Shippers

Beginnings

It can be said that Shippers community first truly started on a very long topic in the Pokemon Anime forum of UPN. The topic was called "Do you Think Ash like misty" and was posted by AJNRules. The topic was basically a war between the "Pokeshippers"- those who believed in Ash and Misty's love, or AAML- and the anti-Pokeshippers.

Notable Pokeshippers on the topic included Parastoise, who had started a pseudo-AAML club consisting of having a list of people who believed in AAML in his sig; Dark Cloud, who was famous for his violent flaming of any non-Pokeshipper; Venusaur003, who helped DC with the flaming; and Archaic, who was a very vehement Pokeshipper and listed in his sig the kinds of Shippers he was a "sworn foe"of (basically every ship that conflicted with AAML.)

Some notable anti-Pokeshippers on the topic were a small group of Palletshippers (those who believed in Ash and Gary's love, or AAGL) consisting of ChaosRocket, Meggie, and RED; Tea, who was one of the leaders of the Misty Lovers Club and didn't believe in AAML because he wanted Misty for himself; SatoshiLover, who didn't believe in AAML because she wanted Ash for herself; and Yoshimitsu, who was a believer in Ash and Richie's love, which he called Yaoishipping at the time.

Forum and Clubs

Later on, UPN got a forum that was just for Shipping, called Shippers Anonymous Unite. The Do you think Ash like misty topic was accidentally deleted when an admin tried to move it from the Anime forum to the Shippers forum. Soon after the creation of the Shippers forum, Archaic decided to found a club for Pokeshipping, the Official Pokeshippers, or OPS. They made up a whole little government system for it, and held elections and everything. Ben the Pokemaniac was elected president, Archaic became vice president, SSJupiter (Wendy) was secretary, DC (Dark Cloud) was the minister of defense, V003 (Venusaur003) was the director of flaming, and Maronz was the minister of relations.

Meanwhile, the Palletshippers were trying to make a name for themselves in the forum. Some friends of Chaos who were also Palletshippers began posting, such as Chaka, Clare (forum name Ffenics), Weez and Delilah. The Palletshippers would point out what was wrong with the AAML hints every chance they got, and soon more people began to become Palletshippers. Chaos made up a Palletshipping slogan, "To protect Ash and Gary's love", and told everyone who was a Palletshipper to put it in their sig.

As Palletshipping grew, so did the animosity between the AAGL supporters and the AAML supporters. Soon almost every topic on the Shippers forum was a huge fight between the two sides. Even innocent topics like interactive fanfics tended to end up in a big fight, each side trying to get the couple they wanted together in the fic, and eventually just inserting themselves into the fic and beating up on the other Shippers with mallets. The OPS had a meeting topic, which nonmembers were not supposed to post on, but Palletshippers would post on it anyways and harass the OPS.

Later Yoshimitsu changed the name for the Ash/Richie ship to Leagueshipping, since Yaoishipping was too vague because it could really mean any yaoi couple. Yoshimitsu remained the only Leagueshipper on the board, though, and he later faded out from the forums and wasn't heard from anymore. Also around this time, SL (SatoshiLover) founded a club called We Adore Ash, or WAA, for people who loved Ash. They had an election and SL became president, and a new UPN member, AshsGirl (Abi) became vice president. However, SL eventually decided that she liked Mondo instead of Ash, and left the board, so the WAA died, and Abi eventually became a Palletshipper. There was also a very small and informal club founded by Leto called the Shigeru Squad, for people who loved Gary, but it quickly faded out. It was also around this time that a small movement was started for the couple of Gary and Misty, and it was named Rivalshipping. Later on Loren Leah, a supporter of the ship, renamed it Egoshipping and founded a club for it called United Egoshippers.

But most of the people on the board were aligned to either Poke or Palletshipping, and while the Palletshippers were having their fun flaming, the OPS was getting kind of sick of fighting. Archaic started saying stuff like, "Would you fool yaois organize yourselves into a club so we can work on making treaties and such?" A short exchange between Chaos and Archaic in which he found out that she and most Palletshippers were girls resulted in him saying that as a token of his goodwill, he would send Chaos a peace offering consisting of the "document", which was a long text file of the complex OPS government system, in order to help her found a Palletshipping club.

