Unshipper By Trade
Feb. 8th, 2021 11:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osteophage[Note: this post was originally made to Pillowfort on Oct 13, 2018.]
Due to stated interest...
An explanation in two parts: both 1) why I decided to create an "unshipper" tag here for my fort, and 2) what the heck that even means.
I. A Background
Somewhere around maybe... five years ago, I tried to write a wholesale criticism of shipping culture once, and it was a bad choice and badly done and a bad experience. Someone I respected at the time came in and shut me down -- and that was the end of that, forever. Incidentally that's a whole circle of people I don't even talk to anymore. Not for that one reason, no, but the surge of sure embarassment didn't help. So I'm more wary, now, in how I talk about shipping as a... broadstrokes phenomenon, if you will. I definitely think I was clumsy and foolish in the things I said back then.
But killing my willingness to share those thoughts with those people didn't kill the sentiment behind them.
And I use the word "sentiment," here, deliberately. The point of this part isn't to rally anyone around a particular cause or crusade. It's to share an explanation, because I like to be understood and account for my own behavior.
As a person who is both fascinated with stories and who uses a lot of internet, I've found that talking about specific fictional stories with other people is usually parsed as fandom, and here is the problem: in my particular experience -- starting around early 2000s MuggleNet and the ATLA section of Fanfiction.net, and later shaped more by tumblr -- one of the most prevalent, habitual, inescapable ways of engaging with fandom has been "shipping." In fact one of the most common ways of positioning yourself in fandom is to share your ships or "OTPs." It's pervasive, akin to asking someone their major when you find out they're going to college. It's S.O.P. -- standard operating procedure. And, for me, that's alienating.
It's alienating because sometimes I don't care about the same things other people care about. It's alienating because a lot of times people prefer different kinds of stories (or different kinds of directions for stories) than I do, which also determines which kinds of stories get created, get popular, get published, get a budget, get circulated. It's alienating because sometimes the ways that people talk about what they like in stories (and what they like in character dynamics) also articulates something larger about how they think about relationships in general -- as expressed by those all-too-common words, "more than platonic" and "more than friends."
Encountering this alienation and this divergence of outlooks and priorities and this overabundace of romantic sexual focus again and again and again can be frustrating. And as a recurring site of frustration, this issue has (unfortunately) become a salient feature in terms of how I relate to fandom -- hence the "by trade" component of the tag, my joke with myself about the frequency as reliable as a steady occupation.
II. A Meaning
I started using "unshipping" recently as a term to refer to a particular reaction or orientation toward either 1) the relationship dynamics of (mostly) fictional characters, or 2) the perspectives of others on those aforementioned dynamics. On the one hand, it's pretty straightforward: I just stuck a prefix of negation onto the original term "shipping" in order to indicate an inverse orientation. But I also think it's slightly different from a host of technically similar terms, such as brOTP, NOTP, nega-ships, and planting.
The term brOTP is a combination of OTP with "bro" as in brother. People use it for lack of a better alternative, but plenty of people have also pointed out 1) the masculine basis of the term seeming to preclude the application of the concept to relationships involving female characters (-- or else accept that you're referring to women as "bros"), and 2) using "bro" or the implication of a male-male relationship in order to communicate a nonromantic/nonsexual dynamic is, of course, anti-gay.
NOTP ("no" + OTP) is taking the concept of the "OTP" (generally speaking, the pairing you have strong positive feelings about) and turning it on its head. Similarly, nega-ship is a term that I've encountered to mean a negative reaction to (or outlook on) a particular ship or pairing, in some cases even a negative reaction to positive-platonic/loving-friendship interpretations of that pairing as well. In other words, it can also be a way of asserting a boundary against encountering that kind of shipping content.
Planting is a term I remember seeing proposed here in this tumblr post to refer to "platonic shipping." Of course some have argued that "shipping" need not necessarily refer to any specific relationship type in particular, but we all know the dominant association. Hence the interest in an alternative, "platonic"-specific alternative without the baggage of brOTP. As far as I'm aware, this never really took off.
In any case, all of these (brOTP, NOTP, nega-ship, planting) are more specific than the breadth of what my unshipper tag is for or what I mean by it.
Here are some of the things that I would categorize under the umbrella of what I've intended for "unshipping" to mean, in practice:
Questions for the readers time:
Are there any pairings or fictional relationships that you unship as hard as some ship others? If there are pairings that you hate (NOTPs, nega-ships) or pairings you embrace in the form of friendships/"platonic" relationships (brOTPs, plants), what are your preferred terms to use for that, and why?
Due to stated interest...
An explanation in two parts: both 1) why I decided to create an "unshipper" tag here for my fort, and 2) what the heck that even means.
I. A Background
Somewhere around maybe... five years ago, I tried to write a wholesale criticism of shipping culture once, and it was a bad choice and badly done and a bad experience. Someone I respected at the time came in and shut me down -- and that was the end of that, forever. Incidentally that's a whole circle of people I don't even talk to anymore. Not for that one reason, no, but the surge of sure embarassment didn't help. So I'm more wary, now, in how I talk about shipping as a... broadstrokes phenomenon, if you will. I definitely think I was clumsy and foolish in the things I said back then.
But killing my willingness to share those thoughts with those people didn't kill the sentiment behind them.
And I use the word "sentiment," here, deliberately. The point of this part isn't to rally anyone around a particular cause or crusade. It's to share an explanation, because I like to be understood and account for my own behavior.
