Some people I know

A. and I have been watching High Potential and enjoying it very much. Today I decided I wanted to try writing a High Potential fanfic. So I went to AO3 to see what the big ships are, what the major tropes are, and so forth, so as not to jump into the fandom totally blind.

Of course the big ship is Morgan/Karadec, because they're partners on the show and we're supposed to interpret their differences as "opposites attract" and to want them to get together. But I just don't see it.

The second big ship is Morgan/Soto, which I find somewhat more plausible than Morgan/Karadec, except for the fact that Morgan appears to be so incorrigibly heterosexual as to render it impossible.

A few people shipped the canon ship Morgan/Tom, which I suppose could work, but I didn't find them to be a very interesting couple, and also he left town just as they were starting to get together. I suppose someone could do a fix-it fic to get them back together, but really I thought they were such a borin couple that I wouldn't even bother putting in the effort.

Which brings us to my favorite ship of the show: Morgan/Oz is a ship that's never going to happen in canon, but I think they'd make a good couple, and it'd be a more interesting ship than any of the above. Which is why at the time I started writing this post, there were 271 High Potential fics on AO3, of which exactly one was tagged Morgan/Oz: mine, in which Morgan and Oz are talking in bed, discussing how if their life were a TV show, the fanfic writers would ship Morgan and Karadec and they'd be totally wrong to do so. 😂

I am reminded of a statement by the former mayor of Bogotá, Antanas Mockus, a politician who employed artistic strategies in his office: "When an artist goes to prison, they take a piece of chalk and draw a line some centimetres from the wall to define their space, so they can have a bit more restrictions (sic). But by making those restrictions they in fact liberate themselves." A line can be a border and simultaneously an assertion of freedom. Being able to decide on your own limits, your strengths and weaknesses, is always empowering, offering a certain degree of sovereignty even in the direst situation.

Joanna Warsza, "Open Mic: Joanna Warsza on the Art of Open Group," *Artforum," October 2025, p. 110.

I've been thinking about this since I read it an hour or so ago. I think the quote from Mockus helped Warsza to set up for presenting her idea, but I don't think Mockus (at least as presented in this quote or — as I think is likely — in this translation of his quote) appears to quite understand what was going on in those prison cells. I don't think the artists wanted to "have a bit more restrictions (sic)," but instead, as Warsza put it, to "decide on [their] own limits."

When I was younger and studying poetry in school[^1], I never really understood why someone would choose to write poetry once prose had been invented, which seemed to me to be a superior method for conveying ideas. It's only later, as I learned more and started producing art of my own, that I learned the potential value of working within a set of restrictions, whether self-imposed or those of a traditional form. And looking back, I wonder if this value of restriction is something that my teachers could have explained to me, or if it's something that I had to figure out on my own in order to understand it.

[^1] Confession: I never really liked or (apparently) understood poetry.