Veni, Vedi, Squeedi

I resist slashing them because in my thinking the friendship between them is deeper than any romance I can think of, and making it sexual just seems a distraction -- That's exactly how I feel about the onscreen pairings on the show. I always respected the preference for Jack-Daniel friendship, the way I respect anyone's preferences whether they're the same as mine or not, but I have real empathy for the longing for the friendship not to be (and here's where I can never ever ever find the right word) trivialized? muddied? with romance. The show injected romance into relationships that I was invested in as friendships -- it violated some kind of Friendship OTP, for me. It's like 'Oh, they were really falling in love all this time, or they really just had the hots for each other all this time, and all that apparent friendship-bonding stuff was just courtship' -- as if the friendship in itself wasn't enough, wasn't strong enough or interesting enough or wasn't valid in some way. Or something. I have so much trouble articulating how this feels like a betrayal or a letdown to me, and it really only pertains to what's onscreen (fic's always a different story, for me), but ... I totally hear you about that. The same feeling keeps me from shipping other characters in fics, except as experiments and challenges for five-things prompts or the like. I resist, because the friendship is so much more important to me. I know that friendship can be an important element of or precursor to a sexual relationship, but TV just loves to turn strong bonds between women and men into romance, and that annoys me and disappoints me again and again. The Jack-and-Daniel friendship is an extraordinary and wonderful thing, and I so totally get the desire to keep it that way.