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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.).
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From:
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Not that I think it's wrong to read sexual tension into scenes just because the two characters never get together--there are plenty of things that are based on unspoken sexual tension. It was just using the expression two different ways. I guess maybe what the person was saying was that the show could just as well have put Zuko and Katara together just as randomly and then told us to accept it. Which yeah, they could have!
HP has such a conflicted attitude about the kickass girl thing in a way. Hermione is in so many ways better than Harry and yet she's totally his helper. It's like her duty in life is to assist in his quest--which is great. Nothing wrong with being the helper. It's like Scully/Starbuck to Mulder. Only it's almost like her romance was planned the same way--it's all for Harry's sake because that way Ron doesn't get left out and since Hermione arbitrarily likes Ron always and never likes Harry the two of them never have a second's moment of tension about that. So Hermione sort of winds up being a prize too, for Ron. She's what keeps him from being the loser.
And yet at the same time, it's these choices with H/G and R/Hr that keep the romance on that "they just like each other" level rather than being like fanfic where we get into the psychology of it and why the person likes the other person. (Actually for Ron/Hermione I always point to the moment where Ron throws away Percy's letter in OotP. That sums up why Hermione is supposed to like him for me.) If Harry and Hermione were together we'd have to get that because their dynamic is one of the few detailed ones in the book. We see how Hermione prods him, how he sometimes gets snippy or yells at her and she gets tearful. If they were in a romance it would be hard for Harry to suddenly disconnect so much that he's talking about chest monsters. He *knows* how he feels about Hermione and Ron. He literally doesn't know how he feels about Ginny, even in the end. He just knows if she gets married in the future it makes him angry to think it's to someone else.
But yeah, I also think that ironically Avatar is more adult with its teen romances because it is far more comfortable with the "I find you hot" plan. Though all the things you say about Mai/Zuko are true, how the real problem is that it comes so late and so a lot of people who don't just instinctively get it are playing catch up, both that and Sokka/Suki rely very much on sexual compatibility it seems. I tend to see Zuko/Mai even at the end of the show as being very much too teenagers all het up about each other who still have a while to go before they hit a mature love. Not that this makes me not believe Mai's announcement about loving him--it's just that it's a dramatic announcement that goes along with all the other drama. She wants to get out from under Azula's thumb and Zuko gives her the inspiration to do that and she loves him for it. For me it doesn't have to be proof that they're meant to be--I can buy that moment without it, in a way.
Aang/Katara then has a problem because it's harder to convey that. Even in the joke ending at ComicCon they've got Aang saying, "Teach me, teach me, my love!" about sex. Though Katara doesn't seem all that ready to teach.
Wow, I've never thought about it before, but that's a really interesting difference between the two. It's like with Aang/Katara they're forced to hint more at "true love" because Aang's a 12-year-old crushing on a 14-year-old--it's sexual, but in a shyer way, and while Katara is easily attacted to Jet it's hard to think she isn't at least a little put off by the fact that Aang is so young and she just can't look back at him the same way, as you say.
But also word on the whole "sure the guy will be friends with that girl, but when it comes time to get married he wants the traditional girl!" Because I hate that and yet it's totally true. Often in life, which is worse.
From:
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Exactly. I classify this in my mind as Rowling's "OBHWF cookie-cutter simplistic plan". The jigsaw is set up so that everyone gets a partner. Dear Ron isn't left out in the cold.
Rowling split up the HP Trio a few times - the broom incident in PoA, Ron's desertion in GoF and again in DH - but in the end there was no romantic tension between the three. Harry's biggest concern was about Ron's brotherly instincts with regard to Ginny.
I've wondered occasionally what might have happened back in the forest, after Ron clobbered the locket!horcrux, had Harry said "well, mate ... I love her too." (maybe waiting until Ron had put the sword down :D).
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Of course, I found Ron/Lavender a pretty good couple--actually, it illustrates my point too. Ron has no particular interest in Lavender before HBP, nor does she for him. But I had no problem believing she'd developed an interest and that he was thrilled with the idea once the possibility was suggested. A painfully ordinary teenaged couple with no better or worse chance of winding up married as anybody else. It's doomed from the start, of course, because Ron already likes Hermione but also because Lavender's interest is immediately kind of marked out as untrue because there's a sense she only likes him now because of the stories about the MoM. (Which is totally different than Ginny crushing on Harry before she's even met him because he's the boy who lived.)
From:
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... because of Ron's insecurity (which we all know he doesn't get over even after a storyline about him getting over it).
Can you elaborate on Ron's "not getting over it"? I can't recall any clues that he's still insecure about Hermione after the evil!Voldemort!H/Hr scene and Harry's "like a sister" declaration.
A very well known H/G fanfic author once happily compared R/Hr to a "knight's quest", where the lady would set out a number of tasks/challenges for the knight to complete in order to win her hand. R/Hr really seemed that way to me, too ... although I couldn't see that as a good thing. If we were to take the "bickering means true love" trope as true - which I would have preferred had been left with the bad television sitcoms - then Hermione had selected Ron as her love interest back in book 2 or 3. According to the OBHWF fans anyway. Which means Hermione was just sitting there for four or five years, waiting for Ron to grow up. Finally, in DH, he mentions the Hogwarts house elves, she ticks that item off her list - "he thought of the house elves ... hey, that's the last item on my list, I can snog him now!". No romantic tension or complexity, it's all part of the 'cookie cutter' template, Hermione was *always* there for Ron, just like Ginny was there waiting for Harry to notice her.
A painfully ordinary teenaged couple with no better or worse chance of winding up married as anybody else.
I've never really thought about Ron/Lavender, which is interesting, because now that you mention it ... I discounted them because it was *obvious* that it was "doomed from the start", as you state ... and yet it is similar in composition to H/G. All physical attraction, no deeper emotional depth mentioned, girl crushing on the boy's reputation/title rather than the individual and so forth. Wow. Never thought to compare the two couples before.
But one of these "painfully ordinary teenage" romances is lauded as a match made in heaven between soulmates. Amazing!
From:
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Oh, there isn't. I was referring to the way Ron gets a whole storyline about gaining confidence at Quidditch in OotP and then gets the exact same story in HBP. So if Harry had expressed interest in Hermione I can't see him ever really not being insecure about it, even if Hermione was never interested back. He'd always be worried she was going to leave him for Harry.
I do think Hermione just selected Ron back in PS and never even considered Harry or anyone else. She pretty much does seem to just be waiting for Ron, never sure the right way to get him to shape up. When he starts showing clumsy interest she doesn't react quite the right way etc.