Replacing storytelling with shipping - Will it ever end?

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Shipping (matchmaking for sane people) by itself is as old as human storytelling, people like a good romance and any case of a story having love triangle or side character that have chemistry invites people to fill in the relationships in their head, especially if there is no conclusive resolution.

However over the last decades, with the advent of the internet the romance surrounding the work has become more important than the work itself, sometimes even actively rewriting the story if the true conclusion isn't accepted by whatever lifeless slugs consume the content. This was tolerable as it was limited to the internet, so you could easily ignore it. However, due to the generation originally engaging it matured (the Tumblr generation) and entered the media workforce, as well as various writers having TDS and thus being on Twitter 24/7 and engaging with that community daily, the focus on shipping in media exploded.

This caused the quality of media products to plummet, especially if they are surprise hits so between seasons the writers have their original vision replaced with unnecessary focus on relationship drama, sinking any good writing and turning the work and its legacy into shit. Arcane is the latest victim of it, but there is no shortage of other works.

So this thread is about talking on whatever shows were ruined by it or are in the process of being ruined by it. Plus talking about if there is any change incoming for good or bad.

 

[HyperboreanRightsActivist]

The euromuttization of American media has been a disaster for anyone who doesn't hate freedom. I have not seen a single movie released after 2016 with a coherent narrative that doesn't just devolve into "but how does this make you feel???".

Late 2000's to late 2010's was when every hack writer and their mum tried inverting morality and making the villain the good guy. Fast forward to 2020, and even that tiny bit of speculative thinking is gone, replaced by a new moral dogma with "acceptable" """""role models""""" at the forefront.

Too much sexualization of gay disabled trans niggers too.

 

[WULULULULU]

This caused the quality of media products to plummet, especially if they are surprise hits so between seasons the writers have their original vision replaced with unnecessary focus on relationship drama, sinking any good writing and turning the work and its legacy into shit. Arcane is the latest victim of it, but there is no shortage of other works.

Thanks for reminding me how the Owl House turned from forgettable kid slop to obnoxious lesbo slop once the lesbo pairing became the main focus and almost everyone wouldn't stop validating themselves over it.

 

[liam dees]

Seeing that Arcane clip go viral on Twitter has made me swear off Arcane. Yeah, I know, "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" and all that, but I just know as an audience member that my investment into Arcane would be spoiled in the future, and that's not worth it for me in most cases.

 

[Chandelier]

Seeing that Arcane clip go viral on Twitter has made me swear off Arcane. Yeah, I know, "throwing out the baby with the bathwater" and all that, but I just know as an audience member that my investment into Arcane would be spoiled in the future, and that's not worth it for me in most cases.

Which one? The jail sex scene or the Jayce and Viktor cosmic hand holding?

 

[liam dees]

Which one? The jail sex scene or the Jayce and Viktor cosmic hand holding?

The jail sex scene.

 

[I hate women (like you)]

the secret to the whole problem is that people as a whole really fucking despise storytelling - what they crave is new realisations of the same couple of archetypes and archetypical images; who gives a single fuck about the unending variety of different stories and characters, when you are able to be entertained fully by 5 pornographic stories with the names swapped out to create thousands of them? you could call it a tag-ification, on most occasions when I stumble upon an advertisement of a YA book (that is, the most widely read type of book) the whole selling point is a list of tags: friends to lovers/enemies to lovers/etcetcetc; slowburn/fastburn; low/high spice and so on and so on - you get the idea. SAD!

 

[Wuornos]

The euromuttization of American media has been a disaster for anyone who doesn't hate freedom. I have not seen a single movie released after 2016 with a coherent narrative that doesn't just devolve into "but how does this make you feel???".

Late 2000's to late 2010's was when every hack writer and their mum tried inverting morality and making the villain the good guy. Fast forward to 2020, and even that tiny bit of speculative thinking is gone, replaced by a new moral dogma with "acceptable" """""role models""""" at the forefront.

Too much sexualization of gay disabled trans niggers too.

All this bullshit came out of America. Not Europe. Same with the queer, trans & paedophile "rights" movement.

 

[Safir]

Shipping (matchmaking for sane people) by itself is as old as human storytelling, people like a good romance and any case of a story having love triangle or side character that have chemistry invites people to fill in the relationships in their head, especially if there is no conclusive resolution.

No, it's cancer, and I can't really remember a single ancient myth with cuntsuffering in it (there could be one, but it's definitely not a staple). Lancelot only started fucking Guinevere in the late Middle Ages.

