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Of Rivalship and RivalSlash
The thing is, I love the rivalry relationship in fiction. But for the most part I don't go for slashing rivals. And I'm trying to figure out why.
I have a long-standing affection for rivalship. For the most part I'm not talking about the villain/hero dynamic (though that's closely related, and also fascinates me) but rivals. "Best enemies," who might have started out as actual foes, even trying to kill one another, but somewhere along the way they've become neutral, or allies, sometimes even two members of a team. But they don't get along, due to fundamental differences (or similarities) of personality, or philosophy, or sometimes just because one or both of them is an ass. And they're constantly trying to prove themselves over the other, always snarking, always, competing, always driving one another to new levels.
They're especially common in fight shounen, fighting face to face as much as back to back, and their chosen expression of affection is "Don't die and deny me the chance of killing you first!" To varying degrees, this is Goku and Vegeta. Ranma and Ryouga. Kenshin and Saitou. Sanzo and Gojyo. Ban and Shido. Yuusuke and Kuwabara. Zoro and Sanji. My latest crush, Yugi and Kaiba. They're countless, and I don't get tired of them.
All these pairs have two things in common: they're one of my favorite relationships of the series in question, often my absolute favorite relationship; for many of them one of the chars (most often the rival) is my favorite character of the series.
And, while slash exists for pretty much all of them, I don't have that much interest in reading or writing it for any of them.
It's a conundrum that's puzzled me for a while, ever since I figured out that yeah, I like slash. It would be pretty damn hot in a lot of these cases. And I can certainly see where it comes from: these chars all have chemistry. They're incredibly deeply bonded--some of them I even call soulmates, not in the romantic sense, but in that they're virtually tied together by fate, absolutely unable to ignore the existence one another, no matter how much it stings. They exist to play off each other.
If you convert that heated intensity to sexual passion, there's pretty much three ways it can go. The first is an unconsummated relationship. Either the attraction is one-sided, an unrequited love--but that's depressing, while not being the kind of high tragedy fangirls like me like to write or read; or it's all UST, which gets frustrating after a while. Sooner or later one craves resolution.
So the two rivals end up engaging in casual, meaningless, extremely sexy sex. Often repeatedly. But a few problems arise with this. For whatever reasons, in many such rivalships, one or both of the two are canonically involved with someone else (often romantically, though it can be an intense friendship or sibling love). While not universally true, I tend to be a canon whore, and don't care to see canon couples broken up, even for the sake of hot boysex, especially when it would be OOC for someone to abandon a loved one for the hated rival. Especially when those couples are OTPs, which a lot of them are for me. More on that later.
Even if both of the rivals are unattached, however, it's hard to maintain casual sex for very long. It's fine for a PWP, but in longer stories, only certain characters have the sort of mindset and life situation that could make a pair believably be fucking, while not having it affect their interactions outside of the sack. If it doesn't turn to something more, it's liable to start breeding resentment, changing the relationship dynamic. One of my favorite aspects of rivalries is the certain definite respect between the rivals; they may despise each other, but they acknowledge one another as equals (or close to); the competition doesn't have the same bite if they're not closely matched. Casual sex, using one another, can too easily damage that mutual respect. There's also the issue of the seme-uke dichotomy, difficult to avoid in animanga fic, in which a relationship requires a dominant and a submissive partner; if those roles are fixed in a story, they introduce an innate power imbalance.
Moreover, in its way, sex without romance, without caring, is even more frustrating than UST. It's almost getting there, but not quite. Because what much rivalslash is driving to in the end is the admission of mutual love between the rivals. Not necessarily verbally; that's pretty much impossible with some of the characters. But in deeds if not in words, the rivals manage to put aside their differences and become lovers.
Except--this undermines the whole rivalry. They might still snap at each other, might still fight and compete, but what's important is the way they truly feel. The intensity of their clashing is supplanted by the intensity of their devotion, and their aggression becomes a sham, a game, just a cover. The snarking still is funny, the peculiar ways of showing grudging affection still is cute. But the edge, the fire is gone. Any doubts about whether they really care, how important they are to one another, are erased.
Now, wait just a minute. I've thrown Gojyo into a freezing river just to make Sanzo take care of his hypothermic ass. I write fifty thousand words just to get Zoro to say "I hate you" to Sanji and have it unequivocally mean "I love you." Obviously I like admissions of caring between rivals as much as the next fangirl! So why the anti-slash, even when it's not interfering with my chosen OTPs?
