rionaleonhart | And You Keep Calling Me Names.

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And You Keep Calling Me Names.

I'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.

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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.

Having read a lot of comics, that is the most Spider-Man thing that can possibly happen. The only way it could be more true to the characters is if Johnny Storm showed up in barely any clothes and started unsubtly flirting with him.

Also I saw an ad at the mall for the Spider-Man 2 game and it was really funny to me that the Spider-Man 2 game was the one with two Spider-Men.

I'm delighted that this plot development has the approval of the biggest superhero comic expert I know!

it was really funny to me that the Spider-Man 2 game was the one with two Spider-Men.

This had not occurred to me, and I'm so pleased to have it pointed out.

"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"

*waits for you to see Our Flag Means Death and get really into Izzy Hands*

I like how you go from 'I am into ships that involve creepy people with determined protagonists' to Spider-Man, because Peter Parker is absolutely a determined protagonist and there are MANY creepy people being intense with Spider-Man!

Peter Parker is absolutely a determined protagonist and there are MANY creepy people being intense with Spider-Man!

It's true! I wouldn't count it among my own ships, but the PS4 game is great if you're a fan of Peter Parker/Otto Octavius.

I've seen those Tobey Maguire Spider-Man movies and then that one where Maguire and Garfield turn up as well, and I agree on Peter/Octavius. That could work.

The game adds an interesting dimension to it because Otto is Peter's boss, and they have a close mentor-mentee relationship! And then Otto becomes a supervillain, and everything becomes a lot more complicated.

'creepy person who hovers between ally and antagonist'

This is how I want to be remembered.

But yes! The moment you summed this dynamic up, I was like... oh, that strikes a familiar note, and I started looking at a lot of my choices too!

I don't know how I managed to accumulate so many of these ships without ever noticing the pattern, but it makes for such a fun dynamic!

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I have no idea why I'm so enthusiastic about master/servant ships, and yet here we are.

I thought 'hmm, I should try thinking of master/servant ships that Tobli might like' - okay, I'm compelled to stop here and observe that, after that closing quotation mark, my phone's predictive text function suggested that the next thing I wanted to say might be 'Dumptruck Daddy'.

Anyway. I tried to think of master/servant ships other than Auron/Braska, but I was only able to come up with Smithers/Mr Burns before I abandoned the exercise. I'm sorry; I've failed you.

When I read how you described your favourite ship dynamic, the ship that came to mind instantly before I even finished the sentence was "ah yes, she definitely does ship Joshua/Neku", so I'm glad to see it came up in your list!

I mentioned before that I've seen The Quarry LPed; in my case, I saw a group LP between 4 people, as you can make it so that different people control the different characters. Since they don't all have equal amounts of play time, and some people had two characters and others one, it was a bit uneven but fun to watch, in particular the indignation when another player got a different person's character killed in death by QTE. :D

From what I watched, my favourite character at the end of the game was definitely Travis, and he was also by far the character that I had the most sympathy for at the end of the game (which is hilarious as your description of him is not wrong). Damn young uns, causing all this hassle in your immaturity. Everything was fine until you all came along! I didn't ship Travis/Laura, but I definitely found those parts the most interesting part of the game.

To navel-gaze a bit in response to your navel-gazing:

It's sort of weird when you think of how broad fandoms can be and that they all exist in the same space by a sort of necessity. I'm on my... what? Fourth month...? of falling down the black hole of Batman fanfic and it's been a weird experience for me as so much of my fandom experience these days is either a) yearn for fanfic, but 0 exists, sorry fannishness you've been thwarted, b) there exists literally one fic, rejoice or c) we are up to a major high of 30 fics, better hope they're stuff you're interested in. So seeing such an absolute mega fandom is bizarre - probably the last big fandom I was in was Supernatural, and that was in the very early seasons before all the angel stuff even began. Even just from reading the fandom there seems to be some fandom tension with some passive aggressive tagging going on (there's a "batcest shippers dni" tag in particular, which strikes me as quite bizarre as it always seems to be on quite heartwarming family fics very focused on family dynamic, so I can't really imagine that batcest shippers would be very likely to open it and interact with it in any way in the first place? Unless they also liked family fic, I guess, in which case I'd imagine they wouldn't be particularly commenting in the guise of a shipper but as someone who had just enjoyed the fic for what it was).

