Oh my god, can I just stop everyone and tell you how much these images break my heart?
So this is from the Odd & Even Numbers short scenes: The first 5 are from the opening and the last 3 are from Heero’s separate mini-scene. All of this takes place immediately after the series (the first images are him actually rejoining the others after blowing up the piece of Libra).
And I just have to say that Heero looks so damn unsure, it’s almost heartbreaking. We have this character who spends majority of the series not worrying about the future, instead living in the immediate present, and then when he wins his ultimate mission and survives through it… it’s obvious he’s thinking ‘what now?’
I think its so unsettling in a way because when we see the end of the series, we’re kind of led to assume that the pilots rejoined the other survivors and had a wonderful evening celebrating.
But we get to these scenes, and in the scene (though my images don’t reflect it), they obviously aren’t. Heero spends the time looking nervous and more quiet than usual, and in one instance is actually struggling to let go of Wing Zero’s controls. When the pilots come in to land back with the others, all of them are quiet, nervous and looking doubtful. When Heero looks around, Wufei is staring at his Gundam, Trowa is helping injured Quatre, and Duo is stretching his muscles. None of them immediately rejoin the others.
(Damn, look who’s showing up ten years late to this discussion with Starbucks…)
Hey guys, just want to start with a preface here: I’ve recently been in several separate conversations about why certain ships become so popular, what leads people (and woman in particular) to ship so much, why certain fandoms become over-zealous in their shipping, and why so many slash ships manage to appeal to female viewers… And while I certainly don’t have scientific or even very thorough answers for most of these, I came across a line in a scholarly journal article recently that struck me like lightning, because it managed to express in just a few words a very complex idea that’s been slowly ruminating in my mind for months:
Many fans, particularly women, are disappointed by the contrived
romantic story lines that are appended to ‘buddy’ series and movies
in which the real emotional energy is between the heroic male leads (or between hero and villain) (McLelland 2006). [Source]
Emotional energy. There it is, the exact phrase I’d been looking for when trying to talk about the extreme popularity of ships like Klance, Sheith, Soriku, NaruSasu, and even het ships like Zutara.
Why do so many ships that have minimal chance of becoming canon become so beloved in fandoms? Why are so many fans attracted to potential relationships between characters the creators never intended to write romantically (or at least never intended to deliver on)?
I’ve said it before and it bears repeating: there’s no one, simple answer for shipping. People ship for an uncountable number of personal, unique reasons, and any attempt at “explaining” shipping will always be reductive and over-simplified. Nevertheless, once this hit me, I couldn’t unthink it:
Look at where the “real emotional energy” is in a story… And that’s where you’re most likely to find the fandom’s most popular ships.
