Why people like Luaggie and odd couples

The following is based off my opinions and observations.



Originally posted by pepemay93

This is the only gif I could find of them by the way. I haven’t figured out how to upload pictures from desktop.





So I haven’t really been vocal about being a Loud House fan on here, mainly because I want to avoid (often manufactured) fandom drama that often comes up in my circle of friends and acquaintances; but some of the few discussions I’m willing to engage in these the fandom are shipping’s and alleged shipping wars. Shipping’s are a funny thing - they are a small thing all things considered, and yet people make these big deals about them as if they are the center of the fandom as a whole.



Because this is Luaggie Week in The Loud House fandom at the time I am writing this, I decided to use Luaggie, and other Loud House" ships - both canon or non canon, and both romantic and non romantic - as examples. But Luaggie is the primary example here.



“So what is Luaggie ?” It is a popular non canonical ship in the Loud House fandom, and is a good example of a “Fanfic Ship” - This means a ship that can only work in fanfiction and is very, very, very unlikely to work in canon. And why is that ? Because Luan has a canonical lover interest in Benny and in the actual show Maggie only appears in one episode, and doesn’t remotely interact with Luan in the actual episode. Maggie’s mother appears in the show more than Maggie herself, and that is as a background character.



This is because Maggie is an Ensemble Darkhorse, which TV Tropes defines as “A secondary or minor character in a work who becomes popular among the works fandom”. What Maggie made popular ? Arguably because she was a teenage version of Haiku (an Ensemble Darkhorse in her own right) or was an emo girl who was the opposite of Luan in terms of personality, but close to her age that it would be believable they’d know eachother. From such, fanfics and/or fan art did one or two things to Maggie; they either pair her up with Luan, or more rarely make Maggie a big sister to Haiku. It should be noted that Maggie is hardly the only example of the Ensemble Darkhorse trope in the Loud House, and is hardly the only secondary/minor character to be shipped with one of the main characters.



“So what makes Luaggie so special ?” Nothing canonically, there’s two short and simple answers to this; some fans write fanfics and art, in turn other fans grew to like them. And so Luaggie spread, but what made them appeal ? Others answer with “opposites attract”; Luan is a clown girl for lack of a better word, and Maggie is a near stoic goth. But my answer is a little more lenient and applicable to other ships both in and out of The Loud House; canon or romantic or no. This is a little something called the Odd Couple and the appeals to these couples are not what they have in common, but what they don’t. They have differences that can play off eachother, and I think that’s what people like to see in polar opposite relationships. This dynamic is also applicable to non romantic relationships and family bonds.



And to demonstrate this, I present to you Loud House examples. The biggest familial and platonic example of this in the Loud House can be seen in Lola and Lana’s dynamic; as twins they are arguably the closest pair of sisters among the Loud siblings, and yet their entire characters revolve around how they are polar opposites of eachother. And for a romantic example, there was Lucy having a crush on Rocky, despite them being seeming opposites with Lucy being a total goth and Rocky…pretty much being your average nerdish kid. Other canon or non canon relationships apply to this dynamic; Lynn and Clyde -or Clynn- are a popular non canon pairing (a jock girl with a nerdish boy); Lincoln and Ronnie Anne - Ronnincoln - is considered one of the biggest pairings in the fandom and it also somewhat falls into the same category of a tough girl and not so nerdish boy. I bring these up because these “Tough Girl and Nerd Guy” kind of relationships have a special appeal to me for some reason. Both Lincoln and Clyde are also popularly paired up with Haiku, which can fall under the same category as Lucy and Rocky above.



Why is contrasting characters appealing to fans ? Because pairing someone up with someone who is the exact same as they are can get boring, if there is nothing to play off with. Let’s take the episode L is For Love for example; besides Benny, Sam, and Chaz, the love interests introduced for the sisters in this episode are basically male, two dimensional, carbon copies of the sisters that serve as plot devices to segway into the reveal that Luna is Bi; Sam was initially popular because she was a confirmed love interest for a major female character, and even then the episode where they go on a date has a plot about what they don’t have in common, which saves Sam from being a total copy cat of Luna; Chaz became popular because he was (physically at least) the opposite of Leni; Benny was initially popular because he wasn’t Maggie (more on that below) and even in his and Luan’s spotlight episode we see a slight difference between them in that Benny was more of a theatre lover than Luan, who was more of a comedian.

It should go without saying contrasts don’t always work for compelling positive relationships. Many of fictions greatest rivalries stem from how two rivals contrast eachother.

