Ship Therapy meme

[sonjajade]

Meme stolen – once again – from missyquill: Five canon couples who could benefit from therapy!  Spoilers abound, so watch out!  If you're curious about the couples without clicking the cut, I chose InuYasha/Kagome (IY), Ed/Win (FMA), Oboro/Gennosuke (Basilisk), Jin/Shino (SamCham), and Kisuke/Setsu (Mushishi)



1. InuYasha and Kagome Higurashi (InuYasha): Here we have a half demon who was shunned his entire childhood by the village he lived in, shunned by his only living blood relative, and eventually sealed to a tree by the woman he loved.  He's rough and brash and pretty close to feral when we first meet him.  Then there's Kagome: a middle school student from 500 years in the future, young, naive, and is usually hypersensitive when it comes to her emotions and her opinions, especially when it comes to InuYasha.  InuYasha first notices Kagome solely because she looks just like the woman who sealed him to the tree.  His feelings for her begin from residual feelings he felt for his first love.  It's not until much later in the series that he begins to separate the two of them, though I secretly suspect he never fully lets go of Kikyo.  Kagome herself doesn't make any mention of having loved another boy, and so her love for InuYasha is a kind idyllic unrealistic thing.  I secretly think that this is the reason the well stopped working in the last volume of the manga.  They both needed time to grow up and mature, and that plot device manages to do that.  But the real reason they need therapy: Kagome is Kikyo's reincarnation.  It must be difficult from Kagome's point of view to feel as though InuYasha solely loves her for her and not for the part of her that's Kikyo.  And for InuYasha it must be one hell of a mind fuck to know that despite Kikyo being dead and gone, she's not really gone, because here is her reincarnation and he's banging the hell out of her.

2. Edward Elric and Winry Rockbell (Fullmetal Alchemist): Archtypically speaking, InuYasha and Ed have a tremendous amount in common- they are short tempered, flashy fighters who deny their feelings over and over again for the sake of their personal quests.  They also both wear red, have light colored hair, have gold eyes, an amazing weapon and are seemingly immortal.  And while Winry is somewhat on par with Kagome personality wise, the big difference here is that Winry is not some naive little girl.  She's seen blood, she's known misery and death, and she's a professional in her trade.  Despite Winry being a shounen age, for all intents and purposes, that girl is a grown ass woman where Kagome is definitely not.  Ed and Winry's relationship seems to reveal itself slowly throughout the story.  It's a gradual realization on both parts that stems from their close relationship as friends.  And that's completely natural.  The reason these two would need therapy is because they were practically raised together.  The Westermarck Effect is a theory that says children who are raised within close proximity of each other are desensitized to later sexual attraction, based on that fact that despite not being related, their emotional bonds are closer to that of siblings than normal children who don't live together.  It doesn't always work that way, certainly.  And with all the time that Ed and Al spent away from her on their journey could certainly alter the outcome.  But can you imagine sleeping with a partner whom you took baths with as a child and knowing what their private parts looked like in an immature state?  I dunno why, but that would bother me, even if my partner were an adult at the time of sexual contact.  Besides this (the fact that they are so close they may as well be family), they sorta are family!  Granny loves those boys as if they were her own, and Winry does too on some level.  How weird would it be to marry your next door neighbor whom you practically considered your brother?  I am sure that at some point they will have issues of some kind.  It might not be major problems, but definitely some weird quirks and squicks between them due to how they were raised together.

Oboro and Gennosuke (Basilisk): Okay, so they don't live long enough to actually need therapy, but if they had they'd need therapy for the fact that all of Gennosuke's family killed all of Oboro's family and vice versa.  Can you imagine your loved ones, ALL of them, being murdered by your in-laws?  How would your kids feel?  And all of this for some empress' kid's right to get on the throne. 

Jin and Shino (Samurai Champloo): Jin is a ronin who killed his master and now wanders Japan as an assassin for hire.  He's quiet, tall, stoic, but when he decides to let someone know who much he cares for them, he's deeply passionate, almost opposite of his usual nature.  Shino is the wife of  man who's a chronic gambler, and when he gets in a bind with a loan shark, he decides to sell his wife to a brothel to help cover his debts.  Through sheer chance she meets Jin and their paths are crossed canon style.  Jin manages to get enough money to lay with her, and they fall in love with each other, enough that he rescues her from the brothel and sends her to a sanctuary where she must remain for three years.  In canon it's never revealed if they hook up again after that, but I like to say they did.  The reason they would need therapy is because they've built their entire relationship on a lie.  The whore that Shino was (her whore's name was Kohana) is who Jin slept with.  It was 'Kohana' that he rescued, and the first time he really comes face to face with Shino herself (and don't count the unagi stand thing, because she wasn't really being herself there, she was helping him serve customers and not being Shino) is when Jin's getting her on the boat to go across the river to the sanctuary after she bought her freedom from her asshole husband.  There's also the matter of- HER HUSBAND!  There was no divorce on the part of the woman in Meiji japan, and unless he let her go, she would still be married unless he got himself killed.  Oh and Shino? She has no idea her lover boy murdered his master in cold blood.  Or that they'll be forever hunted by the survivors of his dojo in vengeance of that act.  Someone call Jerry Springer, we got a hot one here...

