30 days of fanfic meme, question 9
Jul. 15th, 2011 05:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkit9 – Pairings – For each of the fandoms from day two, what are your three favorite pairings to write?
I'll spare you hearing about all 50+ fandoms I've written in and just talk about ones I've either written in a lot or have something to say about. The resulting post is still long.
Angel - the Series (6)
Gunn/Wesley was the only pairing I seriously shipped in the fandom. I could see some subtext for Wesley/Angel in the first couple of seasons, but I never liked Angel enough to want to explore it. Ditto for Angel/Spike in the final season.
Blake's 7 (22)
I mostly wrote Avon/Blake, because I cannot resist love/hate or obsession. Vila/Gan was probably my second favorite pairing, and it's of an entirely different kind, based in friendship and trust but not quite ever becoming love, I think. I also wrote a little bit of Avon/Vila, and although I understand why people like it, I could never quite get the dynamic to work for me.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (40)
Giles/Ethan was my first Buffyverse OTP; I later acquired another one, Giles/Oz, which unfortunately was completely incompatible with the previous. (This is not one of those situations where a threesome would fix everything. So, so not.) So I pretty much just shipped both along separate lines, as it were. They're very different dynamics but I can make them both work as I write. I wouldn't say that I had a third "favorite" pairing, although I was at least mildly interested in most Giles/male pairings (e.g. with Xander or Wesley; I wrote some Giles/Spike but stopped when Spike fanon began annoying me).
Dalziel and Pascoe - Reginald Hill (4)
I like all the canon ships (including the het ones), which is unprecedented for me. And yet the ship that I keep thinking about, Wield/Pascoe, is not canonical except for an unrequited attraction on Wield's part. It's partly that, although I like Wield's canonical partner, I don't actually buy their relationship working; Wield and Pascoe have much more in common. And it's partly just that I'd like to see if it could work. Pascoe cares deeply for Wield, and I wonder whether in the right circumstances he might be heteroflexible enough for it to become something more. In my head I have the skeleton of an unwritten AU in which Peter and Ellie Pascoe do get divorced after Underworld, at which point Wield is also single and lonely, and Pascoe and Wield start a tentative relationship. Trouble is, Peter Pascoe reads as pretty straight to me, so if I were to write it realistically and not just as wish fulfillment, I don't think the relationship would last. And Wield, who is already a little bit in love with Pascoe in canon, would get badly hurt. Which would make me sad.
Discworld - Terry Pratchett (12)
Drumknott/Vetinari is my favorite. Initially I was more of a Vimes/Vetinari shipper, but then I fell for Drumknott. Plus, it's much harder to make Vimes/Vetinari work, due to both Vimes' marriage and, well, his personality. I like Carrot/Angua as a canon ship, and it's one of the few het pairings I've ever written, although the fic was basically all about Carrot's queerness.
Doctor Who (1963) (12)
Second Doctor/Jamie was my first Classic Who pairing and is still my favorite. They cling and they bicker and, to use the fandom catchphrase, are very much Gay Married In Space. Some of the other pairings I ship hard, I've never actually written, namely Third Doctor/Delgado Master and Fifth Doctor/Turlough. And I'm fascinated by the idea of Third Doctor/Mike Yates, in which they bond via mutual exile (the Doctor literally, Yates feeling exiled as a queer man in a military culture). I've written Brigadier/Yates, although I really only see it in "The Time Monster" and don't find the Brig generally slashable.
Doctor Who (2005) (4)
As it turns out, I've never actually written pairing fic for New Who, although I've written some subtexty Ten + Simm!Master stuff, and I do ship them.
Doctor Who - Various Authors (6) [NB This means EDAs and other Doctor Who novels]
The Eighth Doctor and Fitz Kreiner are almost canon, and they have a lovely dynamic, with Fitz being both a loyal follower and a protector, and the Doctor relying on Fitz more and more as the books go on. I'm genuinely OTP-ish about them; I can't picture either of them with anyone else except as a substitute or stopgap.
Merlin (TV) (1)
Back when I watched Merlin, I did ship Arthur/Merlin like most other m/m slash fans in the fandom. And yet when I wrote my sole Merlin fic, I wrote . . . Arthur/Uther. Uther is played by Tony Head, so as with Giles I tend to want to ship him with every man in sight, plus the canon relationship between Uther and Arthur is spectacularly fucked up, with fierce burning love but also a lot of anger and tension. To me it's just too intense to read as father-son in any normal way. And, well, I'm drawn to intense and painful relationships between men (see also: Giles/Ethan, Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr, Blake/Avon).
Sanctuary (TV) (3)
I ship Big Guy/Henry. I've only written one fic for them so far--there's a WIP I'd like to finish someday--but I will proudly stand and declare my support for this cross-species, cross-generation, vaguely emotionally incestuous pairing. There's a ton of subtext for it and it's awesome. I also like, but haven't (yet) written James/John, which has some burning hot UST, and James/Declan, which is pure fanon but is what's sometimes called an "alchemy" pairing, where it's all about what could happen if you put the two together and found the right catalyst. I've also thought about writing Tesla/Henry, but the Big Guy would be sad.
