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Rivers of London: shipping in canon and fanon (the role of fan favorites)
This fandom seems like a perfect example to me of that situation where people like the woman in a f/m relationship - I'd bet that probably everybody who ships the protagonist with Nightingale instead (or in addition but not in OT3, as in... will read both/either) likes her - but are more interested in the other ship because of (1) interest in the other character (and a desire to put that character in a pairing) and (2) screentime and story weight devoted to the relationship.
The narrator Peter's partner Beverley is cool, well-written, significant to the story in various ways; but the focus of the stories is learning magic and solving crimes and the teacher-coworker character necessarily has a more important role in that. Because everything about Nightingale as a character is pretty much cool and mysterious (which doesn't even cover all of his appeal), the protagonist's positive relationship with him is also very interesting.
There has been a certain impulse in fanon to pair Nightingale up elsewhere, which I think is a reflection of how fascinating he is. But it's much easier to be interested in a relationship between two well-known characters, and the series doesn't have many characters left over that he could be paired with. The pool of secondary characters is limited and the amount we know about them is already enough lower to make them substantially less appealing (and for many people less easy) to write about.
In short, I... kind of think this is a character people are dying to pair up - often referred to as a Fan Favorite - Draco in HP, Dean in Supernatural, Fraser in Due South, etc. Fan favorites are sometimes main characters, sometimes not.
The introducton of Castiel to SPN and of Ray Kowalski to DS are both examples where the new (and seemingly more optimized for slashy storyline) character paired with the fan favorite took over as the dominant ship in the fandom relatively quickly after their introduction.
Loki, like Nightingale, is an example of a fan favorite who is paired with the only character with whom they have a complicated, interesting, important canon relationship with a lot of data to sink your teeth into.
Basically, if a new character was introduced to the series canon who was unattached, male, and, er, seemingly more optimized for a slashy storyline with him, I bet such a ship for Nightingale could really take off.
It wouldn't divert all the shipping interest from Nightingale and Peter, because their friendship does already have a lot to interest (and also, Always Slash Mentor and Pupil Pairs is one of the iron laws of slash); and part of the attraction of the ship is the mystique of Nightingale seen through Peter's eyes: the reader identifies with Peter, the newcomer to Nightingale's magical world, and through him admires both the magical world itself and Nightingale's character, his power and expert knowledge of magic, etc. A pairing that didn't capture that frisson of danger and excitement and the underlying poignancy and pathos - in other words, a character from Nightingale's world or more his equal - wouldn't be as compelling a pairing prospect.
The narrator Peter's partner Beverley is cool, well-written, significant to the story in various ways; but the focus of the stories is learning magic and solving crimes and the teacher-coworker character necessarily has a more important role in that. Because everything about Nightingale as a character is pretty much cool and mysterious (which doesn't even cover all of his appeal), the protagonist's positive relationship with him is also very interesting.
There has been a certain impulse in fanon to pair Nightingale up elsewhere, which I think is a reflection of how fascinating he is. But it's much easier to be interested in a relationship between two well-known characters, and the series doesn't have many characters left over that he could be paired with. The pool of secondary characters is limited and the amount we know about them is already enough lower to make them substantially less appealing (and for many people less easy) to write about.
In short, I... kind of think this is a character people are dying to pair up - often referred to as a Fan Favorite - Draco in HP, Dean in Supernatural, Fraser in Due South, etc. Fan favorites are sometimes main characters, sometimes not.
- In Supernatural, for example, it's often remarked that a portion of the interest in the original Sam/Dean incest ship was likely due to all the attention the relationship got and its being foregrounded in a show that lacked other emotionally compelling relationships - and that the season 4 introduction of Castiel had all the appearance of being specifically designed to draw shipping focus to Dean/Castiel instead.
- In the case of Loki, there are significant bodies of fanfiction and fanon pairing him with several other MCU characters (aside from the obvious, Thor) with whom he has had minimal interaction (and his status as a fan favorite character, and Hiddleston's as a fan favorite actor, are certainly undeniable...).
The introducton of Castiel to SPN and of Ray Kowalski to DS are both examples where the new (and seemingly more optimized for slashy storyline) character paired with the fan favorite took over as the dominant ship in the fandom relatively quickly after their introduction.
