#subtle lingfan

[flourchildwrites]

Fullmetal Alchemist Headcanon

#5 - Heart, Mind, Soul & Hand

The Amestrian custom concerning the giving and exchanging of rings perplexed Mei Chang.  Rings made of fine metal and precious gems were pretty, no doubt, but expensive and cumbersome when practicing Alkahestry.  As far as the seventeenth royal princess was concerned, she had nothing to prove to anyone regarding her marriage to Alphonse Elric, the foreigner as some of the Xingese aristocrats still liked to call him.  Owing to her status within Xingese society, the couple struggled with acceptance even after her brother, Emperor Ling Yao, had publicly recommended the union and touted the political benefits of such an alliance.

But Alphonse refused to kowtow on this singular issue.  He vowed that he would give Mei something meaningful to commemorate their union, and despite Mei’s assurance that she neither needed nor wanted anything, Al continued his search for the perfect piece of jewelry, confident that he would succeed before their big fat Xingese wedding day.  However, the blushing bride flatly rejected a necklace adorned with indigenous Xingese jade and haughtily scoffed at a traditional Amestrian engagement ring containing a 2-carat brilliant cut diamond.

Deflated, but not defeated, Alphonse asked for advice.  Unsurprisingly, the Emperor preferred to stay out of it, but Lan Fan was uncharacteristically quick to recommend a new set of kunai.  Al enthusiastically took to the suggestion to heart but tasted something bitter in his mouth less than a week later when Mei gushed about her half-brother’s latest gift to Lan Fan, a set of ornamental kunai encrusted with pearls and rubies.

On his last trip to Amestris before the wedding, the young alchemist also consulted the soon-to-be Führer and his most loyal subordinate.  While Hawkeye plainly indicated that, indeed, Mei was right (rings were not necessary), Mustang was quick to pull him aside and fervently swear that buying his future wife a ring was nothing short of a divine calling, even if she never wore it.  By the time Al reached Rush Valley, his knees had begun to buckle under the weight of such a seemingly simple endeavor.  

Then, one evening after the children were fast asleep and the lady of the house opened a bottle of warm sake to share, the young man confessed his predicament to his brother and sister-in-law.  Winry, clearly sympathetic, quickly offered her brother-in-law one of her heirlooms rings.  Not having the heart to ask her to part ways with anything she inherited from Pinako, Al politely declined, giving Winry’s hand a reassuring squeeze.  

Ed, however, was not as gracious a hostess as his wife. With cherry red cheeks and a boisterous laugh that threatened to wake the baby, Ed clapped Al hard on the back and said, “You know we’ve still got your old suit of armor in a crate out back.  Bet I could dig out that metallic jock strap looking thing since Mei’s clearly got you whipped.”

No one was amused.

Nevertheless, as Al settled down for a good night’s rest in the guest room that evening, comforted by the sounds of Ed tossing and turning on his living room couch, he began to turn the idea over in his mind.  A few hours later, the talented alchemist strode toward the old storage shed clad in a mismatched pair of pajamas and boots with an alchemy textbook tucked under his arm.  He reemerged the next morning with tired hands and a ring that brought tears to Winry’s eyes.

“I made this from my old suit of armor,” Al explained as he offered a small ring to Mei upon his return to Xing.  It was dull silver and plain with the smallest hint of copper blush.  The only unique adornment was a white filament twisted around the band.  “I transmuted pieces of armor from my breastplate, my hand and the place where Ed put the blood seal to make the ring.  The white strand is what was left of my old hair.”

“Why those parts?” Mei asked as regarded the simple piece of jewelry, holding it up the light.  “Surely, that armor was precious to you.”

Al smiled.  His reply was well-rehearsed, but sincere all the same.  “You’ve given me a place in your heart, a piece for your mind, an insight into your soul and you’re about to give me your hand in marriage.  I thought I should return the favor.  It’s equivalent exchange.”

[aeroknot]

me: [crys in rarepair]

[drrockbell]

You’re right, it is a lot worse and fandoms are way more aggressive now they used to be.

Depending on the anime, more or less love interests have more mini fandoms and more disagreements.

Naruto, for example, has almost infinite ships and that fandom has honestly put all of its energy into proving and disproving ships, even 5 years after the anime ended. Fairy Tail is better, but there are still fights and division.

FMA is a hard one and the only real wars were between EdWins and EdRoses which disintegrated just before Brotherhood came out and may as well not even existed considering how small and non aggressive it was.

FMA is probably worse off now than it was 10 years ago because it’s officially a decade since it ended and shippers are typically the ones who stick with a fandom for long periods of time. You said that when it’s clear that a ship is canon there is much less fighting and that’s very true, though sometimes I see people really trying to show ‘clues’ of other ships, like EdLing or RoyEd, and sometimes it’s a facepalm, because really? The author made it obvious what the ships were from the beginning, she wasn’t trying to show any subtle hints towards anything that wasn’t EdWin and Royai, AlMei and LingFan being the only other viable ships being hinted.

