Friends. How many times have you come across posts online like, "Can't girls just be friends? Why do gay people always have to turn everything into a queer relationship?" Ahem... let's be honest.
Many heterosexual people (myself included) ship Wednesday and Enid. I love their dynamic, how different they are, and they're just fascinating to watch. It's not the tired old high school romance between a guy and a girl (in which case, tell me: why can't a guy and a girl just be friends? Why do I so rarely see cross-gender friendships in media? I have many male friends whom I love like brothers, and I rarely see that kind of friendship portrayed).
You know, if you write a strong friendship between a man and a woman with the same romantic subtext that they create for queer relationships... people will inevitably start shipping them. A perfect example is Aloy and Kotallo from the game Horizon Forbidden West. The creators were so lazy in writing Aloy's relationship with Seyka that the most popular ship ended up being a heterosexual one.
It's not that people are just desperate to pair up same-sex characters. No. People want to see LIVING, breathing relationships built on small moments, where you can feel that intangible care, life, and mutual respect in their glances. People are NOT interested in feelings that come out of nowhere after 2-3 episodes; they're not interested in this forced love where you don't even know the person and are already in love with them. We're not in the 1950s with Disney cartoons—this isn't love at first sight or clumsy attempts to get attention over a couple of episodes that somehow turn into love.
It's something shared, like a unity of souls, where people slowly find in another person the answers to what troubled them (this applies to both LGBT and straight relationships). It's care, attachment, loyalty. This is exactly what I find in Wednesday and Enid's relationship. They are interesting, soulful, and unusual. I, like many others, am fascinated by this interpretation.
Why, in our modern world, do we still get questions like: "Why do you ship two girls? Can't they just be friends?" Why do people always see such relationships as just friendship? Why can't something so profound be something more?
I'll say it again. I am a heterosexual woman who loves well-written heterosexual romances: Monica and Chandler, Lucifer and Chloe, Morticia and Gomez, Sheldon and Amy, Piper and Leo. And in the Wenclair pair, I see something similar. I get the same feeling when I see how Wednesday cares for Enid in her own way, just as Lucifer cares for Chloe, and so on.
And why are fans of this pair being shamed now? (I know many say, "Wyler shippers get brutally bullied too," but... many Wyler shippers do the same. I'm not talking about everyone; there are good people on both sides of the barricades.) I'm increasingly leaning toward the thought that people genuinely can't stand the idea that something like this could exist between two girls. It's cruel.
A well-written relationship with such a great chance to be shown on screen and enter television history not as a lazily written romance for a "checkmark" (Seriously. It infuriates me when they introduce a character, make them gay just to "have one," then abandon them. It's clearly done just so the creators aren't accused of homophobia—sarcasm—and then they don't develop it at all. People aren't stupid; they won't fall for this nonsense anymore. I'd be offended.) but as something serious, truly serious. Not a game, not a lazily written script for a diversity checkbox, but something global. Something that has a right to exist.
