joons:

i’ve been thinking a lot about why people don’t get creepy ships and automatically expect you to apologize for liking them

and it’s just that the appeal, to them, is “oh, wow, the phantom kidnapped christine / the villain decided to spare this other character / the vampire snuck into her room, how romantic” and they think that’s super weird and indefensible 

but that’s not how people genuinely think about it? at least not me and most people i know who enjoy those kinds of tropes. we’re interested in characters who don’t have a healthy concept of love, who don’t understand it, making the greatest gesture they’re capable of within the timeline of their stories, recognizing that they Feel a Feeling for someone else and struggling to articulate it. most of the time they are Horrifically Bad at this, but it’s fascinating to watch them bump up into the limitations of their emotional capacity, even as their heart is SWELLING OVER with something they can’t name. their morality doesn’t preclude them from finding someone they admire. we like to hope they’ll figure it out in time and understand how to handle their feelings in a good way, and if they don’t, imagining a scenario where they do and things end happily isn’t hurting anyone. people’s knee-jerk response is “you’re romanticizing, you’re excusing” but all that’s happening is people are recognizing that a character is having a deep internal conflict with themselves and rooting for them to make good choices. i don’t think kidnapping is romantic, i think it reveals that a character who has romantic feelings doesn’t have a guideline for how to express them, and that’s automatically fascinating to me.