#am i still salty about vmars s4?? you betcha

[firelxdykatara]

💔 and 💢

💔 ship that makes you sad: Truly, and from the depths of my soul: Logan and Veronica. And I think the saddest part of all is that it didn’t have to be that way. Like, there are ships that make me sad because they go through angst but at the same time it’s cathartic and satisfying and at the end of their story I’m either left wanting more or feeling as if they came to a good ending even if I wished better for them, and then there’s.......the entire relationship getting tossed into the garbage and set on fire by the revival that was supposed to be giving back to the fandom. Veronica Mars season 4 wasn’t about drawing in new viewers, it wasn’t supposed to be accessible to people who’d never even heard of the show before--and the only reason it was able to happen was because the fandom came together and enabled the post-series material to gain traction. We literally threw money at Rob Thomas until he could put together a movie for us (and yeah, there were people who complained about the fanservice in said movie, but as it was intended to be a labor of love for the fans, that criticism didn’t hold much weight in the fandom at large), and it was on the strength of the fandom that he managed to sell the revival to Hulu.

And then he let it crash and burn.

I’m not sure if it was just hubris, or if he truly misunderstood his own characters and his own story that badly--did he really think the audience tuned in for the mediocre mysteries in seasons 2 and 3? did he think it was the crime that held our attention in the movie? did he think it was veronica alone, and not her relationships with everyone else in her life? and, if so, why was the ‘mystery’ in season 4 so flimsily constructed that it falls apart like a house of cards under the slightest scrutiny?--but either way, the net result was that I sat through an entire season of a show that had, at its center, one of my favorite OTPs in all of my fannish history, which had me making excuses for everything throughout the season that made me cringe, and I came away from it wishing that it had never gotten greenlit to begin with. If I could go back in time and prevent Rob Thomas from making any veronica mars content after the movie, I’d do it. And I can’t even look at LoVe content without wanting to just break down and sob because it’s that damn depressing.

They deserved better. We deserved better. And at the end of the day, my anger will eventually fade, but I don’t think I’ll ever stop being sad about it.

💢 ship that is most misunderstood: Oh, for this I have to say Zutara. I don’t know if it’s because of its popularity, so a lot of people know of it even if they don’t know the details because they haven’t watched the show, and also the people who watched the show and didn’t ship it feel like they have to overcompensate for reasons not to so much that they project a lot of things onto the ship that just... aren’t actually there in canon, or what, but... there are just so fucking many really bad takes (some of which come from zutara shippers, too, but a lot of it is from people who aggressively dislike the ship because of things they built up in their minds about it that aren’t actually true), like ‘they bring out the worst in each other’ (demontrably false, and zuko helping katara gain closure for her trauma is like the opposite of toxicity but go off) or ‘they would fight all the time if they were a couple’ (also false, because they fight approximately zero times after becoming friends and, in fact, seem to be on the same page emotionally) or ‘zuko sees katara as an annoying little sister’ (which is a particular brand of Bad Take that is very transparently there just to make them seem incompatible and isn’t actually supported by anything in the show, but hey, if that’s the only way they can make their ship actually work then whatever) and it’s like... did they watch the same show i did? do they even like katara? (it’s usually katara who gets shafted, although if i see one more ‘kylo ren is the zuko of the sequel trilogy’ take i may actually break something)

anyway, yeah. zutara is heavily misunderstood, occasionally within the fandom but especially outside of it by people who evidently have a vested interest in the ship not being ‘possible’ and want to cast it in the worst possible light so their preferred ships seem so much better by comparison, and anyways it’s exhausting.

ask me about my ship opinions!