The Palletshippers had a private board called "the secret hideout," and there they discussed the possibility of making a club. Though most Palletshippers felt it was a trick and a bad idea, Chaos had actually been wanting to make a club for a while, and so everyone went along with her. They decided on the name Palletshippers International, or PI. Chaos didn't want the club to be as complex as the OPS, so she simply appointed people to offices.

Since Chaos founded PI, she appointed herself president, and she made RED, who was a real life friend of hers, vice president. Meggie, who was actually a notorious flamer, wanted to be relations, and Chaka asked for secretary, so they were given those jobs. Clare was made defense, and then Delilah asked for a job, so she was appointed representative, which basically meant that she was to publicize Palletshipping and tell people about it. The job of the secretary was supposed to be to keep a members list, but around that time Chaka started to move away from Shipping and become more of a Misc poster, so Meggie soon took over the job.

It would become a theme, at least from PI's perspective, that OPS was very formal and political whereas PI was more laid back. OPS had was a meeting topic, where people could discuss Shipping or club issues. People could also post to ask to join, and the secratary would add them to the members list. OPS also had weekly chat meetings at a predetermined time, and if someone couldn't make it, he or she was expected to post on the meeting topic with an excuse. During the meetings, orders of business were brought up and it was the secratary's job to keep the minutes and run the meeting. Hiker would frequently yell "Stay on topic, people!" in every meeting. All of the offices in OPS were associated with rules and duties, and the positions were elected. Also OPS would frequently vote on propositions about club business.

On the other hand, the only thing PI's structure had in common with OPS was the way the meeting topic was run on the forums. The secratary's only duty was to keep a members list, and none of the other offices had official duties. A PI chat meeting just happened randomly when several Palletshippers happened to be online, and Shipping was rarely discussed. PI also never drew up propositions to vote on.

Pact of Pallet

Once PI was settled as an official club, Archaic wrote up the Pact of Pallet, which was a treaty between the two clubs saying that no member of either club would flame a member of the other club over Shipping, and that members of neither club would post in topics that were designated as being for the other club. Archaic said that both clubs should hold a vote as to whether to accept the pact.

The Palletshippers were hesitant about signing the Pact, and Archaic had suddenly decided that the whole Pact thing wasn't such a good idea after all- he wouldn't reveal his reasons at the time, but later it turned out that he figured that if the clubs weren't fighting with each other, things would get boring and the clubs would die off since they wouldn't have any rival to be striving against. But, when the voting was held on UPN, the majority of both OPS and PI members voted to pass the Pact, so Archaic and Chaos signed it. Tea signed it too for some reason, even though he wasn't supposed to. United Egoshippers was invited to be a part of the Pact, but Loren declined.

It was pretty soon after that that Tea resigned from his position as one of the leaders of MLC- it had to do with a few things, one of them being that he wasn't much into the Pokemon anime anymore, and another being the rivalry between the MLC and ::TR::, which was a Team Rocket club. Soon after Tea resigned, another one of the MLC leaders, ajnrules, resigned too, saying that Misty had become a ditz in the Orange league and he didn't like her anymore. That left only one leader for MLC, h-jack, and he wasn't too much into the Pokemon anime anymore either, so the club quickly died off. Sometime during all this, the president of OPS, Ben, resigned and said he had to leave the boards because his real life was getting busy and he didn't have the time anymore. Archaic was basically forced into the presidency, and Para (Parastoise) became vice president.

NAAML Flame War

Soon after the pact was signed, Chaos got a message that someone who called himself MistysLover, or ML, from a message board called Bulbasaur's Mysterious Garden, or BMG, was trying to contact her. He was totally in love with Misty, and completely hated the idea of AAML. He had a club on BMG called No AAML, or NAAML, and he also considered himself a Palletshipper. He had heard that Chaos was the leader of the Palletshippers, and he wanted her to help him out with his anti-AAML movement. Chaos signed up for BMG, and ML joined PI. ML convinced the admins to make a Shippers forum on BMG, and there ended up being a huge flame war there between the OPS and the NAAML.

At that time Palletshipping was banned on BMG because one of the admins was homophobic. This meant the Pact didn't apply there and PI members were free to sign up and flame OPS. A lot of weird stuff went on during the flame war. For instance, at one point an OPS member, Hiker, pretended to quit OPS and join NAAML as some kind of plan to spy on them. ML knew it was a trick, though. After OPS's plan with Hiker failed, for some reason they tried the same exact plan again, this time with DC, but ML was too smart for it.

