To Ship or Not to Ship: That is the Question -misquoted and misrepresented

“To ship, or not to ship: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous secondhand chemistry,

Or to take arms against a sea of poorly construed AUs,

And by opposing end them? To ship: to interpret;

No surety; but by interpretation to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That an OTP is heir to, ’tis a compulsion

Devoutly to be wish’d. To ship, to interpret;

To interpret: perchance to canonize: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that canonization what dreams may come

When we have shuffled beyond this current material,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so honest aversion;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of unmet longing,

The tears of unmatched emotion, the protagonist’s demise,

The pangs of despised love, the series’ delay,

The insolence of fan translations and the spurns

That patient merit of the diehard fangirl takes,

When she herself might her quietus make

With a deeper appreciation and author’s intuition? who would lacking bear,

To lust and swoon over a worthy husbando,

But that the dread of nothing at series’ end,

The disappointment of that to which once watched

No viewer returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those AUs we have

Than flock to titles which we know not of?

Thus fandom does make shippers of us all;

And thus the native hue of ‘cannon only’

Is sicklied o’er with the dreaming glimmer of hope,

And enterprises of great pith and fanart

With this regard their currents turn awry,

And lose the labeling ‘unconfirmed.’–Soft you now!

The fair HijiChi pairing, in thy creators prayers

Be all my head-cannons remember’d!”

-Willy S. with a little help from Shoujo T. ❤

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*image is HijiChi fanart uploaded to Pinterest by “user”

**title image is SanoChi fanart from https://sylphalchemist.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/kiss1.jpg