fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #5961 ]

[ SECRET POST #5961 ]

⌈ Secret Post #5961 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

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01. https://i.imgur.com/sYooAMc.png

Or maybe some people just like shipping ships where characters start out as friends? Plenty of male friendships are slashed in fandom too. Friendship to romance is a trope that just works for a lot of people.

not OP

Yes, but there are different standards. If the two main characters in something are a man and a woman, it's just expected that they're going to get together. Every. damn. time. It's exhausting to those of us who want something different for once.

That doesn't happen with two male (or female) characters, even if some people ship them. It's just not the same thing at all.

nayrt but agreed. I love het ships but I hate forced romances. Just let two people be good buddies and nothing more, at least some of the time.

Exactly. The default expectation is that if a man and a woman are friends in fiction, that relationship is eventually going to turn romantic on one or both sides, and that's stupid and toxic and reductive on multiple fronts because it implies that the only possible reason that a man and woman could have to want to be friends is that they're ultimately looking to tap that.

DA

I would understand if you were frustrated with canon if it was the direction the canon was going to, but if it is just fanon, then who cares? You can still only like them as friends, no one is stopping you.

It seems to me that it's just as valid to be annoyed when fandom insists on shoving a male and female character together romantically when canon itself has explicitly stated that there is nothing like that between them.

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(Anonymous) - 2023-05-03 01:39 (UTC) - Expand

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(Anonymous) - 2023-05-03 01:55 (UTC) - Expand

I'm with you. I had a fandom years ago where there was a man and woman who were good friends. I and a handful of other people wanted them to stay friends but most of the fandom shipped them, and the amount of crap we got for not shipping them was just ridiculous.

God yes. When I first joined fandom I almost immediately went into the slash side and never came back out, because Every Single Fandom did this. As a baby ace, I just wanted my ladies to be awesome without having to suck face with a man, which was apparently too much to ask.

Slash side has better cookies anyway.

Man I love close platonic bonds between men and women that don’t turn romantic, the thing is I might even ship them in fandom but that doesn’t mean I want it to be canon, I’m just someone who likes friends to lovers with ships. But there absolutely needs to be more strong friendships between men and women in media that aren’t romantic because it’s so dang uncommon for that to happen without romance. Usually the only chance I get that is with brother and sister relationships, which I also love but it’s not the same yanno?

You phrased it so well, and I agree. I might ship something like this in private, but it's nice when it stays platonic in canon, because there sure is a lack of f/m platonic bonds, without forced or implied romance.

Ah, the age-old fandom divide! I'm mostly a femslasher which made being in X-Files fandom back in the day quite tricky so not being into shipping (i.e. Mulder/Scully, that's where the term comes from) caught a lot of accusations of hating Scully or (less often) hating Mulder. But I didn't! I loved their intense bond! I just didn't want it to be a romantic relationship.

I think this divide was worst in Star Trek AOS fandom, where the big divide was between Spock/Uhura shippers and Kirk/Spock shippers. One side accused the other of being misogynist and racist (which was only occasionally true) and the other side accused their rival ship of being homophobic (which was only occasionally true).

Mulder and Scully is the ultimate example of this for me. I loved their bond and their friendship, and absolutely hated their romance. And I do like some friends-to-lovers tropes! Just that one didn't feel right to me at all.

I'm wondering if the fandom is X-Files? :)

I'm not even ardently anti Mulder/Scully but recently got into a discussion with someone online who kept attacking me for not immediately stating they should be together after "everything they've been through". My argument was they already are in a strong relationship and from that pov it doesn't matter particularly to me if they add romance to it. (Again, I think they do have chemistry and make a cute couple. I just don't build my entire enjoyment of the series over whether they become one).

I agree, OP. Every time a man and woman are on screen together it seems, they ultimately get together. However, oftentimes the same isn't true of two men (or two women) despite having the same markers as fictional het couples of "being in love".

The double standards irritates me. For example, take Dean and Castiel from Supernatural. As slash shippers state, had they been a man and woman, they would have been together. However, whenever this is pointed out, non-shippers always say "why can't two men just be friends?" (Because whenever it's a man and woman, they are never allowed to "just be friends" and are always eventually placed together.)

So men and women can't "Just be friends" but same sex main characters are rarely together at the end, despite slash shippers seeing every hint of them wanting to be a couple. I'm not saying two male characters can't be "just friends" or that main male/female characters don't become romantic. It would be nice to have some variety, ocassionally.

This. If Steve had stolen a plane to go AWOL to sneak into enemy territory to free POWs single-handedly all with the explicit and only intention to rescue girl!Bucky? Bucky would have been pregnant by the end of the first movie.

Bucky Barnes, damsel in distress. And idc what anyone says, The Winter Soldier is an action-romance movie.

I agree with this secret in principle: more strong male/female friendships would be great. However, in practice, the stronger the friendship is in canon, the more likely I am to ship it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I shipped the hell out of Mulder and Scully, for instance, because they were way closer to each other than to anyone else, and they had an Us Against The World dynamic going on, and they had been through the wringer together, and god damn it that's the stuff. I'm just always going to ship that dynamic, basically.

This. Characters having a solid relationship wherein it's clear that they truly care for each other is the thing that makes me ship them. Majority of my ships are friends-to-lovers because I just love that dynamic.

Mmmm. I remember how much I *adored* Edgin and Holga's Epic Friendship/Life Partners relationship in the new DnD movie.

(And also, for meta reasons, glad because it also meant that Holga wasn't about to get killed off or harpy-ised in the name of shipping Edgin with the hot paladin. I'm... old, and v. cynical.)

I agree completely with all of this!!

Oh man, yes. I really loved that they could love each other and be a family without feeling the need to get romantically involved.

It was so good!

I absolutely agree, but then I also feel this way about a bunch of close male friendships in media, and about siblings that are common incest ships, and...

People are gonna ship what they want to ship, and I'm not going to like a lot of it, but whatever. As long as we don't harsh anyone's squee, it isn't harming anyone to silently grumble that we just don't see the characters that way, eh? ;)

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