB - I mean, given what else people turn in by way of thinly-disguised etc. - but I can't figure out what else to name them.