#I guess ling and his body guard sorta had this in FMA

[burinazar]

[Belavue ramblings]

two thoughts. 1) I’ve often thought that, if the genders in the “beauty” scene were different — that is, when asked about beauty, a male character calls someone specific “beautiful” twice in a row while stuttering and blushing — few people would see it as platonic or sibling-like etc on Vueko’s end and it would basically be considered the natural and widely accepted reading of the text that the male speaker had feelings for the other party. It’s in fact very close to the stereotypical “beautiful isn’t it” “[gazing at other person] yeah, beautiful ” unspoken love exchange. (…incidentally, as common as that kind of exchange is, I can’t think off the top of my head of a comparable scene where the first speaker is a man and the second a woman.)

2) the kind of love that i see Vue having for Be if we read this exchange as romantic, that of a deep admiration for someone who seems celestially above you in a way where you don’t even begin to assume reciprocation and just want to admire them, is a kind of love i more often see male characters express in media (a sort of cousin to courtly love). female characters are more generally the receiving end of such feelings rather than the one pledging devotion. I feel like I can think of exceptions but it’s usually situations where the adored character turned out to be deceptive or manipulative and the female character became disillusioned or was otherwise hurt, which is quite a different thing than the admiration being a) deserved and b) reciprocated.

I hadn’t quite tied these two ideas together before. But they feel true and connected to me. For the shipper basing their characterization in canon, the particular shape of the romantic feelings that Vueko may have for Belaf is something of a refreshing and interesting one re what i am used to seeing genderwise* (now I could very well just have my role reversal goggles in too tight but I feel I’m onto something here), and I think this is maybe related to why some people don’t “get” the ship or how that scene reads as the expression of a deep admiring love to me when potentially they’d see it immediately if a man said those same words to a woman.