Shipping (fandom)
Shipping is a general term for emotional and/or intellectual involvement with the ongoing development of
romance in a work of
fiction. Though technically applicable to any such involvement, it refers chiefly to various related social dynamics observable on the
Internet, and is seldom used outside of that context.
Shipping can involve virtually any kind of relationship — from the well-known and established, through the ambiguous or those undergoing development, and even all the way to the highly improbable and the blatantly impossible. People involved in shipping (or
shippers) assert that the relationship
does exist,
will exist, or simply that they would
like it to exist.
Though
ship is undoubtedly a derivative of the word
relationship in some way, where and when it was first used to indicate involvement with fictional romance is unclear. A common belief is that the term originated in the
fandom for the
anime series
Pokémon, with two American fans who, in discussing their belief in a romance between series villains, Musashi/Jessie and Kojirou/James (Known together as
Team Rocket), hit upon the pun
RocketShipper as a way to combine
rocket ship and
relationship.
However, the archives of the
newsgroup alt.tv.x-files show that the word
shipper was already in established use among fans of
The X-Files as early as May of 1996
[1]— just three months after the first Pokémon games were released in Japan. It would not be until 1998 that any of the Pokémon games, manga, or anime would be translated to English, where the relationship/rocket-ship pun would exist (the first known uses of the term in the Pokémon fandom were during mid-to-late 1999). It seems clear that the Pokémon fandom was not the sole or first inventors of the term
shipping in this sense, as is sometimes claimed; but regardless of that, it may well have played a key role in the development of the term as is known today, by separately developing and popularising it.
The term
ship and its derivatives in this context have since then come to be in wide and versatile use.
Shipping refers to the whole phenomenon; a
ship is the concept of a fictional couple; to
ship a couple means to have an affinity for it in one way or another; a
shipper is somebody significantly involved with such an affinity, and so forth.
Various naming conventions have developed in different online communities to refer to prospective couples, probably due to the ambiguity and cumbersomeness of the "Frick and Frack" format. The most widespread appears to be putting the slash character (/) between the two names (
Frick/Frack). Other methods include
* using the letter X in place of the slash (
FrickxFrack)
* abbreviating both names (usually taking only the first letter of each, with additional letters used if necessary to avoid two or more couples in the same fandom sharing a name) (
Fri/Fra)
* forming a
portmanteau word from the names of the two participants (e.g.,
FooBar, where the names of the characters would be, for example,
Foolhardy and
Barbeque); this is common mostly within fan communities of
anime in emulation of the naming conventions for couples used in the equivalent Japanese fandoms.
Under the right circumstances, fandoms tend to evolve unique trends in their shipping notation. The Pokemon, Harry Potter and
Yu-gi-oh! fandoms have specific semi-descriptive names corresponding with their ships (The Harry Potter Fandom, in particular, has taken this a step forward and uses puns on the naval ship/fandom ship linguistic duality in the form of
HMS foobar); The
Saiyuki fandom has a system by which each of the main characters is assigned a number corresponding with their name, and a ship could be referred to as "1X5" or "2X4" (a smiliar notation system is in use among
Gundam Wing yaoi enthusiasts).
Popularity
Though it takes many forms and influences different communities in different ways, the phenomenon of shipping is practically ubiquitous. Searching any forum discussing an ongoing work of fiction is bound to yield comments, discussion threads and even whole active forums and communities dedicated to the subject.
There are several factors which are believed to be responsible for the high popularity of shipping:
*
Cultural emphasis. Romance is one of the major subjects occupying mankind, and shipping is just yet another manifestation of that fixation.
*
Sympathy. People often sympathise with the themes associated with certain fictional characters and relationships, capitalising on these themes by placing importance on them; romantic relationships, existent or potential, are no exception. Sometimes this is taken to the extreme of a certain character being regarded (consciously or subconsciously) as a stand-in for the shipper, who is vicariously fulfilling a fantasy relationship.
*
Resolution. Often the authors behind the pieces of fiction in question knowingly create situations, foreshadowing and open plot threads that seem, for all practical purposes, to be headed towards a resolution involving characters connecting with one another and becoming couples. Often the theme of romance will be introduced and toyed with, teasing the fans and leaving them speculating as to "where this is going".
