Torrain
Junior Chimp
Posts: 6,054
Political Matrix
E: -1.42, S: -0.52
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« on: June 21, 2021, 06:31:00 PM » |
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In the real world, I’ve celebrated when two of my friends, who seemed well-suited, were honest about their feelings and coupled up. Once or twice, when I’ve been sufficiently invested in two well-developed characters with decent chemistry, I’ve felt a strange facsimile of the same feeling.
Based on that experience, I think that shipping is a parasocial version of a desire for your ‘friends’ to be happy. It can easily become wildly unhealthy (see the novel-length smut fan fiction that teenagers produce in their spare time), especially if your attachment to actors or fictional characters comes at the expense of human relationships.
Some of it is LGBT teenagers looking for representation (much of the Sherlock-Watson shipping was kids looking for more MLM representation in tv).
Strangely though, the largest group of ‘shippers’ online are heterosexual female teenagers and adult woman shipping male characters together (based on author/reader/fiction tags on AO3, a major fan-fiction website). I’m not sure why this is. Maybe it’s harmless curiosity, maybe it crosses the line into a sort of fetishism.
It’s a strange phenomenon, and one that’s been covered extensively on sites like YouTube and in some mainstream outlets. If you want a more in-depth look at specific examples, the YouTuber Sarah Z has produced a few video essays on the subject (focusing on LGBT shipping, Sherlock truthers (it’s complicated) and the sense of entitlement that fans begin to accrue as a show drags on for years).
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