AHC: Shipping Phenomon not Powerful Pop Culture force on the internet

Your challenge, should you accept it is to ensure that the fandom practice of shipping and shipping wars is not a prevelant force in pop culture, and that it at most remains in the darkest corners of the internet.

Is this at all possible or is it so ASB that it requires a change in human psyche.

Bonus points if you point out what force takes it's place as an annoyance on the internet AND what would pop culture look like without fans shipping their favourite characters all the time.
 
Well, the problem is that shipping derives directly from humans' interest in romantic interests. So so long as fandoms exist, people will have opinions about romantic relationships.

Hell, in any love triangle series, shipping will erupt, by virtue of at least some people having differing opinions on triangle resolution than others.
 
I think it would be possible with a radical change to the nature of the internet. If the internet is restricted to academic purposes, then there wouldn't be much shipping or anything else from pop culture on it. However, I suspect that's the only way about it. No doubt shipping was very common before the internet, but the internet opened up many more opportunities for fans to talk in depth about their favorite books and TV shows without being told to shut up.
 
I think it would be possible with a radical change to the nature of the internet. If the internet is restricted to academic purposes, then there wouldn't be much shipping or anything else from pop culture on it.

Back before 1993, soc. and alt. hierarchies, and prior to the great renaming, what would become soc. and alt. hierarchies were rife with pop culture. I don't specialise in shipping research, so I couldn't tell you the particulars, but a great deal of the invidious culture of the internet predates the world wide web.

However, I suspect that's the only way about it. No doubt shipping was very common before the internet, but the internet opened up many more opportunities for fans to talk in depth about their favorite books and TV shows without being told to shut up.

Virulent and militantly corporeal enforcement of homophobia might work. Shipping might survive as an underground phenomena. Of course, the POD would be prior to the early 1970s and would involve sadder shorter lives for many people in the advanced West.

One could call this the "Turing" solution to shipping. Keeping the lobotomies and chemical castrations going strong from the 1960s might be your start.

yours thankful we didn't walk that path,
Sam R.
 
Back before 1993, soc. and alt. hierarchies, and prior to the great renaming, what would become soc. and alt. hierarchies were rife with pop culture. I don't specialise in shipping research, so I couldn't tell you the particulars, but a great deal of the invidious culture of the internet predates the world wide web.



Virulent and militantly corporeal enforcement of homophobia might work. Shipping might survive as an underground phenomena. Of course, the POD would be prior to the early 1970s and would involve sadder shorter lives for many people in the advanced West.

One could call this the "Turing" solution to shipping. Keeping the lobotomies and chemical castrations going strong from the 1960s might be your start.

yours thankful we didn't walk that path,
Sam R.

How would that work? There's a lot of shipping (probably most) which is straight. Are certain you haven't gotten shipping and slash confused?

And why would that work anyhow, it didn't seem all that effective back when homosexuality was actively repressed?
 

Narnia

Banned
Maybe some regulations make it too expensive for people to ship stuff on e-bay. If some kind of mail-related terrorist attack happens it could make shipping too troublesome so people will just buy from big-box stores.
 
How would that work? There's a lot of shipping (probably most) which is straight. Are certain you haven't gotten shipping and slash confused?

No, I'm happy with my understanding, as was the community discussing its past in the 1990s in the early 2000s: http://web.archive.org/web/20121025210141/http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Shipper

Its a non-heteronormative conduct. It is tied into a broader openness about sexual conducts.

And why would that work anyhow, it didn't seem all that effective back when homosexuality was actively repressed?

Back when where and when? Mass and mass participatory media didn't endorse shipping in the 1970s when things thawed slightly, and homosexual cultures have remained ghettoised into the 2000s in most advanced Western countries.

Picking individuals off for especial or demonstrative persecution currently happens within internet communities, and it is claimed to reduce the general and "public" expression of the conduct persecuted. Professionals currently engaged in shipping or slash regularly hide this conduct from association with their real identities. Up the level of homophobic persecution in the 70s-00s—a couple of public unprosecuted, uncoronially inquired suspicious deaths a year amongst secondary media producers—and you can break the nexus of online fan culture by driving it so far underground that it won't appear in public.

yours,
Sam R.
 
Your link doesn't support your definition and it is literally held nobody else.

http://web.archive.org/web/20121025210141/http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Shipper said:
The following definition dates to March 2001 on Shipper World:
A shipper is someone who is in favour of a relationship between two lead characters on a TV program or book/film. ‘Shipper’ is used when someone is in favour of a male/female romantic relationship. (There are also the 'shippers of the same gender-relationships but - for now - that doesn't concern Shipperworld. The only main difference is that their fanfiction is a different category to male/female romance fanfiction - it's called 'slash fiction' because of the '/' used when listing the characters involved.)[3]
...
The following definition dates to November 2002 in media fandom:
A 'shipper is a fan who promotes, projects and just plain revels in a relationship between their favorite characters. Legend has it the term started in X-Files fandom, but the Picard & Crusher fan's also used it. Wherever it began, 'shipper has become universally used with in fandom, unfortunately not always in a complimentary way.…

Emphasis added.
 