Early "love triangles" happened when a villain seduced or raped the hero's wife. The pajeet Sita, Rama's wife, immolates herself after her shitty husband fails to protect her from rape and then abandons her (she gets better). Mordred seduced Guinevere. Heroes of Russian myth often get cucked and murdered (they get better) by their trophy wives and the serpents they rescued them from.

Zeus cheats on his wife, who takes revenge on the poor mortal women. Aphrodite is a slut, but her husband Hephaestus is more honorable, in that he actually beats her divine lover Ares the god of war, not her mortal dildoes. Unrequited love existed. Menelaus and Paris never competed for Helen, Aphrodite bribed Paris by turning Helen into a cockslut. In various fairytales where the hero has rivals for the hand of the princess, the princess herself is either already in love with the hero or doesn't give a fuck, and rivalry consists of unrelated challenges.

the romance surrounding the work has become more important than the work itself,

1.
"Romance surrounding the work" is telling: it's not part of the work, it's porn of it. In a lot of the media, the "romance" is not a plot or a subplot.
Who's to blame?
- movie audiencemaxxxxing, "something for the girlies"
- vidya
- backdraft from vidya
dunno really.

2.
In contrast, there are stories about matchmaking where the reader is meant to be kept in suspense on the edge of her cunt. And now we run into the problem of fake stakes:
- if the heroine doesn't fuck whom the reader wants her to fuck, the reader hates the story
- if the story signals whom the heroine will fuck before you buy, there's no excitement
The latter is now the preferred way to market books. (In fact, the latter is now the preferred way to market all books, they tell you the whole fucking plot, which is why I never read blurbs, I pirate blind.) You'll notice that it precludes "shipping". Shows are more expensive and need to engage in audiencemaxxxxxxing.

3.
HOWEVER
My waifu's show has a relationship in at least a third of the episodes, starting with the second one, and none of them allow for "shipping".
In Yamato, the protagonist acquires a girlfriend. In Arcadia, Captain Harlock has a girlfriend.
Most of these characters die. Some of them are dead before the story begins. The Fossil Warrior's bride is fossilized. Sometimes one or both halves of a couple are pieces of shit. None of them ever invited "shipping".

Owl House turned from forgettable kid slop to obnoxious lesbo slop once the lesbo pairing became the main focus

eckshually, this is not shipping, it's just "romance" (and grooming). I would say a source material dyke pair is particularly anti-shipping, as the "fandom" will excommunicate everyone who dares to imagine an alternative love interest. Once there's a dyke couple and no way to make it a dyke gangbang, shipping is officially over.

TL;DR I fundamentally disagree with the premise of the OP. Instead, I think that
- cuntsuffering (matchmaking rivalry centered around feefees) is relatively recent
- cuntsuffering is significantly older than the interwebs or self-publishing
- the interwebs and self-publishing brought no qualitative changes.

 

[Oilspill Battery]

Arcane really is the most expensive comissioned porn in history for that one fortiche employee.

 

[Squawking Macaw]

The Arcane ending hit you hard lol.
But you're right in that there has been a very noticeable Tumblrification of fiction. People are crippling their creative projects for a small class of sex-obsessed fags who can't see two characters of the same sex enjoy each other's company without wanting them to fuck each other. Or characters who're absolved of all wrongdoing for fucking someone of the same sex. It's even worse when the creators are in on it, then there's no saving the show.

ETA:

you could call it a tag-ification, on most occasions when I stumble upon an advertisement of a YA book (that is, the most widely read type of book) the whole selling point is a list of tags: friends to lovers/enemies to lovers/etcetcetc; slowburn/fastburn; low/high spice and so on and so on - you get the idea. SAD!

I've seen this as well. People saying things like 'my favorite trope is enemies to lovers' or 'my favorite shipping dynamic is...' and recommending each other books or fanfics depending on which tropes they like to read. It's clear that they don't really care about the narrative, they're just after this specific plot beat (almost always romance-centered) that they masturbate to enjoy reading about.

