umbraja replied to your post “fic: lance admits he doesn’t know keith very well fic: but what lance...”
That’s about 90% of all Klance fics. At least if you read the poor characterization of Keith as just Lance being an unreliable narrator and not that the author doesn’t know Keith either.
OH BOY HOWDY klance fic characterization is a whole can of worms oh my god.
most of the ones i read at least have the decency to have lance admit that he WANTS to get to know keith when he realizes that he doesn’t know him at all, and not just jump straight to “in love” despite the fact that they’re clearly not on the same wavelength. though i will admit that i don’t read things that i really truly don’t like. if the characterization is washy in the first two paragraphs i’m out lmfao.
i think the ones that annoy me the most are when lance and keith don’t have the rivalry but keith is still characterized as really aggressive from lance’s POV. like, at no point is keith overtly aggressive in canon. he’s protective, straightforward, focused, and a little short-tempered. he gets stressed like the rest of them. he never attacks without a reason to attack. and i don’t think he would ever attack or be aggro in, like, a coffeeshop setting unless he was well and truly provoked? and sometimes authors know that but they still have lance acting like keith is the most high-testosterone meathead ever and it’s only after three chapters of lance antagonizing him on the false premise that he deserves it that it gets resolved.
i just... ahhhhhhhhhh. sometimes i just don’t understand why people ship it when that’s how they write them/see them. i’m off on a tangent now but there’s so much unnecessary drama involved in klance fics where they purposefully hurt each other and then come back for more and i honestly truly don’t understand? especially when i’m reading fics tagged as ‘fluff’ and ‘cuddling’ and all of that. it’s like... you want a fluffy fic, okay. but you can’t write the ship as fluffy. so the answer is apparently to shoehorn fluff in between them making each other cry and purposefully being assholes to each other? like... to each his own, man, but that’s not canon and it’s strange that klance is the fandom paragon of good queer rep when so many fics coming out of it are mischaracterizations and/or intentionally playing up their rivalry to make it as dramatic as possible when they both admit they were pining the whole time. like wow, how are you going to write them being vicious and vindictive to each other one chapter and sweet and loving the next and not get whip-lash?
and like, duh, this is all just my own opinion but i... don’t tend to see this with other pairings. even ones that also have bad spots and/or fights in canon. like, you don’t see this with kallura fics (though there are waaaay more klance fics in general so maybe i just don’t see enough kallura to see the patterns). you don’t see heith fics playing up the tension between them before the weblum. you don’t see kidge fics where keith blows up on pidge unprompted, repeatedly. like... klance is just a strange pairing when you break it down to look at how people write it and what they like about it, because they never seem to ship it like the characters LOVE each other, and when it does happen they cut out significant chunks of their personalities in order to do it?
there are ways to write klance that aren’t... that.
anyway i have too many opinions i’m going to slink off to a corner now.
umbraja replied to your post “umbraja replied to your post “fic: lance admits he doesn’t know...”
Don't get me wrong. I've seen some really great Klance stuff and I'm not against the ship but this. Exactly this. I have a theory that's largely because Klance is the most popular ship so it's the pairing a lot of people write for just so their stuff will get attention, not because they actually like or even know the canon characters but because they just want to tag their stuff with Klance. I kind of see it happening with Sheith now too.
rip. i feel like a lot of people kind of pidgeon-holed themselves into shipping klance honestly. like, so many people do it and it’s so hard to escape and there’s so much drama with the whole anti movement/discourse that some people just... do it because it’s safe and warm normal. it’s the pure ship, the queer rep ship, the valid healthy ship. the safe ship. fanon characterizations of them are super easy to pick up because they’re EVERYWHERE, and because of this anything klance, even iffy kinda klance stuff, Gets The Notes.
and i mean... i’m not ragging on the pairing or the shippers as a whole. i’d be such a liar if i said i didn’t enjoy it. it’s just very clear that sometimes people aren’t into it because they actually enjoy, like, the characters? lmfao i sound like such an asshole purist when i say it like that but i love the characters so much and THAT’S the reason i read the fics, so when they don’t live up to the hype i’m just like ‘what’s the point’ it honestly doesn’t make sense to me
Uploading this makes me realise just how messy my colouring is lmao. Oh well.
This is a scene from Chapter 3 of @umbraja‘s Kidge fic, ‘The Quiet Kind’.
This particular moment has always stood out to me ad being so incredibly tranquil and just... perfect. I often find myself thinking about it when I have some down time, so what better way to tribute it than to draw it?
Thank you so much to @umbraja for letting me work on this, and also for creating such a beautiful fic!
