Ship Archetypes: Beyond blond/brunette and smol/tol

[merelydovely]

Writing up my shipping preferences for my recent sticky post inspired me to write up a ship manifesto of sorts, not for a particular ship, but for a ship archetype.

I noticed after a while that the vast majority of the slash ships I like fall into an obvious pattern: the knight and the wizard.

The Wizard

The wizard character doesn't need to have actual magic powers. Rather, they excel somehow in the domain of the mind. They may demonstrate physical prowess, but it's overshadowed by their other, more characteristic mind-based talents. Invariably, they also have some kind of personality flaw, psychological quirk, or other social impediment – sometimes a closely guarded secret – that singles them out and causes friction between them and their community.

The Knight

The knight character is typically more in the public eye. They somehow excel are somehow grounded in the physical realm. They are noticeably charismatic, or charming, or at the very least skilled at diplomacy. They have an uncanny ability to inspire people around them to follow their lead and also, as a rule, seem to have a bit of a death wish. Not sure why this is a recurring trait, but it is.

The Ships

I obviously got the idea for the name from BBC Merlin, wherein Merlin is literally a wizard and Arthur is literally a knight, but it didn't really click in my mind until I applied it to Sherlock Holmes (wizard!) and John Watson (knight!)

Here's the list I have so far of ships I've followed at one point or another that outright fit the wizard/knight format:

• BBC Merlin: Merlin/Arthur


• BBC Sherlock: Sherlock/John


• Star Trek TOS AOS: Spock/Kirk


• Star Trek DS9: Julian Bashir/Elim Garak


• X-Men: Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr


• Marvel Cinematic Universe: Tony Stark/Steve Rogers


• Stargate Atlantis: McKay/Sheppard


• James Bond: Q/James Bond


• Teen Wolf: Stiles/Derek


• DC Comics: Batman/Superman

Batman/Superman is an interesting example because on his own, Bruce is "the Dark Knight" with a death wish, but when he's paired with Superman, it's immediately obvious Bruce is the wizard and Clark is the knight who's constantly dying.

Bashir/Garak is probably the most questionable inclusion, as Garak doesn't seem to meet the "physical realm" qualification of the knight, and I almost left them off the list until I remembered just how often Garak deals with problems by blowing them up.

Here's a further list where fitting the "wizard" criteria relies more than a little on fanon, but you can still clearly see the archetype at work in my love of the ship:

• Harry Potter: Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter


• Les Misérables: Grantaire/Enjolras


• Netflix MCU: Foggy Nelson/Matt Murdock

I think the fact that I seem to have imprinted on this archetype like a baby duckling goes a long way to explain why I've never really gotten into Steve/Bucky, despite the mountains of fabulous content available. They're both knights.

It also seems to predict I should really like Lana Luthor/Kara Zor-El, doesn't it? Because I may not know much about Supergirl past the first few episodes, but she definitely strikes me as a knight, and there's no way a Luthor character isn't somehow a wizard.

Any questions about why I classified these ships the way I did? Can you think of any "wizard/knight" ships I didn't list? Do you notice any recognizable ship archetypes in your own fandom tastes?

Comments

[captainlordauditor]

For a while I thought my thing was "mirrors", ie, characters with mirrored or paralleled arcs and/or backstories. And while that's definitely true, I think the most common theme among my ships seems to be, deep sigh, the red/blue phenomenon.

Zuko/Katara from Avatar - red/blue, and aspects of the mirror.
Kyouko/Sayaka from Madoka Magica- goodness, could they get any more paralleled? And yup, red/blue.
Korra/Asami - red/blue. In some ways they could be a Knight/Wizard ship, but I'm not sure Korra has enough diplomacy for that.
Steve/Bucky - okay, this one is a bit of a stretch. But in fanon, at least, Bucky is typically associated with red and Steve with blue.

The biggest exceptions seem to be Spot/Race and Jack/Dave from Newsies. In some canons Spot/Race is red/blue, just not the one I favor. Jack/Dave falls squarely under the Wizard/Knight category though.

I will say I think your categorization of Kirk as a Knight is interesting. I always associate him more with philosophy and charm than physical prowess. Would you say having both is a must for a knight, or is one enough (see also my note about Korra)?

[merelydovely]

I think for the knight, it's not that they necessarily have to be, like, physically strong, it's just that they are somehow the focal point for physical force as opposed to psychic force. Kirk has been deputized by a higher-ranking central power to achieve victory by force of arms or force of personality. So Kirk is the knight because he's in command of the Enterprise's phaser banks, not because he's better in a fistfight than Spock, you know? And when you think of Kirk you're more likely to picture him getting into a really stupid fight and ripping his shirt open because he can't just Vulcan nerve pinch his opponent to sleep. He's grounded in the physical. Various other versions of this writeup have used that wording instead of "excels"; maybe I should change it.

I also probably should've put AOS instead of TOS, though. I'm familiar with TOS only through other people's metacommentary and gifsets.

Korra I think counts as a knight because while she's not especially good at diplomacy compared to Asami, she's got that whole "deputized to keep the peace" thing. I don't think the knight actually has to be good at diplomacy, they just have to have some sort of raw charisma that induces people to follow them or look to them for leadership in some way. Like, Derek Hale was a terrible alpha who made nothing but terrible decisions, but he still convinced a bunch of kids to follow him into battle despite that.

I'd actually be more skeptical of putting Asami in as the wizard, because she's not socially disadvantaged enough!

[captainlordauditor]

Oh, for AOS, Kirk is definitely a knight, I agree! I'm more familiar with TOS, where at least half his victories are diplomatic ones.

I think the use of the word "grounded" does make a bit more sense to me; "excels", to me, implies that they're noticeably better at it than their counterpart, rather than it being their default. It also helps make a distinction between the mind-matters of the knight (diplomacy, and perhaps strategy or tactics) and the mind-matters of the wizard (magic, book learning, long term planning).

...Which makes me think that Spot/Race might actually be the straightest example of the Wizard/Knight ship on my list, if we separate it out that way. Huh.

That's a fair point about Asami as a wizard - I was mostly thinking of how heavily mind-oriented she is. I will add though, that I'm not sure "socially disadvantaged" was the impression I got from your initial description of a wizard? Tony Stark is at the top of the pile socially, and all of the people who look down on him are peers rather than positioned above him. He just has some very large personality flaws.

[merelydovely]

I lump anything that prevents the "wizard" from connecting with the people around them under that "defining wizard characteristic" umbrella. For Tony it's being an emotionally crippled manchild; for Sherlock, it's his allergy to being normal. For McKay it's being a self-aggrandizing hypochondriac lab tyrant who got himself exiled to Siberia. For Stiles it's merely being a dorky, loud-mouthed teenager. For Bashir it's being so full of himself he doesn't even notice how annoying everyone finds him. For Spock, it's being, well, Spock; he can't have normal emotions. They're not disadvantaged in a class sense, they've just got some kind of social barrier that prevents them from fully integrating with their peers in a normal way.

Because of the way the "wizard" tends to work, their social barrier is often directly caused by their mind-based powers. Merlin would have hardly any problem integrating if he wasn't hiding an execution-worthy secret; same goes for Charles Xavier, who would probably be fine if only he could stop being an overbearing weirdo always finishing people's sentences before they've spoken them.