Most reasonable people in fandom believe shipping is always neutral. That is to say, it doesn't matter what you ship, it doesn't impact your understanding of the characterization or plot, and it's neither right nor wrong. Then there are the people who think *some* (non-canon) ships are just crazy, while their (non-canon) ship is superior. This is obviously why the whole stance originated. Still, however much people like to apply the 'all's fair in shipping and stanning' philosophy, it actually doesn't apply to canon ships. And it doesn't *always* apply equally to fanon ships. But rejecting *any* canon ships is automatically not neutral.
That is to say, if you think a canon ship sucks, that's not 'just' another fan opinion; it's a critique of canon. Unless, of course, it's portrayed as a failed relationship (and the canon may or may not signal the relationship will fail from the beginning, so in some stories this gets pretty subjective). In some narratives, you're expected to be invested in certain relationships and then... let go. Naturally, not everyone can do that, let alone every time. In a good story (like with Sarah J. Maas and the Throne of Glass series or with The Raven Cycle), you'll be able to see why things happen the way they do. Not doing so becomes a sign of a closed-minded reader. There's a good explanation possible for why it *had* to turn out the way it did. Sometimes it's a bit more complicated, 'cause a character died or just disappeared for no good reason, so... taking sides is understandable. It's just not *neutral*, basically.
I read someone anonymously confess that they don't ship Kaz and Inej in Six of Crows, and people were like, well, you've got the right to your opinion but you're wrong. Which I agree with, insofar as it goes. That person also was glad Matthias died-- and that's different. I think that's fundamentally different. You can easily not care about Matthias. Truth: I enjoyed him but I wasn't that upset when he died; he was only there in the end to make Nina happy. It's not necessary for the story that you care if he's dead; it's probably better if you don't (or you may not enjoy the ending). It *is* necessary to care about Kaz and Inej, 'cause their arc is a major part of the narrative. If you don't appreciate them, you won't really appreciate the books in general. The line between 'appreciate' and 'ship' gets fuzzy though; it's certainly possible to enjoy a romantic or platonic relationship without going that extra mile to ship. It's just... most people in fandom have clearly never realized this. Possibly because that kind of mild attitude is by nature not fannish.
A lot of people do get this with canon slash ships, which are automatically labeled important and necessary to the story (unless the person is pretty obviously hating on queer pairings). No one on Tumblr or Instagram these days really goes very far in dissing Adam/Ronan in TRC, in any case, mostly 'cause they're queer. Either way, people's feelings on gay male relationships seem to take precedence. Plenty of people have much to say about how much they don't ship Blue/Gansey and how they don't like them (at least without some additions or alterations), and so on. Those people usually do care about Blue and Gansey individually, but have their own ideas about what's best for them (usually it's to be queer, but it could be anything). If I had to guess, that confession about Kaz and Inej probably has something to do with how 'healthy' or 'necessary' that relationship is. My point is that it's actually a pretty big and serious statement of philosophy about the whole canon world, not 'just' a ship, 'just' an opinion.
Of course, a lot of times, a story will play on creating drama and disagreement between readers about possible future ships (especially stories with love triangles). And not every story has a central relationship that you have to care about to get the show. BBC Sherlock is on the other end of the spectrum from an ensemble show like BtVS. You can easily like Buffy alone, or with Angel, or with Spike, all with an equivalent understanding of the show, although it gets iffy with fanon ships. You can probably get away with focusing on a slash ship like Spike/Angel as long as you still care about Buffy. I think it's (just barely) enough of a true ensemble show that you may get away with not caring too much about Buffy... but my feeling is that this is only true to an extent. In the end, it's All About Buffy, and so ultimately you have to give Buffy's needs precedence in judging the relationships and events. It's not the same with Six of Crows. It's not an ensemble in the same way. Every character and relationship is much more important, but I would argue that both Kaz and Inej are the 'main characters', though Matthias and his arc is pretty important. If the reader didn't appreciate that, a big chunk of the text just... clearly flew past them. It's not neutral.
This whole issue really started when people started mixing up fanon and canon ships. Or rather, the distinction and/or idea of fanon started to lose importance. This is pretty natural to people, who tend to think their opinion is reality at the best of times. I guess from that perspective, mere tolerance of others' ideas is already an accomplishment. Understanding of the text and/or reality thus becomes really extraneous for most people. Perhaps I'm the one discounting the importance of maintaining harmony; I realize that's probably the central problem on the Internet these days. I should have focused on how cool it is that those Kaz/Inej fans on Instagram were so chill even as they disagreed. I shouldn't take it for granted, let alone disagree and be more forceful. I just think it's useful to think about *why* that (or any other) opinion on a pairing may be wrong.
