 Shipping. The thing most of us hate and a small faction of us love for some ungodly reason. In fandoms, the term ship is short for relationship, and refers to two or more characters that fans want to see linked up and start dating. Sometimes ships are canon, or made canon at some point in the series, other times they only exist in fan fiction. The important part is that fans on the internet need to dox each other and send death threats if they disagree with which ship is the best. Yes, for some reason, real life humans like to spend far too much time and energy arguing over how made up humans romantic lives should go. I can't decide if this is a sign that we have too much free time and not enough problems due to our first world material abundance, or if hell is real and I'm living in it. There are a million reasons why a fan may choose a specific ship. They may feel that the characters would make a good match, or they might just think that both of them are hot. In fact, it's pretty much always that second one. That's the primary reason. It's the only reason, and it's always been the only reason. Most ships are also painfully heterosexual, or they're gay ships of painfully heterosexual characters. I don't know what that means, it's just worth mentioning. I'm not even sure what it means to be painfully heterosexual, just that that's what the kids call me. But before that, a word from this video's sponsor. Did you know that the human eye is attracted to movement? It originated as an evolutionary trait, which allows us to notice both predators and prey. It also forces our brain to pause and assess the relevance of this movement. Essentially, it resets us, so we can enter either fight or flight mode. Behind me is the scene of Madara Uchiha fighting an army of ninja from the hit anime series Naruto. There's a lot of movement, but none of it particularly attracts your attention. When there's too much of something, it becomes meaningless. 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Try out Campfire today on iOS and Android to start writing better stories faster. Oftentimes, specific ships will be given names that are a mashup of the two characters. Stuff like Naruhina for Naruto and Hinata, Dramini for Draco and Hermione, or Hawkson for Hawkeye and Agent Coulson. Sometimes this doesn't work out, though, such as in The Hunger Games. Katniss and Peta can't have their names combined because it would either be Cat-P or Penis, neither of which works well. That's when you just go by Team Blank, e.g. Team Edward and Team Jacob. Some ships are reasonable. By that I mean they're between characters who have shown some interest in one another or at least have some romantic chemistry based on their time together. Twilight and many other YA franchises lean into shipping hard for marketing purposes, and they tend to be based around these reasonable ships. It was never really in doubt that Bella would end the series by writing that cold, flaccid vampire dick, but she had some real chemistry with Jacob. It was reasonable for fans to hope for a different resolution to the story. Whatever wound up being canon, you could reasonably call either pairing your OTP. OTP is short for one true pairing, and in shipping circles it refers to whatever your favorite romantic pairing is. There aren't any exact criteria for when something can be called an OTP since it is ultimately a matter of personal preference. However, it is usually reserved for pairings that are important to the story. Most ships, OTP or not, are between characters that have significant screen time together or at least some notable moments in a short amount of time together. Little moments like blushing when the other person is nearby or mentioning that they're cute will fuel a fandom for literal years. While the drama surrounding normal ships can get unbearably toxic, they are just that. Normal, and the bulk of ships fall into this category. Then there are a bunch more between characters that have never met, have barely interacted, or have not in any way insinuated that they have any romantic feelings towards one another. Some ships are just stupid, and the proponents don't seem to realize that they're stupid. Zuko and Katara hated each other for most of the last airbender, then grew to tolerate one another by the end. Therefore, Zutara shippers are upset that they didn't get married and have 18 babies. Because in all fan shipping-related art, they have to have children. I assume because no one is truly whole until they squirt out a small clone of themselves. It's also why every single character must be paired up in some way, so they can all have kids around the same age. Then those kids can all pair up, and their kids can pair up, until the entire cast is more inbred than an Alabama barbecue. Wait, this is just the plot of Boruto. This need to pair everyone up can result in some odd shipping choices, though. Zutara is dumb because the characters involved hate each other. Then there are ships like Toph and Tai Lee, two characters who never spoke or expressed homosexual desires, or Aang and Roku, who weren't even alive at the same time. There are even Pokemon fans that ship Ash and Pikachu together because God is dead and we have killed him. And that's not even counting Crack Ships, which are purposely stupid and weird for the sake of comedy. Most of the time, at least. I hope. Think of stuff like Snape and Dobby from Harry Potter, or Jamie Lannister and Daenerys from Game of Thrones. They're self-evidently ludicrous and absurd. The power of fanships can be so great that even corporations and creators are sometimes forced to bow to their will. An example of this comes from The Vampire Diaries, the books, not the CW show. The main romantic entanglement of that series is between Elena, the