I was introduced to shipping relatively recently. Like three years ago recently. And I ship a lot of characters. I ship like twenty characters. But one thing that always baffled me was that elusive OTP. Apparently everyone had an OTP. Some people had four thousand OTPs, which baffled me even more, since the O is supposed to stand for one. And yeah, my ships are adorable and all, but none of them evoked the sheer emotional destruction that is supposed to go hand in hand with an OTP.
Until now.
I was introduced to Tumblr relatively recently. Like a year ago recently. And in that time, I saw so many posts (especially gifsets) about shows I hadn’t seen yet. Some I hadn’t even heard of. Like In the Flesh. From the posts, I discovered that In the Flesh was a romance show about high functioning zombies. I thought that seemed like an interesting take on the zombie genre, so I decided to watch it.
Oh my.
In the Flesh turned out not be a pure romance at all, but rather a general drama show. I’ve got to say, I’d probably be better off right now if it had just been a romance. Because my emotions are not okay! Anyone who knows me knows that I get really worked up about discrimination. And my feelings about its portrayal in fiction are pretty contradictory, as on one hand, I love the realism that it brings, but on the other hand, witnessing it makes me physically angry. X-Men did it with mutants. Dark Angel did it with transgenics. And In the Flesh is doing it with Partially Deceased Syndrome sufferers (the show’s medical term for zombies).
But the show isn’t all just anger.
And that’s where the the romance aspect comes into it. Despite the fact that quite a bit of my anger at the show revolves around the relationships between characters, they’re still so easy to get caught up in. Watching Kieren grow and learn to accept himself as a result of his relationship with Simon… Watching Simon struggle between between upholding his beliefs and honouring and protecting the man he loves… It drives me crazy. It’s beautiful and sad and maddening and grounding and inspiring all at once.
And if this show doesn’t get renewed for season three… If I am left with less than six hours of footage of my very first (and probably only) OTP… Oh I won’t exaggerate. I’ll just be very very sad.
rantings of the ninja robot 