The difference is the nature of the connection. Friends of a certain type can still be rivals, still compete all-out. Romantic lovers should be more supportive of one another, depend on each other in different ways. This is why in so many rival pairings, the rivals do have close relationships with other people--they need others they can rely on, absolutely and unconditionally, without the stress of the rivalry. I love that kind of relationship, too, the total, trusting partnership, such as Ban and Ginji have. But it's a completely different dynamic from rivalship. I enjoy both, and don't especially want to see one transmuted in the other. Especially when I can often have both.
Which leads back to my OTPs. In certain cases I'll be fond of one pairing partly because it allows for exploration of another relationship, without the need to make the latter romantic, since the romance is already present. In Dragonball Z, I loved reading Buma/Vegeta - but while I found them a fun pairing, even more I liked Vegeta and Goku's incredibly intense connection. And it was a rare B/V story that didn't have at least a bit of that, because it's pretty much impossible to write an IC Vegeta without mentioning Goku sooner or later. Vegeta defines himself by how he measures up to Kakarrot.
--Incidentally, you'll note that while my OTPs will vary between het and slash, not a single rivalship I've referenced is male-female. This could be because men and women compete in fundamentally different ways, and therefore don't have that nearly perfectly matched, competitive championship drive that is essential to rivalry. It could also be that in the great general tradition of romance trumps all, it's pretty much impossible to find a male-female love-hate relationship that doesn't canonically become love-love eventually.
There are varying degrees to rivalry, obviously. It tends to be that the less intense the conflict, the easier I am about slashing it. I've developed a taste for Zoro and Sanji, partly because while they have rivalry tendencies, they're not so dependent on it as most (they aren't really evenly matched competitors; Zoro lives for the fight, and Sanji doesn't) and what they have is pretty clearly friendship anyway, albeit of an abusive and argumentative sort. ZoSan also is one of the few pairings that I could see as completely casual sex without it messing up their dynamic, just mutual pleasure between comrades, and that's how I like to write and read it. The moment it crosses the line into a love story, I lose interest.
What it comes down to, in the end, is that while I love the dependency of rivalship, and enjoy seeing the relationship acknowledged, I don't really want more than is already there. The complex relationship that draws me to rivals is that idea of needing someone else, not because you want their body or enjoy their presence, but because that other, striving against you, challenging you, defines who you are. In the end, I don't want rivals to admit, "You're important to me in spite of our differences," but, "You're important because of them, because our rivalry makes me who I am." Which I find as involving and affecting a bond as any true love affair.
I have a long-standing affection for rivalship. For the most part I'm not talking about the villain/hero dynamic (though that's closely related, and also fascinates me) but rivals. "Best enemies," who might have started out as actual foes, even trying to kill one another, but somewhere along the way they've become neutral, or allies, sometimes even two members of a team. But they don't get along, due to fundamental differences (or similarities) of personality, or philosophy, or sometimes just because one or both of them is an ass. And they're constantly trying to prove themselves over the other, always snarking, always, competing, always driving one another to new levels.
They're especially common in fight shounen, fighting face to face as much as back to back, and their chosen expression of affection is "Don't die and deny me the chance of killing you first!" To varying degrees, this is Goku and Vegeta. Ranma and Ryouga. Kenshin and Saitou. Sanzo and Gojyo. Ban and Shido. Yuusuke and Kuwabara. Zoro and Sanji. My latest crush, Yugi and Kaiba. They're countless, and I don't get tired of them.
All these pairs have two things in common: they're one of my favorite relationships of the series in question, often my absolute favorite relationship; for many of them one of the chars (most often the rival) is my favorite character of the series.
And, while slash exists for pretty much all of them, I don't have that much interest in reading or writing it for any of them.
It's a conundrum that's puzzled me for a while, ever since I figured out that yeah, I like slash. It would be pretty damn hot in a lot of these cases. And I can certainly see where it comes from: these chars all have chemistry. They're incredibly deeply bonded--some of them I even call soulmates, not in the romantic sense, but in that they're virtually tied together by fate, absolutely unable to ignore the existence one another, no matter how much it stings. They exist to play off each other.
If you convert that heated intensity to sexual passion, there's pretty much three ways it can go. The first is an unconsummated relationship. Either the attraction is one-sided, an unrequited love--but that's depressing, while not being the kind of high tragedy fangirls like me like to write or read; or it's all UST, which gets frustrating after a while. Sooner or later one craves resolution.
So the two rivals end up engaging in casual, meaningless, extremely sexy sex. Often repeatedly. But a few problems arise with this. For whatever reasons, in many such rivalships, one or both of the two are canonically involved with someone else (often romantically, though it can be an intense friendship or sibling love). While not universally true, I tend to be a canon whore, and don't care to see canon couples broken up, even for the sake of hot boysex, especially when it would be OOC for someone to abandon a loved one for the hated rival. Especially when those couples are OTPs, which a lot of them are for me. More on that later.