Peace and Politics

ML eventually convinced the admins to unban Palletshipping from BMG. This started the era of the clubs making branches on other boards. ML was the appointed branch leader of the BMG branch of PI. ML soon decided, however, that he didn't like Misty anymore, but instead liked a girl from BMG named Savannah Saffron, and though he remained a Palletshipper he wanted to make peace with OPS. Because of this, ML contacted Para to make friends with him, and that inspired Para to contact Chaos to make friends with her, and the three of them, along with an OPS member who was a friend of Para's, Pikachu35 (Jarek), became friends.

Now that PI had a branch on BMG, the Pact applied there. Because of this, and the fact that many opposing Shippers were making friends with each other, there was a time of peace.

Previously, RED's name on the forums had been Sickoshipper, since it used to be very common for people to call Palletshipping "Sickoshipping" since it was a gay ship. As people became more tolerant, though, they stopped calling Palletshipping "Sickoshipping," and instead Sickoshipping came to mean a romantic relationship between Ash and his mother Delia. Because of this RED changed her forum name to RED. Also, Meggie's name on the forums used to be AshGaryLoveBeliever, and around this time she changed it to Princess Meggie.

Other significant events that happened around this time were that Liza (forum name Malasashi) signed up and became very active in PI, and Para developed a short-lived crush on Clare. Also, Maronz suddenly announced that he now liked both Pokeshipping and Palletshipping. While it had happened before that an OPS member had decided that she or he liked Palletshipping as well as Pokeshipping- one example is Tazzy- Maronz was by far the most noticed one, since he was an OPS executive, and he became well-known for supposedly being the first person to like both ships. This started kind of a chain reaction of OPS members deciding that they liked both ships. While some people thought it was great that a person could like both and get along with everyone, some of the people who were very dedicated to and pure in their ship didn't like it at all. Meggie coined the derogatory term "half-breed" to refer to a person who was both a Pokeshipper and a Palletshipper.

Around this time is when Archaic first put together his "(In)complete list of Shippers," which was a list of all known Shipping names. There was constantly a topic on the board where people could submit new ships and Archaic would add them to the list.

The Shippers were getting along well, however some people were getting bored with it and missed the fighting from the old days, and so it was decided that a "flame thread" would be made- basically a thread where all Shippers would disregard the pact, just on that thread, and all be allowed to flame each other. They decided to make it a homage to the old Do you think Ash like Misty thread. Just to make it more genuine, ajnrules was asked to post the homage. The idea was to have a big wild debate like in the old days, but it didn't really work out that way; it ended up being mostly just people insulting each other and not actually doing any Shipping at all.

On this thread is where the first two board member ships were invented. One was Bitchfightshipping, which was Chaos and Archaic. Maronz came up with it as a joke, but Chaos' friends, all of whom knew she really was in love with Archaic, ran with it and it became a well-known ship. The other was Chaoticshipping, which was Chaos and DC. DC made it up himself because he had a crush on Chaos. People kept telling him it wouldn't work (because they secretly knew that she liked Archaic) but he kept pushing it until she had to tell him that she didn't like him. Shortly after that he left the board.

The Shippers seemed to be getting progressively more bored, and they started amusing themselves by making up more and more shipping clubs. Clare founded PiKa, a club for Piketshippers, which was Pikachu and a bottle of ketchup. It was pretty much just totally made up for fun, and people were allowed to give themselves joke titles like "protector of all things saucy". Clare ran the club not only on UPN, but also on her Pokemon site, and it actually became really popular. Clare also founded a club for the new ship she had just invented, Krazyshipping, which was Meowth and Pikachu. Chaos was a huge believer in Krazyshipping, and was also the one who named the ship. A new member named David Hawthorne founded a club called Confusionshippers, which was Misty and Psyduck. David soon became infamous for his extremely violent and tasteless Pokemon hentai. Soon the whole forum was filled up with posts about dickgirls and other hentai-ish things. At first, people found it kind of funny and entertaining, but it soon began to get really old and overdone. Chaos ended up posting a topic called "the state of this Shippers forum", where she basically complained about all the spam and hentai topics.

