Pippadore

"I was deluded, and I knew it. Worse: my love for Pippa was muddied-up below the waterline with my mother, with my mother’s death, with losing my mother and not being able to get her back. All that blind, infantile hunger to save and be saved, to repeat the past and make it different, had somehow attached itself, ravenously, to her. There was an instability in it, a sickness. I was seeing things that weren’t there. I was only one step away from some trailer park loner stalking a girl he’d spotted in the mall. For the truth of it was: Pippa and I saw each other maybe twice a year; we e-mailed and texted, though with no great regularity; when she was in town we loaned each other books and went to the movies; we were friends; nothing more. My hopes for a relationship with her were wholly unreal, whereas my ongoing misery, and frustration, were an all-too-horrible reality. Was groundless, hopeless, unrequited obsession any way to waste the rest of my life?"

Pippadore is the het ship between Pippa and Theodore "Theo" Decker from the The Goldfinch fandom.

The Goldfinch (2013)
Theo’s love for Pippa is an attachment born out of his mother’s death, and something he actually recognizes in the book by admitting he truly isn’t in love with her. Even so, it’s not something he wants to actively work on to get better, on the contrary, he feeds into his own obsession often and never seems to get over it. He always idealizes her and sees her as a perfect being, constantly drawing comparisons between anyone else (especially his mother) and her when he just sees Pippa twice a year at most, obviously not truly knowing who she is at all.

He’s extremely creepy towards her, mentioning his sexual fantasies about her, his hallucinations and misinterpretations of everything she has done with him, and how he imagines beating Pippa’s husband up after knowing about him. He thinks he owns her somehow, and just acts like someone else in her presence, always trying to make everything good for her and only her. It’s all an attempt to connect to his mother, since she was the last person he saw before the explosion. She’s the valve to Before, the thing that Theo desperately clings to in a coping mechanism.

On Pippa’s side, she’s clearly not actually interested in him as a romantic partner and probably never saw him through these lenses. She marries someone else and just treats him like any other friend, rejecting him three times in total.

The Goldfinch (2019)
In the movie, Theo’s love for Pippa is genuinely romantic, completely unlike in the book. Even so, they didn’t change the love still being unrequited, but they do make their scenes more romanticized than they are in the original material. An example is how in their reunion they’re sharing smiles at each other while holding hands exploring antiques, or how they’re still holding hands again in the rejection scene.

They exchange books, and Pippa congratulates him on his wedding, yet it’s clear when he longingly stares at her that he doesn’t want Kitsey at all. Pippa breaks the mood and hugs him, going to bed, leaving a slightly annoyed Theo standing there.

On the next day, they go to the concert together. Theo apologizes for Pippa apparently not liking it, and they have a huge heart-to-heart where they open to each other while holding hands. Pippa says she did like the concert, but reminded her of the accident, and how at home, New York, she thinks about it all the time. Theo also opens up about how he thinks that after Welty died and got his ring, something happened between them and Welty sent him exactly to who he needed to be with: Pippa. Theo confesses, but before he can say it, Pippa interrupts him saying she knows. She tearfully rejects him, saying how they're so similar and couldn't lean on each other, because that would eventually lead to mutual destruction.

At the end of the movie, the montage of Theo and his mom in the museum is played, with Theo looking over to Pippa again.

The Goldfinch (2013)
"And the flavor of Pippa's kiss–bittersweet and strange–stayed with me all the way back uptown, swaying and sleepy as I sailed home on the bus, melting with sorrow and loveliness, a starry ache that lifted me up above the windswept city like a kite: my head in the rainclouds, my heart in the sky."

"For in the deepest, most unshakable part of myself reason was useless. She was the missing kingdom, the unbruised part of myself I’d lost with my mother. Everything about her was a snowstorm of fascination"

"She was the golden thread running through everything, a lens that magnified beauty so that the whole world stood transfigured in relation to her, and her alone."

- Theo describing Pippa when she walked in.

Fanon
Despite Pippadore being considered semi-canon, it’s still very unpopular compared to the biggest ship in the fandom, which is also Pippadore’s rival, Boreo. Most people in the fandom see Theo’s love as it truly is: a desperate and painful unrequited cling to his mom projecting on Pippa. The Tumblr post, Pippa and Theo’s Relationship in “The Goldfinch” by eve enters in more detail on how Theo believes he's in love with Pippa when he's not. Few think the love is actually genuine based on the book, and even fewer think it’s requited at all.

Overall, people like to think of this relationship as friendship in post-canon, with Theo coping with the fact that his mother is gone and can’t revive her through Pippa, and actually learning about her as a person instead of an idol to be chased for.

Some like to think of them as gay and lesbian solidarity. Theo’s side being heavily implied in the narrative by his repression (and his cling to Pippa can also be considered him, with internalized homophobia, trying to have a straight relationship) and just widely headcanonned in general by fandom, and in Pippa’s side not having a concrete subtext, but small things that could be interpreted as her trying to just conform and live a normal life after the accident, which could be translated as her also suppressing some form of attraction to other women to just follow what she should do as the heteronormative society says. Still, it’s just another form of how people view this pairing as platonic and prefer either Pippa with Kitsey or Theo with Boris, or just leaving both of them alone to heal from their trauma baggage by themselves.

Fandom
FAN FICTION

Variations

 * Borippadore refers to the ship between the two and Boris Pavlikovsky