Clearly we need to make sure everyone is using the same understanding of what "shipping" is. My understanding was that "shipping" refers to the people on the internet who have strong opinions on which fictional characters should date which other fictional characters. "Ship" seems to be a reference to "relationship". It seems that half of these are about homosexual relationships, but if the internet somehow were to repress homosexuality, there'd still be a lot of shipping of heterosexual pairs.
I don't know of a difference between shipping and slash fiction, and I think the word "slash fiction" is quite misleading, as it sounds like it's about knife attacks. Also, slashes are entirely the wrong punctuation mark. It should be ampersand fiction.
 
Clearly we need to make sure everyone is using the same understanding of what "shipping" is. My understanding was that "shipping" refers to the people on the internet who have strong opinions on which fictional characters should date which other fictional characters. "Ship" seems to be a reference to "relationship". It seems that half of these are about homosexual relationships, but if the internet somehow were to repress homosexuality, there'd still be a lot of shipping of heterosexual pairs.
I don't know of a difference between shipping and slash fiction, and I think the word "slash fiction" is quite misleading, as it sounds like it's about knife attacks. Also, slashes are entirely the wrong punctuation mark. It should be ampersand fiction.

Your proposed definition doesn't quite capture the force of the opinion. Shipping usually involves counter-readings, tendential or forceful purposive readings. It can also involve gross misreadings or whole cloth invention. So much so that with regularity the "characters" used in shipping bear little if any resemblance to the "characters" in the source texts. Given the importance of deviant and counter-readings of heteronormative texts into homosexual texts; and, given that there's plenty of heteronormative romance available, it is hard to see the possibility of a mass shipping fan culture forming given an extended and violent repression of homosexuality in the West.

The role of Mulder:Scully fanshipping is reasonably important, and again it is a forced ship, "it isn't the notion of Penelope pining for Odysseus that lures Shippers to The X-Files' Homeric quest. It's the idea of the couple venturing out together and of a romance ripening in that context, conflating public and
private and breaking down gender/genre dichotomies" (Scodari & Felder 2000 DOI:10.1080/10510970009388522 p253). We're unlikely to see directors given this kind of free run in the 1990s, nor self-reflective communities playing with these themes, if it is a one way ticket to public exposure and public violence.

yours,
Sam R.
 
So, you're referring to fan fiction. I was simply referring to people saying "I ship these two! I'm a shipper!" If Mr. Xie was referring to romantic fan fiction and not to people simply saying their opinions on who'd be good together, you have a valid point that's worth considering. The problem is that people understand these slang terms in different ways. It leads to a veritable Tower of Babel.
But, on your point, if there is massive opposition to homosexual relationships, and even opposition to people approving of homosexual relationships between fictional characters, the internet is still a place where people often express things that they wouldn't express anywhere else. So, that means you have to change both modern western civilization and the nature of the internet.
 
Have the creators of intellectual property try to stamp out on this sort of thing and stress the canon relationships as truth and other relationships as detrimental, offensive, or disrespectful to the original property. Even if they don't actually physically destroy it, just have them speak out against it. In a fandom I spent five years at the center of, my biggest problem was the sheer number of gi- people, who insisted that the fanon pairings were canon, occasionally bringing up the fact the idea hadn't been actually spoken out against.

It won't be eliminated, but it will be minimized.

Also, just going to add, cut down on all the fucking gay jokes in comedy programs. It sounds stupid, but I think that'd make a hell of a difference in how people put two and two together.
 
So, you're referring to fan fiction. I was simply referring to people saying "I ship these two! I'm a shipper!" If Mr. Xie was referring to romantic fan fiction and not to people simply saying their opinions on who'd be good together, you have a valid point that's worth considering. The problem is that people understand these slang terms in different ways. It leads to a veritable Tower of Babel.
But, on your point, if there is massive opposition to homosexual relationships, and even opposition to people approving of homosexual relationships between fictional characters, the internet is still a place where people often express things that they wouldn't express anywhere else. So, that means you have to change both modern western civilization and the nature of the internet.

Consider for a minute the extent to which the illegal, and widely reviled, habits of people who exchange sexual content depicting actual children is policed. Law enforcement has made it a top priority. Civil society enthusiastically aids law enforcement. And the level of publicly encouraged repression of this illegal conduct has driven it behind networks using cryptography and into peer-to-peer networks. And the police still regularly infiltrate these networks and conduct mass arrests.

Yes it still exists. No it doesn't exist as a powerful pop culture force.

State and public surveillance of homosexuality equivalent to that of the 1950s, amplified, would drive shipping as a "pop culture force" out of existence. The presence of a network of women secretly sharing through cryptographically protected peer-to-peer networks force-shipped Darcy/Wickham stories or discussions wouldn't make "shipping" in any sense as we know it a powerful pop culture force. The presence of authorised heterosexual romance fan communities isn't "shipping" as we know it either.

yours,
Sam R.
 
