fandom meme?

[melannen]

It's a weird day, y'all, and it's been awhile since I've done something like this, so: have a shipping meme.

Give me a fandom in the comments and I will tell you which pairing or poly ship in that fandom:

1. Is the forever ship of my heart
2. Is the one I don't have a lot of feelings about but know I can always go back to for long comfort fic
3. Has the best porn
4. Is just NO

(Caveat: fandom must be large enough to have significant amounts of fic for at least four pairings)
(Caveat 2: it does not have to be a fandom you have heard me talk about much or recently, because let's face it, if it has that much fic I have probably read enough to be able to answer these, although that is not a dare.)
(Caveat 3: all answers to 4 are in the spirit of ykinmkato because I am enough of an Old to believe in that.)

Comments

[lannamichaels]

Vorkosigan :D

[espresso_addict]

I was going to ask this!

[melannen]

This one is tough! I think I really don't interact with this fandom in terms of ships. But I boiled it all the way home and this is what rose to the top:

1. Simon/Alys (with background never-acted-on-because-ethics mutual Simon/Aral pining and backstory ethics-what-ethics Simon/(Ezar)/(Negri) if I feel like lots of pain.)
2. Ivan/By
3. This fandom deserves way more porn (less than 4% porn, and half of that's in Russian!), and I feel like if there actually was any Admiral Naismith porn being written I would be there for it*, but yeah, with what we've got, Aral Vorkosigan/Unwise Life Decisions, basically
4. Byerly Vorrutyer/Heteronormativity

*I still want somebody to write me Ekaterin/Admiral Naismith someday

[jainas]

There is way to little Ivan/By out there... and in a related subject, 4) had me seething with disappointment after reading Captain Vorpatil's Alliance. I mean, *Rish* isn't normative at all by Barayan standards, so that was good at least, but the rest of it had me so disappointed with Lois McMaster Bujold.
God knows I love the whole saga, but it does have some disappointing queerbaiting... (don't get me started on Bel...) The worst is that it would have been very easy to turn Rish male, the plot would have been 99% the same...

Well, I did find a fic that somewhat managed to reconcile me with the canon: A Bit Too Much Good Work by a_t_rain is very plotty and have some stellar characterizations both for By and Rish if you care to try it...

I would totally read any kind of Admiral Naismith-centered porn...

[melannen]

There's too little Ivan/By, but it is, in fact, the most common not-canon-het ship on AO3 (at least if you count all of ADS as one story.) But yeah, there's ways to read By/Rish as non-normative but the canon doesn't really emphasize any of them. The whole series is one of those things that was sort of very progressive when it started but I feel like, on that axis at least, the world progressed faster than the author.

[staranise]

The sound of Ekaterin/Admiral Naismith intrigues me, but I'm not sure quite what it would entail. Care to elaborate?

[melannen]

In my daydreams it involves Ekaterin hearing stories and being intrigued, Miles offering to role-play and Ekaterin being even more intrigued, and both of them rapidly getting in over their heads before they realize just how far it's gone.

(I would be okay with a pre-canon-meeting setup too! Or something where Miles has to resurrect Naismith for an auditorial job and Ekaterin is along for some reason. Or a role-play one where they just both have a lot of fun and scandalize the children/impsec later. But the one in my head is role-play where things get more intense than intended.)