#bc even though it's not like. explicitly shippy. i DO want them to make out about it.

[stantwinscodependency]

every single time i look at older edition D&D rules (there are reasons this keeps coming up, mostly the original baldur's gate games), i end up deeply deeply tempted to write a fic of Ford and Dipper discussing what the fuck THAC0 is meant to do. I may put a scene into the timestuck fic (or possibly a mini-fic as an extra) of Dipper getting to complain about the horrors of early edition DD&MD design in order to vent my frustrations with fucking THAC0 and what the fuck nonsense math they thought they were doing back then.

[waynedunlaptheorgandonor]

ok, if i don’t write this im gonna lose my mind -cue dmx ‘party up’-

here is a ridiculously detailed analysis of why i am bordering on near certainty of caryl endgame, and how everything that’s been set up from the start of s9 (yes, even c@rzekiel and d@nnie) has been leading up to this

spoilers and long-winded analysis under the cut

let’s take this step-by-step, okay? starting with:

The Titles:

i have said this about a million times now, but the very first indication of caryl came from the new opening credits, where mmb’s name was very strategically placed above the graphic of daryl’s crossbow, what’s meant to symbolize henry’s pike, and a bunch of cherokee roses. it was foreshadowing, not only of henry’s death, but also how her relationship with daryl was going to unfold, and, bear with me here, the downfall of c@rzekiel. speaking of which, let’s go there

C@rzekiel:

i have also rambled about this, too, but the way that kang designed this relationship between zeke and carol was so brilliant, because it was never supposed to be real, but you weren’t able to fully see how until the whole story was laid out before us. (which goes with my belief that kang tells stories over long, connected archs, and not just “you know what would be fun to toss in here rn for some drama?” 

carol

1. denied zeke’s proposal

2. never once told him she loved him

3. explicitly told those saviors she could have done without her ring (a line that had absolutely no need to be in there)

4. continuously rejected the title of queen

5. regularly visited daryl in the woods

6. said herself that all it was, was a fairytale. something i’ll delve into more when i talk about carol’s ptsd

but let me touch on how daryl plays into this. we know she regularly went out into the woods to be with daryl, and she did it because he was her tether back to reality. she was living a fantasy life, and knew deep down that it wasn’t real, but had to do it, for henry’s sake, and for the sake of her mental health, because at the time of the relationship, she had not remotely begun to deal with any of her grief

the first scene we get with her and zeke is directly after daryl saves zeke’s life, which is telling. and the first time we hear her talk about her feelings about zeke’s proposal she turned down it’s with daryl, and let us not forget that the script notes stated that daryl was experiencing jealousy about it. he never asked her not to, though, because he thought she was happy, and that was more important to him than her being with him. he was willing to give her up if it meant she was happy, like what kind of angst trope suffering is that?? -chefs kiss-

and we can’t forget that zeke canonically views daryl as a threat to his marriage (i mean, rightfully so). he literally tells daryl to back off his wife so that he can fix their marriage, because he knows carol is starting to go back to him

next!

flowers:

flowers have been being used as symbolism between these two across the past two seasons a bunch. flowers are in mmb’s title card. the first scene of carol/daryl in the time jump shows them seeing flowers. daryl brings carol a flower on the dinner tray. one of the upcoming episodes is “look at the flowers”. obviously the cherokee rose scene is iconic between them, and flowers to carol represent this weird dichotomy. on the one hand, they represent daryl comforting her and giving her hope, and on the other hand, they represent her downfall mentally from the grove. interesting that one of the threads throughout this current season is carol grappling between trying to stay grounded with daryl, and her losing herself to her grief

speaking of grief!

