Proportion of romantic stories for your favourite ships

[g_uava]

How much fic for your ship is romantic in nature? One defintion of romance could be development towards greater emotional and/or physical intimacy.

It seems a no-brainer for most shipfics to be romantic, but for a couple of my OTPs, it's far more common to encounter stories in which one of them grieves over the death of the other half than fics featuring them kissing/hugging/trading love confessions/other stereotypically romantic gesture. I dashed off some thoughts in a journal entry on why that might be the case and wondered about how romantic the fanworks are for other ships/fandoms.

Comments

[author_by_night]

(Replying both here and to your entry.)


I actually crave something in between. My fandom used to have more of that, but lately it's been mostly pure fluff and/or smut, or fics where one either cheats or dies. I'm very much someone who just wants to see my pairing living life. I want to see their platonic relationships, and I want to see more fics where they face adversity together, without anyone having to die, almost die, or be unfaithful. Like I said, there used to be more of what I described. I'm not sure what changed. Could just be that since it's a smaller fandom, there's a smaller selection of interests?

As for why there's angst, a few thoughts.

- I know for a fact that one fic in my fandom was based on the writer's personal experience losing someone. I'm assuming their spouse or partner based on the story, but they haven't elaborated and that's their story to get into. In any case, it was therapeutic. I imagine that's it for a lot of people.

- Honestly, there's a dark curiosity. I wrote a fic where both characters died and reunited in the afterlife. I wanted to explore how other people would respond to their deaths, yet in a way that allowed them to still be together in the end. It was a very difficult fic to write, but I'm glad I wrote it.

[g_uava]

"I want to see more fics where they face adversity together, without anyone having to die, almost die, or be unfaithful" -- yeah basically this!! Variation in available fanworks seem to increase the enjoyability of each one, whereas scarcity only hammers home the deprivation.

The trend of character death would be understandable if say, the most active writer for a rarepair happens to be one processing their grief and trauma. What's puzzling is if multiple writers decide on writing one half of the pair dying, out of all the story ideas out there.

I wrote a fic too of my ship reuniting in the afterlife! It was a point when I hopped onto the character death trend just for the heck of it, but still conclude the story with a happy ending.

[zenigotchas]

I personally define it more broadly than ones you see a development in physical and/or emotional intimacy. Probably cuz I'm not much of a shipper to begin with, so even just a gen story or silly story where the characters are mentioned off handedly to having become an item is enough for me to count it as a shippy fic since that's a satisfying amount of romance for me.

I would say... Based off everything I've seen on the fic sites I personally like using, most of them would count as shippy based off my own definition. Based off the definition you brought up, most would still count as shippy but not as many, but I also gravitate more towards shipfic where it's more like a tiny moment of closeness between people rather than a deeper development.

[g_uava]

Even tiny moments of closeness sound so much more satisfying than the angst fics which start off with the premise of that closeness being impossible 😬

[zenigotchas]

I actually love angst. I didn't as a kid but years of certain ships I LOVED being sunk and other fans using that as fuel to write incredibly gloomy, heart wrenching shipfics about how they can't be together opened my mind. I still prefer my ships to be together, but I can't say no to stuff that sinks ships for the drama.

[g_uava]

I imagine angst, break-up fics to be like shots that are best followed with a chaser of stories involving at least angst with a happy ending.

[fleurviolette]

Generally, the fanfics for my ship are romantic and fluffy. Plus, there’s an occasional saucy fic.

I’m just waiting for my friend to post their new fanfic. I love their fics because theirs is balanced.

[g_uava]

It's great to have shipfic writers who keep the other shippers well fed!

[daryl_wor]

Thank you for this inquiry. It got me thinking, as I am in the middle of a resolution work in which there is nothing but problem to solve so I've gone with multiple relationships resolving and the method for a key ship I worked out manages to survive via their teamwork in helping to solve other problems. Yes! It does keep the romance alive, I have found. I don't have to invent problems for them to solve I just go with what other nonsense shows up in the original and their trying to help or solve things keeps the romance alive and well. Plus I can come up with fun side events for fluff to let them enjoy.

