And Now, The Shipping Forecast

Shipping, for those who have made better life choices than I, is the act of imagining, through art or writing, fictional characters in a romantic relationship for personal satisfaction, experimental purposes, or to annoy Anne Rice.  If two characters have ever existed, someone has probably written a thirty thousand word novella about how they’re getting their rocks off with each other. Some terms should be explained; a sailed ship is one that happens in the original work (Han Solo and Princess Leia, for example), a crack ship is one that could never happen in the original work (like, say, Jean Luc Picard and Elrond) and a slash is a gay pairing (named after the forward slash to show a pairing, such as Kirk/Spock). It’s staggering how many slash pairings there are across the lands of fandom and oh my, does it get weird quickly. If you cast your mind back to when Thor: The Dark World was released and this picture made the rounds on the internet:

     This was used in an actual Shanghai cinema by mistake, and it is even more glorious when you consider that  writing slash fiction is illegal in China

Did you ever stop and think that there’s an entire fandom around these characters having poorly described sex? That it is a robust fandom of art and stories? Were you aware it had a name? (Thorki. It’s called Thorki. I know that because this list is hilarious and ‘Stark Spangled Banner’ is a triumph of ingenuity over sense.) This is made even more puzzling when you consider the vast majority of fanfiction writers are straight American teenage girls; what gives?  

I don’t think there’s an epidemic of teenagers craving incest, if that helps. I think it’s a case that the best and most developed characters in popular fiction are male. Take Molly, from the former best thing on television, Sherlock. As the only female character attracted to Sherlock, you would have assumed that fangirls would have taken her up as an avatar for themselves in their stories. But as a character, she’s not as interesting or complex as John Watson and Sherlock, so she doesn’t grab the viewers’ imagination as much and therefore doesn’t warrant as much attention. Her emotions and feelings are ignored in favour of Sherlock and John’s in the show, so why should she be held as the fan's champion in their own work?

It’s not just teenage girls making boys kiss though; there’s a thing called a Ship War, and this is when groups of fans attack each other over whose ship is better. No, I’m not joking.

My own experience with Ship Wars started with the Harry Potter and the bloody, ruthless battles between those who shipped Harry/Hermione, and those who shipped Ron/Hermione in the mid 2000s. Non survived unscathed; daughter against mother, husband against wife, father against son (actually, probably not that last one). It was a dark time for a young Harry Potter fan to be exposed to literary atrocities on the Mugglenet message boards as fans tore each other apart in a desperate bid to prove that theirs was the real One True Ship. It didn’t matter when JK Rowling stepped in and wrote an entire book about who ends up with whom (Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince is about 75% shipping), the Harry/Hermione crowd refused to be silenced, rising from the dead earlier this year when JK Rowling said she thought Harry should have ended up with Hermione after all.

I had night terrors for days after this story came out.

And this is why shipping can get in the way of enjoying and discussing the original work. By spending so much time obsessing which fictional characters should rub their privates against each other, shippers ignore other creative outlets and analysis, which stunts wider conversation about the work. When Half Blood Prince did come out, I recall there was very little talk about the Orwellian nightmare occurring outside of Hogwarts, but there was a lot of energy put into why Lupin and Tonks were obviously right for each other from the beginning. This is not important in the real world by any sense, but when you’re trying to engage with a text, develop analytical skills and teach yourself how to think about literature and the media, it’s less than stimulating to find that all anyone else seems to care about is how much worthier their ship is.

Yeah, it’s mostly harmless fun. But if shipping is the only pleasure that can be derived from a TV show, film or book, then it might be time to look at it again and see if it’s worth the time, and perhaps start to ask more from your entertainment. Because, let's face it, the romantic relationship is usually the dullest part of any story, especially when there’s so much more fun you can have with it.