#fandoms can get REAL MEAN when they forget that canon is not beholden to them

[whatever-you-can-give-me]

is this post about tristamp!ww cause if so, I COULD NOT AGREE MORE.

it is very important for me to state upfront that i do not begrudge fandom their fun. we all do a little recalibrating of our faves to suit us. i do it all the time. it's normal fandom behavior. it does not cause significant material harm.

(what gets flanderized to the extreme in what kinds of characters is... worthy of serious discussion, especially in the case of characters with canonical or commonly headcanoned marginalized identities [though those are two different things requiring two different kinds of examination] and that is. Not a subject i'm going to get into in a pithy complainpost. but i am Aware. I Am Thinking About It. I Am Thinking About Posting About It.)

but all that aside i genuinely have been. completely boggled and moderately disheartened by the way fandom seems to have just. unpersoned stampede wolfwood? it's happened in such a weird way, too, where he's been replaced by a sort of fandom-telephone version of classic wolfwood, who is himself a composite of like two and half different wolfwoods and 25 years of fandom drift. i've been in various fandoms for like, a decade, i've never seen something like this, where the existing fanon from a completely different canon just swallowed the actual canon.

(how vash's character has fared in all this is. an entirely different can of worms that i have tried and failed to open without sounding like a grumpy asshole, so, moving swiftly on.)

i think the thing that really irks me is that it makes it. so. difficult. to find any specific work for any specific canon, because everyone has decided to make soup instead of differentiating.

which is (grumbles) fine. i guess! i don't like it. the ao3 tags are completely unusable. but like, whatever.

it's just getting kind of tiring that if i want to read about stampede wolfwood, yknow, blorbo from my shows? i have find a needle in a haystack of big buff cowboys who have never shot someone with a laser bc of a ptsd episode in their life and their 150-year-old virgin boyfriends.

[confessionsofatvjunkie]

A non-shippers unbiased Jon-sa/erys opinion...

Okay, I know I’m not completely unbiased here, becasue I’m not much of a Dany fan (and won’t be until she starts being honest about her intentions). BUT since all of my shipping energy is devoted to Braime and Gendrya I just don’t have anything left for other ships! Because of this I am neither Team Jonsa or Team Jonerys, but it has become such a huge part of the fandom its hard not to form an opinion. 

First I think its important to make sure we’re separating our actors from our characters, because while Kit has great chemistry with both Sophie and Emilia, JON has great chemistry with Sansa, but watching him with Dany last season was about as exciting as watching paint dry...

I’ll come back to that, but let’s start with Jonsa first: 

I’m really not here for anymore incest in GoT, and while I know that technically they’re only cousins and not siblings, they were still raised in the same home as half brother and sister, even though they didn’t have much of a relationship in their youth. However, detractors of this ship who use their familial relationship to completely write off the the ship are forgetting a little something... GRRM. He doesn’t seem to have to have the same compunction about this topic as the anti’s do, in his original outline for the books he had a storyline where Arya (yikes, I can’t even think about it!) and Jon fall in love and are tortured by this love UNTIL they find out about Jon’s true parentage. Now we know he moved on from that storyline, but did he move on, or just pivot? Another part of the original outline was that Arya was going to be part of an unwitting love triangle, as Tyrion, who abandons his family to fight on the side of the Stark's develops feelings for her, albeit unrequited... now can we think about a different Stark family member that GRRM pivoted a messy, and complicated relationship with Tyrion to? So if he salvaged some semblance of his original outline by transferring plot points to Sansa, its not out of the question that he would do the same for other plot points. Also people who say there’s no canonical evidence for Jonsa are choosing not to pay attention. I mean, you don’t gaze longingly at your “sister’s” lips, after kissing her on the forehead! Go find the gif, I’m not kidding, he kisses her forehead, looks her in the eye’s then looks down at her lips, and just pauses there! Anti’s you might not want it to happen, but it very possibly could happen 

Now, onto Jonerys: 

(I know they’re technically related too, but they weren’t raised together, so it doesn’t factor into my opinion, thats just what this ridiculous show has done to me!!) I know I said I’m not much of a Dany fan, but I’m going to put that aside, and just look at the evidence provided to us in the show. I think Jon and Dany’s relationship, as presented in season 7 is legit, meaning I’m not really here for the political!jon theories (not because it’s not an interesting idea, I just don’t think D&D are that creative)... so, I think Jon comes to care about Dany (yes, even if he also cares for Sansa - you can have feelings for two people at once) and I think Dany’s feelings for Jon are also real. That doesn’t necessarily mean they are end game, it just means that going into the last season we’re going to see from Dany where her true priorities lie. When she learns there is a surviving Targaryen that has a more legitimate claim to the throne than she does (this is putting aside the fact that I don’t think she has a claim at all, nor does Jon for that matter - but that’s a topic for a different post, lol!) this is the moment that will tell us what kind of person Dany is, and will end up being. She’s either going to acknowledge the claim, or fight against it - there’s really no other option. If she fights against it then I don’t exactly see their relationship surviving that? So she’ll have to decide if love or power is what she wants more. Now I think if D&D had 100% say over how the show ends then they’d have Jon, despite learning of his parentage, “give” the throne to Dany, or at least marry her and rule together (I’ve not seen such huge Dany stan’s as D&D since Jorah!!) Dany would be the hero!! But since we know they’re beholden to GRRM’s ending for the books, I think he’s got a little more imagination than that. I don’t know if Dany will go all Mad Queen, I don’t even necessarily think she’d be a bad ruler (though I do agree with Daario that’s she’s more of a conqueror than a ruler, but  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) but I just don’t think GRRM would end his series so predictably. The only reason I think Jon should “win” is becasue he doesn’t want to rule, and in stories like this it’s always the people who have leadership thrust upon them that do the best job, the one’s who rule because its the right thing to do, and not out of a lust for power. By that estimation I’d be just as happy if Sam, or Gendry, or Davos ended up King (actually Davos would make a great King... side note, this blog is now a Davos for King blog, lol) Okay, I said before I’d get back to the “watching paint dry” comment, and here it it, its true, they were boring! I’m sorry, I just didn’t buy their courtship AT ALL in season 7, again I don’t think this is purposeful i.e. Jon hiding some secret plot, I just think it was a matter of pacing. We’re so used to watching things move so slowly on this show, that to slam all that happened between them in season 7 into just 7 episodes, it just wasn’t believable to me, and all the “he’s not in love with me” and “I’ve seen you staring at her heart *wink, wink*” moments felt so forced. I think because of the pace, we weren’t able to enjoy any pining, or build up, it was, “look here’s our two stars, aren’t they pretty? They’re gonna bang”... then they did. I just wasn’t here for it, and the actors didn’t seem to be either, hence the paint drying boredom of their performances.

tl/dr: Yes, Jonerys is real, but that doesn’t mean its end game... and yes Jonsa could happen. But I don’t really care either way, I just want Jaime to kiss Brienne, and Gendry to get Arya all flustered by calling her m’lady in front of her family, and Davos is King now, that a new rule I just made but is a good rule! Okay, bye!