Passionate Ambivalence

The question was raised on Twitter about ships for The Dragon Prince and I started to reply to but realized it was turning into a whole post, so...

I fell hard in the first freaking episode for the ships that have been dearest to me ever since, but also for like... all the characters, especially the adults... (Kinda vaguely in order of how much I care...)

Varrai (Sarai/Harrow/Viren) is best ship & form of government, my mind will not be changed.  Pls to bring me all the Everyone LIves AUs with a side of Happy Power OT3 Parents.  The show keeps underlining the importance of their relationship by showing how messed up and out of balance everything is with one gone, talking about the three tools of justice correlated with their problem-solving perspectives, etc. I'm ok with lots of variations... Like maybe they aren't all together all the time or exclusively or the actual romance and/or sex bit is more of King Harrow Timeshare Agreement, or the marriage is largely for formality /convenience / An Oracle Did It... But they have to all like & respect each other & be important.


Virrow (Harrow/Viren) = hot dads basically canon in most of the ways I really care about.  Definitively The Most Important People In Each Other's Lives WIth The Painting To Prove It.  We could have had husbands and that's sad.  We also could have had like, friends to lovers to friendly exes to frenemies who play chess & try to undermine each other's war strategies / struggles to control the fate of the human kingdoms. 

I was already in deep by the time it was clear just how much angst / heart sporking this ship canonically brings.  I like making fluffy AUs cuz they deserve to be happy.  There will always be tension, an edge, arguing... but that can be pretty fluffy when you're not dealing with stuff like assassination attempts. Some of my fav flavors include
- No significant hurt, just dad stuff and pancakes and sometimes breakups cuz Sarai Always Lives
- Hurt with lots & lots of comfort
- They hurt each other & enjoy it, with special subcategory Harrow Admits Dark Magic Is Useful & Also Hot


Viren/Mystery Parent - It seemed like forever til their was any information about the brodigies other parent(s), and I really wanted to fill that space with OCs.  And I wrote stuff and didn't post it, woe, but I guess I still will? If I'm fitting it with another main ship then I'm trying to minimize angst, and IMO Lord Pragmatism & Creative Solutions would totally be up for all kinds of arrangements / experiments / not listening to His Royal Boringness give advice about the proper way to make a family.  Then also there's the thing of, you can have an OC or Mystery Mom and go all in with the romance / smut / love story / etc., but that person is going to have to accept that they will never be first in his heart and life and reasons for sacrifice.  Maybe tied?  Maybe the king and the kids are tied and they're like, right next?

Sarai/Opeli - I Just Think They're Neat and I should really post some fic I guess.

Sarai/Lady Justice - It's canon and great

Sarai/any woman character - & also especially the one lady in the council who's maybe the head of the Crown Guard or not & hopefully didn't die & I'm calling her Panya

Sarai/domming the hell out of everyone

Sarai/Viren's ex - I'm realizing there's a lot of ways to do this & I've only really thought about like 1.5 of them...

Anyone/everyone/Viren - bring it plz thx, but I mostly prefer humans and formed my opinions in S1... have done Gren/Viren & prob will again...

Viren/Marcos - I might have gotten a lot out of the scout report scene & been encouraged...

Corvus/Gren - I was confused for a while & thought they were closer in age, but I still like this ship a lot.  Canonical reasons to think they have spent a bunch of time together & developed trust...

Corvus/anyone/everyone

Janaya - I really super like friends to lovers but enemies to lovers can be real good too I want to see them interact more and more Janai everything

Annika/Neha/doing stuff and not dying

Rayla/Marcos - IDK I'm a sucker for life debts and culture shock and they're cute

Marcos/Soren - they can be cute sweet gay & possibly trans jocks together, shy in different ways & foolish in different ways

Raylium?  Raydium?  Whatever the Claudia/Rayla/Callum ship is called.  I like OT3s and Claudia should have everything and everyone she wants and I believe she can save the world.  

Tink/Runaan and also Tink/Runaan/Rayla's parents 

Lujanne/some husbands or spouses 
Lujanne/a bunch of the guests at your wedding where she is catering with versatile, creative protein sources
Lujanne/fun with with magic
Lujanne can freak my bean anytime, is what I'm getting at here...

Are there any ships I really don't like?  I don't really think of any.  They made everyone hot and mostly interesting and I feel like almost everyone who interacts has at least some chemistry.  I don't really think about shipping the kids, but yes if you write Future Ellis / Future Aanya I will read it. 