The whole thing strikes me as quite interesting when I think that I've been playing the Trails games over the last few years, and I really adored Trails in the Sky, which has a story that I really enjoyed and also has a canonical romance between two characters. The characters meet when they're maybe 10 or 11, because the main character's father brings the other character home after saving their life in some quite complicated circumstances. Skip to the main time frame of the first game, when they're about 16, and they're initially treated somewhat as siblings, mostly by other people, and the main character's father is referred to as "dad" by both. Then, over the course of the Sky games, relationship happens. I really loved that ship and, again, it's canonical and the heart of the story. There's no degree of blood relation and I suppose you can argue to what degree they saw eachother as siblings or not though they certainly cared for eachother. From what I gather, that's kind of the basic level of the Batman fandom controvesy; it's all in relation to adopted siblings, who I guess you could just technically AU out of being adopted or meeting or whatever. I'm not judging either way, I'm neutral on the subject, but it's just funny to me that two situations that are really broadly very, very similar can be taken as either so taboo or so not taboo.

the ship that came to mind instantly before I even finished the sentence was "ah yes, she definitely does ship Joshua/Neku", so I'm glad to see it came up in your list!

I'd written most of this entry before thinking 'wait, Joshua/Neku fits the pattern as well!' and going back to add it to the list; I'm glad I remembered it for you!

Travis was probably my favourite character as well! I didn't realise how much I liked him until the Let's Player I was watching accidentally killed him in the final scene; I was startled by how upset I was.

I didn't ship Travis/Laura, but I definitely found those parts the most interesting part of the game.

They've got such a weird, interesting dynamic! However you interpret it, there's a lot going on there. He abducts and imprisons her; she destroys his family; they can end the night as allies, with a strange sense of respect between them, or they can end up killing each other. They're fascinating. I just want to explore them from every angle.

(I mean, three of my four Quarry fics are about Travis locking Laura up after the end of the game, so it's possible I mainly want to explore them from that angle specifically.)

Oh, wow, going from tiny fandoms to Batman definitely sounds like a disconcerting experience.

there's a "batcest shippers dni" tag in particular, which strikes me as quite bizarre as it always seems to be on quite heartwarming family fics very focused on family dynamic, so I can't really imagine that batcest shippers would be very likely to open it and interact with it in any way in the first place?

Huh! I suppose, thinking about it, I do also tag to control for audience to some degree, mainly in fandoms where I'm interested in a controversial pairing. In both The Quarry and Your Turn to Die fandom, I'll often tag my genfics with 'slight Travis/Laura implications' or 'slight Keiji/Sara implications'. It's largely because I want the shippers to know they're welcome to read my fanfiction and interpret it however they'd like, but to an extent it's also putting up a 'don't read this' sign for the benefit of anyone who's likely to yell at me if they realise I ship these characters. Prisoner's Dilemma doesn't really contain much Travis/Laura shippiness beyond canon-typical weird face-stroking, but I tagged it to avoid any risk that someone would come in and go 'wow, it's great to see a fic about these two that isn't written by one of those terrible shippers'; it seems simplest to be upfront about being one of those terrible shippers!

The Batman versus Trails in the Sky fandom comparison is interesting! So is the Trails in the Sky romance treated as less controversial? I wonder whether the divide is because one is canonical and one isn't, or maybe because one is a Western canon and one is Japanese.

that is a good shipping dynamic, says this fellow Battler/Beatrice shipper

I've never played a Spiderman game but I had heard good things about it. I'm glad you are enjoying your replay and all the stuff in it :) If I can ever pull myself out of VN hell I'd put that game on my list.

I had such intense emotions about Beatrice and Battler. What a great, weird pairing.

If you manage to get out of VN hell and give Spider-Man a try, I hope you enjoy it! I found it an absolute joy of a game.

I also approve this ship dynamic :D

I'm glad to have company!

It's difficult to draw the copaganda line in superhero stuff. You can end up saying that everyone should obey the cops all the time for any reason and you're suddenly promoting fascism, or you go really carefully the other way, block out carefully all the issues with policing, of the system and what it does to the people it attracts, the ease of manipulation by even the most well-meaning governments, the inability to avoid cop mentality when dealing with people who have their own important world, and then just when you've decided you've done an absolute winner, you realise that you've written up a paean to the great and noble tradition of vigilante justice and you're suddenly promoting fascism.

It's definitely tricky! I think Spider-Man really tripped up by having one of your first actions in the game be 'help the police re-activate their network of surveillance towers for spying on the people of New York', though. Presumably the game designers were just going 'how can we let the player uncover new parts of the map?', but it made it hard not to view the rest of the game through a particular lens.

