The Prof on shipping. Part 1: General shipping (and handling.)
Normally not something I talk about a lot! But Valentine's Day is just around the corner [hypocritical self-pity redacted]. Plus, JK Rowling just stunned the known universe with her admission that Ron and Hermione may not have made the best couple and that maybe it should have been Harry and Hermione. So if she can go there, I can. And I am procrastinating, and how can I procrastinate better than this?
The other part of this is Pony shipping. "Wait, what?" I hear some of you cry. "Prof, is that really you?" Well, let's put it this way: the show has unmistakeable signs of going that way, whether I like it or not. That's not just Equestria Girls, or what's rumored to be a sequel to EG, either. It's definitely in the main show, although it's not clear at all how far they will carry it.
What follows is some serious teal deer, so hope you're ok with that! I'm going to split this into two bits, so if you're only interested in the Pony bits, you can read that, and if you're only interested in the general bits, you can read that.
BTW, here's a link to the text of the actual interview, as opposed to the excitable press reports: ("JK Rowling ruins your childhood!") My quick thoughts on this one basically boils down to:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” --The Rubiyat of Omar Khyaam
Or put more bluntly, there isn't a thing you can do about it, once it's in the wild. I guess this bothers people who are obsessed with One True Interpretation more than it bothers me. My friend ravenna_c_tan puts this way better than I could: JK Rowling wises up to romance. Or very briefly: Rowling just sucks at romance. I don't care about that. The Potter books are freaking brilliant, and if I want to read a romance novel, I have piles and piles to choose from. The funny thing is that Rowling was pretty tough on shippers who questioned her pairings. The Ron/Hermione one, ironically, is the best developed of any in the series. So maybe the moral isn't the one grabbed by some of the Harry/Hermione shippers ("I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG"), but to what extent it opens the door for people who found other readings in the books. Is it right, now, to say openly, "I have no idea where Tonks/Lupin came from, and her explanation on Pottermore just made the whole thing worse"? Will people now feel comfortable saying, "you know, I can see how she was laying the hints for Harry/Ginny very early, but somehow I didn't find it worked for me"? Or, "I really would have liked to see a CANON gay couple in the books, thank you, ideally one that was not offstage and didn't end in Tragic Gay Death" (although since everything ends in death anyway, that would have been a tall order). People who read Remus/Sirius or Harry/Luna or Neville/Luna (THANK YOU FOR NUKING THAT WITH AN INTERVIEW, BY THE WAY), weren't necessarily wrong.
The funny thing is that I'm (mostly) a canon shipper. If an author says, "so and so are a couple," I'm inclined to fall in and say "all righty then." It has to be pretty blatant for me to say:
That was the case in a novel I read in the last year or so, which will stay nameless because I am nice enough not to ruin it for you. The author put the words "get over it" into the mouth of her main character, and shoved some of her characters apart and re-arranged them together in a way that made me feel that they were puppets. And sometimes the fact that the author herself ships it simply is not enough.
What interests me is WHY people ship certain characters or like certain formulas. There have been other essays on this one, but here's my contribution, along with the kinds I like. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what this says about me.
[More than you ever really wanted to know about me and shipping]For the purposes of this, let's not confuse shipping with slash with porn. Shipping just means romance. Slash is same sex, but not necessarily porn; porn is not necessarily slash.
1: Anywhere from 85-95% of shippings exist purely in people's heads. In the case of Pony, it's even higher. Therefore, "it isn't canon" will only get you so far.
2. Crack shippers are better behaved overall. There are lots of exceptions to this, obviously, but if someone ships something outlandish purely for the lulz, they're less likely to go to the mat in a full out Shipping War.
And let's be clear: a crack ship by definition is something that has absolutely no chance of becoming canon AND has to be utterly off the wall. I hate it when people call everything a "crack ship." It's just snotty. THIS is my idea of real crack shipping.
