To love fangirling

[WoburnSands]

I'm currently fangirling over a male celebrity - so am doing the usual - looking up every YouTube clip of him that's ever been recorded ... Looking up every internet nugget about him.

I was attracted to him cos of his good looks - coincidentally we appear to have had similar upbringings in SOME ways from what I've read!!

Ah there's worse ways to spend a weekday evening !!

Autocorrect at first changed 'similar' upbringings to 'solidarity' upbringings - as far as I know neither of us was brought up by a 1980s Polish political party ....

Wow Niggit - that's some achievement!

Well, it also gave me a cast iron excuse to look at photos and videos every spare moment I had

haha - I see your logic!

I'm always very impressed by the fan sites I follow. The level of dedication that must go into finding the photographs and the information and doing the edits must be phenomenal! And sometimes the artwork and the writing is very good! And as others have said, men 'fanboy' all the time about footballers and the like. It's just seen as a hobby for them and perfectly acceptable. I don't get the real life fanfiction or the 'shipping' business, but that sometimes borders on an inability to separate fiction from reality, but your common or garden admiration and escapism, where's the harm?

Oh yeah... Men and their football

I don't really get 'shipping' at all - it definitely wasn't a thing when I was a teenager!!

Woburn, it probably was around but not in the same way. I'm a 90s/late 80s child and I remember watching shows and films with friends and being like 'Oh i wish X would dump Y and get together with Z! That would be amazing!'

And then we'd spend hours describing how they'd fall in love and such.

Woefully tween but we didn't have superfast internet to amuse us... ;)

And congrats to everyone who has met their fangirl crushes! :) Isn't it the best?!

I'm 44. Trust me, shipping has been around for years, it just didn't have a name.

I have a battered exercise book containing my first attempts at fan fiction from when I was about 10 in 1982

Yay for fangirling.
I don't see it as any different to following a football team etc.
It's fun and you meet new people with a shared interest.

My "puppy love" is genuinely nice to his fans but not all are and I'd hate to fangirl over someone who had contempt for their fans.

trafalgar - that's lovely :) - I went to see a band a few years ago at venue in a UK seaside resort - we spoke to some of the band members after the show and they were lovely. This was a band that started several decades ago and there have been quite a few changes in line up iyswim

Shelagh, I still have some of the fanfics I wrote, as well. In fact, at secondary school I had quite a little racket going on - I'd write fairly racy fanfics in exchange for homework done! Well, as racy as they could be written by a woefully inexperienced 14 year old... It all came to a shuddering halt one day when my Dad saw one of them. I was usually terribly discreet, but this time I heard the ice cream van pull up outside and ran out to buy one, leaving my story at the immortal line "she pushed her hand down between their tightly pressed bodies". When I came back in, my father had added, "unscrewed them and threw them away shouting 'you can't get the wood for them you know!'" (he was a big Goons fan). Somehow I could never bring myself to write any more after that...

I missed a trick at school then!

(That's the sort of thing my dad would do too, only his would be Monty Python!)

It's probably why I was so rubbish at Physics - somebody else had done the work for me...

I did other kids' homeworks for cash. Uncreative [google]

Shipping has been around since at least the 19th century by fans. The term shipping was invented in X files fandom in the nineties.

I don't really understand how anybody can not get shipping! Huge amounts of original fiction are primarily about relationships, including some of the most popular books of all time - Pride and Prejudice for example.

And given the context of this thread, all these people being interested in 'Sid & Nancy' is shipping!

I think I just previously misunderstood the term slightly almond!! - I thought it meant swapping partners over or some such - I've clearly got the wrong end of the stick!!

Yes I'm pretty sure that the 'modern day' shippers are into partner swapping fantasies. What I find a bit odd is 'shipping' people who play lovers in films or TV programmes (as in the x Files) and conflating the characters and the actors so theres no difference, or when its done with band members. Then abusing their 'ships' real partners on social media because they are keeping the 'true' lovers apart, which from what I have seen happens quite frequently. Sid and Nancy were lovers in real life. Romantic fiction is just that- fiction. I don't find people for example, extending the Twilight characters' stories odd at all.

Yeah but is it Nid or Sancy?

Yeah real life stuff is not on. For example, going back 100 years or so to one of my first obsessions, I loved Torvill and Dean. Everyone wanted them to get together. And now because of dancing on ice a new generation has been watching them the last few years and yes, shipping them, which irritates the fuck out of me because she in particular has been married for 26 years to a lovely bloke. So posting all over the place that actually you think they're secretly at it (and writing fic about it FFS) is not good fangirling.

Yeah, its like they are so wrapped up in their fantasy that they don't think about the feelings of the people who they are supposed to admire ( who must be mortified by it) or the people on the receiving end. No, its not good fangirling behaviour at all, and makes people thing all fans are nutters.

'shipping' is just short for relationship so it's a very general and wide term. Shipping two fictional characters does not mean you're going to automatically start in on real person ships, and tbh even the majority of real person shippers know it's all fantasy. It's always the way, it's the loud extreme minority that make everyone else look bad... I have to say though that it's one of the downsides of social media that that minority can rub stuff into actors/celebrities faces, and don't get me ranting on how cringy it is when people like Graham Norton drag out fanart to embarrass his guest. Fandom and its creations are for the fans and should be kept well away from the official side! - ageing multifandom fangirl, geeky and proud.

I'm a shipper and I don't understand what people mean by 'partner swapping fantasy.'

Who is swapping partners with whom? What partners?

I don't read RPF but I don't care if other people do. I don't think they're more confused about fantasy than the OP is liking Sid. I also don't care if people think fan girls are bad because of a few people. That's their own judgey problem.

I learned about shipping through the One Direction 'fandom' and such like - !! - I'm obviously late to the party !!