TV

Lesbian Shipping Wars: The Fight For Visibility vs. The Fight to be Right

This article was written in response to an AfterEllen.com poll asking our readers for their opinions about online shipping wars.

I was 11 years old when I read Little Women, and the first thing I did when I finished the book was rewrite the ending – because it seemed preposterous to me that Jo March and Laurie didn’t get their happily ever after. Reprogramming my imagination by bending other people’s characters to my will was so satisfying that I began writing stories about all of my favorite books and TV shows. It wasn’t until I was in my 20s, looking for an online place to discuss my theories between Harry Potter books, that I discovered the name for people like me: fan fiction writers.

Funnily enough, Louisa May Alcott‘s Little Women was the front runner to modern day online fandoms. Originally, Alcott ended Little Women with Meg and John’s engagement – but fans, many of whom wanted a Jo/Laurie wedding, assailed her with letters begging for a sequel. Because she needed the money to take care of her family, Alcott did write a follow-up novel, but before she started work on it, she famously said, “I won’t marry Jo to Laurie to please anybody!”

If Little Women had been published in 2010 and 2011, instead of 1868 and 1869, it would have been a shipping war for the ages.

Ah yes, shipping wars. To the uninitiated, shipping wars are naval battles. But to the brave men and women manning their threads at fanforum.com, shipping wars are much more serious (and dangerous!) than a skirmish on the high seas.

Shipping is the word used to describe people who support various fictional relationships. Alcott’s collection of pleading fan mail suggests that shippers have been around since the American Civil War, but shippers didn’t really start making waves until The X-Files, the first TV show that inspired fans to use the Internet to debate the pros and cons of a romance between its two main characters.

These days, nearly every popular book and movie and TV show has its own fandom, and almost all fandoms have shippers. Shipping is a shapeshifter; it comes in many forms. It can be as detached as seeing two characters on-screen, sensing their chemistry, and thinking to yourself, “Hmm, it’d be cute if they got together.” Or, it can be as involved as memorizing the nuance of every scene involving two characters, and going into battle if anyone on the Internet suggests that the people in your ship aren’t really suited for/going to end up with one another. (Somewhere in the middle lives fan fiction and fan art and fan forums and all kinds of inside fandom jokes.)

It seems to be a universal law that shipping wars follow shippers – and that vitriol follows shipping wars.

A gay writer buddy who works for a mainstream recapping site told me: “I’d rather be flogged than be forced to write about Glee. It’s a giant shipper orgy, and you know how shippers are: they can go from kissing you on the mouth to eating you for breakfast in two seconds – especially when you’ve got that many gay viewers breaking down every look and every touch. If they’ve been talking about something in the forums and you don’t agree with it in your recap, watch your back.”

I started asking around, and a lot of my writer friends shared similar sentiments; many of them actually seem scared of shippers. So I began questioning my non-writer friends, most of whom are TV fanatics. Nearly all of them said the same thing: I like to read fan fiction/track the Tumblr tag/Tweet about my favorite TV couples, but that’s as far into fandom as I’m brave enough to wade.

“Is the militancy more pronounced in gay and lesbian shippers?” I asked. The answer was a resounding yes.

So I decided to ask AfterEllen.com readers what they thought about the prevalence of shipping wars – both on our site and on the internet at large. Of the 3,500 participants in our survey, 68 percent identify themselves as shippers, which is the same percentage of people who said they participate in online fandom activities. That’s a pretty interesting statistic because it suggests that shippers are responsible for most of the Tweeting and Tumblr-ing and LiveJournal-ing and Facebook-ing going on out there. (As opposed to the old X-Files days, when online chatter was split pretty evenly between “Relationshippers” and “Noromos.”)

Nearly 80 percent of our survey participants said they care more about lesbian TV couples than they do about straight TV couples.

That statistic alone may be one of the reasons lesbian shippers have a reputation for being combative. AfterEllen.com reader Jessie told me: “I do sometimes get aggressive in my shipping, because I don’t feel like I’m just fighting for my preferred couple; I feel like I’m fighting for lesbian visibility. How often do you see a lesbian or bisexual character break up with a girl and get into a relationship with another girl? Not often. She’ll usually go for the guy. So I feel like the choice is my lesbian ship or another straight relationship on TV.”