Carol’s PTSD:

people have bitched that kang is just telling carol’s same storyline all over again, to which i’m like, tf show are you watching?? here’s what kang has done. gimple dealt with carol by literally just locking her away in a house to mull over how terrible she is a person, while never once actually dealing with her grief, and then handed that over to kang as a boiling slop of diarrhea, and somehow kang managed to take that, perform alchemy, and turn it into delicious loving carol juice.

she had henry killed off to parallel sophia, yes, that’s true, but the /reason/ she did that is because she’s righting the wrongs that were done to carol by essentially rewriting her storyline the way it should have gone. carol has lost So Much. more than most, i think, and kang is like, “that would fuck someone up pretty fucking bad, i think, so let’s see her actually have to grapple with that.” kang stays true to the carol gimple created, in that her instinct is to run away (think boat), but she’s using daryl as a means of forcing her to confront her demons. the two of them, at any given time, are running away from their struggles, but daryl is finally at a place of stability, and so he’s taking carol by the hand and saying, “no. i’m not letting you do this again. you have to stay,” and carol does, because she loves him, but consequently she’s having to actually feel it (something she explicitly stated she “can’t let herself do”), and is now experiencing the consequences of it, and poor daryl is stuck trying to handle it. his entire plotline this season has revolved around trying to help carol heal her wounds so that they can finally be together the way they should have been ten years ago.

they should be together, and daryl shouldn’t be with anyone else? glad you asked, because that brings us to:

D@nnie:

i actually think that kang never meant to make daryl/connie a ship, bc nothing in season 9 really indicated anything more than a mutual respect, and part of me truly believes that she saw the reaction to the two of them, and was like, “you know what? i can work with this.”

carol is pushing daryl towards connie because she wants to take alpha down and knows she might go down with her and she needs to know daryl won’t be alone. that’s it. period. end of sentence.

but okay, let’s extrapolate. she asks him if he’s interested in connie, and daryl very, very bluntly says no. you can’t tell me that his answer was meant to be evasive. he delivered that line like straight up “no.” no room for debate about his feelings. if they wanted to leave room for doubt they would have had norman redo his delivery, because it is too obvious. he is shutting it down completely. and carol is like, “why not?” and /that’s/ when daryl gets evasive. very “don’t worry about it, why are you worrying about it, i’m not in love with you, shut up.” 

fucking kills me, guys.

now the current spoilers about carol telling daryl to get angry at her for (supposedly/probably) killing connie furthers this belief that she wants daryl to pull away from her. because he’s her tether, she loves him, and as long as he still wants her around she can’t leave. she wants him to hate her, and daryl refuses. he’s pissed as all get out about what she did, sure, but he doesn’t hate her. also, the idea that daryl going back to try and save connie and magna means he’s in love with connie is absolutely baffling. have you met daryl? his instinct is to save people at all costs. he wouldn’t leave his friends stuck in a fucking cave, are you serious? just because connie is a woman doesn’t mean daryl wants to fuck her. he’s allowed to care about his friends.

but anyway, the point here is that every “d@nnie” spoiler has been music to my ears, bc not once has it been actually shippy. that first episode with the asl book and them together? it was supposed to juxtapose zeke and carol, and how carol and daryl immediately forgot about connie and zeke in order to be with each other. every other thing with connie has either been very cute and platonic, or has been carol trying to push her on daryl. -chefs kiss- my dudes, you’re worrying about nothing

Misc bc I’m Late for Work:

here are just a handful of other indicators that caryl is on the horizon

-the dream where she dreams she’s MARRIED TO DARYL, and the scenes where she wakes up in bed and looks over and he’s not there. why set that up if the end result isn’t going to be them together in bed?

-the bracelet/the acorns and what they symbolize 

-the use of “we” (”we don’t sleep” “it was like that for us before all of this” “since when have we never been enough?” etc)

-their parallels to alpha/beta (see my other long-winded text post on that one)

-ten years worth of history between them!!! that kang understands and references (carol’s claustrophobic, look at the flowers, etc)

so anyway, i don’t have time to tie this up with a nice bow bc i really have to get to work, but this is all to say that i am very very confident about the caryl endgame. i think it’s being drawn out bc kang needs to right the wrongs done by gimple first, but that caryl is where she’s eventually headed. every spoiler has been 100% caryl positive to me. i am zen af, and i think you should be too.

