branchandroot

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Three Weeks for Dreamwidth: Favorite pairing/character archetypes? :D Are you more fond of rival!slash or best friends turn lovers or master/servant or....?

The easy answer is: yes, please, all of the above!

I certainly do have a major kink for captain/lieutenant pairs, especially the ones where the "captain" is delicate looking and apparently sweet and the "lieutenant" is the brawny and/or stolid type. Yukimura/Sanada, Byakuya/Renji, Kazuki/Juubei, Tsuna/Xanxus. This set up only works for me, of course, when the "captain" is actually a galactic grade badass; otherwise there wouldn't be nearly such tasty tension and chemistry. If the "lieutenant" is secretly a total squish, this is a bonus, but I'm also entirely good with the trope of a "lieutenant" who feels a deep and abiding need to compete with and strive to equal his "captain".

For broadly similar reasons, I love me some rival!slash. I like the intensity with which rivals focus on each other, especially in sports manga. ES21 was a very good series for this. Roy and Ed, my gateway pairing as it were, were kind of six of captain!kink, half a dozen of rival!slash.

Of course, I'm also very fond of best-friend relationships, like Roy and Hughes. I'll write those both ways, turning sexual and not. Again, it's the intensity of the relationship that matters.

This leads pretty naturally into my taste for a particular variety of sib-cest. I'm all over the Seiran/Ryuuki dynamic, or the Yuuta/Fuji, or the Ryousuke/Keisuke. In all cases the siblings have a very intense, almost exclusive, focus on each other. I like that a lot, as long as it's written in the happy-fluffy way, and not in the hideously dysfuctional way. This is, to be sure, a fine line to walk because it would be very, very easy for the dominant sibling to take terrible advantage of the other. For this reason I am very cautious about reading fic written for these.

At bottom, I write a whole lot of "how does this relationship work?" fic. When I set out to write about Roy and Hawkeye, it was driven on the one hand by "what would the politics actually look like next" and on the other by "how would these two actually go about becoming something other than a working relationship?". When Em and I started brainstorming how to subvert and recuperate the women of KHR, a lot of my focus was on "what choices would Kyouko and Haru make when precipitated into this new world, what compromises would they reach with the people they love?". When I went to write about the AU where Seien inherits the throne, the framework was family as much as politics, and it wouldn't have been nearly as powerful is Shouka weren't more Seien's father than the Emperor ever was.

And what I like to read are stories that will give me fodder for that kind of thing.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

chronolith

Have you seen Ouran Kouko? I don't think it is your usual thing, but I think you would be very interested in a lot of the relationship dynamics. Also, Haruhi is made of awesome.

From:

branchandroot

*direful* Oh, I saw it. The class issues made me froth at the mouth, Tamaki is too much of an idiot to be the kind of Heart I can accept, and I am really, very seriously NOT down with the way Haruhi is taken advantage of by the lot of them.

From:

chronolith

The class issues are a problem. Less so in the manga, mostly because Haruhi smacks them around for it a lot more often.

Ah well.

From:

annotated_em

Mmm, yes. "How does this relationship work?" is the key. If you can sell me on a relationship dynamic that's going somewhere, I'll read just about anything.

From:

branchandroot

Exactly. I mean, the pyrotechnics are all well and good, but it's the people who are most interesting.

From:

theodosia21

Oh, yes. It's the relationship dynamics rather than the plot that tend to make or break a story for me. Not that a good plot isn't awesome, too, but it's the relationships that hook me. ^_^

From:

branchandroot

Exactly! Really, if you don't have good characters to hang the plot on, how can the plot /be/ good?

From:

anehan

I almost said I'm not fond of best friends turned lovers, but then I remembered Eiji/Oishi, and that pretty much ruined that theory. But let's say that usually I'm not too fond of this kind of relationship dynamic.

Weirdly enough, though, I love sibcest. Fuji and Yuuta, Bill and Charlie Weasley, Bill and Tom Kaulitz. Heck, if I watched Supernatural, I'd be all over Wincest. There's just something about that dynamic that appeals to me. Don't ask me what. I don't know the answer. I need someone else to psychoanalyse that.

From:

branchandroot

*snickering* Now there's a fun game: psychoanalyze each other based on pairing preferences.

From:

anehan

Oh lord, don't tempt me to start a new meme.

