DE: Wove....twue wove

[bjornwilde]

 What was your characters first canon love like? Or, in cases where that doesn't work, how about head canon? Or, since not all of us have characters with romances, what was their first friendship like? I'm thinking more how did the relationships go--were they silly, intense, filled with ups and downs, not so healthy, etc.--than descriptions of the other person but feel free to answer in your own way.

Comments

[bjornwilde]

Jess: Her first canonical romance read as off to me. It was the typical near father figure romance we saw a lot of in 70s/early80s movies and I was happy when they wrote him out. Her first canonical friendship was much better and lasted until Carol Danvers was wrote in as her best friend. Sadly Lindsey McCabe hasn't been seen since the early 90s. She needs to make a come back as she was an awesome character, her Mary Jane in a sense.

Quin: His first, and only, canonical romance was with Khaleen and unfortunately she wasn't written that well. She, at least to me, read as just being someone who existed solely for him and his plot. His first canonical friendship had much more agency but of course since that person was Obi-Wan, he would have to.

More later if I get the chance.

[never_shall_yield]

Javert - a woman, blind, who carries scales. YES THAT'S RIGHT, JUSTICE!!!!!

*ahem* I lie, anyway. His first love is authority, and maintaining the status quo. I can't tell you anything about friendship, or romance because he's a big nope on all of them.

Valjean - well, I have to guess that his first friendship was with his sister, who raised him. I imagine it was a mix of normal brother-sister mixed with mother-son dynamics - and he must have loved her, because he provided for her and her seven children when her husband died. OK, he did it sullenly but he did care for the kids too, and did try to find out what happened to them once he'd got out of prison. So I imagine they were there for each other, shared the hardship and lived without much joy but with a lot of unspoken care.

The others later!

[camwyn]

Gordon's never actually had a canon love other than Alyx, although there are people who will argue for slashy romantic stuff going on between him and Barney Calhoun. I'm going with the het interpretation; you've seen how that's gone.

Shephard similarly has had no canon love interest and the closest we get to seeing any canon friendships is some cheerful insults slung around on Goose-7 before the Xen manta fighters shoot the Marines out of the sky. As far as headcanon goes I suspect he had an absolutely massive crush on a girl in his class when he was thirteen and never, ever, ever told anyone because he was afraid they'd make fun of him. You know how kids can get.

Ellen was something of a social outcast in the Vault thanks in no small part to the Overseer resenting having to bring in outsiders to keep his bastion of pure humanity alive, and to the older people in the Vault resenting having to pretend the Vault had never been opened in the first place, thus leading to Dr. Park and his daughter being generally avoided where possible. Her only really notable friend was Amata, the Overseer's daughter, who thought her father was being silly; the other candidate is probably Paul Hannon, Jr., who is at least enough of a friend to canonically apologize for how poorly his friends treat her at her tenth birthday party. Ellen and Amata got along very well up until Ellen's father left the Vault, and Amata got Ellen to escape before the security men came. Unfortunately Amata then called Ellen back to the Vault when the younger people found out about her father's deception and started a revolt- which would have been fine if she hadn't concluded things by telling Ellen that she was grateful for her help but she had to leave and never come back, because it'd cause trouble with too many other people. Ellen refused to speak to Amata when Amata finally made it to the surface because of that.

I wish I could say about Varric but the dude lies through his teeth about anything really personal or important, so who knows.

[genarti]

So Enjolras would be happy to tell you all about his beloved -- about 640,679 square kilometers, first modern republic even if she was cruelly betrayed, capital city Paris...

No, uh, I joke because he does (canonically!), but I have no solid headcanon about his first friendship, and romance is not something he's ever been interested in signing up for. (Romantic friendship is a different matter, but now we're getting into a long "okay but let's define all our terms in his era and in ours" discussion.)

[mogget_cat]

The Old Kingdom series waffles between shipping Yrael/Freedom and Yrael/Chaos. >_>

Of course, to a Free Magic creature, freedom and chaos are the same thing. Free Magic isn't evil so much as unrestrained, which can look very similar to the short-sighted, Yrael would say.

His first friendship was in Milliways, with Ophelia, and was quite intense, full of ups and downs. Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in the early days of the bar.

