I’m moving toward my goals on patreon. When I reach 300$ a month, I’ll start posting longer comics on Saturdays. If I reach 700$ a month, I can keep posting daily for the foreseeable future *and* expand the project. You can pledge for just 1$ here.
instead of saying “i want to kill myself” whenever something bad happens to me as a result of circumstances beyond my control i’ve started saying “i’m going to kill god” and it’s honestly done wonders for my self-esteem
In the early years of space flight, both Russians and Americans used pencils in space. Unfortunately, pencil lead is made of graphite, a highly conductive material. Snapped graphite leads and particles in zero gravity are hugely problematic, as they will get sucked into the air ventilation or electronic equipment, easily causing shorts or fires in the pure oxygen environment of a capsule.
After the fire in Apollo 1 which killed all the astronauts on board, NASA required a writing instrument that wasn’t a fire hazard. Fisher spent over a million dollars (of his own money) creating a pressurized ball point pen, which NASA bought at $2.95 each. The Russian space program also switched over from pencils shortly after.
40 years later snide morons on the internet still snigger about it, because snide morons on the internet never know what they are talking about.
I started a new project on my patreon. It’s a collection of drawings celebrating rest & joy. I’m trying to create the softest warmest art collection online. You can check it out here.
I know there’s the whole thing about killing a character off to show the injustice of the world or whatever, and yes you probably should avoid a twilight and genuinely kill at least one of your main or secondary characters (not just a random one which you threw in just so you can kill them)
But you don’t have to kill a character to kill them
You could break them completely, strip away everything they know and force them to become a different person, essentially killing who they were before. Even just with gradual character development you could eradicate the character that was first introduced.
You could take away their will to live, have them screaming for death, and deny them the right to die.
Have the hero become the villain. The villain become the hero.
In September 2016, “Steven Universe” aired the episode “Future Boy Zoltron” in which a new character, Mr. Frowney is first introduced. The former comedy duo partner of Mr. Smiley, it took a grand total of 20 minutes before the first shipping fanart of these two appeared on Tumblr.
They’re not conventionally attractive, the animation style doesn’t try to make them “sexy”, indeed they’re hardly the “bishuonen” that outsiders to the slash shipping world often assume are the usual fodder for obsessive fandom. But within seconds of their interactions together I felt that “spark” where I knew, I just knew, that I’d be seeing fanart of these two immediately if I looked. And sure enough, I was right.
To both my endless fury and endless awe, Rebecca Sugar had cracked the mystery of the “fandom favorite” shipping dynamic with a single 10 minute episode and unconventional characters. I was forever changed and the seeds of this essay were born.
I realized the root of so many popular ships, going back to the grandaddy of them all, Kirk and Spock, were variations on the traditional Vaudeville “Double act” to an almost depressing degree once you begin to notice it. To quote Wikipedia:
“A double act, also known as a comedy duo, is a comic pairing in which humor is derived from the uneven relationship between two partners, usually of the same gender, age, ethnic origin and profession but drastically different in terms of personality or behavior. Often one of the members of the duo — the straight man, feed, dead wood, or stooge — is portrayed as reasonable and serious, while the other one — the funny man, banana man or comic — is portrayed as funny, less educated or less intelligent, silly, or unorthodox. If the audience identifies primarily with one character, the other will often be referred to as a comic foil. Despite the names often given to the roles, the “straight man” need not be humorless and it is not always the comic who provides the act’s humor. Sometimes it is the straight man who gets the laughs through his or her sarcastic reactions to the comic’s antics…Most often, however, the humor in a double act comes from the way the two personalities play off each other, rather than from the individual players. In many successful acts the roles are interchangeable.”
I really hope it’s okay to add a couple of comments that I thought of while reading this very insightful post.
1. You mention that you can almost predict how fandoms will oversimplify characterization based on this - I agree, and moreover, you can often seen fans creating this structure in the absence of characterization. There are a few popular ships between relatively minor characters where there isn’t a great deal of solid personality development for one or both. In that case, I’ve noticed that there seemed to be some kind of fandom characterization template that writers were falling back on but couldn’t put words on it. It’s exactly this, I think, and I really appreciate your analysis for putting it so elegantly.
2. As I was reading this, I was thinking “but that doesn’t fit ships x y and z that I like” - but I noticed all the ships that I was thinking of fit into a different pattern. They’re all “two reserved, serious, unsentimental introverts, but one is book-smart and one is street smart” (to put it in the crudest terms possible). This doesn’t play on the “maximum contrast” principle but seems like it could still fit into your broader notion of “very different people playing off each other is what makes a ship interesting”. Although maybe I’m oversimplifying?
