#bc this doesn’t even get into my uthodurn arc crackship: imogen/deanna

[hello-eeveev]

Fearne and Chetney are weirdos and besties and I love them Do Not Separate. They should do something about whatever it is they’ve got going on, but I don’t see them becoming romantic? Like, this game of chicken is going to end with the fade to black and then it‘ll just start again! Which is exactly what I want! I love their weird, hornt up flirting, gimme more! They are neither romantic nor exclusive, but they are a Thing and that’s just a fact. They will go after the same woman and not stop teasing and flirting with each other the whole time. Iconic.

I also ship Fearne and Ashton! I ship it a lot, but not romantically. I’ve mentioned before that I think I might headcanon pretty much all of the bell’s hells as on the aromantic spectrum, but my headcanon of aromantic Ashton was the first and most concrete. Like you can’t just say, “Sometimes it is very easy to misconstrue friendship for love, lust for love, it's very amorphous. I have a hard time defining it to begin with, and there's only really a couple situations where it might've even applied” and not have me go “👀 🖤🤍💚???”

Defining the nature of how I imagine their relationship is weird. Like if I were to label it as a QPR, the platonic bit is much more fuzzy compared to say, Orym and Fearne, who are a Pair, but a strictly platonic one. But their relationship would also be less physical than Fearne/Chetney, for example. Partly because of Ashton’s general touch-aversion, but also partly by choice, I would think.

What’s most compelling about them to me is the way Fearne—whose upbringing in the Feywild has given her a love of things that are weird and dark and off-putting—looks at Ashton—who on some level considers themself fundamentally broken/damaged and who has a deeply cynical view of people and the world—as someone lovely and beautiful and interesting, and Ashton delights in Fearne’s weirdness. The aspects of themselves that often frighten others do not scare each other.

Fearne is not beholden to the attitude of “well this is just how things are” because, well, that’s not true when you live in the Feywild for 100+ years. On the other side of this coin, you have Ashton who actively rejects this attitude because he has seen firsthand how the status quo doesn’t serve anyone except for those in power and how it especially harms those who do not have any. So there is this sort of unprecedented tenderness that Fearne can give to Ashton because she just cares about them, and that’s kind of the beginning and the end of it, and there is a freedom from rules and expectations that Ashton can give to Fearne. They’re walking along these neighboring philosophical roads, where Fearne’s like “lol rules? what are those?” and Ashton’s like “fuck the rules because the rules fucked me.” And this is a lot of deep thinking about who they are as people without mentioning that the way they even became friends was a friendly game of stealing from each other! Fascinating chaos duo 10/10