Some Thoughts On Shipping
Today, I had a revelation while watching The Pirates! In an Adventure With Scientists!, a claymation film that does what it says on the tin. The two main pirates, The Pirate Captain and The Pirate With A Scarf (really) are voiced by Hugh Grant and Martin Freeman respectively, with the latter being the best friend and 2iC of the former. As this is a kids’ film with a fairly standard emotional arc, the primary message is Learning To Be Yourself: basically, the Captain betrays his friends while trying to live up to a stupid ideal, Scarf Pirate gets upset, and then they reconcile at the finale when Captain realises what a fool he’s been, and everything gets put right. That’s an oversimplification, but for the purposes of my revelation, it’s what matters: the two men are friends, Scarf Pirate repeatedly tries to reassure the insecure Captain that it’s who he is that’s *really* important, the Captain doesn’t believe him, turmoil ensues, they part ways, and then they’re reunited. That’s their entire relationship.
Now, while I like Martin Freeman as an actor, I’m not in the least attracted to him, which seemingly puts me in a minority on tumblr - or at least, in a minority as far as the blogs I follow are concerned. And this is relevant, because without almost daily exposure to sexy screenshots and fansquee posts about Freeman via my dash, I might never have had the following train of thought, which went vaguely like this:
Brain: Wow, they’ve really made Freeman’s pirate character look like him. I mean seriously, it’s like a claymation John Watson, to the point where I’m actually feeling astonishment that I’ve never seen any pictures of him from this film on tumblr. I mean, the internet ships him in everything else, why not this?
(pause)
Brain: I am suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to ship Pirate Captain and Scarf Pirate.
Me: Wait a minute. Why? Why would you think that? Not that we object to shipping, here - I just want a better justification than the presence of Martin Freeman.
Brain: Well, think about it. If Scarf Pirate were female and had exactly the same lines, their relationship would read as a romance. So why not?
And that thought brought me up short, because all of a sudden, I realised how widely applicable a comment that was on movie characterisation - or, more specifically, on how lazily ingrained The Hero Always Gets The Girl trope has become in terms of narrative structure and dialogue. By way of demonstration: think of just about any action/adventure film where the male lead has a female love interest. Because their romance is an expected byproduct of the story rather than its primary focus, the chances are that their attraction will be inferred visually instead of through dialogue - that is, by the tacit cultural assumption that Two Pretty People Of Opposite Genders Must Necessarily Have Makeouts, strategic use of soulful glances and meaningful touch, and subtextual sexuality. Or, put it another way: what probably won’t happen is that either party will actually voice their attraction aloud, openly ask the other person out, or otherwise discuss their feelings, unless it’s at the very end of the film and they’ve already slept together/kissed. The only real exception is if the guy has a longstanding crush on the girl, in which case we’ll get to hear him talk about his feelings of love, and then watch her reciprocate without commentary - because in Hollywood movies, whoever the hero likes, the hero ultimately gets, which makes the heroine’s vocalised feelings prior to that point redundant.
Which means that, over and over again, audiences are trained to infer the presence of romance from unromantic dialogue; because if The Hero Always Gets The Girl, then the hero’s conversations with the girl must always be coded for getting the girl, even when the exact same lines from a different character - or, more specifically, from an unattractive/unavailable/unsuitable character - would read instead as comradely, friendly, neutral, sarcastic or hostile. Thus, we learn early and often that outside of narratives which are actively described as romances, cinematic romance is almost always a matter of subtext. The paucity of female characters in action films doesn’t help this any: the same trick wouldn’t work with multiple eligible ladies present, because then there’d be a need to differentiate the hero’s relationships with them, and that in turn would mean devoting precious dialogue to feelings and non-stock characterisation. But when there’s only one woman present, the very fact of her gender and physical attractiveness is enough to lend romantic weight to her exchanges with the hero, thus freeing the dialogue itself of the burden of being romantic.
And the thing is, as the vast majority of these stories are created in the male gaze, as male fantasies for a male audience, it’s probably fair to say that many male viewers never stop to question why, on the basis of the evidence as presented in the narrative, that particular woman would fall for that particular man, because to a certain extent, that would be like questioning gravity. What, you want an in-depth explanation for why Honey Rider sleeps with James Bond? Because he’s James Fucking Bond, that’s why. It’s his story; therefore, he gets the girl. But for those of us who grew up identifying with the women in such stories, that was frequently a shitty explanation - especially, to keep with the 007 analogy, back in the days of Connery and Moore, whose Bonds tended to be written as smug, misogynistic, paternalistic, racist shits you’d sooner punch in the mouth than take to bed. Which meant that, oftentimes, you’d end up reading romance into unromantic dialogue almost as a defense mechanism against the narrative’s ingrained sexism, even in instances where the writers clearly didn’t care if you bothered or not; because without the romance, you were nakedly just watching woman after woman fall into the hero’s bed for no better reason than that he was the hero, and if that were so, then what did it say about the heroine’s characterisation and agency? Only that they didn’t matter; or that, if they did, they still mattered less than her willingness to kiss or be kissed by the leading man, and that was depressing as hell.
So how, then, does all this tie in to shipping?
Here’s my tentative theory: that because female audiences have been more or less trained to interpret any meaningful, funny and/or emotional encounters between heroes and heroines as implicitly romantic in order to account for relationships that otherwise run the gamut from perfunctory to nonsensical, it’s extremely easy to start viewing all such encounters between all types of character as being similarly romantic - because if we’re used to viewing romance as an implicit function rather than an overt characteristic, then even when The Hero Always Gets The Girl isn’t in play, it’s still force of habit to look for the type of interactions that would affirm it if it was and use them to infer the presence of other, subtextual romances.
Thus: because Pirate Captain and Scarf Pirate shared a few emotional moments which, had they taken place between a hero and a heroine, would’ve been implicitly coded for romance, my brain picked up on the pattern, identified it as an instance of unromance = romance, and told me to ship it.
So, yeah. Obviously - obviously - there’s way more to shipping than this. Not for a second am I claiming to have cracked the code or discovered the be-all, end-all of the logic behind noncanonical romance, which is glorious in its variety, scope and passion. But still, it strikes me as being relevant that lots of us have grown up watching shows and reading books where you only knew the romance was happening precisely because it was never described as romance, but nonetheless had to be because it involved the main character and whoever was clearly identified as their love interest. Once you expect or want a particular romance to happen, unless you’re careful, your brain skips over the logic gaps in your chosen narrative the same way it flls th blnks n n ncmplt sntnc - automatically, with little or no recourse to conscious thought. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, per se: it’s just worth watching out for.
But seriously, though: I cannot be the only one who thinks Scarf Pirate looks like an oceangoing John Watson.

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kyanve reblogged this from ryxl-was-here and added: ^^^^ “If there’s more than one female character and the writers are putting any effort in, they’ll be differentiating a...
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….this explains so much. I kind of wonder if rape culture could be mitigated in younger generations by exposing children...
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epicyclical reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
Wow, this is a really great insight about slash and about how het romance is portrayed in media. Recommended read!
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kyurism reblogged this from spacejuliet and added: Very interesting indeed.
spacejuliet reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
Now I want to watch that pirate movie….but seriously, this stuff about shipping. It’s really interesting.
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I think this idea also contributes quite a bit to rape culture and the multitude of consent issues we see in our...
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aryas-zehral reblogged this from fozmeadows and added:
Interesting musings on why we ship. :)
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