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Thoughts on canon het
A couple of weeks ago I did a fanac research survey advertised on Tumblr (one of ![[tumblr.com profile]](https://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico)
cfiesler’s surveys; it’s closed now but they’ve put up a few results already), and one of the questions was how likely you are to ship canon het, and then if you said not likely, it asked why.
I said something like “because canon almost always screws up canon het,” which I acknowledge is not a super helpful answer, but it was also a very small text box.
So just for fun I sat down and listed out all the ways canon screws up canon het.
(FTR, I am using a very restricted definition of “ship” here that implies a certain level of active enthusiasm and fannish energy applied to the pairing; I don’t usually bother to anti-ship canon het, and there’s a few canon het ships I ship, or that I ship despite the fact that canon screws them up. But it’s usually going to be “despite canon” (see: Miles/Ekaterin) or “Specifically TO spite canon” (see: Bruce/Betty) than because canon. But we’ll get to that later!
First, here are many, many ways that canon screws up canon het:
(some of these are inspired by![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sholio's post on characters who are supposed to be in love but never think about each other, in which I agree on the principles and disagree on the ships, and also by a lot of different posts over the years by other people.)
I said something like “because canon almost always screws up canon het,” which I acknowledge is not a super helpful answer, but it was also a very small text box.
So just for fun I sat down and listed out all the ways canon screws up canon het.
(FTR, I am using a very restricted definition of “ship” here that implies a certain level of active enthusiasm and fannish energy applied to the pairing; I don’t usually bother to anti-ship canon het, and there’s a few canon het ships I ship, or that I ship despite the fact that canon screws them up. But it’s usually going to be “despite canon” (see: Miles/Ekaterin) or “Specifically TO spite canon” (see: Bruce/Betty) than because canon. But we’ll get to that later!
First, here are many, many ways that canon screws up canon het:
(some of these are inspired by
sholio's post on characters who are supposed to be in love but never think about each other, in which I agree on the principles and disagree on the ships, and also by a lot of different posts over the years by other people.)- If a character is introduced specifically to be the Love Interest, it is very likely they will never rise to the level of Interesting In Their Own Right. This is especially likely to be a problem in shorter canons like movies, where there’s not a lot of time for development, or in cases where the love interest isn’t part of the main cast. But it can also happen when a long-standing character suddenly gets shoehorned into being The Love Interest and all their other storylines drop away. (I was going to say this is a gender problem and on the rare occasion when the male character is the Love Interest, it at least has the appeal of novelty, but actually my mom’s been watching Hallmark Originals lately, and nope, when the male Love Interest is common in the genre it’s just as boring.)
- There’s also a lot of “He was a boy. She was a girl. Can I make it any more obvious?” Yes. Yes you do need to do more work than that.
- If it’s a longer canon where the romance is between a main character and a not-main character, the romance is often not well-integrated into the story: often you get long stretches where it’s barely mentioned, which gives the impression that it’s not all that important to the main character, and then the occasional scene or plotline where it feels shoehorned in.
- Or you get the situation where the love interest character is taken out of the picture for convenience: sent to Norway, abducted by aliens, stuffed in a fridge. This again creates the impression that the love interest isn’t actually that important as a person as much as a device to check certain emotional boxes for the protagonist, and it’s boring, plus if you were invested in the pairing, it’s awful, and it’s just not worth it.
- There’s a large cohort of people who think the only interesting story about romance is How They Got Together. In fanfic this works, because we can write How They Got Together 20 million times and it just gets deeper and richer with repetition, but when you’re trying to do this in a series with continuity, you either end up writing excruciatingly endless will-they-won’t-they, or repeated breakups and get-back-togethers that mostly just present a case for why they shouldn’t, or a bunch of romance-of-the-weeks that aren’t worth getting invested in, or the situation where they get together and the romance does, in fact, stop being interesting, because the writers think the interesting part is over.
- When canon does try to do a centered, established relationship between two main characters, they often seem to think that the only character storyline those characters can have anymore is This Threatens the Relationship. We almost never see them have personal crises where the relationship is nothing but rock-solid support; we never see them have personal life developments that are just about them and they aren’t worrying about how their partner will react because they know their partner will support them; we don’t see plotlines where they think the relationship is fine, because it is, and then are happily surprised when it gets better. In short, the established relationship too often gets written as a weakness, when it should be a strength; written as unstable, when it should be supportive.
- For that reason or others, the relationships are often shown as terrible relationships that are bad for everyone involved even as the writers are trying to tell us they’re a romantic ideal. This does not work. I am perfectly willing to ship screwed-up pairs, I ship a lot of very screwed up non-canon pairs, but not if canon is trying to tell us that they’re healthy when they’re not.
- Too often centered, established canon het will automatically get put on what Poly Weekly calls the Relationship Escalator, no matter whether that makes sense with the characters’ history or personalities - you step on and automatically get carried one at a time up the steps of dating, I love yous, moving in together, romantic engagement scene, formal wedding, kids, and then if it goes on long enough, kids’ life milestones take over. Sometimes just to mix it up, they change the order of a couple of them! There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it gets awfully predictable, and when a character has previously shown little to no interest in being railroaded into normativity before the endgame ship became canon, it can go OOC pretty quickly. Sometimes it’s well done and manages to stay mostly IC, especially if it’s over the course of many years, even then, but if I was in it for adults having adventures, not episodes about their kids choosing a college, I’m not interested once the show turns into that, even if it pulls it off in theory. Also, there are options other than the Relationship Escalator. I would like to see a show where the two leads start dating and then just… keep dating, because they’re happy where they are! The angst could be about the pressure to get on the relationship ladder, and them deciding over and over that they don’t want to! It could be great.
