Save the puppies!

One of my rambly meta posts ahoy.

A metafandom-ed essay Shipping Kills Puppies! caught my eye and reminded me of one of the things that I perennially just don't grok -- i.e. why many fans/fen seem to regard shipping as the One True Approach to a fandom, sometimes apparently to the point of finding it bizarre that it might be approached in some other way. As I understood it, the author's basic theme in the linked post was that the really vicious ship wars occur where there are canon ships that spoil OTPs, and they therefore draw the conclusion that said canon ships are generally a Bad Thing that stop you hunting for subtext that shows how amazing A and B would be together, which is where all the fun is.

Seems odd to me. If I get fannish about something, it's simply because I like the source material, whatever it is. If it's essentially all about the ships -- e.g. This Life -- fine. If it's essentially high drama -- e.g. the Lord of the Rings books -- fine. If it's the more normal mixture of gen plot arcs and character ships -- e.g. Farscape -- also fine. I'm happy to take it as it comes, provided it holds my interest. And if it doesn't -- e.g. the recent BBC Robin Hood (which I just couldn't get into enough, despite watching being practically a bounden duty for a Nottingham lad) -- then frankly I don't really care who ends up with who, or want to be bothered to play around with the possibilities offered by the 'verse or the characters.

So as I say, I remain somewhat mystified by the approach to fandom in which the shipping (or slashing, which is largely but not entirely a subset of it) is the key point. It seems to be a "one-size-fits-all" approach, a sort of meta-fandom (as opposed to metafandom) in which sources are just raw material for the real fandom of OTPing, and the actual events of the text almost incidental. Fine if that's your thing, but even though I quite enjoy many ship speculations and stories, I generally want more than that from a fandom.

Seriously, to link your enjoyment primarily to shipping seems to be just setting yourself up for disappointment (except in the rare cases where a left-field fanon ship actually becomes canon, such as Remus/Tonks in HP -- and even there it developed in a way most of its fans didn't like). Also, it misses out on a lot of the fun available from the other 90% of what is actually happening on the page or screen!

Oh well. I guess it's just a plenty-of-room-for-all, never-the-twain-shall-meet type of thing. Now I suppose I'd better press on with my springtime_gen fic, and wonder whether I can get away with a bit of shippy stuff that seems relevant to the story ...