#dimplesridley

She plopped down to the ground next to El — Jane, she corrected in her head — on the sidewalk outside Mike’s house. They’d beaten the boys there after school — they always did — and had to wait on the curb until Mike got home. On rare occasions, Nancy would be home and would let them in. But mostly, the two sat outside, practically daily, alone together, for all of fifteen very long, very quiet minutes. Max usually spent the time on her skateboard, rolling down the street, maybe doing a small trick. Jane generally sat on the curb, watching her silentl, observing the way the wheels moved on the concrete, the movement of the muscles in Max’s legs, the way they moved to manipulate the board holding her up.

Jane’s eyebrows furrowed, as if the idea that she would talk to Max were foreign to her. “About what?”

Max shrugged, dropping her board to the ground in front of Jane and sitting on it, knees bent up. “About anything?” she tried hopefully. “How your day was, what you’re thinking, I don’t know,” she trailed off. “You never talk to me.”

Jane looked at her in that way, that way that she looked at Max, as if Max were a strange object sitting in front of her instead of a teenage girl. Perhaps she was.

Max sighed and stood up, rolling her eyes. “Never mind,” she muttered. She made to put one foot on her skateboard but before she could, it rolled away from her slowly, turning and bouncing into the curb next to Jane. The bottom of Max’s shoe hit the pavement with a slap.

“I —” Jane paused. “I don’t know you.”

It was not a great excuse, and they both knew it. “You haven’t tried to know me,” Max said, moving to Jane’s other side, the one not blocked by a skateboard.

Jane said nothing for a long moment. I don’t know how, she thought, wanted to admit. Mad Max was a mystery and part of her was waiting for someone to explain it to her. She had learned quickly that Max had no interest in taking her place in their party, but that had done little to temper the loss of balance she always felt when the other girl was around.

Max held out a hand to her. “Come on,” she said.

Jane, sensing the weight of the moment, let her palm press against Max’s and her fingers tighten around her hand. “What are we doing?”

With the other girl’s hand in hers, Max used her left foot to pull her skateboard to them. When Jane stared at her, eyes a bit wide and confused, she added a quiet, “Trust me?”

Jane nodded firmly.

“We’re skateboarding,” Max told her. Jane eyed her and she said, “I’ve seen you watching me. So now I’m going to teach you.”

“And then I’ll be a zoomer?”

Max grinned, carefully guiding Jane on to her skateboard, their hands firmly clasped. “Yeah, and then there will be two zoomers, and no one will be able to keep up.”

In a way, it all started because the show was justifiably proud of having two women of colour as leads and mainly promoted Michael and Philippa during the first season’s production, even if it didn’t mean the Captain would be sticking around. If you go back far enough in fanarts, you’ll see people may have started investing in their relationship, even shipping them, before the show began. Michael and Philippa were all over the promotional material and HELL YEAH TWO WOMEN IN ROLES THAT TEND TO BE EXCLUSIVELY FOR MEN OF COURSE PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE INTO THAT.

The first episode happened, Philippa and Michael had a fun, cute and often intense chemistry where there was no real hint of mother-daughter rapport and that could have easily been interpreted as flirty had they been men or a man and a woman. They were simply really enjoyable together and it didn’t take much to read it as “First Officer has a crush on her Captain”, which is not unheard of in the Star Trek fandom (TOS, Voyager).

Philippa died. No one is ever dead in sci-fi, so we kept our fingers crossed for a return, in flashbacks at least. She lived on in fanon anyway, having pre-canon complicated feelings for her First Officer or rising from the dead for an exhausted smooch. At this point, we’re four episodes in and still no mention of a mother-daughter relationship. This means we have months of fans kinda shipping them prior to the show combined with almost a month of the show being on air with no characterisation of their relationship in a specific direction, except Michael being awfully devoted to Philippa and affected by her death. Fans weren’t wildly extrapolating.