I find it awfully hard to be offended by any of that. And while we're at it, I think some people, especially media critics, who should know better by now, willfully misunderstand and misuse terminology. They know perfectly well what fanfic and fan art is by now, and if they don't, they are too out of touch to be media critics. They know they're being offensive when they call slash porn, or clutch their pearls about same-sex shipping. I know that everyone in the universe isn't familiar with fandom, although my students mostly ALL know about it whether they participate or not. But for a media critic, it's just unconscionable.
3. Het v. slash. So many people have weighed in on this that I think I'll steer clear. Personally, I can like either one, while being aware that for now, slash ships are less likely to go canon. This will change.
5. Stuff I generally don't like:
Teacher/student
like Snape/Hermione. Ouch. I've noticed that this ship appeals to some serious eggheads. Snermione shippers tend to be the smart ones in the crowd. But I find it really hard to ship a couple who started out as teacher and student. And yes, that's because I'm a teacher. I know that some students will probably have crushes on me, no matter how old and fugly I am, just because they are in love with the subject matter. The more they're turned on intellectually, the more it'll spill over onto me. But I'm the magician. I'm not the trick. Pull the curtain back, and I'm not the Wizard at all. And it's just wicked to take advantage of that.
Real life shipping:
I know, I know! Lots of people like it, and from what I can tell, some musicians just DEPEND on it. They're basically playing a role anyway. But for me, it's always going to feel a bit weird, as though I'm making people into puppets. I can distinguish just fine between an actor and his role, thanks. That's why it does not matter a hill of beans to me whether an actor is gay or married or whatever. He's not my toy, anyway.
Do I even have to get into the stuff that will get you arrested? Let's not.
6. Stuff I like. So many of these are unusable these days, which I deeply regret. In the rush to make everything "healthy," and let's be honest here, love is NOT healthy a lot of the time, we've jettisoned nearly everything interesting. Can we draw a line under this stuff and say "this is a closed course with professional romance characters: do not attempt?"
Enemyships.
Oh, dear, how I loves me a good enemyship. It's splashed all over my writing. But to me, there's a tricky balance. The characters have to hate each other for the wrong reasons. Feuds will do nicely, and if you think about it, Romeo and Juliet revolves around this. There's no reason for them to hate each other, really. They're just inheriting something they don't understand. That's why I can ship the HELL out of Sims 2 Tybalt and Mercutio. There's nothing personal involved. Check their memory panels--which I know are all screwed up, but check 'em anyway. Same deal with Spider Jerusalem/Max. Neither of them personally did anything to hurt the other before they met. It's all "your father, whom you hate anyway, killed my father."
Draco/Harry, on the other hand, hate each other because they're on different sides. You have to handwave an awful lot of what it means to be a Death Eater to make that work.
If they hate each other "just because," that's also tricky to make work. I'm always going to think "for gosh' sake, let it go." A movie that does this really well is The Shop Around The Corner/She Loves Me. The couple gets on each other's nerves at work, but on paper, the built-up dislike vanishes. And it's cute. And it has James Stewart in it. And you should totally watch it.
The schoolyard romance:
Whoa whoa whoa! I can see this getting controversial now! But let me explain. I had "boyfriends" when I was a six or seven year old girl. My nephew is seven and he's engaged to be married. Does he have a clue what that really is? Nope. They're planning to get married when they're 52. There's a passing notes in class, does he LIKE like me, Valentine-drawing stage that is just ADORABLE.
Extend that further, and you get one of my very favorite class A ships: one friend grows out of it, and the other doesn't. One retains the childish and slightly pathetic expectation that they'll get married someday like they pinkie-promised, and the other moves on, because that's what people do. Oh, man, the unrequited passion you can wring out of that kind of ship, and if you've read my stuff, you know I have. Does the pendulum ever swing back in real life? Most of the time, no, but in a fic, it can melt my heart.
Time travel stuff:
When it's done right? Awesome. (Somewhere in Time, oh God, I am a walking cliche.) You can paper over a lot of stuff with that. Behavior that wouldn't work these days is fine to me if the guy isn't clear on what the rules even are. Vampire novels often fall into this territory. And by the way, I was fine with Edward "stalking" Bella. I know it's unpopular to say that, but it's true. You could really do a lot with the fact that he's in love with someone for the first time AND he's 108 and the last time he knew anything about this stuff, second hand, yet, everyone acted differently.
