Cimorene

For a while I was following the reading regimen described in this entry, which is what led to my recent post about awkward moments in revisiting past fandoms. I read Smallville for a while too; I just ran out of it before the others and was reduced to just DS9 and DS. A couple of days ago I ran out of DS9 as well. I'm pretty sure that a lot of this is due to a lower percentage of early works in Smallville and DS9 having been imported to AO3 over the years. I'm not saying I would necessarily have enjoyed rereading them all or wanted to bookmark them, but I do feel like I didn't see all the ones I've read in the pre-AO3 era. So there's only a couple of Smallville bookmarks, but I have a bunch of the others. This is just a first batch.

( smallville (2) )

( star trek: deep space nine (5) )

( due south (5) )

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.

• 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.

(Big version here)

Please click for the bigger version. This is based on data taken from two polls performed by thefourthvine, with the data in my tables taken out on 22 Feb 2009.

This plot follows the same format as my earlier graph here, which, of course, did not have any Science behind it, only me squinting at the screen and placing the dots by the seat of my pants. I've reversed the axes in this one, however, so that better-written canons are at the top of the graph and gayer ones to the right this time. I prefer placing slashiness and quality on the two axes so that there's one data point per show and one show per data point, which lets the interaction be more easily seen.

(ETA: The clearest example of skewing I see on the plot is Highlander. LOTR might be skewed, too, by people's childhood memories or something, I guess. But Highlander? Look at it! IT HAS THE SAME QUALITY SCORE AS SGA. I'm pretty sure that it's not just my personal... weirdness, or whatever, that wants to ROFL at that. SGA is bad, but it's not that bad.)

It should be noted that mean is only one measure of central tendency and, at these sample sizes - which is to say they're all rather small but they vary from fandom to fandom - it's important to look at the others as well. To that end, here is the table I used to generate the graph:


(big version here)

Median and mode (ie, the most popular rating) are just as interesting as mean in their own ways. Scanning down the standard deviation columns, a few of those numbers will jump out as extremely large, representing a much higher degree of disagreement on the rating in question: the slashiness of Supernatural (no surprise where the primary pairing is incest) and the quality of Merlin (I'm kind of at a loss for this one but there it is), for example.

It's well worth checking out the results in the two posts of thefourthvine's where I took the data because you can easily see the bell curves for some questions, and distinguish others where the distribution shows much higher or lower consensus. (The Science of Slashiness & Moar Science!)

For me, an important part of absorbing any canon is creating a personal canon of spackles and slash to fill in the gaps around it. Of course, I might read or even write first-times set anywhere in it, but there's always something that I really believe in, like: I believe in Fraser/Ray K at the end of "Call of the Wild", and in Kirk/Spock after "Amok Time", and in Holmes/Watson after The Return, and in Garak/Bashir not before the end of the entire series. I believe in Nick/Greg, if you want to talk about my current shows, either after or very shortly before "Grave Danger". (Which isn't to say that I always believe in my fictional OTPs, or even in pairings I like.)

So watching a show for the first time is interesting. After SWAK, and then a few times during season 3 of NCIS, I could almost believe in established Gibbs/DiNozzo. Not that I subscribe to the view of an emotionally abusive Gibbs who practically attacks Tony's confidence with hot pokers - but he did warm up a little, gradually. There was the episode where Tony was framed, especially. Wow, that one stood out for me. And I liked to read the UST there as conscious on Gibbs's side, if not, er, un-U (I mean, est rel already). But moving on to season 4, we have that whole Amnesia Thing. Not so much the amnesia itself as the Mexico Thing, I think, make it impossible for me to believe in a first time before that point. I mean, I've read some stories like that, but Gibbs's motivation just doesn't seem internally consistent through the s4 premiere to me that way if he knows about a romantic (or sexual, as long as there's warmth and affection in it - and look, okay, there is) relationship. So I could only buy it if his amnesia had totally hidden the entire thing from him, but I don't buy that either. Still a little fuzzy, maybe, but there was also that entire weird conversation between Ducky and Dr. Who Looks Like a Smaller Sean Bean about how amnesia just doesn't work like that and it must be, in fact, just emotional repression~. Not that I actually know anything about that - not a neuroscientist or a psychologist or anything - but I find the idea of it lasting that long, but only partially, too hard to swallow.

new due south goodness by bethbethbeth.