For some reason I wanted to talk about Elincia ships.

[professor_tammi]

The "I am forever behind the times" tag is really relevant here, btw. So relevant that it was created just for this post! (But it applies to all of my posts.)

I sort of needed to do this because the only pairing I've actually discussed at length is ~my OTP forever~, and I've always enjoyed reading about why different pairings interest different people. Though for some reason, I rarely see people attempt to offer explanations for why they ship or don't ship things (I don't think "it's TOO POPULAR" is much of an argument, though). Especially on forums, where pairing topics tend to boil down to people posting long lists of things they ship with some added ship bashing at the end for the heck of it which then quickly escalates into a shipping war. It tends to confuse me a bit. (Wouldn't that be a good way of avoiding shipping wars - just talking it out? Um. Maybe I'm wrong. I'm not sure.)

But yeah, I've already gone off-topic. Whoops. Who would've guessed.

Elincia/Geoffrey:
To be honest, I was completely neutral to this pairing at first, as I tend to be with most queen or princess/knight pairings. I liked Elincia as a character before I became interested in it, though - her character development was just excellently handled imo. It took me a while to warm up to Geoffrey, but once I realized that he wasn't your typical knightly knight in the sense that he's really a little dorky, I started liking him. Which might have something to do with my fondness for dorky characters, but um.
Edit: honestly, I think this is one of the more important things about Geoffrey as a character - he's not the classic ~perfect knight~, especially not compared to someone like, say, Seth. It makes him more interesting and human to me.

Something that makes Elincia/Geoffrey stand out a bit from most queen/knight pairs, aside from their personalities, is their background, as they're childhood friends in addition to that. I have a thing for victorious childhood friends, I think (which should hardly be surprising given that I ship Ike/Soren). I've always felt sort of awful for the ones who are left hopelessly pining for their best friends, forever left alone. Furthermore, I think I could sort of see Elincia being the dominant one in the relationship, or alternatively that they would both be fairly equal in dominance, which is a subversion of the more classic princess/knight cliché. I quite like these subversions, actually.

Something that really bugs me is seeing people claim that FE9!Elincia didn't care for Geoffrey - she most definitely did. She spends most of the game being unsure of whether he's really alive or not, but I believe on of the more prominent examples of her concern for him occurs rather early in the game:

Elincia: Did anyone other than yourself survive?
Kieran: Of course! Though I was the only one unfortunate enough to suffer the misery of captivity. General Geoffrey and several of his soldiers fought off the Daein attack. They were able to slip away. Even now, they wait in Crimea, hoping for one last chance to strike a blow against Daein.
Elincia: Geoffrey...He is alive? Ah...How those words drive off the shadows across my heart...Thank you, Kieran. Thank you...for surviving.

 

Even then, I still believe it takes until RD for Elincia to get over her crush on Ike, but I do think she loved Geoffrey even in PoR. Though, for rather obvious reasons, her attachment to him is easier to see in their supports and in RD.

(Also I sort of ship Elincia/Lucia too. But it kind of makes me feel bad for Geoffrey, lol. I should just make it an OT3 or something.)

Ike/Elincia: (or: why I don't ship this)
So, um, for the record, I don't hate the Ike/Elincia fanbase - sorry if I came across that way last time I discussed it. I'm not too sure if I did, but it wasn't my intention. Almost all ships are bound to have some vocal annoying fans, but that's no reason to actually dislike the ship itself.

If I only consider the in-game dialogue, one of my bigger problems with this pairing is the complete lack of chemistry, at least from what I can tell. In PoR, Elincia only really opens up once she reunites with her old friends. Before that, she attempts to put on a strong face in spite of the fact that she most likely feels very out of place and lost. So for most of the game, she is essentially wearing a facade, and she doesn't really open up to any of the GMs - not even Ike. This is in spite of the fact that she talks with him several times throughout the game. I'd say that Ike considers her a friend, but they never quite connected imo; she simply wasn't herself around him.

Their personalities clash with each other, which sort of ties into the above point. Ike's bluntness confuses Elincia on several occasions. Similarly, I highly doubt Elincia would fit too well together with someone like Ike, as I feel she would have need of a more romantic type who would actually consider her feelings (from what I can tell, Ike is really considerate and protective of his close friends/family, but doesn't quite act in the same way with Elincia - which isn't surprising, since they haven't known each other for that long). To be honest, I could just never see Ike as being particularly romantic. Which is probably pretty obvious at this point, buuut.

I think there are certain scenes with them that can be interpreted as sort of shippy, the most notable being FE9's ending scene. I mean, there's hand-holding and all - people are free to view it as romance if they so wish, or it could alternatively be seen as platonic. It really just depends on the player and one's personal preference.

There are some arguments from a really old shipping war lol I sort of wish to address, but I think I'm just going to stop here because I'm trying to ignore the crazier fans. Although admittedly it would be really fun to counter all of the arguments since none of them made any sense whatsoever, but still. (I still think that shipping war is the most hilarious and depressing thing I've ever read, though.)

But then there's also the fact that Ike/Elincia breaks up both Ike/Soren and Geoffrey/Elincia, so I'm pretty obviously biased I guess
Seriously though why can't the childhood friends just win. They're both pretty cool really

Also I was browsing dA as always, and while I already knew about the existence of Soren/Link, I was rather miffed to find out that it has a fanclub with no less than 73 members. I mean, to be fair, the founder is well aware that is is complete crack, but
Soren/Link, what is this I don't even

(My computer froze twice while I was writing this by the way. I should probably do something about that. It froze 5 times yesterday. I don't even know what the problem is ;o;

I wanted to discuss other ships (like Heather ships!), but I'm really tired and it's late and I need sleep so maybe some other time)