i’ll add to this if i think of anything i missed, but here you go. caryl is endgame and they gon fuck

the end,

-diz   

[thezolblade]

tma meme

tagged by @sazandorable​ ~

Top 10 episodes

101: Another Twist 118: The Masquerade 119: Stranger and Stranger 81: A Guest For Mr. Spider 80: The Librarian 79: Hide and Seek 92: Nothing Beside Remains 39: Infestation 34: Anatomy Class 100: I Guess You Had To Be There

tend to enjoy the ones where we get a lot about the overarching plot; i’ve only listened to most of them once at work and i get the feeling i’m missing a lot of the connections that i’d get if i relistened to everything, though some pieces fall into place just browsing the wiki and transcripts a little. jon is so... ;.; i don’t think anything’s likely to displace another twist as fave.

(oh, and did you see my message on twitter the other day? had more feels about ep22 after talking about it on discord, but after the group chat moved on i felt i maybe shouldn’t go on and on about it in other people’s space, but if you’re interested in any more rambling then, guess i wouldn’t be derailing anything posting here... since the other people who lived in the same building as martin’s flat probably couldn’t see jane prentiss, same as most entities that are invisible to most people, would martin have been able to infer that, from hearing people walk past in the hallway outside his front door without screaming or attracting jane’s attention? would martin have been worried that the worms might have gotten people anyway? he went so far as to seal the cracks round his windows in case the worms got round the outside walls, but then when he got to the archives we didn’t hear him worrying about his neighbors. while he was trapped for those two weeks, do you think he heard his neighbors walking past, and had to avoid calling out to them for help, in case drawing their attention was enough to get them hurt?)

5 Episodes that scared you the most

mostly they’re effective as horror in that i feel horrified for the characters, to some degree, but not scared as if there was a real life danger - generally find it a bit weird that people talk about ‘horror’ genre and ‘scary’ things as if they were the same when they’re so different.

still, 94: Dead Woman Walking and 70: Book of the Dead had lines that were maybe a bit too unsettling, the inscription 'Life is a current that cannot be fought. It is a march with one destination. You cannot cease your step, nor move your course, to one that skirts the journey's destination. You have already read too much.' and "The moment that you die will feel exactly the same as this one." - left me thinking about how death is real enough. we’re bodies that are only very temporarily alive. and sure a story is only a reminder, but it can leave one feeling down anyway, kinda flat and nauseous. but georgie is a good symbol of one way of getting on with things anyway - accept reality as it is and let fear burn itself out, then live for the sake of it, even we don’t all have our fear completely cauterized.

Top TMA ship(s)

well jon and martin are interesting in canon and there are some very funny plays on that in the fanart here on tumblr, and feels for the episodes where they get protective of each other... but i guess i’m about as ace as jon, bc i didn’t interpret martin’s friendliness as a crush until elias explicitly described it that way and the actors confirmed it in the Q&A. even looking back now, i can see how having a crush could lead martin to act the way he does (...or if s4 is as bad as it looks, the way he used to...) but it’s not the only plausible explanation for that behaviour. i mean people can be fond of each other and determinedly nice without necessarily feeling romantic attraction. and i honestly just want to see them get more fond and protective of each other, to have each other’s backs more effectively and appreciate each other’s efforts, whether or not the ‘crush’ is ever ‘reciprocated’ in romantic terms - tho if romance was the form that all of that came in, i’d be just as happy as if it was platonic, especially as that’d make physical comfort more likely, since it’s a lot more common than cuddly queerplatonic stuff - tho i’m not really expecting the ship to sail far in canon since we already know that ‘nobody’s going to be okay’...

