Maybe if it were, like. A weird threesome writing challenge? Like, "I'm gonna write A/B fucking every other member of the cast, a handful of crossover characters, and maybe an OC or ten."
well, relationship tags on ao3 do have a character limit (as in like, letters, not number of characters listed) so maybe thats why? cause like, you can list a/b and a/c and c/b but that'd put your fic in tags of other ships that people may not necessarily appreciate it being there because its technically not that ship its a poly ship. (Like, I know I'm unhappy whenever I see a certain poly ship in my otps tag, so...) edit: forgot BBcode existed for a second
Fully-filled shipping grids for flushed, pale, and caliginous work; sixteen doesn't divide by three, so ashen ones don't work. Annoying to a completionist.
So, on the one hand, holy shit, Megatron/Bulkhead content, what genie heard my internal monologue, what good deed did I do to actually have something to enjoy and look at??? Wow. But on the other hand, I've yet to see a single one of these that doesn't come with some facetious "HAHA LOL WOW ISN'T THIS FUNNY ISN'T IT SUCH A CRACKSHIP ISN'T THIS WHOLE CONCEPT HILARIOUS" comment attached, and it's like. People do this with every Bulkhead ship, in every continuity, as if his very existence in a shippy context is a joke, and I don't know if I feel more sorry actually liking him a lot or annoyed at the fandom shitting in my cereal even while they're the ones offering it to me.
This is why I hate that "crackship" these days has some nebulous meaning related to canon viability instead of "ships that literally sound like someone was on crack while coming up with them". Either we call every "two pretty characters who never talk" ship a crackship as well, or we go back to calling them all rarepairs and stop subtly invalidating ships with characters you personally don't want to fuck.
When *I* was a fandom young'un, crackship meant things like Hogwarts Castle/The Giant Squid (and we walked to our fic uphill both ways in the snow) ETA: By which I mean I heartily second your vent
Will admit I've never been sure where the line between rarepair and crackship lies. Wrote something I considered a crackship previously and oops I accidentally chemistry so I guess this is just a rarepair now?
Crackship I've always taken to mean and prefer to mean shit like The Giant Squid/Hogwarts Castle. Things that are just so off the wall bonkers that I cannot comprehend it being taken dead serious. Because who even how could you. There's actually few things that really hit that for me.
For something to qualify as a crackship, it needs to have some level of absurdity inherent to the premise. Like a castle with a lovelife. (Which, like -- considering it's the Hogwarts Castle, that's absurd but not implausible) Or something like Cargo Ship i.e. character and some significant object. I'd argue pilot/their giant mecha are inherently crackships, which just goes to show that crackship doesn't mean "cannot be played straight" And that's why it's so fucking offensive to me that "crackship" now means something like "this is inherently absurd because it could never be canon". Like, you can shove your canon up your arse, for one, and also there's nothing inherently absurd about any possible character interaction narrative being compelling to someone.
Honestly, I'm still mad at this (the worst part is that it involved a lot of people in the fandom who I respected before this, so I'm also just Bitch Eating Crackers about this now) because the broader TF fandom sure loves to talk about how much they love Bulkhead and what a "sweet boy" he is and subsequently reduce him to this big blob of Bland Sweet with no real relationships to anyone and then promptly sideline him and never talk about him again. AND YEAH IT DRIVES ME PRETTY FUCKING CRAZY because fandom has all these jokes about how bigger is better and Cybertronians being size queens and labour frames being considered hot but disposable and I'm just over here like *flails* SO BY YOUR OWN LOGIC Bulkhead should be the most implausibly Farmer's Market Hot(tm) member of Optimus Prime's Team Of Supermodels, and there is absolutely no fic or meta or anything exploring the possibility that maybe he isn't an entirely asexual blob or a big blushing virgin who couldn't even grasp the idea of people wanting to bang him. Like people projecting all their sexual anxiety on The Fat One (and The Poor One) is a thing I've seen in other fandoms, but it's a really bad look in a fandom where general fanon agrees on the beauty standards not working like that. And I'm only more annoyed when this is done to Prime!Bulkhead -- with Animated, I think it's gauche as fuck to reduce Canonically The Smartest Autobot to some neutral blob with no personality other than "he's nice :)" but Aligned fandom's character assassination is almost worse because Bulkhead was Wrecker, no way they weren't fucking like rabbits back when their job was to have no sense of self-preservation, are you really gonna argue he's entirely morally uncomplicated and sexless??? And it's often done explicitly to get him out of the way so they can ship Wheeljack with someone else. That is, when they don't just pretend he doesn't exist at all, and try to implant Ratchet or someone sufficiently "hot" in his relationship with Wheeljack. (Please don't let me get started about how much fucking nobody in this fandom can write Prime!Wheeljack right without making him one of a handful of tropes he Absolutely Isn't In Canon. Like, surprise, if you pretend his only fucking friend is an entirely different character, you're prolly gonna fuck him up, too.)
You're right and you should say it! Bulkhead is WAY more complex than just 'the nice one', especially in TFP! Like, he's straight up a proper petty dickhead several times in the show AND is also incredibly kind. He's an interesting character!
you can say you ship character A and character B all you want but when you constantly villainize B for angst fodder for character A x character C i begin to doubt that claim immensely
I Belong to House Castielo on tappytoon (sadly you can't read it anymore since its on haitus, I only have the chapters i paid for but I enjoy the first half the best anyway) was very enjoyable until I realized the endgame ship was probably going to be between Estelle and her bodyguard. Now, I like bodyguard ships a lot! One of my favorite set ups. But not when he met her when she was ten :( ew
I still like the relationship she has with her father and brother and the servants of the household, as well as her tutor and governess. It's all mostly cute and wholesome! And I thought at first that she'd end up with the Prince or one of her brother's friends. But then they kept....hinting shit. I don't know if they'll actually be endgame, since they were having tensions in the latest chapters, and who knows what was planned since its either been ended prematurely or they just aren't sure when the haitus is over. Since you can't buy any chapters past early this year I'm assuming it isn't coming back. Idk I'll have fun with fanfiction, it's just a shame. I wish they had stayed as close friends.
In the comics defense there is "only" a seven year difference, which isn't the worst that can happen in a historical fantasy, but yanno.
Starving in the desert for Starscream/Winblade content that doesn't randomly make Starscream into a gigachad sex pest and instead retains the things that I like about him ie. extremely high levels of queer dramatics and a complicated and multifaceted love language involving gift-giving and acts of service and the occasional extremely carefully considered backhanded compliment. The one time I have a M/F ship where I kinda just want them to be written as catty power lesbians to sate my need to see someone kiss a very feminine man, I get this instead. Also I would straight-up kill for someone to write Megatron's and Windblade's jock fight to the death over Starscream's affections.
