And You Keep Calling Me Names.
Jul. 27th, 2023 04:16 pmI've identified a pattern in my shipping habits, and it's 'creepy person who hovers between ally and antagonist'/'determined protagonist who has an intense relationship with aforementioned creepy person and doesn't know how to feel about that'.
It's not a dynamic that's guaranteed to captivate me; if it were, I'd have spent my intense Lost period writing Jack/Locke. But the description applies to Travis/Laura of The Quarry, Keiji/Sara of Your Turn to Die, Hinata/Komaeda of Danganronpa 2, Neku/Joshua of The World Ends with You and Beatrice/Battler of Umineko, so I think it's fair to say I have a weakness.
I first identified this pattern by thinking about similarities between Travis/Laura and Keiji/Sara, so I thought at first that I just had a penchant for shipping determined young women with creepy men who are too old for them. But it turns out that age and gender aren't a major factor; the important thing is just that one half of the pairing is being weird and the other half is feeling weird.
Maybe young woman/older man dynamics are just likely to include the requisite sense of creepiness, in the same way my fondness for 'cynic'/'idealist who makes them a little less cynical' dynamics also often leads me to pairings with significant age differences. Older characters are more likely to be portrayed as cynical; younger characters are more likely to be portrayed as idealistic.
Thank you all for joining me for this episode of navel-gazing about why I'm unstoppably shipping the woman in her twenties with the man in his fifties. I'll be honest: I'm having a great time. The Travis/Laura corner of Quarry fandom is lively and friendly and enthusiastic (it's possible their approach is 'another shipper! we'd better be really nice to her, because nobody else is going to be'), and the dynamic between the characters is just so interesting to explore.
For something that's not about The Quarry, I've been replaying Insomniac's Spider-Man for PS4 so Tem can watch!
Spider-Man immediately shot into my ten favourite videogames of all time when I first played it back in 2019, and it remains an absolute pleasure every time I revisit it. So much love and care has gone into every aspect of it, and so much fondness for Peter's character.
It's not a perfect game. There are moments that feel uncomfortably like copaganda, although apparently Insomniac's aware of that criticism and planning to make changes in the sequel, and the base battles go on for too long. And, er... no, that's it, I love literally everything else about this game.
They could so easily have made a game that's just 'Spider-Man beats up loads of bad guys', but instead you get things like 'Spider-Man spends so much time beating up bad guys that he fails to sort out his rent payments, returns home after two days without sleep to find himself evicted, and has to use his spider powers to chase after the garbage truck taking away his stuff', and I think that shows a much deeper understanding of Spider-Man.
I love how many non-combat optional things there are to do, too. You can fight loads of guys if that's your thing, but you can also spent hours swinging around the city without throwing a single punch, collecting backpacks and photographing landmarks and conducting research and chasing pigeons.
The character writing is great. The animations are great. The battle system is great. The traversal is great; there's a fast travel system I absolutely never use, because getting to places is just so much fun. Listening to J Jonah Jameson calling me a menace on the radio as I swing across New York is great. It's just a great game.
It's not a dynamic that's guaranteed to captivate me; if it were, I'd have spent my intense Lost period writing Jack/Locke. But the description applies to Travis/Laura of The Quarry, Keiji/Sara of Your Turn to Die, Hinata/Komaeda of Danganronpa 2, Neku/Joshua of The World Ends with You and Beatrice/Battler of Umineko, so I think it's fair to say I have a weakness.
I first identified this pattern by thinking about similarities between Travis/Laura and Keiji/Sara, so I thought at first that I just had a penchant for shipping determined young women with creepy men who are too old for them. But it turns out that age and gender aren't a major factor; the important thing is just that one half of the pairing is being weird and the other half is feeling weird.
Maybe young woman/older man dynamics are just likely to include the requisite sense of creepiness, in the same way my fondness for 'cynic'/'idealist who makes them a little less cynical' dynamics also often leads me to pairings with significant age differences. Older characters are more likely to be portrayed as cynical; younger characters are more likely to be portrayed as idealistic.
Thank you all for joining me for this episode of navel-gazing about why I'm unstoppably shipping the woman in her twenties with the man in his fifties. I'll be honest: I'm having a great time. The Travis/Laura corner of Quarry fandom is lively and friendly and enthusiastic (it's possible their approach is 'another shipper! we'd better be really nice to her, because nobody else is going to be'), and the dynamic between the characters is just so interesting to explore.
For something that's not about The Quarry, I've been replaying Insomniac's Spider-Man for PS4 so Tem can watch!
Spider-Man immediately shot into my ten favourite videogames of all time when I first played it back in 2019, and it remains an absolute pleasure every time I revisit it. So much love and care has gone into every aspect of it, and so much fondness for Peter's character.
It's not a perfect game. There are moments that feel uncomfortably like copaganda, although apparently Insomniac's aware of that criticism and planning to make changes in the sequel, and the base battles go on for too long. And, er... no, that's it, I love literally everything else about this game.
They could so easily have made a game that's just 'Spider-Man beats up loads of bad guys', but instead you get things like 'Spider-Man spends so much time beating up bad guys that he fails to sort out his rent payments, returns home after two days without sleep to find himself evicted, and has to use his spider powers to chase after the garbage truck taking away his stuff', and I think that shows a much deeper understanding of Spider-Man.
I love how many non-combat optional things there are to do, too. You can fight loads of guys if that's your thing, but you can also spent hours swinging around the city without throwing a single punch, collecting backpacks and photographing landmarks and conducting research and chasing pigeons.
The character writing is great. The animations are great. The battle system is great. The traversal is great; there's a fast travel system I absolutely never use, because getting to places is just so much fun. Listening to J Jonah Jameson calling me a menace on the radio as I swing across New York is great. It's just a great game.