*
Prediction. In somewhat of a feedback loop, the popularity of shipping leads many people who otherwise wouldn't have much interest in the subject to attempt predicting the eventual outcome, if only because they are much more likely to find somebody willing to discuss this subject than any other.
The influence and prominence shipping has on a specific online community will, mostly, be the projection of two factors: The way the author of the work-in-progress at hand treats the subject of romance in their work (intentionally and unintentionally), and the preexisting tendencies of the specific target audience likely to both come in contact with said work and discuss it online. The many combinations of those sole two factors possible already make the actual manifestation of shipping in online communities amorphic and hard to define, sometimes to the point of hardly being recognisable as different instances of the same phenomenon. Teenagers, in general, appear to be the most eager target audience to engage the subject, while a roughly equal mixture of males and females in the work of fiction will lend itself to more prominent shipping discussion than otherwise- and even more so if these characters are all coming of age, which is one of the most powerful ship discussion stimulators.
Non-conventional ships
Though they certainly tend to be the most commonly encountered, heterosexual relationships are not the be-all and end-all of shipping. The most prominent example of this is the wide support of
homosexual relationships (also known as "slash" or the borrowed Japanese terms
Yaoi (Male homosexuality) and
Yuri (Female homosexuality), with stories of male homosexuality, thanks to their large fanbase, being by far the most prominent. There are even online groups affiliated with romance that is considered
taboo by many, such as
incest and
bestiality.
The term "slash" itself predates the use of "shipping" by at least some 20 years. It was originally coined as a derogatory term to describe
Kirk/
Spock (or "K/S"; sometimes spoken "Kirk-slash-Spock", whence "slash")
homosexual fan-fiction, which has been a mainstay of a segment of
Star Trek fandom since the early 1970s. For a time in the late 1970s and early 1980s, both "K/S" and "slash" were used to describe such
fan-fiction, regardless of whether or not they were
Star Trek related. But as homosexuality became more accepted in society, so too did the terms lose their derogatory connotation. "K/S" eventually fell out of use altogether, but "slash" became a universal term to describe all homosexual themed fan works.
Discussion and debate
One of the more universal manifestations of the shipping phenomenon is the tendency of enthusiastic fans to discuss and debate the merits of their favored (and less favored) pairings in online forums. The degree to which these discussions gain prominence among their respective forums is influenced by a number of factors, though the most significant seems to be the potential of the subject's development in the work in question. That is, romantic plot threads capture the interest of the fans much in the same way that other plot threads do: through introduction of opposing forces to create conflict. Fandoms corresponding to series in which this has not been adequately done—for example, by the inclusion of only couples
already very much in love without any factors that might disturb this in the foreseeable future, or by failing to include anything indicative of romance at all—characteristically see very little shipping discussion compared with fandoms for series in which it has (though as previously noted, shipping seems to be an inherently appealing subject and will often garner attention vastly out of proportion to its share in the work in question).
Ship debates are different from other similar online debates in that they do not wholly correspond to reality but rather have to take the fictional nature of the subject matter into account. Two levels of argumentation are commonly encountered—one consists of attempts at logical, neutral prediction and the other of confrontations regarding where the
canon should go if it wants to create the most convincing, emotionally powerful or otherwise aesthetically appealing narrative (and why). These two planes of reasoning are not quite mutually exclusive—they intersect through the important concept of
authorial intent, and it is usually possible to make limited inferences as to what the author would consider a "better" story and thus be likelier to write; and aside from that arguments valid on one plane might amount to conclusions valid in the other. Shippers commonly resolve that a relationship the author is portraying as positive must be positive by definition, and change their emotional point of view accordingly (or at least, try to); and even more commonly, shippers let their personal preference dictate a less than neutral distribution of the benefit of doubt regarding what is objectively less or more likely the author is trying to convey.
On the other hand, Ship Debates share many similarities with other online debates in their sociological and logical patterns. In part naturally arising from the nature of forums, in which there are no arbiters to speak of and proving one's point logically is often secondary to making a strong impression, they are strewn with
fallacious logic and farfetched theories (the growth of which is strictly dictated by ad-hoc necessity rather than anything resembling rational synthesis of the available evidence). With fandoms large enough and debates thick enough with accumulating bad blood, factions can arise, which in extreme cases become so hostile as to trivialise the matter of the actual dispute at hand.
