Replacing storytelling with shipping - Will it ever end?

[Toji Suzuhara]

americans like John Money

Money was born and raised in New Zealand. So kiwis are actually to blame for troonery

 

[EFL MLG Rapist Aryan]

literally 99% of new media for young-ish people has insane levels of shipping, I think it's being hypersexed that causes it

 

[Inside your walls]

I'll be real while destroying stories and characters for sake of shipping is absolutely dogshit, I think that shouldn't be the only issue to focus
on when criticizing modern writing.

While it is a problem, I do think another issue that is also plaguing modern writing is the fact that millennial writers are not interested in writing actual characters, they're rather interested in writing "fandom versions" of those said characters as a default thing. Because why bother having a character that can resonate with anybody no matter what, has something to say about a certain topic and has an interesting character arc, when you can just write a very watered down, flanderized and fandomized version of that character that activates TvTropes poisoned minds of stunted manchildren?

 

[Chandelier]

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.

As someone who reads fanfics, this is true. There's only so many romantic tropes you can take before they all blend into one. I am very picky about what I read, published or otherwise, and so much of it is predictable slop one has to wonder what the IQ is of the people writing it. Most of them are young women, so they aren't teenagers anymore. They're college educated, yet act like autistic speds because they are (and there is data for this).

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

When Christian Linke said a popular M/M ship wasn't canon, they fucking dogpiled him on Twitter. Just pure, seething rage, despite the homoerotic bait. Despite him being the co-creator, the animators liked the ship, even posting fanart around the studio. That doesn't mean much; that's a personal preference. That's not authorial intent.

Some League Of Legends animation, right? Yaoi baiting is a good way to get more fujos watching while not pissing off other fans who don't want to see too much gay. The fujos create media that promotes the show to more fujos. The fandom gets loud and annoying and then at the end... Nothing. No buttsecks 4 u.

Arcane Episode 9, specifically the bit where the two male background characters get blasted away into the cosmos for gay sex (or at least, that's how the fandom perceives it). Never mind how the build up to that was fundamentally retarded. Eventually, the shippers move on to cannibalize another fandom. A contrast to Arcane would be Hannibal, but unlike Arcane, Bryan Fuller intended for Hannibal and Will Graham to be a couple and it was in the script.

 

[Kari Kamiya]

I've always hated romance in fiction, let alone shipping. It's rarely ever interesting. At best, it's tolerable and at worst, it overshadows the plot. It's gotten to a point where if anyone tries to recommend me a show or a movie and I catch the slightest whiff of romance, it's a hard pass from me.

You must be fun at parties.

 

[Lord of the Large Pants]

Star VS. The Forces of Evil. Tl;dw typical cartoon show about a magical girl (Star) from another dimension that starts episodical and then starts having an overarching plot.

What the creator did is that she killed off the big bad guy that she had been hyping up since episode 1 at the end of season 2, and now for the next two seasons what we have is that Star gets involved in a previously-resolved love triangle that encompasses her psycho ex-boyfriend and her new best friend. Best friend who already was in a love triangle that encompassed Star and another girl, but that was dropped in favor of a lesbian pairing between the other girl and a dyke that came out of nowhere (literally no build-up, she's just presented as the girl's girlfriend the moment the character debuts). So in the end seasons 3 and 4 are exclusively about two semi-overlaping love triangles involving both protagonists that get resolved in an extremely anti-climatic way with retarded, largely irrelevant villians in the background. The worst part is that the first love triangle isn't even resolved at the end of the show because the last thing that Star and her best friend say to each other (after a semi-apocalyptic event which makes it so that magic stops existing and that both dimensions get fused together) is a "hi". That's it, the fucking shipping wars TV show ends up with a "hi".

Why did this happen, you might ask? Because the show's creator wanted to self-insert the story of how she met her husband into the story using Star as an stand-in for herself and the best friend as an stand-in for her husband. And then you wonder why animation these days is so shit

I have a somewhat higher than average opinion on Star VS, so I'm probably biased. However. I think this is slightly inaccurate.

Marco and Jackie didn't break up because Jackie went gay, they broke up because their relationship wasn't working. Same with Kelly. Marco couldn't let go of Star. One of the running themes of the show is being in love with your best friend, and Jackie couldn't be that for him.

I actually was fine with the very last shot of the show. The will-they-or-won't-they question was absolutely not unresolved. They did. They have. They are. They will continue to do so. It would've been nice to see more of a payoff after all the shit they dragged the viewer through, but they answered the question.