Top Gear (UK) RPF (8)
A quick disclaimer, since this is RPF: this is not speculation or gossip about these real people's real relationships. It's about the ways I can imagine fictionalizing them to make interesting stories.
So: I love James/Richard, but Richard's apparently happy marriage is an impediment to certain kinds of stories. Much of the James/Richard I've written (or at least started) has an element of unfulfilled or unrequited-ness. James/Sim Oakley (the guy who helps him build things in Toy Stories and Man Lab) is a pairing I've written once and would like to explore further, because they clearly have fun together. And then there's James/Oz Clarke, a much more fraught dynamic because Oz seems to ping all of James's issues about proper masculinity. I'm interested in all these pairings, but the Top Gear fandom and I did not click well, so I'm not sure if I'll write more or not.
X-Men (all versions)
I'm putting all the versions together because my shippiness doesn't much alter. First and foremost, there's Charles/Erik, who've fought against each other for 50+ years, hurt and betrayed each other, even tried to kill each other, and never stopped loving each other. Long-term "best enemy" loves are my bulletproof kink, as you may have noticed, and one of the things that especially draws me to Charles/Erik is that there's still, always, the possibility of some kind of happy ending. (It's possible for other such pairings too, like Giles/Ethan and Doctor/Master, but harder to accomplish.) For me, XMFC is a different continuity from X1-3, but I ship Charles/Erik there too, in the different context of their intense mutual fascination before everything goes wrong, or the regret and longing that I imagine post-movie.
Secondly, there's Scott/Logan(/Jean). This is more of a movieverse ship for me; I don't know enough about their history in the regular comicsverse to have an opinion there, although it was a workable idea in the Ultimateverse comics that I've read. It's a very triangular dynamic even if the story is set after X2 and Jean isn't actually there. The trouble is, the canon timeline for the movies, insofar as it has any consistency, doesn't leave much room for either a threesome or for Scott/Logan post-X2. I've never managed to get Scott and Logan together in a fic, although they do kiss in Signal to Noise.
There's no third that I've written and not just thought about, unless you count Jamie Madrox/his duplicate, which I guess one could. There was some interesting stuff going on about Jamie's duplicates and the extent to which they had independence in the new series of X-Factor comics, before I stopped reading them because (a) I got fed up with an originally independent series being dragged into all of Marvel's big stupid "events," and (b) I got fed up with P3t3r D@vid, having made the mistake of reading his blog. (Ridiculous l337 spelling is to hopefully prevent any Google Alerts issues, as PD has been known to be vindictive online.) Still, identity issues are another of my perennial kinks, and Jamie has those in spades.
I'll spare you hearing about all 50+ fandoms I've written in and just talk about ones I've either written in a lot or have something to say about. The resulting post is still long.
Angel - the Series (6)
Gunn/Wesley was the only pairing I seriously shipped in the fandom. I could see some subtext for Wesley/Angel in the first couple of seasons, but I never liked Angel enough to want to explore it. Ditto for Angel/Spike in the final season.
Blake's 7 (22)
I mostly wrote Avon/Blake, because I cannot resist love/hate or obsession. Vila/Gan was probably my second favorite pairing, and it's of an entirely different kind, based in friendship and trust but not quite ever becoming love, I think. I also wrote a little bit of Avon/Vila, and although I understand why people like it, I could never quite get the dynamic to work for me.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (40)
Giles/Ethan was my first Buffyverse OTP; I later acquired another one, Giles/Oz, which unfortunately was completely incompatible with the previous. (This is not one of those situations where a threesome would fix everything. So, so not.) So I pretty much just shipped both along separate lines, as it were. They're very different dynamics but I can make them both work as I write. I wouldn't say that I had a third "favorite" pairing, although I was at least mildly interested in most Giles/male pairings (e.g. with Xander or Wesley; I wrote some Giles/Spike but stopped when Spike fanon began annoying me).
Dalziel and Pascoe - Reginald Hill (4)
I like all the canon ships (including the het ones), which is unprecedented for me. And yet the ship that I keep thinking about, Wield/Pascoe, is not canonical except for an unrequited attraction on Wield's part. It's partly that, although I like Wield's canonical partner, I don't actually buy their relationship working; Wield and Pascoe have much more in common. And it's partly just that I'd like to see if it could work. Pascoe cares deeply for Wield, and I wonder whether in the right circumstances he might be heteroflexible enough for it to become something more. In my head I have the skeleton of an unwritten AU in which Peter and Ellie Pascoe do get divorced after Underworld, at which point Wield is also single and lonely, and Pascoe and Wield start a tentative relationship. Trouble is, Peter Pascoe reads as pretty straight to me, so if I were to write it realistically and not just as wish fulfillment, I don't think the relationship would last. And Wield, who is already a little bit in love with Pascoe in canon, would get badly hurt. Which would make me sad.
Discworld - Terry Pratchett (12)
Drumknott/Vetinari is my favorite. Initially I was more of a Vimes/Vetinari shipper, but then I fell for Drumknott. Plus, it's much harder to make Vimes/Vetinari work, due to both Vimes' marriage and, well, his personality. I like Carrot/Angua as a canon ship, and it's one of the few het pairings I've ever written, although the fic was basically all about Carrot's queerness.