Kisuke and Setsu (Mushishi): Mushishi doesn't have any reoccurring characters apart from Ginko and Adashino, but one of the episodes revolved around a man who was stuck in a bamboo forest with his wife and daughter... and his wife wasn't human (and evidently neither was their daughter).  Kisuke as a child played in the forest with the other village children, and met Setsu there but for some reason she could never leave the forest.  One day she gave him a drink of special water, and then Kisuke was also now stuck in the forest.  Overlooking the possibility of Westermarck here, there's the fact that these are two children who have raised themselves from a certain point on.  Eventually, they begin a sexual relationship and their daughter is born.  When that child is born, Setsu births a bamboo chute and the infant is found within.  Ginko discovers that both Setsu and the little girl are half mushi, and that the magarudaki mushi stalk in the middle of the bamboo forest is what's keeping the family trapped inside.  Setsu, in an effort to appease her husband's wish of seeing his village again, chops down the mushi stalk, which ends up killing both her and their daughter.  But when the stalk begins to grow again, two chutes are found where the stump was and Kisuke's family is reborn.  Reason for therapy: KISUKE'S WIFE IS NOW A BABY.  How do you go from making love to your darling woman to watching her grow from infancy and possibly never be able to have sex with her again, because now she sees you as a parent and not as a husband???  I mean, poor Kisuke, his wife dies, but then yay she comes back to life, but boo she's a baby!  And Setsu!  What dfo you tell this girl when she does reach physical maturity? 'Hey honey, this is gonna sound MEGA CRAZY, but you and I used to be married and we actually made your 'sister' four years before you were born.  And I know I'm an old man now, but I've been waiting a long time, so come sit on my lap....'  Kisuke went from devouted father and husband to creeptastic pedobreath.    I think my mind is now officially broken!

Comments

[nochick-fics.livejournal.com]

You nailed the Ed/Win thing, in motherfucking spades. If I was nodding any harder right now, my head would roll off, lol.

ETA:I have also long pondered whether or not she would have loved him as much if he did not have automail all along, as well as how his lack of it would have affected their overall dynamic. This, too, would be some prime shrink material. My BFF is a therapist; I must make him discuss this with me, lol.

This post reminds me that I was given Basilisk and need to read it. Thank you!

[sonjajade.livejournal.com]

What I think would have happened if Ed had accepted his mother's loss and not tried to bring her back, thus keeping his and Al's bodies in tact, would they three of them would have been like family and I can see Winry helping him get dressed for a date and giving him pointers on talking to girls. I don't see them romantically linked at all realistically. But when he loses his arm and leg, and she sees it, and assists in his surgeries, and makes his automail, it's almost as if she becomes his mother, and maybe she feels some sort of responsibility toward him in that capacity, and she might see him as like a father figure to Al, thus making it in her mind that a mother figure and a father figure need to go together... I feel bad for wrecking everyone's canon now XD

[nochick-fics.livejournal.com]

But when he loses his arm and leg, and she sees it, and assists in his surgeries, and makes his automail, it's almost as if she becomes his mother, and maybe she feels some sort of responsibility toward him in that capacity, and she might see him as like a father figure to Al, thus making it in her mind that a mother figure and a father figure need to go together

But see, that makes perfect, creepy sense. Creepier still when I think about that end of series image of them mimicking Hoho and Trisha. I know it was just done for contrast, but it weirded me out to no end.

It's so not an ew-het thing, because I do like het. I know a lot of my yaoi kin hate Rose, but I would (and sort of do) ship Ed with her before I would ever ship him with Winry because it just sits right with me a lot more than Ed/Win ever will. I don't knock anyone for liking them (a lot of people on my flist do) but I just can't wrap my mind around them precisely for the reasons you pointed out. I know this makes me a bit of a hypocrite since I ship Elricest (one of my two incest exceptions), but it is what it is.