Well thanks a lot, CHALLENGERS
Well if you're not going to mention X-Files, I will.
OH MY GOD???
Aishwarya Kumar
Look, as a OG X-Files fan who spent hours upon hours on my college roommate's PC trawling through alt.tv.x-files and, yes, alt.tv.x-files.creative on a damn dial-up, let me tell you: I AM VERY WELL AWARE AND VERSED IN SHIPPING AND FAN FIC. And I can only imagine how much easier it is to do both nowadays, where there is CONSTANT CONTENT for fans to clip and read into and Zapruder and project and use as fodder for fun.
I mean, X-Files fans had to tune in every week AND HOPE for an ambiguous glance between our two sexy principles and then dine on that for at least another week. Or if we were lucky during Sweeps Week – DO ANY OF THE CHILDREN EVEN KNOW THE TERMINOLOGY THAT I AM USING – we'd get a photoshoot of David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson ABSOLUTELY KNOWING WHAT THEY ARE DOING.
You cannot even imagine the insanity that erupted in the shipping fandom when this Rolling Stone cover dropped:
Otherwise, we were making meals out of crumbs.
"OMG they JUST MET and yet she ALREADY TRUSTED HIM SO MUCH that she ran to his hotel room to show him the mosquito bites ON HER BACK???? AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!" – A post from me on alt.tv.x-files in 1994 probably, before being yelled at by the dudes who actually watched the show for the aliens to take that shit to dot creative.
Cheyanne's motivation to write fanfic comes from a lack of resolution to romance in the original works.
"I just needed more," she says. "I needed to know what happened next, and if no one was going to tell me what happened next, I could write it."
There's a similar urge for RPF (real people fiction) writers. Even though social media has increased the visibility of celebrities, there are only so many pieces of information publicly available. So, it's only natural for fans to fill in the blanks with their own narrative fiction.
"They write fan fiction because reality is just not delivering," De Kosnik says. "In the absence of the storyline actually progressing in the way that they wish it would progress, fans create the narrative and share that with each other, and read each other's narratives."
So y'all, trust me – but also NO ONE – I get it. Fans are gonna ship and make up whole entire narratives in their heads about people. It's what fans do. And 99.9% of the time, it's pretty harmless fun! Let people have their fun!
This from Chris Evert made me laugh:
Do you see any parallels between you and Jimmy and Emma and Carlos?
"No, because they're not having a relationship," she says.
BUT.
I did absolutely full-body cringe when THE SPORT – like, the actual formal institutions – were willingly throwing rocket fuel on the fire. This whole thing only works if there are some adults in the room!
Shipping is the purview of fans and comes from a place of love. Institutions shipping is gross because now you're actually using it for clout? For attention? For money? AND you're lending some sense of legitimacy or credence to the whole thing, which is also not good!
Once real people who have the responsibility to know better also start to treat these players not like people or athletes, but as...characters in some scripted reality show, it's just not funny or entertaining anymore. It's basically this energy:
I also laughed at this:
I reached out to his manager to see if I could ask him my one burning question. He told me he'd love to help, but Alcaraz would not be doing interviews during the hardcourt season.
I reached out to the WTA to see if I could pose just one question to Raducanu. "Maybe tomorrow," they said at first. "Maybe next week," they said later. Now, they've gone silent.
Credit to her, she tried. But some things are best left to the fandom.
Editor's note: I did a search for "threesome" in the free-image database and the header is the first pic that popped up.