Then you have the Great Cancel Culture! Where people try disprove ships they think is problematic.

“These two used to be enemies so supporting it would be abuse :/“

Or

“This character did a bad thing at the beginning of the show so you’re all supporting an abusive ship!!!”

Then you have your typical age gap ships, where some are really screwed up, like a 13 and 35 year old that is clearly messed up, but then you’ll see people freaking out over ships with a 15 and 17 year old.

Tumblr was probably the most detrimental thing though. Back then, people had to sought out content they were genuinely interested in, now new content is in their face everyday, including posts like, “Why X Ship is problematic” and “Y Ship is better than Z ship” and that definitely gets people’s attention.

One of the worsts things though, is that people can’t seem to understand that they don’t need a reason to dislike a ship, but they still try desperately to explain why. I’ve seen stupid things. “Ed and Winry knew each other for years. It’s practically incest!” Coming from someone who shipped Ed and Alfonse Heidrich. “But Winry abuses Ed. Shipping this means you support domestic violence!” Coming from someone who wrote an EdxEnvy r*pe fic and called it good yaoi smut.

All anyone had to do was just say the ship wasn’t for them. That it just didn’t click or they preferred a different dynamic, but they spend so much time trying to explain why and believed that it absolutely needed to be said, they just couldn’t grasp that maybe it’s not the ship that’s the problem, maybe the ship was just a soup when they preferred stew.

Longish Post about shipping

When did shipping become a competition? I’m sure I’m not the first person to point this out, but I am really curious when shipping became so competitive. I remember the first time I even figured out what shipping was, it was for FMAB since my OTP at the time was Royai and it was my first ever ship and one of my favorites. The ship never became canon officially, and I had a lot of fun reading fanfiction of it, looking at the fanart of it and just having a blast with it. I remember the friends I had at the time who were into it shipping it also and it was just fun to do. And it was the same with EdWin, it was a fun ship that I loved back then. Even the RoyEd shippers around the time I don’t remember being too mad about the other ships, since RoyEd to them was fun, something they liked, but it never had much of a shot at being canon. 

Maybe those are bad examples since in those ships the author didn’t really provide other potential love interests and so there were no ship wars. I guess another early example I remember was the Zutara shipping from ATLAB, people shipped it but generally accepted when Aangtara became a thing, and if I remember right ( Which I may not because I left the fandom due to not enjoying the show)  MaKorra shippers were relatively peaceful about Korrasami. It wasn’t really until recently in some of the fandoms I’ve been in that ship wars have been such a problematic thing. 

I have a couple of theories as to why this is, and I wanted to name a few of them and go into detail about them, and kind of start a discussion about why ship wars have become much more problematic. 

1. Characters are starting to get more love interests in a story or potential love interests. In the examples I mentioned above, I think it was pretty clear from the start Ed and Winry were going to be together, and Aang and Katara. Not anything against the authors or the couples, it was just something which was going to happen. Maybe I’m wrong, but it hasn’t been until recently that love triangles ( think Twighlight, which was the first ship war I ever saw) were a common format. With characters getting more love interests, it became easier to fight over who they would end up with since it wasn’t so obvious. An example of this is Blake from RWBY. In canon, Illia, Sun, and Adam have all expressed interest in her which would make it easier for shippers to argue about it, where before, probably Blake might have only been teased with one of them. ( This one is a bit of a stretch and I don’t know that I did a good job explaining it) 

2. Social media has made it much more possible for actors and writers to interact with the fans of a series. I don’t want to pick on RT here, but with Fair Game, for example, part of the reason the situation spiraled out of control so quickly was due to the show-runners interacting with the fans and getting their hopes up that it would be canon. Another RT example of this is that Barbara and Arryn have both expressed a lot of love for the BumblBY ship, and some shippers really latch onto that. A non-RT example would be how some Voltron fans thought Klance was going to be canon based on the support it got from the cast on Twitter. Interaction between the fans can be really cool, but it’s also easy for it to turn sour very quickly if false hope or misinformation about a pairing is spread. 

3. This one might be another stretch, but representation I feel has also added to ship wars. ( Note that I do not think representation is inherently a bad thing, and I will try to explain my take) Recently, more LGBT content has appeared in works, and that’s a good thing. The community has struggled for a long time for representation and the idea of heteronormavity is still a complex one. I remember when I first found fanfiction, it was next to impossible to find F/F or M/M content ( except for smut which is another issue, the sexualization of ships, especially LGBT ones as slash) and the media at the time had bare-bones representation. With LGBT getting more rep, it means it no longer has to be a crack ship when two same-sex characters interact. This sort of goes along with the idea I mentioned earlier of multiple love interests above, adding more potential characters without the show being flamed in large for it. 