Even if both of the rivals are unattached, however, it's hard to maintain casual sex for very long. It's fine for a PWP, but in longer stories, only certain characters have the sort of mindset and life situation that could make a pair believably be fucking, while not having it affect their interactions outside of the sack. If it doesn't turn to something more, it's liable to start breeding resentment, changing the relationship dynamic. One of my favorite aspects of rivalries is the certain definite respect between the rivals; they may despise each other, but they acknowledge one another as equals (or close to); the competition doesn't have the same bite if they're not closely matched. Casual sex, using one another, can too easily damage that mutual respect. There's also the issue of the seme-uke dichotomy, difficult to avoid in animanga fic, in which a relationship requires a dominant and a submissive partner; if those roles are fixed in a story, they introduce an innate power imbalance.
Moreover, in its way, sex without romance, without caring, is even more frustrating than UST. It's almost getting there, but not quite. Because what much rivalslash is driving to in the end is the admission of mutual love between the rivals. Not necessarily verbally; that's pretty much impossible with some of the characters. But in deeds if not in words, the rivals manage to put aside their differences and become lovers.
Except--this undermines the whole rivalry. They might still snap at each other, might still fight and compete, but what's important is the way they truly feel. The intensity of their clashing is supplanted by the intensity of their devotion, and their aggression becomes a sham, a game, just a cover. The snarking still is funny, the peculiar ways of showing grudging affection still is cute. But the edge, the fire is gone. Any doubts about whether they really care, how important they are to one another, are erased.
Now, wait just a minute. I've thrown Gojyo into a freezing river just to make Sanzo take care of his hypothermic ass. I write fifty thousand words just to get Zoro to say "I hate you" to Sanji and have it unequivocally mean "I love you." Obviously I like admissions of caring between rivals as much as the next fangirl! So why the anti-slash, even when it's not interfering with my chosen OTPs?
The difference is the nature of the connection. Friends of a certain type can still be rivals, still compete all-out. Romantic lovers should be more supportive of one another, depend on each other in different ways. This is why in so many rival pairings, the rivals do have close relationships with other people--they need others they can rely on, absolutely and unconditionally, without the stress of the rivalry. I love that kind of relationship, too, the total, trusting partnership, such as Ban and Ginji have. But it's a completely different dynamic from rivalship. I enjoy both, and don't especially want to see one transmuted in the other. Especially when I can often have both.
Which leads back to my OTPs. In certain cases I'll be fond of one pairing partly because it allows for exploration of another relationship, without the need to make the latter romantic, since the romance is already present. In Dragonball Z, I loved reading Buma/Vegeta - but while I found them a fun pairing, even more I liked Vegeta and Goku's incredibly intense connection. And it was a rare B/V story that didn't have at least a bit of that, because it's pretty much impossible to write an IC Vegeta without mentioning Goku sooner or later. Vegeta defines himself by how he measures up to Kakarrot.
--Incidentally, you'll note that while my OTPs will vary between het and slash, not a single rivalship I've referenced is male-female. This could be because men and women compete in fundamentally different ways, and therefore don't have that nearly perfectly matched, competitive championship drive that is essential to rivalry. It could also be that in the great general tradition of romance trumps all, it's pretty much impossible to find a male-female love-hate relationship that doesn't canonically become love-love eventually.
There are varying degrees to rivalry, obviously. It tends to be that the less intense the conflict, the easier I am about slashing it. I've developed a taste for Zoro and Sanji, partly because while they have rivalry tendencies, they're not so dependent on it as most (they aren't really evenly matched competitors; Zoro lives for the fight, and Sanji doesn't) and what they have is pretty clearly friendship anyway, albeit of an abusive and argumentative sort. ZoSan also is one of the few pairings that I could see as completely casual sex without it messing up their dynamic, just mutual pleasure between comrades, and that's how I like to write and read it. The moment it crosses the line into a love story, I lose interest.
What it comes down to, in the end, is that while I love the dependency of rivalship, and enjoy seeing the relationship acknowledged, I don't really want more than is already there. The complex relationship that draws me to rivals is that idea of needing someone else, not because you want their body or enjoy their presence, but because that other, striving against you, challenging you, defines who you are. In the end, I don't want rivals to admit, "You're important to me in spite of our differences," but, "You're important because of them, because our rivalry makes me who I am." Which I find as involving and affecting a bond as any true love affair.
no subject
Anyway, this pretty much describes me to a "T" -- I have nothing against slash, but I tend to veer away from slash of my favorite rival pairings (and my OTP friendships, as well) because I like the relationship better the way it is. Adding sex to the mix inevitably changes the dynamic and usually not, in this one reader's opinion, for the better.