[student_of_impossibility]

Henry has no such canon yet, and Eriond is a pile o' Not Applicable. I'll do Lois later, because I know a lot about her and she is Complicated.

Tavi's only love is Kitai. (He had a crush on a girl, but it wasn't love. She was the local hot girl.) Kitai initiates the romance when they're 17, he's never interested in anyone else, it's easy, comfortable, strengthening, passionate, playful, all good things--except he never has to work for it, so for years it doesn't occur to him to mention he loves her. On the one hand, they have an empathic soul bond, but he's also an incredibly verbal person. He never said it because, to be awfully blunt, it was so obvious he didn't think it was important. So he kind of fails to associate the word love with Kitai (even in narration, implied inside his head) until the end of book six. Whoops.

They frankly are not entirely healthy in that if one dies, the other will too (in all likelihood, it's assumed). And she doesn't have an Agenda in life, which he does, so his takes priority. Butcheritis. But she is the one person who can absolutely guaranteed rein him in any time he's gone way too far. So it's a mix of baseline creepy soul-bond unhealthy and both being such strong personalities that it works out much healthier and stronger for it.

[aberration]

Asami - Unsurprisingly, the first people she really knows she felt love for were her parents. And then especially after her mother's death, she became very close to her father. As in one of those, being able to recall each other's thoughts and memories with little prompting, easily playing off one another, would-have-difficulty-imagining-a-way-to-be-closer-to-someone emotionally kind of relationships. While she had other friends and some family, her father was the one person she could always really count on coming back to, to have someone who would always be able to understand her point of view. It also meant that she kind of let herself drift apart from the friends her age she had while she was still in school, because she had this best-friend figure in her father that she could fall back on. And she had certain adults within her father's company whom she thought of as friends, and whom she could often talk to more easily (and had more in common with, in some ways) than friends her age, before she met - well, Bumi in millicanon, and then Mako and Korra and Bolin.

Her first romantic feelings for another person were for her first kiss, an earthbending girl in her physical education class when she was thirteen. But this only lasted for a few weeks, until their class ended and both kind of them lost interest. It was something that had been nice in the moment, but neither really tried to continue it once they weren't regularly seeing one another anymore.

In canon, the first person she's shown having any kind of relationship with is Mako. It's young, cutesy teenage romance, and it gets interrupted by the whole revolution taking over Republic City, and Mako having feelings for another woman. Even with their teeny romance, they did work well together, and had sort of similar-but-not-too-similar personalities that they almost always got along pretty well, up until the end. But their relationship never got to, say, the stage of saying "I love you" – Asami does love him, but she didn't reach the point of being in love with him. And by the end of their romantic relationship, she had much greater concerns to deal with. As a friend, though, she likes having him around – I like to think after he got over his awkwardness in Book 3, they hung out a lot in Republic City while Korra was away.

And I guess to address that point, spoilers for the finale: As far as I'm concerned, she said 'I love you' to Korra, in the romantic-'in love with you' way. But I don't think Korra was the first person she'd said that to.


Elle - The first people she can remember loving are also her parents, and like Asami her mother's death meant most of this love ended up being directed toward her father. Unlike Asami, however, Elle's father was much more distant toward her. He did express affection toward her, mostly through things like gifts, but he was also cruel and abusive, though for a long time Elle didn't know the extent of that. It meant her love for her father was more an obsessive need to make him happy with her, and she directed almost all of her social attention, so to speak, toward this.

Her first real friendship outside this, and her first romantic feelings for another person, were for a boy named Matt Neuenberg, whom she had a collected while working for the Company. She visited him frequently when he was in the Company facility, and he had a crush on her that she didn't really understand. But she was able to develop friendly and romantic attachment to him, though he died before that could really go anywhere. It's a relationship she puts a lot of emotional attachment into, but it also didn't really last long enough to develop into love. X is probably the first person she has felt any sort of healthy-type of love for.


Will is... really... complicated. Because love is viewed in a myriad of ways by everyone, and he gets to have everyone's opinions about it, and that makes it confusing and complicated, especially to label in any way. And there's also an extent to which having his kind of "empathy" means that – the kind of emotional connection and closeness and sharing that other people consider to be love, or being in love, are things that he has to do, all the time, with almost everyone. It's one-sided, but it's also hard for him to view it as one-sided because he's never perceiving a relationship solely through his own eyes. So that also makes all of this difficult to answer. But! Okay.