4. Canon became more important to people, and thus they wanted their ship canon more. I remember when I was younger, the only debates I ever saw about something being canon were usually about DBZ, or anime movies if they were canon to the series. There were no real arguments about ships being canon that I can remember. But somewhere along the lines, the idea of being canon became important to people. ( Let me be clear, there’s nothing wrong with wanting a ship to be canon) and so people got competitive about if a ship had a shot at being canon. 

I’m not in many fandoms, and so I go back to RWBY. If you scroll through any ship tag, you can find very talented artists, writers and content creators, as well as probably whole walls of text about why an interaction between a character means they’ll be canon, or how the creators of the show set up this and this to be canon. Most of them are really interesting, but it goes to my idea. I think we attach the label of canon as being important, maybe more than the label of ‘ a ship you enjoy.’

If BlackSun doesn’t become canon, I will be bummed and disappointed. But that doesn’t make it a worse ship for being not being canon. The show will always have volumes of the build-up and the adorable moments between them, my favorite of which changes so much. There will always be art and appreciation posts, fanfiction and content for them. Your ship not being canon doesn’t mean you don’t have to enjoy it. 

Some of my favorite ships ( Especially OC x Canon ships) will never happen. My favorite ships for Yang ( Mercury x Yang and Ren x Yang) will likely never happen, but that doesn’t have to take away from just how much I enjoy them. 

Anyways, let me know in the comments below how you think ship wars got so bad in some fandoms, and maybe some of your favorite ships. Also, let me know if you want me to edit the tags since I tagged this with the different ships I mentioned, but I can definitely remove it from that ship tag if you don’t want this on your dash. 

[aeroknot]

i’ve been sitting on this fic WIP for... i don’t even want to count how long... but like i’m talking about it anyway, taking a break from alternating between deep cleansing my room and working on Mermay, AND it’s my BIRTHDAY. so imma treat myself by treating y’all to what i’m actually alluding to.

it’s a slice of some lingfan ‘cake’ tasting:

“You work so hard, you deserve it, and it’d be awfully soothing. I’d make sure. I promise.”

She merely hums. Her impassive expression on her oval face doesn’t leave, and not for the first time he laments how almost always she so dutifully strives for her best impression of her mask even when he’s asked her to discard it. (Unless in the moments they secret away, where he’s asked her to discard much more, which he’s wanting — trying — to get them to transition into now.) But however uncannily her face mirrors its stoicism it’s still not so pale as the porcelain, gilded instead with a yellow-pink-sandy-gorgeous glow, and the celestial contrast baffles him; That beneath it she strikes him as much more lunar, like her stillness could manifest as a reflection of the moon on this very pool’s surface when it is untainted by ripples. Despite her sunlight skin she feels of night and dangerous shadow and the comfort of the dark, formidable and nurturing, as much the glinting blade casting out blasphemers as the womb delivering the virtuous from her own warmth into the charge of the sun, the only being besides him that kisses color along her skin. Oh, how he wants to kiss that warm skin some more. It doesn’t matter how many times he’s already been invited to, because if he didn’t want, and more specifically want her, he wouldn’t be Ling Yao.

His gliding study all around her face moves from her plump cheek to her eyes when she pauses her surveilling to glance at him. Before she looks away, and even at such distance, he can catch the speck of shine in her irises. It nudges his memory: the sun is also a star, one of millions, but hers are the only ones he can truly stare into… though when they burn into him in the moments she speeds his heart, compels his body, she just as easily sparks the blinding flashes of cosmic cousins behind his eyelids— and how annoying it is that she keeps regarding him now as if she’s unaware or unperturbed by her power to do so.

As he sinks back pressing more weight onto his elbows he remembers the last time she summoned them; the last time they made love. He remembers the ecstasy that reliably speckles his vision with patterns of light, his eyes squeezing shut at the feel of moving together, blurring all lines between them and melding all phases of night and daylight as their bodies work to come before revealing dawn does. And it reminds him, also: the light of the moon is the light of the sun. The glinting mask of the Emperor’s Shadow reflects the face of the Dawn Emperor.

When her stars glance to the side to him again, over that subtle bump in the bridge of her nose (a regional Yao trait they share that makes him brim with pride more than avarice), he knows it’s because she felt the sudden roil in his chi. He knows his energy ripples over the water toward her in great rings even when his lust could not drop upon the surface to send them, because it already resides beneath it, low, low inside him.

in something i’ve been writing on and off one of my sentences includes “the sun is also a star” and i had written it Before the movie announcement and had never heard of it as a book title beforehand lmao

nothing is original everything is fake!