What started as a simple wedding invitation sent me down a rabbit hole of fan fiction, Animal Crossing, and anime.
A few weeks ago, I got a message from a friend of mine telling me that they were engaged and were getting married in a small wedding over the weekend. They and their partner agreed that they would like me to be the officiant. Honored, I quickly said yes and asked them for more details. The details, of course, were that this wedding wasn’t just a normal wedding. No, this was a wedding taking place on an island in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. And they were not getting married themselves, but instead planned to roleplay the marriage of Levi Ackerman and Erwin Smith, two characters from the anime series Attack on Titan. My friend really wanted Levi and Erwin to enter into a romantic relationship, a yearning I soon found out is so common in fandoms that it has its own term: “shipping”, or having a “ship.”
Undeterred, I settled into the idea that what I was bearing witness to was not just the holy union of two fictional characters, but also two real-life people making their ship official (well, official in the eyes of Animal Crossing boss Tom Nook, at least). But I really wanted to know: Why does shipping mean so much to certain people that they’ll plan an elaborate virtual wedding to live out their dreams? Now that the vows have been uttered and my friend’s marriage is “official”, I know all about the joys (and sorrows) of shipping. Ships Ahoy! If you’ve ever considered yourself part of a fandom at any point in your life, chances are you may have had an encounter with a ship. To some people, this is serious stuff. In this case, a ship is not a maritime vessel, but rather a fandom practice, one that involves making up relationships between fictional characters from shows, movies, or any other work of fiction. And in some cases, those shipped might even be real-life public figures. Ships range from canon relationships (ones that appear in the work) to alternate universe scenarios that would be highly unlikely to ever occur in the normal storyline. And it’s by no means a new phenomenon, either. Perhaps the first modern example dates back to the 1990’s and can be traced to The X-Files message boards, thought to be the first internet fanbase by many. It’s here where many early internet users debated the physical and metaphysical relationship between the show’s protagonists, Mulder and Scully. But there’s evidence that shipping dates back even further back. In 1913, Sybil Brinton, a wealthy Englishwoman in her forties and a rabid fan of Jane Austen’s romance novels, published a whole book called Old Friends, New Fancies, centered around Austen’s characters. Shipping in fandoms is the fuel that keeps fanboys and girls alive, whether that’s bickering in Twitter threads, yearning in dedicated subreddits, and of course, the treasure trove of fan fiction and fan art in just about every corner of the internet. Sometimes the ships are the driving force of the fiction, and sometimes it keeps the show alive well after the credits have rolled on the final episode. Attack on Titan is no different. While the dystopian anime is still ongoing (the final episodes are set to air sometime in 2023, while the manga it’s based on wrapped last year) it is by no means free of potential ships. War, terror, destruction—all progenitors of love, right? Learning about my friend’s imagined coupling, I instantly thought of that scene from Metal Gear Solid, where Otacon muses, “Do you think love can bloom on the battlefield?” to which Solid Snake replies “Yeah. I do. I think at any time, any place, people can fall in love with each other.” This is especially true when the battlefield consists of giant titans with an insatiable hunger for humans. I was a fan of Attack on Titan when the anime first premiered back in 2013. That first season was unique in that it conveyed a sort of hopelessness and despair that, in my opinion, is missing from many Shonen anime.
