Goveballs
| Goveballs | |
|---|---|
| |
| Michael Gove / Ed Balls | |
| Name | Goveballs |
| Description | Fighty bitey foeyay |
The sparkiest, snarkiest shadow pairing of the Brown and Coalition eras, Michael Gove and Ed Balls lit up Education Questions with their flirty trolling for more than three years before the tides of politics pulled them apart. Although their shadow relationship is long since dissolved, the pairing lives on.
History[edit | edit source]
Ed and Michael first came together when Michael was assigned to shadow Ed's Education Department during the last few years of the Brown Government. They spent their whole time trolling each other and then swapped places at the 2010 election and trolled each other some more. Both of them seemed to enjoy this adversarial relationship immensely, far more than they ever enjoyed any of their other ministerial jobs. Education Questions never had quite the same spark after Ed was reshuffled, and Ed was vastly more competent and dynamic when he was shadowing Michael than in his later roles.
In their capacity as opposing party spokesmen, they shared many, many flirty encounters in the Commons and in the television studios.
Support[edit | edit source]
95% of their interactions, to be honest. Here's a sampler.
Michael on the cookbook Ed published as education Secretary:
Fanon[edit | edit source]
The Meme[edit | edit source]
The first Goveballs fic set the tone for the pairing, in which sex is a continuation of parliamentary debate by other means. The standard dynamic is rough, snarky hatesex (or is it?) with each of them trying to get the best of the other, and one or both parties feeling ashamed of the liaisons but too addicted to them to stop. Goveballs fics tend to be heavily grounded in the real world, using their parliamentary debates and Michael's repeated cock-ups as Secretary for Education to provide context and drama. The well known insecurities of both partners supply a rich seam of angst and insults for writers to mine.
Goveballs spans the spectrum of Gove subbiness, from fics like the one linked above in which he is completely dominated by Ed despite his best efforts to fight back to ones in which they switch or Michael tops from the bottom to a few, especially in the early days of the pairing, in which he is the dominant partner. Fics also span the spectrum of consent, from a reasonably healthy tryst in which both Michael and Ed are getting something out of the relationship to bad life choice to emotional abuse to outright non-con. Most fall into the "bad life choice" category.
The hidden nature of Michael and Ed's positive feelings for each other, in many cases hidden even from themselves, makes the pairing a natural choice for hurt/comfort fics. There are a number of stories in which Ed or more frequently Michael suffers some sort of injury, deliberate or accidental or supernatural, and the other party comes to the rescue or visits the victim in hospital to offer snarky cheer.
AUs[edit | edit source]
Goveballs isn't a focal pairing in any of the major alternate universes, although its prevalence means that it does crop up from time to time around the edges, for instance in various fics set in the Wizardry AU.
However, Ed and Michael have some AUs all their own:
- "When The Minutes No Longer Work" - A dystopian AU in which they are the sole parliamentary survivors of an apocalyptic catastrophe eking out a living in ruined London.
- A college AU involving a kilt - Ed persuades Michael to come to his sorority party in a kilt. Humiliation, spanking and dub-con ensue.
- "Our Best First Mistake" - Michael knocks up genderswapped Ed at uni and they end up in a shotgun marriage.
