sistermagpie (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sistermagpie) wrote2008-10-02 10:10 am
sistermagpie) wrote2008-10-02 10:10 am
Where did that ship come from?
Recently I’ve read a couple of conversations that made me think about shipping. Specifically I've been thinking about the criticism: Why does s/he like her/him? As in: We don't understand why s/he likes her/him. The sudden attraction comes out of nowhere. If we don't understand that it's not realistic/it's badly written or whatever.
I'm going to use actual ships to talk about this, but hopefully this will not set off a ship argument or make anybody feel criticized for liking or not liking a ship. One of the ships I'm going to talk about I don't like (Harry/Ginny from HP) and one I do (Zuko/Mai from Avatar), so hopefully that separates it from liking or not liking the ship straight off.
Both these ships have gotten this criticism. In both cases, some people felt like the part where the guy (who in both cases was more our pov character) started to like this girl just happened, and that the relationship happened off-page. To give more of an idea of where I'm coming from, here's why I was surprised to hear this. In the exchange I was reading someone had criticized Zutarians for "making up meanings" for Zuko/Katara interactions--iow, writing in an off-page romance. The Zutarian countered back that it was hypocritical for the person to have a problem with off-page Zuko/Katara when they defended off-screen Zuko/Mai.
That made me say...whoa. That's two different definition of "off-screen/off-page" here. Zuko/Mai happens onscreen. The two express attraction to each other. They kiss. They refer to each other as boyfriend/girlfriend. They tell other people they like/love each other. They kiss some more. That was the definition of "onscreen" the Maiko person was using.
What the other person was saying was that s/he never saw *why* these characters liked each other, and if that wasn't argued convincingly and we just had to make up the reasons they clicked, how was that any different from Zuko/Katara, especially since presumably this person could argue why those two characters should be attracted to each other.
I hate to drag Harry/Hermione into this because they shouldn't automatically be defined as the anti-Harry/Ginny ship, but I know some of the feelings there are similar. Even more so than Zuko/Katara, Harry and Hermione are friends. We know what they like about each other in a far more detailed and less superficial ways than we know why Harry and Ginny think each other is awesome.
But these couples--H/G and M/Z--were described as *unrealistic* because of this. The couples aren't convincing, it "makes no sense," it just comes out of nowhere.
But the thing is, in real life, isn't that just as often how it happens? Especially if you're a teenager who's therefore only recently developed a consistent sexual desire? (Consistent meaning that it's always part of your pov, not consistent meaning you always like one person, gender or type.) When I think back on high school romances at my school that's actually the way it always seemed to play out to me. More often than not somebody liking somebody else made no particular sense whatsoever. Sure you expected a popular girl to date a popular boy in her group or whatever, but my friends more often seemed to like totally random people. Could any of them have given me a convincing meta-reason for why they focused on these random girls or boys? Probably not. I can think of a couple of fairly long-relationship where people never stopped asking what they were doing together.
Of course we accept things in reality that make bad writing in fiction. I don't consider "but that's the way it happens sometimes in real life!" as any kind of defense of something that doesn't work in fiction. But in this case I think there is a defense here. Romance fiction is very concerned with why people like other people, why the hero is the best man for the girl (or in general), why the heroine should get the guy over any other girl. But in a story about something else, like HP and A:TLA both are, I don't think it's odd to throw in random sexual attraction from one teenager to another as just another obstacle. It's not the reasons for Harry liking Ginny that are important, it's that he thinks she's hot and that gives him something he wants that he has to do something to have. (Okay, he doesn’t have to do much—it’s Harry Potter, after all!) Or even more with Zuko and Mai, their attraction for each other creates a relationship that will then have an effect on things. It's not that Zuko and Mai see that the other has X qualities and therefore fall in love, it's that Zuko and Mai have a long-running attraction to each other, which leads them to date, and once they date they like each other even better and discover things about each other. The stiltedness of their overtly romantic scenes makes sense given their lack of experience and discomfort with affection in general. Trying and failing to do what you think a boyfriend is supposed to do or say isn’t a sign Zuko doesn’t like Mai, imo, but that he wants Mai to like him because he likes her and doesn’t know how to do that.
In a way, in these cases it would almost be less realistic to me to get careful scenes that explained exactly what they were supposed to be attracted to in the other. Sometimes romance works backwards; you see who the person is attracted to and then you can work that back to the way they are in other ways. Their attraction says something about them, not the other way around. HP takes this even further with the idea of love potions that give you a scent to follow to your True Love For Life and as romances go that's not as interesting as a sophisticated fic that dives into what makes Harry and Hermione or Harry and Draco or Harry and Luna tick and how their two psychologies attract each other. But that doesn't, imo, make the other way badly or underwritten necessarily.
