Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-4839682-20130723082014/@comment-22525977-20130924061844

I don't actually ship Swan Queen in the show, although I did up until about halfway through the first season—I stopped after their relationship went from "obvious UST and fairly reasonable but not unconquerable antagonism stemming from the situation at hand" to "legitimately hating each other," and now that we're in season two and they've both made it very, very clear that they'd be 100% okay with the other dying, I'm definitely not shipping them any longer. Which is a shame, because initially I think they could have been taken in a really great direction.

On the other hand, I'm in the process of writing a really massive crossover AU of OUaT wherein they're all but certain to end up falling for each other (and I say all but certain because at this point, Emma hasn't gotten to Storybrooke and I can't be completely sure that these versions of them will have chemistry until I start writing them together. But based on the outline and the changes in Regina's past caused by the crossover + the way she and Emma interacted in the early stages of season one, it looks very much like it's going to happen).

So I guess that makes me a strictly-non-canon Swan Queen shipper, or at the very least a early-season-one-point-of-departure Swan Queen shipper?

(Mind you, I have a lot of problems with the way romantic love is portrayed on the show in general and also the insistence that people are broken without it; right now my ideal would be for Regina to not have any love interests but develop meaningful friendships with other members of the cast and in so doing begin to heal.)

Regarding homophobia: I think it's less that Swan Queeners immediately decry anyone who isn't in to Swan Queen as homophobic as a defense mechanism (at least, not the ones I know of; there could well be crazies that I've managed to avoid thus far—happens in every fandom with every ship), and more that a lot of people—myself included—see the nigh-universal lack of representation of characters outside the heteronormative spectrum as a symptom of our culture's deeply ingrained problems with homo/bi/ace/trans/etc. phobia.

Thus, it's not the dismissal of this one ship specifically that is homophobic, it's that the dismissal of this ship IN ADDITION to buckets of other LGBTQIA ships is percieved as both correlated with and contributing to this very widespread problem. It's not as if these things are coming out of a vacuum.