I think safety comes into play strongly for me when I ship het, which is sometimes a hard thing to account for with something like Sif/Loki. Basically, with het, I tend to look for relationships that are basically healthy or could be healthy, but also have tension.

Actually, Sif/Loki having an element of safety to it makes total sense to me - it's one of the reasons I ship Sif/Loki and not Darcy/Loki is because Loki could have a temper tantrum and kill Darcy - Loki could probably kill Sif, but he'd have to work damn hard to do so, and I buy that Sif is enough of a statigist and knows Loki well enough that most of his favorite tricks wouldn't work on her.

Emma/Regina has taught me that those same narrative tropes mostly apply to f/f relationships too, but even then, my emphasis is less on the threat they pose to each other and more on how beneficial their relationship could be for both of them.

Same here. I just want them to live in Regina's house and co-parent Henry and have awesome sex and also fight things.


It's odd and confusing. I know there are differences, but I can't quite pinpoint why that is or why I have those hangups, or if it's even a bad thing to have them.

I think it's just interesting - it also reminds me of when I was talking about my list of favorite male character and how all of those men are people I would feel safe with (whereas, I wouldn't automatically feel as safe with, say, Regina or Adelle deWitte). (On that subject, you are not the only friend of mine who's a fan of mad scientist characters, and I think that element of chaos and unpredictability is part of why I don't fall for crazy mad scientist characters.)