That sounds like a long-winded way of just saying "they're not writing a romance!" which of course gets countered with "that doesn't mean the romance in it should suck!" and that's not what I mean. These shows are writing romance, obviously. Romance is part of the plot (the gay romance just as much as the het romance--I'm looking at you, DD/GG!). It makes things happen, gives people motivations, is part of what people want. What I'm saying is that there's a valid tradition of presenting attraction as a done deal that doesn't have to be defended or explained for a reason. Someone pushing another person's sexual buttons, just striking someone else as physically attractive even if that person is bad for them or has other qualities they normally wouldn't like, is also part of life so shouldn't be automatically discounted in fiction.
With both these couples I have no problem in the end finding reasons why they work for the characters. I can see reasons why each would find the other superior to other people, and choose to spend their time with him/her, to get married and have kids once the initial sexual curiosity has been satisfied. I don't mind that I don’t relate to the feeling of attraction that strikes the characters but instead just know that Mai has a crush on Zuko already and Zuko is very okay with that, or know that Ginny has always crushed on Harry and Harry is now going to think she's the girl he wants as a girlfriend because she's better than other girls that way. That doesn't strike me as unrealistic or badly written given what came before, and it makes sense to me that two boys who have previously been focused on other things (or in Harry's case a different girl) would now find their attention wandering to this girl.
Really, any ship needs that spark of “and then sexual attraction arbitrarily happened.” Even in a story where you ship the two main characters and understand their relationship inside and out and see just how good they are for each other and how they hurt each other and why they need each other, if you don’t have that moment of OMG, WANT! there’s no romance. Though ships can still be criticized or disliked, both for reasons outside the text (not liking what that romance seems to "say" in the context of the story) or inside (not seeing chemistry, finding it squicky, not buying it, finding the characters annoying together, feeling like the writer is just writing their own fantasy without communicating it to the audience etc.).
I'm going to use actual ships to talk about this, but hopefully this will not set off a ship argument or make anybody feel criticized for liking or not liking a ship. One of the ships I'm going to talk about I don't like (Harry/Ginny from HP) and one I do (Zuko/Mai from Avatar), so hopefully that separates it from liking or not liking the ship straight off.
Both these ships have gotten this criticism. In both cases, some people felt like the part where the guy (who in both cases was more our pov character) started to like this girl just happened, and that the relationship happened off-page. To give more of an idea of where I'm coming from, here's why I was surprised to hear this. In the exchange I was reading someone had criticized Zutarians for "making up meanings" for Zuko/Katara interactions--iow, writing in an off-page romance. The Zutarian countered back that it was hypocritical for the person to have a problem with off-page Zuko/Katara when they defended off-screen Zuko/Mai.
That made me say...whoa. That's two different definition of "off-screen/off-page" here. Zuko/Mai happens onscreen. The two express attraction to each other. They kiss. They refer to each other as boyfriend/girlfriend. They tell other people they like/love each other. They kiss some more. That was the definition of "onscreen" the Maiko person was using.
What the other person was saying was that s/he never saw *why* these characters liked each other, and if that wasn't argued convincingly and we just had to make up the reasons they clicked, how was that any different from Zuko/Katara, especially since presumably this person could argue why those two characters should be attracted to each other.
I hate to drag Harry/Hermione into this because they shouldn't automatically be defined as the anti-Harry/Ginny ship, but I know some of the feelings there are similar. Even more so than Zuko/Katara, Harry and Hermione are friends. We know what they like about each other in a far more detailed and less superficial ways than we know why Harry and Ginny think each other is awesome.
But these couples--H/G and M/Z--were described as *unrealistic* because of this. The couples aren't convincing, it "makes no sense," it just comes out of nowhere.
But the thing is, in real life, isn't that just as often how it happens? Especially if you're a teenager who's therefore only recently developed a consistent sexual desire? (Consistent meaning that it's always part of your pov, not consistent meaning you always like one person, gender or type.) When I think back on high school romances at my school that's actually the way it always seemed to play out to me. More often than not somebody liking somebody else made no particular sense whatsoever. Sure you expected a popular girl to date a popular boy in her group or whatever, but my friends more often seemed to like totally random people. Could any of them have given me a convincing meta-reason for why they focused on these random girls or boys? Probably not. I can think of a couple of fairly long-relationship where people never stopped asking what they were doing together.
