All You Need to Know About Shipping

Shipping, short for "relationshipping" is the act of wanting a particular romantic relationship to occur in your choice of medium.

There are different kinds of shipping that fans participate in. Often, ships are separated by categories depending on which characters are shipped together. Ships may be "het" (heterosexual), "slash" (homosexual and between two men), "femslash" (homosexual and between two women), or "polyamorous" (one relationship which occurs between three or more characters, either of the same or differing genders). Many ships that can be found online are inclusive of the LGBTQ+ community.

Often, shipping results in fanfiction or fan art. This practice is a way for younger fans to explore their own sexuality. Homosexual ship pairings are overwhelmingly popular, and while some heterosexual fan writers no doubt sexualize relationships (most often between two men), popular fan works that address ideas of sexuality or gender that differ from the norm are overwhelmingly popular on AO3 and on other fan sites like Tumblr or DeviantArt. The majority of fans who participate in the creation of fan fiction or fan art are younger, and therefore it can be inferred that they have a more liberal outlook. Many fans are also members of the LGBTQ+ community, or identify as allies.

Shipping within a fandom brings with it its own particular set of "tropes" or popular topics or prompts for fan works. For example, the most popular ship on AO3 for the "Supernatural" fandom is "Dean Winchester/Castiel" (the slash denoting that it is a same-sex relationship). In the show, Dean Winchester is a human male, while Castiel is an angel. Many of the most popular fan fiction works on AO3 are centered around these characters, who have both died multiple times within the show canon, finding peace and escape from their fraught lives through their relationship with each other. Coffee Shop AUs are popular, as are fan fictions where the pair meet as children and grow up together, thereby negating most, if not all, of the difficulties they might have faced in the original universe of the show.

Also popular in fan fiction tropes - particularly in "Supernatural" and "Teen Wolf" tags - is the Alpha/Beta/Omega (A/B/O) prompt. A/B/O is a prompt that steals liberally from hyper defined and liberally fictionalized pack dynamics exhibited by wolves. Essentially, A/B/O is a way for fan writers to 1) explore social hierarchies within a series of set parameters that dictate content and characterization, 2) explore the fluidity of gender dynamics often associated with the gender binary (men and women) without necessarily having to conform to what many fan writers consider to be a societal obsession with heterosexuality, and 3) brings in enough fantasy element to make the previous two methods of social commentary distant from the sociopolitical problems of real life.

There is often conflict between fans regarding ships. Commonly referred to as ship wars, arguments and outright online warfare can occur between fans that disagree over whether or not a ship is canon, whether or not it's acceptable to ship something, or even just whether or not they like/dislike someone's ship. When fans disagree, they might send each other hate mail, make vague posts about how one thing isn't okay within fandom, or outright tell the other fan's username to others in a bid to blacklist the fan from fandom circles. To avoid getting into a ship war, it's best to avoid tagging fan work under ships that it doesn't include, don't tag the general fandom, and avoid insulting someone's ship especially if fans of said ship follow you on social media.

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