Why Do You Ship What You Ship?

[pennswoods]

I posted the following question to my Tumblr a little while back in responses to some of the arguing over shipping and assumptions being made about why people ship. I'm often frustrated by the simplistic and reductive assumptions that emerge in this kind of wank and wonder where other people are coming from. I expect we all ship for a number of reasons. The prompt elicited a number of really interesting responses which can be read in the notes to the post, but I'd love to hear more. Behind the cut are my own.

Have you ever thought about why you ship what you ship? And I don’t mean just what you like about a particular pairing but also what purpose it serves in your life.

Is it due to something you are dealing with personally? Is it a way to blow off steam and have fun (and if so - why this ship and not others)? Does it feel safe for you for some reason? Is it more about community than about you? Does it reflect past experiences, regret, hopes and wishes or even examined/unexamined prejudices? Does it get at something you cannot get at in any other way?

I love the different and detailed responses this post is generating, and it makes me want to share my own response to the question. The more that discussions of shipping come up, the more I think about why I ship what I do, and the more I realize just how much my shipping is in direct response to what is going on in my real life. I started out shipping in the HP fandom and was open to reading just about everything but settled on several OTPs.

• Neville/Luna because it was cute and a little bit silly and had the best ship name (The Government Stole my Toad) and I was so new to fandom and fanfic and shipping and this seemed like a fun place to start. I feel I was in a more optimistic space in my life. This was when I was in my early 30s, relatively newly in love and still a doctoral student with so much potential ahead.


• Snape/Harry when I was overwhelmed with life and teetering into a depressed state and need the pain and angst to cry over something other than myself. I was drawn to the inherent tragedy in their lives and their relationship. In pre-Deathly Hallows fandom, I would actively seek out fic of this pairing (only) where one of them died.


• Snape/Hermione when I wanted hope or when I was struggling to function as an adult in an adult relationship. There was also some degree of wishful thinking for Snape too since he had paid the ultimate price for his mistakes in canon. But I could also relate to Hermione in many ways due to her desire to tackle the difficult and to push herself to grown and mature. So many post Deathly Hallows SS/HG fic dealt with the successful maturation of love and of a relationship and it gave me a kind of hope and guidance in the form of tales written by these wise fanfiction writers (some of whom I got to know rather well on LJ).

And then in 2011 I hit a rough patch, and I’m still not sure what went on. (Cut for personal reasons and description of suicidal ideation.)

I think it was a confluence of factors like work stress and the tenure process that eroded my self-esteem, deep loneliness (it had been years since I’d had friends I could open up to) and insecurity in my marriage. But I found myself crying every day as I rode the bus to and from work, battling thoughts in my head that constantly devolved into vicious self-loathing and a desire to obliterate myself. Every thought ended in my death and I used to fantasize about different ways I could choose not to avoid death. I wouldn’t seek it out, but if there was a bus coming and I was already in the road, why bother getting out the way. It would hurt a lot. But then it would stop and I wouldn’t have to be this waste of skin and blood and bullshit. This led to a vicious circle of further self-loathing because I knew this would just hurt people around me (especially my husband), but my reasoning was unreliable and I couldn’t see myself as anything but a waste of life.

I didn’t step in front of a bus, but in January 2012, a lonely man who didn’t really have friends jumped off the roof of St. Barts, leaving his roommate and best friend to witness to his ‘death’ and to suffer the repercussions alone.

And many of my HP friends, who had gradually been drifting away erupted into squee and pointed me to places where I could download the episodes to hear Molly’s observation that Sherlock looked sad when he thought John couldn’t see him and to experience the wealth of emotion that Benedict and Martin infused into their characters in that rooftop scene. And there was fic, so much fic trying to explore and heal John’s grief, trying to reunify them after this huge mistake and betrayal, trying to understand how these two difficult personalities could repair their relationship and grow together.

I fell in love with the hope and the relationship work that went in to so many Johnlock stories. I was at a stage of my life where fluff couldn’t really engage my mind and where I could no longer imagine myself in Hermione’s shoes, but I started to relate to a 30-something loner, who clearly wasn’t a hero, who was difficult to live with and who was often an asshole. And then my husband and I moved to Sweden (a country whose language I still don’t speak and where I still don’t have any friends outside work colleagues), which only amplified the tension in our marriage and led to even more communication breakdown and loneliness.

