Why Must I Ship?

This seriously concerns me.

 

I spent at least a year- a year!- watching Avatar- Avatar!- without giving much more of a thought to who'd get together than "oh, yeah, Aang likes Katara, I guess."  Even once I'd heard of shipping- nadda.  I didn't care.  Just liked to watch the fandom.  (I sort of ship Tokka now.  But that came later.)

And, in my young, foolish days, back when I read Twilight in all seriousness, Bella and Edward made me squee.  In all honesty, they still do.  I CANNOT HELP IT.  I HAVE TRIED.  DO NOT JUDGE ME.

I finally acknoledged that maybe, maybe, I might ship just the tiniest bit when I started scouring the internet for Han/Leia.  But that's not shipping-shipping!  It was resolved ten years before I was born!  That's just liking the dynamic between a canon pair!

Still, I admitted that they were my OTP.  My only OTP.  That was as far as shipping went with me.

It took me months further to realize that I now watched and read things with one eye who "who got together" instead of on the action.  That occasionally, I even was disapointed when the main character chose someone else. 

I try to get into comics, and what am I reading?  No, not action stuff.  Batman/Catwoman fluff.  Because that's my favorite type of fanfiction.  PG to PG-13 fluff.

Lord help me, now I'm trying to write it.

I can't write romance.  I cut my teeth on Twilight- I cannot write normal romance.  I spent a several month period killing off almost every love interest any of my non fanfic characters had.  Seriously.  One survived intact, and he barely did.  Now I've got to de-Wangst them!

And I'm a shipper.

For the last five months or so, I've been introducing Avatar to my Aunt Mary.  She's really liking it, much more than she expected.

And within four episodes she was a Zutara shipper.

I really do not understand how this works.