Most people who have been participating in debates which have gone this far for long enough tend to be aware of this to some degree and often keep debating for the sake of sportsmanship, loyalty to their faction or out of a sense of commitment to spread their truth and make sure that their side of the issue is heard. Newcomers, on the other hand, tend to step in blissfully unaware of this situation, share their opinion and be shocked at the polarized response, typically containing extremes such as enthusiastic approval or sarcastic mocking with little middle ground. This form of conflict has led to the shipping phenomenon often being featured in
fandom wank, a well-known
weblog hosted at Journalfen.net which specialises in mocking fan over-reactions.
Like most other emotionally charged online discussion ship debate tends to eventually die out of participant starvation rather than experience swift logical knock-outs - Since, again, the debate was never organised but rather emerged out of the collective conflicting opinions of the members of the fandom in question, and thus lacks a frame to define why or when it ought to end, and technically even exactly what it is about beyond the fuzzy involvement of romance in the series. With series of a large enough scope these debates can go on for even years on end, accumulating and assimilating many issues- related to the series or not- which have very little to do with their original premise.
This fundamental hole in the structure of typical ship debates leaves it unclear which side is winning, or even which side has the "advantage", to the degree it could even be defined at all. One method of measuring which side has the more convincing case is popularity polls (though they are subject to all sorts of collective bias and are not a solid predictive tool- The
Naruto series, for example, seems to be headed towards a resolution of its romantic plot threads which at one point in the past was less popular than its main alternative in the series' western fandom by a factor exceeding four to one and apparently remains less popular within the western subset of the fandom even now).
Fan works
In
fan fiction circles, authors often let their shipping tendencies influence their work and espouse a certain romantic pairing between two particular characters in their fiction; in fact, the pairings found within are considered such a defining factor that story summaries in fiction archives often notify the potential reader of them while neglecting other important features. The extremity of this phenomenon can be found in certain sections of the fanfiction archive
fanfiction.net, and many other fan fiction archives, where fanfiction is searchable by rating, length, genre, date, language, and
pairing. While this in part reflects an emphasis on shipping by many fan fiction authors, it is also considered a useful service to those readers who only wish to read about certain pairings (or conversely, wish to avoid reading stories involving pairings they dislike).
Though to a lesser degree, this influence still exists in other fan works. Since
fan art, for example, is by nature more focused on a particular scene or character(s) and allows for less flexibility in terms of theme integration, it is usually either without shipping influence at all or wholly a tribute to a certain pairing.
Example cases of shipping-conflicted fandoms
Daria fandom was marred through its entire run by shipper debate. From the series' first season, the main conflict was between people who thought that the title character,
Daria Morgendorffer, a wisecracking, green-jacketed, cynical, intellectual teenager, should have a relationship with
Trent Lane, a slacker rock-band frontman, whom Daria met through his sister, her closest friend
Jane Lane (a slightly less cynical artist), and people who thought that such a development would signal a turn away from the more subversive aspects of the Daria character, and thus the show, notably represented in such episodes as "This Year's Model", where Daria sends armed mercenaries to a modeling agency tryout.
The show's writers responded by having Daria develop a crush on Trent, even having Daria go as far as to get a piercing because Trent encouraged her on (Daria thought the better of it eventually; the hole closed soon after Daria took the piercing off), as well as having her get rashes on her head as the sight of Trent. Trent, however remained involved with his off-and-on girlfriend
Monique (who also was in a rock band), who immediately became a target of 'shipper ire. The crush ended in the third season's finale, "Jane's Addition", when Daria realized that Trent lacked a professional work ethic.
In that very same episode, the viewership met, for the first time,
Tom Sloane, a charming and intellectual son of privilege who nonetheless drove a
Ford Pinto. Although Tom became Jane's boyfriend, threatening Daria and Jane's friendship in the process, Daria and Tom warmed up to each other throughout the fourth season, leading up to its finale, "Dye! Dye! My Darling," broadcast August 2, 2000[
2]. With Jane and Tom's relationship in crisis, a heated argument between Daria and Tom leads up to not one but two kisses. With Daria indecisive as to whether this relationship should be pursued further, Daria and Jane's friendship was in tatters for the rest of the episode. (Tom and Jane broke up.) In the made-for-TV movie "Is it Fall Yet?," Daria decided to begin a relationship with Tom, and Daria and Jane patched their friendship together.
