[ SECRET POST #2230 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2230 ⌋

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

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Notes:

Early because blizzard, not quite sure if power will last.

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 103 secrets from Secret Submission Post #319.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 1 2 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

I think it's something that happens with both sides:

One side gets annoyed that *fandom* doesn't let friends just be friends without most of the discussion being about shipping them. If you love their friendship, it's annoying that other people insist on interpreting it as romance. It's also true that there's not a lot of media that focuses on close friendships in general.

The other side gets annoyed that the fiction itself doesn't ever have gay romances, when pretty much every female/male relationship always ends in romance or has a touch of romantic feelings in it.

Part of the problem is there's just little of either. There's not a lot of media that focuses on female friendships, and most media about guys is very careful to make it seem TOTALLY PLATONIC.

Both sides feel like they're not getting enough of what they want, and they often feel at odds with eachother.

[truxillogical]

TBH, I was Side 1 for a good long while, which is why I wasn't even a slash fan until after college (and why my first slash ship was between a canonically gay character and his ambiguous sometimes-buddy that he was literally handcuffed to for several weeks). It especially drove me nuts in the LotR fandom with Sam/Frodo, because all I could think was, "What is wrong with you all? Don't you have a Deep Friendship like that? Haven't you at least seen one? Can't people be friends without it being romantic?!"

And at some point I realized that's not really it at all.

I mean, for some fans, it kinda is. Some fans will always be the crazy, wide-eyed ones who insist that everything is canon and no, it's really gonna happen, no matter how implausible it is. But for most fans, I think, even the ones who post pictures of simple Male Bonding Moments (or Female Bonding Moments, if we're talking Once Upon A Time, because wowzer, Red and Snow, what.) along with tags like "TOTALLY IN LOOOOVE!!!!"...well, I think they mean that about as much as they mean, "I HAVE FEELS!!!!"

Which is to say, yes, they mean it, but with a bit of tongue-in-cheek and mostly for the fun.

What I guess I kind of mean is that shipping two same-sex characters because they're buddies doesn't necessarily mean that fans don't also appreciate their canon, platonic buddy-hood. They may like the slashing more for, say, fanart or fic purposes, but that's usually a guilty pleasure anyway. I've read plenty of slash fic for characters that I also like as platonic BFFs. You can appreciate both. It's really not all that different than being able to ship multiple ships with a given character.


That said, "teh gayz moments" will always get more play for pretty much the same reason that FEELS gets a lot of play--it's fun and silly to play up, and fandom is insular, and with the internet, it kind of just feeds off of itself, and...wacky fun?

[(Anonymous)]

Well, I'm talking about a specific, sizable subset of people who do very much want them to be about romance.

In fact, if we're talking OUAT, Mulan and Aurora would be a good example. Aurora is canonically in love with Phillip, and Mulan is heavily hinted to be in love with him, but there's definitely a powerful set of fans who believe it's romantic. I think the difference is the people who think it SHOULD be love, and the people who wish it were. The former is the one that tends to butt heads with Team 1 the most, and the latter Team 1 gets annoyed with because it usually swamps over any talk about the friendship side. Rather, the friendship side is seen as a special flavoring for the romance, which is what they're really interested in.

I'm not denying there's a group of people who love the friendship and the idea of them being together romantically without necessarily believing that a good author in a perfect world would definitely have written them together, or something.