(i’m getting really worried about what martin meant by ‘goodbye jon’ in the s4 trailer; that guess someone made on the discord about how maybe martin gave up his own ability to connect with people seems horribly likely. if he had to sacrifice something once he was convinced that peter ‘was right’, would he be ready to give up unreciprocated feelings for someone who wasn’t going to wake up, and wouldn’t want him even if he ever did somehow recover, someone who thought too little of him to return his feelings even if he wasn’t completely disinterested in relationships anyway? would he be ready to stop feeling so attached to a parent that hates him and always will no matter what he does, and to coworkers who were caught on tape saying that he has to accept that not everyone likes him? at that point in time, could he even believe that anyone left alive actually cared about him?)

for other ships... daisy and basira sounded interesting, again mostly because elias said one of them cares deeply about the other even though i didn’t catch anything directly between them that felt necessarily shippy beforehand.

Favorite Monster(s)/Avatars

jon

michael shelley

helen richardson

Ex Altiora, it definitely counts

Favorite Entity/Entities

the descriptions of the vast whale-like creature underwater, the vast space entity, and jon’s dreams of a vast entity watching everything, have me wondering whether they’re one and the same - whether ‘the eye’ and ‘the vast’ are two aspects of it, like leitner’s metaphor about the eye, hand and foot appearing unconnected to an ant, and like that old story about blind men feeling different parts of an elephant and giving contradictory descriptions of ‘an elephant’ as a result, which i heard in the context of ‘a metaphor for god described by different religions’. considering the lonely’s effect on one of the astronaughts was kinda maybe triggered by another of them having an experience with the vast (the spacesuit floating away, and passing the window), maybe ‘the lonely’ is another aspect of that creature, the way it makes people feel...? it’ll be interesting to see canon delve further into all of this.

Any Entities that Don’t Scare You?

well mostly they’re not scary as mentioned above, though i often feel sad for the characters. the flesh often gets weird enough to just leave me kinda puzzled sometimes, like ‘where is this going?’, though on a meta level i like that it’s because it’s some kind of embodiment of animal fears, not human ones.

[unfamiliarties-a]

canon divergencies in characters.

i'll try and keep these as short as i can, but basically if you want to know where any timelines or portrayals differ from general canon then here's a master list for everyone. i'll update this for any muses i add or remove from here. any additional questions then just drop me a line. there will be spoilers for various fandoms. if any muses i have don't appear on this list then either there's no canon divergency to consider or i'm still in the process of deciding these things, again, feel free to just ask about it.

general.

tracy mcconnell. this one is kind of obvious but basically my tracy did not die at the end of the series and by extention ted did not wind up with robin after this, regardless of how much time had passed. ted and tracy both ended up together, had two beautiful kids penny and luke, and tracy was there for her daughter's wedding.

luke skywalker. i'm fine with everything that happened in the last jedi. i know a lot of other people weren't, but i'm cool with it. i didn't want luke to die particularly, but i'm okay with the fact that he did. i'm happy to write things with luke as a force ghost or luke if he had survived the finale fight.

elena gilbert. this is less a divergence of elena herself but more the general direction of the show that i didn't really enjoy. so with that everything after season three is considered to be divergent from the show. my particular peeves were plec's lack of care about elena's career goals from this point (aka the doctor thing) and her absence from the show after season six (aka why would you get rid of the main character of your show you dumb fucks). i'm fine with elena waking up as a vampire at the end of season three and the reveal of her and damon meeting before she met stefan.

loki laufeyson. no real canon divergency here. loki's death was heartbreaking and i definitely didn't want it to happen but i'm okay that it did and how well it was done. i will say here though that i do believe that loki was under some partial influence from the scepter during the attack on new york, but i'm not condoning anything either. that's just my five cents on the matter.

jess mariano. ooh, boy okay. so .. the kyle's bedroom thing. i wanna make it clear that jess, or my jess, or just how i saw things personally, was not going to rape rory. yes he was pushy and his behaviour that night was all around shitty and i do not excuse it for a moment, but he never would have gone all the way forcing her. and the first thing he did after the fight was apologise to her when he saw her next. that's just the tea for me. everything with a year in the life was cool with me i just wish there had been more scenes of him haha.

tony stark. the 'zuccini' comment just did not happen. k. thanks. bye.