Doctor Who (1963) (12)
Second Doctor/Jamie was my first Classic Who pairing and is still my favorite. They cling and they bicker and, to use the fandom catchphrase, are very much Gay Married In Space. Some of the other pairings I ship hard, I've never actually written, namely Third Doctor/Delgado Master and Fifth Doctor/Turlough. And I'm fascinated by the idea of Third Doctor/Mike Yates, in which they bond via mutual exile (the Doctor literally, Yates feeling exiled as a queer man in a military culture). I've written Brigadier/Yates, although I really only see it in "The Time Monster" and don't find the Brig generally slashable.
Doctor Who (2005) (4)
As it turns out, I've never actually written pairing fic for New Who, although I've written some subtexty Ten + Simm!Master stuff, and I do ship them.
Doctor Who - Various Authors (6) [NB This means EDAs and other Doctor Who novels]
The Eighth Doctor and Fitz Kreiner are almost canon, and they have a lovely dynamic, with Fitz being both a loyal follower and a protector, and the Doctor relying on Fitz more and more as the books go on. I'm genuinely OTP-ish about them; I can't picture either of them with anyone else except as a substitute or stopgap.
Merlin (TV) (1)
Back when I watched Merlin, I did ship Arthur/Merlin like most other m/m slash fans in the fandom. And yet when I wrote my sole Merlin fic, I wrote . . . Arthur/Uther. Uther is played by Tony Head, so as with Giles I tend to want to ship him with every man in sight, plus the canon relationship between Uther and Arthur is spectacularly fucked up, with fierce burning love but also a lot of anger and tension. To me it's just too intense to read as father-son in any normal way. And, well, I'm drawn to intense and painful relationships between men (see also: Giles/Ethan, Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr, Blake/Avon).
Sanctuary (TV) (3)
I ship Big Guy/Henry. I've only written one fic for them so far--there's a WIP I'd like to finish someday--but I will proudly stand and declare my support for this cross-species, cross-generation, vaguely emotionally incestuous pairing. There's a ton of subtext for it and it's awesome. I also like, but haven't (yet) written James/John, which has some burning hot UST, and James/Declan, which is pure fanon but is what's sometimes called an "alchemy" pairing, where it's all about what could happen if you put the two together and found the right catalyst. I've also thought about writing Tesla/Henry, but the Big Guy would be sad.
Top Gear (UK) RPF (8)
A quick disclaimer, since this is RPF: this is not speculation or gossip about these real people's real relationships. It's about the ways I can imagine fictionalizing them to make interesting stories.
So: I love James/Richard, but Richard's apparently happy marriage is an impediment to certain kinds of stories. Much of the James/Richard I've written (or at least started) has an element of unfulfilled or unrequited-ness. James/Sim Oakley (the guy who helps him build things in Toy Stories and Man Lab) is a pairing I've written once and would like to explore further, because they clearly have fun together. And then there's James/Oz Clarke, a much more fraught dynamic because Oz seems to ping all of James's issues about proper masculinity. I'm interested in all these pairings, but the Top Gear fandom and I did not click well, so I'm not sure if I'll write more or not.
X-Men (all versions)
I'm putting all the versions together because my shippiness doesn't much alter. First and foremost, there's Charles/Erik, who've fought against each other for 50+ years, hurt and betrayed each other, even tried to kill each other, and never stopped loving each other. Long-term "best enemy" loves are my bulletproof kink, as you may have noticed, and one of the things that especially draws me to Charles/Erik is that there's still, always, the possibility of some kind of happy ending. (It's possible for other such pairings too, like Giles/Ethan and Doctor/Master, but harder to accomplish.) For me, XMFC is a different continuity from X1-3, but I ship Charles/Erik there too, in the different context of their intense mutual fascination before everything goes wrong, or the regret and longing that I imagine post-movie.
Secondly, there's Scott/Logan(/Jean). This is more of a movieverse ship for me; I don't know enough about their history in the regular comicsverse to have an opinion there, although it was a workable idea in the Ultimateverse comics that I've read. It's a very triangular dynamic even if the story is set after X2 and Jean isn't actually there. The trouble is, the canon timeline for the movies, insofar as it has any consistency, doesn't leave much room for either a threesome or for Scott/Logan post-X2. I've never managed to get Scott and Logan together in a fic, although they do kiss in Signal to Noise.
There's no third that I've written and not just thought about, unless you count Jamie Madrox/his duplicate, which I guess one could. There was some interesting stuff going on about Jamie's duplicates and the extent to which they had independence in the new series of X-Factor comics, before I stopped reading them because (a) I got fed up with an originally independent series being dragged into all of Marvel's big stupid "events," and (b) I got fed up with P3t3r D@vid, having made the mistake of reading his blog. (Ridiculous l337 spelling is to hopefully prevent any Google Alerts issues, as PD has been known to be vindictive online.) Still, identity issues are another of my perennial kinks, and Jamie has those in spades.
