Similarity and Differences In Shipping · 11:45pm May 18th, 2013
This started as a reply to a comment Bradel made on my post about the OCs I designed, and got way too long. It also started to feel like a good follow up to my old "Gone With the Wind Approach To Shipping" essay, so it's a blog post now.
When the question comes up of a ship being too similar (or too different) to work, the questions that always follows for me is "How are they similar? How are they different?" This is an important question, because there are ways in which similarity helps, and there are ways in which it can hinder a relationship.
In trying to figure out how to communicate about this, I worked out three parts of how I think about a character. These are arbitrary divisions- other people might make totally different ones, and there are traits that could be part of more than one catagory. But this might be useful, at least for me, for talking about the ways characters are similar and different in a relationship.
Superficial traits: Things like what activities the character likes, what kind of entertainment they like, what kind of work they do or want to do, what foods they like, etc.
The term superficial makes this sound unimportant- don't judge a book by it's cover and all that. These things don't have anything to do with who a character is as a person/pony. But I actually think that some similarity here is very important, in realistic relationships at least.
Look at it this way: real life couples, no matter how different they seem, will almost always have at least one activity in common. This isn't some rule of attraction, it's common sense; Once you're out of high school, and definitely once you're out of college, you're only likely to interact with people you have something in common with. You keep in touch with friends you share activities or interests with. You meet people at a party, or a gym, or at work and you know that they're the type of people who like to go to parties, or to the gym, or are likely to get hired at the place you work. If you then manage to ask them on a date, the kind of date you take them on is likely to be influenced by what you think is fun, and if they think it's boring you probably won't have many more. Before you even get to the relationship, you're going to weed out the people with whom you have no superficial things in common.
Of course, characters don't have to have a lot of superficial things in common. A couple might meet at a sports bar. They both root for the same team, and they hit it off, but during the day she's a construction worker whose hobby is reading about quantum physics and he's an accountant who likes anime. They might fall in love, but a lot of the early relationship, and a lot of the relationship things they do, will likely revolve around sports unless they find other interests in common.
Personality: By this I mean the more abstract traits that interact with the superficial traits; are they optimistic or pessimistic, hardworking or lazy, active or passive, ambitious or laid back. Their Meyers-Briggs score would fit in here. This also includes background to some extent- family, social class, education, etc. Basically, things that affect how they react to the world and interact with each other.
Here I believe there's more room for opposition. Characters who have some superficial traits in common but pursue them in different ways have some serious advantages. They can learn from each other, they can divide tasks and situations and take care of different parts.
One of the problems that can come up here is communication- characters with different types of personalities communicate differently, they can be saying the same words and mean different things, or just not understand the connections the other one is making. This is where having superficial traits in common can help: I don't know how many concepts I've explained to my husband using D&D, or Tolkien, or MLP as a metaphor. Or, for a fanfic example, the sports team metaphor that AJ and Dash use to understand their relationship in The AppleDash Project.
But all in all, different personalities can work together well. Personality is the area where a character definitely shouldn't be dating their clone- different points of view with the same goals in mind is always a good thing, though having some similarities in this area can aid in communication and general understanding of how their partner thinks.
Core Values: For the purposes of this, we're going to define core values broadly as the ideals a character is willing to sacrifice for. The sacrifice can be many things- time, money, other ideals, their life. Obviously this is a matter of priorities- one might be willing to sacrifice to a certain point for an ideal but no further; or willing to sacrifice love for family, and sacrifice family for justice.
Similarities here get really, really important; because a character should have ideals that they're willing to sacrifice for, it's often the better part of a character. But when a character is in a serious relationship, any sacrifice they make will be a sacrifice their partner is also making. If they offer money to a cause, that affects their partner's finances. If they sacrifice time, that affects how much time their partner has with them. If they are willing to lay down their life, their partner has to live with that.
This is where relationship ruining resentment comes in. Because if the sacrifices a character makes aren't ones their partner would willingly make, their partner will resent them. Worse than that, their partner will resent the best part of them. At the same time, a character will resent a partner who won't let them live up to their core values by denying them sacrifices that they want to make.
This comes up in a million little ways in a relationship (whether to plant a flower garden or a vegetable garden, whose family to spend the holidays with, whose job is more important, if/when to have kids), and not all clashes will ruin a relationship. Good communication skills can let a couple work out compromises, or determine when they're willing to make a sacrifice not only for the cause under discussion, but for their relationship. But the more often the characters core values don't line up, the more stress the relationship is under. And if a situation comes up that sets important core values of both characters in opposition, some resentment is a guarantee.
