Lord Help Me, I Do Not Understand Straight Women

[rynling]

Since about two months after I got into the Zelgan ship (so for about half a year now), its fandom on Tumblr has been obsessed with babies. How many babies, what to name the babies, what the babies are going to look like when they grow up.

I don't get it. I don't get it. I don't get it.

I mean, I sort of get it. The babies of major characters are an opportunity to create OCs in a universe that wouldn't otherwise accommodate OCs while showing the canon characters as older and more mature versions of themselves - as adults instead of screaming teenagers, basically.

I'm working on a "shitty dad Ganon" story right now in which Ganondorf has to babysit Tetra while they wait for Link. Ganondorf is canonically a grumpy fucker, and Tetra is canonically a little smartass, and it's cool to play with that sort of dynamic as they gradually learn to tolerate each other. It's also fun to yank them out of their canonical roles as villain and victim and to put them into a situation that neither of them has any idea how to handle.

The variations on the "Ganondorf makes half a dozen babies" story I've been seeing popping up have been somewhat more difficult for me to process, however. And yet somehow everyone seems to have jumped onboard the concept of babies. There's even been some gorgeous fan art dedicated to people's personal headcanons.

Is there some sort of biological drive at work here that I'm genetically unequipped to understand?

Comments

[renegadefolkhero]

I don't understand it, but I've managed to unconsciously surrounded myself with others who don't understand it, which has afforded me a level of protection.

Maybe part of it is I don't want to understand, to be honest. There's so much going on there I don't want to deal with.

Besides, anything to do with babies/children/teenagers is the opposite of escapism for me. I used to kind-of enjoy YA but now I'm like HOW OLD IS THAT KID CAN YA DRINK CAUZ if you aren't old enough to have a martini i can't empathize with u at all go to ur room

[rynling]

Someone recently gave me a copy of Camille Bacon-Smith's monograph Enterprising Women, which is about early Star Trek fandom. Around the middle of the book there's a scan from a fanzine, the caption for which reads, I shit you not, "Beverly Zuk's illustration for Lois Welling's The Displaced shows Spock with Susan, and Spock's five children by three partners." Apparently this sort of thing has roots.

I've also been having trouble with YA fiction. The last YA book I read was Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl, which was described to me as "a landmine of Harry Potter fandom feels." Like an idiot I took the bait, but I ended up disappointed. My impressions were something along the lines of, "I remember there being more drinking, these children are in college, why aren't they drinking." It's strange; YA fiction seems to be very open about teenage sex and nontraditional relationships these days, but Cthulhu forbid anyone is shown having a glass of wine with dinner or smoking up in the woods behind someone's house.