As a person who is both fascinated with stories and who uses a lot of internet, I've found that talking about specific fictional stories with other people is usually parsed as fandom, and here is the problem: in my particular experience -- starting around early 2000s MuggleNet and the ATLA section of Fanfiction.net, and later shaped more by tumblr -- one of the most prevalent, habitual, inescapable ways of engaging with fandom has been "shipping." In fact one of the most common ways of positioning yourself in fandom is to share your ships or "OTPs." It's pervasive, akin to asking someone their major when you find out they're going to college. It's S.O.P. -- standard operating procedure. And, for me, that's alienating.
It's alienating because sometimes I don't care about the same things other people care about. It's alienating because a lot of times people prefer different kinds of stories (or different kinds of directions for stories) than I do, which also determines which kinds of stories get created, get popular, get published, get a budget, get circulated. It's alienating because sometimes the ways that people talk about what they like in stories (and what they like in character dynamics) also articulates something larger about how they think about relationships in general -- as expressed by those all-too-common words, "more than platonic" and "more than friends."
Encountering this alienation and this divergence of outlooks and priorities and this overabundace of romantic sexual focus again and again and again can be frustrating. And as a recurring site of frustration, this issue has (unfortunately) become a salient feature in terms of how I relate to fandom -- hence the "by trade" component of the tag, my joke with myself about the frequency as reliable as a steady occupation.
II. A Meaning
I started using "unshipping" recently as a term to refer to a particular reaction or orientation toward either 1) the relationship dynamics of (mostly) fictional characters, or 2) the perspectives of others on those aforementioned dynamics. On the one hand, it's pretty straightforward: I just stuck a prefix of negation onto the original term "shipping" in order to indicate an inverse orientation. But I also think it's slightly different from a host of technically similar terms, such as brOTP, NOTP, nega-ships, and planting.
The term brOTP is a combination of OTP with "bro" as in brother. People use it for lack of a better alternative, but plenty of people have also pointed out 1) the masculine basis of the term seeming to preclude the application of the concept to relationships involving female characters (-- or else accept that you're referring to women as "bros"), and 2) using "bro" or the implication of a male-male relationship in order to communicate a nonromantic/nonsexual dynamic is, of course, anti-gay.
NOTP ("no" + OTP) is taking the concept of the "OTP" (generally speaking, the pairing you have strong positive feelings about) and turning it on its head. Similarly, nega-ship is a term that I've encountered to mean a negative reaction to (or outlook on) a particular ship or pairing, in some cases even a negative reaction to positive-platonic/loving-friendship interpretations of that pairing as well. In other words, it can also be a way of asserting a boundary against encountering that kind of shipping content.
Planting is a term I remember seeing proposed here in this tumblr post to refer to "platonic shipping." Of course some have argued that "shipping" need not necessarily refer to any specific relationship type in particular, but we all know the dominant association. Hence the interest in an alternative, "platonic"-specific alternative without the baggage of brOTP. As far as I'm aware, this never really took off.
In any case, all of these (brOTP, NOTP, nega-ship, planting) are more specific than the breadth of what my unshipper tag is for or what I mean by it.
Here are some of the things that I would categorize under the umbrella of what I've intended for "unshipping" to mean, in practice:
- in reference to a specific character dynamic, expressing a preference for a nonromantic interpretation (as fan) or nonromantic future outcomes (in canon), or, in reference to a specific character dynamic, expressing a preference for a nonsexual interpretation (as fan) or nonsexual future outcomes (in canon)
- in reference to a specific character dynamic or story, expressing a dissatisfaction or frustration with a current canon romantic/sexual focus
- examples: this one
- in reference to storytelling patterns at large, expressing a preference for nonromantic character dynamics, or, in reference to storytelling patterns at large, expressing a preference for nonsexual character dynamics
- in reference to a specific fandom "ship" (whether that may mean a romantic or sexual interpretation of a character dynamic, aspiration for the development of romantic or sexual outcomes between characters, or enjoyment of an existing romantic or sexual relationship), expressing a distaste for that specific ship or that ship's fanworks
- examples: this one
- in reference to the culture of fandom or shipping, expressing a sense of alienation or personal disinterest
- examples: this one
- in reference to the culture of fandom or shipping, expressing a criticism or negative reaction to an action, practice, or pattern
- in reference to the culture of fandom or shipping, expressing a hope of or interest in exploring, talking about, and devoting attention to alternative possibilities
These are all very different things, in some ways, but I am gathering that range of possibilities together here under this umbrella intentionally, in order to include both the personal (in a "personal preference" sense of the word) and the ideological (in a "claims you can argue about" sense of the word). My sentiments of alienation from and objections to narrative norms and fandom shipping culture blends some of each, so I'm not trying to separate the two. In other words, some unshipping posts will be the kind that warrants arguing with if you disagree, and some will not, just like how some shipping posts make claims that warrant arguing with if you disagree and some just come down to personal taste.
Accepting unshipping as a valid way of engaging with stories and fandom entails accepting the following:
- "They belong together" is no more neutral a statement than "They don't belong together."
- Romantic and sexual interpretations or orientations toward a pairing are not the only way of valuing a pairing or character relationship.
- Unshipping itself has no inherent negative or positive moral value.
Questions for the readers time:
Are there any pairings or fictional relationships that you unship as hard as some ship others? If there are pairings that you hate (NOTPs, nega-ships) or pairings you embrace in the form of friendships/"platonic" relationships (brOTPs, plants), what are your preferred terms to use for that, and why?