Viravos and to a certain extent Rayllum are things I try to avoid cuz I'm not interested and they. are. everywhere!!! and especially like so many Virrow & Viren fan persons sailed away with the sparkly elf and I just... I am happy for them but I just. don't. get it. and it's like it takes energy to deal with that?  IDK.  It's like Bagginshield or Thorki ealier in my fandom experience, but now I write fic sometimes, so in addition to sifting thru content to find stuff that's... not that... I'm also, like, berating myself for not making more and better content.

Ana Mardoll has a fantastic post on her blog about the Beauty and the Beast story. It's the author's note to her new book, which I can't wait to read. It has me thinking about Beauty and the Beast-type stories.

The one I'm most familiar with is The Phantom of the Opera, and I was pretty well obsessed with it for years...maybe decades? My interest comes and goes, these days. That's a story that seems, when told well, to be as much about music, and genius and madness, and possibly something about ghosts, as about love, or "love..." One of my favorite versions was the miniseries that was on when I was in elementary school, starring Teri Polo and Charles Dance, with bonus Burt Lancaster. I composed, but never wrote down, fanfiction stories for it, of the Mary Sue fix-it variety.

My Character, J, was very much in the Mary Sue-as-fantasy-self mold. She was tall, and had red hair. (I am not-tall, quite short in fact, and have not-red hair, and I am fine with this now. At the time I was big for my age, and had blonde hair which I utterly despised, which could have something to do with living briefly in Thailand, but probably doesn't.) She could do f***ing everything. She could ride horses and do martial arts, and generally outrun, outsmart, outfight and out-(fill in skill here) anyone, and by anyone I mean "the male characters" since there wasn't much female competition in the media I was into. She got to save, smack some sense into, and kiss/bonk/etc. Erik.

I had that same character having adventures in other universes. Chiefly Star Trek, where she got to have a brief fling with Dr. McCoy but spent most her time just being Awesome Lt. Mary Sue. She was from the Really Cool Planet I had way too much fun making up, to the point where I just wanted to make up stories, travelogues really, about that planet and its cultural festivals, and the history of its founding, and its Vulcan community, and the popular holo-shows there, and what happened when a popular actor in one got married and his husband tried set up McCoy and Spock...(Hmmm, I guess those characters and that setting kind of bridged the gap between the Mary Sue phase and later slash fandom, as well as encompassing a period of filing-off-the-numbers exploration of fantasy and scifi concepts I'm still involved with off and on.)

Getting back to Phantom, I also actually wrote down the early chapters of fairly involved story that started off vaguely "inspired by" where the horribly disfigured (by a curse!) character courted a beautiful blonde princess who rebuffed him and ended up with her awesome kickass brunette sister. It got way More Complicated Than That quickly, partly because I love worldbuilding and partly because I realized that while a princess might reject a suitor for insufficient prettiness, there are probably seventy zillion cultural factors involved in why he would be unsuccessful, regardless of having had A Vision of his One True Love*.

So I went off worldbuilding and giving Phantom/Beast/Barbarian from The Cold Mountains Guy (henceforth known as Z) a culture, and a past. When I started doing that it became obvious that this character was my viewpoint character, the one I identified with, and the princess thing was kind of a distraction that I might get to eventually. Z was never abusive or a monster, although he killed people and hurt friends and made mistakes. I think that comes out of the fact that I felt somewhat that the Beast/Phantom isn't just a monster. But I never really wanted him to Get the Girl, either. And I guess the best I could come up with was for him to not need The Girl.

You can't have that in Beauty and the Beast, (or The Little Mermaid, which is different but similar as far as the magic part goes) unless you have someone (maybe the potential love interest?) find another way to break the spell, removing the coercion...which is a good idea. Perhaps I'll go find some fics like that and read them, or prompt some or write some or something.

*Not really.

My kids borrowed the film The Last Airbender from the library and watched it. I know I did this to myself by watching it, but at least it was mostly free? Anyway, ha, I share with you my pain and rage.

I am having a hard time deciding whether to rant first about the HORRIBLE RACE ISSUES or the OVERALL TERRIBLENESS of the movie. I think I will go with terribleness, because it seems to me that the whitewashing bullshit just goes hand in hand with a fundamental misunderstanding of, and disrespect for, the source material.

(Is it always this way with whitewashing? I feel like it is, but maybe there are counter-examples?

I'm thinking about fantasy worlds like Earthsea or The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, where there are pale-skinned people in the story, so by whitewashing you are/would be not only sending the message that people of color are not allowed to be protagonists and heroes; you might also be planting the suspicion, in the minds of people familiar with the source material, that the whitewashed characters are actually Kargish/Arameri/etc.

But anyway, that doesn't really apply to AtLA world.)