The uproar this caused was instant. The 'shipper faction having won the initial debate (in fair part having do with other artistic decisions
Daria made after Season 1, such as a musical episode, "Daria!" extended dream sequences laden with 70s-80s detective show references ("Murder, She Snored"), and human representations of the major
holidays (and
Guy Fawkes Day) manifesting themeselves in Lawndale in "Depth Takes A Holiday"), conversation now turned to whether Tom was more appropriate than the long-dismissed Trent. The conversation ran in favor of Trent. The debate was satirized by the show's writers in a piece on MTV's website. [
3]
In the series finale made-for-TV movie, "It is College Yet?", Daria and Tom break up over the fact that they are going to different colleges. The debate was over, and so was the series.
In interviews done after the series' run, series creator Glenn Eichler revealed that "...any viewer who really thought that Daria and Trent could (have) a relationship was just not watching the show we were making," [
4] Tom came about because "...going into our fourth year...I thought it was really pushing credibility for Daria to have only had one or two dates during her whole high school career," and "teaser" episodes like "Pierce Me" were "...intended to provide some fun for that portion of the audience that was so invested in the romance angle. The fact that those moments were few and far between should have given some indication that the series was not about Daria's love life." [
5]
The
Harry Potter series is infamous for generating what was probably one of the most intense shipping debates to ever occur in the collective history of fandom. Spanning nearly seven years, from early 1999 to mid-2005, the "ship debate" as it was known saw supporters of the prospective relationship between
Harry and his close female friend
Hermione Granger constantly at odds with supporters of Hermione winding up instead with
Ron Weasley, close friend of both- to eventually draw attention from the mainstream media and even
J.K. Rowling, series author, herself.
The debate was mostly held within the
Harry Potter for Grownups discussion group, with the the focus later shifting to a thread inside the FictionAlley forums called "
The DeathMarch" (later renamed to simply the 'Debate Thread' to do away with the extreme connotations of the former). The factionalism that consequently emerged, however, was much more far-reaching within the fandom. Many prominent web sites, such as
The Sugar Quill and
Fiction Alley, had shipping agendas which had contributed much to their creation and in a way even defined them; Being a famous or effective ship debater could gain a fan a status very similar to that of an accomplished author of fanfiction.
The deciding point that signaled the debate's transition from just another discussion into a miniature online war was the release of
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which developed the issues of romance in the series significantly and set several trends for the debate's continuation. Harry/Hermione supporters, set back by blatant clues in the narrative regarding Ron and Hermione's repressed feelings for each other, turned to more complex venues of argument seeking symbolism, subtext and
metonymy to support their case, arguing that what other fans perceived as clues were in fact a cleverly-constructed smoke-screen (or red herrings). This mode of thought extended to quotes by Rowling herself on the matter; her saying that Harry and Hermione are "very platonic friends" and her asking somebody who proposed them as a couple "do you really think they're suited?" were variously interpreted as not specific enough, clever avoiding of the question and misleading in general, rather than straight answers.
Another front fans of the Harry and Hermione relationship had to deal with was the alternative in the form of the possibility of Harry ending up with
Ginny Weasley, Ron's younger sister whose obvious crush on him served as a comical plotline since
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Arguably this debate was conducted on more even ground, as Harry/Ginny largely lacked the concrete build-up Ron/Hermione had to challenge Harry/Hermione with; Instead arguments promoting this possibility often resembled those for Harry/Hermione at least in general form if not in essence, claiming metaphor and precedent as the blocks of the build-up of their relationship instead of concrete character development. Much of the case for Ginny as Harry's eventual significant other was by elimination, that is, the high probability that he
will in the end have a significant other and the various obstacles to accepting other major candidates for this role (Hermione due to Rowling's aforementioned statements, Luna due to her late introduction and lack of development and significance involving Harry's point of view). Precedent in the
boarding school story genre of the main character and his best friend becoming officially family by marriage, and the
Princess and Dragon overtones of the climax of
Chamber of Secrets, were often cited as a strong thematic foundation of this romance, though it would be years before actual character development would follow in their footsteps.
