Enemies to lovers ships are NOT fundamentally the same as hero-villain ships but I don’t think Twitter is ready for that conversation

Enemies-to-lovers ships, definitionally, are between people on opposite sides of some ideological divide. They are *antagonists*. But an antagonist is merely someone who opposes a protagonist, and need not necessarily be a villain +

Because, to me, a villain is someone who deliberately takes actions which are in some way harmful. A villain has to be ~evil~ but antag doesn’t. Example: a character who’s solely an antag because they’re running against the protag in a student council election is not a villain.

Antagonists hinder each other’s goals, and while they are often binarily classifiable as “good” and “evil,” they don’t have to be to do that. Thus, enemies-to-lovers couples can start off on opposite sides without either of them actually having the moral high ground.

Hero-villain ships, by that definition, are between someone who is choosing to do evil and someone who is choosing to do good. This is a massive simplification, as being associated by default with a group doing evil things +

(good example: someone whose country is on the wrong/unjustifiable side of a war) does not necessarily make someone evil; to be a villain, the character has to concretely embrace ideals or take actions that harm others besides the protag whose goals they’re in the way of.

That would also be enemies to lovers but not necessarily a hero-villain ship. See also: ships between a hero and former villain who made a conscious choice to turn away from their villainy. There are a lot of variations on this but what I’m driving at is that there are MANY +

ETL ship dynamics that are not hero-villain. “Opposite sides/both morally neutral,” “opposed but neither is doing anything wrong”, “opposed by default but both trying to do good” - all of these fall under the ELT umbrella and to conflate them with hero-villain ships solely +

Because people typically think of HV shops when they think of ETL would be rather inaccurate. Hero-villain ships, to me, have to be between an unredeemed villain and a hero, and they tend to be extremely polarizing. That’s why I feel that it’s super important to make the +

Distinction between enemies-to-lovers ships and hero-villain ships. ETL isn’t inherently problematic or unhealthy because there are a TON of forms that it can take besides the hero-villain ship, which is what people usually refer to when they say that ETL is questionable.