As far as melodramatic teen romance goes, I honestly think they did a fairly good job with that part. Star and Marco always had believable chemistry. I thought they were kind of sweet together.

That's not to say the show didn't drag it out too long. Star getting back together with Tom was absurdly forced. I've always suspected that was a decision by executives rather than writers.

Full agreement that Toffee was mishandled though. Eclipsa was even worse. The wasted potential there was unreal. My general experience has been that female written media has better character dynamics at the expense of the actual plot.

 

[OutInTheRain]

One of the things with shipping as well, is that once the ship happens. The shipping fandom dies. They don't care what happens next, they just care the ship happened, and then they are out. Even the characters stories for at least one side of it, seems to just die off. Sometimes it dies for both characters. There are so many series where post ship, everyone just thinks it sucks. Friends, The Office, X-Files. You can however argue that those shows were showing their age and it was a hail mary to keep things going.

 

[Zbk3VmLfujjzjxBd43tL]

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.

Ancient Greece is the oldest example of shipping. The Iliad was composed 1000-700 BC, before the "Greek love" pederast shit arose (it was originally a Cretan cult that spread everywhere). So later generations of Greeks and Romans ended up obsessing over who was the top and who was the bottom in the Iliad. The actual text has none of the little hints writers in later times would drop to tell the audience who fucks who. That didn't stop people from centuries later insisting that Achilles was fucking Patroclus.

The issue is that a lot of IPs where this doesn't fit, such as Star Wars recently with Acolyte, tried the same approach and failed miserably because the demo of SW are nerdy dudes, mostly white nerdy dudes.

The thing I've noticed since around 2015 is that the entertainment industry is completely clueless when it comes to what the public likes and why.
They throw shit at a wall in the hopes that something sticks and when it does, they milk it until something else sticks.
Now however, they pretty much completely fucked up everything that stuck so far with bad executive decisions.
Decisions such as making an MCU show about middle aged lesbians and a Star Wars show about a woman thirsting for a serial killer.

Can you really blame Disney Star Wars for doing that? Literally the only group that even remotely appreciated the sequel trilogy was the "ReyLo" fandom. You know, the same audience of adult women who are into true crime and saw Kylo Ren as the bad boi Columbine shooter-type they could fix. That was the entire appeal. So since actually writing something that isn't slop is out, why not target something at this crowd?

 

[Overly Serious]

This video is a short but good watch on a phenomenon that ties into this - series that focus more on their characters' writing rather than their plot tend to attract a lot of these young obsessive types. Naturally, if you write a good character, people will watch your slop just to see that character - it doesn't matter how good or bad the rest of the show is (see: Alastor from Hazbin Hotel, Jax from The Amazing Digital Circus, whatever other shit tweens are into).

If you put the focus on characters' stories and dynamics with each other, then of course the resulting fandom will be a circlejerk of people shipping anyone and everyone together and not giving a damn about the plot. This happened with Jujutsu Kaisen (Suguru Geto and Satoru Gojo). I also cannot ignore the elephant in the room - it happened with My Hero Academia. People were convinced Midoriya and Bakugou were gay, and threw shitfits online when the author ignored shipping culture (as should be done) and concluded the series the way he wanted.

If you're an animator and want to find success in today's online environment, the formula is simple. Write a quirky character and add homoerotic subtext with another character, and people will flock to your series instantly, no matter how bland the plot.

That was an interesting watch. And I hadn't thought of things in this way. I guess a greater focus on character rather than story does lend itself to more 'audience participation' for want of a better term (maybe Audience Projection). It also might go some way to explaining Hazbin Hotel which is a mystery to me. After seeing a thread on that show permanently on page 1 of the Media forum for over a year I decided to give it a watch to see what the fuss was about. Aside from it being vaguely distasteful (all the porn career stuff with one of the characters) there was almost nothing to it. It was just some mostly slightly unpleasant people.... being on screen.

 

[Trollblade69]

As far as melodramatic teen romance goes, I honestly think they did a fairly good job with that part. Star and Marco always had believable chemistry. I thought they were kind of sweet together.

They had good chemistry, but there were so many fumbles in execution that put me off the pairing. Jackie being unceremoniously chucked out of the show felt like a transparent railroading of the Starco relationship, and then Booth Buddies made me hate the whole relationship despite good episode ideas following it like Curse Of The Blood Moon.

