There are lots and lots and lots of differences between a television series and a film. Some of them are really important, like how long you can spend meandering around a subplot, how many main characters are really feasible, and average budget. (To wit: films can meander much less, they can have far fewer characters, but their budgets are often much more fun.) Others, however, are really trivial, and into that second category falls today’s subject – shipping.

Y’all are denizens of the internets, so I’m not going to insult your intelligence by explaining the term at any great length. What I will say is that in film fandoms, shipping either simply does not exist, or exists to so much smaller an extent as to be ignorable. The reason for this is pretty simple – when you watch a film, you see the whole thing from beginning to end, and then you stop. With television, you have a whole week between instalments. You have time to talk to other fans about what you thought of the lesbian subtext in this week’s Rizzoli & Isles (TOO SUBTLE), or commiserate with the rest of the fandom when Bones and Booth still didn’t kiss at the end of last night’s episode. With films, there isn’t a whole lot of point in arguing with who the hero ends up with, because you already know the answer, because you already saw the ending. TV fans do not have that advantage. They are basically guessing about where the producers and writers are going to take the show, and that is what gives rise to shipping.

(The obvious exceptions to this rule are things like Harry Potter, [which a) was based on books, which I will come back to presently, and b) has sequels, which give you the time-space to think about the characters], or things like The Phantom of the Opera [which gives you a pretty equal division of interest between your two male leads, and because she ends up with the guy whose name isn’t in the title, there will always be an argument to say that she should have gone with the Phantom]. [Also, Phans have been known to be batshit insane.])

Books are more like television than films – partly because the story is often spread out over a few volumes, but more because it takes a hell of a lot longer to read a book than it does to watch a film, or even a play or an opera, and you’re likely to put the book down and do other stuff parallel to reading it. I’m going to use an example from Twilight, much as it pains me to do so (...I have Twilight issues, which, if I ever actually get my rejection letter from AfterEllen, I will explain at greater length), because it so neatly illustrates my point. Anyone who has ever read Twilight must surely know that Bella will end up with Edward. This is really, really obvious. And yet there is still a Team Jacob, because most people don’t read books the way I do (which is almost invariably in one sitting, and at lightspeed) and will put down their copy of New Moon about three-quarters of the way in and think, ‘Look, Jacob’s not a creepy stalk-ass bastard with hundred-year-old-virgin issues! Let’s ship him with Bella, now Edward’s out of the picture.’ And then by the time you’ve got to Breaking Dawn and you realise that OH MY GOD, JACOB ENDS UP WITH RENESMEE, AAAH, MY BRAIN, you have that Team Jacob shipping framework in your head, because you had time to reinforce it as you ploughed through Eclipse.

And that brings us neatly to my very favourite thing about shipping; the shippers.

Y’all, I’m a teenager, and I’m in love; the combination of these two factors means that I am probably as happy and optimistic right this minute as I ever will be. And perhaps that colours my view of everything, and maybe when I’m thirty I’ll look back at this blog and think ‘...damn, I was naive’, but I genuinely think the world is a basically good place, that I have lots to look forward to and lots to be thankful for, and, to bring us back to the actual point, that television is actually pretty good. And what I love about shippers is that they have a sense of that optimism. They genuinely believe that the show will do the right thing and get those characters together, and that faith in something, even in something as trivial as television, makes me hopeful.

So although I usually ship the most prominent ship in any given fandom, I love that there’s a whole crazy-ass smorgasbord of opinion. I love that even on Bones, a show which most people would agree has been a one-ship affair since Day One, has Tempe/Angela shippers, or Cam/Booth, or Zack/Brennan; there aren’t many of them, but they’re out there. And I also love that people take time to ship minor characters – Ryan/Esposito on Castle, for example, which is pretty obvious but also really cute, or, despite its obvious wrong, Alex/Huang on Doum-Doum of Our Lives. I know it’s a silly thing to get worked up about, but shipping is like that. You start off being all supercilious and very much aware that it’s all pretend, and then three weeks later you find yourself fighting for Jane/Lisbon as it was going to cure malaria or something. It’s Very Serious Business.