main character, and her two love interests. There's Stefan, the brooding vampire bad boy who used to be a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War, and Damon, the brooding vampire bad boy who used to be a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War. The author of the books, L.J. Smith, intended for Elena and Stefan to be the canon pairing by the end, but her publisher, and a large chunk of the fanbase, wanted Elena to be the endgame. Long story short, Smith was fired and replaced with a ghost writer who likes Damon more, and that's the direction the books and the show both went in. I can't comment on whether this was the better choice because I've never read the books and barely watched the show. Most of my exposure to this drama came secondhand because my sister was obsessed with this franchise and she was adamantly team Elena, to the point where she would try to convince me and others who were not in the fandom that it was the best ship. Her reasoning seemed to boil down to Damon being hotter and that he and Elena sometimes glanced at one another. In preparation for this video, I read through a bunch of old forum arguments from 10 years ago, back when we still had forums, where teenagers called each other slurs for not agreeing that this week's episode cements Elena's true feelings. They seem to have done that every week while the show was airing, and at least once a month between seasons. The internet is amazing. And that brings me to the more fascinating part of shipping. Shipping wars. You see, sometimes people who are both fans of the same franchise are fans of mutually exclusive ships, e.g. Selena and Elena shippers for the Vampire Diaries. They can't both be satisfied, therefore they both hope for their preferred outcome, therefore they hate each other. Yes, if someone disagrees with your opinion on the lives of fictional characters, then they are ontologically evil and must be wiped from the planet by any means necessary. I'm not joking. The people that take this seriously start websites spanning flame wars, send death threats, dox each other, all totally normal healthy things that reasonable people do. The first time I ever realized that the internet is a terrible place was when I mentioned on a forum that I thought Naruto and Sakura would have been a terrible couple because she spent the entire series chasing that Sasuke dick while he gave up on her before the time skip. This resulted in several days of manga nerds telling me to unalive myself. I got the last laugh though. Not only does the manga end with Sakura catching that Sasuke dick, not only does Naruto move on with someone who treated him better, but Sakura is stuck at home raising her daughter while Sasuke goes off to be emo in the wilderness. When the manga ended, we got a tsunami of butthurt the likes of which have barely been seen before or since. Those whose ships were not made canon in the epilogue or sequel threw a fit. Primarily the narusaku fans who demanded the ending be rewritten and everyone else making fun of them. And we were happy to make fun of them because their entitlement made them twats. Some of the most insane shipping wars of the internet age were the harry potter shipping wars. Good lord I could spend hours going over that. I'm not going to but you know I could. This started basically as soon as the first book became popular and ramped up as the internet and franchise got bigger. They grew up alongside each other in a way. After the penultimate book The Half-Blood Prince came out the shipping wars entered a new larger phase that left us all stupider. This was a time when the characters in the series were getting older and showing more romantic interest in each other and by the end of the book it was clear Harry was super into Ginny, his best friend's younger sister, and that Ron and Hermione were super into each other. Many in the fandom found this a reason to celebrate while many others dove straight into a combination of anger and denial and they never seemed to move on to the other stages of grief. Many Harry-Hermione shippers decided that if JK Rowling truly didn't want to end the series with the two of them together she wouldn't have spent six books showing off that they were friends. I don't understand the reasoning here either. Maybe JK Rowling just isn't that good at writing romance. I know that seems like a strange explanation but it's the only one that makes sense. During this time one of the biggest Harry-Hermione shippers penned an essay claiming that Ron Hermione shippers were anti-feminist because Molly Weasley is a stay-at-home mother. You try connecting those dots, I'm not sure how that makes sense either. Another time an irate fan claimed that buying Harry Potter books was the same as donating your money to fund forced abortions in China. That one kind of makes sense because no actually it doesn't. If I wanted to fund forced abortions in China I'd buy basically anything available at Walmart. A fan by the name of McGonagall, very creative name, wrote an entire essay where they professed a belief that God would make sure that Harry and Hermione would end up together at the end. I have so many thoughts about this. If you believe in an omnipotent being that created the whole universe why do you think he cares about children's literature? Do you think Rowling was sitting there in her writing room cackling evilly at the knowledge that Harry would never get to be with his one true love when God appeared to her like the ghost of Christmas future to let her know the error of her ways? Are you so arrogant to believe that the supreme creator of humanity would give us free will and then intercede in our actions to stop Harry and Ginny from making sweet love but not to stop the holocaust? McGonagall's