actually the most romantic thing in the universe

[rhodochrosite]

lately i have found myself typing '[objectively unromantic thing] is the most romantic thing in the universe' way too much so as guy who loves categorisation i am going to try to sort my favourite ship dynamics into types but since i have such incomprehensible taste i don't know how successful this will be. let's find out!

first of all, i will never not pickship and that is a promise everything else is subsidiary to the fact that i love to smash my faves together more than anything. actual canon interaction is 100% optional i will invent the dynamic myself if i have to but truly the vast majority of my otps are my favourite x my second favourite... i'm already so invested in them individually of course i will be invested in them together. also a lot of these categories cross over because everything i like is kind of the same. broadly i have sorted these dynamics into four groups: <power dynamics>, <haterism>, <narrativeshipping>, and <not knowing each other>


POWER DYNAMICS
unbalanced power dynamics are the best that's all i have to say. preferably via formal rank differences but unequally reciprocated feelings are also fine

mentorshipping

• eg any troika member/kirihara (prince of tennis), riku/sena (eyeshield 21), v/kaito (yugioh zexal), haruna/mihashi (oofuri)

MY FAVOURITEST DYNAMIC IN THE WORLDD there is nothing more heart touching to me than imparting skill and knowledge to someone else. this isn't really reflected in the examples i put but i particularly love it when the mentee reminds the mentor of the person they used to be so in that vein i really enjoy cynical mentor x idealistic mentee. i also love when they end up as enemies

sparring mentorships

• eg *****/**** (***), androssi/baam (tower of god), squalo/yamamoto (katekyo hitman reborn), ...bucky/natasha (marvel)

the best kind of mentorships are when the thing that's being taught is how to fight!!! the additional element of physicality and violence is so chef's kiss

leader x second-in-command

• eg sanada/yukimura (prince of tennis), milner/assistant (utopia), xanxus/squalo (katekyo hitman reborn), iwaizumi/oikawa (haikyuu)

I <3 HIERARCHIES AND FORMAL COMMAND STRUCTURES!!! and i love HENCHMEN... my preferred flavour is total loyalty from the 2ic rather than a treacherous 2ic looking to supplant the leader (more interested in that kind of antagonism coming from the leader's protege/future successor... as an aside loyal 2ic x ambitious protege is also delicious), but i love so much when ideological conflicts threaten the 2ic's absolute devotion. it's good if they compromise their ethics to carry out their leader's will but also really good if they finally draw the line at some point

leader x protege

• eg any current captain x future captain ship, oikawa/kageyama (haikyuu), altan/rin (the poppy war)

i'm legacyfucker9000... person currently in the prime of their power and their protege primed to take over once they're gone is so good, i really like the feeling of passing down something greater than yourself. for the most anguish inducing take i especially love when the protege both admires the leader and wants to defeat them for an extra rivalry element with the inheritance feelings. from the leader's side i optionally also enjoy the complicated emotion of like, directly contributing to your own downfall by training the person who will one day overthrow or succeed you

leader x lancer

• eg yukimura/niou (prince of tennis), atobe/shishido (prince of tennis), kite/rin (prince of tennis), hanamaki/oikawa (haikyuu)

i love guys who come off hostile, disrespectful or uncaring of the leader's authority, but are unwaveringly loyal when it comes down to it and the leader knows it :') best version is when the lancer is high up in the chain of command because the leader trusts their judgement and abilities despite apparent inconstancy or antagonism

self-sacrifice

• eg yukimura/marui (prince of tennis), kiryu/yusei (yugioh 5ds), daniel/roen (tower of god)

as a person who buys wholeheartedly into sunk cost fallacy it is so so heart touching to me when someone selflessly and without prompting gives up something very important for someone else with no expectation of or perhaps even desire for reciprocation... straight up dying for the other person being the extreme example but very welcome too


HATERISM
i like it when people don't like each other <3 especially if there's bitter history between them!!

