it's so weird liking HOO these days as someone who was #here as they were coming out. it just feels like people... forgot... how jason and piper were written in the series. i do think piper being the one more conflicted about their relationship is a little more interesting bc she's a daughter of aphrodite- giving her a complicated relationship with her own love life is more interesting than the alternative. but modern day [you know.] shippers will tell you lies about jason's feelings when their conjectures are simply not true. like i think its overtly simplistic to say that j/asiper are written like a lesbian/gay boy ship. it's certainly An interpretation but it simply is not universally true—jason literally dreams of growing old with piper in BOO (which is so fucking devastating). like i'm sorry but he really does genuinely love her.
yeah it kind of leaves a bad taste in my mouth when people do everything in their power to insist that jason never genuinely loved or was even attracted to her because like... not only is that factually untrue (bro spends so much of tlh wanting her secretly and choosing not to show it) but why is it necessary to even do that. I'm just being cynical here but it reeks of The Thing in fandom where people will observe a man's canonical attraction to a woman of color specifically (especially bipoc/biwoc) and then invalidate those feelings (i.e. headcanoning said man as gay instead of bi/pan/unlabeled queer/etc) to knife all potential of that canon love interest in favor of what is deemed the More Valid mlm ship. it's reflective of a long history of woc not being seen as lovable/attractive/as legitimate love interests. sure it's not always rooted in prejudice but man isn't it weird how it happens all the time. like it's the kind of thing you'll see absolutely everywhere in almost every fandom once you start to take notice of it because fandom bloggers only care about men/dynamics involving men and just don't fuck with woc like that because they're extremely bad at practicing intersectionality. it's a trend that's biphobic and racist and misogynistic in one fell swoop! very efficient /j
I see what regard jasiper is held in nowadays and feel like I just occupy a very weird space here lol. things were so different ten years ago. like I do have to blame rick's lackluster hoo-ship writing to some extent because I myself don't really like jasiper (I don't dislike it either I just. don't think they ought to date lol) but I do care about their relationship and everything that happened between them, and I can't help but feel defensive of them because rick did them soooo dirty. like genuinely the way their breakup happened is just some of rick's absolute worst writing (imagine spending 5 books telling your readers that their relationship can be real and true in the end despite the fake memories and then you break them up offscreen over the fake memories. like okay so you just lied then LMAO). rather than recontexualizing hoo-era jasiper in the aftermath of their breakup as an event where neither party ever held romantic feelings for the other (again it's so unnecessary!!! you can ship whatever without denying that jason loved her!) I wish people could just internalize jasiper as a thing that was real and did happen. because it did!!! it did happen!
