Why I ship

In this entry I intend to get very personal. I consider myself a very open person. I have no qualms about telling my life's story to the next stranger I meet in the street, so why should doing so anonymously on the internet be any different? I'm 25 years old, closing in on 26 in a few short months. While the people around me measure their past and current relationships in months and years, mine can be measured in weeks. My longest, most serious and meaningful relationship ended five years ago after having lasted two months. Ever since then my lovelife's been at a standstill. I haven't feelt that zinge in five years. And I wonder if I am even capable of falling in love with someone. It's been so long that I don't know if I can trust my memory of what it was like, trust that I ever truly was in love.

I don't know why I'm like that, because all my life I've been surrounded by love, by people who've stayed together their whole lives and who still love each other after decades of being together. Both my sisters are happily married, my parents, my grandparents... Me, I have my doubts that I will ever find someone. Sometimes that thought upsets me, other times I just accept that's the way it is. I think my doubts regarding my romantic future is definitely a contributing factor to why I ship.

For anyone here who's unfamilliar with the term "ship", here's a brief explanation. It's when you read a book, watch a movie or a television show and you get invested in the idea or the actuality of two people becoming a couple. I'm not talking about your average "I hope they get together at the end", where afterwards you place the disc back in its casing, or the book back in the bookshelf and don't think that much more about it. I'm talking about getting so emotionally invested in the characters and the romance that you not only *want* the people to get together. You *need* them to. You get excited when the romance is good and upset when it isn't. And usually you don't stop at just watching/reading, you talk about it with your friends, you go online and search for communities where you can find likeminded people to discuss it with. The real passionate look for fanfiction/fanvideos to either help them through the bad times or to elevate the good. The more creative bunch of us, we make them ourselves and share them with other likeminded shippers.

Again, for those not familliar with the terms I bring up, I will explain:

- Fanfiction is the phenomenon where a person takes characters from books, movies, tv shows and so on (from now on referred to as fandom), and use them to write new stories. Some authors may use the setting in a fandom and bring in their own original characters. Both are classified as fanfiction. These stories can be directly linked to events taking place in the fandom that either changes, expands on or explains the things that took place, they can be original concoctions that take place in the future, past or in between the fandom's running plot, or they could be based in alternative universes and realities. The general misconseption a lot of the uninitiated have is that fanfiction mainly consists of poorly written erotica/porn, but the truth is that while, yes, there are a lot of sex-centered fanfiction out there and a vast majority of it is so badly written you don't know whether you should laugh or cry, that is still only one small portion of the fanfiction total out there. There are a lot of stories where sex only play an indirect part of the plot, and stories that are of no sexual nature whatsoever. And most importantly, while I may be mentioning fanfiction in regards to shipping, there are vast amount of fanfiction that have little or no romantic content whatsoever, where the adventure and/or friendship gets the full attention.

- Fanvideos is the cross between fanfiction and music videos. They are fan made and there are many different ways to go about it. The more popular types of fanvideo are the slideshow and the typical music video. Generally the vidder (creator of the fanvideo) use a song as the core of the video and place the images and/or video clips accordingly. This can be done randomly, or the vidder could try to match the images/clips up to the lyrics/rhythm/mood of the song. This is typical either for character/shipper videos and action/adventure videos. A step up from that is to make a video that tells a story, this could entail summing up the plot of an episode/arch/movie, a character or a pairing's story, or the vidder could use the clips/images to tell a new story, to manipulate what we see to make it seem like something else entirely is happening. The really good vidders can drag in clips/images taken from other fandoms and still manage to keep the story revolving around specific fandom characters/ships.

There are of course several other creative ways of expressing love for a character/ship/fandom, but these two are the ones I primarily use, so that is what I'm going to focus on. So back to what I was saying before.

I am a shipper. I admit it, I get so invested in pairings, both actual and potential pairings in fandoms that I enter this obsesive state of mine. It doesn't happen with all pairings I see (all my ships stems from TV shows), I am more than capable to just like a pairing without it breaking my heart when they don't work out, but it's just with some ships there's this gut feeling I have. Something in me reacts to what I see in front of me and for some reason I *need* those two to work out. I feel that pang. I can relate to one or both of the characters, or not. I can be physically attracted to one or both of the characters, or not. Either way it's like I fall in love with the pairing, or something close to it. I get shivers, I get knots, if things are good with my ship I can remain happy for days. If it doesn't, my mood easily drops.

It might seem insane to use the fictional world to compensate for what you feel is lacking in the real world. I'm not really sure if that is what I'm doing, but I know I partly make my ships my link to love, to romance. The things I feel regarding my ships, some of it I think I have yet to feel about an actual living and breathing person. Maybe I will find that with someone, I *hope* I will find that with someone, I'm just not counting on it.