Snowflake catchup: day 8

[obstinatecondolement]

In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend of mine today where we butted up against a difference in understanding we had about what to "ship" something actually meant in practice. Specifically, I was said the following about a ship:

"Yeah, like, I do not ship this! I think it's a fascinating kind of... deconstruction of teen crushes on authority figures? Or people who they think are safe outlets for burgeoning sexual feelings who turn out to be not that? But I think it's repulsive. And my reading of [movie] is that [character 1] had a crush on [character 2] and the betrayal of him turning out to be literally manipulating him as part of an elaborate revenge plot shut down [character 1]'s tentative exploration of bisexuality for years. Also, I have never thought it was reciprocated, lol. Like, I don't get people who ship it in a fluffy consensual way, and I find the way that I think it is actually plausible to be repellent, but I do get it? Idk"

which they found interesting, because their feelings on the ship and reading of the canon was pretty much the same as mine, but they felt that they did ship it. So we clearly meant different things when we said "I ship this" or "I don't ship this" and we teased out what we meant specifically by this shorthand.

I am not aware if there is any agreed upon Definitive™ meaning, but I thought it would be a fun subject for a poll! So, here goes:

Poll #28319 Shipping

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 20

View Respondents

So like... what does "I ship this" mean to you?

View Answers

I want this to be canon
2 (10.0%)

I think this is an aspirational relationship dynamic
1 (5.0%)

I find this interesting, but I don't necessarily want it to be canon or think it would be a good idea in real life
15 (75.0%)

I find the characters very attractive
5 (25.0%)

I find the dynamic between the characters very attractive
16 (80.0%)

I actively want to engage with this ship (via fanworks, meta, just thinking about them) in a more than incidental way
17 (85.0%)

I think this is a plausible interpretation of their canon relationship
10 (50.0%)

I think this is a plausible extrapolation of their canon relationship's potential evolution
12 (60.0%)

I don't like the relationship in canon but the fanon/what it could be is great
2 (10.0%)

Other I will explain in comments
2 (10.0%)

The responses are check boxes, so tick as many as apply!

Comments

[kavyina]

As a new DW user, YOU CAN MAKE POLLS? This is fantastic.

More on the topic, yeah, if I ship something, I'm shipping it because the dynamic and/or characters are interesting (and attractive) to me, not because I want it to be canon or even think it should be canon. In fact, if my ships were made canon, I probably wouldn't like the canon versions!

[obstinatecondolement]

Unfortunately, you have to have a paid or premium account, but yes!

The definition I settled on was that I actively wanted to engage with it in more than a once-off experimental way (i.e. something I felt I could plausbly write for an exchange, for example). This is, of course, complicated by the fact that there are things I ship that I avoid fandom content about because I disagree with/dislike the most common interpretation of it in fandom, but I think that by including "just thinking about it" or even, like, re-visiting canon for that ship (either in part of in whole), in my definition of "engaging with" a ship allows for that. There are also ships that I think are nice and that I do think should happen in canon, but that I don't feel I ship. It's a deceptively simple question with a lot of potential complex answers really!

[cornerofmadness]

thanks for sharing

[obstinatecondolement]

No problem!

[justanorthernlight]

This question is very interesting to me! I'm not very ship or romance focused (when talking about what fandoms I'm in I always feel like I need to disclaim that I am an "indifferent" shipper), and the ambiguity over what people mean by "shipping" isn't something I see discussed much. It kind of ties into the fandom purity debates, with whether a ship needs to be healthy for it to be a true ship, or whether a dynamic that is interesting to explore is enough.

I do think fandom would benefit from bringing the term "darkship" back into vogue to disambiguate things a bit.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yes, it was very interesting to me that a term I had quietly thought was commonly understood to be what I meant by it had different shades of meaning for other people.

I'm torn on the concept of "darkship" being widespread, to be honest! It might be a helpful way to signal that you didn't think it was a great and emulatable realationship dynamic for real life, but I also feel like it might have the effect of like... implying that shipping something that way was fundamentally different to the standard way that something Should be shipped. Like (and this is maybe a flippant comparison to make, but also I am trans, so I think I'm allowed) I really didn't like when trans* was being used as an "inclusive" term, because I felt like I, as a non-binary person, was being pushed into the asterisk and implied to be a new and fundamentally different thing to people who were simply "trans" if that makes sense.