On this topic, it was discussed that the Shippers forum desperately needed moderation. UPN did not have mods, only admins, and all the admins posted almost exclusively in Misc and mostly considered the Shippers to be "the scum of the board." The owner of UPN, Jaxel, was not famous for giving in to demands for change, so it seemed unlikely that he would agree to start having moderators, or to make any of the Shippers an admin. However, if a site was hosted by UPN, the owner automatically became an admin, so the Shippers made up a plan to make a site and try to get it hosted so that either Chaos or Archaic, who by this time had become the de facto leaders of the community as a whole, could be an admin.

It was decided that the site would be a joint site between OPS and PI, and that it would be sort of a "harmony" site, about all the major ships, just getting along and not fighting in spite of their different beliefs. OPS seemed to be all for it, and so was Chaos, but most of the PI members really did not care for the idea at all. They hated Archaic, hated Pokeshipping, and had no interest in working closely with OPS. The PI members complained about this a lot to Chaos. Meggie and Clare complained the most and both threatened to quit PI and UPN over it. This worried Chaos, because she felt that Clare was one of the most popular Palletshippers, and that Meggie was the only one that helped her do any of the actual work of keeping PI running.

Chaos began to feel guilty for trying to force her members to get along with OPS when they didn't want to. Chaos was actually considering resigning as president until something happened that placated Meggie: Jarek converted into a half-breed and joined PI. Having no one besides Meggie who actually did any work and fearing that she was losing her, Chaos made him vice president, since he promised to do work. This required "firing" RED from the VP position, but Chaos felt she wouldn't mind since she really didn't do much. She did think that if anyone deserved to be VP it was Meggie, but of course she was about to quit, so she didn't seem to Chaos like a valid option. Chaos told Meggie this, and Meggie said that she would stay if she was VP, so Chaos gave her the job. Chaos explained what happened to Jarek, and he understood. But she felt that since she had already promised him an executive position, it didn't seem very fair to go back on that, so she ended up totally restructuring the whole executive system.

She decided relations and defense weren't needed anymore, since PI and OPS were at peace. It wasn't a problem getting rid of relations, since Meggie was being "promoted" out of that job anyways, but getting rid of defense left Clare without any job at all. Chaos thought this was kind of a good thing though, because she exasperated with Clare's complaining and threats to leave, and besides, she was going to college in about a month anyways and wouldn't have much time to post anymore. However, it was pretty clear that Clare wasn't happy at all about losing her executive position. She also got rid of the representative job, since Delilah wasn't around anymore and probably wouldn't even notice. She replaced all these eliminated jobs with two positions called executive assistants, which basically meant that their job was to help the president and VP. Jarek was made one executive assistant, and Chaos promoted Malasashi into the other position.

One thing that happened around this time had to do with two Rocketshipping clubs. One was called RSU, Rocketshippers United. Quite a while before, Raichi, a.k.a. Yamato, a member of a board called TRHQ, had started up the RSU club and spread it to UPN. Lots of people joined, but there wasn't really much to do since Rocketshipping had almost no opposition and plus Raichi wasn't around UPN much.

Meanwhile, over on BMG, a member called Machamp had a club called TRC, which stood for Team Rocket Club. He turned it into a Rocketshipping club and renamed it Rocketshippers International, or RSI. He had tried to spread his club to TRHQ, but Raichi didn't like another Rocketshipping club trying to compete with hers and a big war ensued. Raichi won the war and they basically kicked Machamp and his club out of TRHQ. Machamp had also tried to spread his club to UPN, but it didn't really work out for him. For one thing, almost everyone was already a member of RSU. For another, Archaic couldn't stand him and encouraged people not to join the club. At one point, Machamp had won an election to be the Branch Director of the BMG branch of OPS, and Archaic had impeached him for 'treason'- defined as using his position in OPS to try to get people to join his Rocketshipping club. However, the real reason Archaic impeached him and didn't want people joining his club was, secretly, because he just didn't like him. Starmie replaced Machamp at the BMG branch director for OPS.

Chaos started talking to Machamp, and she decided that it seemed pretty unfair the way Raichi was acting, not letting Machamp have his club just because she didn't like competition. Chaos talked to Archaic about this, and despite his dislike of Machamp she convinced him of her view, and they decided that since Raichi was never around UPN anyways, they would tell her club to leave UPN and make RSI the main Rocketshipping club of UPN. Obviously there was no official way to do this, but Chaos and Archaic announced their decision on a thread, and Raichi agreed to leave, and pretty much everyone quit RSU and joined RSI. Chaos and Archaic became joint branch directors of the UPN branch of RSI.