Adorkableness. I hope I need not explain.
Pining away for love.
What happened to that storyline, hmm? No, I don't want a friend of mine to DO that. I want her to understand that the sun keeps shining and that life is still good, and that someday food won't taste like cardboard and she'll laugh and really mean it. But for crap's sake, go ahead and LET her lie on the bathroom floor, feeling that her life is over. If it's a period piece, do ahead and let her run mad. Because in this case, that IS reality. You gotta get through it to get to the other side. And please especially let me see guys being eaten away with unspoken love, too.
Give me some unrequited love, dammit!
Oh, yes, and:
Lurve that's first love and lasts forever and ever and ever, amen.
I do not give a rat's that this rarely happens in real life. I am a sucker for it in a story. Tell me you didn't tear up at the idea that Snape loved Lily for his entire life and threw it away by being a *bad person.* It doesn't make him suddenly nice or wash all the bad stuff he did away. It's just touching. I have zero problem with the idea that everyone falls in love and stays in love with someone they knew as a kid in Harry Potter: it's better than introducing a lot of new characters in which we have no investment.
I love Shakespeare, and I love opera, and people still respond to 'em because that over the top stuff that people "shouldn't" feel is exactly what it feels like on the inside. And somehow, never seeing characters express it feels lonely.
Pink and fluffy is okay, too.
I'm fine with spun sugar. I love cute. Give me cute by the ton. Pour on the pink and the lace and the sweets until I die of contact sugar overload.
And it's also fine if they get married and live happily ever after.
Now take another look at that list of stuff I like. Notice something funny? By rights, I should have loved Twilight. It's got lots and lots of stuff I like. Almost all the stuff that are dealbreakers for a lot of people would have been fine with me. The author *herself* busted it by pushing the everlasting love button and then trying to walk it back, by having a character break her hand, ha ha ha, and a bazillion other things.
The text failed to establish its own authority. And I guess that's true of Rowling, too, and it's nice to be able to say so!
See a forthcoming Part 2 on shipping in MLP. Probably not so extended, because I have mixed feelings about it, but I also really want to lay that out there.
The other part of this is Pony shipping. "Wait, what?" I hear some of you cry. "Prof, is that really you?" Well, let's put it this way: the show has unmistakeable signs of going that way, whether I like it or not. That's not just Equestria Girls, or what's rumored to be a sequel to EG, either. It's definitely in the main show, although it's not clear at all how far they will carry it.
What follows is some serious teal deer, so hope you're ok with that! I'm going to split this into two bits, so if you're only interested in the Pony bits, you can read that, and if you're only interested in the general bits, you can read that.
BTW, here's a link to the text of the actual interview, as opposed to the excitable press reports: ("JK Rowling ruins your childhood!") My quick thoughts on this one basically boils down to:
“The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.” --The Rubiyat of Omar Khyaam
Or put more bluntly, there isn't a thing you can do about it, once it's in the wild. I guess this bothers people who are obsessed with One True Interpretation more than it bothers me. My friend ravenna_c_tan puts this way better than I could: JK Rowling wises up to romance. Or very briefly: Rowling just sucks at romance. I don't care about that. The Potter books are freaking brilliant, and if I want to read a romance novel, I have piles and piles to choose from. The funny thing is that Rowling was pretty tough on shippers who questioned her pairings. The Ron/Hermione one, ironically, is the best developed of any in the series. So maybe the moral isn't the one grabbed by some of the Harry/Hermione shippers ("I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG"), but to what extent it opens the door for people who found other readings in the books. Is it right, now, to say openly, "I have no idea where Tonks/Lupin came from, and her explanation on Pottermore just made the whole thing worse"? Will people now feel comfortable saying, "you know, I can see how she was laying the hints for Harry/Ginny very early, but somehow I didn't find it worked for me"? Or, "I really would have liked to see a CANON gay couple in the books, thank you, ideally one that was not offstage and didn't end in Tragic Gay Death" (although since everything ends in death anyway, that would have been a tall order). People who read Remus/Sirius or Harry/Luna or Neville/Luna (THANK YOU FOR NUKING THAT WITH AN INTERVIEW, BY THE WAY), weren't necessarily wrong.
