Sudden runaway popular slash pairings in an established canon

[cimorene]

I posted some recs last week (?) for the suddenly-runaway-popular-slash-pairing-from-an-established-canon that I happened to have been reading, Steve/Eddie from Stranger Things (s4). The thing about this pairing that strikes me, as I can now confirm having seen the rest of the seasons (mostly) as Wax rewatched them since then, is that it really is based on very few interactions - more the amount of scenes you'd usually expect for a side slash pairing from a movie (like, say, the butler and the hacker in the old Angelina Jolie Lara Croft movies). Slightly more than that, but nothing like the amount of scenes between two of the main characters in an ensemble movie.

The last time I remember thinking more or less this was when they introduced CGI Luke Skywalker in The Mandalorian and that pairing suddenly exploded into popularity on the basis of a much-slimmer like... two sentences and twenty seconds (or something like that).

I think the same psychological and sociological forces are at work behind both of these pairings, on reflection: namely, a romantically unattached beloved fannish object who previously didn't seem to have any viable slash partners in canon - someone people were ready to dote on and wanted to see happy (and perhaps in both cases especially wanted to slash with someone, although that's probably more true for Luke Skywalker than for Steve Harrington, who was previously romantically linked to Nancy but is appealingly himbo?); and a new male character who is also romantically unattached and quickly becoming a fan favorite in their own right due to extra charmingness (this probably doesn't need that much explanation, since the new-popular-character-ness of Din in the Mandalorian and of Eddie in this season of Stranger Things is obvoius, but I'll point out that they're both appealingly emotionally vulnerable and shown doing nurturing stuff, they're both characters from especially marginalized backgrounds, they're both sorta underdogs, they both have a special subcultural identity that can make them particularly relatable to fans). I think there's a sense of "Finally, someone WORTHY of my Blorbo!" going on with this type of pairing.

And I also feel like I've seen this sort of dynamic before, but I honestly couldn't think of any more examples in the last four days or so of lying around thinking about it.

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

Major Lorne in Stargate was kind of a character like that. Also Haldir in LOTR.

I don't think Lorne had a True Love, though? He was more of a Little Black Dress?

[cimorene]

I don't think Lorne was really that popular, although there was a flurry of slashing him with Parrish after that one episode. I think it was a fairly early episode though? Like season 2 perhaps? And that there hadn't really been that much of him before it? I did see him paired around more after that with other people, so perhaps there's an element of that. But I don't remember him being a fan favorite really, although the ecosystem back then was much less fertile ground for memes and shitposts and so on, so that could make it harder to tell I guess. Nowadays if there's a character without a good pairing option you can still see tons of gifs and photo edits of them via the various fanartist channels that exist. Tumblr and Twitter made for an explosion in those.

[princessofgeeks]

Dunno; there seemed to be an explosion of Lorne/Parrish and other fic about Lorne. I really was only on the margins of SGA and I was aware of it.

The actor who played Parrish was very popular from other shows, which explains him. But Lorne was quite the phenomenon there for a bit.

[stranger]

A pairing that came out of nowhere after Thor in MCU was Clint/Coulson, based on about 40 seconds of a spoken conversation over audio comms -- that is, no face-to-face scenes at all. The conversation definitely shows the kind of familiarity long-term professional partners should have. Agent Coulson was an established minor character from earlier movies, as was Clint (Hawkeye) from Marvel comics. There were quite a number of stories about the pairing itself, and more that include them as a couple in Avengers team fics. I'd guess Coulson, as competent but ordinarily human in SHIELD, and Hawkeye, also with a hypertalent but not "super", were relatable to fans as humans among the variously superhuman characters.

[cimorene]

Yeah, I remember it well! I suppose this could be an example of that phenomenon. Coulson was liked already after IM2. The explosion in popularity was such, though, that I suspect a lot of people who interacted with that pairing were introduced with it to both characters.

[princessofgeeks]

Very good point!

And there was that clip of Coulson taking out convenience store robbers too.