natasha romanoff. i have my own bio for nat which you can read here. it's really the best guide for what i consider to be natasha's story, which is basically my own accumulation of natasha's appearances and history in the films and comics, so it would be nice also if no one stole what i wrote. also just a smol thing that the natasha and bruce trash romance did not happen here.

extended.

damon salvatore. similar to above that i have little to complain about with damon himself but with what way the show went after season three. i do think that damon's motivations and relationships with particular characters weren't put across properly to the audience, so i'll be here to clear up those instances. i'm okay with the damon and caroline thing, i don't ship them or i don't agree with what he did but i won't label it as rape. i'm not a survivor myself so i'm not telling anyone how to feel about it, to me i just think that caroline did want to sleep with him in the beginning but not after he attacked her and they didn't sleep together after that fact. the compulsion applied to damon getting her to help with with things in the town and feeding on her, but i don't think he compelled her for sex, so i treat it in that context. however i won't be explicitly writing this side of their relationship and my damon did apologize to her. i'm happy to keep the enzo and damon backstory but not them running off to kill people etc. the sibyl stuff however did not happen, nor the stuff with lily etc.

peter parker. i've seen a lot of the discussions about peter being transgender, i'm not against it in anyway, i actually think its kind of neat. i'm lgbt myself so its awesome to see some representation like that and i fully support all the trans peter's out there. personally for me however, i see peter as still figuring things out in all aspects of his life, including who he is as himself and being a friendly neighbourhood spiderman. so i'm not against exploring a trans peter in the near future, or atleast figuring that out, but for now i just think peter is too all over the place to put a label on himself either way, so he won't refer to himself as trans or otherwise, or who he's interested in sexually or romantically. it's all just one big figuring things out schtick, so be patient with him.

rory gilmore. okay so i liked the reunion series aka a year in the life but i didn't personally think that rory's arc was the best so i'm going to negate it entirely and do my own thing with it, whatever that will be. my biggest peeves really was her attitude to certain job prospects and her falling back into a crappy relationship with logan - which i never really cared for in the original series anyway. i can acknowledge that rory and logan were a thing back then, it actually lends to rory's conclusion at the end of that season but i won't write shippy things for them going forward, and i'm not even that keen in writing past shippy stuff for them. i'm a hardcore rory and jess shipper, so while she didn't wait around for him either, i'm totally down for them getting together. 

sam winchester. the whole becky rosen debacle did not happen. this includes them meeting, the love potion and the mess that was their 'marriage’. it just did not happen. becky rosen does not exist here. sam did not kill emma. if dean were to have a daughter then sam would not just kill her, monster or not, he would try to help first and probably to a fault, like he did with jack. there was never a romantic attachment with ruby. they were work partners of circumstance, they both used each other and slept together and ruby did manipulate him. sam has all his memories of the cage, due to the immense torture he went under during that time, a good portion of his 'memory’ is down to sensation, sight, sound, feeling, ect. from this its hard for him to say whether or not he was sexually abused / raped by lucifer in the cage. he was most definitely tortured and he retains the feelings of being violated in every way imaginable, but he doesn’t have a solid picture in his head of what exactly happened or atleast the whole of what happened.

dean winchester. though the show isn’t explicit with dean’s sexuality, my dean is considered to be a closeted bisexual. he has an interest in men and at times doesn’t hide it well and is very in denial about it. he’s never gotten a chance to even experiment it or entertain the idea due to the kind of life he lives, i.e. being a hunter. he will be very concerned about getting into a relationship or even a romantic entanglement with another guy, but it’s not to say its something he doesn’t want with the right person. dean was a demon for a lot longer than the show portrayed, we’re talking months and not weeks. dean loved being a demon, not looking back on it now, it makes him feel unclean whenever he thinks about it, but as a demon dean was as dangerous as they come and it took several botched attempts to bring him down by sam and castiel before they were eventually able to catch him.

