Recently I have become curious about the practice of “self shipping.” Self shipping at its core is when a person projects themselves to be in some kind of romantic relationship with a fictional character. Often someone who self ships will make drawings or write fanfiction featuring both themselves (or an avatar/fursona version of themselves) and their preferred fictional character. It is also common for the self shipper to make shrines to their beloved with pieces of merchandise or photos of them arranged methodically. These shrines can be where the person will perform a variety of rituals.
Often the person practices some amount of method acting online as if the fictional character is real and is truly in a relationship with them, though if pressed will admit that they know it isn’t true. It is important to note that sometimes these people are in real life relationships as well as their online imagined ones.
This background information isn’t some new cultural anthropology. People have been doing this for a long time. The Beatles inspired the same cultural phenomena, but the fans were attached to men who were in theory attainable. Behind the wall of their commercial image there were real men there. When someone self ships with the fictional reporter from Spongebob it is a completely empty symbol of real experience that they are aspiring to, they are happy just experiencing the puppet show of their own making. Romancing the idea of the Beatles presents issues in that they changed their hairstyles and demeanors, not to mention aging. Perhaps these human attributes made them unsafe for those who need a safe object of desire to latch onto who doesn’t put them through the trials and tribulations of real people. To be able to desire and love in a safe manner when it comes to the fictional character could be attributed to the prevalence of this phenomena at all (other than the obvious take of autistic people taking a character as their special interest).
I will state it this way: I am sad. I am depressed. I am not depressed when I am in love and someone is equally in love with me. This is my truth and will continue to be my truth until I am able to grow out of my sort of needy fear of abandonment and self loathing but I think accepting who I am might be healthier than attempting to pretend I am some version of myself who doesn’t desire messily, who isn’t gross with love. I don’t think I am a bad partner but my girlfriend broke up with me very recently. This is fine. It’s neither of our faults, just sort of one of those tragic facts about both of our brains. She must sleep with other people and even though I logically want her to experience the vast world of lovers, it makes me sad. Originally she was cheating on me, then we opened the relationship. I held myself together the best I could for her sake but would break down often. She doesn’t want to take care of me when I’m sad or more accurately she is unable to take care of me due to other unrelated brain issues. So we broke up.
Real life relationships are ugly in this way. Me and it loved each other as deeply as I have ever felt love. My mother is an alcoholic, my father convinced me demons were living inside of me, my sister treats me as a you would any disgusting faggot. All real love will fail you at some point, and if you are unlucky it sometimes leaves you feeling more alone than when you started. Sorry to be all sad in front of you. I have said this in my writing before but I will repeat : in person I am much less whiny and self absorbed. I am good at asking people what they are doing today and I’m trying to get better at remembering to offer them water when they visit. This self indulgent break for autobiography is mostly to give background on my curiosities and any catharsis I feel from sharing these emotions is more than overwhelmed by embarrassment.
I have been reading romance novels and romance fan fiction since I was in highschool as a form of escapism so this practice of achieving a synthetic feeling of romance via projecting the self onto a character is nothing new. I have even tried my hand at writing my own romance before, mostly just short stories written in my notes app when I couldn’t sleep. Never have I gone to the extent of making a fleshed out imagined world like those who practice self shipping have. The date is January 14th 2025 and I am going to spend the rest of the day experimenting with self shipping to see what it can bring to my life and I am documenting it in case my findings can help someone else’s life. I feel the need to state that my life has many good things in it. I ate at a Veselka this week and it was really good. I think my roommate Sofe is awesome and she let me hang out with her and our friend Diana and they both gave me some clothes they didn’t want anymore. My friend’s Gracie and Rhea called me and checked up on me and I love them both so much. Today's excercise is an experiment like all relationships are.
Now back to research.
The first step of self ship is like any relationship: Choosing a person. What is different about the self ship is that there is no courtship that follows unless of course one desires to imagine a period of having to prove themselves. Better yet one can imagine their character trying to court.
