next_to_normal | Wrong!shipping Meme

Day 14: The ship you love for the angst, banishing all joy and sunlight.
Aeryn Sun/John Crichton (Farscape)

There are a lot of things to love about Aeryn/John. They're hilarious, they're badass, they're gender-bending, they're opposites, they're an interspecies romance, they change each other for the better. But the thing that qualifies them for wrong!ship status is the fact that they're both battle-scarred, traumatized people who've each died twice and at least one of them is almost certainly losing his mind. Their PTSD is off the charts. And it's the emotional damage, more than anything else, that keeps them apart for most of the series. AND I LOVE EVERY SECOND OF IT.

It's not enough that he's stranded in an unknown part of the universe with no idea how to get home, or that she's been banished from the Peacekeepers and forced to give up the only life she's ever known. If that were all they had to deal with, it'd be a pretty happy ending, because they learn to trust each other and grow closer and fall in love and discover that they can both be more than what they were.

And then Aeryn dies.

Aeryn's death is all the more devastating because John's the one who kills her. Not on purpose - he wasn't in control of his brain at the time - but still. He gets control back just in time to watch her die, knowing that it was his doing, and he's overwhelmed with guilt. They bring her back, of course, but at a terrible cost, and Aeryn's determined never to let anyone sacrifice themselves for her again, even if it means keeping the people she loves - especially John - at a distance. Then all of a sudden there are TWO Johns (don't ask). They're identical, as proven by a never-ending series of ties in Rock, Paper, Scissors - but when the crew is forced to split up, only one of them gets to go with Aeryn.

And again, they grow closer and they fall even more in love, and it's going so well that Aeryn agrees to go back to Earth with John, which is a pretty serious commitment considering she's an alien. Which is, of course, when John sacrifices himself and dies, leaving Aeryn brokenhearted.

But wait! There's another John, right? They're identical. It's all good. They'll just pick up where they left off and it'll be okay. Right? Nope. Because now they're at completely different places emotionally - while he's been pining for her all this time, she's lived a whole relationship with him and lost him. And Aeryn is so traumatized by the death of "her" John that she can't bear to even be around the surviving one. And they let a coin toss decide their fate, and Aeryn walks away.

When they're reunited once again, Aeryn's managed to sort out her emotions and realizes that she loves John Crichton, not this John or that John, and she's ready to be with him. Except John can't trust her anymore - because she left without telling him she was pregnant, and because she came back in the company of John's greatest enemy. He's so determined to shut Aeryn out that he actually takes drugs to get rid of his feelings for her. It doesn't work, though, and once they've been through hell to defeat the bad guys, they finally manage to get it together and John proposes and Aeryn accepts and it's all very beautiful and that's precisely when they both get killed again.

No, seriously.

And that's where the show ends. Except it doesn't, because Peacekeeper Wars! In which there is resurrection of sorts, a shotgun wedding (with actual guns), and a baby born in the middle of a war, because nothing is ever easy for these two, not even their happily ever after.
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