enemies
obviously i'm a huge fan... the very definition of haterism. ideological tension is the best basis for enmity imo none of this simple misunderstanding stuff i want deeply and tragically incompatible worldviews!! here are my favourite subtypes:

childhood friends to enemies

• eg luke/thalia (percy jackson), takasugi/katsura (gintama), dimitri/felix (fe3h)

love the contrast between the current enmity and the painfulness of remembering that they used to be close :')

childhood friendly rivals to enemies

• eg yusei/jack (yugioh 5ds), gintoki/takasugi (gintama), tenka/sousei (donten ni warau)

best of all worlds... friendly mutually beneficial haterism to unfriendly mutually destructive haterism is so ideal... i don't think i've ever seen this in an actual canon but friendly rivals who veer very close towards lovers before swerving hard in the opposite direction and ending up as enemies is the most perfect trajectory to me *__*

exes

• eg inui/yanagi (prince of tennis), bortz/diamond (houseki no kuni)

i think falling out of love is so good. getting back together is nice but realising that the people you've become are no longer compatible and you'll never be able to return to the relationship you had before is also nice

enemies to reluctant allies

• eg reiji/shun (yugioh arc v), takeru/ryoken (yugioh vrains)

gritted-teeth enemy of my enemy teamwork for the sake of a temporarily aligned common goal despite haterism otherwise is so fun every time, i love the group project energy. especially if the antipathy is only one-sided and the other person is fine or even happy to be working together. really funny if it shades into leader x lancer dynamic

rivals

• eg yugi/kaiba (yugioh dm (the original rivalshipping)), chihaya/shinobu (chihayafuru), kirihara/ryoma (prince of tennis), crow/jack (yugioh 5ds)

separate from enemies! rivals is more focused on competitiveness and pushing yourself to become better so you can beat the other person rather than necessarily trying to kill the other person (though that might also be an element of the dynamic depending on the canon but like your rival is your balance you don't truly want to get rid of them)... fun and flirty tension <3 or anguished tension <3

you saved me, you should remember me

• eg reiji/serena (yugioh arc v), yusaku/ryoken (yugioh vrains), *******/******** (****)

this is so specific but basically when A saved B's life when they were children, and then they grow into ideologically opposed enemies on different sides of a war who don't recognise/remember each other at first, and by the time they realise who they had once been to each other it's too late to reconcile... OR IS IT!!


NARRATIVESHIPPING
as a 2pickshipper i often have to rely on metatextual connections rather than actual canon interactions to form my theses and i literally do think that it's it's more important for a ship to have parallels than to like be in love or anything. it's actually really hard for me to ship any dynamic where i can't Connect Dots between the characters... this is less important in rpf obviously but it's everything to me in fpf

narrative parallels

• eg yukimura/kirihara (prince of tennis), shun/serena (yugioh arc v), finnick/johanna (hunger games)

NOTHING IS MORE TRUELOVE THAN BEING NARRATIVE PARALLELS!!! "you and i are the same" is simply the most romantic dialogue ever i loveeee acknowledgements of similarity or recognition of the self in the other, that's a confession in my eyes. i do appreciate a good set of narrative foils too but i prefer sameness over contrasts >__> if i had to pick ONE type of ship out of all of these it would be narrative parallels because even most of what i enjoy about mentorships stems from some kind of parallel between the mentor and mentee

selfcest

• eg yugi/atem (yugioh dm), bakura/ryou (yugioh dm), yuma/astral (yugioh zexal)

metaphorically being the same person is extremely romantic to me and so is literally being the same person. i'm including bodysharing, clonefucking and alternate dimension versions of the same person under the general selfcest umbrella they are all good

identity theft as a love language

• eg yuzu/serena (yugioh arc v), yagyuu/niou (prince of tennis), shinichi/haibara (detective conan), shinichi/kaito/ran (detective conan)

pretending to be someone else is the height of romance!! especially if the other person doesn't know about the identity jacking

highrankershipping

• eg cxk/zzt (idol producer), any zahard princess ship (tower of god (the original highrankershipping)), most interteam sportsani ships

i love people who win. and i love when people who win interact with other people who win. i love elite cliques!! i also love when they don't interact and/or aren't cliquey it is simply enough for highrankers to rank highly in the general vicinity of one another it's great when they don't know each other too, i find this so compelling. basically this is synonymous with pickshipping because being a highranker is a prerequisite to being one of my picks lol

tinhetting

• eg reiji/serena (yugioh arc v), seungcheol/nayoung (pledis), cato/clove (hunger games), noi/shin (dorohedoro)

special subcategory for tinhets because i love hetshipping so much it's unreal. explicitly canon hets can be a little hit or miss for me but if that shit is narratively implied or if i can like delusionally draw connections between a guy and a girl it just makes me uniquely unhinged i can't really explain why. these days i use tinhet to describe any noncanon het i like but originally the meaning was supposed to be narrowly construed ie legitimate belief that the interactions were intended to be read romantically / that the people in question had a crush on e/o

protagonist x final boss villain

• eg yukimura/ryoma (prince of tennis), ai/yusaku (yugioh vrains), yamato/sena (eyeshield 21), hinata/oikawa (haikyuu)

wasn't sure whether to put this under haterism but imo it's more about the structure of the story bringing them together, any enmity/rivalry is secondary to the inevitability of narrative forces because there SHOULD be some kind of history or thematic paralleling that builds up to the big boss battle... i especially love a formerly invincible final boss who suffers their first defeat at the hands of the protag, Unkillable Guy x Guy Who Kills Them Anyway is a very special relationship dynamic. extra epic if it overlaps with leader x protege


