SHIP HAPPENS:
THE INEVITABLE OUTCOME OF UNDERREPRESENTATION by Anastacia Kellogg Ship, n. Short for romantic relationship. v. To endorse a romantic relationship. Shipping, n. The act of endorsing a romantic relationship, usually fictional, usually in a fan-created work. 2016 was a poor year, like most years, for queer representation in popular media. In their annual Where We Are on TV report, GLAAD tallied up only 4.8% of regular characters on television as LGBT, while their Studio Responsibility Index found only 17.5% of major studio films were LGBT-inclusive. Queer characters that do appear tend to die quickly, as did the 26 queer women on TV in the 2015-16 season according to the count by LGBT Fans Deserve Better. In fandom spaces, however, we have a different story. There is a decades-long tradition of audiences responding to their favorite media by writing stories set in those worlds or centering around those characters, placing them in romantic situations that would never happen in the source’s official canon. There are hundreds of thousands of these fanfictions, and the most popular couples, pairings, or — in the most fandom-friendly lingo — “ships” are, more often than not, same-gender. What drives audiences to increasingly favor these love stories that do not, officially, exist? The lack of diversity in all sorts of media has been countered with a relentless push for more inclusive movies, television, and literature. This has resulted in an audience that is increasingly critical of even their favorite franchises, an audience which holds standards and expectations that large-scale productions routinely fail to meet. The history of this push and pull for diversity representation is far longer than can be cov-
ered here, and the list of popular queer ships is even longer than that. I can only take a shallow sampling—a far too shallow, far too male-centric, sampling—to illustrate. — One of the most infamous non-attempts at queer representation in a major franchise was
What drives audiences to increasingly favor these love stories that do not, officially, exist?
28 | OutWrite, 2017
J.K. Rowling’s Word of God announcement that Albus Dumbledore was gay. It prompted a lot of negative responses, many of which were predictably homophobic, logic-bending “proofs” that she was somehow wrong about her own character. Much of the criticism however, came from LGBTQ fans of the series who were unhappy with the way it had been handled. The problem was one of visibility. Queer fans don’t need to know that queer relationships are happening somewhere off in the fictional world; we take that as a given. What we are invested in are the relationships whose stories are told and the characters who are navigating them. Whether the people involved are good or bad (and remember, Dumbledore and Grindelwald were both bad people), fans have the right to feel cheated when the portrayal of the relationship is never suggested to be anything more than a teenage friendship. So it’s little surprise that the most popular queer ships in the fandom are non-canon ones. We see pairings like Dean/Seamus or Remus/ Sirius: pure, loving relationships which are, most importantly, extrapolations of non-romantic relationships we actually witnessed on page and screen. —
