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rant time because who the fuck do i send this to and also i have free will over this dead account ❤️ i’ve started watching off campus and i genuinely think i cannot bring myself to enjoy it—using the term hetslop feels a bit extreme but also the genre of sports romances is largely overdone. it’s a saturated market that has been inbred so many ways that nothing feels original. this might be someone else’s cup of tea, but it sure as hell is not mine. it feels like authors take the same five tropes, throw shit at the wall, and hope one of the combinations stick. this can apply to any genre of romance, but again, it seems prevalent with stories that can be deemed ‘hetslop’. straight relationships are so saturated in the media that the effort put into them is nonexistent. the chemistry could be minimal, the development could be absurdly cliché, yet no one immediately critiques it because that’s just what is expected.
this brings up the second point i have, which is somewhat unrelated, but it’s to do with queer ships that involve a character in a straight pairing, or ships within friendships. i ship a lot of things that aren’t canon—gelphie, mal & evie, klance, renga, the list goes on—because their development and relationship feels far more profound. they have a firm foundation of compatibility and complexity that i see as integral to any sort of romance, while a lot of canon relationships are ‘oh here big mouscles man and girl who is not like the other girls!!!’ and they seem to get together for the sole purpose of having them get together. little to no chemistry, and the characters could do better on their own. or the alternative, where characters need the relationship to display even a single molecule of relevance.
this isn’t like a straight ship hate post, like, they can be done well. tom holland’s spiderman + zendaya’s mj, hiccup + astrid, fjord + jester!!! i’d give everything to them but seriously, there is more to write than wtv the hell i just watched.