john winchester. sam and dean were never beaten by john or harmed physically by him, who never would have raised a hand to his kids over anything. he wasn’t a perfect dad, he was a man grieving his wife and he made mistakes, he made his boys grow up too soon bc he couldn’t stand the idea of them not being ready someone or something tried to hurt them. no john winchester hate will be accepted here. john did tell dean to kill sam if he went evil. not because he didn’t believe in sam or hated him for anything. they had both made their peace with each other before john died. john just didn’t want his son to be corrupted or become something he wasn’t, he didn’t want azazael’s plan for sam to ever come to fruition. he wanted sam safe and himself always.

mary winchester. sleeping with ketch did not happen. bc good god, no. she was grieving her husband, john was the one. she would not jump into bed with a shit like ketch. that is all. mary did abandon the boys for the british men of letters. she was dealing with coming back to life, being a mother to two grown boys, grieving a dead husband and now living in a time and place completely different to her own time. she was adjusting to her new situation and granted she did not deal with that very well. i won’t make excuses for her in that respect but she didn’t do it out of spite or dislike for her sons.

[thezolblade]

Ship Meme! Tagged by @the-cryptographer​ ~

1) Ultimate Otps:

Which of them have ‘ultimate’ qualities...? GS Isaac/Alex would be kind of an ‘ultimate power’ ship, if they got a plot with twists and turns and character development and reasons to cooperate. I’d expect that more from fic than canon - so many other canons have lots of epic slow burn adventure fics for hero/villain-or-antivillain ships. But so far in GS, for those two, I’ve mostly found (good) crackfic, or non-shippy ‘they fight to the death and Isaac wins and marries Mia’  stuff that doesn’t treat them with even as much nuance as the canon.

Not that I mind mudshipping - my ultimate GS polyship would be something like Isaac/Mia/Felix/Alex(/Veriti/The Ice Queen), with interesting dynamics between every two characters in that set of four (and Mia/Veriti), even with some of the bonds possibly being platonic. Though when I’ve written long plotfic it’s very easily gotten platonic/ambivalent/angsty bc it tends so much towards drama, and conflict may drive plots (hence its abundance in plotbunnies), but I find it hard to headcanon characters getting past hurts and grudges very easily; I want to see them make the effort, but it feels like they’d need a lot of time and personal growth to get there, and I might not even figure how well they do until I’m almost 100K words in. And in some very angsty verses there’s no chance. I want to read other people’s adventure fic too, with fun ideas that manage heel-face turns or antihero plots in a slightly lighter way...

PMMM Madoka/Homura is another ‘ultimate power’ ship, if they can get to a point where Godoka and Homucifer can deal with each other as equals again, both with full knowledge of everything that’s happened and the resolve to truly save themselves, each other, and the rest of the universe. :o

Utena/Anthy is quite an ‘ultimate reality’ ship, when they find their revolution.

2) A ship you’ll always 💜??

The Harvest Moon fan in me is going ‘purple heart? that’s not a very high level of affection??’ ...but taking it as an emoji for ‘love’... without repeating anything above, pokemon Green/Red is always nostalgic (gameverse Ash/Gary, the names get a little confusing as there are localisation differences and I like the old manga and anime too but haven’t watched/read anything recent in those canons).

GS Imilshipping, too, in fic verses where they had a close bond. FE Lucia/Ilyana, I wish they had epilogue content after their support, still mean to write out a plotbunny for them sometime. Soren/Ike, of course, and Tibarn/Reyson.

ToS Lloyd/Colette/Sheena/Zelos, again with strong bonds between all of the pairs in that foursome. They did so much to help each other find hope by striving to save and trust each other, creating a new kind of salvation together.

Skies of Arcadia Fina/Aika/Vyse, Vyse/Ramirez, and Ramirez/Galcian. Never found much fanstuff for it, but it caught the imagination.

3) Current obsessions??