NOT KNOWING EACH OTHER
this is sort of a subset of narrativeshipping because narrativeshipping is about what's in my head rather than what's in canon but also it's kinda distinct enough to have its own category. this type is about the lack of closeness, even if (especially if) it seems that they should know each other. just like... existing separately but having vaguely overlapping spheres. this is romance to me. not the same as haterism because haterism is about intense feelings, not knowing e/o is about no feelings or like really vague or lukewarm feelings, but somehow ending up physically proximate anyway

2 people who are both closer to the same 3rd person

• eg takeru/aoi (yugioh vrains), joshua/seungcheol (seventeen), oshitari/jirou (prince of tennis)

especially if they have some kind of external circumstance that draws them together like being in the same age line, but they're still weirdly distant or at least not as close as they could be. it doesn't have to be jealousy just like... ambiguous tension. or not even tension maybe they just have no reason to interact

replacement goldfish

• eg yuto/yuzu (yugioh arc v), yugo/yuzu (yugioh arc v), yagyuu/niou (prince of tennis) except that they're both replacement goldfishing themselves

a "you remind me a lot of someone very important to me" type dynamic. can grow out of the replacement feelings and into a dynamic premised on their own terms, or stay as one person using the other as a substitute for someone else forever. again not reflected in the examples but i think it's extra tasty if the replacement goldfish in question knows they're just a substitute but is willing to stay anyway because even a shadow of the real thing is better than nothing

classmates / coworkers

• eg niou/marui (prince of tennis), sousei/kiiko (donten ni warau), shinichi/haibara (detective conan), literally any kpop ship but especially haechan/renjun (nct) for classmates energy though they do know each other

varying degrees of knowingness allowed here but the key is situational closeness and context-specific understanding of someone else. special shoutout to company approved propaganda cps i love deliberate fanservice and transactional relationships. i've folded classmates and coworkers into the same subset but i think classmates veers closer towards knowing and coworkers veers closer towards not knowing.

both are relationships that may not have eventuated if not for situational necessity but classmates is like... gossiping, passing notes in class, bitching about stuff together, always sitting next to each other, linking arms in the hallway, Those Two Girls. coworkers is less cliqueish and more professional, something along the lines of commiseration rather than bitching, joint accountability, helping e/o out with difficult clients, emotional support during deadline crunching... it's very slightly different vibes

last survivors

• eg gale/johanna (hunger games), felix/ingrid (fe3h crimson flower route), chaghan/rin (the poppy war), mayu/ryo (7 seeds)

often overlaps with <2 people who are both closer to the same 3rd person> if that 3rd person is dead or out of the picture lol. this is about situational closeness again, forcing two people who wouldn't otherwise talk to each other or would prefer the company of others to interact due to the sheer lack of anyone else to interact with LOL i want the 'we have nothing left but each other and if i could choose i wouldn't have chosen you but it's not up to me' vibes

to conclude, here is a visualisation filled out with yugioh ships:

and here is a visualisation filled out with tennis ships:

i don't necessarily like a ship more just because it fits into more categories but my #1 agendas for both series being in the overlap of all 4 is creating an image that really makes me think...

Comments

[prizefig]

hmm i'm surprised you didn't make Memory a category of its own... or i guess Memory is kind of a broad meta-category that overlaps everything else too. not to overcomplicate your model more than it already is lol

anyway, it really is amazing how much we broadly like the same types of things and have extremely similar taste but we like them in different ways and will go in opposite directions in execution. like, i love power dynamix but ambiguity & ambivalence >>> formal command structures, and enemies to reluctant allies/lovers >>> friends/lovers to enemies, and i also love the sub-categories of not knowing each other you posited but i also need canon interax to live. i do think ultimately we're not so different after all tho but my priorities among these dynamix are distributed differently than yours. lmao idk if i should continue navelgazing in this comment or just save it for my own post since i'd been meaning to do something similar for general story tropes, but ship dynamix would be easier.