On the other hand, when characters share core values, this strengthens the relationship. Both characters will feel proud of the sacrifice, and of each other for bearing it happily.
It should be noted that many people, and most romances, take the stance that love is a core value that should trump everything else. Therefore, a character should be willing to sacrifice any core value to make a lover happy, and the partner should be willing to do the same for them. If this is the case, then core values will never really clash because one of the characters will make a sacrifice for love, to make their partner happy.
I personally think this is stupid. I think most people, and every character on the show, have some ideals that they will not sacrifice for love. Be it family, honor, security, freedom, a sense of duty to a certain group... these are all noble things. I think it's worse to deny that nobility in order to force them to stay in a relationship, to compromise those deepest of core values, than to admit that the relationship isn't strong enough. I don't like the idea of compromise whittling away the best parts of them in the name of love.
So, when I say that a ship is too different to work, I'm thinking of either superficial traits (I can't find where these characters would connect in the first place), or core values (the relationship would be under constant stress from compromising things that are actually important). Occasionally I feel that the personalities are so different that communication would be difficult (especially with a pony who isn't the best at communication to begin with. *ahemDashahem.*) but in those cases there are usually problems somewhere else, too.
When someone says to me that a ship is too similar to work, I jump to personalities- do the characters act and react too similarly to get along, or to cover the necessary bases in one another's lives? I don't really feel that characters can be too similar in terms of superficial traits or core values, that would just make the relationship stronger. Personality, on the other hand, is a balance- too dissimilar and they can't communicate, too similar and they have nothing to offer their partner.
It's entirely possible that other people have different concepts of "too similar" or "too different"- if anyone does have a different meaning, and would like to explain it using this set of ideas, please do! I'm always interested in knowing when people think differently, especially when I can figure out how they are thinking.
But anyway, in terms of the OCs I designed, I tried to give them similar superficial traits and core values, with new and different points of view to bring to the relationships. I might not have succeeded in some cases, but this is the theory I started from, and the theory I'm usually starting from when I talk about shipping.
Aww, and I was actually getting some writing done on "Bell, Book & Candle". Now I have to come read your blog post.
I should get your opinion on that TrixieMac I'm 7k words into writing.
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On the one hand, TrixieMac seems like a ship that would take a lot of headcanon manipulation to work. Based on what we know about the characters, there's pretty much no connection at all.
On the other hand, we really don't know much about either of them. They're both pretty much all headcanon in terms of superficial interests and core values, so you have tons of wiggle room there.
It really depends on how you play it.
Interesting. I think core values are the most important aspect of making a relationship work, and that the other stuff can be extremely different and things will work fine. One of the things that made me question Rarijack the most was your assertion regarding the core value difference between the two of them as Rarity being focused on artifice, while AJ is focused on plain honesty, and how those value differences can lead to resentment. I don't know that I fully accept that as the fall down end of Rarijack working, but it certainly made me question the viability.
I'm not sure I believe there's such a thing as 'too similar,' though. Unless it's a clone, every character has difference enough to keep things from being 'so similar there's no point.' If two have the same foibles, they might not be able to help each other, but they can very strongly empathize with each other. It's one of those things that most people fall into some category of 'do as I say, not as I do,' and they'd be able to recognize those foibles in themselves readily in a partner and can probably help, so in the end the relationship would still be mutually beneficial.
The real breakdown is if personalities clash in such a way that they lead to destructive tendencies in both parties, or if core values stand in opposition in such a way to breed real resentment. I could see some real resentment brewing in Rarijack if artifice really is a sticking point for both AJ and Rarity. I don't know that it is, but I could see that. And I could see plenty of other things getting in the way for characters that could wound a relationship fatally. Of the mane six, I don't know that any of them have a strong enough core value shift to completely tear down the possibility of a successful relationship. Some personality clashes could go in the direction of destructive, but for the most part they don't frequently have trouble seeing eye to eye on what's important. They might have different interests and different approaches to life, but there's a seed for all the pairings that makes them possible, I think.
This is some very, very nice analysis – and if I weren't busy trying to get some story writing done today, I might just go re-blog instead of, or in addition to, commenting at length. I really think this is a blog post people ought to read.