From:

chronolith

Oh no. Let's not. Especially since my pairing preferences never match up to anyone elses. >_>

From:

kemis

Mhh, you raise a difficult point. Personally, I like the rival thing better - rivals, master/servant, etc etc, because it focuses, IMO, more on the differences between the characters and how and why they end up together. The best friend thing, I like that too (I read almost anything) but it's usually always the same thing with (slightly, if at all) different flavors.

And, ohhh! *raises hand, jumping up and down* I love sib-cest too! In fact, I could say that one of the things that often has me starting to follow a series. Well, that and the fics I find about it. ~~If I have ever mentioned that your Seien/Ryuuki fics are what got me into SaiMono, this is a good moment to repeat it again.~~

I, thought, know precisely what's the reason why I like sibcest. Imprinting!^_^

From:

branchandroot

*grins* One's reading/writing kinks are always kind of fun to contemplate.

*hearts* Seien/Ryuuki would get anyone into SaiMono.

From:

kemis

That's the one and only kink I know exactly how I acquired.

The first fic I ever read (back when I had just discovered what yaoi were, when I was a TOTAL n00b who had owned a internet connection for a grand total of three months, when I barely knew any English and I didn't even know what fandom is, never mind what fanfics are) was a NC-17 N/C on two brothers. Which it took me several readings and a couple of days to figure out that, yes, I had really just read that and that it was not in fact canon (not that I knew what canon was).

Quite an introduction to fandom and fics, right?XD

So yes, I completely blame that one kink on imprinting.^^

From:

alas

I know exactly what delicious dynamic you're talking about regarding captain and lieutenants, but when I read this:

where the "captain" is delicate looking and apparently sweet

followed by Byakuya, it's lucky I wasn't drinking anything XD.

From:

branchandroot

*laughing* Yeah, he's not quite in the "sweet" range! Elegant and refined, yes; sweet, really not so much.

From:

chronolith

Have you read Yuki Kaori's Count Cain-GodChild series? It is about as cracktastic as Angel Sanctuary

From:

branchandroot

I've poked at it now and then, but it's really too gory for my taste. Concentrated gore, that is, without enough plot in between.

From:

chronolith

It's very Sherlock Holmes-y at the beginning and then you start getting the fucked up relationship between Cain, his parents, and Dr. Jezebel.

I never really thought of it as all that gory. I think both Bastard and Hellsing have stuck my gore sensors for anime & manga at a pretty high level. It's possible to ping my 'too much angst' sensor I'm looking at you Here and Now, Then and There but hitting the level of too much gore is pretty hard to do.

I also like the God of War games, so that probably says something.

From:

branchandroot

Well, I didn't like those two either, so there you go. When the page starts dripping, I'm gone.

From:

chronolith

I'm pretty fine with gore in anime, manga, and some games. But in movies or games that are highly life-like looking at you Call of Duty I tend to punch out.

It's interesting what causes people to sit through an anime/manga. Most shonen manga make me nuts because of how they treat the women and I just can't deal with it. I can't stand Bleach by and large, but I can deal with Hellsing just fine because Integra makes my heart happy.

From:

mitsuhachi

Thank you! Captain/lieutenant is exactly the way to describe a particular D/s dynamic I've been trying to talk about, and no really knowing how. Seconding on how crazy hot it is, too. <3

From:

branchandroot

Yes! That one! It's totally crazy hot, especially if there's a soupcon of conflict added.

From:

mitsuhachi

My favorite is when the second is superficially more powerful in some way--not necessarily strength; Merlin's magic, or Spock's intellectualism, for instance--but they CHOOSE to serve their captain. That bit makes me keyboard-smash like you would not believe. <3<3<3

From:

chronolith

Okay, one more rec/question and then I will shut up and go away. But Code Geass might be interesting to you. Though Lelouch is a great big bastard to trump all bastards.

I keep throwing these anime at you because I think that they have relationships that you would find interesting. Only it appears our tastes are, like, wildly divergent. I should be used to this by now, given that I am the hardcore outlier in fandom

From:

branchandroot

Yeah, I think we'll have to settle for minor overlap. I watched a few episodes of Geass but it didn't really grab me. I actually have a fairly narrow band of interest for giant robots, and Geass just didn't quite manage to hit it.

From:

chronolith

Geass is really less about the giant robots and more about politics and Lelouch being a manipulative bastard. I do like the fact that he can't pilot the damned mech at all.

Well. Oh well. At least I like what you write even if I find the canon baffling & infuriating?