I was thinking about Jake Peralta and Charles Boyle from B99 vis a vis Holmes and Watson and I formed a hypothesis which I have just tested. My hypothesis was correct…but I don’t know why.
Hypothesis: B99 has actually successfully prevented viewers from reading the primary m/m partnership homoerotically. To put it more simply: people by and large do not slash Jake and Boyle.
I did a search on AO3. Would you like to know how many pics show up in the Charles Boyle/Jake Peralta tag?
THREE.
For purposes of comparison, there are 1692 Jake/Amy pics on AO3 and 172 Jake /Rosas, as well as over a hundred Rosa/Ginas.
This is amazing. It’s an author-intent miracle. Yeah, I know the show doesn’t ship them, but that never stopped ANYONE. How, Moffat and Gatiss must surely be wondering, did they manage to keep Eros out of that bromance?
I have formed a few theories.
1. The inclusion of openly gay characters makes people stop looking for coded gay characters.
2. Viewers are protecting the canon ship (Jake/Amy). Plausible but does not explain the much larger number of Jake/Rosas and Amy/Rosas.
3. Both characters are given multiple heterosexual relationships. True; again, never stopped anyone before.
4. It is precisely the absurdly self-abasing intensity of Charles’s devotion that stops people from reading it romantically. Variant: it is so obvious that Charles desires to BE Jake that we don’t ask whether he wants to DO Jake.
5. Nobody wants to imagine Charles Boyle having sex. This one has merit. Despite all the girlfriends he has, his sex life is always kind of disgusting to the other characters, as is his way of introducing it very inappropriately I to conversation.
I dunno. It’s fascinating.
Tag: shipping
There are a couple of things about current shipping culture that confuse me.
1. The focus on whether or not a pairing will become canon as a reason people should ship something or not. Do you not understand what the “transformative” part of “transformative works” means?”
2. This idea that saying “I ship that” means “I think that, as presented in canon,this is a perfect, healthy relationship that everyone should model their relationship after.”
Sometimes shipping something does mean that. Sometimes shipping something means “Person A is a trash bag who doesn’t deserve person B but I would love to explore how Person A might grow to deserve Person B.” Sometimes it means “I want these characters to live together forever in a conflict free domestic AU.” Sometimes it means “I want Person A to forever pine after Person B. Nothing is beautiful and everything hurts.” And sometimes it just means you like their faces and want to see Person A and Person B bone in various configurations and universes.
Listen to your parents, kids.
This really should be one of a handful of Public Service Announcements randomly and chronically inserted into one’s dash.
Hell man sometimes it means “these two are TERRIBLE and I want to watch them burn like a catastrophic forest fire as a proxy for all the shit I don’t actually want in real life (like to light my own apartment on fire and scream) and then laugh at the destruction at the end.”
All “I ship it” really means – really – is “I think there’s a story in those two, and I want to hear it.”
Sometimes it means “these two characters never met but wouldn’t it be HOT if they did” or even “these characters don’t live in the same universe and don’t have remotely compatible anatomy but goddammit I love a challenge.”
Fanfic is about the “what if” and the “what the hell, why not?”
Problematic ships: are we having a semantics issue here?
More and more I’m beginning to think that a lot of wank
about problematic “ships” comes from the fact that we’re collapsing an entire spectrum of how people approach fandom pairings into a single word. (To keep the language
simpler here I’ve only talked about “pairings”, but this also applies
to poly ships.)At one extreme, I’m personally reluctant to use the word “shipping” at all about
pairings I read and write, because I don’t think “shipping” really
describes how I approach fandom. I don’t have strong feelings about who
characters should be paired with. When I read or write a pairing it’s because
that pairing has a dynamic I’m interested in, not because I think it would be good for the characters.At the other end of the spectrum, I know people for whom
“shipping” really is believing that two characters should be together, because they have such a great relationship dynamic in canon. Who believe that being together would be better for both characters.
When people say that nobody should ever “ship” or create fanworks about a pairing because
they have an unhealthy relationship in canon, those people seem to be assuming that
literally everyone who creates fanworks about a pairing “ships” them in that second sense. That the only reason to create fanworks about a pairing is because you believe the
characters have a great relationship dynamic in canon, and would be better off together.Fandom is about so, so much more than that.
Sometimes we want to read or write about unhealthy relationships. Sometimes we want to explore what circumstances might
make a relationship healthier, or unhealthier, than what’s depicted in canon.We “ship” characters with unhealthy canon dynamics because we believe these are interesting and important stories
to tell.Not all relationships are healthy. It’s absurd to insist that we should only ever tell stories about completely healthy relationships.
….
Crap, that makes a *lot* of sense.
I mean, this is an actual quote from an anti post I saw today: “If you ship an abusive ship, you condone that ship automatically. There’s no way around it.”
This person clearly understands the word “ship” to entail some sort of moral endorsement – they’ve said so outright!
But that isn’t the only kind of “shipping”, and that kind of “shipping” certainly isn’t the only reason people create or enjoy fanworks about a pairing.
Beltainefaerie's Flights of Fancy 