I never could really figure it out because many of the rival/friend/enemy pairings that I adore have all the hallmarks of a classic romantic relationship of the "Romancing the Stone" type -- characters who start out hating each other and bicker constantly, only to have a core of mutual affection grow underneath it. In a romantic situation, that sort of thing usually drives me crazy. I generally dislike bickering couples in TV, movies and comics. (With certain exceptions -- I love Bulma/Vegeta, for example.) But give me a bickering pair of GUYS, and I'm all over that. And, I'm perfectly fine with bickery slashy subtext when it's in the original (e.g. Eroica *drools*). But when that sexual element is added to the relationships between Goku & Vegeta, or Yusuke & Kuwabara, etc, it seems to lose a lot of what originally appealed to me about the character dynamic. Expressing your deep-down affection for somebody by beating them to a pulp or casually saving their life and then pretending you didn't mean to do it is TOTALLY different from expressing it by having sex with them. I guess, sex to me implies a level of tenderness that is not usually found in these sorts of relationships, or at least not sustained for that long. Sex without tenderness is a power struggle at best, rape at worst. In sex you have to give as much as you take.
Usually the rival characters that I like are both very strong, very masculine individuals, and neither one of them is likely to fall into a nurturing role in a relationship. Maybe that's why I like seeing really masculine characters paired off with nurturing ones (e.g. Kuwabara/Yukina or Shido/Madoka) because it balances the relationship. With the rival relationships, though, both people are forceful and domineering personalities, or the dynamic wouldn't work. Neither one seems particularly capable of maintaining the level of "give" that is necessary for MY idea of a healthy sexual relationship.
Maybe that's why I can see friend slash (e.g. Gojyo/Hakkai -- which very nearly *is* canon -- or Jounouchi/Yugi) much more easily than rival or enemy slash. Where the nurturing element is already there, I actually *could* see it slipping over into romance, given a suitable situation. (I still usually prefer friendship in this cases too, maybe because it seems like expressing love as sex is taking the easy way out -- it's harder yet more rewarding, for me, to walk the line between. But at least there I can *see* it, which isn't really the case with rival slash.)
no subject
And this probably does contribute to our tastes for one another's fic, though it helps that you can write. Did I mention a couple months ago I experienced a resurgence in my DBZ affections, went and reread all the manga and then went and reread all your fic? mm, good stuff ^_^
I often enjoy the bickering couple 'Romancing the Stone'/Han & Leia style 'ship myself, but it comes from a fundamentally different place than most rivals - all those relationships are intended from the start to become romantic (as almost all close male-female relationships are traditionally 'supposed' to do, grrrr. Except in a lot of kids' shounen, which tend to sidestep the majority of romantic possibilities altogether in favor of friendship. Much love for shounen.)
So I don't mind it in canon, but turning a relationship that isn't going that way to that direction can irk. Because, as you said, it's such a drastic change - the tenderness aspect, yes. I was discussing in some the comments about how there's a certain level of, hmm, submission needed to make a relationship work (though which direction it goes can be questioned; who's weaker, when the strong guy can be whipped by a single word?) and that submission creates a power imbalance that upsets the equality of a rivalry. (As a side note - Shido/Madoka and Kuwabara/Yukino, awww. Love both pairs. I'm not that interested in reading or writing fic about such sugar-sweet romance, but I eat it up like candy in the canon itself. If that makes sense.) Eroica falls somewhere in the middle, I suppose, because it's so permanently UST - I'm not sure how an actual relationship would work between them, it's not like either the Major or the Earl would ever give an inch (without taking it somewhere else, at least) --then again, I'm reading Eroica less for the slash and more because it's one of the funniest things I have ever read. The outrageous gay-ity is just a bonus!
Friend-slash for me is very much on a case-by-case basis; sometimes I can't see it any other way (Gojyo is in love with Hakkai, that's canon! Um, nearly! Dammit!), sometimes it depends on how it's done (I don't think Daniel and Jack would ever actually get together, but they can be awful cute), and sometimes I'd just as soon keep them "only" friends (I haven't found enough of any Yugi-Jou relationship stories to truly test my tastes, but for whatever reasons Jounouchi comes across as really straight to me. --so stop pairing him with Kaiba! Who he hates! And who is asexual anyway! Kaiba doesn't like boys or girls! Kaiba doesn't like people! Damn fangirls... >_>) And I admit that due to the bias towards pairings in all fic, some friendship pairings I read less because I want to see them shacking up with each other, and more because I don't want to read about them shacking up with anyone else...