 

[The Nothingness]

I'm reminded of the Sherlock fandom and how mad they were that there was no big gay reveal at the end. I didn't watch the show so I'm not sure what gay baiting there might have been. But you'd have to be pretty retarded to think such a mainstream show based on such iconic characters would do that. You'd alienate all the Cumberbitches that wanted his alien babies. They were absolutely loony thinking his wife and children weren't real.

I remember when Sherlock's finale aired a bunch of fans thought there was a secret extra episode airing the next week where they'd finally buttfuck. That the new series premiering that week was fake and it's name (Apple Tree st. or something) was some kind of code for the secret Sherlock episode. I was in stitches.

That reminds me of Killing Eve, another Brit show where an intelligence agent is assigned with capturing a notorious assassin. Both are women and they develop a mutual obsession with one another as the series progressed. I learned about it after seeing a clip of the assassin at child's birthday party, disguised as a clown, for a hit. After the series finale aired, fans were disappointed it did not end with the two characters together and that the assassin got killed off.

 

[Chandelier]

One of the things with shipping as well, is that once the ship happens. The shipping fandom dies. They don't care what happens next, they just care the ship happened, and then they are out. Even the characters stories for at least one side of it, seems to just die off. Sometimes it dies for both characters. There are so many series where post ship, everyone just thinks it sucks. Friends, The Office, X-Files. You can however argue that those shows were showing their age and it was a hail mary to keep things going.

This is true. Certain fandoms - such as Shadowhunters - originally had no gay pairing but the show canonized an official gay pairing - Magnus Bane and Alec Lightwood. Another famous example is Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham from the Hannibal show, which still goes strong after all these years. But 90% of the time, yes, when it's confirmed, all that drama and excitement dies. You have your honeymoon period and then it's over. In the Transformers fandom, there are a few gay ships (don't ask), and they don't even top 3k fics. The examples I have above have around 25k and 35k respectively, and they're relatively old fandoms (Hannibal is almost ten years old).

Shippers are like locusts: once their boredom reaches a fandom, they'll go and cannibalize another. Such is female autism.

 

[Trump's Chosen]

One of the things with shipping as well, is that once the ship happens. The shipping fandom dies. They don't care what happens next, they just care the ship happened, and then they are out. Even the characters stories for at least one side of it, seems to just die off. Sometimes it dies for both characters. There are so many series where post ship, everyone just thinks it sucks. Friends, The Office, X-Files. You can however argue that those shows were showing their age and it was a hail mary to keep things going.

Ahh now I get shipping. It's the woman version of wanting to see women nude. Like how belle delphine lost most of her clout after going nude. Shipping is the romance counterpart of that.

 

[Toji Suzuhara]

But 90% of the time, yes, when it's confirmed, all that drama and excitement dies. You have your honeymoon period and then it's over.

Didn't the same thing happen with the Blake X Yang (aka Bumblebee) ship in RWBY? The only reason as to why it's somewhat known nowadays is because of that scene where Ruby lashes out at the two

 

[Space Police]

Macross WNBAG because they forced a love triangle when there was no need for one and doubled down in later entires. Robotech won, by the way. Also Arcane sucks because Wings said to ban any mention of L*ag*e of L*g*nds in any context.

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!

I've always hated romance in fiction, let alone shipping. It's rarely ever interesting. At best, it's tolerable and at worst, it overshadows the plot. It's gotten to a point where if anyone tries to recommend me a show or a movie and I catch the slightest whiff of romance, it's a hard pass from me.

TSMT so much TSMT! Romance and "character drama" are the lamest things ever. Nobody seems to care about setting or worldbuilding or story nowadays unless it makes the characters look a certain way. Why bother developing a new form of storytelling or creating a strange and immersive world when you've got characters for everyone to self insert into! People who care about "character drama" often just wish they could befriend or have sex with certain characters. Also, there is no such thing as a "bad character". Billions of different people have existed, and everyone is unique, so chances are there have been (or will be) a person who acts exactly like what people deem a "bad character" in media. It's the same reason there's no such thing as bad acting.

 

[Chandelier]

Didn't the same thing happen with the Blake X Yang (aka Bumblebee) ship in RWBY? The only reason as to why it's somewhat known nowadays is because of that scene where Ruby lashes out at the two

Not my fandom, so I cannot tell you, but other examples I can give are the Keith/Lance of Voltron and the classic Johnlock ship. Legacy fandom keeps them alive, but it's not as active as others anymore (since I sperg about Arcane a lot, that fandom right now is super fucking active). You will have only the devoted fans that create better works and are generally far more chill about it because they're there for the actual love of the work vs the shipping. Voltron was an enormous fandom back in the day and it's since cooled - you'll still find hundreds of fics posted monthly on Ao3 but it's not as active as it once was. I remember Hetalia being a huge fandom back in 2010 and that shit was wild, WILD I tell you. Since then the fandom as mellowed out and the shipping wars are largely over.

