okay well. valancholia propaganda for @sp-fanclub. everyone vote valancholia in the finals . please. because
a) valancholia is a banger ship
and b) val deserves to be at the forefront of fandom again.
(more details on both of these points below the cut <3)
MY FIRST POINT
valancholia is such an enticing, adaptive ship.
they're foils. they both have this horrific dichotomy of power and they're both trapped in relationships with men much older than them who are awful to them. the jealousy and rage between them is unnecessary and gets encouraged by everyone around them and it's brilliant. there's truly no real reason for them to hate each other, but they do anyways. they do to the point of murder, of violence, of rage.
they're enemies to lovers- or, if you're like me, and prefer everything real fucked, they're enemies And lovers! isn't there just something so damn intimate about hunting someone down? i mean, scarring them permanently, leaving a mark that will never go away, physically and mentally. a reminder of you on their skin for the rest of their life- isn't that romantic, in its own horrid way?
plus, they're extremely flexible! they've got enemies to lovers, but they've also got begrudging friends (in later books). they've got bickering and they've got working together. you want fix-it? just think about if one of them wasn't under the thumb of a more powerful mage. they've got popular trans headcanons and metaphors (melancholia's desperation for validity can absolutely be read as a trans thing, but that's a whole other post).
they're lovely. they're funny. they'd clash so hard, which makes them ten times more interesting. vote for valancholia <3
MY SECOND POINT
consciously or not, this fandom takes every chance it can to dismiss women. valkyrie is the main character of the series, and she's so constantly ignored.
the ship wars started with 5 wlw ships to 16 mlm ships. on ao3, valkyrie is tagged as a character 200 times less than skulduggery is, despite being the main character of the series. 7/10 of the top tagged characters on ao3 are men.
people who refer to the dead men never group her in with them, even though she has officially been a part of them for, i believe, seven books. fics, shippy or otherwise, completely ignore her existence in favor of connections between male characters who show up for a few books and never again, or between characters who literally never interact on page. hell, sometimes it feels like hopeless, a character who literally only ever shows up in a short-story collection outside of the main series, is more spoken about than valkyrie.
even those of us who acknowledge val as a real character don't escape this. the amount of people i see bringing val into stories or posts only to check their 'women involved' box, or reducing her into nothing but classic feminine stereotypes and completely ignoring who she is, is absolutely insane.
and this is only talking about val. we're not even mentioning china or tanith or stephanie or melancholia or any of the other hundred women in the series and the way they get turned into nothing more than girlfriends or wives of characters like ghastly and skulduggery. i can count on one hand the amount of times i've seen tanith mentioned outside of a ghanith post.
we're a small enough fandom that we can be conscious about this. we can pay attention to who we're portraying and the way we talk about characters. bring women back to the forefront of fandom.