essay was roundly mocked, even by the other people who shared her preferences. The reasons why are hopefully obvious by now. The fact that a real human being took this so seriously is completely absurd. It's like watching your dog try to grab a skittle that's been stuck under your fridge for a year, only your dog can vote and hasn't been sterilized. Cassandra Clare, author of The Mortal Instruments, allegedly hated the Ron Hermione ship being canon so much that she wrote a Ron Ginny incest fic called The Mortal Instruments. Jesus Christ, what am I supposed to do with that? And that's not even counting the entire trilogy of Draco fanfics she wrote that were about a Draco, Harry and Hermione love triangle. This trilogy also got her banned from fanfiction.net for plagiarism. That's a true fact, look it up. I can only imagine how bad this stuff would be if it happened in the modern day and we had to throw all of JK Rowling's turfiness into the mix. I don't even want to think about how obnoxious that would be yet. I know I've been poking fun at teenagers for most of this but some of this fighting was done by people in their 20s and 30s. What the fuck? Shouldn't you have a job and children and shit by that age? Then again I'm in my 20s and I'm here observing and laughing at all of it so maybe I'm not in a position to judge. As much fun as the Harry Potter shipping wars are there's a better example of this phenomenon and just how fucking stupid it gets. There's one ship in particular that I'm willing to bet the majority of my audience has never heard of or at least haven't thought about in years and I bring it up because it's an absolutely ridiculous one yet it's not a crack ship. It's one that proponents meant to be a serious relationship. It's the worst ship of all time and believe me that's saying something. I'm of course referring to Ulki Hime, the shipping of Ulkiora and Orihime from the manga series Bleach. Bleach is a divisive series for a lot of reasons. The art and action are both fantastic many of the characters are fun and interesting too however the story lines are clumsy and repetitive. I personally like it in spite of the flaws and maybe I'll do a video on that one day but we're here to talk about the romantic entanglements of fictional characters in a series all about Japanese ghosts saving the world from magical Germans and demonic Latinos. From here on there will be spoilers for the whole manga, be aware. During the second major arc of the series one of the main characters, a teenage girl named Orihime, is kidnapped by the demonic Latinos one of whom is named Ulkiora and taken to another dimension so her friends have to go and rescue her. They go through a whole gauntlet of bad guys to reach their friend and we get some cutaways to Orihime being held prisoner. Some of Ulkiora's underlings beat her up because they're jealous of the attention she's getting from men because if you're going to fail the Bechdel test you may as well fail harder than everybody else. She has some talks with Ulkiora about feelings and how he's dark and empty inside. He doesn't understand human emotions if you couldn't tell from his fucking character design. Then finally he has a fight with her friends who came to rescue her. He brutally murders one of them in front of her while taunting her about it, then tries to kill another friend. Then she watches them fight some more and Ulkiora crumbles away into dust but he reaches towards her when he dies so I guess it means they had a connection or something. Shonen manga sounds stupider the more you describe it. Let's review. Ulkiora threatens to kill Orihime's friends, kidnaps her, tells her about how much he doesn't care about her well-being, allows her to be abused by his underlings, then nearly kills two of her friends in front of her in extremely brutal ways. This all takes place over the course of a couple days. She gives no indication that she has any feelings towards him, romantic or friendly. When he dies she seems to maybe feel sorry for him since he was super emo and that's about it. From this the most annoying faction of the Bleach fandom decided the two of them were in love and we got ass loads of fanfiction and arguments about it. Forums exploded with fans proclaiming that Taito Kubo had no idea what he was doing because he set up this obvious relationship and then ended it before it had the chance to bloom. These people are stupid. I'm all for different interpretations of media but this is reaching farther than Monkey D. Luffy. Ha! See, I know my animus. Like many dejected fans, Ulkihime fans found solace in fanfiction. The problem wasn't that they were about a stupid ship. The problem was that they were about a ship between one character with half a personality and one with negative personality. No hate for Ulkihime. She's very funny and her crush on Ichigo is endearing. She just never gets a chance to shine or much character development. All the hate for Ulkihara though. Beyond his cool character design there's nothing about him that stands out as neat, interesting or deep. These fanfics included lovely setups such as high school AUs where Ulkihara was a depressed bad boy, alternate timelines where he decided not to be evil anymore because he learned what love is. Even if you were Ichigo and Ulkihara switch places in the story so the emo sad boy is the protagonist and the hotheaded free spirit is a villain. Makes perfect sense. These are all awful even by the standards of shonen manga fanfiction and if you haven't been part of that community then who boy you don't even know how low humans can sink. The worst examples are the ones where Ulkihime commits suicide because she's sad that the man who kidnapped her is dead. Fuck the people who wrote these. Sincerely. In the endless stream