News Ticker

Menu

What floats your boat?


Row row row your boat~
Gently down the stream~
And we'll see if it sinks or floats~~
Among the fanfics and doujins~

Have you guessed it yet? Yup, I'm talking about ships! Not the boat, or the cruise...but shipping two characters in an anime/manga fandom romantically together. It truly is such a wonderful thing to be able to pair characters up outside of canon pairings in the series...there's just so much to fantasize about~!

Warning: the rest of this article contains mentions of yaoi pairings~

Let's see... I first came across the term ships, I was in the Yugioh and Prince of Tennis fandom. And boy, there were a lot of ships. There are dedicated lists naming every ship paring which run into the hundreds (most of which were guy x guy pairings...cause well...the two animes hardly had any female characters). Which wasn't really surprising considering the number of characters in both series. Everyone, and I mean everyone, from the main characters to even the smallest guy in the show has a ship. It was pretty amazing if you ask me.



A little further into ships and we can go on to ship names. And these, matter a lot to the general fandom. Ship names are commonly a combination of two characters names, like in the Free! fandom shipping Makoto and Haruka would make the ship name be MakoHaru, but that's not the important part. The thing about these ship names is the combination in which the ship names are written as I learned. It is important to define who is the 'top/dominant/leader/seme' in the relationship by putting the character's name first, followed by the 'bottom/submissive/follower/uke' in the pairing name. So, shipping MakoHaru, was different from shipping HaruMako even if it's the same characters involved. 

Delving further into this ship naming business, I found that more established fandoms have specific names for specific ships, like Pillar pair (Tezuka x Ryoma) in Prince of tennis. 

By this point, I thought I was ready to go read and conquer, fanfics and doujins.

Until...


I realised that that was something called OTPs and OT3s...or OT(n)...where n = number of persons in the ship (or boat...or even cruise...by the time you end up with n = 7...T T). Just what is this OTP thing? Well, OTP stands for 'one true pairing' a.k.a. the two characters in the anime that you ship together forever and you'll stand by their awesome relationship till...um...forever. So, OT3 or OT(n) would just mean instead of two characters you ship together, it could go up to three or four...or however many characters you wanted it to be. Ah yes... the fandom will never be satisfied by just having two characters...the more the merrier I guess...~


Yeah...this pic is pretty squeal worthy...
Then I thought, how are ships created? I guess it's normally when two characters in the anime show certain signs of affection (or rivalry) toward each other and the fandom just reads into it as romantic interest...honestly, that's the only reason why sports anime in particular end up having a multitude of pairings. In some cases though, like Kuroshitsuji and Free! (I'm looking at you...) the situations the characters get themselves into seem so intentional that it's like the author wants people to ship them together outside the context of the anime, and so I think the fandom is pretty quick on the uptake when it comes to situations like that. And in the last case, there are of course the obvious canon pairings.

Shipping characters together is also a great way to break into otaku communities like fanfiction writing or in role playing forums. As what better way to fangirl (or fanboy), than to squeal with other like minded people online over not just one character but a pair of them and talk about how the two would get along with each other in the series or scenario~

Bottom line, I think shipping is a awesome way to to test how far the characters can be romantically together in a fixed setting~:D

Who do you ship today?

I ship Sebby and his cat~xD Don't judge~
Written by Neko

Share This:

Post Tags:

No Comment to " What floats your boat? "