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Post by RavenStar on Jan 19, 2006 6:20:34 GMT -5
Clayton, I'm afraid I have to disagree with you - I can easily see Kim's compatability with Ron: He's the support guy - always there to pull her back from the edge when she gets above herself or out of control; He defends her to a realistic point; He respects her; and - in his most important role - he's always the one cheering her on, telling her she CAN do something when she's unsure that she can. She, on the other hand, helps him out with problems he has, respects him enough to listen to his wild opinions when everyone else thinks he's just whacko, and constantly defends and supports him - also to a realistic point. Just those factors alone make for one hell of a great romantic relationship.
But that's the problem I have writing a relationship like that: It's too obvious, been done 40,000 times already, and there's really not room for much story tension with a relationship between them.
In my stories, I've tried to relfect Ron's most critical personality aspect - his "cheerleader for Kim" aspect - the most, in the way that fits the story, obviously. He supports Kim, gets suspicious and jealous when Shego first enters - but after Shego proves herself to be 100% truthful, starts accepting her as another friend, and before long is cheerleading both Kim AND Shego - and in the case of Understudy, Monique as well. In a fairly critical scene in the rewrite of Understudy (nearly done, coming soon!) I'm currently doing, he plays a vital role in letting Shego realise something she's overlooked in a brief spate of anger.
With Kigo, I've seen a lot of people say they can't support the pair because it's clear to them Shego is pure evil. We know she used to be a good guy, so that immediately makes her NOT pure evil, at least in my book. Very evil, maybe, but not PURE evil. If she is evil, then: Why? Why is she evil? What exactly made her turn from good to evil? The explanation Hego gave of "The more we fought evil, the more Shego liked it" doesn't fly with me. It also doesn't explain why in Go Team Go, all Kim has to say is "Aviarius" and Miss "pure evil" decides to just go along with them and go fight Aviarius. If she were pure evil, she wouldn't have given a rat's ass about stopping Aviarius and would've blasted Kim and Hego the hell out of there. We know Shego can laugh, cry, swoon, and purr seductively from Emotion Sickness - what happened to make her supress those sides of her so much that all she does normally now is sneer, grin, make snide remarks, etc.? It's so much of juicier angle to work with. Kim, to me, works for Shego as a lover because, despite her distate for her, Kim cares about people too much - she seemed to feel bad for Bonnie after meeting her sistser, so it seems natural she would even care about what happened to Shego and want to help her - and it's pretty clear they both enjoy making snappy remarks at and fighting each other. You'll recall the characters Benedick and Beatrice in a little play called Much Ado About Nothing. They start out verbally abusing each other with some nasty displays of wit, but at the end of the play, they find out they love each other. Add the layer of extra tension from the lesbian aspect into the bill, and Kim and Shego make for a much more dynamic and interesting couple than Ron and Kim or the other thousand-odd pairings that have appeared.
I mainly decided to write Kigo because it allowed me to more easily tread the ground of storytelling I love to write about the most - and that's the study of the grey area between good and evil - how different are we from our enemies, really? How do we know when one's crossed the line from good to evil, and vice-versa? Is there even a line? and all that good stuff. It was much easier to do this with Kigo than any other pairing. And it's a lot trickier to write this couple and not give any of the other characters the shaft or diminish their roles. I realise the pair isn't possible when going strictly by the show's canon - it's just it's much more of challenge to write and do it well than writing a "normal" pairing such as Kim/Ron.
Also, on the topic of Mr. Possible interfering, what's his first change of rules when he realises Kim's grown up in Monkey Ninjas in Space? "No boys."
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Post by Aers (That Writer Chick) on Jan 19, 2006 9:16:52 GMT -5
*chuckles at last line of RS's post*
exactly - I'll be honest, K/R is easy for me and that's why I love doing it. If I really wanted a writing challenge I'd try to put them into tougher situations; make myself work for the win, as it were.