The funny thing is that I'm (mostly) a canon shipper. If an author says, "so and so are a couple," I'm inclined to fall in and say "all righty then." It has to be pretty blatant for me to say:
Click to viewThat was the case in a novel I read in the last year or so, which will stay nameless because I am nice enough not to ruin it for you. The author put the words "get over it" into the mouth of her main character, and shoved some of her characters apart and re-arranged them together in a way that made me feel that they were puppets. And sometimes the fact that the author herself ships it simply is not enough.
What interests me is WHY people ship certain characters or like certain formulas. There have been other essays on this one, but here's my contribution, along with the kinds I like. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what this says about me.
[More than you ever really wanted to know about me and shipping]For the purposes of this, let's not confuse shipping with slash with porn. Shipping just means romance. Slash is same sex, but not necessarily porn; porn is not necessarily slash.
1: Anywhere from 85-95% of shippings exist purely in people's heads. In the case of Pony, it's even higher. Therefore, "it isn't canon" will only get you so far.
2. Crack shippers are better behaved overall. There are lots of exceptions to this, obviously, but if someone ships something outlandish purely for the lulz, they're less likely to go to the mat in a full out Shipping War.
And let's be clear: a crack ship by definition is something that has absolutely no chance of becoming canon AND has to be utterly off the wall. I hate it when people call everything a "crack ship." It's just snotty. THIS is my idea of real crack shipping.
I find it awfully hard to be offended by any of that. And while we're at it, I think some people, especially media critics, who should know better by now, willfully misunderstand and misuse terminology. They know perfectly well what fanfic and fan art is by now, and if they don't, they are too out of touch to be media critics. They know they're being offensive when they call slash porn, or clutch their pearls about same-sex shipping. I know that everyone in the universe isn't familiar with fandom, although my students mostly ALL know about it whether they participate or not. But for a media critic, it's just unconscionable.
3. Het v. slash. So many people have weighed in on this that I think I'll steer clear. Personally, I can like either one, while being aware that for now, slash ships are less likely to go canon. This will change.
5. Stuff I generally don't like:
Teacher/student
like Snape/Hermione. Ouch. I've noticed that this ship appeals to some serious eggheads. Snermione shippers tend to be the smart ones in the crowd. But I find it really hard to ship a couple who started out as teacher and student. And yes, that's because I'm a teacher. I know that some students will probably have crushes on me, no matter how old and fugly I am, just because they are in love with the subject matter. The more they're turned on intellectually, the more it'll spill over onto me. But I'm the magician. I'm not the trick. Pull the curtain back, and I'm not the Wizard at all. And it's just wicked to take advantage of that.
Real life shipping:
I know, I know! Lots of people like it, and from what I can tell, some musicians just DEPEND on it. They're basically playing a role anyway. But for me, it's always going to feel a bit weird, as though I'm making people into puppets. I can distinguish just fine between an actor and his role, thanks. That's why it does not matter a hill of beans to me whether an actor is gay or married or whatever. He's not my toy, anyway.
Do I even have to get into the stuff that will get you arrested? Let's not.
6. Stuff I like. So many of these are unusable these days, which I deeply regret. In the rush to make everything "healthy," and let's be honest here, love is NOT healthy a lot of the time, we've jettisoned nearly everything interesting. Can we draw a line under this stuff and say "this is a closed course with professional romance characters: do not attempt?"
Enemyships.
Oh, dear, how I loves me a good enemyship. It's splashed all over my writing. But to me, there's a tricky balance. The characters have to hate each other for the wrong reasons. Feuds will do nicely, and if you think about it, Romeo and Juliet revolves around this. There's no reason for them to hate each other, really. They're just inheriting something they don't understand. That's why I can ship the HELL out of Sims 2 Tybalt and Mercutio. There's nothing personal involved. Check their memory panels--which I know are all screwed up, but check 'em anyway. Same deal with Spider Jerusalem/Max. Neither of them personally did anything to hurt the other before they met. It's all "your father, whom you hate anyway, killed my father."