URS logo

Years later, Chaos' best friend Koji had a girlfriend called Tako, who was Raichi's best friend, and Chaos found out that this incident had totally traumatized Raichi and that she was still upset over it. Raichi disliked both Chaos and Koji and made posts in her Livejournal about how much they had hurt her, though Chaos did apologize at this point.

Another person upset about the Rocketshipping club incident was Clare, because she felt that Chaos and Archaic had gone and made a decision for the whole forum without consulting anyone else. Soon after this, Clare made good on her threats to leave UPN, and she was gone. People on the boards remembered and missed Clare for a really long time, and a lot of people begged her to come back, but it was no use.

At that point Chaos was very involved in the workings of OPS. She was extremely close friends with Para and chatted with he and Jarek almost every night, and was also becoming more attatched to Archaic, especially since he'd gotten upset one night and confided some personal problems to her. At some point Archaic drew up something called the Indigo Accord. Its purpose was basically to tie PI and OPS really close together, but it was so extreme that even the OPS members thought it was a terrible idea, and they all yelled at him for it. So, he came up with an idea where he said that he would resign as OPS president and give the power back to Ben if he wanted it. But he told Chaos and Hiker that it was secretly all a trick to get the OPS members to realize how much they needed him as a leader and beg him to stay. It pretty much worked, and the OPS members didn't find out about his ulterior motives.

Around this time the concept of "Shipper Games" was created. Shipper Games were basically games that Shippers would play with each other on the Shipping forum, which were usually somehow loosely related to actual Shipping.

One Shipper Game was the Random Question Game, where members would ask questions about themsleves and see if their friends could answer them correctly. The RQG later evolved into a game about asking hypothetical questions which everyone in the group would answer, such as "What one item would you bring with you if you were stranded on a desert island?" and it was often played in chats.

Another Shipper Game that was played was Shipping Survivor, based on the TV show Survivor. Shipping Survivor started off with two tribes, the Pallet Tribe and the Poke Tribe. There was a thread for it where the Shippers RPG'd as if they were on an island. Immunity challenges were done in ICQ chats, which were usually quizzes on Shipping or Shippers history, and then people would be voted off.

During this period of peace, Chaos and Para were chatting with a new PI member called Kat, and the conversation led to a joke comparing the Shipping community to the mafia and saying, "The only way out of the family is death!" This joke eventually evolved into calling the Shipping community "The Family" and meaning it seriously, in the sense of everyone in the community loving each other and intending to stay together as friends. It became very common for Shippers to call the community The Family and to call the UPN Shipping forum "Home."

War and Politics

The whole community kind of blew up for a while over an incident where Archaic got very mad at Chaos because of an argument they had over whether Poke or Pallet had come first, and which was more popular in Japan. Archaic wrote a rant directed at Chaos saying that he was "sick of trying to please her" and basically declaring war on PI and saying that opposing Shippers could never be friends. At the last minute he decided not to post the rant because it would be like political suicide, but he did show the rant to Hiker, who showed it to Chaos despite having promised to keep it a secret. Hiker also told Chaos that Archaic had told him that he was never really her friend and was only using her as a political tool, and Chaos became very upset and deleted the joint site, which upset Hiker greatly and made him feel bad for telling her.

Hiker and Para talked to Archaic and told him what had happened. Archaic apologized to Chaos and said he wrote the rant when he was mad and didn't really mean it, and also claimed he never said anything to Hiker about not really being her friend and just using her. Chaos forgave Archaic but felt very uncomfortable and decided to leave the forums. She posted a topic announcing that PI would no longer have anything political such as offices, propositions or meetings, and would be converted into just a signature club. Chaos said that she was leaving Meggie basically "in charge" but that there would be no official leader. Chaos began posting instead on a board called The Pokemasters, or TPM, where Shipping was actually totally banned.

Logo for the joint site. Text later added by Para after the project failed.

Because of this entire incident, Para, who was in love with Chaos, decided that he couldn't trust Archaic anymore, and also he didn't like the way OPS was being run, so he resigned as vice president and quit OPS. He also changed his online name to Caurt, which was his real life nick name. Caurt asked Archaic if he could name his replacement, and Archaic said yes.

