it seems to be ship opinions time on fedi! please ask me mine! fandoms include: all of mxtx, nirvana in fire, any book/movie/musical/play/etc I've posted a review of in the last many years I've been on the internet.
@soph_sol I’m interested in your feelings about any ship from Spinning Silver
@lirazel I am so obsessed with Miryem/her Staryk lord omg. two powerful and capable and honour-driven people who have a wide gulf of cultural disconnect between them and who each have their own distinct goals they're working towards, who over time learn how to understand and respect the other for who they are. It's endlessly fascinating to me.
@soph_sol I also enjoy them. Also Miryem/Wanda tbh. She can have a complicated magical husband while she lives in Staryk land and then a sweet lovely girlfriend in human land.
@lirazel honestly....I never really saw it personally. I know a lot of people ship miryem/wanda but my ace goggles are too strong when it comes to wanda I think lol. wanda has absolutely become part of miryem's human-world family though!
(the f/f nnovik fairy tale retelling ship I ship passionately is Agnieszka/Kasia!)
@soph_sol I can read Wanda as ace too and am perfectly happy to do so.
You're 100000% right about Agnieszka/Kasia though. I am still bitter that wasn't canon. I'm not saying that the stuff with Agnieszka/the Dragon ruins the book for me because it doesn't. But Agnieszka/Kasia makes so much more sense and if it had gone that route, then Uprooted would also be one of my very favorite books like Spinning Silver is.
@soph_sol Novik doesn't seem very open-minded when it comes to ships. I haven't read her dragon Napoleon books, so maybe she's more willing to explore other dynamics there, but the Staryk lord and the Dragon are like the same character, and Mirnatius is like a brattier version of the above.
@plalligator @lirazel sigh yeahhhhhhhh. there are things I love about the dragon books. BUT. they are........imperfect.
@soph_sol @lirazel so true story, i started those books without knowing who she was and then my girlfriend had to be like “you know naomi novik is astolat, right” and i was like “WHAT?!??!” and at which point i just quit reading because the dissonance between what she was writing in fanworks and her published work was just too much.
@plalligator @soph_sol Oh, that's so interesting. I'm not sure that dissonance would bother me? But it's super interesting that it would you!
@soph_sol @lirazel for me, the fact that she made her name in fandom on old-school slash ships, but then in her published fiction there’s not a gay person to be found felt…telling. not that she has to put her wallet name on gay erotica but given that the dragon books started out as master & commander fic??? it was enough for me to take a pass on the rest of her stuff
@plalligator @lirazel YEAH it really rubbed me the wrong way for SURE. eventually like...five books into the dragon series, or so, she made a minor background m/m ship. but the degree to which her published works ignore queerness, as compared to her vast swathes of m/m fanfic, is a real statement.
@soph_sol @plalligator @lirazel This is a rant I get into with my wife often. Many of her fics are brillant: displaying flawed characters, diverse viewpoints of the same events, people in relationships growing together in new ways, forms of othering, many fascets of queerness, seamless world building. I read many of her fics with 0 knowledge of canon and every character felt fleshed out.
As for the published books, I loved some, but nowhere near the same complexity and 0.05 queerness. 😭
@soph_sol @plalligator @lirazel I dearly, dearly hope this is a matter of contracts and publishers, and perhaps, somewhere, she has other stuff published under a different name that I will stumble upon someday. And for all this specific salt, I am very happy she gets to write pro and that she still writes fics for pleasure that she chooses to share.
There are an increasing number of openly-fic-writers getting published, many doing queer works, and it is awesome. More cake! 
@MoonRaccoon @plalligator @lirazel honestly....I read an interview once with her years ago where she talked about wanting to write books where her daughter could read about women getting to do things and have relationships at the same time. so I think all the het is coming from her own impetus tbh.
also her fics have many good things but they're almost exclusively m/m with no other queerness to be found, which is.... certainly a perspective that some old-school slash fans take. plus the degree to which her fics display an interest in people from hereditary nobility and how great they are, it makes me uncomfortable too.
So I'm glad she's writing things that make her happy, and that she has a successful career, but I am no longer looking to her for stories that come from the same perspectives and priorities as me
@MoonRaccoon @plalligator @soph_sol @lirazel idk not to be too harsh but if i was specifically writing the books i wanted my kids to have making sure there was a whole rainbow of relationship types would be at the top of my list, not my reasoning for cutting everything but m/f out
@Satsuma @MoonRaccoon @plalligator @lirazel RIGHT?!