There is one particular ship dynamic that never fails to wreck me, and I’ll call it Soulmates, But Not Like That. Not in a “some higher power has decided that we are destined to be together” way, but something that is almost the opposite of that. It’s that character who has been alone for a long time, and has maybe convinced themselves that they will be alone forever, and who has a lot of barriers to intimacy with most of the people around them, for whatever the relevant narrative reasons are. And then they just happen to cross paths with this ONE FUCKING PERSON who works for them, through some very specific combination of personality and circumstance and life experience and mutually compatible damage. And there is always the shock of what are the fucking odds, and underneath everything the terror of what if this doesn’t last. what if there’s no one else. I would just go back to being alone. I don’t know if I could do that after knowing this. Because when you finally let down that wall of emotional self-sufficiency the thought of having to put it back up again is painful. And in real life I don’t at all believe that there is only One Designated Person for anyone, but in fiction I do tend to gravitate toward characters who believe themselves to be The Only One in some way, and I will always be emotionally compromised by that dawning sense of oh. You are like me.