Caurt and Chaos had recently been talking to Mcsweeney, who was a very infamous member of UPN who was always posting up these really crazy, funny, inappropriate things and getting in trouble for it. He held the record for being deleted from the forums the most times. At first everyone on UPN hated him, but later he became really popular. He was mostly a Misc poster, but he never did really "hang out" with the Misc crowd, or "veterans" (vets), and he also posted in Shippers a lot. He was a half breed, but he refused to join either OPS or PI because he didn't like being in a group unless he could be the leader, and plus, as far as OPS went, he didn't like the overly political way it was run.

So, Caurt considered who it was he wanted to succeed him, and eventually he and Chaos came up with a plan where Caurt would appoint Sweeney as the new vice president. They basically decided that because they knew Archaic hated Sweeney and that it would make him really mad, and Caurt also thought that Sweeney could keep an eye on Archaic and tell him if he was doing anything underhanded.

Archaic was only online on Wednesday and every other weekend because that was when he was at his father's house, and only his father had internet access. So during a time when Archaic was not able to get online for a week, Para named Mcsweeney as his replacement, and Mcsweeney then staged a "hostile takeover" of OPS. He pointed out that instead of refuting the Palletshippers, OPS did nothing but focus on "meaningless politics and bizarre espionage campaigns" and that he wanted to make a change and get back to actual Shipping. Many of the OPS members were actually behind him said they supported him, but at the next OPS meeting Archaic quickly impeached Sweeney and called an election to replace him. Jarek was elected as the new VP.

Because of this incident Chaos realized that even when not posting in the forums, she was still deeply involved in Shipper Politics, and decided she may as well just start posting again. She stuck with the idea of PI being totally non-political, though, and instead of having any official offices, she just called herself the founder and Meggie the co-founder, meaning that they were the unofficial leaders.

However, Chaos leaving had caused a chain-reaction of other Shippers leaving, and also UPN got hacked and Jaxel had to restart the board, and server problems were also causing a lot of downtime. Because of these factors the Shippers forum was much smaller and less active than previously.

Around this time Chaos started posting in Misc much more often, and there she met her best friend Koji. However, the way they first met was that she insulted him and he called her a bitch, and she told her Shipper friends about it, and they came and flamed Koji to defend her. Koji said "Shippers, scum of the board, flame me when my back is turned" and he flamed them back. Koji flamed Abi, and so Abi's friend Pikachu9128 defended her, and Koji banned him. This caused many Misc members to say that Koji was abusing his admin powers. Soon after Koji resigned from his admin job. Chaos really seems to remember him saying at the time that his decision to resign had something to do with this incident, but Koji claims the two things had nothing to do with each other, and it has been an ongoing disagreement.

Around this time, the members of PI began to really miss DC. They remembered how much fun he was to make fun of, since he was always doing ridiculously dorky things. For instance, one time he insulted someone, and then admitted he got the insult from the Garfield Book of Insults. Another time he named a forum of his "Ships Ahoy" and said he got it from a cookie commercial. PI decided that he was a "comical geek," much like Urkel, and that they needed him back to entertain them. RED made a "bring back Dark Cloud" thread that lasted several pages. On the thread, V003, whom PI didn't like because all he ever did was complain and say that the forum sucked, posted up saying that he was going to warn DC against coming back. So the people on the topic told V003 that if he prevented DC from coming there, it would be his fault that they had no Comical Geek, so they would have to make HIM the Comical Geek that they made fun of.

Another thread around this time was the mottos thread. An OPS member had said that PI wasn't productive. So Chaos made a thread listing several PI mottos, saying that obviously PI was productive since they'd done all the backbreaking labor of making up these mottos in a meeting chat the night before. Chaos meant the thread sarcastically, as a commentary about how PI just had fun while OPS was always bogged down in pointless politics, and all the mottos were silly and generally rude. They were:

PI: To protect Ash and Gary's love (Original version, by Chaos)
PI: Because you have to believe in something (Inspirational version, by Meggie)
PI: SHIPS-A-FUCKING-HOY! (Homage to DC version, by Meggie)
PI: If you don't like us, too damn bad! (by Jarek)
PI: Do you have the balls to Palletship? (by Meggie)
PI: I hope for Gary's sake that Loser-itus isn't a sexually transmitted disease! (By Catherine)

The PI members thought the thread was funny and many of them used the mottos in their sigs. Delilah put all six of them in hers. But some OPS members took the thread totally seriously. One OPS member, Alex, said "I don't think making up profanity filled mottos can be considered productive." Therefore another motto became "PI: Where we consider making up profanity filled mottos to be productive."