[g_uava]

Yes, aside from fics for dark ships, shipfics tend to boil down to the relationship being a solution to the characters' various problems.

[daryl_wor]

Well-l-l, it started that way, but the television program seems to be nothing but problems, which is the theme, so foiled ships abound, but as I found the people solving those problems or nipping them in the bud, that allowed for the relationships to thrive as well. So, as more problems come along the ships maintain in the purpose of absolving the difficulties. Fascinating journey, no doubt. It's taught me a lot. I guess having the relationships help the characters but their ingenuity in changing from despair to solution creating a thriv-ation, if you will, rather feeding off of each other, healing for healing. It makes all the difference.

[doranwen]

Oh, it really depends on the fandom. My current obsession (EO from SVU) is a ton of romantic fic, though that ranges from soft h/c-centric to Kinktober fills. My last fandom was fluffy romantic if the ship appeared at all (it was a super tiny fandom that hadn't seen new fic in years, I wrote a bunch of fic ranging from friendship - with the canonical pining on one char's side - to love confessions, but all pretty fluffy overall).

The only fandoms I can think of where my ships are mostly written platonic are ones with a large ensemble cast in which another ship is the juggernaut (such as me shipping Clark/Chloe in Smallville when most people shipped the canonical Clark/Lois by the end, or else Clark/Lex).

Not sure what the Logan and Rogue situation is with X-Men though… Last I knew it was mostly romantic but it could be otherwise now for all I know. (I only watched the first three movies and decided not to get into any of the other canon; haven't read new fic for ages.)

Does it count as an OTP if I don't ship them romantically? I have one (tiny) fandom where probably half the fandom ships them romantically but I ship them as eternal best friends only. (One of them had a SO they loved but lost, the other never married.) Canon doesn't ship them so the fandom was free to decide if they did or not without having to deal with it.


…And now that I wrote all that, I realize you probably meant "fic for the romantic ship which is written either romantically or not". Hmm, in that case… I don't think any of my ships have much fic that's written in a platonic manner. I mean, I've written some fic for an undefined ship (they don't kiss or talk relationshippy or do anything sexual, but the level of nonsexual intimacy is noticeably higher than friends would have) which sort of counts like that, but I haven't tagged it with a / because it's sort of vague. But otherwise, all of the major fandoms I can think of, the fic tends to be pretty overtly romantic in some fashion. Whether it's more fluff or more angsty romance ("I love you but I'm married and don't want to break my vows" which is a lot of EO fic, lol) or more smut depends on the fandom (EO tends to be more smutty overall than Clark/Lois from L&C:TNAOS, for instance), but that's about it. Maybe I'm still misunderstanding the question?

[g_uava]

You understood the question correctly! I just wanted to know how often other fans encounter what can be described as 'typical' shipfics, i.e. stories where the characters perform typically romantic gestures. That seems to be the trend for the fandoms you and others mentioned, which from a glance are based on Western canons, unlike the fandoms I'm into that are based on Asian media and having a smaller Western fanbase.

"The only fandoms I can think of where my ships are mostly written platonic are ones with a large ensemble cast in which another ship is the juggernaut" -- this makes sense to avoid 'conflict' with the juggernaut ship, or if the author doesn't want to write polyamory themes

[doranwen]

Well, in that last case, it's as much that most people aren't writing them as a romantic ship because they aren't into the ship in the first place. If they're into Clark/Chloe, for instance, they'd write them together and sort the rest out to suit them. (And I *have* seen one or two polyamory fics with Clark and Chloe and someone else.) But the majority aren't into Clark/Chloe so any fic they write those two are platonic in, and not just "they're together but we're not seeing the romantic gestures" but "these two are just friends and will only ever be just friends".

