#valkubus

(a.k.a I kinda get a bit salty on this one)

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1. Laurel and Tommy - Arrow

As soon as they got introduced I felt the feeling of doom. Because they were so immediately adorable and full of chemistry. I loved them from the word go even though it was so clear they were going toward a Laurel and Oliver resolution (and then to add insult to injury they changed their minds on that, but Tommy was taken from Laurel anyway).

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2. Clara and Danny - Doctor Who

It's up for debate if Clara's relationship with the Doctor was meant to be romantic-coded or not (I personally prefer it as 'not' but they really were very fuzzy with the lines) but either way Danny was still used as the threat that might separate them. And that was really annoying for me because I liked Clara and Danny so much. And then they killed him (which is a scene that still tears my heart to pieces).

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3. Cordy and Doyle - Angel: The Series

They were short and sweet and I enjoyed them (and though the Cordy and Angel thing wasn't really a thing at the time, there were some signs that it was on the writers' minds... and I wasn't a fan). And then they killed Doyle (...I might have to rename this post to 'killing off the love interests I actually enjoyed to give way to the ships I didn't').

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4. Rachel and Joey - F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

This ship went past my notice when I watched the show as a kid (my entire obsession rested on Monica and Chandler) but after rewatching as an adult I actually really liked their potential. It might have come up a bit unexpectedly but there really was something quite genuine about it (and Rachel deserved so much better than Ross). I wish they hadn't ended it as such a joke.

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5. Worf and Troi - Star Trek: The Next Generation

They were created with the sole intention of getting in the way of Troi and Riker. But I liked them better. I just found them more interesting.

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6. Tamsin and Bo - Lost Girl

They were more fun to watch than Bo and Lauren, had better chemistry and I just enjoyed them a lot more ('and then you see you' living in my head rent free for years now). But instead they gave Tamsin the short end of the stick and used her as a stepping stone (in so many ways, genuinely, even past shipping they just never gave that Valkyrie a single break... and then killed her in the most insulting way possible, because of course they did).

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7. Wynonna and Dolls - Wynonna Earp

Talk about chemistry. Season 1 of that show was so good and I really did fool myself into thinking this was where they were heading but no, of course not (I should have learned my lesson about Emily Andras after she killed off Hale on Lost Girl). How is an old dude with a gross mustache more interesting than a literal dragon? The answer as far as I'm concerned... they're not (now guess if they killed him off. Guess!).

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8. Lucy and Flynn - Timeless

A tragic love story happening in the wrong order and out of time because he meets her when he needs something to hold on to and she gives him a crusade. And she meets him while he's zealously following that crusade and thinks he's just a terrorist? Dude. But no, apparently the happy ending is supposed to be the guy that wanted the cake and to eat it too (sometimes I genuinely boggle at how the writers just will not notice when they've hit gold and instead go on beating that dead horse even more to death (and yup, somehow manage to kill the gold)) .

9. Dutch and Johnny - Killjoys.

(First I have to say that I still recommend this show a 100% and this is just quibble of a shipper at heart) But how is it that when you build the whole series around the heart of this relationship, you still end up using Johnny as a brief stop point (a la basically a Married!AU) before you put Dutch back with his brother? Like, yes, they're each other's best friends and always will be but people that are in love can be each other's ride or die best friends too.

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10. Mel and Abigael - Charmed (2018)

Maybe.

I’ve been on a nostalgia trip lately and rewatched 1x01 plus (made the mistake of rewatching) Tamsin Season 3 scenes because I was curious…was Valkubus even really that good?

It turns out. Yeah. It could have been, anyway. :(

I feel like these days, Lost Girl gets a pretty bad rap on the internet because it was such an early example of queer women representation on tv and standards are a lot higher now. At the time, a lot of queer women ate this up. But now I feel like younger queer women get a whiff of Lauren, Doccubus, and the disaster that was S4-5 from a mile away and have secondhand embarrassment that we ever put up with that shit. There’s a general vibe of, man, back in the day when there was only The L Word and Lost Girl, queer ladies sure had it rough. It’s the only explanation for why they swallowed that Doccubus crap.

But I always want to say to those folks: yes, a lot of things about the show do suck, particularly Lauren and Doccubus and S4 and S5 in their entirety, but that’s not all Lost Girl is!

It was also a show with one of the best platonic friendships (and, in Kenzi, one of the best characters) on tv, ever, period! It was also genuinely funny and charming.

I feel the compulsion to defend Lost Girl’s honor sometimes. Like, it might look bad from where you’re standing, but it wasn’t all a garbage wlw couple, racism, and TERFyness, I swear…

Though. To be fair. That stuff is in there. And to be clear I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for never watching this regardless of the reason.