Either way, shippers provide the fanart and 'spirit' for a fandom, but once they get bored it's over. When you cater to them your work won't stand the test of time because they'll be moving on to their next batch.

 

[Jacques1194]

You know as someone who is still active in the South Park fandom, I hate how the fandom is full of young women and girls who want them to do more with the female 4th graders but it all boils down to "Make these two a lesbian couple." Like sure I'd actually love it if they did more with the female 4th graders because the show does have a big female fanbase despite it being a male centered show, (though that's probably because of the fuji addicts.) but these women give 0 ideas of what Trey or Matt could do with the girls. I'm not saying the creators will listen to the fans because they have a history of ignoring them, but it would be nice to be in a fandom where people actually gave ideas of what they can do with said characters. All these people care about is if they are some flavor of queer and not story or character development.

One of the things with shipping as well, is that once the ship happens. The shipping fandom dies. They don't care what happens next, they just care the ship happened, and then they are out. Even the characters stories for at least one side of it, seems to just die off. Sometimes it dies for both characters. There are so many series where post ship, everyone just thinks it sucks. Friends, The Office, X-Files. You can however argue that those shows were showing their age and it was a hail mary to keep things going.

Maybe it depends on the fandom but I've noticed the opposite. Once a gay ship becomes canon they move on to the next two straight characters and scream at the creators to make them gay as well. Big example is like above with South Park where after Tweek and Craig became canon they moved on to Kenny and Butters, or Stan and Kyle and scream at the creators to make those canon as well. In fact, I've seen fans that were more upset that Kenny and Stan's Fractured But Whole character's sheets stated they were straight and "cis" instead of focusing on characters that didn't have this. They were desperately trying to argue with people about how certain scenes (in their eyes) confirmed it. Like Stan telling Kyle "I love you", forgetting that Stan was drunk in that scene. Imo none of these people want good story telling even when it comes to gay shipping. Hell, I'd argue that they don't even enjoy shipping same sex characters. They do this because they think if they scream the loudest to make everyone gay in a show that it gives them power to bully any fandom to give them what they what.

 

[Chandelier]

Not to plug my own shit but shippers really have a lot of nerve to ask why they're so hated when they unironically call any male character who shows affection towards another a 'faggot'. This is all over Arcane Twitter and it floors me that they have the gall to snipe about 'oh well brotherly relationships are already portrayed in media!' Like fuck they are. They don't even care about the characters, they just take one look and sexualize them because they are literally too autistic to interpret it as anything else. Here is my post in the Arcane thread showcasing it; by no means is it a smidgen of what they actually say.

When shippers get defensive when others say they sexualize everything, one only look at their social media and conclude there's nothing to their minds aside from who fucks who. Seeing them call a character who looks a certain way (in this case, Viktor) a 'fag' and that he's only there to get his ass filled up by Jayce enrages me. And these are progshits saying this, not 'homophobes'.

I do not blame Christian Linke one bit for pissing them off. They are insufferable, intolerable, and toxic as fuck. They're literally zoomers stuck in a child-like mentality because I don't even see YouTubers react this way. And it isn't 'shitposting' or 'being funny' either. I'm sure they wouldn't like it one bit if I said they were nothing more than white, fat autistic women who are incapable of touching grass.

Edit: here is what I am talking about. These cunts will say shit like this and wonder why they are hated.

 

[Pokemon Conquistador]

literally 99% of new media for young-ish people has insane levels of shipping, I think it's being hypersexed that causes it

Or alternatively, the fact that no one gets any sex in real life. When you deny people the chance to hook up and marry in real life because the average house costs as much as a crystal palace on the moon, then you need to provide an alternative. Also, most autistic nerds these days look like they were sculpted from Chris Chan's belly fat. No one wants to put themselves out there for a relationship because they know they'll only nab the disgusting opposite sex version of themselves. What they can do is live vicariously through an established, attractive couple.

Female nerds (who make up most of the shippers) also have a fear of actual sex, so will pursue/write idealized depictions of gay sex. They want pure romance without the threat of domestic drudgery, obligations and responsibilities, or being held up to standards of any kind.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Reviving the thread because it seems Kingdom Come Deliverance is next on the chopping block for taking a well done male relationship and turning it into sodomy.