Johnlock fanfiction that dealt with similar themes (heart-breaking angst with a happy ending) became a source of consolation and hope but also distraction and escape that I used to steady myself to get through each day and to fight despair so I didn’t feel like I did in 2011.

This year is better than last year on the home front and I have found an English-speaking therapist who is working well with me. We have sometimes talked about fandom and fanfiction and through these conversations it’s become clearer to me that I ship Johnlock right now because it brings me joy and that it’s a positive and valuable thing to nurture that joy while dealing with the parts of my life that continue to challenge and overwhelm me.

Comments

[mundungus42.livejournal.com]

What a fabulous discussion!

I fell into shipping because my first fandom was a big freaking troll. It was X-Files, and the writers spun out the Mulder/Scully UST so much that it made the actual semi-consummation thereof feel like a serious letdown. Thankfully, the M/S fanfiction was much more satisfying.

Because the archives I frequented were romance-heavy, when I first started reading and writing, fanfiction and shipping were pretty much inextricable. Hell, in the early years of Harry Potter, you determined who your friends were based on whether they were Hermione/Harry, Hermione/Ron, or Hermione/Draco shippers (unless you were all about Harry/Ron or Harry/Draco, which had its vocal supporters, but again, in the early days, not as much as the het ships... how times have changed! :D). I didn't have a strong allegiance to any one HP ship (though Ron/Hermione always made me gag) until Snape rolled up his sleeve to show Cornelius Fudge his Dark Mark, which precipitated my long, ecstatic fall into Hermione/Snape.

At last! Not since Mulder/Scully had two characters presented such a fascinating combination of compatible traits and transgressive yumminess. I was hooked from the first fic I read, and it's been my HP OTP ever since. I read plenty of other ships in HP (Snarry, Snuna are favorites), and I've even discovered that I quite like gen.

I think my first slash OTP manifested shortly after the first Pirates of the Caribbean film came out, and I started shipping Jack Sparrow/James Norrington HARD. There were two actors that I adored chewing up the scenery with more fizzing chemistry than either of the romantic leads had. And then the rest of the movies happened. *sigh* I tried my hand at fix-it fic, but the movies keep happening.

Which brings me to Sherlock. I discovered the ACD fandom in about 2001, when I was first starting to dabble my toes in HP slash. I'd received Les Klinger's Annotated Sherlock Holmes for my birthday, and having recently re-read the whole canon, I wanted to see what was out there in terms of fanfic. Of course, Holmes/Watson was THE OTP, and there was so much sumptuously-written fic that I was too intimidated to write it, though I did manage an ACD crossover with Harry Potter. Then when Sherlock came out with perfectly cast leads and loads of ACD in-jokes, all bets were off. I like that there are more opportunities for shipping with Sherlock than in ACD, but Johnlock is what I most frequently seek out to read, and it's what I'm most drawn to write. But bless Mark Gatiss for giving us a Mycroft for the ages. And Rupert Graves for giving us a Lestrade to love.

And now? The Marvel Cinematic Universe is being a jerk who keeps casting painfully attractive people who bring unexpected depth and nuance to their characters, which is making me want to write fic in a way that a fandom hasn't since Sherlock. I'm holding out as long as I can.

So yeah, it seems as though I'm a sucker for smart characters with sharp tongues, especially if portrayed in media by talented actors, especially when they appear in well-realized, rich universes. And relationships involving normalizing a power imbalance. And pretty costumes.

[pennswoods.livejournal.com]

I fell into shipping because my first fandom was a big freaking troll.

LOL! It seemed this experience left a great impact on a number of folks. And oh that fic you just linked to, wow! That goes way back.

I am wondering if I'll want to dip my toes into more Holmes/Watson (not Johnlock) fic. It's a different flavor, but so many people have found these characters compelling for so long (including Gatiss and Moffat!)

I can see how talented actors who are good at conveying a depth of emotion while also playing up expectations of nobility, intelligence, vulnerability, dedication, and attractiveness amp up shipping potential.