Loki, like Nightingale, is an example of a fan favorite who is paired with the only character with whom they have a complicated, interesting, important canon relationship with a lot of data to sink your teeth into.
Basically, if a new character was introduced to the series canon who was unattached, male, and, er, seemingly more optimized for a slashy storyline with him, I bet such a ship for Nightingale could really take off.
It wouldn't divert all the shipping interest from Nightingale and Peter, because their friendship does already have a lot to interest (and also, Always Slash Mentor and Pupil Pairs is one of the iron laws of slash); and part of the attraction of the ship is the mystique of Nightingale seen through Peter's eyes: the reader identifies with Peter, the newcomer to Nightingale's magical world, and through him admires both the magical world itself and Nightingale's character, his power and expert knowledge of magic, etc. A pairing that didn't capture that frisson of danger and excitement and the underlying poignancy and pathos - in other words, a character from Nightingale's world or more his equal - wouldn't be as compelling a pairing prospect.
Yay, RoL metà!
part of the attraction of the ship is the mystique of Nightingale seen through Peter's eyes: the reader identifies with Peter, the newcomer to Nightingale's magical world, and through him admires both the magical world itself and Nightingale's character, his power and expert knowledge of magic, etc
Yup, this is definitely what hooked me into the pairing (that and some excellent fic.
Re: your point about Pter/Nightingale shippers liking Bev - I certainly do. I also ship Peter/Bev and actually Bev/Peter/Nightingale too (though I tend to see Bev and Nightingale venturing into polyamory basically just for Peter). I'm just one person, but from what I've seen in fandom your theory is correct.
Anyway, I enjoyed this and all the parallels with Supernatural (I'm not familiar enough with the other canons you mentioned to appreciate those references).
Would you mind if I linked this post in
Re: Yay, RoL metà!
And of course, their introductory paragraph is inescapably suggestive, and I have given some thought to whether the author intended it as such (that is, to suggest attraction on Peter's side) and I'm honestly not sure, haha. Overall my reading of the canon intent usually settles on Peter being partially, but not exactly consciously, aware of this attraction, not in a way that he conceptualizes as affecting his sexuality (whether or not the author sees that itself as 'normal'. i.e. I think many people would say that not all men feel attracted to other men and that Peter does (at least in that scene), but there are plenty of men who also say things like 'It's not being attracted it's just KNOWING when men JUST ARE attractive,' and things like that. Whether Peter thinks that, and whether Aaronovitch thinks a) that it's true or b) that Peter thinks it but that it isn't true, are separate issues.
Re: Yay, RoL meta!
Will link, then, thank you. I'd really like
I doubt I'll ever be in a position to ask BA (though I understand he is active on Twitter and often replies to fan questions of this sort) but if I ever were, this 'did you intend to make Peter attracted to men' thing would be the first question. I'm not sure I want to ask the second set of questions you're asking because I'm often afraid that by putting the author's personal thoughts/beliefs into the equation I can risk potentially not liking them anymore (I don't think it's the case, but what if BA turned out to be homophobic or something along those lines, that's what I'm thinking of here). Sometimes it's just best to make assumptions based on canon and leave it at that.
Overall my reading of the canon intent usually settles on Peter being partially, but not exactly consciously, aware of this attraction, not in a way that he conceptualizes as affecting his sexuality
I agree.
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I do find it interesting that like you said, Beverly is one of those (rare?) female characters that is canonically in a m/f relationship that someone is bumping over to m/m but doesn't seem to get hostility directed at her. I love her, but I think I need something more from how she's written. Something where the walls come down, like Peter and Tyburn talking at the end of The Hanging Tree.
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Yeah! I mean, there's something about Beverley - she's kind of unusual (although all other things are not equal - the fandom demographics, and then you could argue that hating the girlfriends has become less popular in fandom overall in recent years too).
But is she missing something that would make her more compelling? I mean, you can always make something more compelling by adding something else to it, but if you examine her as she is, I don't think she is thinner, or has less story potential, than many highly popular female characters. Being a secondary character isn't a barrier to being popular for male or female characters overall, either.
I do think that she could get cooler on the page, though, with some tweaks to essentially the same story. (I don't mean that this is a flaw: more an unrealized potential?)
