#if reading people talk about why they don't like rbron upsets you

[dingleautomotives]

could i ask why you don't ship rbrn anymore?

this is a pretty long post. obviously it is rbron negative by virtue of the fact that i’m explaining why i don’t ship them so if that kind of thing upsets u... probably don’t read!

it’s been a long time coming friend. true fans™ of this blog will remember i basically quit shipping them in summer of 2016 for a while for a variety of reasons related to ‘shippability’. i felt like the show was never going to write them in a way that was character driven, the show didn’t seem to know how to make that reunion make sense. the writers knew the fans wanted rbron together but they didn’t understand why so they wrote a mismatched series of weird mini arcs that were all plotty messes and none of which were particularly interesting/romantic/good for my shipper heart. so layer one here is: as a shipper, rbron just doesn’t do it for me a lot of the time. i felt like in order to get what i wanted from them as a couple i had to resort to head-canons, reinterpreting scenes by adding layers of emotional depth that weren’t present onscreen, and supplementing what the show gave us with fanfic. 

layer 2, though, is that as i’ve watched the last two years or so, i’ve had so many moments where rbrt’s behavior straight up made me uncomfortable. especially where aaron was concerned, but also just in general. i vividly remember each of these moments because i felt like i’d been punched. because i was SO disappointed. when aaron met ryan and rbrt continued to lie to aaron about who he really was (letting aaron believe that gordon had a second victim. watching that guilt literally consume aaron and still thinking they should lie to him). when rbrt left lawrence to die in april ‘16. when rbrt burned the letter but more so when he got caught and lied about burning the letter (twice). the way he spoke to chrissie after ssw. rbrt kissing rebecca. lying about it for weeks. but mostly that scene when aaron defended him in the pub KNOWING what he’d done and then rbrt still lied to his face in the backroom. the way rbrt talked to aaron on his birthday. some of the things rbrt said during their big fight in jan (a fight i will own to really liking at the time, but mostly because i thought it was setting up an arc to address those issues but. it wasn’t). the abortion stuff. trying to make aaron feel like rbrt cheating was his fault too even though he was literally being tortured in prison. trying to manipulate aaron into getting back together. repeatedly lying to his face since they’ve broken up. all of these things made me mad tbh even when i was at Peak™ shipping levels. and i just kept telling myself they were ooc flukes. (i haven’t even mentioned anything that happened in 2015!)

and you know bizarrely, the ONS is something that i could very easily get past. obviously cheating is horrible but i think in general it can be portrayed in a way that’s human and that couples can recover from. 

but i feel like there was some weird tolerance that i had for rbrt screwing up over and over again and aaron always having to forgive him for those screw ups. it was like i kept telling myself that wasn’t their REAL dynamic it was just the dynamic the show was writing. the show was writing them WRONG, i said. but with this latest round of SLs... the liv stuff, the lawrence stuff, the chrissie stuff... my tolerance for making excuses for rbrt was just worn down to nothing. it was like the show was trying to tell me “you think this dude has a soul? nah man!!!”

i realize that villain!rbert is something a lot of people love and that a lot of people, in fact, signed up for. and like i get that, villains are fine. but i personally just can’t deal... with when he turns that villainous behavior on aaron. that’s just not something i enjoy as a shipper. he lies to him, he manipulates him, he tries to control him. these are not ooc flukes. the show has spent a significant amount of time showing this to be true in the last 6 months. and i am not denying that those lies/manipulations comes from a place of love. rbert DOES love aaron. but saying “he lied to his face because he doesn’t want to lose him” only works for me the first 5-10 times. 

look i know christmas is coming and all of this rbert character degradation is heading towards a redemption and maybe emmrdale is going to tell the Story of All Stories here. and that’s fine. for me, rbron isn’t something i enjoy anymore and i’ve kind of been on an on-again/off-again roller coaster with them for a long time. i had them blacklisted the month before their wedding, and i was still very much a “shipper” back then. like. my point is i’ve always had weird mixed feelings about rbron. some of the happiest periods for the fandom were the angriest/bitterest periods for me. things that were “gifts” to the fandom like the picnic and the pub quiz were massive disappointments to me and my dumb standards. and on top of that emmrdale has chipped away at everything i thought i liked about them so all that’s left (for me) is the stuff that makes me uncomfortable. and it suddenly has just made me see everything a Lot differently. so it just made sense for me to walk away. 

but yeah! that’s the honest truth from me!

please don’t send me 109385023 anons explaining why my opinions on rbron are wrong, i don’t have time to answer them fam. this is just where i’m at right now. i don’t really have any intention of talking ab rbron very much on this blog in the future. but since you asked, i’m answering.