(Fair warning: it’s been a day and I am tired, so I am not guaranteeing spotlessly outlined and supported discourse here, but have some thoughts anyway .:)
Today I saw a post going around in explanation & support of the prevalence of slash writing/reading amongst women in fandom, and I understood a lot of what it was getting at. I’ve written more than enough of it myself to spend half of the essay kind of wryly nodding along. Tangentially, though, it also made me marvel again at how in Critical Role circles, so many people jumped right on board with the Percy/Vex relationship even if slash was usually their thing. It pretty clearly made a difference that this show had a vibrant, interesting, engaging female character involved, whose ownership of her own sexuality (often kind of a loaded phrase, especially when it’s getting thrown around by male writers) was not only confident and take-charge but downright playful. She was evidently enjoying herself, and so was Percy, and it’s amazing how much such a simple thing helps. But what I think is also interesting, and somewhat unique to the circumstances of the show, is that this came out of a collaborative creative exercise. This wasn’t the result of a single author’s idea or fantasy; this wasn’t something you could say was an exclusive product of either the male or female gaze. This was the work of two people who both brought things to the story and supported each other’s arcs in general along with the relationship specifically. And it showed. I think some of that mutual effort even sneaked into the characterization despite themselves, which is to say “despite Taliesin’s tendency to shit-talk Percy every chance he gets.” 😉 (Compare any of those comments to how Percy acted with Vex when it really mattered. Specifically, when it really mattered to her.) To borrow a quote, they really did fill in each other’s gaps in a lot of ways.
And then in the face of all that you got fans saying things aloud like “omg, I actually care about a het relationship, what the hell” and I’m still sitting here thinking, “It’s funny how that actually can work when the character dynamics aren’t completely fucked up, isn’t it…”
(There’s probably a related conversation to be had about Vaxleth, how that developed, and the amount of attention it got, especially in relation to how attached – in a much more typical way – fandom got to the idea of Vax and Gilmore, but again I say “I am tired” and will save that one for later. 🙂
What was the rule again? The amount of slash produced for any given fandom is inversely proportional to the percentage of engaging and complex female characters? Hence why most anime fandoms are full of slash, and critical role kind of isn’t….
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, too. Like, every now and then someone new wanders into the tag, probably coming from a slash-writing or -reading background themselves, looks around, and is like, “wait a second, why are all the most popular pairings het? Why is no one shipping Percy and Vax? This fandom is weird.”
Which really, really just goes to illustrate, like you pointed out, how rare it is to have a complex, playful, and sexy dynamic with a female character who has actual agency in it. Suddenly the het-ness doesn’t even matter, the ship is just so much fun.
(Also Percy will forever exist in the conflict between Taliesin convincing himself Percy’s a bad person, while also doing everything in his power to make sure Vex gets the focus and attention she deserves. People in general and Taliesin in particular seem to think we’re all just liking Percy because we’re conditioned to like fucked up, tragic, revenge-obsessed assholes and overlook their every flaw. Fuck that noise. We like Percy because of the way he got over his shit and the way he treated Vex.)
Quoting for commentary, especially that last bit.
And quite honestly, if we were in an alternate universe where Vex wasn’t around (which would be tragic) or was into someone else (I could absolutely get on board with Vex/Zahra, or even Vex/Keyleth, especially since Kiki clearly has a crush), I might have ended up shipping Percy and Vax, too. It would be a frequently explosive mess, but at least it would be interesting. And Vax has made more than enough comments about Percy’s good looks to make it plausible from that angle. Chalk it up to the twins having similar taste, I suppose. 😉
But still, I’m glad we got what we did. I am so, so glad we got what we did. I fell in love with the idea early on, but was so afraid I was just letting my little shipper heart run away with me that I spent weeks talking myself down so I wouldn’t get disappointed, or so I wouldn’t tread on anyone’s toes. I sat on my hands and kept my mouth shut for as long as I could stand it. Then everything happened. EVERYTHING. And I am still so glad.
Oh, for sure, Perc’ildan is hot, and Vex goes well with just about anyone. That’s another fandom peculiarity. Under normal circumstances, Vex or Vax would be the fandom bicycles. They are just the most shippable – except for the fact that, despite Game of Thrones’s solid effort for the better part of this decade, moooost of us are still not down with twincest, whereas Percy is extremely shippable with both. So he’s the bicycle.
…It doesn’t help that at this point, everyone in the main cast has hit on him in some form. They made him their own bicycle. Wheee. Minus Keyleth. Percy and Keyleth are even less shippable than the twins. All of the social dynamics of incest, none of the kinkyness.
Ahem. Well, I was lucky(?) enough to only be drawn into this fandom after Percy’s first death. When a friend of mine ( @actualinspectorkemp, you know who you are :P) dragged me into this by pointing at the possible Perc’ahlia yelling YOU WOULD SO TOTALLY SHIP THIS. So I only started watching after I knew Percy would survive and what, ah, transpired during his resurrection ritual 😀 still, those 3-10 weeks until they ACTUALLY hooked up were a bit nerve wracking.
Minus Keyleth. Percy and Keyleth are even less shippable than the twins. All of the social dynamics of incest, none of the kinkyness.
??? I question this assertion. For the first major chunk of the show I was shipping Percy/Keyleth pretty hard. They have their fans too. It’s not a popular ship but I wouldn’t say it’s like, unshippable by any means. (Can we really say anything is unshippable these days? As you said, incest has surges of popularity in various fandoms. People ship stuff just for fun, or based on nothing at all, or because they think the characters are hot.) Considering that Vax point-blank told Percy to look out for Keyleth after he was gone, there’s a nice foundation for something post-show if one so desires.
Percy and Keyleth were very good friends, especially early on before the Briarwoods stuff, they were socially awkward nobility together. They were science buddies, creating the Diplomacy glove together. People have shipped things based on far less. Hell people ship ships based on blatantly unhealthy dynamics (lord knows I do, all the damn time.) What’s wrong with shipping a pair of good friends who have things in common? It’s SWEET. It’s NICE.
Since when does a friendship mean pseudo incest?!
Yeeeeeah, sorry I know this is derailing from Page’s original point but as somebody who ships Percleth with my whole heart, I’m pretty fucking confused at the idea that they’re somehow less shippable than twincest.
They’re friends. They’re not siblings. They’re not related at all. Stop calling close friendships pseudo-incest.
(Also confused about the suggestion that it’s Game of Thrones that’s been trying to make fandoms okay with incest. I envy you for apparently sleeping through the entirety of the Supernatural fandom but that shit’s been on for loooooong time)
Oh gods, what have I done here. In case you haven’t seen my response to Maroon, that was supposed to be a tongue-in-cheek thesis on why the ship has so little content. I did not intend to start any shit, ship war, or even judge anyone who does like it, and am sorry to have insulted anyone. It always felt very much like a sibling dynamic to me, and I assumed that’s why it never got much traction in general, and that’s what I was trying to say. Poorly, apparently.
Also yes, I am aware it was not Game of Thrones that started making people ship incest. I just happen to come from a community where we make fun of the show a lot, and part of that is how they turned the very abusive twincest relationship from the books into a somewhat disturbingly positively framed power couple – so a main stream show basically condoning incest. I did in fact avoid Supernatural like the plague because I can’t stand brother who is not Dean in this but Dean in Gilmore Girls, but spent enough time in several anime fandoms to know incest was a thing long before GoT came on the air. It was less of a suggestion and more of a joke. A poorly perceived one, evidently, again, and I am sorry.
Overdressed & Underappreciated 