[justanorthernlight]

Oh yeah, I can see how that could get very twisted. It's been a while since I engaged with that kind of discourse, I've forgotten how slippery the slope is into narrower and narrower definitions of the 'right' way to do/be a thing.

My line of thinking for darkships was more towards Hero/Villain ships and Villain/Villain ships where the villain(s) is/are absolutely not redeemed... I was in a particular fandom a while ago where at least one person was routinely having very public meltdowns about their NOTP being popular because character A at one point tried to kill character B- but I guess that ties back into the issue with the word shipping having a wide range of meanings to different people.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, these things can get very fraught! I honestly think the solution to situations like the one you are describing is more along the lines of people avoiding stuff that upsets them rather than sorting things into subcategories or having stricter definitions of terms though. Obviously that is harder to do in practice and a lot of the people rending their garments about other people doing fandom wrong are often very resistant to just accepting the idea that other people have different preferences to them that they find actively upsetting, but that those people had a right to those preferences. And, like, I do think there are things that it are unacceptable (e.g.

antisemitism cw

Nazi AUs where one character is an SS officer and another is Jewish

) and things that I think ought to be criticised even if they shouldn't be Forbidden (e.g. writing a canon female love interest as a harridan shrew who is trying to ruin her canonical love interest's life and exists as an obstacle to the m/m ship) but by and large I think that people kind of need to be cool with the idea that not everything is for them. And that the presence of something they don't like is not the same thing as the absence of something they do like (as in "It seems like everyone's writing X/Y, but there's nothing for my ship Y/Z and I'm bummed about that" is not the same as "People shouldn't write X/Y.")

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

As a programmer, I still read "trans*" as "everything that starts with the prefix 'trans'" (which, initially I believe it basically was, being shorthand for "transgender, transsexual, transvestite") and was very puzzled the first time I saw it being objected to as a footnote-type notation.

[obstinatecondolement]

Another example at how we can understand the same terms in very different ways! Although, tbh, even with that meaning I feel like "transgender" was, at the time at least, commonly understood to be an umbrella term encompassing all of these and more.

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

I've always been rather given to "this amuses me" shipping. Crackships, as we said, back in the day. But when I seriously "ship" a thing it's usually a mixture of "I enjoy thinking about how these characters relate to each other/might in contexts we haven't seen them in" and "I am interested in exploring how these characters might interact in [context we have not seen them in in canon]." Whether the characters are or will be together in canon doesn't necessarily matter, because what I want to see might still be fanfic-only or just in my brain (like, maybe I really want to see them on a normal date night and canon ends with the first kiss, or maybe I want to see how they got together and they're established at the beginning of the canon story.)

Sometimes I actively don't actually want them to be canon, either because the author wouldn't be able to pull it off — horrible example, but when I was a teenager I was into Harry Potter and "shipped" Snape/Harry's mom and JKR managed to make that "canon" in a way I absolutely hated — or because in the actual context of the story/medium/genre it would cause Problems. Some ships would change the message or tone of the story too much, some would have to be forced in ways that would make other parts of the story less enjoyable, etc. But if I find them compelling in fanfic or speculation I might still say I ship them.

[izzet_bedtime_yet]

As a sidebar, because I'm apparently full of those tonight, I used to know so many teens/young adults whose definition of "ship" was "find sexually exciting" and more recently the same age range seems to default to "believe will happen in canon" which just goes to show.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yes, it's interesting how it can be a generational thing! I feel like there wasn't anything approaching the same focus on "this will/should happen in canon" when I was a baby fan. Although that was also due to mainly being an m/m shipper and not feeling that it was realistic that canon would make their characters queer, so maybe the fact that it's more plausible now has led to more people thinking that shipping something meant that it was going to or should happen in canon.