My favourite thing of all, though, is when the source material is genuinely ambiguous. Doum-Doum of Our Lives is split almost perfectly down the middle between Olivia/Elliot and Olivia/Alex, and that’s so much fun. You suddenly have a team, united in the face of absurdity. (Because, honestly, how could anyone think that Elliot would cheat on his wife?) It’s silly, yes, but that’s part of the brilliance – if you don’t feel like playing today, it doesn’t matter. You aren’t going to be kept up at night, worrying about whether Grissom will ever remove his head from his ass and marry Sara. It’s not like you don’t care, because you do, but you only care when it’s actually happening. That’s the glory of shipping.

I do think that the shipping for lesbian couples is a different kettle of fish, if only marginally. Because we are represented so much less in any given show (The L Word obviously excluded, on grounds of taste as much as anything), lesbian ships tend to have very intense fans, because ‘Oh my God, we’re being represented, please don’t break them up, we need the good publicity’ is actually a pretty good argument. (And I imagine male gay couples are much the same, but I don’t know that for sure. You’d actually be stunned at how little overlap there is between gay and lesbian culture, probably because while straight couples always have at least one person of the right gender going on, gay couples of the opposite gender are going to cause total nonplussed-ness. Although, having said that, I think we would probably all ship any gay couple on principle, because even though we don’t get why they like the gender we’ve been trying to get away from our whole lives, they’re still our figurative, cultural-outcast siblings, and most of us pretty much want all of the goddamn letters in the ever-expanding acronym [LGBTQIA? Or something? I mean, for God’s sake, I read AfterEllen every day, I listen to k.d. lang, I’m applying to Smith and Wellesley; I am a fully paid-up member of the lesbian mafia, and I’m still not sure what the letters are meant to be] to be happy. It’s a pretty sunny community.)

So, in an attempt to get back to my actual point – why does shipping occur? Why is that people feel so drawn to pair off characters like the end of a Jane Austen novel? For serious, I genuinely have no idea. And, clearly, it’s been going on a while; there are some wonderful letters from Louisa May Alcott, whose fans shipped Jo/Laurie hard enough to rival any modern Booth/Bones shipper, stating with contrarian firmness that she “would not marry Jo and Laurie to please anybody.” This makes her a precursor of the wonder and horror that was to come in the form of creator backlash and shipping wars, but mainly it makes her fucking awesome, because how many 19^th century writers who were entirely financially dependent on the success of their books can you name who were that ballsy?

My own pet theory is this: we all want someone to love. It doesn’t matter how we want to love them – as friends, as siblings, as lovers, as family – as long as we have someone. I have someone. I love her, and so she has someone. Y’all probably have lots of someones. So if we care about any character, to whatever extent, we want them to have someone too, because having people to love, and people who love you, is pretty much the backbone of human happiness.        

(Nothing fancy, then, that theory. I wish there were a way to denote eye-rolling.)

And so we will continue to watch Bones and Castle, safe in the knowledge that they will get together eventually, because that’s just how those particular shows roll. On the other hand, we’re bound to be really freaking surprised by some crazy-awesome decisions on other shows – I mean, can you imagine what would happen if Rizzoli and Isles actually did get together? It would be spectacular, because no-one is expecting it. What if Jane and Lisbon decided to sleep together for the sheer hell of it? What if Alex comes back and reveals that she and Olivia have been having a Grissoms-esque secret relationship this whole time? What if Goren and Eames are together when they come back? The possibilities for mind-screwing surprises are so many and so much fun that optimism is pretty much the only appropriate response. Sometimes, yes, your ship is going to get squished (and my sincereish condolences to those shippers), but just as often you will find yourself loving whatever seemingly bizarre combination of characters that the almighty producers have thrown together for your amusement.           

And that, my friends, is what shipping is all about.