We are adrift, and the thinnest breeze may blow us where it will.

-- Rachel Hartman

emily/mona

oh I ship the hell out of this. I do feel that way about every Mona x a liar pairing, as someone with taste, but really I think Janel and Shay have excellent chemistry so much stronger than .. really any of Emily’s canon lis tbh. And the parallels between Vandermarin and Emison are really fascinating and moving and make Mona and Emily excellent foils. I also just tend to enjoy Emily dynamics that allow her to be be cunty <3 and this definitely does that, and on a meta level I think there’s something interesting about the tension between Emily who, as much as I love her, does get the treatment of being the only canonical queer main char* who is one of the good guys and therefore has to be a “good queer” the audience finds palatable vs Mona who is subtextually queer in a really clear cut sense and gets to be very morally gray, and that creating a tension in how Emily perceives Mona (also something of this with Jenna but that’s not the topic at hand) and how they interact. Their 2.19 storyline slays it’s my favorite part of an episode I like a lot in general, and their little moments together in later seasons are always a treat. And I’ve said this before but my standing favorite pll fic, rose in a fisted glove by speakpirate, is an Emily/Mona (and also Vandermarin and also Emison) fic, it pushes a lot of buttons for what I like in character studies/fics in general and what I like in pll content specifically and so it really stuck with me I should reread it. 

*= since the writers often don’t know if they wish to write Alison as queer or a main character or a good guy  

emily/aria

I ship them, they’re not my favorite liar dynamic (in the show, book wise is a different story) but there’s a tenderness to their scenes together that really endears me to them. Also on a shallow note they look really pretty together. Some of my favorite scenes of theirs are the flashback where Aria is so protective of Emily when the rumour about her and Ben sleeping together comes up, their porch swing meet ups, them reconnecting beginning of s1, the exchange in s3 where Emily says that she’s more angry than scared and Aria asks if she can borrow some of that, and the general vibe of a lot of their 4b and 6b scenes. 

Also they’re my no.1 ship in the pll book verse.  

emily/maya

I enjoyed them a lot, they’re probably my favorite canon pll ship (I say probably because in the parts of the show where Emison works for me I have more intense emotions/shippy feelings for them and stimulate more analysis from me, but then they also have that embarrassing flop period in the jump whereas emaya never disappointed). I think they had consistently really strong chemistry (yes I think they do better in that department than Emison) and their s1 storyline I like a lot for how it feeds into Emily’s coming out storyline + her recovering from grief and finding love again. In season 2 their storylines aren’t quite as solid probably because of Bianca coming in and out more when she was more of a fixture in s1 and the one biphobic Emily storyline is cringey but they’re still very sweet and the s2 finale is heartbreaking.

obviously this poll is formatted a little differently than the others since I have canon and noncanon options rather than the primary ones all being liar-ships, so maybe if you vote for a canon one also comment in tags which noncanon option you prefer and vice versa if your fav is noncanon you could leave which of her canon ships you like best in the tags