Why I don't ship E/C

[betweensunandmoon]

It's not just that I prefer Raoul and identify more with Raoul than with Erik, though that is part of it. I wouldn't ship Erik and Christine even if there were no Raoul at all because the relationship is so very obviously unhealthy for both of them. It surprises and worries me that so many people seem willing to overlook that.

Comments

[erimia]

My main problem with E/C is not even that it's unhealthy - after all, some people may like this or that pairing because they find the relationship interesting, not because they think it's a right way to have a relationship or because it's something they would want to have in real life - but because it's so often written/presented in the way that I don't find interesting. This post pretty much sums up what I dislike about the certain approach to E/C that is and always has been very popular:

But where most E/C shippers go wrong is in assuming that because their dynamic is more interesting and more appealing, Erik and Christine are going to settle down happily and have eight children and make sweet sweet music of the night together until they die at a ripe old age, romantically curled up in the coffin in one another's arms. An ending like that is, quite frankly, R/C dressed up with a mask and some pretty music. The excitement and passion of their relationship, let loose as it is in so many twisted forms, makes it ridiculously unstable; to remove the instability is to remove what makes E/C appealing.

(Obviously I disagree with them that R/C is boring or less interesting). A lot of E/C fics are precisely about "settling down happily and having eight children" and it comes with its own bag of problems: changing characters' personalities (like making Erik less dangerous or more attractive), glossing over Erik's crimes and psychological issues, glossing over Christine's trauma, creating a Christine that either is nothing like in canon and sometimes is too bland/"everywoman", diminishing other characters and relationships and just ending up looking too damn similar to a "stereotypical" romance novel. Some of these problems may crop up in R/C as well, but generally this pairing is just more... balanced, whether in their relationship dynamics, their personalities, the amount of interest the fans have in either character, the level of grounding in reality etc.

[igenlode]

Love doesn't have to be certified healthy to be permissible (what chance would most of us have if it were? I've had enough trouble trying to convince psychiatrists that just because something hurts that doesn't mean I want to forget it, or stop it hurting if the choice is between pain or nothing.)

I don't 'ship' Erik/Christine because it doesn't happen, and trying to violate Christine's integrity when she's pretty explicit about what she does and doesn't want not only offends my sense of canon but seems to me a pretty rotten thing to do to a character. Erik loves Christine. Christine doesn't love Erik, and the more she sees of him the more scared of him she gets. That's sort of fundamental to the whole plot, and if you change that basic dynamic you're not writing fan-fiction -- you're pretty much writing your own romance and putting the labels of your favourite characters on the protagonists.

"If there were no Raoul at all" is an interesting supposition. I've a feeling I have come across stories taking that premise ("Phantom of the Paradise" is of course one where the Phantom and Raoul are effectively the same person -- at any rate, Swan certainly isn't Raoul), and while that ought to offend me more on the grounds of being wildly distant from canon, in practice it doesn't seem to have that effect.
It does have a tendency to morph into straight "Beauty and the Beast" territory, where monster imprisons girl who eventually perceives that he is a big softy underneath.