Disclaimer: If you don’t know what I mean when I say “ship,” fear not! I only learned about this term in the last year. Apparently it’s been around for a while, but I am not as up with the slang as I used to be. Thank goodness for 21 year old sisters who can keep you in the loop! Anyway, “ship” is short for “relationship” and to “ship” a couple means to support their relationship. I like how they (they being the assorted teens of the internet, presumably) took the end of a noun, made it a word of its own, and then made that word into a verb. Kudos. A related term, which I also recently learned, thanks to Friend of Christine (™), Katie, is “OTP.” OTP stands for “One True Pairing” and … well, I’m not totally sure what it means and how it’s different from ship, other than I think it’s like your uber-ship. Like, I’m not totally sure who my OTP is, but I think it could be like Coach and Tami or Buffy and Angel (possibly mine) or something like that.
Anyway, I’m going to add I Don’t Ship It as a new recurring feature on the blog, one in which I stake out my contrarian feelings on certain ships. To be sure, many of my ships conform to the conventional wisdom, but some do not. Those will be the focus of these posts. Ok, so let’s take it away!
Honestly, I feel like my true hatred of the Fitz and Olivia ship shouldn’t be the least bit controversial or contrarian, but I know that it is, which I find deeply confusing and bewildering. Here’s what I think: Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant III have the most, manipulative, codependent, borderline abusive relationship on television right now. Every scene between them makes me cringe and/or yell at my TV and kind of ruins the flow of the show for me.
Here’s the argument that Fiz/Liv shippers make: they are truly in love and are each other’s soulmates and have been kept apart by cruel circumstance and will one day live happily ever after. My rejoinder: where, exactly, is the proof of that? We hardly ever see Liv and Fitz having a conversation. We don’t see them just chatting about what they’re interested in or what they’re up to or whatever. I get that the stakes are heightened since he’s the POTUS and she’s Olivia freaking Pope, but I truly feel that we have seen no real evidence that these two are “in love” beyond the fact that they are obsessive about one another and seem to have great sexual chemistry. Is that love? Is that what we’re promoting as love in the 21st century? Because that really disturbs me and creeps me out. (But it does make me feel like my cynicism was correct all of these years, so, bonus.)
In reality, Olivia Pope is an amazingly fun character–she’s strong, she’s independent, she’s smart, she’s sassy–who is completely dragged down by her obsession with Fitz. Because Fitz is a horrible character (unlike Olivia, who is not). We are repeatedly told that Liv, Cyrus, Mellie, etc. all see greatness in Fitz, which is why they rigged the election for him and why they put up with his BS week after week. But what, exactly, have we the audience seen from President Grant? He’s a drunk, he’s incredibly mean to his wife (like, all the time and in public), he’s emotionally manipulative, and he’s weak. It’s just completely unclear to me why someone as great as Olivia Pope would be so obsessive about this particular man. I understand that people have their weaknesses and blind spots, but Olivia’s for Fitz is so inexplicable that it really detracts from someone who is otherwise one of the strongest female characters in fiction.
I also can’t stand the brazenness with which these two operate. I know Mellie knows about them, but last week they were just blatantly making out in the Oval Office where she (OR ANYONE FOR THAT MATTER) could walk in! (And of course, Mellie did walk in and it was horrible.) I know Mellie is a difficult character, but the cruelty with which Fitz treats her is astounding to me. Even this week we saw a flashback to shortly after Mellie was raped by Fitz’s father. Fitz didn’t know about this because Mellie didn’t tell him, but we saw a scene of him berating her for being cold to him. This scene seemed mostly about him being upset because she wouldn’t sleep with him. He didn’t seem, like, I don’t know, worried that there might be something deeply wrong with his previously affectionate wife; no, he was just cranky that he wasn’t getting any. It infuriated me. And then Olivia had the stones to call Mellie out this week and tell her to stop doing whatever it was she was doing with the VP nominee. I mean, can you imagine the brass? Going up to the wife of the married guy with whom you are having an affair and telling her to stop flirting with some other guy? Where does Olivia Pope get the nerve?
All of that is not even to mention the gross and relatively abusive emotional manipulation that goes on between Liv and Fitz. I hate it, I hate watching it, and I hate thinking that someone out there thinks that Fitz and Olivia are OTP (used it!). I love Scandal, but everything to do with those two together removes me from what I enjoy about the show and just makes me cranky and disturbed. I wish we could live in a Scandal world where Fitz was gone forever, Mellie was the president (in case you haven’t noticed, I’m hardcore Team Mellie), and Olivia just went back to doing awesome Olivia Pope things like drinking wine without moping and saying “It’s handled” all the time. (And if she wanted to be with Jake, aka incredibly more attractive than he used to be Noel Crane, that would also be just fine with me.)
So there, blog people, I said it–Olivia Pope and Fitzgerald Grant III: I Don’t Ship It.
‘Til next time.
It’s Handled,
Christine
The Inactivity of Old Chris-teen 