ALSO idk if you've read it already, but you haveeeeeeeee to read ancillary justice. the main dynamix is literally haters to leader x 2ic w/ hints of one-sided You Saved Me I Was Your First Ship, You Should Remember Me (and many variations and inversions on that theme among various characters), and there's some light mentorshipping + potential narrativeshipping in the books 2 and 3. i already did a quotespost of the first book that includes most of the major main dynamix moments if you want to check if it baits you (though the leader x 2ic dynamix doesn't actually happen until book 2).

[rhodochrosite]

lol i did want to indicate somewhere that memory is absolutely fundamental to my conception of romance but its more like a theme than a specific dynamic... like i guess its what underpins my interest in shared history / legacy / debt etc etc

feel free to keep elaborating here if you like!! or if you save it for your own post i will gladly read... i love to discuss shippings... ctfu i love how on paper our interests seem really similar but diverge wildly in practice every time HAHA i do love ambiguity/ambivalence tho id categorise more under haterism or not knowing e/o.. but also what i enjoy out of power dynamics is the maintenance of the hierarchy whereas i think you enjoy more the destabilisation and subversion aspects. all the enemies dynamics do have an invisible To Lovers appended to the end its just that like that doesnt mean that theyre in love or like do anything or otherwise not be enemies.. words dont have to mean things.. i really like absences as much as presences which is a great hack to not needing canon interax for my ships dkjfgkdsfjg i feel like ive gotten super lucky mostly tho i always end up getting canon interax for my narrativeshippings and not knowing e/o shippings anyway

i have read ancillary justice!! wrote an essay on it back in high school english so i kind of dont remember shit about the dynamix since i was reading with my school brain and not my fan brain.. but i never got around to reading the rest of the series anyway so maybe ill give it another shot with this in mind🤔

[prizefig]

AND IT SHOWS LOL... but worry not, this is just from my years of knowing you, i don't think you're beyond subtlety about it.

i did just wrack my brain trying to list all my favorite ships from various fandoms and it was kinda no_correlation.jpg or maybe there is a correlation and i'm just not seeing it 🤷‍♀️ i really related to your tweet about this post that was like "all ships i like have in common is that i like them" lmao, so idk if it's worth a post just yet.

yeah, as the society destabilizer in question i guess it should come as no surprise that i enjoy subverting and complicating the established (or like, "established" if it's ad hoc) power structure. maybe this is leaning more into haterism, but the most compelling sub-categories you listed under powerdynamixshipping to me were the leader x lancer and the leader x 2ic particularly with an ideological clash that causes tension in their relationship. it's actually true that haterism is the most romantic thing in the world, imo.

fully agree re: any enemies dynamix implicitly including To Lovers and that they can simultaneously be enemies and lovers (for any given value of lovers). again, for me it's the ambivalence of being attached to someone but not being able to be with them and how to navigate that. i'm not really super interested in childhood friends to enemies because i guess shared pasts are less compelling to me than shared futures, going from not knowing each other to Knowing each other. or maybe it's just that the shared past has to be equally complicated and friendship alone doesn't cut it.

i'm rereading what you wrote about not knowing each other and finding myself agreeing with it, but it's not really the not knowing each other that draws me in it's the forced intimacy that uhhh forces them to know each other. situational proximity, relationships of necessity/convenience, codependence, etc, are all really good to me. i'm p sure this is the case for you as well, but you're putting the emphasis on the not knowing each other/shared past and i'm putting the emphasis on the forced intimacy/shared future. there really should be something instead of nothing imo!!!

re: narrativeshipping and 2pickshipping, i think i actually come to 2pickshipping via narrativeshipping (for fpf at least) where a lot of my ships will be my fav x their fav (or anyone they have a sufficiently complicated and intense relationship with) and that becomes my 2pick because i'll just get invested in the second person anyway. i do get pretty lucky often in that the characters i'm initially drawn to tend to have interesting dynamix going on, so i can't think of any instances where i've actually 2picked people who straight up did not know each other. at least until kpop, and even then there's the built in forced intimacy that provides a baseline of knowingness and makes fabricating dynamix easy enough. but even then, my favs' favs get guaranteed free spots at the top of my bias list via adjacency goodwill.

ok so obviously at this point it's pretty clear that Knowing Each Other is super important to me, which i've mentioned before ("you're the only one who knows me, babe" is the most romantic thing in the world) which explains the draw of selfcest and related dynamix... it really is about not just acknowledgment of sameness or recognition of self through the other but profound understanding, or at least attempting to get there. that said, i think one of the other things that ties a lot of my ships together is taboo/transgression... which kinda goes without saying lol... i already said this to you before, but you know i love people who fuck when there are reasons that they shouldn't.

re: ancillary justice, haha i wouldn't have been surprised if you'd read it because it does have a lot of your fav tropes going on, and i def think it's worth revisiting!! i didn't like books 2 and 3 as much as the first, but there's still some really fascinating stuff in there.