Lots of MadoHomu vibes after getting a oneshot written for them. Confident!Madoka makes both of them happy when they’re not dying; it’s a shame she doesn’t get much screentime as her confident and cheerful self, since so much of her time as a magical girl passes offscreen. Even while she was more unsure during the series, she demonstrated her desire to protect her friends, and Homura commented time and time again on her kindness - she loves her for it, and when she discourages it anyway, it’s because she’s come to believe that it’ll be the death of her. If they were truly safe, they could support each other so well - it could be a world away from the desperation that marked the end of Rebellion, when neither of them are at all okay. :s

Also getting quite into darkfic plotbunnies, and I know ‘darkship’ is a term in some cases for character dynamics fulfilling their worst potential, descending into violence and destruction that at least one character Does Not Want, but in the verses of those plotbunnies I guess they still fit the label of antiships better than ships.

4) A ship you never thought you’d like??

Uh, a lot of the stuff on the gs kink meme caught me by surprise, when rarepairs got suggested and the fills or plotbunnies got interesting - Alex/Ivan, Eoleo/Rief, Alex/Amiti (in a BAD IDEA way). And on lj/tumblr, Mia/Sheba was pleasant surprise too. Not that I ever had any preconceptions about disliking ships, they just hadn’t occurred to me.

In FF7, I don’t think I expected to see compelling Cloud/Seph or Zack/Seph at first, all those years ago, but I quickly found that there are a lot of good AUs and darkfic. Especially when they’re alongside other good ships like Cloud/Zack, Aerith/Zack, Aerith/Cloud, Aerith/Tifa, Tifa/Cloud etc.

5) A ship you used to like but don’t anymore:

Uh idk exactly. I used to read a lot of Buffy fic by ship to find characters whose dynamics were interesting in the show, but iirc I ended up skimming any content that was really ‘shippy’ to get to the plot and jokes and emotional bonding over real stuff, not random physical attraction, and nowadays I don’t think I’d bother skimming so much stuff just bc I hoped it’d be interesting and wanted to keep giving it a chance.

6) A ship that should be canon??

Well some that are very strongly implied but not explicitly stated feel like ‘yep that’s canon’ but could maybe use some more in-universe and author confirmation when not everyone seems to agree - Ike/Soren, Utena/Anthy in some versions of canon, etc.

7) A canon ship you hate???

I like to hate the way darkships go sometimes, but that’s what makes them an interesting story, going ‘noo’ about characters’ bad decisions, though that usually only works if they had better potential that they’re falling short of, not necessarily in a romantic sense... Can’t think of many cases where that happens in canon. Uh I think most explicitly canon relationships are either one option among many routes (and I get tired of support grinding), or I’m a bit indifferent, or if I dislike how it’s done I’d still start playing devil’s advocate and wondering how it could have been done differently if I spend any time considering it.

Oh in FE Awakening I kinda hated how Virion’s flirting in the main plot cutscenes was creepy and painted him as a bad joke, but his supports are much better and some of them are great - how do you explain liking his ships when he has such a bad start (and such bad English voice acting)? I also hated the way the player character’s support options didn’t all show up until endgame, so I missed them the first time and had to replay and wait until then to support grind, and then it all got repetitive grinding the same dlc maps so many times over just for such short supports, and the endgame marriage candidates that were most interesting (bc how the hell could the game make that work, with a head of state or a former enemy??) ended up with really rushed and unconvincing relationship development, and the child recruitment maps were hellishly difficult at that point in the endgame, and all in all it got a bit un-fun and not worth the effort. :/

8) A ship you shipped for years??

Most of the above. Also stuff like Saiyuki Sanzo/Goku, GS Alex/Felix or /Saturos, Jenna/Sheba, Karis/Sveta, Pokemon Misty/Erika, FE Florina/Lyndis, and, uh, probably stuff that I’m forgetting right now.

9) A ship everyone 😍 but you don’t care for?

...Was there anything? Some of the cliche stuff bugs me, but I’d usually think ‘what about writing the dynamic this way and maybe adding poly?’

10) Favorite rare pair???

Mm what's rare? Any gs Alex!ships at this point...

Edit: I forgot to tag anyone, so. If meme time sounds like fun, @sazandorable, @meganekkomeguca, @droory, or anyone who feels like it?