The Book Nerd’s Guide to Shipping

Welcome to the Book Nerd’s Guide to Life! Every other week, we convene in this safe place to discuss the unique challenges of life for people whose noses are always wedged in books. For past guides, click here.
Though it’s hard to remember at this moment, there was once a world in which Rainbow Rowell was not a highly successful author/best friend you always wanted. In those dark days, writing elaborate fanfiction about anything—let alone your own work—was something not much celebrated, or even much noticed, by the literati or the culturists or those elitist snobs, the book reviewers.
Instead, fanfiction was swept into dark corners of society, including Tumblr, many of the more lusty pages of Archive of Our Own, A Song of Ice and Fire forums, and the cottage industry of Sherlock Holmes pastiche. Lo, they were repressive times for those of us so devoted to our favorite fictional characters that we actively embellished, reimagined, and sometimes improved upon their narratives!
Did I then speak of my unshakeable belief in a Harry/Hermione pairing to anyone beyond those closest to me? Surely you jest! In those days, we shipped in back alleys, we swigged slash fics in speakeasies, we hid our OTPs from the authorities.
Or at least that’s how I remember it.
Now that’s all changed, of course. Today I can tell you comfortably that I am a card-carrying member of the Mystrade brigade, having been persuaded by the BBC’s Sherlock to comb through the canon to find any stories the two characters appear in together—let alone ones in which they trade one iota of dialogue. I live openly, and without fear.
That’s not to say shipping comes without grief, or totally without fear of judgment. I’ve read Albus Dumbledore-Sorting Hat slash fics that would make sailors blush. (I’m not proud.) For the most part, however, those who wholeheartedly ship Sansa-Margaery, Thorin-Bilbo, or any character-any other character that is literally not made of cloth, do so freely and in the open.
It’s acceptable to reexamine the canon, to find flaws or gaps, to attempt to fix them, to tease out a single line into voluminous hidden subtext, to free characters from the confines of a single story.
It’s acceptable to gather friends and confidantes at the library or a coffee shop and compose headcanons when someone has an off-the-wall revelation, to write letters to Peter Jackson suggesting that if you’re going to alter the text anyway, then Tauriel’s storyline be replaced in The Hobbit movies’ director’s cuts with any one of the 1,500+ works of Aragorn/Legolas slash fiction. (I am speaking totally hypothetically, of course, Peter.)
It’s acceptable to change your ships, to recognize Hermione would probably be better off falling in love with a nice, competent, eminently reasonable Auror whose name you do not know, to have your worldview on Mr. Bingley change after reading one of the many modern adaptations of Jane Austen, to have the courage to ship characters from different works.
It’s acceptable to write a column admitting (hypothetically) to the nerdy things you may or may not have done in the name of love and fiction.
What a time to be alive, a time to write, to create, to do and to share all that with others. Except for the Sorting Hat slash fic; keep that to the speakeasies if you please.