No, seriously, the early shipping was amazing: fans fell hard and headcanoned they had a thing in the past. This isn’t Doctor Who where River Song had a secret identity that could potentially reveal a familial bond with Amy: Michael already had two mothers. This is Star Trek where Amanda and Sarek have a 40-year age difference or so. This really did not seem wild at the time (not that there is anything wrong with big age gaps per se). Fans weren’t expecting the show to suddenly come out of the woods with such a specific characterisation of their relationship this late in the introductory game: dead mentor and grieving martyr was already enough.

That’s when the end of episode four came in and introduced the whole mother-daughter relationship (as well as ensure Philippa would never come back by making a Klingon snack out of her). Many might say now this dynamic was here from the start because Philippa was an older mentor, but I can assure you that from week to week it was not that evident, unless you assume every older woman must be a mother to younger characters. That’s coincidentally when I started shipping them out of sheer contempt for the trope of referring to any female mentor/protegée relationship as familial: it is my personal fictional arch nemesis, the female equivalent of “no homo”, that I seem to encounter in every fandom where there’s more than one female character.

Fun times. I remember seeing more than one shipper nope out of there, which is more than comprehensible: I was uncomfortable myself, but primarily because I am not half bad at analysing texts and their relationship really didn’t read as  maternal to me. Yet one line could hardly erase weeks of shipping, of creating, of fandom building headcanons and a community around it. A bunch of truly amazing fics and fanarts were produced fairly early and kept on being produced which cemented a community, however small. The introduction of the Emperor did not remotely help: the promo for the episode itself was inexplicably gay and Milippa fans did spend a week flailing in anticipation speculating this Philippa and that Michael might have a thing, the episode itself tossed around lines and tropes generally used for star-crossed lovers even if “daughter” made a long-awaited reappearance, this time literal, and Michael kept missing Philippa to the point of abducting her autocratic blood-thirsty counterpart. Not even taking into account Michael and the Emperor’s interactions in the finale. I mean… 

Not everyone see the tension, of course, and the canon does see their connection as maternal, but there is no denying that the season hinged on the strength of Philippa and Michael’s love (familial or not) and that this canonical intensity fuelled a ship that not only preexisted its labelling, but also was not exactly lacking in material.   

There is no point in debating canon interpretations (I don’t create in or for canon), but there is something to say about intent vs. execution, because the gay vibes are there. I love what Daniel Mallory Ortberg had the guts to say concerning the Michael/Philippa situation when reviewing the finale for Vulture:

Then there’s a lot more excavating of the warped mother-daughter dynamics between Michael and Georgiou, which I could do without for two reasons:

1. The amount of sexual tension between Mirror Georgiou and Michael is … let’s go with non-zero. Sure, part of that is because every Mirrorverse character is characterized primarily via Murderous Horniness (as evidenced when Georgiou takes a quick detour to have a threesome on Qo’noS), but there’s a lot going on between the two of them in all of their scenes.

2. The original Georgiou and Michael did not have that sort of relationship in the least! They were deeply fond of one another and Georgiou taught Michael a great deal, but Michael had a solid relationship with both of her parents and met Georgiou well into her own adulthood. There’s plenty of grist for the mill in terms of wanting to redeem herself and struggling for the approval of a lost mentor without adding Murder Mommy dynamics into the mix.

(x)

Finally, I think it is worth mentioning that Philippa and Michael were also the first meaningful and long relationship between women on screen in Discovery. The second woman Michael interacts with is the prisoner and she leaves pretty quickly. The third is Ellen Landry and she is killed after one episode (which was just long enough for me to start shipping them together: I hate this show). Tilly was introduced in the third episode only and Michael doesn’t interact with any other woman before Katrina Cornwell in the mid-season finale. The femslash shipping options were not exactly varied: I clung onto what was/had been there. I know it’s not the first reason behind shipping Milippa, but it is a factor.

Again, this blurb solely reflects my views and observations. But I would be curious to read what @mswyrr, @nomi–sunrider and other fans have to say about this.