DuosRoomate (Hilde) took the whole thing so seriously that she ended up starting a big fight on the topic. Chaos disliked Hilde since a while back she had tried to join PI even though she didn't believe in Palletshipping, just to prove that someone could be a member of both PI and OPS, even though at the time there were already tons of people who were members of both clubs. So anyways after this incident, Meggie, RED and Chaos started making fun of Hilde all the time, and came up with a Ship called Idiotshipping. Idiotshipping was Hilde x V003, and the theory behind it was that they were the two biggest idiots on the board and should therefore be together.

Another joke thread was made by RED, called PI Proposition 02: New Anthem. OPS was always having these proposition threads where they voted on various issues, but the only thing PI had ever voted on was the Pact, so to be funny RED decided to just make up something silly to vote on. The anthem was a slightly modified poem from a horror movie, and RED said to vote "yea" or "nay". The poem was:

Fore score and seven years ago
There was a man
Whose prison was his chair
The man he had a monkey
They made the strangest pair
The monkey ruled the man
And climbed inside his head
And now as fate would have it
One of them is dead

Only Jarek, Meggie and Chaos actually voted on it, and they all voted yea. Chaos then posted saying jokingly that she was disappointed that more PI members hadn't voted on this important issue, but that since all the votes were "yea", PI could say hello to the Monkey Poem as their new anthem. Maronz, totally not getting the joke, posted up saying that the anthem should have something to do with AAGL, and he voted "nay" even though the voting was already over. By now, Maronz had quit OPS and converted into being a full Palletshipper, but after this incident many PI members began to think of him as being very dense.

Soon, Archaic posted up an OPS proposition, asking members to vote whether or not to dissolve the Pact of Pallet. Chaos figured that when she had said that PI was through with politics, that it was pretty much assumed that the Pact no longer applied, since the Pact was political and all. Chaos posted and told Archaic that PI had already dissolved the Pact, but that she guessed if OPS wanted to keep following it even though PI wasn't, they could. He said that he had been unaware that PI had dissolved it, and that there was no sense in OPS following it if PI wasn't, and so the Pact was officially dissolved.

Pretty soon after that, Chaos made up a song parody to the tune of a rap song and called it PI's Anthem, and it was basically a song about PI members that made fun of OPS. It was sort of made in celebration of the Pact being officially dissolved. Chaos posted it, and then Caurt and Jarek made up an Unofficial OPS Anthem song parody making fun of PI, so then Meggie made another PI song, so Caurt and Jarek made another OPS song, so Chaos made another PI song, and then TR_Char made a Gymshipping song for some reason. It was called it Song Wars.

Sometime during all this, Machamp had changed the name of RSI to URS, or Universal Rocketshippers. He ended up appointing a member called Mike Counts to the vice presidency. Mike was really odd, he didn't actually like Pokemon that much and supported only Rocketshipping, and he was kind of homophobic and really big into hentai. However, Chaos became good friends with Mike. He was making a URS site and Chaos helped him out with it. But much later he ended up getting totally sick of Pokemon and deleting the URS site and resigning from URS and leaving the Shipping community.

Quite a while ago, BMG had been hacked and totally destroyed, and it had been down for a long time. But it came back, so OPS and PI both went over there, since both clubs used to have branches there. The only major thing that happened on BMG at this time was that Jarek had been becoming unhappy with how political OPS was, so he signed up for BMG under the secret name Seraph Pikachu, and started a club meant to compete with OPS called Pokeshippers BMG, or PoBMG. A few people joined, which made Archaic mad, but ultimately the club wasn't very successful. Eventually Jarek admitted to Archaic that it was he who was Seraph Pikachu, and Archaic was upset for a while but he got over it. Jarek was still unhappy with Archaic's rule, though, and for a while he and Matt started to make some plan to get Archaic out of office that involved Matt being a spy or something, but Chaos talked them out of it.