*but*... as in all writing, it's up to the author to make it work. If you want to write good fanfic you need to make your reader BELIEVE what's on the page and make them want to continue. You can have the best plotline or the coolest tagline or the best dialogue in the world, but if you don't work on putting them all together the reader won't make it past the first paragraph.
research shows that newspaper/journalism articles have ONE paragraph to grab the reader - ONE paragraph in your local paper is all you get to sell your story. For submitting short stories it's along the same lines. When I was submitting my novel to agents they only needed FIVE pages of over 300 to determine if it would work for them, based on the fact that people only read so much before they decide if the book's for them.
SELL your fanfiction the same way - if you want to write Kigo or any other shippiness, you need to sell that relationship within the first few paragraphs to the reader.
I'm rambling again... darn it, I'm useless without that first cuppa chai in the morning!
*wanders off*
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Post by Scoutcraft Piratess on Jan 19, 2006 17:49:29 GMT -5
Aers brings up a great point. SELL it. Make it believable, if it's not. That's what creativity is about. People can believe anything if it is tempting enough--it doesn't matter how 'realistic' it is. Human nature is multi-faceted and extremely complex--plenty of grey, as RavenStar said. That's why I rarely try to prove a certain ship wrong. I may not like a ship because that is my opinion, but it can still be a believable ship.
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Post by apoptosis on Jan 19, 2006 18:20:05 GMT -5
Wow, 'oly cr4p, this thread has exploded - in a wonderful way too. *goes back to reread everything she missed* I'm sure is helping many KP writers; I know that from even what I had read before the last few pages has really gotten me thinking.  |
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Post by MrDrP on Jan 19, 2006 20:57:42 GMT -5
First off, I just want to say that I agree with Apoptosis -- this has proven to be a very interesting and stimulating thread and has got me the idea factory humming.
Second, the Much Ado analogy doesn't work for me. Neither Benedick nor Beatrice tried to kill one the other. Shego, however, does try to kill Kim, more htan once, and participates in multiple schemes that would be fairly described as being evil -- from a plot to essentially destroy Wisconsin (she was the controls of the magma drill) to her role in the Diablo plot. Shego is evil.
The writers surely didn't intend this, but one of the most profound things ever said in the show was Hego's remark that the more Shego fought evil, the more she liked it. Evil is seductive. And it is a lot easier to go from being good to evil than the other way around. Christopher Browning wrote a book called Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland which detailed how over period of 16 months a group of normal, middle-class Germans became a group of ruthless killers, drunk on murder, who were responsible for the deaths and deportations of more than 75,000 people. They started off like your neighbors. They laughed, joked, etc. But as they were seduced by evil, they changed. They became harder, coarser. Just like Shego (and, no, I am not saying she is a Nazi). Yet they wrote letters home and cared about their families (just like Shego ultimately cared about her brothers -- but isn't it interesting how ashamed she was of that fact?). Aviarius is a threat to Shego's relatives; she's going to take him out. Period. That doesn't dilute her evil nature.
We already know what made Shego evil. Having tasted evil, she likes it and likes being that way. The woman is a recidivist (we've seen her in prison -- though having to listen to Junior sing was probably more than enough to discharge her debt to society -- and can surmise she's been back more than once since we've seen Kim capture her).
And we know from SiT just what kind of hell on earth Shego would create if she were in charge. Talk about evil.
There are very few people in history who could be described as pure evil. But as we've seen all too many times, you don't need to be pure evil to cause a great deal of pain and destruction. Garden variety hard core will do the trick.
Anyhoo, this is why I don't see Shego turning good and, to me, her being evil is one of the insurmountable barriers to a Kim/Shego relationship.
As much as I dislike KIGO, mad props for this one. Very funny! (And I guess, then, it's a good thing for Ron he's not a boy ... he's Ron!)
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Post by cloudmonet on Jan 19, 2006 23:22:40 GMT -5
Hmmm. How many times to you hear about someone who committed heinous crimes in their youth getting identified and arrested in a different state, with a different name, a family with no idea of their evil past, and so forth? Not real often, but it does happen. In a very real sense, they stopped being evil. Some crimes have a statute of limitations. Murder doesn't. Escaping prison doesn't either.
Put a time monkey in Shego's hands, and she'll do whatever evil she can with it. Shego talks tough, really tough, but has she actually killed anyone? I'm not arguing that she couldn't, I think she could, but has she?