[rhodochrosite]

😭ive been trying to find correlations between my ships for like 5 years and this longass post isnt even comprehensive (eg did not know where to put Horrible tropey cliche ya supernatural bad boy het romances) so um.. good luck connecting the dots! tho u did do a lot of dot connecting here

i think i like simultaneously love and hate disrupting power dynamics, im very invested in maintaining power structures but i also like tragedy lol... surprised u pointed out leader x lancer as interesting to you because that one is the most Ultimate Maintenance Of Power Structure to me moreso than even leader x 2ic which i think is best when the ideological tensions grow too strained for the 2ic to keep repressing whereas the lancer is only antagonistic on the surface and very invested in loyalty underneath. but yes fully agree any degree of haterism is so romantic :')

'going from not knowing each other to Knowing each other' ctfu i think this is the central point of our divergence in tastes bc my central interest as memoryfucker9000 is the reverse i love when there is nothing instead of something. i dont like childhood friends as a trope so its kind of just there as window dressing to make the current state of haterism more compelling to me Because of always looking backwards to the shared past rather than looking towards some shared future.. wow maybe WE are the narrative foils in question i feel like all our differences in opinion come down to me liking distance and you liking proximity. even the different reasons for liking selfcest etc youre seeing it as someone else knowing you and im seeing it as you knowing yourself

im also very easily influenced by my faves faves but im not really sure at what stage that happens ie whether its before or after i independently(?) make my picks but i thinkkkk once again im the opposite to you i 2pick first and then look for the narrative links... its kind of obscured by the way i have consistent fave patterns even if not ship patterns and also the way im mostly into fpf franchises with huge ensemble casts that do have heaps of highranker interax anyway so its a bit of a chicken and egg situation lol. i love people who fuck when they shouldnt as well but probably for different reasons to you i havent really thought about this in depth 🤔 i think the draw for me would have to be like the specific reason why they shouldnt rather than the general transgressive nature of the act

hmmmm ancillary justice reread coming this winter break then...

[prizefig]

omg so true, the narrative foils were the friends we made along the way. once again thinking back to the alex & pj partners podcast ep where they dichotomy is “I am done, I wanna walk away, I am not interested in doing this anymore, I don’t wanna fight for this, it feels bad, I want to escape it, I’d rather blow this whole thing up.” vs “This is the last good thing I’m ever going to have in my life. I don’t care how bad it gets, I will stay in it until there’s nothing left.” which is sort of adjacent to what we're talking about... like there's probably (definitely?) a non-negligible area of overlap between our tastes/fundamental philosophies, but i think we've still managed to cohere a few themes into recognizable clusters... this is so interesting lmao now i want to know where all of our other friends fall along these lines.

hmm i guess the appealing thing about leader x lancer is the interplay of loyalty and haterism, i do still like loyalty kink but it has to be complicated by other factors too. which is basically the case for like any ship dynamix really, even ones i'm not really into i can be sold on by being told that the characters involved have conflicting and contradictory feelings towards each other. plus i guess i like the unrepression of leader x lancer more, where the lancer is allowed to blatantly flout the established power structure because they're special 💘

re: the selfcest thing, i came across this excerpt on tumblr earlier that you might enjoy. it's from "mirror traps" by hera lindsay bird, which i can't find the full text of online but it's in her self-titled book which should be easy enough to acquire.

yeah, i wanted to elaborate on the transgression thing because it's not that straightfoward for me either but i hadn't really thought it through/couldn't articulate my vague impression, so we'll probably come back to this conversation at some point. there's probably a lot of other angles we could get into, since you said this post isn't comprehensive and i still have dots that remain unconnected despite my essay length comments lol... shipping meta is so fun tho

[rhodochrosite]

ME TOO i love to see people speak on their shipping philosophies it is so fun to read people connecting their own dots. & word i see... i don't actually consider myself a fan of loyalty kink it has to be like just these specific circumstances but i truly agree that dynamics involving conflicting and contradictory feelings >>>>>>>

also thank you for this excerpt!! that's really romance... i will investigate and see if i can obtain the full text <3 haha i feel like i definitely solidified a lot of my own shipping thoughts a bit more thanks to this conversation even if just in contrast which i guess is the purpose of a foil :^) i look forward to seeing you connect more dots!!