"Shipping" in My Little Pony fanfictions is ...

First of all, as I begin my closing statement to this wonderful discussion--and I say this with complete honesty--it has been both an enlightening experience and a wonderfully fun experience debating discussing with you, IncoherentOrange. Congratulations are in order, both for your compelling discussion points and your--soon to be recognized across-the-board--engaging writing style.Secondly, I'd like to stress one final time how this wasn't really intended as a debate about shipping's illogicality per se, as my opponent has pointed out, but merely as an exploratory discussion--albeit in a debate format--of shipping's relative merits and detractors.And now, to get on with my final case:Pro makes the very valid claim that shipping stories have one flaw apparent (or should I say, inherent?) in that their very premise is that of pairing two (or more) characters that would not have otherwise had a romantic relationship--to cite the common example, TwiDash (Rainbow Dash and Twilight Sparkle). However despite the fact that poor authors may portray this relationship poorly--which would be outside the bounds of this discussion--shipping allows for deviations not in the end result (which is somewhat predictable in other styles of writing, for example "Tragedy" genre fictions) but in the actual application of the relationship.Let me stress that once more, as it might otherwise get assimilated into that large paragraph: Shipping, while it may remove the end-result deviation that other genres have--or not--to satisfy the audience, allows for numerous portrayals of said relationship--from comedy to tragedy. I realize that I cited audience appreciation for the first part of my sentence, while I completely disregarded it for the second, but let's take an example of an author who, through his unorthodox--or deviant, depending on how you characterize them--takes on several "ships" or character pairings have regularly granted him audience satisfaction. While this certainly isn't to say that this user, MallaJong (now known under the handle "MallaJong1" due to some extraneous issues), is representative in any way of FIMFiction.net's userbase, and this also isn't to say that examples should be the deciding factor in this debate, I feel that this user adequately shows that the concept of shipping--that of pairing two characters--can take on new, vibrant forms while still maintaining its tried-and-true structuring.Now, this isn't to say that the stories themself hold any literary merit, but merely that they provide an interesting proof-of-concept that an audience like FIMFiction.net's holds in high regard unorthodox methods of writing within the shipping genre. For example, MallaJong's "Spike's. . ." series, in which he pairs Spike, Twilight Sparkle's draconian assistant, with an ever-increasing number of other characters in ways that have--for reasons that should be adequately described by citing an example title: "Spike's Dating Simulator"--been rarely, if at all done before, has received placement in the "Featured" box ("most popular stories" box) several times.Of course, Pro could very well make the case that an audience's likes or dislikes are not measures of the inherent value of the genre, so I offer this contention:Whether or not shipping is good in microcosm, it certainly allows another avenue for creativity in macrocosm. At the same time, it also detracts from creativity, as Pro has very rightly pointed out with his contentions, through seeming to--though this is more of a fault of the writers themselves--force a "cookie cutter" template upon writers of shipfics.It appears that we are still at an impasse. While I shall never convince Pro (and indeed, I am liking the concept of shipping even less as this debate progresses) and may fail to convince the audience in the end, I feel that it is good to notice that shipping, for all its faults, has at least provided another potential avenue for creativity.I thank IncoherentOrange in the utmost for agreeing to and conducting this debate/discussion with me, and I honestly could care less who wins. Not that "winning" means anything, of course.Let me reiterate my thanks, and allow this system to purge our conversation from its "active" memory as soon as possible.IX