That said, my own attitude toward similarity and difference in the comment on the OCs blogpost was looking at the situation less from a romance perspective and more from a writing perspective. I'm always very wary of obvious choices. I like subverting expectations. When you show me a set of six OCs that match up pretty obviously with potential romantic interests among the Mane Six, my immediate reaction is to say, "Okay, I can buy that, but what would happen if we mixed things up and paired them with the wrong ponies?"
And, in fact, I think the fact that this can be done so easily is one of the strongest points in favor of those characters being good OCs. I was hoping that the intended pairings would be a little less obvious, and I'll admit I'm not 100% sure about the pairings you have in mind, but it felt like >>Tchernobog got them right. But I'm very happy with my second-tier hope that the OCs were easily separable from their intended pairings.
To frame things as you've framed them above, I think I was only really looking at superficial similarities and personalities when I looked through the OCs. Some of that is probably laxness on my part, though to some extent I think it may be because, in my style of writing, characters' core values are pretty malleable until they're actually written. Diagnosis, for example, I think could easily be written with (1) the advancement of medicine, (2) helping others, or (3) friendship as a principal core value, and for me I probably wouldn't really decide between those until throwing him into a few situations where I could force a decision and write myself an answer. But I certainly agree that, with well written characters, significant or numerous core value conflicts are likely to spell the doom of a relationship.
Looking back over the OCs and thinking within your frame, I do definitely feel like there's some strong personality similarity between all the natural pairings except Fluttershy and Fifetrill, which was actually one pairing where dissimilarity kind of worried me (cf. precisely Jake Roberts' new thread in Intelligent Shipping Discussion), and although I didn't have this handy frame to work with at the time, I think that was probably why I felt a bit like the natural pairings were a bit too easy, even though I really liked all the character ideas. And looking at my own ideas, I guess I was working very much in the superficial vein of things.
So, um, Bradel Fridge Logic for the win?
I expect that it will be a matter of seconds before somepony points me to a link where the Myers-Briggs (or Keirsey) results for the Mane Six (and possibly others) can be found.
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I think you'd be looking for this.
ETA: One second. One freaking second.
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Thank you both, in no particular order.
Lovely, I'm Scootaloo.
As to the blog post - it hits on some of the reasons why I'm not a huge fan of characters sacrificing their dreams/goals for a partner. Obviously certain amounts of give and take are required for meaningful relationships, but big stuff (like AJ giving up the farm or Dash not joining the Wonderbolts, or Rarity deciding to stay small in the fashion industry) always seem like they'd cause too much resentment, even if it wasn't initially obvious. This is different, say, than Dash deciding on her own that she may not want to join the Wonderbolts due to a perceived discrepancy between her own moral values and the core beliefs of the team (ala Wonderbolt Academy). That's a personal choice that isn't really instigated by a pressure to conform to someone else's wishes.
As to your OCs, I think they did have a lot of similarities with the Mane 6 members you paired them up with, but they all had unique characteristics that set them apart as foils as well. Like Twilight and the medical guy could get into spats on who knows more on certain subjects, or if he's haughty (I think you said somewhere that he was) he may act superior to her and cause shenanigans that way (Twilight might get more uppity in return - bitch, please, I'm the student of Princess Celestia! - or she might develop a bit of an inferiority complex). On the other hand, the two could use their unique branches of knowledge and general bookishness to excel at their own projects, help each other out, and empathize with each other when their research hits a wall. So yeah, being given only the concepts for the characters so far, it seems like they adhere to your relationship model thing, which makes sense to me.
Also, you should write textbooks/writing guides. You take stuff that seems like logic that I feel like I already know but put it into pretty words that I can analyse properly without wanting to smack my face against a wall.
You seem to be getting hung up a lot on who the characters are rather than the who the characters are when they're together. A while ago you wrote a blog titled 'The intangible character in a romance' that discussed the idea that the relationship itself is a kind of character, separate from the two characters in the relationship. It wasn't the first time I'd heard it, but I did very strongly agree with it. That 'intangible character' is far more important than either either character on their own in determining the possible success or failure of the relationship.
Of course, similarity in likes, personality, and values will make a relationship more viable, while dissimilarity will make it less viable. But there is no such thing as an absolutely viable or absolutely unviable paring. Love isn't math, it doesn't work by absolutes, and two plus two won't always equal four.
