The reason why I haven't been doing the character meme making the rounds again on my flist recently is that most of the questions are either 'shipping-centric - "Which are your five favourite/least favourite 'ships" or go in the "which characters do you love/despite" region. And my problem is what with many of my fandoms, those questions don't apply. Take Firefly or Farscape or Blake's 7. I basically like all the characters, in varying degrees, admittedly, but I can't say I really hate a character or a relationship. (No, people we're supposed to boo-hiss like Niska or Simon and River's parents or Grayza don't count.) And if you asked me this about Babylon 5 or DS9, I could maybe come up with one relationship and one character I genuinely dislike (and wasn't meant to), but not more, and one loved relationship plus lots and lots of well-liked ones are equally unsuitable for this meme. I'd have to fib. It ties with me being a gen person at heart, I suppose; I'm not in a show/film/book for the romances or even the subtext, though of course individual relationships, platonic or otherwise, can become an important reason why I enjoy a show/film/book. The Londo/G'Kar relationship, for example, is of course a major reason why I fell in love with B5 back then and love it to this day. But it never was the only reason, and while after a decade of not finding any slash about those two I wrote some myself, I don't have to see their relationship as a romance in order to enjoy it; it's fascinating without (or with) a sexual aspect.

There are fandoms I could do the meme for, but the relationships/characters in the "despise" category would probably be mostly fanfic creations. Heroes comes to mind. Hiro/Charlie aside, I don't think any of the on screen romances were particularly well done - as opposed to the family relationships, friendships and marriages - , but I don't hate or despise them. I don't have any strong feelings about them one way or the other. On the other hand, the fact that season 2 made me suddenly care for and be interested in Mohinder also resulted in me realizing that I've stopped finding Sylar/Anyone relationships funny and have moved to being genuinenly creeped out by and loathing the very existence of Sylar pairings. (Well, except Sylar/Mary Sue. That is STILL funny.) It's not that I can't see where the Mylar comes from - they do have chemistry, and Sylar is undoubtedly obsessed - but Mohinder, Parasite aside, is rather healthily unobsessed with Sylar. He's not interested in killing the guy himself (which leads to such things as phonecalls to the police (The Hard Part) or luring Sylar in front of security cameras (Powerless) if he is forced to deal with him), he's not thinking about him when he's not around, and he doesn't show anything but negative reactions when Sylar is. Which means I really can't see passionate enemy sex any time soon, and don't even get me started on scenarios in which Mohinder makes Molly, whose parents were killed by Sylar, live anywhere near him. As for Sylar/Claire or Sylar/Peter... I'll see your "ew" and raise you a "yuck". So my "five pairings you despise" list for Heroes would probably sound like this: Sylar/ *insert list of other Heroes characters* But, and this brings me back to the start of this paragraph, all these pairings aren't actually creations of the show. They're fanfic creations. And I'm absolutely aware that some fanfic pairings I enjoy would be considered disturbing, creepy or rantworthy by someone else. So, glass house, stones, etc.

To go back to on screen romances: the very few that have made me feel something like genuine dislike verging on hate, or on the other hand really passionate love (as opposed to indifference on the one hand and various degrees of mild fondness but not love on the other) are probably saying something about what works and doesn't work for me in terms of a show, too. Oddly enough, the Jossverse, which arguably gave a lot of screentime to its various romances, doesn't come to mind, and I love BTVS and AtS and am very fond of Firefly. But all the romantic relationships there qualify only for the "varying degrees of fondness" definition - the relationships I loved were non-romantic, with the exception of Angel/Darla, which, err, wasn't exactly a romance, either.

However, I do love the Lois/Clark - or if you look at the way it was written for the first two seasons, Lois/Clark/Superman - relationship in Lois & Clark, and to this day this remains for me my favourite incarnation of those characters and their romance. Looking back on the show, I can't figure out why this worked for me whereas Ned/Chuck in Pushing Daisies never gets out of the mild indifference zone, because both relationships are written as romantic comedies and definite pairings, i.e. while the leads might however temporarily consider other candidates in their minds, the narrative leaves no doubt they're meant for each other and will end up with each other. Perhaps the difference to me is that I do adore these particular incarnations of Lois Lane and Clark Kent as individuals, too, and Ned and Chuck never get more than benign indifference from me, either (as opposed to Olive, Emerson et al).