It’s a good point. We saw some mild shipping wars in the Pretty Little Liars recap comments when Emily’s first girlfriend was hauled off to juvie camp and Emily started up a romance with another girl. But even the most hostile of those comments didn’t compare to the shipping wars that went down on the ABC Family message boards, where the debate included not only Maya and Paige as potential love interests for Emily, but also Toby Cavenaugh.

Another pretty obvious reason for impassioned lesbian shippers is that humans always have (and always will) project themselves onto fictional characters. People have been making sense of their own lives via narrative projection for as long as stories have been told. And for loads of psychological and physiological reasons, love stories are some of our favorites to tap into. The pool of lesbian couples isn’t exactly deep. Take even one away, and we might not be able to find a way to replace it. Maybe shipping for visibility jolts gay viewers into “fight or flight” territory, like we’re shipping for our own romantic survival.

But what about shipping for the sake of shipping? Yes, that’s a real thing too. We’d all like to think our personal version of shipping is a noble effort to preserve our queer culture – but that can’t be the whole story.

Even mild shipping wars – like the ones we saw near the end of Pretty Little Liars‘ first season – are shipping wars. They devolve into name-calling and accusations and personal insults faster than you can say “fanwank.”

Only two percent of our survey participants said they engage in fandom because they want to convince other people that their ship is the best ship, but 30 percent said they’ve gotten into a debate in which they tried to bring someone else around to their way of thinking about shipping. (Which must mean 28 percent of them were forced into the debate!) In fact, the majority of survey participants said they’d be less likely to get involved in a fandom conversation if they sensed a shipping war breaking out.

If only 30 percent of people are engaging in shipping wars, it is a really loud, really active 30 percent. And my guess is that it comes from the following two statistics:

1) Of the 30 percent of people who say they’ve engaged in shipping debates, there is a huge incongruity between people who say they’ve brought someone around to their way of thinking, and people who say they’ve been brought around to someone else’s way of thinking. 64 percent of people say they’ve changed someone else’s mind. Only 20 percent say they’ve had their mind changed. That means the majority of shipping soldiers are either really good at choosing the right side of an argument, or really bad at telling when they’ve actually changed someone’s mind.

2) 19 percent of people who engage in shipping wars say no one has ever, or will ever, be able to change their mind about their favorite ship.

The longer an argument goes on without compromise – which is what happens when people assume that their way of thinking is the only correct way of thinking – the louder and nastier and more personal it gets. (Incidentally, 70 percent of our participants say they would never respond as aggressively in person as they do online.)

Camille, the most honest AfterEllen.com reader I spoke to about shipping wars, told me: “Sometimes I get angry when I comment – because I like to be right.”

My original question was: Are shipping wars sinking the Internet? 73 percent of our survey participants say they are less likely to participate in a discussion if a shipping war breaks out. Out of the 15 TV writers and recappers I asked, 14 said they’d rather write about shows without vocal shippers. If so many people are put off by shipping wars, and shipping wars are so prevalent, are they actually ruining our fandom experiences?

Apparently that depends on how well you can drown out the noise. I’m a natural shipper. I love love. And just like the majority of AfterEllen.com readers (76 percent), I enjoy fandom for the sense of camaraderie and shared experiences. I couldn’t begin to quantify the joy of writing and reading fan fiction, trolling through Tumblr for hours on end, or just live-Tweeting with readers during shows like Pretty Little Liars. In fact, participating in fandom is one of the things that helped me come to terms with my own sexuality.

The online fandom experience is one of the best things about modern pop culture – but if our survey is any indication, most people prefer snuggles to shouting.

Truth be told, I would have been one of those folks bombarding Louisa May Alcott with fan mail, pleading with her to put Jo and Laurie together. But when she didn’t, I wouldn’t have unleashed an angry letter at her. I wouldn’t have accused her of being a hack writer, or the spawn of Satan. I wouldn’t have even plotted the murders of all the gloating Team Amy people in the Little Women fandom. I would have done the same thing I did when I was eleven: I would have written my own ending.

Jo March wanted all the castles in the air to come true, so she and her sisters could live in them forever. And that is the beauty of fandom: Every castle is possible. The sails of our ships are limited only by our imaginations.

So I guess the real question is: Will we use our imaginations to expand the magic of narrative? Or will we use our imaginations to invent new ways of calling each other twats?

Lesbian Apparel and Accessories Gay All Day sweatshirt -- AE exclusive

Related Articles

Leave a Reply

Back to top button