Friday, August 26, 2011

Something About Fanfics and Shipping

As you can imagine, what with my recent influx of Pony vids, I am a Brony. And whenever I get really into a TV show of any kind, I'm going to read fanfiction. It happened with Avatar: The Last Airbender and it's happening now. One aspect of the community I get seriously caught up in is shipping.

Shipping is basically playing matchmaker with characters in a show/book series/etc. A prime example would be the Twilight series. Sometimes, depending on the series, fans will get into heated "discussions" about which pairings are cuter/more logical, a lot of the times escalating to an all out "Shipping War", hence Team Edward and Team Jacob. I was no stranger to this in my days as an "Avatard". We chose our respective ships (mine being Toph/Aang), looked for "evidence" within the context of the show, and raged/rejoiced when the ships were finally revealed at the end. Since then, I still find it difficult to watch A:TLA without getting pretty pissed at certain scenes with "Ship Tease", most notably involving Toph and Sokka (screw that ship).

What I like about the MLP fan community is that this sort of thing hasn't happened yet. Considering that most of the main characters are female, shipping is mostly recreational rather than something to speculate, that is, unless the creators try to Get Crap Passed the Radar. Also, while some fans may have their favorite ships (mine being Applejack/Rainbow Dash), they are open minded enough to enjoy fanart and fanfics of other ships (Fluttershy/Rainbow Dash, for example).

When it comes to fanfiction, I basically only read "shipfics". For some reason, I'm more drawn to stories of characters I love falling in love. Maybe it's because I'm a hopeless romantic, emphasis on hopeless. Or maybe it's because I'm a lonely, socially deficient dork who has never had a girlfriend, trying to escape reality.

The thing about escapism, for me, is that I prefer to reads stories that don't depress me. After all, why would I want to escape boring reality just to get depressed? So you can imagine how irritating it is to find a shipfic that starts out normal but at the end, the author decides to break the mold and have the relationship not work out.

Recently, I came across a fanfic on Deviantart called "First Date" by HiddenBrony. In this story, Rainbow Dash gets up the courage to ask Twilight Sparkle out on a date. It's a nice and simple story, that is until the author decides to flash forward about a year to the wedding of Applejack and Fluttershy (apparently, this story is in continuity with his other work, "A Hop, a Skip, and a Jump") and we find out that Twilight and Rainbow Dash didn't even go on a second date.

The story is well-written, granted, but that ending stills leaves me a tad bitter. There are comments on this story about how the ending was "realistic" in that not all of the relationships can be "super perfect". While I, a hopeless romantic, am pissed because I found ANOTHER fanfic that starts out promising and then ends up turning me emo. (Do NOT get me started on "Of Mares and Magic")

I can't stop writers from writing these stories, I can't stop people from liking these stories, but I also can't prevent myself from reading these stories unless the author gives a warning, like having an ambiguously depressing title like "Rejection".

I'm not saying that romantic fanfics can't have drama ("Confessions and Considerations" is awesome) but you can at least have a happy ending.

My Devianart account is "thecrazyavatarcritic", BTW.

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