Alas, though it may seem from my last post on Sherlock Series 4 that I'm always obsessively going 'with the grain' of the text, I'm actually not a total purist.... Though I admit it sounds false when I just say so. So, all right, I'm probably a textual purist and/or a canon-whore (as I've often lamented), but I've been around. I mean, I've been a lurker in so many fandoms (usually at the far edges, where the truly wild things are), of course I've worn the 'transformative reading' shoe on my own foot before, so to speak. Usually I make up all sorts of *reasons* for why my relationship with Draco Malfoy or Loki is 'not the same' (and I did just recently), but my point is that I know what frustration with the canon feels like. I think that's a pretty universal experience, surely. It's probably impossible to always take everything in stride; if nothing else, sometimes the writing is just... bad. Right?
Sometimes that's not the problem, of course. I was never in fandom for Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, but I remember my outrage quite clearly. I felt let down on a very fundamental level, even though now, I would probably try to rationalize it. I would probably say, 'well of course Will and Lyra are apart, that's the kind of story it always was'. That's the sort of thing I'm used to saying about The Raven Cycle and Sherlock, right? Except even then, young and relatively innocent as I was, I was certainly aware that it was an inevitable, built-in issue of narrative type. It's just... I didn't want to accept it. It went against every natural feeling in me, 'cause I was so certain the protagonist shouldn't *have to* go back home after their adventure in the fantasy world. Like, yeah, I know that's a founding trope of the entire genre, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
Well, everyone has their limits, and things they are and aren't interested in seeing, particularly in genre fiction (where the whole idea is to have a special slant to reality). I don't begrudge people who need to nope out of any story, and of course I also understand the urge to fix what seems 'wrong' even if technically it's intrinsic to the story. I rebelled against Spike having to die as the ending of his relationship with Buffy, for sure. I read tons of fix-it fics. For an even better example than Buffy, or even Draco's arc in the Harry Potter books, you have Loki in the Thor movies. I was talking about it recently, and my friend told me that Loki and Thor's relationship is tragically doomed. Like, well, I get that it's basically what the story is saying, but... well, I don't think Loki and Thor *have* to be doomed. I think they're stuck in an endless cycle, stuck in this story *together* without beginning or end, and it ultimately seems satisfying and natural to imagine an actual resolution and growth for Loki. Same for Draco or Spike: where there's growth, there's a way.
Honestly, I'm not really sure how one can be a fan of a character and yet refuse to integrate a development that's truly logical for them, *regardless* of whether one accepts what happens in canon plot-wise. For example, to me, rejecting Spike's choice to go find his soul because of Buffy is *fundamentally* different than choosing to rewrite his death and/or have him get back together with Buffy afterwards anyway. Like... a *lot* of people in Buffy fandom did reject this choice for Spike, and I remember feeling really confused and frustrated by that, 'cause like... whether or not you ever *wanted* this for his character, it was so obviously necessary, so clearly in-character and a sign of progress. It's essentially equivalent to rejecting Spike if you reject it, rather than being about rejecting the *narrative*. There's no way around that, 'cause characters have their own logic. It's only when the narrative demonstrably *ignores* the characters' logic (as BBC Sherlock probably did by never allowing explicitly canon Johnlock) that you have real wiggle room. Even then, there's ways such a relationship does and does not make sense, depending how you write it.
Essentially, it seems that my frustration with the resolution of Will and Lyra or Buffy and Spike's relationships seems fundamentally different, even if it's still rejecting the canon on some level. I just feel like the *plot* development is a different animal altogether; it's not nearly so important as it is to maintain character continuity. That's why I said in my most recent S4 John post that the real problem with denying the plot in TST and TLD is the ramifications for the *characters*. Rejecting a character arc is absolutely not equivalent to saying you wish TFP didn't happen the way it did. TFP may or may not happen, as the plot of any episode is essentially fungible (as AU fics demonstrate), but the characters develop a logic that cannot be denied. Even in AUs... or perhaps especially in AUs, in my opinion.
I suppose I fundamentally don't think 'anything goes' even in reading transformatively; I've certainly felt that way when I shipped transformative pairings like Harry/Draco or Thor/Loki. It was always about rearranging canon trajectories while leaving the heart of the canon characters intact, 'cause otherwise, y'know, it's no longer recognizable as the canon character, and then what's the point? And that applies both to fic and to meta. Like, that happy ending I've often wanted to see 'my way' only seems valuable if it's fully believable and congruent with the text as far as possible... 'cause otherwise it's pure wish-fulfillment, and isn't that people's main critique of TFP to start with? Wish-fulfillment driven plotting makes for questionable storytelling choices, and I feel like if you're not actually going to genuinely improve on canon, why bother?
In the end, maybe you can convince me that Will and Lyra being apart is 'for the best' in terms of storytelling, of course. Maybe I could see it that way... but wish-fulfillment is a powerful thing, so I'd want to make it happen my way anyway. That's certainly natural. That's how one relates to fiction. I just... I want to believe in it. And for that, the characters have to remain who they are, every step of the way. That's something like my One True Character theory, and in the end it's a matter of faith, I suppose.