Draco/Harry, on the other hand, hate each other because they're on different sides. You have to handwave an awful lot of what it means to be a Death Eater to make that work.
If they hate each other "just because," that's also tricky to make work. I'm always going to think "for gosh' sake, let it go." A movie that does this really well is The Shop Around The Corner/She Loves Me. The couple gets on each other's nerves at work, but on paper, the built-up dislike vanishes. And it's cute. And it has James Stewart in it. And you should totally watch it.
The schoolyard romance:
Whoa whoa whoa! I can see this getting controversial now! But let me explain. I had "boyfriends" when I was a six or seven year old girl. My nephew is seven and he's engaged to be married. Does he have a clue what that really is? Nope. They're planning to get married when they're 52. There's a passing notes in class, does he LIKE like me, Valentine-drawing stage that is just ADORABLE.
Extend that further, and you get one of my very favorite class A ships: one friend grows out of it, and the other doesn't. One retains the childish and slightly pathetic expectation that they'll get married someday like they pinkie-promised, and the other moves on, because that's what people do. Oh, man, the unrequited passion you can wring out of that kind of ship, and if you've read my stuff, you know I have. Does the pendulum ever swing back in real life? Most of the time, no, but in a fic, it can melt my heart.
Time travel stuff:
When it's done right? Awesome. (Somewhere in Time, oh God, I am a walking cliche.) You can paper over a lot of stuff with that. Behavior that wouldn't work these days is fine to me if the guy isn't clear on what the rules even are. Vampire novels often fall into this territory. And by the way, I was fine with Edward "stalking" Bella. I know it's unpopular to say that, but it's true. You could really do a lot with the fact that he's in love with someone for the first time AND he's 108 and the last time he knew anything about this stuff, second hand, yet, everyone acted differently.
Adorkableness. I hope I need not explain.
Pining away for love.
What happened to that storyline, hmm? No, I don't want a friend of mine to DO that. I want her to understand that the sun keeps shining and that life is still good, and that someday food won't taste like cardboard and she'll laugh and really mean it. But for crap's sake, go ahead and LET her lie on the bathroom floor, feeling that her life is over. If it's a period piece, do ahead and let her run mad. Because in this case, that IS reality. You gotta get through it to get to the other side. And please especially let me see guys being eaten away with unspoken love, too.
Give me some unrequited love, dammit!
Oh, yes, and:
Lurve that's first love and lasts forever and ever and ever, amen.
I do not give a rat's that this rarely happens in real life. I am a sucker for it in a story. Tell me you didn't tear up at the idea that Snape loved Lily for his entire life and threw it away by being a *bad person.* It doesn't make him suddenly nice or wash all the bad stuff he did away. It's just touching. I have zero problem with the idea that everyone falls in love and stays in love with someone they knew as a kid in Harry Potter: it's better than introducing a lot of new characters in which we have no investment.
I love Shakespeare, and I love opera, and people still respond to 'em because that over the top stuff that people "shouldn't" feel is exactly what it feels like on the inside. And somehow, never seeing characters express it feels lonely.
Pink and fluffy is okay, too.
I'm fine with spun sugar. I love cute. Give me cute by the ton. Pour on the pink and the lace and the sweets until I die of contact sugar overload.
And it's also fine if they get married and live happily ever after.
Now take another look at that list of stuff I like. Notice something funny? By rights, I should have loved Twilight. It's got lots and lots of stuff I like. Almost all the stuff that are dealbreakers for a lot of people would have been fine with me. The author *herself* busted it by pushing the everlasting love button and then trying to walk it back, by having a character break her hand, ha ha ha, and a bazillion other things.
The text failed to establish its own authority. And I guess that's true of Rowling, too, and it's nice to be able to say so!
See a forthcoming Part 2 on shipping in MLP. Probably not so extended, because I have mixed feelings about it, but I also really want to lay that out there.