Of course we accept things in reality that make bad writing in fiction. I don't consider "but that's the way it happens sometimes in real life!" as any kind of defense of something that doesn't work in fiction. But in this case I think there is a defense here. Romance fiction is very concerned with why people like other people, why the hero is the best man for the girl (or in general), why the heroine should get the guy over any other girl. But in a story about something else, like HP and A:TLA both are, I don't think it's odd to throw in random sexual attraction from one teenager to another as just another obstacle. It's not the reasons for Harry liking Ginny that are important, it's that he thinks she's hot and that gives him something he wants that he has to do something to have. (Okay, he doesn’t have to do much—it’s Harry Potter, after all!) Or even more with Zuko and Mai, their attraction for each other creates a relationship that will then have an effect on things. It's not that Zuko and Mai see that the other has X qualities and therefore fall in love, it's that Zuko and Mai have a long-running attraction to each other, which leads them to date, and once they date they like each other even better and discover things about each other. The stiltedness of their overtly romantic scenes makes sense given their lack of experience and discomfort with affection in general. Trying and failing to do what you think a boyfriend is supposed to do or say isn’t a sign Zuko doesn’t like Mai, imo, but that he wants Mai to like him because he likes her and doesn’t know how to do that.
In a way, in these cases it would almost be less realistic to me to get careful scenes that explained exactly what they were supposed to be attracted to in the other. Sometimes romance works backwards; you see who the person is attracted to and then you can work that back to the way they are in other ways. Their attraction says something about them, not the other way around. HP takes this even further with the idea of love potions that give you a scent to follow to your True Love For Life and as romances go that's not as interesting as a sophisticated fic that dives into what makes Harry and Hermione or Harry and Draco or Harry and Luna tick and how their two psychologies attract each other. But that doesn't, imo, make the other way badly or underwritten necessarily.
That sounds like a long-winded way of just saying "they're not writing a romance!" which of course gets countered with "that doesn't mean the romance in it should suck!" and that's not what I mean. These shows are writing romance, obviously. Romance is part of the plot (the gay romance just as much as the het romance--I'm looking at you, DD/GG!). It makes things happen, gives people motivations, is part of what people want. What I'm saying is that there's a valid tradition of presenting attraction as a done deal that doesn't have to be defended or explained for a reason. Someone pushing another person's sexual buttons, just striking someone else as physically attractive even if that person is bad for them or has other qualities they normally wouldn't like, is also part of life so shouldn't be automatically discounted in fiction.
With both these couples I have no problem in the end finding reasons why they work for the characters. I can see reasons why each would find the other superior to other people, and choose to spend their time with him/her, to get married and have kids once the initial sexual curiosity has been satisfied. I don't mind that I don’t relate to the feeling of attraction that strikes the characters but instead just know that Mai has a crush on Zuko already and Zuko is very okay with that, or know that Ginny has always crushed on Harry and Harry is now going to think she's the girl he wants as a girlfriend because she's better than other girls that way. That doesn't strike me as unrealistic or badly written given what came before, and it makes sense to me that two boys who have previously been focused on other things (or in Harry's case a different girl) would now find their attention wandering to this girl.
Really, any ship needs that spark of “and then sexual attraction arbitrarily happened.” Even in a story where you ship the two main characters and understand their relationship inside and out and see just how good they are for each other and how they hurt each other and why they need each other, if you don’t have that moment of OMG, WANT! there’s no romance. Though ships can still be criticized or disliked, both for reasons outside the text (not liking what that romance seems to "say" in the context of the story) or inside (not seeing chemistry, finding it squicky, not buying it, finding the characters annoying together, feeling like the writer is just writing their own fantasy without communicating it to the audience etc.).
no subject
And I get the backtracking idea, too, I think it actually worked really well in the case of James and Lily. I just think the problem was that Harry had been so built up as a character that in order for it to really work, Ginny had to kind of have been that built up, too, or else she just becomes a handful of convenient personality traits Harry gets as a reward for saving the world. Like I never got the whole 'want' thing from Ginny's side, just that she'd had a crush on a boy she didn't know when she was 11 and somehow, conveniently, still liked him four books later. Like, it was just kind of assumed that you would get why she'd want Harry, but there wasn't enough to back up that assumption or that want. I think that you can see and understand so much more of a character's personality and motivation than a RL person's that you kind of need a greater understanding of that in a book than you do in RL. Like, that's the thing about H/D; there's a spark and then, in the ensuing relationship, neither Draco nor Harry loses any of their personality, more is just uncovered. Ginny kind of goes from one polarity to another when she gets with Harry.
Uh, but yeah, in general, I think that's a problem people have when writing LI for heroes who have to sacrifice a lot, etc., the girl becomes kind of a gift. They did the same thing in SPN, though at least there they admitted that she was just a fantasy, not something that could ever be real.
no subject
I'm not sure why H/Hr or H/L would make any more sense than H/G in the long run. I mean, Hermione maybe from the pov that she's the girl he chooses to spend most of his time with, but there's no reason he ought to be attracted to Luna. Ginny's the "best" girl in the school, so her being a prize for Harry kind of does make sense. Storywise, anyway. Character-wise too, I guess, if you figure that Harry always has to have what is set up as the prize only the best guy wins? Like I said above, it comes across to me ultimately like what attracts them to each other is a shared sense of satisfaction and superiority which isn't very complimentary but probably does attract people!