Do you want Rey and Kylo Ren to become a couple? Ross and Rachel? Hermione and Harry? Or are you really against these pairings? If so, you’re a shipper. Shipping is the dominant way of engaging with fiction now – and it has a great impact on contemporary literature, film and TV.

You are shipping a couple if you really, really want two fictional characters of a TV show or film franchise (or any other serialized narrative) to have a romantic relationship. The term ‘shipping’ comes from ‘relationshipping’ and it has a long history going back all the way to Star Trek. It became widely used when the world was fascinated with the apparent sexual tension between Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the two main characters of the TV show, The X-Files. And shipping became a truly global phenomenon with two extremely popular serialized narratives, Harry Potter and Friends.

The creators of Friends discovered something revolutionary from a marketing point of view: You can double, triple or quadruple the number of viewers if you manage to get them to ship a couple on your show – in the case of Friends, Ross and Rachel. Sitcoms before Friends didn’t use this trick. But after Friends it was not possible to ignore the shipping aspect of the genre. All the big sitcoms have been using it systematically – the more intelligent ones, like Community or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia use it ironically or comment on the phenomenon on a meta level.

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"Shipping also reveals a lot about our society and about just how lonely and unloved people often feel. It is this loneliness that fuels the need to experience romance and love at least vicariously."

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But shipping is not only for TV show junkies. Probably the most visible shipper community, even now, is the Harry Potter fandom. What makes shipping in this context even more a question of life and death is that there are two (well, at least two) couples to ship: Hermione and Ron or Hermione and Harry. Here is J. K. Rowling’s account of her encounter with the phenomenon of shipping:

"Well, you see, I'm a relative newcomer to the world of shipping, because for a long time, I didn't go on the net and look up Harry Potter. A long time. Occasionally I had to, because there were weird news stories or something that I would have to go and check, because I was supposed to have said something I hadn’t said. I had never gone and looked at fan sites, and then one day I did and oh – my – god. Five hours later or something, I get up from the computer shaking slightly [all laugh]. ‘What is going on?’ And it was during that first mammoth session that I met the shippers, and it was a most extraordinary thing. I had no idea there was this huge underworld seething beneath me."

Harry Potter is somewhat atypical inasmuch as shipping had no visible effect on the books themselves (at least according to the author). But most serial narratives are radically transformed by the phenomenon of shipping.