 

[MugolEx]

It's a perplexing thing to witness. Like you said, matchmaking has been a thing for story telling for a long time. A love interest is normally used as a way to heighten the stakes of a story because there is more to gain and inversely more to lose. And it helps that love is a strong universal trait that the vast majority of people can relate to and understand at a very human level. But shipping in itself is a more potent and in many ways a perverse mutation of the love interest trope. To see shipping as a main staple of millennial story writing means it's over adaption must have a catalyst. I want to say it's because everyone is a gooner now, but that wouldn't really be satisfying explanation and is ultimately reductive. Maybe it was just the Internet doing what it has done with every sub group of interests and exacerbates them. I don't think bronies would have ever been a thing if people didn't come to the realization that a non insignificant amount of 30 year old men enjoyed watching the cartoon unironically. With out the Internet, these people would have never known about each others existence. As much as I want to just smoke bronies for being weirdos, it was at the start a quirky and novel sub-fandom and ultimately harmless. But as I am sure we are all aware it quickly spiraled into degenerate mess and sweaty middle aged men inserting themselves in spaces meant for prepubescent girls. These fuckers had to constraint and lacked self awareness. And I believe the same thing had happened with "shippers." Places like Deviant Art and Tumblr became a breeding ground for people to share their favorite fictional couples or the couplings they wanted to see. Once again harmless, but then quickly exacerbated by the people who live vicariously through fictional characters. They take the love interest trope way to fucking seriously to the point that the story exists just to push a gross romance angle instead of it being complimentary to the story. And it just so happens that these same people eventually started to work in the industry, bringing over their obsession with them and thus grow a like minded audience that validate it.

As I said shipping is perverse, usually anyways. A lot of these shippers live vicariously through fictional characters and tend to see themselves in them in some way. Either it being some sexual identity or fetish. It's why you may have notice an uptick in two female relationships and not two male relationships because a lot of these writers are straight men themselves and are more comfortable writing in two lesbian characters. Because writing a homosexual relationship for two guys is just fucking gay and they can't jerk themselves off to that. And any special identity that they may impend on a character like being "non-binary" is often just to make themselves look socially aware by being "inclusive." How many times have you heard about the asexual non-binary female character that for some reason still as a preference for other woman?

In short: Millennial writing and its consequences have been a disaster to modern story telling.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

All this bullshit came out of America. Not Europe. Same with the queer, trans & paedophile "rights" movement.

Magnus Hirschfeld wasn't American, and he's probably the earliest mainstreamer of all that shit.

 

[BigKant]

Arcane really is the most expensive comissioned porn in history for that one fortiche employee.

I want to remind all of you that Fortiche is a French animation studio. That is all.


This is what you get when you have a fujo as a writer on your show. Total Shipper Death.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

So this thread is about talking on whatever shows were ruined by it or are in the process of being ruined by it.

Every single Western cartoon in the last 15+ years, and sometimes manga falls victim to this. Like supposedly My Hero Academia ended the way it did because Horikoshi was worried about pissing off a group of shippers instead of committing and in the process let down everyone.

Shipping was all fun and games until someone got hurt and it never stopped. Although it was tainted long before then tbh. Like personally, the moment Team Edward/Jacob became a thing and I caught myself from getting into a worse scuffle with a Digimon shipper at roughly around the same time, I had to remind myself shipping was just for fun and wasn't serious business. Too bad the rest of the female species didn't take that to heart.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

All this bullshit came out of America. Not Europe. Same with the queer, trans & paedophile "rights" movement.

Bullshit, until the 2010s Europe was the more "progressive" one in LGBT+ shit. Even now, Canada is still a few steps further into degeneracy and society-destroying policies.

 

[Gog & Magog]

Shipping subcultures should always be ignored by authors. Never give them attention.

Magnus Hirschfeld wasn't American, and he's probably the earliest mainstreamer of all that shit.

Fun Fact: Hirschfeld once examined the secretions of both homosexual men and women based on his own hypothesis which claimed gays had eggs in their semen while lesbians had semen in their ovaries. Seems he had believed lesbians and (other) gays to be confused hermaphrodites in desperate need of his quackery. He promoted all kinds of wacky psuedoscience yet now he's a symbol of homo history. Selling other homos total bullshit which ultimately harmed many of them gets ignored by "queer" academia. Ain't it ironic?

 

[starborn427614]

Knew this would be about Arcane before I even clicked on the thread. You're not wrong about the main concept, but at the same time fandoms can be giga retarded and you should never listen to them as a collective.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

Selling other homos total bullshit which ultimately harmed many of them gets ignored by "queer" academia. Ain't it ironic?

They're their own worst enemies, the LGBTP have made people hate them more than ever, and have been doing a good job of that for decades.

 

[Fire Flight]

Arcane really is the most expensive comissioned porn in history for that one fortiche employee.

It's still funny as fuck how the edged the Yaoi fans so hard without delivering anything.