(Note: in particular today, I’m looking at non-canon
slash ships borne out of canon friendships.
I know good/evil ships have a huge following too, but that’s not really
my focus.)
The last
time I rewatched The Lord of the Rings,
I was indulging in my mild fanvid addiction on YouTube and found myself back at
my usual challenge: looking for videos
about a friendship and mostly settling on romantic ones that were just
ambiguous enough to read platonically if I squint. When I’m looking for fanvids about a duo
instead of a single person or a show/film as a whole, it’s a challenge I
encounter often enough, but it does seem to crop up most tenaciously with
male-male pairs in a canon friendship.
I’ve already found this with the likes of the Second Doctor-Jamie and
Steve-Bucky – now it was time for the same with Frodo-Sam.
That got
me thinking about the popularity of slash in fandoms. From Sherlock-John to Harry-Ron (as well as
female/female pairings like Kara-Lena,) they can easily be found pretty much
anywhere. I’ve never been too big into
shipping non-canon couples in general, but I do understand the appeal in plenty
of slash pairings. I won’t get into the
various threads that have been brought up in assorted thinkpieces – however,
for me, on the most basic level, I get why there are fans who gravitate to the
storytelling possibilities of slash.
First of all, while LGBTQ representation in movies and TV has been
growing in recent years, it’s still pretty few and far between. A given show is just as likely as not to have
no same-sex pairings (and that’s even truer for movies,) and in the ones that
do, the pool is limited and it might be tougher to find a couple that’s
well-written and acted all around.
(Even
then, a lot of networks are leery about depicting LGBTQ affection – there can
be a sense of a same-sex couples kisses being “rationed,” seeing them merely
hug in emotional moments when other couples would kiss, and I still remember
the stark contrast of the highly-explicit first season of Game of Thrones suddenly getting coy with Renly and Loras. Paradoxically, a non-canon slash pairing may
get to be more touchy-feely with one another onscreen than a same-sex couple in
a canon relationship.)
What’s
more, there’s a certain appeal in the complex nature of the friendships (or
frenemy relationships, etc.) that often get slashed by fans. Rather than trotting out the same coming-out
romance narrative, hammering home the simplistic notion that this is a “gay
romance” storyline, or just being relegated more to background status while the
straight couples get the juicy drama, there’s great fodder for storytelling in
a lot of these popular pairings. I mean,
look at Steve and Bucky, longtime friends and comrades in war who are separated
for decades, one believing the other to be dead. Both are pulled out of their own time and
reunite unexpectedly on different sides, with Bucky having been mindwiped and
brainwashed into oblivion. Watching Steve
fight for Bucky’s humanity is so
compelling, and it’s arguably next to impossible to find a canon romance
between two men that meaty and engrossing.
These are the types of stories that same-sex couples so rarely get to
have, but they’re not as closed to straight couples, and slash fans can latch
onto them for precisely that reason – someone could easily argue that, if Frodo
had been a woman (or vice versa,) she and Sam would’ve most likely fell in love
at some point in the trilogy. Hell, to
use the Steve-Bucky example above, Marvel’s TV branch basically did just that
with Matt and Elektra in The Defenders!
But while
I understand all that, I still don’t tend to ship those kinds of pairings
myself. There’s the rather simple reason
that, if I like two characters’ relationship on a show, I usually like it for
the relationship they have and don’t really want to see anything different
(i.e., if I like two characters romantically and they’re not currently in a
relationship, the show is probably intentionally sending will-they won’t-they
vibes – and major ones at that, since my asexual butt doesn’t always recognize
the subtler stuff.) But more than that,
I do feel like the popularity of slash can at times undervalue platonic
friendship to an extent. I get the
argument – relationships like these in fiction are overdue, and if fans ship so
many, it’s because they’re eager for at least one to become reality. I
understand, and I’m not out to ship-police anyone. But when every pair of close male friends in
particular garners a strong shipper following, it feels a bit to me like,
because they’re close, they have to
love each other romantically. Like
that’s the best and truest way for affection to exist, like it ought to be an
inevitable conclusion to the care these two have for one another.
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