rose-griffes:

lj-writes:

Noah Fence but the way I hear the show went (I dropped it at the pilot) having better ideas than the writers seems like a low bar. That’s what fanfiction is for, though, right? I get wanting a ship to be canon–and I’m a lot more sympathetic to the ship you mention than to reelo–but blowing every little “clue” out of proportion and, worse, mocking people for disagreeing, that’s just being a conspiracy-theory hawking asshole.

I’m also reminded of the worst behaviors of zootarians from the ATLA fandom. This was another great ship that had a dedicated group of asshole shippers who insisted it HAD to be canon, that it was ALREADY canon, and, after the show ended, that it was ACTUALLY canon and they were ROBBED. To this day, almost a decade after the show ended and after we’ve had sequels featuring the actual main ship’s children and grandchildren, this contingent spreads conspiracy theories about a secret fourth season, the head writer being strongarmed by the producers and so forth.

It gives me all sorts of schadenfreude that there’s a significant overlap between disappointed Zitarians and reynos. So much for their infallible powers of analysis.

This leaves me thinking about four related questions:

1. What’s the message in the text of the medium? A lot of BBCLock fans said that the show queerbaited its fans. I don’t know if it did, because like you, I said, “Hahaha, NO” with the very first episode. (That brings up another question: who gets to decide if something is queerbaiting? Answer: probably not me.) 

I have no idea how anyone got zutara-will-be-canon material out of the show A:TLA. 

The medium so far with reylo and Star Wars is TFA–and potentially the related novels as well. I don’t see hints of reylo within TFA, or even subtext. But what do I know; I’m not an English major. /s 

2. What responsibility does a content creator have in their comments outside of the medium? Here’s where I think that Gatiss and Moffat did what they could (from what I know, which isn’t all that much), given the greater responsibility in handling (or in this case, not handling) a queer storyline: they tried to make it clear that they weren’t going to make a romantic couple out of Holmes and Watson. They made multiple blunt statements for years that they had no intention of telling that story in their show. 

With reylo (het ship with two able-bodied white characters), there’s not really a ‘take great care’ caution sign blinking overhead, imo. And honestly, no matter what they do, at this point anything anyone says will be twisted into ship fodder by the “my ship will be canon” crowd.

3. How much should an audience believe in comments from those content creators? J.J. Abrams is notorious for deliberately misstating things. Gatiss and Moffat were telling the truth about johnlock, but people buried deep in TLJC couldn’t see it. 

No content creators for Star Wars have said anything as definitive as “this is / isn’t the story we’re telling about X pairing”, other than maybe Kathleen Kennedy closing a door on finnpoe, if I’m remembering that moment correctly. 

4. What message is the marketing sending? Zutara fans have a few things that they point to as proof of their ship and the great deception that they, er, ‘suffered’… I don’t know about BBCLock. Star Wars marketing is skewing toward the white characters in a big way, but I wouldn’t say it’s deliberate shipbait, but rather the traditional marketing default toward whiteness. 

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1, 3, and 4 are all through the lens of audience interpretation, of course, so even the most carefully written and created film with a well-planned marketing campaign can end up with some fans misreading various elements. 

Most A:TLA viewers were fine with the obviously foreshadowed pairing of Aang and Katara as endgame. Zutara-was-supposed-to-be-canon fans are just a really noisy minority. Preferences of fans online are not often indicative of the general audience’s preferences, though. For example, white m/m ships dominate AO3, whether the source materials include those pairings or not. Usually not, in fact. 

The thing that gets me with canon Reylo, especially in regards to 1 and 4, is its contradictions. One moment they’re like “Reylo is so obvious in the text and the marketing! The GA will eat it up!!” and the next it’s “NO ONE can get these exceedingly subtle symbols and allusions except for us English majors!” It seems to me it has to be one of these two: Either their ship must arise out of an understandable story accessible to the general audience, or it’s an esoteric exercise in subtext meant only for English majors. Given that it’s Star Wars I’m going with the former, personally.

And nothing in a plain reading of the actual story, one that doesn’t depend on microexpressions and very long-shot literary comparisons that don’t actually work, suggests that there’s a romance there. Some kind of deep and meaningful connection, yes, such as Star Wars protagonists have always shared with the main antagonists, but why assume it automatically means a romance? Because it’s a relationship between a white able-bodied man and woman?

Regarding 1, for all that shippers like to point to works like Twilight or 50 Shades as evidence of how popular something like Reylo could be, they seem to be missing or ignoring the fact that there was nothing surprising in the love story for either of these works, at least in terms of who ended up with who. The endgames were blatantly obvious from the moment the principal characters were introduced.