But what if things went the other way? What if her crimes piled up on her to give her really long sentences? What if the prison system came up with a cell that would actually hold her? If she did get away, she might go straight like those people in the news who got caught years later.
Give Shego different external pressures, and she'll respond differently. She's nor real stable. Making bad guys go good may be harder than making good guys go bad, but it does happen sometimes.
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Post by surforst on Jan 19, 2006 23:31:02 GMT -5
Shego talks tough, really tough, but has she actually killed anyone? I'm not arguing that she couldn't, I think she could, but has she? Well considering all the times she really did try to kill Kim. For example how many people here would think throwing someone in a welded box, with holes, into a water filled bit that's top was iced over isn't an attempt to kill them. Has Shego actually killed? Who knows but she has tried and that is judgement enough on her. Shego is a bad person plain and simple. |
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Post by allaine on Jan 20, 2006 8:57:30 GMT -5
If Shego ever thought that one of Drakken's death-traps could possibly kill Kim Possible, then she's not evil. She's nuts.
Sincerely, Allaine ;D
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Post by Aers (That Writer Chick) on Jan 20, 2006 9:12:02 GMT -5
but let's not forget that in KP's world the villains are held to a different standard - I mean, let's face it - if villains in the comic and cartoon world acted like the ones in *our* world everyone would have a gun and just shoot them, period!
remember Kim lambasting Falsetto Jones for staying to watch them die? And SSS berating Junior for this and that because villains have a code of evil to live by?
personally I enjoy the fact that there are no firearms (seriously) in the KP world - otherwise Kim and Ron would have a lot more bulletholes in them. As for Shego, I think she's evil in an "I'm anti-good" way - she wants to be exactly opposite of her brothers, so she's evil.
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Post by allaine on Jan 20, 2006 10:27:40 GMT -5
but let's not forget that in KP's world the villains are held to a different standard - I mean, let's face it - if villains in the comic and cartoon world acted like the ones in *our* world everyone would have a gun and just shoot them, period! remember Kim lambasting Falsetto Jones for staying to watch them die? And SSS berating Junior for this and that because villains have a code of evil to live by? personally I enjoy the fact that there are no firearms (seriously) in the KP world - otherwise Kim and Ron would have a lot more bulletholes in them. As for Shego, I think she's evil in an "I'm anti-good" way - she wants to be exactly opposite of her brothers, so she's evil. So if we can find a way to make her brothers evil, Shego might very well give up villainy in disgust?  Sincerely, Allaine |
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Post by Aers (That Writer Chick) on Jan 20, 2006 11:00:35 GMT -5
So if we can find a way to make her brothers evil, Shego might very well give up villainy in disgust? Sincerely, Allaine ooh... I like that one! just imagine the possibilities...  |
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Post by The Last Son of 84 on Jan 20, 2006 11:05:51 GMT -5
Oh, I've gone down that path once before with a fic. It certainly did bring about ways to put the characters through hell and make them better for it.
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Post by MrDrP on Jan 20, 2006 12:13:56 GMT -5
If Shego ever thought that one of Drakken's death-traps could possibly kill Kim Possible, then she's not evil. She's nuts. Sincerely, Allaine ;D Oh, I think that's letting Shego off the hook. In Golden Days she lowers Kim into a crock-infested swamp. I sincerely do not think Shego expected Kim to escape. But yes, Shego probably is nuts, just for working with Drakken ... |
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Post by Aers (That Writer Chick) on Jan 20, 2006 12:29:39 GMT -5
ooh... just imagine a psychologist's notes on Shego... *shivers* |
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Post by cloudmonet on Jan 20, 2006 20:55:49 GMT -5
The lasers substituted for them have similar effect. If Kim can dodge lasers, she can probably dodge bullets.
I thought about the gun problem when writing my first Kim/Ron story, "Big Monkeys." It didn't seem reasonable to give lasers to a bunch of impoverished African revolutionaries. And good old Will Du showed up with Globasl Justice antiexplosive foam. Now I know why all the villains in Kim's America, Europe, and Japan use lasers. There had to be a reason.
