#the fact that Seiya got in on it too and dragged Toy along

[chicagocubsreactions]

Rookie dress up road trip! [9/10/23]

[takaraphoenix]

1, 2, 16, 19.

Thanks for asking, my dear! ^o^

1. Name a ship that feels like home.

*laughs* I already gave a rather elaborate answer for that. But you know me, I’m a multishipper at heart.

Another, different ship that feels like home for me…

Seiya/Usagi. That might have just been my first experience of “But wait. They are far cuter than her with the guy she ends up with!”. Prior to Sailor Moon, shipping didn’t really exist to me. It was just… watching a show/movie and when two people ended up with each other, well, they ended up with each other. I didn’t quite care for it either way.

And then Sailor Moon came along and for seasons, I just… watched and accepted that Usagi-chan is with Mamoru, because That’s How It Is. And then they wrote Mamoru off the show and replaced him with Seiya and I love Seiya so much and she had such a much better dynamic with Usagi than Mamoru, they were so cute together and Usagi did definitely return her feelings to some capacity, otherwise there would not have been as much blushing and getting into such situations.

…And then the fucking show brought Mamoru back and the two remained endgame and I was like “No. What. No. Go get together with Seiya?? He makes you way more happy than Mamoru does! You are way cuter together!!!” and for the first, and actually only time, there was a love-triangle and the protagonist ended up with the wrong angle. And I was confused.

And that’s how I got into shipping, like the concept of it. I didn’t know about fanfiction back then, heck really not, though later on I did get into Sailor Moon fanfiction too when I learned about those.

And even now, every time I rewatch the anime - which, I did periodically as a kid and teenager and then it became fewer and fewer but still - I immediately get dragged back into this ship and this mournful feeling of “oh no. she’s gonna end up with the wrong guy again, isn’t she?”, like rewatching would somehow change the outcome of the story…

But yeah, there’s so much sentimental value attached to this ship for me, because Sailor Moon, at large, was really the first big thing for me, it was the very first show I was really intensely invested in and hyped - I had so much merch, my room was plastered with posters, I had the bedsheets, I never missed a rerun, I had the damn soundtrack and listened to it on a loop (much to my father’s misery…). And even years after the fact, when I discovered the vastness of what anime fandoms are like, I never lost it. Fanarts exist? Let me look up all the pretty Sailor Moon. Wait, doujinshi? Oooh, let’s look for Sailor Moon (note: DO NOT LOOK FOR SAILOR MOON DOUJINSHI. Especially not when you’re only 12 years old. Don’t. Don’t do that). Fanfiction? The same. My first… proper collectible anime figurines that were not just toys from Toys’R’Us was a set of Sailor Moon and the Outer Senshi.

There’s no fandom that is more nostalgic than Sailor Moon to me, and consequently, my first ship holds a huge feeling of coming home.

2. Name a ship that you love but have conflicted feelings over.

Interesting one… I mean, I guess I’d have to say Poseidon/Percy. He’s his dad and it’ll never stop feeling weird writing it, but at the same time I do ship it, because… he’s not A Dad. He’s the sperm-donor who then shows his face for the first time when Percy is 12 and meets Percy like… a total of four times maybe. On the basis of “he’s Percy’s dad”, I genuinely have a more permanent full-stop no-ship reaction to Paul than to Poseidon, because in actual canon, Poseidon was never much of a dad. Sure, sure, fanfiction, fleshing out what little there is in canon.

But, at the same time, that can go the other way. These are Greek gods and honestly, fucking their kids is like… what they do. So, for the most part this ship for me is “Percy getting wooed by the King of the Sea, all powerful, totally spoiling him, Percy getting godhood and the fucking respect he deserves. Blood relation nonwithstanding”, but there is a “but he is Percy’s father and you’re mainly writing them with a father-son relationship” in the back of my mind half the time. Most the time, that’s being solved by doubling down on a daddy kink. Which is kind of ironic considering that’s not really my kink either, but you make work with what you have.

Especially the more often I wrote Poseidon as a Good Dad who actually raises Percy, it does feel more and more conflicting. Because for me, the incest problem has never been much about blood but about the dynamic of the characters and the “actually being raised by them”-part. It’s why more recent fics featuring the ship have been about Neptune/Percy - still the same god, but also thanks to Riordan’s weird stunt, also kinda Not. Loophole! ;D

16. Name a ship in which you love all characters equally.

Nicercy. Differently though.

Like, I’ve explained my weird character-love before, but here’s the highlights of it: I usually always latch onto one character and love them in a “this is the character I want to write about, the suffering poor precious I wanna make feel better because canon fucks them over about the trauma” - you know, the protagonists and bottoms of my stories like Percy, Jace, Jack, etc. And then there is “I love the character-design of this one - physical, powers, background, personality. This is my favorite character, I love them” - that’s Nico though, in this case.

So, while usually in my ships one character is both of those things and the other character can just… vary between like basically all other characters from this fandom, PJO is a very rare fandom in that my two categories of favorite character don’t overlap in one. And thus, this ship is the one bringing together the two different types of favorite character I have.

It’s rare, there is only a very, very small number of ships where that’s the case, because in most fandoms, the character I latch onto and the character I love as a character the most are one and the same.

19. Name the ship with the loveliest fans.

Oh, Nicercy, hands down! I just love them? They are the sweetest readers and I made a lot of wonderful friends among those shippers. ^o^

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