#(I do not think dom is an interesting character)

[s0lk]

stannarrator is an odd and confusing ship to me because i can enjoy it but only when it’s not framed as canon. that’s not to say i’m completely against the ship or that i haven’t consumed/made content of their canon selves in the past, but i’ve been doing some thinking and i feel like there’s a lot of pretty concerning aspects to their canon dynamic that are either downplayed or flat-out ignored by the fandom. (fandom mischaracterises characters for the sake of shipping, fork found in kitchen, i know, i know.)

i feel like people tend to reduce them to “toxic yaoi”, which… i mean, “toxic” is accurate, but i feel like the label is generally used to mean an enemies-to-lovers couple who fights often and usually has some kind of sadomasochism involved. this is what i generally see with fanon depictions of them - stanley is a cheeky little brat and the narrator is a cool sexy dom who like ties him up with the adventure line or something. i admit i was very much one of these people for a while. the thing is that they aren’t toxic in the sexy internet sense, their dynamic is genuinely unhealthy and harmful. there’s a massive power imbalance between them - which is very much exploited by the narrator - and while a power imbalance isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the key issue is that stanley is never seen to take the same enjoyment from it as the narrator does. if we take the narrator’s description of his emotions to be true, stanley is often pretty damn terrified by the things that happen to him, and if we take the description to be false, then the narrator still wants to cause suffering. he wants stanley to be afraid, to cower and beg for mercy, to do exactly what he asks of him, no matter what. in the ultra deluxe announcement, stanley runs from the narrator. he tries to be free of him, but there is no freedom to be found. he is trapped.

despite all this, we (the fandom) still like to have stanley be the silly, disobedient, sort-of-masochistic little critter, and i think the main issue is that we project ourselves so much onto him. we disobey the narrator, so naturally stanley must do the same. we play the countdown ending, think “goddamn he sounds hot” (which, i mean, i’m not going to argue with that) and decide that stanley must obviously feel the same way. there isn’t much to his personality in canon, so we decide that that makes him a blank-slate self-insert character, but that means that most stannarrator content ends up feeling more like player x narrator instead, with stanley being merely a vessel through which to enact our own desires.

there’s nothing necessarily wrong with characterising stanley this way, obviously. you can do what you want with him, and that’s the fun of it. it just annoys me when stanley acts as the player generally does, and it’s framed as if this is him, this is absolutely the canon version of his character, because the narrator says stanley makes those choices so obviously this is who he is! what this interpretation completely fails to consider is that, unlike with most video games, stanley and the player are two entirely separate entities. isn’t it so much more interesting to consider the implications of that, or to explore who stanley could be without the player’s influence?

this is why i really like AUs, because you’re awarded a degree of creative freedom that you don’t have when you’re working entirely off canon. want stanley to be a real person, with no one puppeteering him? go for it! make him a mischevious little fellow, because now it is actually him thinking and feeling for himself! you can even find workarounds or solutions for the more problematic elements of their dynamic, by putting them in scenarios where there is no power imbalance (coworker AUs for instance) or getting the narrator to actually acknowledge and rectify his own flaws and cruelty to stanley. the latter i particularly like (and it’s what i’m trying to achieve in my own fic), because it doesn’t deviate too far from canon but still allows for their relationship to get a little healthier. the thing with that though is that it takes Time, and i mean a Lot of time. and even when the narrator has improved as a person, it doesn’t really feel right for them to suddenly jump into a relationship. or even have a relationship. there’s a lot that goes into rebuilding a bond after that sort of treatment, and stanley has every right to not want anything to do with the narrator, whether romantically or at all. i do like the thought of them at least being friends after all that recovery (i’m a sucker for happy endings), but realistically there’s no reason stanley has to fall in love with the narrator.

anyway. yeah. once again, i don’t hate them as a pair, and i completely understand why people portray them the way they do, but it just… bugs me. dunno if this makes sense or if anyone feels the same way about this as i do, but here it is.