the feminist librarian reads

If you’ve never just wanted two – or more! – characters to get together (or perhaps enjoyed seeing characters who are already together navigate a relationship) it might be hard to understand what shipping is about. In the abstract, it’s as straightforward as that: we see something between them – romantic chemistry, or sexual tension, or a great friendship, or a really epic hatred – and we itch to push them closer. Sometimes it’s about sex; sometimes it’s not. A lot of the time, it’s just really fun, either to imagine it or to create and consume art about it. Shipping dominates transformative fandom – fanfiction, fanart, and the like. “Getting them together” is one of the rock-solid foundations of the fanfiction world: a lot of fic falls within the romance genre, where much of the pleasure of the story lies in the ‘how’ of the budding relationship. And just like professionally-published romance, these stories are largely written and read by women.