That's attempted murder. Still a crime, but not quite the same legal problem for the perp.
"But officer, it was part of a magic act we were rehearsing! You have to believe me."
"So not," said Kim, producing the flip pad labelled Dr. Drakken's deadly plot.
"That was part of the act, too. Then, see, Dr. Drakken uses the transportulator to get her out and..."
This is where the lawyers get involved.
I'm not arguing that Shego's not bad, just that she could stop being bad if forced by sufficient pressure. If you want a good Shego, it's not impossible to get one. Difficult, but not impossible.
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Post by Scoutcraft Piratess on Jan 21, 2006 13:10:40 GMT -5
So if we can find a way to make her brothers evil, Shego might very well give up villainy in disgust? Sincerely, Allaine That's what I would like to see. For me, no. She might be disgusted that they were also evil, but she has done so much evil, and she does seem to like it enough, that I believe she would stick to it. |
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Post by clayton on Jan 23, 2006 16:20:56 GMT -5
Ron may be an admitted slacker, but it still doesn't change what I've written about him. Yes, I can see those two dating for more than a week. My wife and I know everything about each other and for a long stretch of our relationship (the part from when we first met to after our engagement) we did everything together - work, play, etc. There was still lots to talk about. Even when there was nothing to talk about. It happens when you're in love. Yes, Kim knows those things about Ron and, guess what, she still likes being with him. Guess she's not as shallow as some people have suggested. And Ron puts up with a lot from Kim, too -- her temper, her bossiness for starters. Gee. Sounds like two people who actuallyc are about one another. Shego sure seems to dislike Kim every time they encounter one another. As for the magazine? More likely that she's reading up on her foe -- Know Your Enemy. They only work closely together when their mutual survival requires it. Pet names? How about terms of derision. And Kim never calls Shego anything other than Shego. Actually, Shego made derisive comments about Kim's fashion sense in that episode, ridiculing Kim's fleece. ("And this advice comes to us from a fashion-don't in fleece!" Shego says, followed by "It's gonna blow the pipeline, Kimmy, and you're skin definitely doesn't need more oil." I can feel the love there.) Something tells me Shego was wearing green long before it became hip. Bad boys. Here's the actual dialog: Ron: So, you like the bad boys? Kim: Well sometimes I…[Kim’s dad walks by]… no, not at all, but some girls do. Kim's never says "boys" so her voice can't be shaky, which means your point is moot. Now, maybe Kim likes bad boys. And this proves she has something in common with Shego, how? Danny in Agony County is a far cry from Drakken -- or Shego. Team up. See above. Martial arts styles are similar. Okay, great I'll spot you that. Enough to build a relationship on? Nuh uh. The vault thing. Are you saying Shego doesn't want to hurt Kim? Then why did she try to kill her at Granny Crockett's? Or feed her to the gators in Everglades? The vault thing is explained by the KP universe's strange laws of physics, not Shego's affection for KP. Powers. Shego gave the scepter to Kim to cover up for her unaccustomed good deed on behalf of her brothers. Shego cares about her evil rep. The fact that she was embarrassed by what she did was evident by how she slammed Drakken afterwards. Similar interest in clothes. Yes, they like wearing them. I don't get the impression that Shego actually likes to shop, which Kim clearly enjoys. Further, Kim and Shego dress quite differently, that club banana jacket aside. I can't see Shego wearing capris ... The question about Shego working with Kim and what that would mean for Ron's chances be is pointless -- it has nothing to do with the KP universe that actually exists. The fact is Kim works with Ron -- that's a huge part of what makes them tight -- and they fight Shego. Sure, if Kim didn't work with Ron and never really got to know him, then things might be different; who knows, Kim might be nothing but a shallow cheerleader. The fact is, you many not like Ron, but Kim does. And as Kim says in The Ron Factor "I wouldn't go freak fighting without him." Shego's being a woman is irrelevant to my arguing this point of Shego v. Ron. I for one would still feel this way if Shego were a guy who appeared out of the blue. We've actually been there: it's called Erik. And we really saw Kim at her finest there, didn't we? Ignore your loyal friend who's risked his life for you for some crush who happens to be better looking