cipher-fresh:

A phenomenon I’ve seen in fandom with a large central ship is that people will have their shipping goggles activated at such an intensity, they doggedly erase character traits that don’t contribute to pushing forward romance. The two individuals in the relationship are rendered utterly one-dimensional through the loss of any individual aspects of their story or personality that could be interpreted as an obstacle to shipping.

This makes fanon interpretations of the characters boring and uninteresting to read about because they have no character traits other than being in love with their romantic interest. I like shipping as much as the next guy, but I hate fandom-at-large’s tendency to only engage with a story through shipping, and especially to the extent that the characters are barely individuals, and do not exist outside of the central romantic relationship