opinions incoming:

The thing is, right, shipping is a default lens lots of fandom looks at everything through. Want to explore any form of intimacy or emotional connection between characters? Shipping.

It's a genre convention.

Because fanfic and fandom culture is about *response*, and it's responding so often to media where the genre conventions are about implication, and where (for queer relationships especially), you don't habitually get things made explicit and it's all about coding and subtext.

A lot of fanfic has always been about making subtext text, picking up on anything that pings as UST, pulling it out into the foreground and resolving it explicitly, looking through the lens of looking for hints of romantic/sexual relationships subsumed into platonic ones

That's a *huge* part of what fanfic is and does. And it does, I think, mean there's a collective tendency by and large to read any interesting unresolved tension between characters as UST, and to portray any form of intimacy as romantic/sexual - and that's *a genre convention*.

It's a mirror of the conventions of genres and forms which won't ever say "and they bang".

Fanfic counterbalances by going "and they bang!" at EVERY OPPORTUNITY.

Instead of saying "no homo" all the time, you say "yes homo" ALL THE TIME.

Portraying any and all connection and intimacy as romantic/sexual is a genre convention. Looking at fraught relationships/rivalries/nemeses and going 'hatesex!' is a genre convention.

It's a mode for talking about emotionally significant character interactions and dynamics.

which is I think a lot of what's going on in the background when there's drama about shipping unhealthy and problematic relationships. There are people operating in a paradigm where if you're interested in two characters and the dynamic between them...

...whatever that dynamic is, whether it's romantic or platonic, positive or negative, if there's an emotional connection of whatever form interests you, the automatic way to explore it, the well-trodden path with tropes and community around it, is 'what if they kissed??'

and then there are people operating in a paradigm where romantic/sexual relationships in shipping map more closely to what can/should/would be romantic/sexual relationships in real life or in a genre that wasn't running on shipping.

and those are not compatible paradigms.

n.b. that smut and shipping is not the ONLY way of filtering "I want to explore this emotional connection" through a specific tropey lens, but it's obviously one that works for a lot of people, and it's one that a lot of fandom culture and language and structure is built around

(I read a lot of smut because I can't get the h/c fix but there is smut instead, or the h/c fix comes with 'and then they kissed' appended, and a lot of shipfic because the closest approximation to the dynamic I want is sitting in the ao3 '/' tag not the '&' tag, ngl)

I might wish the subset of fandom where the preferred mode of engagement with an inter-character dynamic is "what if character A got HORRIBLY INJURED and character B had to deal with that" instead of "what if character A and character B kissed/fucked" were larger but

regardless, "make it sexy" is a time-honoured tradition round these parts, and it's not even necessarily about whether you get off on it* as much as the frame that This Relationship Is Narratively Interesting sits in by default.

(*though for some people it is and tbh getting off on it is ALSO not the same thing as 'thinking it's good or realistic or should be emulated irl', for the record)