and, possibly, smarter. A great message to send to kids, by the way. Friendship, compatibility, loyalty? Nah, those don't matter in a relationship. Fortunately for Kim, when the chips were down, she turned to the one person she knew she could count on -- Ron. And when all was lost, he was there for her. Yeah, I'm Kim I'd definitely want to walk away from that kind of guy. Sorry, but I give our Kimmie a little more credit. She knew what she was doing when she took Ron's hand and led him to the prom. Finally, I can't speak for others, but my issue isn't with same-sex pairings. It's with this one (Shego/Kim) in particular. There's no basis for it and no way for it to work. Kim and Ron may break up, but at least they're together, per canon. There is no evidence of interest on Shego's part towards Kim, nor is there is any evidence of any interest on Kim's part towards Shego (and please don't cite the picture in her locker; by that argument, she also wants to do something nasty with Drakken behind bars). Even if one were to accept all of your points as valid, which I don't, the best youcould, assuming you want to somehow, some way bring Shego and Kim together and stay true to the characters, is have Shego abduct Kim, use her, and leave her to suffer afterwards. That may seem harsh, but there it is. Shego is a mercenary predator, not some secret romantic longing to kiss her enemy. Anyway, that's all I have to say. We're obviously not going to agree on this or change one another's minds on the matter. Several times Kim has worn Shego's clothes... And it's only a matter of time until Shego tries replacing Kim by dressing up like her.  |
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Post by MrDrP on Jan 23, 2006 16:34:40 GMT -5
Sorry, friend, but Kim wore a Shego outift exactly once, and that was in Twin Factor when she was under mind control. We can assume that Drakken had her don the suit, thinking it was appropriate henchwoman's attire.
There's absolutely no evidence for this statement. Shego holding Kim's helmet (is that shot from Ron Millionnaire?) says, uh, nothing ...
Finally, I'm amused by the pics you have at the bottom of your message. The two fan art pictures are well done, but irrelevant, since they have nothing to do with the show. The three screenshots have Kim and Shego fighting; Kim is looks horrified in two of them, tweaked in the third. Shego looks sadistic in the first, vicious in the second of them, tweaked in the third. Sure looks like those two can't stand each other to me ...
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Post by Aers (That Writer Chick) on Jan 23, 2006 16:36:23 GMT -5
and it's "borrowed", not "barrowed"... unless you're thinking they've decided to start living underground. |
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Post by apoptosis on Jan 23, 2006 17:20:13 GMT -5
Sorry, friend, but Kim wore a Shego outift exactly once, and that was in Twin Factor when she was under mind control. We can assume that Drakken had her don the suit, thinking it was appropriate henchwoman's attire. Maybe it was just me, but I think that suit looks a whole lot better on Shego than on Kim. >.> The green/black combination just matched Shego because of her eye and hair color, but with Kim, IMO, the green/black of the suit with Kim's red hair just clashed.  I mean, it wasn't horribly wrong, but I just didn't think it complimented her well. Eh, I still digress. But, more back on topic: Can we agree that there is no intended Kigo subtext in the actual KP show, but with enough time and catalysts and a good work-up, the two characters could possibly (no pun intended) hook up in the fanfiction world? Which then leads to another question, would Kigo fanfiction with such a good solid foundation (we've spent about 6 pages discussing plausible setups, so any of those) totally violate canon? Or maybe just stretch it a bit? If set far enough in the future, still remain in the realms of canon? What exactly IS canon? Just the show itself? I mean, in all fanfic stories, we all have to make SOME guesses and assumptions of material not explicitly mentioned in the show itself? Canon? Mostly canon? Ahh, more questions than I can answer.  Apologies for continually re-hashing this thread, but I'm really enjoying chatting with everyone, and already, I know of several ways I could have rewritten or reworked my original and first Kigo story, and now have several ideas of what I would like to do in the future to improve the...ahh, believe-ability (coinage, anyone?) of a Kigo-based story occuring in the KP universe. So, thank you again. |
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I mean, it wasn't horribly wrong, but I just didn't think it complimented her well. Eh, I still digress.