[quailfence]

I don't like the relationship in canon but the fanon/what it could be is great
This option is interesting to me because while I have experienced this before (mostly “a fic that I read for reasons not relating to the ship wrote that ship really well” and now that I think about it a bit more most of those fics were Kirk/Spock/McCoy I think?), more recently I’ve experienced the opposite: I’ve seen a bunch of people say that they like the fanon version of Doctor/Yaz from Doctor Who more than the canon version, whereas I personally like the canon version more than the fanon version

[obstinatecondolement]

Yes, I agree! There are a few ships that I like in canon but I can't stand the (most commonly represented) fandom version of. I unfortunately ran out of spaces for adding options, but it's definitely something I experience more often than liking the fanon version of something over the canon version.

[amado1]

Man, that's a good poll! Even just for myself, I often mean "I ship it" in entirely different ways. Saying I ship Troi/Riker is totally different from saying I ship Worf/Riker or Troi/Crusher... even though I engage with all three ships, enjoy them, see the appeal, and understand the canon roots, it's a totally different flavor of shipping.

[obstinatecondolement]

Thank you! And yes, I definitely agree! I ship different things in different ways more often than not. Also these are all great TNG ships.

[adriennefae]

For me it varies somewhat from ship to ship. It definitely doesn't have to mean that I want it to be canon or think it would be a good idea in real life. It does, however, generally mean that there's something I find interesting about the characters and their dynamic that I want to see more of (or in some cases, that there could be if we ever actually saw them interact), that I think something about them as a couple would be interesting/fun to watch, and that I think about the ship and create and/or engage with content for it in a more than incidental way, as you put it.

Finding at least one of the characters attractive makes me more likely to ship something, but it's neither necessary nor (usually) sufficient.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, my feeling was that most people who'd see this poll wouldn't feel like it was an "This should be canon" or "This is such a good relationship model" kind of thing, I think that's more common in different subsections of fandom than on Dreamwidth.

I agree that being personally attracted to one or more of the characters is not necessary or sufficient for me to ship something. I do find that I often become more attracted to them the longer I write from the perspective of someone who finds them attractive, though. It did interest me that "I find the dynamic between these characters very attractive" got three times the number of votes as the option for finding the characters themselves attractive, but I think that it makes a lot of sense. With fanworks it's more about emotions and story than just about things being attractive in an aesthetic sense.

[lebateleur]

For me it means "I like the idea of exploring these two (or more!) characters in a sexual or romantic relationship via fanworks." There's no expectation that the relationship be any definition of healthy, or value judgment on any creators or consumers if it isn't. But then again, I also don't expect fiction to explore only healthy situations or themes, and think there can be a lot of value in thoughtfully examining ones that aren't and how characters with XYZ characteristics would respond in such situations.

[obstinatecondolement]

Definitely agree! If fiction were only permitted to depict healthy behaviour and relationships it would be very trite and dishonest, imo. Also, while the ship I mentioned in this post is one that I find (personally) repulsive, that doesn't mean that I think no one should ship it or that people who do ship it are themselves repulsive! Like, I definitely get the appeal, it's just not pushing any of my buttons. I have other ships that are desperately unhealthy that push all my buttons.

[lebateleur]

Yes, to everything you've said above. I'm not sure how best to put it, but I don't think that exploring unhealthy things--or even having them push any (let alone all)--of your buttons, is in itself unhealthy. If anything, in my own personal experience (which I am not generalizing to fandom here) it's been the people who refuse to think about these things--even in fiction--who are more likelier to act aspects of them out in their real world lives.

So it doesn't particularly worry me when I encounter something I think is unpleasant, or unhealthy, or that I don't like in fandom so long as there's no indication the author embodies it in real life too; I just backbrowser out and moving on when that happens.

[obstinatecondolement]

Yeah, the idea that it is unhealthy (or Bad For You in a more nebulous moral, psychological or spiritual sense) to have your buttons pressed by certain ideas in fiction (or in a roleplaying scenario) reminds me of nothing so much as the Victorian moral panic over children (or, lol, women, who naturally lacked moral fibre and needed as much guidance in this sphere as a child would) reading novels and being led astray by them.

EDIT: I think that I misread your original comment a little! When I said (in the comment you were replying to) that there were certain ships that pressed all my buttons that were desperately unhealthy, I meant unhealthy for them if they were real people engaged in a similar relationship, not unhealthy for me as a reader/viewer/etc.