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Narrative
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alt title(s): Ship "How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before and never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them and take the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover."
Hoo Boy.
Steve Jobs of Apple Computer reportedly said, "Real artists ship." What he meant was that a professional producer of computer software or hardware actually gets a product out. It has also been used to refer to professional writers releasing a story before the deadline set by their editors. That is not the sort of Shipping that this entry is referring to. The same goes for the sort of ship that Dido had in mind when writing the refrain of her rock pop hit "White Flag" (though the lyrics are surprisingly applicable).
"Shipping" (ostensibly derives from "Relationship", though it might as well be "Worship") means rooting for fictional romance. Of all the obsessions that universally afflict fandom, this is by far the most persistent, widespread and prone to be Serious Business. This is probably because humans are wired to seek a romantic partner in such a powerful, fundamental way that they even get a considerable kick out of doing it by proxy. Of course, if the characters actually do get together you just might get a vague feeling of being cheated out of something, given that you don't get to bask in their fictional happily ever after; which is why you might want to go for the more difficult, yet ultimately more satisfying strategy of going outside and talking to other people. And also why once the much-anticipated Relationship Upgrade happens, shippers are wont to lose interest very quickly.
Expect to encounter fan forum threads with a hundred times the activity of all the other threads combined, titled "Will Bob get together with Alice or Eve? Round 997!" *. Proceed with caution.
What factors into a fan's shipping preference varies and is definitely not limited to the Canon at hand. Several considerations that you would expect to apply do not. Characters may be shipped despite being still in grade school, of the wrong sexuality, siblings or twins, mortal enemies or just generally the bane of each other's existence, separated by an age gap of decades or centuries, not of the same narrative continuum, part of a story where romance just isn't an issue, inanimate objects, nigh total strangers, considered as a possible couple at all only because they're both left single after you're done pairing everybody else, extremely implausible as a couple by design or even outright denied to ever possibly get together by Word Of God. Even when the source material goes as far as to have an Official Couple, sometimes fumbling execution or otherwise Values Dissonance will drive fans towards emotional investments diametric to those the author intended.
Shippers will take no prisoners in their quest to make their OTP come to life, and will have no qualms about interpreting the tiniest, most ambiguous details as evidence and even actively rooting for sympathetic characters to die just to get them out of the way. At times this can become so ridiculous that fans would deliberately challenge each other to rationalize pairings made at random, or chosen to be as wrong as possible, as a form of self-deprecation. Worse, it may cross the line into being indistinguishable from its own parody, so that pairings that were conceived in this way may as well gain a following just like the rest of them. But in the end, all but the most die-hard shippers are reasonable people, will be friendly at least towards their natural allies and have some limit of how severely they can be starved for validation before they Abandon Ship. That is, if they ever expected to be validated in the first place.
Frequently the writers know full well how loaded the subject is and play with the audience, sometimes to the extreme of letting the characters themselves get in on the fun. It goes without saying that not all ongoing tease storylines endure and graduate to Relationship Upgrade; and then a majority of the ones that do don't until near the very end. This is usually not done to frustrate fans (or at least, not for this sole purpose), but rather because the writers are also aware of romance being a very powerful device that should be handled with great caution, lest it swallow the storyline whole. For the audience, being thus denied leads to frustration, and frustration leads to the dark side, that is, writing wish-fulfillment fan fiction as a form of emotional venting.
Though it's possible to pretty much stick a "/" between the names of two characters to refer to a ship, it's become an unspoken rule of cyberspace to resort to Idiosyncratic Ship Naming, partly as to make labeling Fan Fics easier. Common form includes Cutesy Portmanteau Couple Names (which was imported from Japanese Anime fandom), "Fooshipping" where foo is something or other descriptive of the relationship (bonus points if it's something like Rocket Ship or Pirate Ship), and taking Theme Naming to its obvious conclusion- for instance, if characters have numbers associated with them, relationships may be denoted by arithmetic (3/4 may appear to merely denote a fraction, but lends itself to an entirely different meaning when appearing in the context of Codename Kids Next Door.)
As far as omnipresent forces of nature go, shipping is up there with Death and Taxes. An "example section" would just be a list of pieces of fiction popular enough to have 1. any online discussion going on for them and 2. at least one fan come across this page. Suffice to say that on any show, "Joe/Mary is popular and so is Don/Daniel, though there is lots of vitriol between supporters of Gum/Popsicle and Twix/Popsicle", up to minor variations. For an example with some unique flavor to it, you might want to look into Shipping Tropes.
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