missoyashirou replied to your post: I don't like that the failed relationship was two...
I gotta be frank, the last IP I can think of that had a romance with the mindset of ‘You should give up your dreams and let me take care of you instead’ was friggin’ Mirai Nikki, and the character in that mindset was an obsessive stalker who locked the target of her affections in her basement.
Thankfully - don’t know that one. Though it sounds like the kind of story that could either be horribly twisted fun, if done with awareness - or the terrible kind of ‘but she loooooves them’ kind of approach that signals a Fifty Shades version of what passes for ‘romance.
I don’t know what it is about VLD and romance but it seems really, really hard for them to pull it off in any form of healthy way. Granted, they seem to have a hard time pulling off any kind of relationship well (other than flat out family), including the friendship that’s supposed to bind the core group together so -
but still, VLD relationships that turn romantic seem to be an almost ‘I earned this’ kind of mindset in their telling. Shay and Hunk seem to have avoided that but there hasn’t been much focus on that beyond a line or two here and there and that’s possibly been their salvation. But it seems, otherwise, that VLD has a bad case of turning one half into a prize that isn’t given a lot of self-agency in what happens or doesn’t and the other half is the ‘winner’ that kind of wears them down or otherwise ‘earns’ them. Not saying all the ships are that way. There are certainly some fandom ships that are much healthier than others and even some of the kind of shifty ways VLD does things get set right when fandom is doing it, but a lot of the way VLD writes things seems to be focused entirely on the ‘I’ principle instead of the ‘you’ principle. Even when the character is show thinking about the ‘you’ instead of ‘me’ in the relationship, there’s still this weird undercurrent of ‘well, they earned that other person’s love you see’ which kind of messes with any selflessness the story might be trying to show. We get shown everything from one side of the pair, person A, and the other side almost seems to be passively there to respond when enough time has gone past and A has put in enough ‘attention points’. We’re never really given any indication of how person B feels though so it always comes back to the feeling as if person A ‘earned’ it. Its the writing itself that makes it feel selfish, even with unselfish characters. I can think of three ‘ships’ off the top of my head without even trying and in each one, one person is the passive receiver who gives no indication of deeper feelings and the other person is the pursuer who put in the time and therefor has a right to them.
It’s pretty shifty to me and that’s without me counting Adam and Shiro as one of the ships. But Adam and Shiro’s relationship does seem to follow the same pattern what little of it we see. Adam specifically mentions that he’s put in his time and now its time for Shiro to chose him. And thank God Shiro doesn’t. But its still the same pattern and its creepy as hell.