Because I’m on a roll, I just realized: wow, I never liked long-term slow-burn unresolved romances, haha. I loved Mulder and Scully (a lot), but the way I dealt with it is just sort of liking them together and wishing vaguely for it (they’re so perfect!). At no point did I seriously, consciously need the show to be something other than just this awesome series about Spooky Mulder investigating Spooky Shit with Scully in their cute bantery way. The expectations that are set if you watch the early seasons are pretty clear, and you’d be a happy camper if you stayed within that enclosure, and a not-so-happy camper if you wandered out to the pastures of long-form character arcs and romantic progression. This was true even though there were character growth arcs (that is, Scully got ill, for example, and this was eventually revealed, dealt with, and had consequences). Even though that’s true, the whole approach was that this was something of a bonus.
Compare The X-Files arcs to something like Buffy, and you’ll see the difference; Buffy is also episodic, but it’s a character-driven show, as opposed to a show people liked because of the characters. There’s a difference, and although I really loved both, I probably am more fond of Buffy in retrospect. A big reason is that Buffy liked to directly resolve its character arcs, romantic and otherwise. This is true even though I found both the Buffy/Spike and Mulder/Scully resolutions ‘unsatisfying’ from a shippy perspective. I knew Mulder was even with Scully at the end, while Buffy wasn’t with Spike! And yet I prefer the latter.
I don’t think one approach is ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the other, to be clear. I just definitely have a strong preference, though there may not be a difference in terms of how invested I get. If anything, I was probably more into The X-Files as a teen; I’m just more interested in coming back to Buffy, and I ultimately have more faith in Buffy to satisfy me no matter what actually happens to its characters. In other words, I fundamentally disagree with people who think that leaving things unresolved is naturally better from a fannish perspective.
That is to say, I contest the idea that it’s better not to kill off a character, better not to make them evil if they’re once good or get a soul if they’re soulless, etc. Buffy is notorious for just such choices: killing beloved characters off, making them switch ‘teams’ (ethically and sexually!), having really unexpected (but built-up) romances emphatically work (until they don’t). Nothing really hangs or even remains mysterious in Buffy, long-term. Everything is grist for the mill.
Why do I love it? It’s classic storytelling, for one thing. It makes for classic arcs, satisfying resolutions, and the spectacle of rising/falling tension, with conflict as the driver of narrative progression. And it’s not that The X-Files doesn’t have such conflict, and also address it; it just doesn’t necessarily resolve it. Things (characters or past plot points) keep coming back, again and again, in a different context. This really works well for The X-Files if you view it in the context of its genre: the mystery, the intractability of events and the slippery nature of ‘the Truth’ is key. There is no single truth because it’s got to always be ‘Out There’, and this absolutely has an effect on character arcs and the Mulder/Scully relationship. It could never really get anywhere too too concrete, because that would sort of defeat the purpose. And by contrast, BtVS operated on more of a comic book genre model: important characters did sometimes return, but they returned on a new ‘level’, so that old resolutions weren’t usually elided so much as progressed. Buffy is a heroic narrative in a way The X-Files never was, and this definitely affected the kind of romance that could exist on the show. To be clear, Buffy didn’t really have any traditionally, explicitly ‘successful’ romantic relationships in the long-term either, due to its genre. However, this is because the relationships were worked through and processed rather than left ambiguous.
Anyway, my point is these rather different approaches to the narrative were baked into these shows, and worked for them in context. An open-ended Buffy would be extremely unsatisfying, and I believe that so would a fully resolved X-Files (I mean, what would you even do?) Obviously, I am arguing that an open-ended narrative is similarly a really bad fit for BBC Sherlock. Why?
Naturally, the answer lies within its genre and the approach the show takes to characterization. BBC Sherlock’s clearly builds on itself (that is, it moves forward linearly), and it’s got the hallmark of vivid reveals, reversals and transformations just as I described with Buffy. Unlike The X-Files reveals, they are not mysterious, incomplete or difficult to grasp, but simply built up gradually. Unlike Buffy, this is not an ensemble show with a steady churn of characters; unlike The X-Files, the cases are demonstrably not the point. In other words, the narrative frame is such that a growth-based resolution must occur, and it must occur within the frame of the main characters, because there is basically no one else of much consequence. The plot is directly linked to the character arcs, just as in both of the other shows (though more heavily in Buffy), so one can’t claim that just the plot will undergo a resolution. It’s the central relationship that must resolve romantically to fulfill its nature. (As a bonus, an unhappy resolution won’t work because John and Sherlock must remain as a team, much like Mulder and Scully).
I really didn’t mean to prove TJLC, btw, that just sort of... happened. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I can't believe Buffy premiered EIGHTEEN years ago. I've been watching it since the beginning. That's longer than some of you guys have been alive. Oy. I am OLD.