Will had a relationship with his father that involved a mutual level of trust and, more importantly, some desire to make the other person happy, or at least a baseline of calm and content. They both did things for each other to try to make their respective lives more pleasant. They pretty much never actually spoke to each other in terms of endearment, and an outsider might have thought their relationship was cold, or that his father was even neglectful. But the real point is that for them saying things like that would have been at worst confusing, and at best redundant. There was distance, but they both sort of understood why that was, and that it was better to leave it.

He didn't really have any friendships outside this growing up. I don't mean this to sound as... ridiculous as it does, but it was just easier for him to form affection-bonds with animals, and yes especially neighborhood dogs, than it was for him to build relationships with humans. It didn't help that he and his father moved around so much anyway, so even if he had had that capacity, he wouldn't have had the time to really maintain a friendship for very long. But the social overload he feels was even worse when he was young, which meant he really had to close himself off when he was in school.

When he was in his late teens and early twenties, though, there were some people who found his extreme introversion intriguing rather than off-putting. And he did have romantic-sexual feelings for some people. None of these relationships lasted for very long, because after a while he kind of stops being intriguing and starts just being the guy who never calls you and you always have to call him and he never wants to start a conversation or pick something to eat and he goes off for a few days without telling you and it's so much work and ugh.

(He's even worse with friendships. People tend to think of Will as their friend depending on how they're feeling about him and, well, what sort of relationship they want to have with him at a given moment, and he does nothing to discourage that.)

Anyway. The first person in canon for whom he shows romantic feelings for is Alana, who also finds him intriguing, but at least for different reasons. I don't know how that would end up, but they never really have such a relationship, and what they do have gets fucked up really quickly, so. I don't know that he had ever been in love with someone. And then, um.

Look, he really hates this question.



Katara - The first people she's aware of loving were of course, her parents and her grandmother and her brother, Sokka. Her mother also died when she was young, but her father left not that long after, and so Katara actually projected most of her love and need for parental attention into the memory of her mother. It's not a close relationship in the same way as... well, people who still have a parent physically there and alive, but part of Katara stepping up and taking care of her village was a way for her to feel a connection with her mother, and model herself off the person she thought her mother would be. (And of course, in canon Sokka talks about how Katara had really become that figure in his life and I tear up every time at that scene.)

The first person Katara had romantic feelings for, and the first person she kissed (I think Bryke confirmed this?), was Jet. He was very handsome and suave, and was the first person she'd encountered who really openly expressed interest in her. But their relationship ended pretty quickly when she found out he was a jerk who was going to wipe out an entire village, so.

The first and only person Katara said "I love you" to in a romantic sense was Aang. (I hope Bing doesn't hate to hear that! But even when they're apart I can't imagine her having feelings like that for anyone else.) He was also her first non-brother friend.

[death_gone_mad]

I had a headcanon for Amascut that involved a loving relationship, or maybe more of an obsessive one-way relationship, that went horribly, terribly wrong and traumatic. I kept the idea half-baked in case canon threw a curveball and oh boy did it throw one at me by including her on her brother's trip to Freneskae and leaving her there. So, the lore writers managed to put something even more traumatic than I was imagining into her backstory while keeping it vague and not describing it at all. There still may be room for that love gone bad story since it was implied that when she got back from Freneskae (somehow) she was still... not that bad mentally but she got progressively worse as centuries passed by.

But anyhow, canonically, I am guessing she and her brother were very close and trusting before the trip to Freneskae. She hates him and everything he does now, but he still cares for her and wants her to get better, despite all she has done to the world and despite her turning the underworld into hell and trying to steal souls on their way to the afterlife. He hasn't been able to help his sister heal, though, since it is his role to safely guide souls through the underworld to the afterlife, and well, Amascut turned the underworld into a hellscape. I think he might blame himself a little for her condition and there might be a part of Amascut that blames him too.