There are a few characters that come to mind as potential suitors for Emerson Borakove, and while someone doesn’t have to choose just one character to ship themselves with, I think it would help the research aspect of this if I just chose one. Recently I have been obsessing with Van Morrison but his life is too real and maybe too sad to truly attach my obsession on. Moving on to my next choice: I have always been attracted to Kermit the Frog. I remember telling my friend Emma when I was first in college at an open mic about my desire to be in a relationship with Kermit the Frog and having people sitting around us looking at me as if I had something weird on my head. They started to ask me questions like:
“Do you mean you would if he was a person?” or “Do you mean dating someone who has similar traits?”
And while I felt successfully alienated from my peers I defended my choice, saying no, I am attracted to Kermit the Frog as he is. Not that I am trying to go fuck a frog puppet, more that I love his demeanor and his shape and I could feel some sexual attraction to him no matter how difficult to understand. Now, I don’t feel as much attraction compared to imagining a true human who would love me, but part of the appeal is that Kermit isn’t real. He won’t age and we won’t slowly turn into people who end up being incompatible. So all this is to say that this attempt of self shipping will feature Emerson the Human and Kermit the Frog.
The next steps of self ship just include making (or paying someone to make for you) artistic representations of the love between you and your ship. While I am not a talented visual artist I figured I should start by making some drawings of me and Kermit in a variety of situations including me laying my head on his lap, going to the beach for the first time together, getting married, and having children. The more detailed I imagined the situations the better I felt while drawing them, as if I was actually creating this reality, and feeling the emotions associated. Even if it came with an empty aftertaste, I couldn’t lie that it didn’t feel sweet and soft.
Finally the last step in this is sharing these manifestations with the world via social media. The website deviant art is a major hub for these kinds of drawings but I have no presence there so therefore no way to see how reactions to the drawings would make me feel. This whole journey was inspired by twitter user @sillypuddyyyy who self ships with reverend Putty from the adult swim show Moral Orel. Her account stood out to me as she made big cardboard cutouts of her character and took photos with him. For some reason these photos really affected me. I could understand that her love of this fictional character was real and that just because Putty was all imaginary didn’t mean as much as one could assume. I followed her and everytime she posted it felt like seeing a lovely couple in love doing things people in love do, a type of empathetic happiness. I wanted their relationship to last, I wanted them to make each other happy.
I decided to share my own version of a photo like that. I don’t have the resources to make cardboard cutouts of Kermit but I could add him into photos of me digitally. I dressed as if I was going on a date, or what I’d wear if I didn’t worry about seeming to be “too much”. I wore my one flamboyantly green dress to match Kermit and took some photos. I added a little caption and posted it to X “the everything app” and my Instagram story.
The feeling I get when I get likes on this photo is a muted but very real feeling similar to how it felt to get likes on a post of me and my ex girlfriend. People being happy for me being happy (or just possibly amused). A mutual follower commenting “beautiful couple :)” is wonderful even if there is a (possibly imagined) tinge of light sarcasm. This is an example of how the communities surrounding the self ship activities make the imagined world real. Without any effort I imagine showing Kermit her comment and him smiling and saying something like “Easy to be a beautiful couple with a girl as beautiful as you by my side!” or something. Not my best work but I’m not a romance writer, I am a romance reader, and right now I’m simply doing experiments on myself.
Let’s wrap this up. This little experiment is me being a tourist in these communities. For some reason I feel guilty saying that I’m too busy to dedicate my time to being in a relationship with a fictional character, it’s just as likely that I just haven’t found the right one. When I was in a real relationship there was no limit to the time I was willing to dedicate to my lover, maybe there is a fictional character out there for me who will inspire the same feelings. I think people are too quick to assume that the thing they are judging is wrong rather than themselves. I don’t like eating natto but that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with natto. It’s honestly much easier to assume that there is something wrong with me and my taste. After all there are more empty containers of natto then there are Emersons in the world. Love will live on even if it’s not always enough. A small light flashing from my computer can keep me awake for hours in my room that’s 99% more dark than it is light.
“Love takes miles, Love takes years”
or “I’ll never grow so old again”
or “That which did not kill me only made me weaker”
or “Have you ever been so in love with a girl that you couldn’t see past right now?”
or “I hope I treat her kind… when she starts to see the darker side of me”
or “Don’t think of her reading on the L train”
or “Who will be watching my body when I sleep? Who will I believe in?”
or "All throughout my life you cast a light that's shifting blue"
one year ago today
