Shipping a Couple Isn’t About Products but About Attraction

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Zach, and I’m from Tallahassee, Florida.

Essentially, I’m in Gen Z, and I spend a lot of time online.

And often something that comes up, essentially, when people talk about relationships online, or celebrities or characters that they love in relationships, they’ll often associate those relationships with what they call ship names, a name that’s, as you say, representative of their relationship, right?

So you can think of Brangelina for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, or maybe Everlark for Katniss Everdeen and Peter Malark from the Hunger Games series.

So I’m essentially wondering, I’ve seen a lot online. It’s been present for pretty much the entire time I’ve been online.

And I’m wondering, is this a new thing, like a Gen Z thing? Is it just from the online space? Or has this thing of ship names, of naming a couple, been around for longer and doesn’t have any historical significance?

Wow, that’s a big one.

And ship names, we should talk about ship as well. That’s part of the jargon of the pastime, isn’t it?

Yeah.

So Gen Z, that puts you as being born in what decade?

The 2000s.

2000s.

2002.

2002.

Okay, great.

And so, yeah, and then the universes, the fiction universes that you talked about also help us kind of picture where you’re at.

But a lot of this is older than that.

There are two fandoms I think that we really need to talk about when we talk about this.

One of them is the X-Files, and the other one is Star Trek, because these two were really fundamental in kind of getting this started.

Star Trek in particular, even before the rise of what we think of as the kind of modern, fully public internet, people were already pairing up characters in Star Trek and fanzines on paper.

They were pairing up Spock and Kirk, and they were doing things like putting them, just abbreviating the relationship as K slash S, which is where we get this slash fiction term from.

And slash fic, as you know, usually means fiction, fan fiction for gay characters that in the original, you know, the original universe, they weren’t gay.

But the fans say, well, what if these two characters got together? What would that be like? What kind of relationship would they have? Let’s write some imaginary fiction and picture what could happen if they got together.

So that’s one of the ways that two names were combined, K slash S, on paper.

And so this would be at least as early in the 90s and maybe as early as the 60s.

I don’t have the details on that.

But I know that it was happening very early on.

But this whole idea of calling it shipping and talking about shippers and talking about ships really started with the X-Files.

And this is all abbreviating relationship and relation shipper and relation shipping.

When the X-Files started in 1993, there were these two characters, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, and they were both very attractive people.

And the show was mysterious and thrilling and ambiguous.

And the internet and its chat forums were exploding in popularity.

And everybody, some people, really wanted those characters to get together.

You know, they wanted these two sexy hot people to get together.

Of course they did.

So that is really where those terms shipping and shipper and stuff came out of it.

And you can actually find examples of these as early as like the mid-90s, 95, 96, 97, around there.

Yeah.

And that’s really interesting.

I don’t know what I was thinking if maybe you would go past, you know, beyond the Internet’s history.

But it’s really interesting to see that it was even, you know, the ship names of the K slash S was present on paper.

I had not heard anything about that before.

Yeah, if you Google Kirk Spock slash fic, you will come up with some really great articles on the origin of this and very well researched because people who are into that sort of thing also are just meticulous in like uncovering the history of their passion.

And if you remember, the original Star Trek wasn’t that many episodes, and people always kind of wanted more, so they went ahead and wrote them.

They went ahead and wrote their fan fiction and wrote more episodes because they just couldn’t stand that there wasn’t more of it.

And you’ve got to kind of love that, that humans, when they love a thing, they just make more of it.

And now that ship has sailed.

Well, I’m really glad you asked that question, Zach.

We appreciate your calling.

Yeah, take care, Zach.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I think the last time we talked about something related to this, we got so many emails from devoted fan fiction and slash fiction fans, and I love hearing from them.

By all means, send us email to word at waywordradio.org and tell us whatever you know that we left out.

We’d love to hear from you.