#and i refuse to uwuify them do it if that's your thing

[swashbucklery]

Out of curiosity why do you ship sabine and shin ?

Okay anon so I am trying to figure out how to approach this ask because I know that this fandom has a real problem with bad-faith actors looking to troll Wolfwren shippers and I do not have the patience to deal with that, but also I do want to talk about them because they're lovely.

So. If you are asking because you're a troll, the answer is that I'm a big mean lesbian who likes ruining Star Wars and gets off on making innocent fanboys cry, #sorrynotsorry, it's part of my Terrible Queer Ruining Agenda and I am going to be doing it every second Tuesday until society as you know it has crumbled into gay dust.

If you're not a troll: because they hit this very particular combination of Trope Buttons that makes me ever so happy, anon!

Because it's about - like, there are ships that I love because they are a type of loving partnership that entrances me, where I see myself or see the type of love that speaks to my soul and want to enjoy the process of rolling around in it like a cat in nip. Then there are ships that I love because I'm attached to a particular character where like - this blorbo deserves the world and that includes a healing love, a warm love, a love that cultivates a space for them to rest after the harsh world around them has bruised them ever so.

THEN there are ships where - the dynamic fascinates me and I want to dig deeper into it. Where it's not about cultivating love as much as it is taking what's on screen to its gayest and most extreme possible endpoint, and that's where Sabine/Shin really gets me.

It's about the deep obsession of nemeses and the way that can feel inherently queer. It's about the ways that they are both mirrors and opposites. The way that Sabine carries so much anger and self-loathing and shame and guilt in her little heart and constantly pretends that she doesn't. The way that limits her throughout the series is riveting to me.

It's the idea of Shin, who in may ways is a more successful Jedi but in other ways is a sad, lonely little weirdo who has no community except for this weird old man and pretends that she's fine with it but can't be.

The way that they are both successes and failures in ways that mirror each other, the way that they orbit each other as nemeses and fight constantly but in their darkest moments have a weird little glimmer of - not love, but the beginnings of compassion.

And I have seen lots of writers and artists who look at that glimmer and see it as the beginning of a 200k slowburn story where they bicker and argue and slowly tenderize each other into being people who can be vulnerable, who learn to soften their prickly edges to fit around each other. And that's wonderful, and that's a beautiful way to ship Sabine & Shin.

For me, it's more about digging into that weird, fucked up little place of what if they didn't. What if they stayed fucked up and didn't soften but those orbits got closer and closer together. What if it wasn't toweringly romantic what if the orbit was the path of a comet colliding with a moon. What if that was somehow what each of them needed even though they both hated needing it. What does it feel like to confront the fact that sometimes our desires and what we want our desires to be don't align? What would it be like to envelop that in the complex ten-dimensional web of denial that both of them embody; desiring but pretending not to desire, indulging but pretending not to indulge. How far could that go before it hit a crisis point? What would that crisis point be?

There are so many stories there and that's fascinating and a thing that I find fun to explore in fiction, anon. If that's not for you, that's totally alright but there might be other dimensions that I described above where they ping with your interests more.

Or, they might just not be for you, and that's also okay.