#i will agree that rpf shipping can feel a little squick to me

[ardentperfidy]

ok so I got this response to this post I made about a queer ship in the show arcane and I thought about replying snarkily and then I thought about ignoring it and then I actually couldn’t stop thinking about how commonly I hear variations on this in fandom spaces, across fandoms, and specifically the accusation that queer shipping undervalues friendship

and I think it is true that there are a lot of common queer ships, often mlm ships, that are based on coding that has an equally or more plausible intensely close platonic reading, but I want to defend the romance reading and I think it’s because of this weird confluence of tropes/social phenomena??

because the quintessential romance most of us grew up with is the Disney princess, love at first sight thing, but this doesn’t actually involve much romantic development. the romance is either an endgame prize or a side plot. and because it doesn’t really involve much development (and thus, in the absence of an external obstacle, is pretty boring), it’s the kind of romance plot seen in a lot of mainstream media where the focus of the show isn’t romance. the relationship shown on screen is often just a meet cute, or a moment where characters feel a “spark”, and then a few scenes where we establish that the characters have a common interest, admire some character trait of the other, or even just both felt the spark. and honestly, it comes up a lot in network TV because it makes it easy for producers to try out love interests, keep them on the backburner, and if people don't respond to them well, we get a briefly or not at all foreshadowed conflict that breaks them up, and if people respond well then usually we get a dramatic life or death bonding scene to show the depth of the characters' feelings for each other (of the kind we often see repeatedly between platonic leads - don't @ me, @ the number of episodes i've watched that are just 'girlfriend getting kidnapped'). then there’s the unrelated fact that most men, especially american men, don’t have close, emotionally deep friendships. it’s not good or healthy, but it’s a well-established phenomenon (thx toxic masculinity). and honestly, most people in general don’t have the intense closeness of relationships we see on tv because most people’s lives just aren’t that intense! which is all good and fine, outside of sitcoms most people don't want to watch the reality of like, weekly or monthly catch-ups on life between groups of people who are super busy with the monotony of daily life, but like, it is definitely beyond what most people experience in their everyday friendships.

so then when we get fictional depictions of very intense same-sex friendships, it just hits all of our trope buttons for one of the other big romance tropes, this time often in shows where the romance IS a big part of the story, of long time friends who realize it’s love. I mean, it’s Harry Met Sally, it’s Jim and Pam, Cory and Topanga, Luke and Lorelei. the story is they’re just friends until they’re not, and honestly often the only "set up" or other compatibility we get differentiating this from just a friendship is that the characters are het and hot (again, thx Harry and Sally, men and women can't be friends). so we've seen this trope over and over, we feel it in our bones, and then when you get a show where the canon love interests are shallow (often the female love interests of male leads, because misogyny and comphet), but the same-sex leads have this intense, platonic long-term bond, (like, lookin' at you supernatural, sherlock, 9-1-1, probably more that i just don't watch), and, even when there is no queer-coding, no romance-coding, just a platonic bond, it is totally understandable that this hits all of these trope buttons for people!

or there's also the fact that this is just all fictional, and people can enjoy their media consumption even if it's in ways you wouldn't enjoy your media consumption.