I loved the Insomniac Spider-Man game but it definitely had copaganda issues - I feel like it's a bit of a carryover from it mimicking the Batman: Arkham series in style, where ofc Batman has his trusted pal Jim Gordon, and he utilises a lot of gadgets and surveillance in how he handles superheroing. In comparison, Yuri's pretty new to the canon and Peter acting as if he cares about whether or not there's a warrant before he breaks into a warehouse made me snortlaugh. I'm fond of Jeff Davis but they laid the Good Hero Cop stuff on kinda thick. Etc etc.

Similarly, MJ being a reporter made me pull a bit of a face; I know it was partly to find easy hooks for her to be a part of the plot, but, well. Adaptations stop pasting MJ's name and red hair onto totally different characters challenge.

OTHERWISE, though, great game and yes, the eviction sequence was such a highlight, and they really nailed the character in having him work for a small scientific start-up with a strong social license and very fragile funding.

In comparison, Yuri's pretty new to the canon

This is a really interesting point! (All your points here are great, actually.) I wonder if the depiction of Spider-Man working with the police would have felt different to me if I'd already been familiar with Yuri.

and they really nailed the character in having him work for a small scientific start-up with a strong social license and very fragile funding.

Yes! I was mildly surprised to realise that this game was about a Peter Parker in early adulthood, but everything about him felt like a natural progression from the teenage character I was more familiar with.

I wonder if the depiction of Spider-Man working with the police would have felt different to me if I'd already been familiar with Yuri.

In my experience, handwobble. It's not as though Peter never has one or two cops he works alongside here and there, but it's not a defining thing for him the way Gordon is for Batman. Spidey spends a lot of time being considered suspicious and, yanno, awfully destructive. Which he sort of is. So.

Haha! I found it really refreshing they finally moved Peter to adulthood. Adaptations get hooked on the teen hero thing and forget the story arguably gets MORE compelling once the poor guy is trying to juggle college, jobs, and all the other dreaded adult responsibilities alongside his self-appointed Spider responsibilities. Like, mood buddy.

'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'.

Finally, the perfect words to describe one of my absolute favorite ship dynamics! (I can't believe I never associated it before with Beatrice/Battler--yet another reason to love that ship.)

I'm glad I managed to pin it down at last! I was vaguely aware that my fondness for pairings like Hinata/Komaeda and Neku/Joshua came from the same place, but I've never been able to put it into words before.

I think I'm partial to this dynamic, too! In no small part because I also ship Beatrice/Battler, Neku/Joshua, and Keiji/Sara (we played Your Turn To Die earlier this year and I set sail on these two almost immediately)! I wouldn't say it's a dynamic that's bound to seize my heart every time without fail—like, I'm indifferent toward Shuichi/Kokichi from Danganronpa V3, ditto Godot/Phoenix Wright. But when it works for me? It works for me. :D!

In no small part because I also ship Beatrice/Battler, Neku/Joshua, and Keiji/Sara (we played Your Turn To Die earlier this year and I set sail on these two almost immediately)!

Excellent taste! I'm delighted that multiple people have commented to say it's a dynamic they enjoy as well.

I did think of Shuichi/Kokichi while defining this dynamic! I don't really ship it either, which seems weird to say, given that I've written Shuichi/Kokichi fanfiction. I ship Shuichi a little bit with everyone, so I suppose what I mean is that I don't ship him with Kokichi any more than I ship him with everyone else (whereas I have a particular fondness for Shuichi/Kaito). But their interactions can occasionally be fun, I have to admit.

Godot/Phoenix hadn't occurred to me as an example of this; that's an interesting observation! Alas, I really dislike Godot, so I don't think that one is ever going to win me over.

(I'm playing catch up in my read list! Apology for the late ass reply)

I love your self-introspective look into a shipping trope that works for you.

Spider-Man is excellent. Like, way too excellent. It gets the Spider universe in a way the current books don't. I adore that you also get to play as MJ occasionally and it gives her an important sense of agency. I really hope we get more MJ segments in the upcoming game.

Late responses are more than welcome!

It's so good, both as a game and as an entry in the Spider-Man multiverse! I also think it's very cool that you get to play as MJ, even if a part of me goes 'oh no' when I get to an MJ mission. They tend to be stealth missions, and I'm terrible at stealth!

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And You Keep Calling Me Names.

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