Who the characters are before the relationship is important in determining whether or not they'll ever get together to begin with, but how they change each other while in the relationship determines whether they stay together. How they react to each other, respond to, adapt to, or steamroll over each other's differences. They grow and develop in response to the other. They might try to better themselves, they might try to overcome certain flaws or assimilate certain strengths, they might become stubbornly unchanging, and they might retreat away from each other if the change proves too much. Either way, the two people who enter a relationship aren't the same two people who exit it.
From what I understand, you're making characters specifically to be shipped with certain other characters. Now (and here's the part where I make a total ass out of myself--get the cameras ready), besides being downright silly, that's just bad character design. There's such a thing as designing a character to serve a specific function within a story, it's appropriate for minor and background characters. But not for something so dynamic as a romantic relationship. Create the characters first, then let them decide for themselves whether they want to begin a relationship, and moreover, whether that relationship will succeed. If you've created multi dimensional characters, real living characters, your involvement shouldn't be more than minimal. It isn't up to you to decide who does and doesn't stay together.
You, me, and everyone else has their own ideas about the various pairings, and how they should work, and how they wouldn't work. We could argue whether Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy have anything in common, or whether Rainbow Dash and Applejack would be in conflict too often, or if Pinkie Pie is too wild to ever take a long term relationship seriously forever, but we'd never get anywhere. Put the characters in the situation. If the author has done his/her job and really let the characters act and react naturally according to their values, we'll find out for certain who does and who doesn't stay together.
Another great analysis from bookplayer. If I were to disagree with any part, it would be to move the center on 'personality differences'
That is to say: it is fairly important that two people or ponies can talk to each other if they want a successful relationship. If they can't talk, even minor problems somewhere else can break the whole thing.
But there are two ways to talk: speak the same language, which involves having a lot of superficial or personality similarities, or have, as a core value, the need to communicate. If you work at it, and your partner works at it, you can learn each others' language.
As for Meyers Briggs, judging types should stay with judging types, I'm told non judgers hate that.
But introverts should alway date extoverts.
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I don't think you've made an ass out of yourself, and that's a very organic way of writing, but it's not always possible.
As an example: That happened in my novel. Two of the characters wanted to be shipped, so in the third draft I went ahead and shipped them. It's cool when that happens.
Then I wanted to write a prequel side story for my novel, and I wanted it to be about another character's first girlfriend. In designing the new character, I wasn't going to write about dozens of characters and find the one who wanted to be shipped. Instead, I had to think "what kind of girl would Ian's first girlfriend be?" and design from there. In that case it's interesting, because I had to design the ship to fail. I knew they broke up before the book, so she had to be the type of girl he would date, but there had to be things that just wouldn't work.
So, back to fanfic, it's not much different to think "What kind of pony would Twilight fall in love with?" There's a certain amount of playing with different characters in one's head, but at some point you have to make a decision and roll with that one, revising either the story or the character so it fits.
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Having never written original romance, I can't really comment. But creating a character just for the purpose of starting and then ending a relationship seems... dull. Like you're limiting both yourself and that character's potential.
But even then, you're basing your decision on what Twilight would look for in a partner, or at least what she would find attractive. Not what you want her to find attractive. The decision is still being determined by the character.
Even if you started with something like, 'I want to ship Twilight with Rainbow Dash' instead of 'Who would Twilight fall in love with', you'd still have to figure out why they would get together, what they might see in each other. It's still determined by the characters.
Original characters shouldn't be any different. I understand your reasoning behind each of your potential OC pairings. They're clearly based on what each of the mane 6 would look for in a potential partner. But it seems very one sided. For example. have you asked yourself what your OC's want in a relationship?
Your intention was to show that OC relationships could work, yes? I tried that once, it was a miserable failure, and it didn't have anything to do with compatibility issues between the characters. The most important aspect of making such a relationship 'work' is if the reader (and character) wants to see the two characters end up with each other. And the only way to make that happen is to write likable, relatable, interesting characters.
Anyway, it's something worth thinking about, in the very least.
what do you think of crack pairings???
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It depends on the pairing. Some of them are unexpectedly awesome- Daring Do x Zecora seemed amazing to me as soon as I heard it. Others don't seem to make sense. However, as I mentioned to Martian about TrixieMac, a lot of crack pairings involve background ponies, and a lot of background ponies can be given alternate headcanons that would make ship that seems weird actually work really well.