Happy Valentine’s Day! I should probably talk about something romantic, but I’ve come to realize that both as a reader/audience member and as a writer, I’m more of a shipper than a romantic.

For those who aren’t up on Internet talk, “shipper” is short for “relationshipper.” As far as I can tell, the term originated in the X-Files Usenet newsgroup back in the mid-90s. If you wanted Mulder and Scully to get together, you were a relationshipper, or shipper. (The other faction was the No-Romos, who wanted them to stay friends and partners but not get involved romantically.) From there, the term spread. “Shipping” is wanting two characters to get together, looking for evidence that they might be developing feelings, imagining how they might get together and what it would look like if they did, sometimes even writing fan fiction about the characters being romantically involved. If you say you ship a couple, you want them to be romantically involved.

While some shippers really do want to see the couple get together, the real fun is in looking at the subtext and trying to figure out where things might be going. I think this is why I prefer to get my love stories in genres other than romance (and now romantasy). I have the most fun trying to read between the lines and figure out what the characters feel based on their actions. Romance novels are a lot more up front about the attraction. Even if the characters are denying it, you know where it’s going and it’s still pretty obvious. I think a lot of the “Moonlighting Curse” is due to this. Once the couple is together, you know where things stand and there’s no more room for imagination. (Though there were other things going on with Moonlighting, so it wasn’t just them getting together that killed the show.) This also makes it a lot harder to do in a book than in movies/TV. When you can get inside the characters’ heads, there’s little guessing, unless they’re utterly oblivious.

As an example, I’ve always said, not entirely jokingly, that Aliens is one of my favorite romantic movies. It’s fun to analyze the way Ripley and Hicks interact and see the way he looks at her and figure that they were falling for each other, and later they’d get together (the third movie Does Not Exist, so there). I was vindicated in this when I heard Michael Biehn say on a convention panel that he played the whole movie as though Hicks had a huge crush on Ripley.

I like to say that I write shipper bait instead of romance because the romantic relationships in my books tend to be fairly subtle and leave the impression of there being a lot more romance than there is because there’s so much material for the reader’s imagination. I’ve even had a book that didn’t have a kiss in it rejected by a fantasy publisher with the recommendation to send it to a romance publisher because it was too much of a romance.

I’ve been trying to think of my favorite fictional romances, or at least some that I think were handled well. I’ve got more from movies and TV than from books. Connie Willis probably does my favorite book romances, though she writes science fiction. Ned and Verity’s relationship in To Say Nothing of the Dog is quite lovely and has a swoonworthy conclusion. There’s also something pretty epic in the Blackout/All Clear duology that involves time travel and an outcome worth cheering out loud for. Lately, she’s been writing all-out science fiction romcoms, and they have just the right mix of romance and action. You want the couple to get together, but it’s not super obvious where things are going.

I think Jim and Pam’s relationship on The Office worked pretty well (aside from some iffy stuff in the final season). It helped there that the mockumentary format meant that we only saw what the camera crews were there to see, so even when they started dating it wasn’t entirely obvious what their status was and there was still room to guess and imagine.

Possibly my favorite TV romance was Nathan and Audrey on Haven, which had all kinds of supernatural stuff going on, plus one of my favorite paranormal tropes, the “in another life” thing in which the same people keep running into each other in different timelines, sometimes not knowing each other, but always falling in love when they meet.

Shipping isn’t limited to couples that actually do end up getting together or who are on that trajectory. I’ve even seen people ship characters from different fictional universes. It’s really common to ship non-canon relationships, sort of an amusing what if. My personal favorite there is that I figure things would have gone very differently for the galaxy if Obi Wan had ever turned to Padme and belted, “My gift is my song, and this one’s for you.” Seriously, an Obi Wan who looked like Ewan McGregor was right there, and she went for the whiny kid? I’ve seen some unhinged fan theories that this is what happened (well, maybe without him acting out Moulin Rouge), and Obi Wan was Luke and Leia’s real father. Anakin does get really jealous of Obi Wan having anything to do with her toward the end.

Somewhat closer to possibility is Cassian Andor and Jyn Erso in Rogue One. That lost opportunity is even sadder after the Andor series, which makes it look even more like she’s just the person he always needed, and they found each other just a bit too late. There are some pretty loaded looks they exchange. In my mental happy place, the Enterprise flies by and beams them out right before things go boom.

There’s a lot more room for romance in fantasy now that romantasy is the hot thing in the market, but I’m not sure I write enough outright romance for that. My shipper bait is too much for fantasy but not enough for romantasy.