I think you might be right about "codependency", though from everything you've said about character relationships that you fan on, I do think you like them more entwined than I do. But having said that ... I think that our tastes in that area are probably closer than they seem when we talk about it, as evidenced by the fact that we often fan on the same things...
As you know, I definitely do fixate on characters who are tremendously important to each other, and I like to see their relationship as somehow unique -- which is one of the big things about Sheppard and McKay that appeals to me, because "brothers" is about the closest word I can think of to describe how they act, except they're not related so they don't have the shared family history and other weirdness that goes along with being flesh-and-blood siblings; it's a very unique, hard-to-pin-down relationship, and even if they aren't each other's everything (which I actually prefer them not to be), if they ever lost the other, it would be impossible to find someone else with whom they could have a similar relationship. (Actually, in their specific case, that's one of the reasons why slashing them does change the relationship to something that's less special to me, because suddenly all the indefinable weirdness collapses into a relationship that *can* be described and easily qualified -- "boyfriends" -- and that makes it less interesting to me than when it's this extremely odd something that even they don't seem to know how to define.)
Re: Part 2 (edited)
Date: 2008-11-28 10:58 am (UTC)I think you might be right about "codependency", though from everything you've said about character relationships that you fan on, I do think you like them more entwined than I do. But having said that ... I think that our tastes in that area are probably closer than they seem when we talk about it, as evidenced by the fact that we often fan on the same things...
As you know, I definitely do fixate on characters who are tremendously important to each other, and I like to see their relationship as somehow unique -- which is one of the big things about Sheppard and McKay that appeals to me, because "brothers" is about the closest word I can think of to describe how they act, except they're not related so they don't have the shared family history and other weirdness that goes along with being flesh-and-blood siblings; it's a very unique, hard-to-pin-down relationship, and even if they aren't each other's everything (which I actually prefer them not to be), if they ever lost the other, it would be impossible to find someone else with whom they could have a similar relationship. (Actually, in their specific case, that's one of the reasons why slashing them does change the relationship to something that's less special to me, because suddenly all the indefinable weirdness collapses into a relationship that *can* be described and easily qualified -- "boyfriends" -- and that makes it less interesting to me than when it's this extremely odd something that even they don't seem to know how to define.)