of half-hearted, poorly thought out wish fulfillment known as the Internet, Ulkihime fanfiction stands out as some of the worst I've ever come across. It's just such a beautiful combination of misunderstanding the characters and actively hating what the original writer created that I'm in awe. Seriously it's not uncommon for weird ships to emerge from the ether of human consciousness. What set this one apart is that none of the fans seems deterred by the fact that Ulkihara was fucking dead. Like for real dead. There was no reviving him. With something like Harry Hermione you could argue that it would be canon later on. That wasn't happening with the emo Mexican bat boy. But wait there's more. I didn't even mention that Orihime has been in love with someone else the entire time. Literally since her introduction in the first few chapters she's had a massive crush on Ichigo, the protagonist. While at first you could write this off as a schoolgirl's infatuation we later see it's intense enough that she's willing to break into his house and molest him in his sleep. Wait what? Ulkihime shippers tended to pretend this wasn't a thing because it poked a big hole in their fantasy. I assume this ship emerged from the bottomless well of love that teenage girls have for the sad boy aesthetic rather than any sort of genuine thoughts that the two of them were good together. Wait I think that describes 90% of all ships. This is also why some people shipped Ichigo with the old man who lives inside his soul and also turns out to be the final villain of the series. Kind of. Some people also shipped him with his homeless ghost friend that lived in his closet for a while. That's not a metaphor. Maybe Bleach is stupider than I wanted to admit. Some people were so upset by the way these ships turned out at the end of the series that they burned their manga volumes in protest. That's only acceptable if those are the Viz translations because those were shit that kept censoring the violence. Maybe they were just upset because Orihime looks a bit like the young version of Ichigo's mother. A Bleach fan forum called DeathBerry even closed itself off to new registrations after the finale due to the massive amount of newcomers who flooded the site with gloating and mockery. Another forum called Bleach Asylum even deleted the entire thread shipping Ichigo with his homeless ghost friend because the moderators were so butt hurt. Does any of this come up in Burn the Witch? No, I'm really asking. I haven't read it yet. I could spend twice as long talking about the Bleach shipping drama as the Harry Potter shipping drama and that was a much smaller fandom, which should give you an idea of how bad this shit got. Why have I spent so much of this video's runtime focusing on the drama associated with Ulkihime? Partially because it's a smaller shipping war that people rarely talk about anymore. Partially because I find it funny. And partially because it seems to speak to a deeper truth in this whole phenomenon. Shipping culture won't allow a single character to go unpaired, even if they have to be paired with someone that doesn't match their sexuality or is otherwise a bad match. They can't be alone or they will be sad. It's as predictable as the sun rising in the east each day. There's this idea that characters are somehow incomplete if they don't have a romantic partner and possibly children. They can't just exist as a hero with dreams and a complex inner world. There is next to zero indication that Ichigo or Ulkihora or, hell, the vast majority of the cast of Bleach has any interest in pursuing romantic relationships, yet the shippers had to spend time acting as if they did. To many people, we're simply not complete otherwise. All the adventures and world saving and comedic hijinks were just the prelude to the real part of life, that is, home life. This is the way a lot of people view the real world. You spend your youth making friends and having fun and traveling, then you get married, pop out several children, and never do anything fun or interesting again. This mindset is so deeply ingrained in people that they don't even realize that they've never thought about it. So many of us simply follow the script we're given, never even realizing that it's there or that we have other options. And some members of every fandom are so caught up in this that they have to drag it into the fandom with them. We can't even escape to this aspect of our culture in the realm of fiction. Most of them probably don't even realize that's what they're doing. This is just what they've been conditioned to think, that there's only one path to life. That's depressing. Shipping Wars might be the dumbest part of online fan culture to ever come into existence. Actually, I shouldn't specify online fan culture because Star Trek fans have been arguing about this since before the internet. Maybe other fandoms were too. I refuse to rot my brain any further by checking. This is why more writers should just embrace polyamorous or harem relationships. If everyone jumps into a giant fuckpile by the end of the story, everybody will be happy. Except religious conservatives, but fuck them. Huge thank to everyone watched this far. Thank to $10 and above patron people names Appo Savilainen, Olivia Rayan, Brother Santotis, Buffy Valentine, Carolina Clay, Dan Anseliovich, Dark King, Dio, Echo, Eevee, Flax, Great Griebo, Carcat Kitsune, El Lindberg, Liza Rudikova, Lord Tiebreaker, Matthew Bodro, Microphone, Peep the Toad, Return of Cardamom, Robi Reviews, Sad Martigan, Celia the Vixen, Tesla Shark, Vevictus, and Wesley, and all the other names. Thank to people for give patron money if you want name on list or other patron benefit. Consider, donate. If not, share, like, video, comment, subscribe. Thank. Goodbye.