Many fans had hopes of the shipping question being resolved with the release of
Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix; for a time, referring to "book five" in the debate was practically synonymous for alluding to that time when J.K. Rowling will finally unambiguously put the conflict to rest. There is, in fact, evidence to suggest that by that time Rowling was already familiar with the breadth and intensity of the shipping culture in the Harry Potter fandom- prior to the release of
Half-Blood Prince she surprised the fandom by displaying knowledge of shipping culture, and admitting that she was taken aback when she first discovered shippers online and surprised that people had dedicated themselves so passionately to relationships that she knew were not going to be part of the series. Her earlier outright statements regarding the shipping question slowly became vague, elusive responses, indicative of knowledge that the issue is much more conflicted than she had previously suspected and as a by-product making the interpretations of the Harry/Hermione fans somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy. This apparent decision on Rowling's part to leave the shipping question alone for the time being reflected on the fifth book as well; it contained little to no progress regarding any romantic plotlines, or rather, not anything that could be unambiguously used to argue in favor of one side of the debate or the other. For example, this book saw Ginny apparently giving up on Harry and becoming more of a friend than the girl with a crush on him, which could have been (and was) interpreted either way- as the resolution of the plotline into nothingness, or as an essential step towards them accepting each other as equals.
The much-anticipated resolution did not come until two years later, with the release of
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. The apparent subsiding of Ginny's feelings was used in its storyline as a springboard to an ironic twist of Harry suddenly finding himself crushing on
her, apparently too late and very much angsting over this fact. Things ended well for them, though, and spending time together as boyfriend and girlfriend makes Harry the "happiest he could remember being for a very long time". Rowling later commented that she had planned Ginny as Harry's "ideal girl" from the very beginning.
Though this would have been enough to cause plenty of fireworks in and of itself, the effect was dramatically amplified by an interview with J.K. Rowling conducted by webmaster of the fansite
MuggleNet, Emerson Spartz, and fellow webmaster of
The Leaky Cauldron, Melissa Anelli, shortly after the book's release. During the interview Spartz commented rather hysterically that Harry/Hermione shippers were "delusional" several times, to which Rowling chuckled, though making it clear that she did not share the sentiment and that the Harry/Hermione fans were "still" valued members of her readership. This incident resulted in an uproar among many Harry/Hermione shippers, who announced that they would return their copies of
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and boycott future
Harry Potter books, levelling criticism at Spartz, Anelli, and Rowling herself. A distinctive group of dejected Harry/Hermione fans, who had made strong emotional investments in their chosen pairings, declared Rowling a cheap cop-out show and her implementation of the Harry/Ginny romance two-dimensional and lacking- some going as far as to outright turn on the series they were once such great fans of with vicious criticism, their outrage echoing strongly enough to warrant an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle[6] (Compare with the "Ms. Scribe Harry Potter fanfic sock puppet conspiracy of 2003"
[7], which is also closely related to the shipping faction conflict and received similar coverage from Metro Silicon Valley News
[8]).
Rowling's attitude towards the shipping phenomenon has varied between amused and bewildered, as she revealed in that interview. She explained that
"[..] I'm a relative newcomer to the world of shipping, because for a long time, I didn't go on the net and look up Harry Potter. A long time. [..] I had never gone and looked at fan sites, and then one day I did and oh - my - god. Five hours later or something, I get up from the computer shaking slightly [..]. ‘What is going on?' And it was during that first mammoth session that I met the shippers, and it was a most extraordinary thing. I had no idea there was this huge underworld seething beneath me."[9]
And later made a tongue-in-cheek reference to the severity of the shipper conflicts while describing in her website how she contacted Spartz in order to invite him for the aforementioned interview:
"I was worried that Emerson, who was not expecting anything at all, might simply hang up on me; as I heard his Dad walking away from the telephone to fetch him I was trying to think of way to prove it was really me and not some angry Harry/Hermione shipper trying to lure him down a dark alleyway."[10]
In a later posting on MuggleNet, Spartz explained,
"[..] My comments weren't directed at the shippers who acknowledged that Harry/Hermione was a long shot but loved the idea of them together. It was directed at the "militant" shippers who insisted that there was overwhelming canon proof and that everyone else was too blind to see it. You were delusional; you saw what you wanted to see and you have no one to blame for that but yourselves."[11]
The
Xena: Warrior Princess fandom saw often nasty "shipping wars" that turned especially intense due to spillover from real-life debates about
same-sex sexuality and
gay rights.