This dramatically predates the 'net. There was Kirk/Spock slashfic in the '70s, before anybody knew what slashfic or shipping was.
 
This dramatically predates the 'net. There was Kirk/Spock slashfic in the '70s, before anybody knew what slashfic or shipping was.
Not quite. This was how slashfic and shipping were invented and coined. The term 'Mary Sue' also comes from Trek fiction.

But has anyone seen any of the terms used outside Trek sources before the early 90's? That's what I notice a curious lack of.
 
Not quite. This was how slashfic and shipping were invented and coined. The term 'Mary Sue' also comes from Trek fiction.

But has anyone seen any of the terms used outside Trek sources before the early 90's? That's what I notice a curious lack of.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. fandom also has a vocal contingent of people who ship the two heroes, Solo and Kuryakin, and write slashfic about them; this was also active well before the creation of the Internet.

One thing about slashfic, shipping fics and fanfic in general is that, according to a number of writers and other commentators (themselves active in the fandom community) who are familiar with the topic, slashfic isn't really a gay phenomenon; it started out as an expression of the sexual fantasies of certain heterosexual women (who comprise, according to many commentators, the great majority of fanfic writers). When Kirk/Spock slashfic first started becoming popular in the Trek fan community, indeed, a lot of people - not all of them necessarily being antigay bigots by a long shot - regarded the whole thing as weird and slightly distasteful; I think David Gerrold wrote disparagingly about K/S slash in The World of Star Trek, commenting that if people really wanted to write about gay people in the Trekverse, it made a lot more sense, in his opinion, for them to create original gay characters.

More generally, if you go to look at the major fanfiction archives on the Web, you'll see that the great majority of them are relationship stories of some kind - not necessarily slashfics or even shipping fics pairing noncanonical couples, but stories exploring the romantic relationships of various couples. Again, this is because so many fanfic writers are people - women or men - who are most interested in the relationship aspects of a certain franchise. The Spock/Uhura pairing, which is canonical in the rebooted Trekverse, for example, has become a favorite subject for fanfics.

(Fair warning: I'm really not a fan of slashfics, or shipping in general. I dislike the contortions or distortions to canon that are often necessary to produce noncanonical ships, straight or gay, and I really dislike the obsession that seems to be prevalent with all too many shippers these days that their ship is the one and only thing that matters about the franchise. The fandom section of Tumblr is full of particularly immature shippers.)
 
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I once received over two-hundred pieces of hate mail for implying that shipping slash was for 'girls', mostly being scolded for being sexist a handful of token gays who mostly claimed they wrote what they know. I was told not to knock people's kinks and accused of trolling. This is one of a variety of reasons I left my fandom of seven years, where I'd out"lived" most other members and, at the risk of sounding douchey, was a hell of a better writer than most of the people there.

Of course, that's what ended up bringing me here, but you know something's fucked up if you feel a greater sense of control talking about politics and history than about animated television shows :p

Really, the fetishization of homosexuality is on a rapid rise on the internet and the amount of times I've been accused of bigotry or hell, of being a Republican, strictly on the basis of opposing slash shipping, has been more than enough to make it one of my greatest pet peeves.
 
I once received over two-hundred pieces of hate mail for implying that shipping slash was for 'girls', mostly being scolded for being sexist a handful of token gays who mostly claimed they wrote what they know. I was told not to knock people's kinks and accused of trolling. This is one of a variety of reasons I left my fandom of seven years, where I'd out"lived" most other members and, at the risk of sounding douchey, was a hell of a better writer than most of the people there.

Of course, that's what ended up bringing me here, but you know something's fucked up if you feel a greater sense of control talking about politics and history than about animated television shows :p

Really, the fetishization of homosexuality is on a rapid rise on the internet and the amount of times I've been accused of bigotry or hell, of being a Republican, strictly on the basis of opposing slash shipping, has been more than enough to make it one of my greatest pet peeves.

Interesting you should use the phrase "the fetishization of homosexuality", which I think to be the single biggest problem with slash shipping. This Tumblr blog might be of interest to you:

http://ughfandoms-in-general.tumblr.com/

And it's not just fetishizing homosexuality, either. There's this really, REALLY disturbing trend among some fans of "Sherlock" to fetishize the lead character's claimed sociopathy. So maybe it's not so much repressing homosexuality with greater brutality that we need to look at to make the OP's AHC work; maybe it's more a matter of changing the gestalt of fandom, from Star Trek: TOS onwards, making it so that projecting one's fantasies onto one's favorite media characters is considered, particularly in the fan communities themselves, to be seriously Not Okay?
 
Maybe some regulations make it too expensive for people to ship stuff on e-bay. If some kind of mail-related terrorist attack happens it could make shipping too troublesome so people will just buy from big-box stores.

May have missed the point here :p

Shipping has a second meaning and in pop culture it is the writing of fan fiction which focuses on romantic relationships between characters that aren't normal interested in each other in that way.
 
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