Thoughts about Lost Girl from memory (now I could be wrong about ANY of this—it’s been 5 and in most cases 10 years!):

Kenzi is quite possibly my favorite tv character of all time and considering I haven’t fully rewatched S1-3 in over a decade, that’s crazy

Lauren is STILL, to this day, my least favorite tv character of all time, and considering I haven’t fully rewatched S1-3 in over a decade, that’s crazy

It’s not that I haven’t watched a ton of other stuff since then, it’s just that those characters were THAT impactful, I swear

Bo and Kenzi is such a rare example of a platonic female friendship done right. I can’t think of another example like them. Most of the time the friendship either sits on the backburner or ends up feeling kind of romantic. Neither is the case here. Not only that, but it’s not just some cute side thing. In a show that is romance-focused enough that we could probably even call it part of the paranormal romance genre, this platonic friendship is the core of the show. Lost Girl still stands out among its peers for this.

Back then, shows had the balls to try to be Buffy. And that’s part of Lost Girl’s charm. It’s shameless Buffy-ness. Now, we don’t see that as much. Like, look at something like Netflix Wednesday. A show that SHOULD be trying to be Buffy, but isn’t. You are never going to be better than Buffy. You might as well copy it. Lost Girl understood the assignment.

Tamsin and Bo’s chemistry in Season 3 is legitimately THAT good. After two seasons of Bo ping ponging around between two mediocre romances with people who fell to her charms instantly, patronize to her, and lie to her, Tamsin bulldozes her way into an interrogation room and gets Bo’s hackles up in a way they never have been before on the show. They both immediately challenge each other in new ways and have to learn to trust and respect and like each other before anything else can even happen. Unlike Lauren and Dyson, Tamsin never bullshits to Bo. They make each other better people. And they have this incredible banter and chemistry between their personalities. It feels so OBVIOUS when Tamsin and Bo’s relationship starts to develop over the course of S3 that the showrunners must be building up to something, that THIS is the dark horse endgame romance Bo deserved all along, only for them to immediately throw all of that in the trash at the start of S4. The Bo and Tamsin we see in S4 and S5 are basically unrecognizable characters. “Lost Girl.” More like “Lost Potential.” Fuck me. God damn, it could have been so good.

Instead we got that crap (pointing at Doccubus). Are you people happy with your room temperature soup type shit fuckass canon wlw ship?

Lauren really, really sucks, and so does her romance with Bo. She’s poorly written and she’s a miserable human being that the show never stops pretending is a good person. She’s abusive, she’s elitist, she’s probably a covert narc, and she treats everyone around her like shit. I fail to understand what makes her romance with Bo appealing other than her being “hot.” People say queer women can do better now, but the truth is we could do better then, too, and people just didn’t.

Like honestly, I’m not sure if any of the old Lost Girl forums even exist anymore, but I know the Showcase comments sections are gone, and the WILD discourse that I used to see in these spaces between Doccubus fans and everybody else… I make no comment on the Doccubus fandom in 2025, yall are probably perfectly normal and nice people, but in 2013 it was truly the Wild West. Peeking into a comment section with Lost Girl ship discourse was like being Snake Plisken in Escape From New York. It was vindictive and nasty on all sides, don’t get me wrong, but Doccubus fans in particular exhibited a level of delusion and fanaticism that to this day is the standard by which I measure toxic shippers.

People won’t want to hear this, or would prefer a euphemistic phrasing, but the show was racist. Even if you pretend S4 and S5 don’t exist, which I do. I’m thinking of not just the fact that Hale is virtually the only person of color in the main cast, but the way the show likes to cherry pick myths and monsters from different cultures and slap them onto white people with minimal care or research. I also don’t remember much but I’m willing to bet Hale isn’t portrayed well either.

TERF vibes. Except for the season premiere of S3, which goes beyond the realm of “vibes” and is just straight up disgustingly transphobic propaganda. To the point where even when I was 16 or 17 watching it, with no real knowledge of trans issues, was immediately uncomfortable. And that episode is just what I remember! I’m scared to find out if there’s more. We shall pretend that episode doesn’t exist because transphobia feels out of character for the main group on this show. I can’t really see it on them.

I’m still going, so….in S4, Michael Grassi was added as writer and consulting producer, which I had a bad feeling about right from the jump. Mainly because I had never seen that name before in the credits of this show. Dude with no history of working on Lost Girl, suddenly becomes consulting producer. What could go wrong? Well, apparently a lot. There’s no way to tell how much blame for how bad the season was should be assigned to whom, and I have no doubt there were multiple factors at play, but Grassi’s addition is the smoking gun.

I didn’t even finish S5, but Andras was no longer showrunner this season, replaced by Grassi, and I vaguely remember it somehow being even worse than S4, so there’s that.

I feel this is important context though: I don’t consider S4 and S5 to be part of the same show. I know it is. Factually. But I don’t consider them when I think about and talk about Lost Girl. To me, Lost Girl is three (flawed but fun) seasons long.

Examples

Tamsin and Lauren go to extremes trying to catch Bo's attention while Kenzi feeds them increasingly terrible advice

Avatrice, but it's Lilith giving Ava the shovel talk

Jemily I fucking love you, you idiot

Korrasami forgiveness

Xena/Gabrielle: ghost

Shiara proposal during a gunfight

Polytrix+mistletoe (please don't actually send me this; it's already a 3k+ jumbled mess of words in my fic drafts)

My usual fandoms/pairings are in my pinned post, but I'm down to clown. Shoot me a message-the worst I can say is I'm not familiar, and we talk about other options.