Shortly after the 1995 debut of the action/fantasy series about a woman warrior seeking redemption for a dark past, some viewers began to see hints that of a romantic attraction, or possibly a sexual relationship, between
Xena and her sidekick/best friend
Gabrielle. Toward the end of the first season, the show's producers began to play to this perception by deliberately inserting usually humorous lesbian innuendo (the
subtext) into some episodes. The show acquired a cult following in the lesbian community. However, Xena had a number of male love interests as well, and from the first season she had an adversarial but sexually charged dynamic with
Ares, the God of War, who frequently tried to win her over as his "Warrior Queen."
While subtexters (Xena/Gabrielle fans) were the largest single group in the active
Xena fandom, Xena/Ares shippers were a small, yet vocal presence as well; they were joined by Gabrielle/
Joxer shippers after Joxer, a bumbling warrior wannabe who sometimes followed Xena and Gabrielle on their adventures, fell in love with Gabrielle. The debates among fans of these "ships" were frequently tinged with sexual politics. Many straight fans strongly rejected the idea of a sexual relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, for a variety of reasons. Some felt that such a relationship would play into the stereotype that strong women who live independently of men have to be lesbians; some supported other pairings; some simply did not see a sexual dynamic between the characters; and some were generally hostile to same-sex relationships. Meanwhile, many lesbian fans felt that Xena belonged to the gay community as a lesbian icon. Some claimed that any nonsexual interpretation of the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle, and any support for a heterosexual pairing for either of the heroines, was either actually motivated by homophobia or objectively contributed to the oppression of gays.
These conflicts came to a boiling point in the fifth season, when the show's producers played down the lesbian subtext somewhat and introduced an overtly romantic Xena/Ares storyline in which Ares fell in love with Xena and offered her his help in a conflict with the other Olympian gods (caused by a prophecy that Xena's newborn child would cause their downfall). Despite Xena's clear rejection of Ares and her professed loathing of him, Ares kept stalking her, and finally resorted to a rape attempt, holding her baby daughter, her partner, Gabrielle and her kinsman hostages. In spite of that, Xena outsmarted him and never gave into him. The official Studios USA Netforum became a site for ferocious battles between Ares/Xena shippers and subtexters, who were concerned that Xena and Ares would end up as an official couple. In the sixth season, the subtext was ratcheted up again, to a point where Xena and Gabrielle were "outed" as a couple. However, several sixth season episodes also played up the Xena/Ares dynamic, and the ambiguity of both relationships (whether Xena and Gabrielle were lovers and whether Xena reciprocated Ares' feelings) continued to fuel the "shipping wars" on
Xena message boards. These wars did not abate even after the show ended; with no fresh material from the show itself, both Xena/Gabrielle and Xena/Ares fans looked for new ammunition in (often contradictory) comments made by the actors and writers. In recent years, however, the
Xena fandom has also seen a growing number of "bitexter" fans who embrace and appreciate both relationships. Today, the "shippers" are a small minority, sporting web site focused on an invented relationship between Ares and Xena that never was.
*
"Meeting Melissa and Emerson" from
J.K. Rowling's Official Site*
"If you're an obsessed Harry Potter fan, Voldemort isn't the problem. It's Hermione versus Ginny." from the
San Francisco Chronicle online*
ShipWar - A LiveJournal community which parodies the ship debates.
*
A Call to End The Shipping Wars - An essay on Mugglenet.
*
Masterlist of Ship Essays - A collection of
Harry Potter shipping essays.
*
Shippers' Paradise - A subsection of the BulbaGarden forums (Pokemon fandom), dedicated to shipping discussion.
