...Yeah, this could definitely be an Entire Literal Essay, actually. This is...not the short version, but it is the shortest I can manage.
So my main thought is that Friendship is the hardest form of love for our culture to see as distinct and important in its own right, and âfound familyâ often (though not always) ends up as a sort of...middle ground between that point and the âOnly Romance Is Importantâ idea. In a ship-dominated culture, Friendship is often reduced to Level 1 Romance, andâat least in some waysâa found-family-dominated fandom culture can end up reducing Friendship to Level 1 Family.
In practice, I think that....even when we know that we donât see or want to see an important relationship as Romantic, a lot of us still struggle with the idea of Friendship by itself being equally valuable or important. So we equate âfamilialâ with âimportantâ (because family is undeniably as important as romance, right? Or at least itâs a lot easier to make that caseâand also, there is the not-at-all-insignificant benefit that it marks your view of a relationship as CLEARLY platonic!), and then we try to fit every relationship we love into a clearly-labeled Family-Shaped Box, in order to affirm its importance and give it legitimacy that âjust friendshipâ might not.
...which is, ironically, what shippers are sometimes doing when they seem to be putting every relationship they love into a Romance-Shaped Box for the same reason. Thatâs the highest-status box there is! Donât you think this relationship deserves the highest Relationship Rank??
But Friendshipâphilia, using the Greek word (or at least using it as C. S. Lewis uses itâisnât a weaker form or âfirst stageâ of other loves. Itâs its own form of love. Not lesser, but different. And if we keep following our instinct to âlegitimizeâ it by conflating it with family/storge, we end up doing both kinds of love a disservice.
(And I am definitely including myself in the group of people with this instinct! Thereâs a fandom Iâve gotten into recently thatâas not infrequently happensâhas a central relationship you could easily consider âfather-son,â âbest friends,â or a mixture of the two, and thereâs variance within the fandom. I personally view this relationship pretty much purely as âbest friendsâ in my own interpretation, but...a few years ago, I would have been much closer to the âfather-sonâ camp. And even though Iâve consciously changed my approach to character relationships over those last few yearsâmainly due to a variety of other fandom exposures over the past few years, and the pro-friendship opinions Iâve formulated while thinking about themâI still have some of those pro-familial instincts I entered fandom with! Theyâre very much what I came here with, and even though I now like other approaches better, theyâre still in my brain.)
The disservice to philia comes in the fact that we are still not celebrating it as a non-romantic, non-familial form of love in its own rightâwhich stinks, because itâs great!! and important to humans!! and we should all appreciate how wonderful Friendship is without feeling like we have to turn it onto another kind of relationship once it passes some Importance Threshold. Itâs also a less-important disservice to specific fictional relationships that we try to fit into a Family Box and maybe end up misrepresenting or oversimplifying in the process.
The disservice to storge comes in the fact that, with the label of âFamilyâ so highly valued in itself, it tends to get overused and slapped on everything until itâs started to lose all distinctively familial meaning. It becomes harder for us to explore the depths and beauties of distinctively familial love when weâve lost the verbal distinction between ârelationships founded upon specifically familial roles, a strong shared background, and/or an unchosen yet unbreakable connectionâ (which is how I would identify storge relationships just off the top of my head) and the âfound familyâ definition of âany group of people who love each other not-exclusively-romantically and arenât related.â
Personally, I kinda miss alternative labels like TVTropesâ âTrue Companionsâ or âPlatonic Life Partners.â Characters donât need to be spouses or siblings to be important to each other. They can be solely and purelyâthough not âjust!ââfriends.