- Relatedly, the idea that the only real, successful relationship is the Endgame Ship, and that once one relationship is the Endgame Ship all others must have been lesser, and that there can’t be relationships that go for a few years and end and that’s great because you both grew from it, or that stalled out early, or stayed might-have-beens, or you got in a relationship that neither of you wanted or expected to be forever, or that make better exes or fuckbuddies than lovers, or whatever. Or that the canon relationship is only important because it *is* the Endgame Ship, so any hint that they might not be together forever means the whole thing is meaningless. It can be good now without being forever!
- I like characters who aren’t visibly straight. I like characters who don’t have any romantic relationships! I like intense platonic male & female relationships. If you bring in canon het for a character who didn’t have any before, or turn a platonic relationship romantic, you’re already fighting my resentment over the fact that you’re messing up something I liked.
- Let’s face it, there will be annoying gender role and heteronormativity stuff mixed up in canon het. Even if the canon is trying really hard to subvert it and point out that this couple really are equal partners and feminist and stuff, they will be having to lampshade that hard because the reverse is so much more common, and it makes me tired.
- She almost certainly deserves better than having to put up with him. Sorry. That’s just how it is, man. She does.
- Even if everything’s going well, even if so far they haven’t screwed up and everything’s exactly how I like it, if it’s an ongoing canon I have to either trust the creators a whole lot, or I’m constantly waiting for them to pull the rug out from under it for ~drama~, and I'm just too tense to enjoy it. Don’t have to worry about that with non-canon ships! Canon can't ruin it if canon isn't doing anything with it!
- If they do manage to avoid all the above - pull off canon het that’s a believable, interesting partnership between two people who appear to genuinely enjoy each other and have chemistry and are better selves around each other - then I’m probably not interested in the fanfic. ‘Cause the good canon ship has ruined me for wanting any other ships for them, but none of the fanfic is going to do the canon ship as well as canon does.
(And most of these aren't unique to het: canon not-het often has some of the same problems. Not all of them, and canon not-het is still rare enough that the ones that are mostly annoying via ubiquity don’t really apply. But then with queer canon ships there’s the additional fun of waiting to see who’s going to tragically die first.)
Which isn’t to say I never ship canon het. You can usually sell me on it in fanfic if you try, and I usually don’t actively anti-ship it or anything, I just don't get invested. And I haven’t been watching most of the recent shows that are supposed to be really good for canon het (like B99). It’s just that canon het is very rarely going to be the ship I get super invested in or go looking for. Often I read the fanfic until they become canon and then re-read the old fanfic from before they were canon.
But here’s some canon het I am 100% there for, just for fun:
Duncan MacLeod/Amanda (Highlander): They are great together, but they both have their own stuff going on separate from each other, and they’re never going to be each other’s One and Only, and that’s fine. (Amanda is pretty much my archetype for the “poly comet” partner - the person who swings into your orbit every few years, and it’s hot and heavy while they’re there, but you both know they’re going to swing out again, and then back again, and then out again, and you both like it that way. It’s a really great archetype for a TV show recurring guest star and I don’t know why there aren’t more that do that. It doesn’t even have to be explicitly nonmonogamous if they only swing in when the other person’s unattached so I don’t know why it doesn’t come up more, except that canon het is so often so bad at doing anything other than Relationship Escalator.)
Lois/Clark (Superman): I’m not sure they even really count as canon het, because they don’t really live in a canon anymore? In any given version canon is at least as likely to screw it up as not (and I think my ur-version is in the old Fleischer cartoons, where IIRC they never technically get together) but they have transcended canon into myth at this point, and I ship them in that plane that transcends canon. So none of the “canon does it poorly” problems apply because I am super uninvested in any particular canon version.
Beverley/Peter (Rivers of London): So this looked, in the first couple books, like it was going to hit all the points and be boring and terrible, but then he just sort of… skipped all the “getting together” parts and went right to the bit where they’re partners and they make each other better and happier? And it happened pretty much right alongside Beverly becoming more a part of the Folly’s work (in fact, that technically happened first; Bev didn’t make a try for Peter until Nightingale had already deputized her,) so we get to see their relationship functioning without having the conflicts all be internal to their relationship. And, I mean, she does technically deserve better probably, but she wants Peter, and she should get what she wants, and she’s not going to put up with him one second longer than he’s worth it, and he knows that and he’s okay with it, because he has things he might have to give her up for too. I’m still not completely sure it won’t go off the rails eventually, but right now it’s great, and the fact that it does skip over a lot of the milestones - and that Peter is a super unreliable narrator - means that there’s plenty to explore in fanfic, because canon doesn’t explore it enough to outshine the fanfic.
Han/Leia (Star Wars sequel trilogy): This one’s odd, because I really wasn’t interested in them back in the day in Star Wars fandom? I mean I didn’t not ship them, they were fine together, but I certainly didn’t seek out Han/Leia stuff, and most of the EU that focused on them was just bad. But after TFA I kind of got really into it. I think because TFA makes it clear that they walked under the relationship ladder before they tried to climb it: that they love each other and will always love each other and that they try really hard to love each other well, but they were never going to be the sort of people who could hang onto a Happy Ever After for very long - and that makes it interesting, and it makes a lot more sense for who they are in the movies than the boring relationship ladder version that turned up in the old EU.
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