(no subject)

[raincitygirl]

koalathebear has written a very interesting and thought-provoking post about Rey/Kylo Ren shippers (who skew young), and how teenaged girls are conditioned by popular culture (especially romance novels) to interpret abusive behaviour as romantic behaviour. And she manages to talk about it without patronizing the teenaged girls in question, mainly because she talks a lot about how she too interpreted this stuff in a romantic way when she was a younger and less emotionally experienced koala. And actually, the way I’m phrasing it makes it sound like she’s being incredibly patronizing, but she’s not, IMHO. I’m just phrasing it poorly.

I’m slightly handicapped in evaluating her post by not actually having read the Twilight series or 50 Shades of Grey, both of which she references as normalizing and romanticizing emotionally abusive behaviour. But it’s such an interesting post that I’m going to assume she’s interpreting these books correctly, because I don’t have time to read books which, if Koala’s right about them, will probably make me want to throw my device at the wall. Spoilers for Star Wars: the Force Awakens in her post, obviously.

I didn’t interpret the Rey/Kylo Ren interactions in a shippy way myself (I found Ren more irritating than compellingly villainous), but I have to admit I was not especially surprised to find that their shippers were all over Tumblr. I didn’t give it much thought further than that lack of surprise, though, and I didn’t link up the average age of the shippers with the popularity of emotionally abusive relationships in fiction geared towards the YA girl market.

I have not read a huge amount of romance, mostly read Sister’s Harlequin Presents novels when I was bored and catsitting for her when she used to live nearby. I remember opening one at a random page and reading that the heroine was reminded when her billionaire boyfriend (is there any other kind?) was bragging about all the things his new yacht could do, that her late father had spoken very similarly about his brand new fancy lawnmower. And the heroine then decided to keep that observation to herself, on the grounds that the boyfriend would probably not appreciate the comparison. It was very funny, so I read the whole book. Unfortunately, that one random page was the best part of the book. It wasn’t terrible, it just lacked the wry humour of that yacht/lawnmower comparison. And the hero was a jerk whom I kind of wanted to punch in the nose.

I have also read a couple of Jo Beverley and Carla Kelly historicals, both of which I found significantly less….formulaic than the Harlequins. Also, with much nicer heroes. I was not seized with the impulse to devour Kelly or Beverley’s entire back catalogues, but they definitely showed that the romance genre is not inevitably geared towards normalizing and romanticizing emotionally abusive relationships. Nevertheless, the type of book that normalizes abuse is definitely out there, and these books seem to sell. Often they sell to perfectly sensible, intelligent women (see above re: Sister’s collection).

And I don’t know if reading this type of book makes a person more likely to actually end up in an emotionally abusive relationship in real life, or whether this type of romanticization is confined in women’s heads to books/TV/movies. Perhaps it’s fortunate that in real life, the demand for young, physically attractive, unmarried billionaires far outstrips the supply! Most billionaires, in my admittedly very limited experience, look and act like Donald Trump or worse. You wouldn’t put Trump on the cover of a romance novel. (Note: I don't pretend that the above is an original observation. Others have said it before me, but it's worth repeating)

Anyway, to sum up, I don’t have a huge amount of experience with the genre, but I found Koala’s post extremely thoughtful and thought-provoking, so go read it.

Edited to add: Adding a cut tag, because that was more uncut text than I intended to inflict upon readers. Also, minim_calibre has rather different thoughts, here. Short version: her experience of the ship is rather different than Koala's. Which just makes everything even more interesting.

Comments

[minim_calibre]

Huh. The average age of the shippers I've seen tends to skew way older--40 somethings in it for the bad and wrong aspects. (It's hitting the good guy/bad guy kink, not the redemption one, for most of them.)

[raincitygirl]

Hmmm, VERY interesting. I wonder if it might be a question of the platform. If Koala found the initial redemption kink posts on Tumblr, and as we know, the Tumblr user base skews pretty young, that could have led to it seeming like the shippers also skew young. Maybe if she'd looked on other platforms as well, there would've been a greater diversity of ages. And a greater diversity of reasoning behind shipping the pair, to boot.

Of course, Koala's post isn't intended to be a definitive analysis of shipping trends. It's more a, "Hey, I'm noticing X phenomenon, and I think it's related to Y," type of post.

Now I have even more thoughts on the subject. This is excellent!

[minim_calibre]

See, I was noticing it on Tumblr! But I know a lot of Tumblr Olds.

It comes up on FFA a fair amount, too--not being fannish about Star Wars, I tend to see it if it's in one of my usual dememe search terms (Tumblr, wank, [name of whatever popular story I read and hated and want to see if someone else hates so I can feel less alone]--the usual)--where there's a lot of people having the same response to it as the Tumblr Olds.

[raincitygirl]

Well, if you both noticed the phenomenon on Tumblr, I got nothin'. I don't think anybody involved has the time or energy to trawl all over Tumblr doing quantitative analysis of the shippers and their birth dates on their profiles. It's an interesting idea, though.

[koalathebear]

I actually have no idea of the precise ages of the people who are shipping Kylo Ren/Rey - it was the Mary Sue article poster who referred to ages.

The shippers I've seen have been divided into the:
- redemption category; and
- like the bad boy category
- just like shipping a controversial and slightly naughty ship

[raincitygirl]

My apologies, in that case. I guess I didn't read closely enough.