Romance in Star vs the Forces of Evil

Welp, here’s me opening up a can of worms…
Given the nature of Star vs the Forces of Evil, romance definately seems to be something heavily foreshadowed in the show, perhaps even more so than some other cartoons. Gravity Falls, for example, certainly has it as an aspect of the show, but most of shipping pretty much amounts to a few teases here and there. But Svtfoe starts the shipping from day one when Star and Marco first meet. Heck, the show in general seems to spoof the Magical Girlfriend genre of anime pretty heavily, so of course this is a conversation worth talking about.
This’ll pretty much be me examining what we’ve seen in the series so far and predicting which ships are likely to become canon and which ones aren’t. That being said, before anybody starts throwing knives at me, even if I have my own preferences, that doesn’t mean I’m automatically right. Fans of the show can ship who they want with whoever else they want. Even if I don’t agree with it, its not the end of the world.
Jackie and Marco
This…. isn’t a relationship I particularly care for. Jackie kind of serves the same role Trixie Tang does in Fairly Odd Parents; a faux love interest for the main character to fall for. Everything we know about Jackie comes from Marco’s point of view. We know she likes skateboarding. We know she’s “cool”, whatever that means. We know that she and Marco have been acquaintances for a really long time, but Marco never actually spoke more than a few words to her at a time.
At the current moment, I don’t think she has enough of a character to be a legitimate ship. That being said, there has been another character in a popular show who kind of started in a similar position to Jackie.
Originally posted by universe-and-universe-universal
Wendy Curdoroy from Gravity Falls was kind of underdeveloped in the first season. A lot of people actually didn’t think to much of her when the show first started; I know I didn’t. Season two comes around and suddenly she’s awesome. She’s a big sister to most of the cast. She’s lazy, snarky, and butch. The best scenes we’ve seen with her as a character only occurred when the Wendip ship was officially sunk. Hopefully, we might be able to see something similar with Jackie.
It is kind of interesting that Star ships these two in universe.
Star and Oskar
I actually like Oskar a bit more than Jackie, despite the fact that he is to Star what Jackie is to Marco. Mostly, I like his character design, and I think he’s funny. (On a tangental note, he’d probably play the role of “loser best friend” to Marco a lot better than Marco’s actual loser best friends, but thats just a thing I would change if I were in charge of the series. I am not in charge of this series. I’m a loser in college.)
Perhaps the biggest difference between Oskar and Jackie, though, is that Oskar doesn’t seem to have nearly as much room for character development. He’s a joke character.
Star and Jackie, Star and Janna, Janna and Jackie
( @svtfoeheadcanons)
We could only hope for a genuine lesbian relationship in this cartoon, but at the moment it seems unlikely. With that said, I have an easier time believing a characters like Star and Janna to be bisexual much more than a character like, say, Mabel Pines, but that’s pretty much restricted to fanon. Wishful thinking mostly, though a fandom can dream.
Tom and Marco
This… is pretty dang unlikely, if only because the two pretty much hate each other at this point. I suppose there is some resemblance between this ship and Dippifica, but Pacifica had a few redeeming qualities. Tom doesn’t.
Tom and Star
Slightly more likely than the above, but I still wouldn’t put my bets on it. If it were to happen, in theory, then Tom would have to make a complete and unambiguous turn to the side of good, but given his controlling personality, I don’t think that’s gonna happen. And if Star and Tom were to go out in their current state of character development, well, the lesson isn’t exactly too savory.
Star and Marco
Originally posted by discordlikesturkey
This is the ship that has the most foreshadowing, with pretty much every single episode hinting towards it in one way of another. The episodes with the most evidence for a relationship between these two include The Other Exchange Student, Cheer Up Star, Storm the Castle, and of course, Blood Moon Ball.
The Other Exchange Student clearly shows Star jealous of another person taking up the Diaz’s attention, while Cheer Up Star features several flashbacks of Star and Marco being cute together, trying to cheer the other one up. Blood Moon Ball, of course, features Marco becoming incredibly protective over Star, and maybe just a bit jealous of Tom.