But didn’t Luaggie start a fan war ? Hardly. There was a pretty one sided fan war going on around the time Stage Plight aired. Because this was Luan and Benny’s episode, fans of them - Lunny’s -were getting all hyped that their ship was going to be made official, and spent a good amount of their time bragging about it to Luaggie fans. Now as I mentioned above one of the reasons why Benny became popular with fans in the first place was because he was a Luan love interest that wasn’t Maggie, and Luaggie detractors tend to hate it with a burning passion. Now I can see where they are coming from, considering Luaggie’s popularity in fanfics and art, and some fans have a problem when it comes to compartmentalizing fanon and canon. It gotten to the point that when Luaggie art used to get shared, Lunny fan’s would get all up and arms about how Benny was Luan’s love interest. What people call ship policing.



Trust me, I can understand their frustrations I’ve been on the receiving end of such things, so I can certainly put myself in their shoes, albeit with different ships.



Anyways, Stage Plight airs and Luan and Benny are an official couple. Did Luaggie’s complain ? Cry ? Leave the fandom ? Have a total social media meltdown ? No. For the most part, Luaggie’s I’ve seen and talked too generally took the episode in stride, said they liked the episode and went on with their lives. The episode certainly didn’t stop Luaggie fan works from being made, as the Lunny fans predicted. Because Luaggie was always a fanfic based ship, and I don’t think anyone seriously thought or expected them to be an actual couple in the show. Lunny fans on the other hand spent their time showboating and singing sweet victories over the “defeat” of the Luaggie fans, celebrating a war they made up in their own hands.



I have seen some go as far as to say Luaggie is a toxic ship, which I don’t see. I think people have different ideas over what a toxic ship is. A friend and I talked about two different ideas of what a toxic ship is; to him a toxic relationship was reflected by their fans and bullying behaviour they do in the name of their ship; to me a toxic ship would be a relationship that promotes or romanticizes abusive ideals such as rape, incest, pedophilia, victimization, etc. As such I don’t see how Luaggie falls into that category - although a non Loud House ship called Jemma from Every Witch Way, might fall into that category, but that an analytical rant for another day.



That being said, it does bring to mind the concept of Ship Policing, which means telling people who they are allowed to ship or not to ship and bullying others over them. Again, I think this might have to do with a failure to differentiate between popular fanon and canon, and I have been on the receiving end of this so I gotta vent.



Stress Induced Rant incoming



I once got into a shipping debate earlier this year regarding two non Loud House related ships in a Facebook group I’m in where the non canon Kigo ship of the Kim Possible fandom was brought up. I mentioned that Kigo didn’t really appeal to me due to re-watching the show and coming to the conclusion that Kigo would be canonically problematic, and their canon pairings (Kim x Ron, and Drakken x Shego) grew on me. At no point did I say Kigo doesn’t work as a fanfic couple, but canon wise, I saw too many problems that goes against Kigo’s favour in comparison to their canon boyfriends.



I am going to use this as an example of what shipping police are and how not to debate other fans. So when I mentioned I wasn’t into Kigo in comparison to KiRon and Drakgo, this one Kigo fan went ballistic and kept badgering me. So I explain myself, answer all her questions, and bring up some of my points and reasonings. In turn, she answers my points with Double Standards and Non Sequiturs; either dodging my questions or saying my answers don’t apply when they don’t go against her arguments. She then resorts to using fanfics as “proof” that Kigo would work in canon, and when that fails she starts making Ad Hominem attacks and personal insults - notably calling me retarded when my autism was briefly mentioned in the discussion - and went on about it well past midnight. Rule of thumb, when you resort to personal insults and attacking someone over an opinion that won’t budge, you kind of forfeit your argument. Luckily, this was only one Kigo fan, who doesn’t represent its fandom as a whole



Venting over.



Like I mentioned, ships are a funny - they actually mean very little in the grand scheme of things, but to fandoms, they are the center of the world.



I should also say there a third or fourth reason non canon ships become popular; a lot of fans either take note on onscreen chemistry a paring may have, or project some where there is none, and that is because fans tend to project themselves or their ideas onto characters they like, including what their ideal relationships would be like. It’s hardly exclusive to The Loud House fandom. Me for example, in stories I wrote but never posted, I paired a young adult version of Steven Lloyd from the Halloween series and Edith Sawyer from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series; I design them to have an obvious contrast between them and show how it would play off between the two, but these are two characters that never met in canon (especially since the two series never crossover). Had I wrote a legitimate Halloween/Texas Chainsaw crossover, chances are I’d implement that pairing into the story.



As far as Luaggie goes, I don’t see it as any different than another Leather and Lace relationship applied to fanfiction and fan art. What’s my opinion of them ? Really that depends on the fic or the artwork. I’m not gonna delude myself into thinking it’s gonna become canon or have some power over canon. Nor do I think it’s worth getting all hyped and excited for a non existant ship war.