[beatrice_otter]

I mean, that presumes that I have a ship. I do have ships! Lots of them! In fandoms with large casts I might have five or ten in that fandom alone! but to me the romantic part of it is often the least important part of the story, I just like the characters interacting together.

[g_uava]

At this point I'm grateful for fics where my favs are alive and interacting without one of them ending up dead 😂

[beatrice_otter]

Heh. I feel you.

[arcanetrivia]

The main existing ship in my fandom is a canon married couple, so that in a mostly sweet/fluffy depiction is the most common; although there's a part of the fandom who agrees with past Word of God that they were not good for each other and should not have gotten married, and so ignores the relationship. (It's a game series where the third through fifth installments were made mostly without the involvement of the team that made the first two and the sixth.) There's also some whump or hurt/comfort because it's possible to interpret one of the two as having PTSD, and he definitely canonically died and spent time as both a ghost and a zombie (he got better). There's not much explicit fic (my thoughts about why that is may be outside the scope of this post) and most of what is on AO3, I wrote myself 😂

[g_uava]

"Word of God that they were not good for each other and should not have gotten married" - Initially I thought this was Ron/Hermione from Harry Potter. Anyhow that sucks to deflate the enthusiasm of those into the couple after wrapping up canon.

"most of what is on AO3, I wrote myself 😂" - Let's keep on fighting the good fight to pour on the fanworks and alleviate the fanworks drought for our ships!

[arcanetrivia]

Initially I thought this was Ron/Hermione from Harry Potter. Anyhow that sucks to deflate the enthusiasm of those into the couple after wrapping up canon.

It's Guybrush/Elaine from Monkey Island. And it's not quite so depressing as that.

"Past Word of God" was more like: Ron Gilbert, creator of #1 and #2 (1990, 1991), wasn't a fan of the way that the team for #3 (1997) had them get married; although they get together in the first game it's mainly a parody of how the protagonist in that sort of story "gets the girl", and in #2 they are depicted as having broken up and she's fed up to here with him. Generally, #3 wasn't the game he would have made had he not left the company some years prior. This he did make open blog posts about, although it was pretty much "water under the bridge"; what he would have done had become kind of irrelevant since he was no longer involved in any way. There's a segment of the fandom who agreed with him then and now, and either just don't ship Guybrush/Elaine or go so far as to consider them a NOTP. Some of these are purist enough to even reject the "non-Gilbert" games (as they're called) entirely as not even canon.

However, he did do a little consulting on #5 (2009), a fair portion of which was around "how do we handle this relationship", and by the time it came for him to make #6 (2022), whatever his personal feelings about whether it should have happened or not, they made the decision to accept the world elements (including the marriage) that #3-5 had introduced rather than reject them, out of respect to everyone that had made these games. So while they initially considered in #6 depicting the relationship as rocky or troubled, they discarded it early on as it just didn't seem to be working and testers wanted them to still be together as they had been for 3 previous games; and it probably would have distracted from the story they were actually there to tell.

So basically you can have your pick of whether you ship them or not, but when it is shown it tends to be on the fluffy side. That's the tl;dr ;)

[duskpeterson]

I think a lot of this tradition dates back to the days in when the only acceptable occasions for male characters to touch each other were when one of them was ill, injured, or dying. The Starsky & Hutch vids I've seen have a lot of hurt/comfort scenes. And of course this is simply a reflection of modern male behavior in the US and some other countries.

There are also a lot of older fics that liked to explore the borderland between friendship and romance. These days, that still happens, but those fics are more likely to be labelled queerplatonic.

Beyond that, I do think it depends on the fandom. Some canons are simply more encouraging of romance than others.

[g_uava]

"the only acceptable occasions for male characters to touch each other were when one of them was ill, injured, or dying" -- Yeah, this, and I think many authors of those fics are too young to think up another scenario that gets guys to be vulnerable with each other.

[duskpeterson]

Makes sense.