With that said, though, their relationship isn’t perfect. In Blood Moon ball, despite the two having the light of the blood moon shine upon them, binding their destinies together, the fact of the matter is that Star didn’t want Marco to tag along from them, going so far as to have her scold him at the end of the episode. That particular element could suggest that Star just doesn’t see Marco as anything more than a best friend.
Storm the castle also features the two getting in a fight. Despite the fact that this show tends to be pretty gender neutral when it comes to the action scenes, Marco is still only human while Star is an alien princess with years of experience. There will be times when Marco is just too limited to go on adventures with the athletic Star Butterfly.
And yet that episode also features some of the strongest Starco imagery presented by the entire series, including the hugging gif shown above.
The relationship between Star and Marco is a very likely one indeed. Marco keeps Star in check, while Star takes Marco out of his shell. The issues that do occur between them, though, can either be interpreted as proof these two don’t belong together, or else obstacles the two must overcome to make their relationship stronger.
Now I could stop here and say that Marco and Star are going to be THE canon couple of the series, but I do see one more ship that might be just as likely:
Marco and Janna
( @gearholder )
Here’s an underrated ship that nobody seems to talk about.
Of all of the human students featured in the show other than Marco, Janna might be the character with the most defined personality. She’s witchy and interested in the occult, and she’s also something of a tease to Marco, in more ways than one.
Her first appearance was in Monster Arm, where she and Jackie are clearly shown admiring Marco’s new found appendage. Janna even out right says she wants the monster arm to be her boyfriend
Originally posted by elementlizard
(Yes, I am aware of the implications of this scene. So were the people behind the show.)
Janna makes a more prominent appearance in Mewberty, where she gets a hold of Star’s spellbook. Marco, of couse, needs the book pretty urgently. When he approaches Janna over the situation, the events that unfold are pretty dang flirty. Janna asks Marco if they can make some magic with it, and a few lines later says that he’ll need her soon enough. Granted, it’s because she took his house keys, but whatever.
The reason I believe this ship has some chance of becoming canon is because of what this means for the story and how it relates to the genre Svtfoe is directly spoofing.
If Svtfoe was a typical Magical Girlfriend story, then the introverted dorky main character would be Marco, the perfect girlfriend of fantastic origin would be Star, and Jackie and Janna would both be characters who Marco would of have had trouble with in the past.
Magical Girlfriend stories typically get criticized for a variety of reasons: It supports the typical Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, it objectifies pretty much every female character involved, and it suggests that the best romances are the ones that suddenly come out of nowhere, and that romances between friends are doomed to end in heartbreak.
Svtfoe, though, isn’t a typical Magical Girlfriend show. Star herself is the point of view main character, and is far from a perfect person. She isn’t meant to be the perfect male fantasy. She’s meant to be her own character. Theres a reason why this show features her name in the main title.
Meanwhile Marco himself is also a main character. In a show like Svtfoe, where the tropes of these stories are thrown on its head, it makes plenty of sense for Marco to NOT enter the relationship with the “Magical Girlfriend” character, and to instead pursue the childhood friend character that is so often ignored in these kinds of stories. Janna and Marco have the same childhood friend angle he and Jackie have, while at the same time carrying a similar character dynamic as Star and Marco, where Marco keeps Jackie out of trouble, and Jackie takes Marco out of his shell.
Honestly though, with this kind of show, it could go either way. If the show ends with Star and Marco, well, that’s a sweet relationship between two character’s we’ve been following since the beginning. If its Marco and Janna, then its a subversive relationship going against the typical tropes of this genre. I’d honestly be happy with either happening.
And I suppose this is the part where I hand the question of to you. Which ship do you guys support? Did I miss anything. Did I get anything wrong? It’ll be a nice conversation. Now if only Tumblr let me allow responces.