On the "canon romance invoking passionate dislike/hate" side of things, well. Three examples come to mind, and in all three cases, they're limited to a specific time period, and don't apply to the entire duration of the show. And again, I'm not counting something like Dexter/Lila, which was written to evoke hostility; I'm talking about on screen romances that were meant to evoke emotional support for the lovers. So, my three hated canon romances:

1) Kara/Lee (BSG). I'm currently rewatching season 3, and I really have to press the button as soon as their scenes come up (pre-Maelstrom, that is - I do like their scenes there), otherwise I get into hate and ranting mood again. I'm all for interestingly messed up relationships, but that one was dreary, it brought out the worst in each character - Lee came across like a self-absorbed, self-pitying twit, and Kara as a selfish and abusive child - and it didn't contribute anything to the overall narrative. Say what you want about Baltar and Six, but their affair actually had a function in the overall plot from the start and continued to have it all the way through - whereas you could cut out every single Kara/Lee scene from mid-season 2 onwards and not a single plot point would be rendered incomprehensible. Lastly, the writing for each character got ever so much better as soon as they finally broke it off that the show should be forbidden from ever letting them go near romance territory again.

2) Sydney/Vaughn in season 3 of Alias. Not before, not after, but in season 3, their scenes together are of the same dreary, insufferable quality as the pair mentioned above. Vaughn worked quite well as Sydney's emotional support in s1 and 2, and s4 acknowledged they had issues, let them overcome them and most importantly showed why they were actually good for each other as a couple. But s3 - it wasn't Vaughn's marriage that was the problem, it was that he behaved like a selfish twit and Sydney like a mooning teenager (complete with use of the word "soulmate") which made the pairing so obnoxious to me, during that period. Thank JJ for Sydney's scenes with people not Vaughn (i.e. Will, Weiss, Jack and Sloane!) which allowed me to retain my affection for her, and of course for all the Jack and Arvin scenes in that season anyway.

3) John/Aeryn in season 4 of Farscape. Same thing, again, repeat. Not before, not after. It's also the difference between well plotted angst with emotional pay off and gratitious angst with cheap resolution, when you compare it with season 3, where the two Johns arc provided a good reason for the John/Aeryn divide in the last third, and came across as heartbreaking, yet inevitable. But in s4, the difficulties used to separate Farcape's main couple were introduced and then never resolved - Aeryn bringing Scorpius on board, John taking the Laka - with the end of "Mental as Anything" as the cheapest resolution without any pay off ever; Aeryn who in previous seasons had had her own relationships and her own agenda now was All About John, but it was hard to see how their relationship was good for them. It only seemed to make them both miserable, and not in interesting ways. Again, this isn't true for previous seasons, and it's definitely not true for The Peacekeeper Wars which makes John and Aeryn into a functional couple again, but in season 4, I hit the fast forward button every time when they're alone together.

Preliminary conclusion from all of this: I think that the three disliked pairings have in common, and what separates them from a loved pairing like Lois and Clark, is this: during the time period I hate the pairings, their participants were presented as having no other agenda but each other, not caring about anything else but each other, and also being generally useless. Whereas the Lois/Clark romance might have been the central narrative of Lois & Clark, but Lois being a reporter was central to her being, and she never forgot that, Clark/Superman was more laid back but as invested in being a reporter, and they were about the scoop, finding out the truth and sure, fighting evil as much as about each other. As soon as BSG gave Kara and Lee quests of their own again, as soon as Farscape made John and Aeryn into "Butch and Sundance" again, a fighting team that did care what was going on in the Unchartered Territories, my feelings of violent hostility ceased. In short, all you need is not love. Love is important, but if that's all, you annoy me, character. Whether in canon or in fanfic.