Fairy Fixit has a headcanonned best friend/work buddy who is an illithid/mindflayer type person who fanboys Tentacles of Our Waves hard. They geek out on TV shows together, but in revenge for making her watch Tentacles of Our Waves, Fairy Fixit makes him sit through her favorite show, CSI: Elevator Inspectors' Unit.

[ceitfianna]

Will doesn't have a canonical romance but his relationship with Little John is one of my favorites. They push up against each other as they worry about who Robin trusts more, they argue and then realize they work together. Its one of my favorites in all fiction and a reason I love the if not enemies but friendship/relationship that improves over time trope. He's also someone who goes all in with his relationships, he does that with Robin and with the women he's dated in Milliways. There's no halfway for Will.

For Charles, I think Raven is the best to talk about since their relationship defines them both so much. It begins with you're like me than becomes truly siblings, its not always healthy for both of them. Charles is paternalistic to Raven, Raven often ignores Charles but they also improve each other since they can be honest with each other. When Charles goes looking for romance, the people he's attracted to are the ones who challenge him; Moira and Erik.

Quentin, Quentin's canon romance started out as a sweet teenage moment with him being happy and wanting to spend time with Katie. Then she was pulled into his world and it all ended painfully with him having to grow up quickly. I think it was a pretty healthy relationship before Blind Michael got involved for all that it was a Fae hiding his nature with a mortal.

William doesn't have any canonical romance, he's too young and he's also someone who is incredibly tied into his family that I think he's never been as good as connecting outside of it. I think he's had crushes but his brother is his best friend. He tends to be intense in his relationships since he doesn't have a lot of practice with lightly knowing someone.

Ivan's had a lot of relationships, his first one was I think light and more about kissing and flirting than anything deep.

Jane's first real relationship is with Tom and its painful, complex and wonderful as they are each other's equals. But within their time and place, its hard for them to find happiness.

Sameth doesn't have any canon relationship mentioned but his friendship with Nick is huge. They balance each other, they flirt and are comfortable. My headcanon is that he's gone on dates with girls for various occasions, his sister doing some setting up, but he can be rather awkward. Nick's the smoother one.

Moist, hm, Moist definitely had more relationships before canon starts and my headcanon is that for him, its all about pleasure. He tries to not get who he sleeps with or goes out with mixed up with his jobs as that's messy. I think that happened to him when he was starting out and it ended badly.

Demeter's tricky since I'd have to go check the various myths but most of her early relationships were with her family so many shades of weird and fucked up.

Tumnus doesn't really have romantic relationships but I think in terms of friendships, they tend to be quiet and with neighbors such as the Beavers.

This is an intriguing question, I'm not sure that I answered it properly, but I like thinking about it.

[herr_bookman]

Ahahaha. Oh, gosh.

Autor's canon love is a beautiful prima ballerina named Rue who plans to tear his heart out and feed it to a crow. He falls in love with her because of the theory of narrative causality (i.e. the plot requires it), and recognizes this, because that's the kind of meta character he is.

Alana Bloom's canon romance is Hannibal Lecter. The less said about that, the better.

Tahno doesn't get one, because he's too busy being a playboy.

[last_kallig]

Canonically, a female Sith Inquisitor has a grand total of one real romance option in the base game.

Millicanonically, Ibani is in her first romance right now. :-D
I was definitely not planning on her falling for a Dunmer from the Elder Scrolls games! She fell in love rather quickly, although I suspect the accidental 'sharing' helped speed the process up quite a bit.

[bjornwilde]

I love the surprises Milliways gives us and the chances for things canons just don't allow.

[merryeccentricities]

Joly's first love, canonically, is pretty definitely Musichetta; and it's as sincere and awkward and flaily as might be expected from him (friend-wise he arguably also had a simultaneous first love with Bossuet, which relationship is ...what it is, a couple of cheery nerds who like bad puns and politics, and whose relationship doesn't really translate into modern social models without a lot of term defining, alas.)

Bahorel hasn't ever really fallen in love with anyone, at least not to the point where he'd acknowledge it being worthy of the name, because,well, he is a Romantic and he has some pretty serious qualifications on that. But partly that's because he fell and fell hard for Paris before any actual individual person affected him, and not, as some probably assume, in an especially joking or metaphorical kind of way. Bahorel is sometimes a little odd.