Eh, I don’t know if he was trying to make himself more relatable to fans. Tbh, I don’t think he’s ever been particularly interested in that. This is not the first time, however, that I have heard him say that shipping just isn’t how he engages with narrative. Which, you know, fine. But romance and the development of romance has been a staple of storytelling since, I dunno, Gilgamesh. And any writer worth his salt should know that and have a basic sense of what an audience responds to when it comes to romance. And it seems a little bit silly to chide fans for having feelings about it.
But shipping culture is…it’s own weird thing. It takes investment in romance into this entirely different realm, and in addition to conflating crack shipping with shipping more generally, I think Bryan and a lot of writers get frustrated with the demands and expectations that shippers place on them, particularly when 1) satisfying those demands would compromise the story they are trying to tell, and 2) romance (particularly one particular couple) becomes a fan’s only point of identification or investment in that story.
So to be fair to Bryan and to all the other writers and showrunners out there, I think that is incredibly frustrating! In fact, I think it’s a big reason why shippers need to stop asking creators, writers, and actors about shipping! Because not only does it almost automatically put them on the defensive but it asks them to become complicit in a mode of viewing that really could seriously compromise their ability to tell the story effectively.
Shipping and fandom culture is, after all, about playing around in the gaps and interstices in the narrative, making subtext the actual text. But shippers and fans also have a bad habit of treating their headcanons as gospel and insisting that everyone see these minor details in this particular way. And that is toxic not only for other fans but for creators and writers who feel that demands are being placed upon them to follow through on subtexts and implications that they never intended to put there in the first place!
In fact, this feels like exactly what happened with Korrasami. I don’t want to get too conspiratorial in my thinking. My assumption is that Bryan had personal reasons for making that relationship canon, that he wasn’t just trying to please fans. But my impression is that at some point, he started to look at that relationship like a shipper and not like someone who had control over the direction of the story. And I think it gave him a way to rationalize making that relationship a canon romance without putting very much thought into its development. Because in a shipper’s eyes, that subtext is enough. In fact, for a shipper, characters don’t even need to interact with one another in order to be shippable. So any kind of subtext is a gift. All the rest can be filled in with headcanon. And I maintain that this is one of the reasons why Korrasami is so appealing for a lot of people - it is heavy on subtext and extremely headcanon-friendly. There are no inconvenient canon interactions (like, say, Makorra’s B2 breakup) to work around.
But as I’ve always said, what satisfies a shipper isn’t necessarily going to satisfy everyone else. And it bothers me that Bryan’s self-identification as a Korrasami shipper allows him (and some fans) to sort of give himself a pass on the lack of substance Asami was given and the lack of specificity that friendship was given.
And about friendship: I think one of the other issues going on here is that BOTH Bryan and Mike are just far more interested in telling stories about friendship than they are about romance. In fact, numerous comments, including Bryan’s dismissive statements about “love interests,” point to the fact that they see platonic relationships as a higher expression of love than romance. And they are not the only writers to see things this way. Although if they are going to use Miyazaki as a model, they need to understand what actually makes his platonic formula work: the absence of acknowledged romantic feelings.
Furthermore, it would be nice if he understood that what makes most female love interests uninteresting is the fact that they are written that way, usually only for the purpose of servicing the hero’s development. That they could ever see Korra that way relative to Mako is mind boggling to me. Korra is the hero of her own fucking story. That they could say something like that while not seeing that fact that Asami is written as a typical love interest for both Korra and Mako (and then there’s all these nameless women who are apparently shippable with Mako) is kind of nuts to me. Of course, their tendency to toss romantic relationships into their stories left and right would seem to belie that, but the relationships they are clearly the most interested in as storytellers really seem to be friendships (the one giant fucking exception being Kataang, which Bryan denounced as “forced” in his post-finale post).
I think this prioritization of platonic relationships over romance is also somewhat evident in the fact that he seems far more interested in Korrasami as a political statement than as an actual romance. Both of his big posts about it have referenced LGBTQ issues, and that’s all fine. I’m glad he stands for good causes. But 1) this tendency to lean on the political value of the relationship plus 2) the bland “they live happily ever after” statement in the commentary plus 3) the fact that his art show piece was similar to the point of plagiarism to a lot of Korrasami art that I have seen on tumblr, all suggest to me that he has very few ideas about what this relationship really looks like, how it really functions.
Finally, while I would say that my description of problematic shippers above could certainly apply to Makorra and Korrasami shippers alike, I do not see shippers as a monolith. In fact, for numerous people in both groups, the primary source of identification and engagement in the narrative was Korra herself, not necessarily Korra in any particular relationship. This is why a lot of what happened in the finale was hurtful, not because of sour grapes over shipping but because of what happened with Korra. And this is why the focus on shipping to the exclusion of everything else (not just on tumblr but in Bryan’s public posts and in the media) is exhausting and disheartening.