I fell into fandom in February 2002 and started writing fic in April or May. (In retrospect, I am surprised it took me that long to jump in with both feet, so to speak!) I hung out mostly at FictionAlley and various Yahoo Groups, with occasional stopovers at SugarQuill and ff.net, and man, I was so happy to get onto LJ where it wasn't all HP all the time. Anyway, I have probably read most of those old shipping essays (H/Hr and R/Hr). Hell, I remember there were people who'd even get into shipping wars over R/Hr and H/Hr in popular epic fanfics.
The whole thing has always baffled me, partly because I do not 'get' romance in the way most people do (I am an aromantic asexual) so the issue of who falls in love with whom is always secondary for me, and partly because I do not understand the OTP mentality at all. I have always figured that the idea that there is only one person in the whole universe who can make a second person perfectly happy is sad, scary, and stupid. People can love lots of people, sequentially or simultaneously. People can be happy in lots of different ways, and all happiness takes work. So while I may think some ships are more likely than others, some are more stable than others, and some are more interesting to me personally, I do not understand the driving need to have one of them 'win,' so to speak. I think maybe some of that need to have 'your' ship become canon is because people see ships as having great importance to the thematic unity of a story, and if the 'wrong' ship becomes canon, it means the story has violated their guidelines for good storytelling... but since I don't consider romance central to almost any story, that argument fails to carry emotional weight for me.
Eh. To sum up, shipping is weird because people are weird. Inescapable fact of life. *sigh*
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Date: 2009-11-18 06:13 am (UTC)The whole thing has always baffled me, partly because I do not 'get' romance in the way most people do (I am an aromantic asexual) so the issue of who falls in love with whom is always secondary for me, and partly because I do not understand the OTP mentality at all. I have always figured that the idea that there is only one person in the whole universe who can make a second person perfectly happy is sad, scary, and stupid. People can love lots of people, sequentially or simultaneously. People can be happy in lots of different ways, and all happiness takes work. So while I may think some ships are more likely than others, some are more stable than others, and some are more interesting to me personally, I do not understand the driving need to have one of them 'win,' so to speak. I think maybe some of that need to have 'your' ship become canon is because people see ships as having great importance to the thematic unity of a story, and if the 'wrong' ship becomes canon, it means the story has violated their guidelines for good storytelling... but since I don't consider romance central to almost any story, that argument fails to carry emotional weight for me.
Eh. To sum up, shipping is weird because people are weird. Inescapable fact of life. *sigh*