A friend writes and asks me why I prefer Jack/Ianto over Jack/Gwen. I've really thought about it because the idea of  "shipping" -- well, let's just say I found fandom by doing a random search in Google looking for information about the series. Slash --what's that? But from the beginning, I was fascinated by the Jack/Ianto dynamic.

Partly it has to do with the two actors playing beautifully off each other. Let's face it, John Barrowman ain't never going to win an Oscar (although God knows weirder things have happened on Oscar night!), and Gareth David-Lloyd shows promise but hasn't really earned his chops yet. BUT... when they are together, they are believable. They are open to each other, and they trust each other (the convention pics prove it, I think), and so make us believe in the characters' vulnerability to each other. They have created two beautiful, damaged people coping the best they can, and maybe falling for each other in the process. It just happened that it's two men, rather than a man and a woman. I don't get anywhere near a similar vibe from John and Eve. They work well together but the vibe between them has a certain degree of distance. The way they play Jack and Gwen, to paraphrase another fictional alien, "the having would not be nearly as satisfying as the wanting."
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edited several times to try and make sense of it -- which means it probably doesn't.