Thinking about villains again
Jul. 22nd, 2023 03:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
phantomtomatoI love reading old posts about new-to-me fandoms. It’s the first thing I do when I finish a new canon and have fannish, shippy feelings about it: what have people said in years past? What sorts of fic and art did they make, and what discussions did they have, and what were the disagreements within the fandom? Especially when the fandoms are decades old and there are cycles of this, and enough time has passed for some of those posts to be people reflecting on their experiences of fandom years after they were very active in it. (My meta-fandom is fandom history.)
Anyway, I have been happily doing so this week and thinking again about what attracts me to shipping villains. It’s not the ‘problematic’ nature of the ships, or the ability to write dark tropes like abuse, consent issues, and tragedy. It’s not kinks like age gaps, D/s, possessiveness, or obsession. All of that is fully orthogonal to why I’m into them, often actively squicky, but the villains draw me in over and over again despite what should be a hurdle. (And is a hurdle—wading through fic written to very different ends in order to sate that hunger for the ship isn’t fun.)
I’ve seen a lot of that in the discussions I’ve been reading. To paraphrase some comments:
> A murdered B's family, why would you want fluff for the ship?
> ‘Don’t you know A/B is abusive?’ Yes, that’s why I like it!
I don’t know how to relate to those. I’m reading the same canon, feeling the same chemistry between the characters (or potential, if I attach strongly to only one character). Still, the urge I get is to fix: I don’t believe he’s emotionless, I think he’s repressed and lying to himself; what does it take for him to acknowledge his own feelings? Nothing is unforgivable, because figuring out how to bridge that hurt (including family murder!) with forgiveness and understanding is the appeal of the ship.
I think this is rooted in some of the same interests as those that drive darker explorations of these sorts of characters and ships, but I want to put the effort into writing towards happiness—whatever that looks like for them. It’s not fluff, though it might not be dark in the expected ways. But, then, that’s why I’ve always struggled with these genre distinctions! I still keenly feel the lack of language for categorizing the sort of villain fic I enjoy.
Then again, that’s what makes diving into an older fandom so preferable. It’s old, and dead, and these discussions and disagreements have long since been rendered irrelevant; I don’t need to suffer that ill-fit as an active member of a current fandom.
Anyway, I have been happily doing so this week and thinking again about what attracts me to shipping villains. It’s not the ‘problematic’ nature of the ships, or the ability to write dark tropes like abuse, consent issues, and tragedy. It’s not kinks like age gaps, D/s, possessiveness, or obsession. All of that is fully orthogonal to why I’m into them, often actively squicky, but the villains draw me in over and over again despite what should be a hurdle. (And is a hurdle—wading through fic written to very different ends in order to sate that hunger for the ship isn’t fun.)
I’ve seen a lot of that in the discussions I’ve been reading. To paraphrase some comments:
> A murdered B's family, why would you want fluff for the ship?
> ‘Don’t you know A/B is abusive?’ Yes, that’s why I like it!
I don’t know how to relate to those. I’m reading the same canon, feeling the same chemistry between the characters (or potential, if I attach strongly to only one character). Still, the urge I get is to fix: I don’t believe he’s emotionless, I think he’s repressed and lying to himself; what does it take for him to acknowledge his own feelings? Nothing is unforgivable, because figuring out how to bridge that hurt (including family murder!) with forgiveness and understanding is the appeal of the ship.
I think this is rooted in some of the same interests as those that drive darker explorations of these sorts of characters and ships, but I want to put the effort into writing towards happiness—whatever that looks like for them. It’s not fluff, though it might not be dark in the expected ways. But, then, that’s why I’ve always struggled with these genre distinctions! I still keenly feel the lack of language for categorizing the sort of villain fic I enjoy.
Then again, that’s what makes diving into an older fandom so preferable. It’s old, and dead, and these discussions and disagreements have long since been rendered irrelevant; I don’t need to suffer that ill-fit as an active member of a current fandom.