The answer could simply be in the nature of her and Peter's relationship - even at the beginning, when there was UST, it wasn't extremely suspenseful; it's been pretty much wholesome, and their dynamic pleasantly comfortable, which is of course just the sort of thing mediocre television shows never want to do and is why tv couples tend to get stuck in a will-they-won't-they timeloop or then a will-this-destroy-them? conflict-resolution loop every time they face anything at all. This tv model of relationships is obviously bad, but there's no denying that there's more fizz in an unresolved anything. Of course, in theory a character could be maximum badass regardless of whether they were in an established relationship or not, but since Peter is the POV character, their dynamic colors the way the reader sees people. Where his relationship with Nightingale has that tasty Master-Pupil vibe, and the excitement Peter feels to learn more about him - mixed with a little awe, his attitude in describing Bev's river magic (which is also fairly mysterious and not a little awesome, or could be!) quickly became much more matter-of-fact. I don't say this is unrealistic or even incompatible with being really romantic, but it seems to bring her a little more down to earth; he never really feels overawed... there's not a distance between them that they'd like to bridge and can't for some reason, and that's the essence of why UST works so easily.
Or the idea that walls aren't coming down (even if you just meant it as an example): she isn't particularly vulnerable (at least, not so the reader can see: there's been more and more non-job-related stuff that is behind fades to black...) and we don't see them vulnerable at each other very often (I mean even Foxglove Summer, in a situation that could have gotten more anxious and/or h/c, didn't really go there).
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I guess I want some of that story potential poked at a little more? Her character as it's set up is great, but I want her brought forward more - I guess I feel like she gets more heft than Jaget, but Guleed is probably right there equal with her. (Is Peter ok with Maxim? Is Maxim just a worshipper, who has found his purpose in life and chooses to do this, or is he a guy with a susceptible brain who's now enslaved? Have Peter and Beverly actually ever had a talk about it? Also, was Peter actually ok with fathering a river?) Like you say, it's just as mysterious as anything Nightingale does but Peter seems a lot more relaxed about it than he does when Nightingale does something weird. Beverly tells him to take a lot of stuff on trust.
Maybe it's just that we see so much of Beverly filtered through Peter's reflexive snarky approach to the world that I can't get more of a sense of her. I think that's why I feel like the scene with Ty and Peter helped flesh out Ty's character and the world that the Rivers inhabit so wonderfully and I want something like that to happen with Beverly.
I suspect a lot of my thoughts have to do with how BA has decided to tell the story and how he's crafted Peter's voice. It's similar to how he only obliquely hints about how Peter must feel after finding Simone's body.
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That's a good point, because I often find myself falling out of the story a little bit at the point where the focus shifts away from (or skips over elaborating) part of the story with Beverley: speculating about what the author was trying to do.
Like, the fact that she isn't more present in the story doesn't mean she isn't as important to Peter, because in reality when we tell a story that isn't about our partner we don't necessarily stop to go into detail about them when they briefly make a side appearance. But wanting to see more of her in the story because she's cool and we want her to have the opportunity to be even cooler is also reasonable for the reader.
isn't implausible for a goddess to do, and I can see how it could work for Peter to do that, but the rivers' deity-powers often seem like Peter himself takes their coolness too much for granted in that he just... doesn't seem as curious about them? Like okay maybe if you, say, live with a tiger you get blase about the things that big cats can do so you're not as excited if you run into, like, a mountain lion and get a demonstration of some of its skills and behaviors, fine, but Peter has a lot of excitement about explaining how other magic works both when he does sort of understand it and when he doesn't, and he's perfectly willing to explain in detail about other stuff that he knows plenty about (like history or architecture) under the assumption that the reader doesn't. So I definitely think there is space for more about river magic and also just more awe at how... awesome it is. (And I don't think that would mess up the portrayal of a pretty solid and comfortable established relationship, necessarily.)
I've just agreed with all of your comment, but longer, I guess.
I do sometimes get an inkling of a suspicion that the author, while satisfied with the relationship he's portraying and how he wants it to be, just isn't as interested in it and in her as he is in the other side of the books.
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I do sometimes get an inkling of a suspicion that the author, while satisfied with the relationship he's portraying and how he wants it to be, just isn't as interested in it and in her as he is in the other side of the books.
BA has said that Beverley was not part of his original plan for the series and it's fairly obvious to me that in her first appearance she was intended to be a Girl of the Book and then grew into something more.
My big frustration with Bev is firstly that we get very little insight into what SHE wants at any given time (with no spoilers, there's a thing in Lies Sleeping that we should absolutely know whether it was a goal of hers and...nothing) and secondly that Peter rarely if ever has to do any emotional labour on the page for her. She comforts him in his times of need; he never does the same. I'd like to see some reciprocity.
But it's also pretty obvious at this point that we're not going to get that in the series, her role is very much Peter's Girlfriend, so - fic!
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(tbh all the other runs range from 'not bad' to 'ehhhh' to 'actually terrible' but those two are worth it.)
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With Rivers of London, I don't think we're likely to get a new shippable character with Nightingale without breaking from Peter's point of view. Because by all rights, he does or did have interesting, important relationships with men - he's got a thirty-year friendship with Abdul; doomed himself to likely death for David Mellenby; and I'm sure there's an alternate universe out there somewhere where the big ship ended up being a Seawoll/Nightingale enemies to lovers deal because the right person wrote the right fic at the right time.
(With women, there's Molly and Vavara, which I guess, in some other universe, I can see people being into)
But Peter isn't all that interested in Abdul and Nightingale's friendship, and he's not privy to much information at all about David Mellenby. And outside of Nightingale getting a canon love interest, I can't imagine Peter spending that much attention on Nightingale's other relationships in the narration.
Edited to add: I don't mean to imply that Peter should care more about Nightingale's relationships with other people or anything - it's more about the nature of such a focused point of view to privilege all of the character's relationships with the narrator, rather than with each other. TV Shows and movies typically don't have quite the same level of obviously focused point of view.
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That said, I didn't mean to imply anything about how likely that might be in the original post - it was more theoretical.
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And yes, there can be future hypothetical interactions that Peter witnesses, but it can be hard to get the sort of emotionally charged moments that tend to set off ships with a third person in the room. Especially if at least two of the three parties involved are allergic to displays of emotion. Most of Nightingale and Abigail's relationship is built from Peter interacting with each of them one on one while referencing the other - but that requires Peter to have a very strong relationship with both parties.
I mean, anything is possible, and as you mentioned, the cast is growing. It just seems unlikely that anything other than a targeted effort is likely to register more than what options are currently available.
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And yeah, I definitely don't think it would be possible to have a scene like the one where Peter meets Nightingale between two other characters, not least because it wouldn't work without knowing what Peter was thinking.
But a no-heterosexual-explanation scene, or even an especially moving bonding moment, aren't really necessary to launch a fannish ship. Maybe to launch a massive, fanon-dominating ship on the order of Peter/Nightingale, but a healthy ship that becomes quite popular can be based on a canon relationship that exists on the edges, involving secondary or minor characters (Krycek, Methos, Loki in SPN, Hux), particularly when the interactions are tense because they're combative and/or involving banter.
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Much as I like Nightingale/Varvara, unless it were a juggernaut in fandom with amazing longfic, I'd be much more satisfied by finding one of the ten billion urban fantasy series that has a central het ship that I like. It's only a small percentage of what's out there, but there's a lot out there!
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Also, funnily enough - I didn't even consider Nightingale/Vavara until writing that comment (Me trying to imagine Nightingale with women tends to make my brain come up with a 'footage not found' situation), but once I did, I realized it hits three or four tropes that I could really be into. Like, five minutes of thinking about it and I could probably write an old school ship manifesto.
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ETA: I modified it anyway - who knows, it might help someone else even if it doesn't affect your guidelines.
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I found it in intriguing because the only reason I've ever shipped Peter/Nightingale is because I'm very suggestible to well-written fanon, and there's a lot of very good Peter/Nightingale. I definitely natively see Peter/Beverley and Nightingale/Abdul, and if I am looking for tragedy it's Peter/Lesley (though Peter is so screwed up about Lesley's various face iterations that the pairing is a little too dark for me), and I'd also be very happy with Peter/Sahra.
I wonder how much is just because it's the only Peter-centric slash pairing that has much canon support, too.
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