Around this time, DC finally came back. Pretty soon after he came back, Meggie, who had had a crush on him back near the beginning of the community, started liking him again. A ship was made for the two of them called Flameshippers, since they were both famous for their flaming. However, DC didn't like Meggie back, and she eventually got over him and started an online relationship with Afree, a half breed whom she had liked since she first came to UPN. Afree had previously been a full Pokeshipper, but when he saw Chaos' Palletshipping site, he converted into a half breed. He also used to be a member of OPS, but he quit because of how political it was and made his own club called The Real Pokeshippers, which was mainly made as a joke and he remained the only member of it.

During this time Caurt came up with the idea of having a Shippers Dance Party, the concept for which would much later evolve into the incessant Shippers Proms. Basically it was an RPG dance thread, and the "DJ's" would post up song lyrics, and everyone could pretend to drink and eat refreshments and ask each other to dance. During this thread a Pokeshipper called Phyx began to like Chaos.

Around this same time was the birth of a Shipper Game called Shippers Truth or Dare. Basically a thread was made where Shippers asked each other truths and dared each other to do stuff. Someone was asked, if they had to have sex with a Pokemon, which one would it be. DC was dared to admit that he was the comical geek in an Urkel voice. Someone was dared to flame the guestbook of a ShiShi site. Mcsweeney was dared to put "I have hot sex with Jaxel" in his sig for a week, and to post on Misc and declare his love for Jaxel. Meggie was dared to make a topic on Misc asking Mcsweeney to marry her. Eventually the Misc people figured out that the weird topics showing up in Misc were the result of a Shipper game, and a big Shippers vs. Vets argument ensued. The vets thought the Shippers were trying to take over their forum and wanted them to stay out of it. The Shippers were still mad about having no moderation for their forum. Basically the two groups had a big flame war on a topic on Misc where everyone fought and insulted each other, and some Vets said that the Shippers forum should be replaced by a Music forum. The war eventually faded out, though, and nothing really ever came of it. Archaic made a comment that it was ironic, because previously he had actually had a plot that never materialized to incite a Shippers vs Vets war to liven up the forums.

Soon OPS invented something called a Fic Party Chat, which was where people would all go into a chat room and write an interactive fic together. OPS planned on having a Christmas Fic Party and a New Year's Fic Party. At first they weren't going to allow PI members to come, but the PI members all thought it sounded fun so they begged to come, and Archaic finally said they could as long as they didn't write Palletshipping. So they went to the parties, and they found ways to mess with AAML besides writing Palletshipping. Those Fic Chats were where PI first came up with their long running inside joke about Mayor McCheese and the Hamburgler yaoi.

Archaic had said he had some huge announcement to make at the end of the New Year's Party, but that it was a secret and he wouldn't tell anyone until then. But, he did tell Caurt and Jarek. Chaos asked them to tell her. Caurt wouldn't, but she convinced Jarek to tell. It turned out that Archaic was going to resign as president of OPS, and he was giving the leadership of the club to Caurt and Jarek. Since Chaos knew the secret now, Caurt and Jarek discussed with her exactly how they would run the club when Archaic was no longer in power. They had decided to get rid of all politics in OPS and have a triad leadership, meaning that there would be three leaders who were all equal in power. Caurt and Jarek would be two of the leaders, but they needed a third. They talked about it and decided Wendy would be a good choice. They explained the whole situation to Wendy and asked if she would be the third triad member, and she said she would. But, Caurt had been talking a lot lately about wanting to leave UPN, and he admitted to Chaos that he didn't plan on staying as a leader of OPS for very long. Then Chaos found out that Jarek planned to resign from his leadership position in February, because he wasn't very into Shipping anymore. Then Chaos found out from Caurt that Archaic didn't even know about their plans for the triad. Chaos told Caurt that Archaic deserved to know, but Caurt refused to tell him, saying that if he did, Archaic might change his mind about resigning.

Chaos decided to tell Archaic, because she thought he deserved to know, and also because she feared this plan might be the end of OPS, and by this time PI and OPS were very symbiotic with each other. When Chaos told him, Archaic was pretty upset that Caurt and Jarek would do this behind his back. He wanted to confront them, but Chaos told him if he did that, they'd know she told him, and they would hate her. So Archaic agreed that instead of confronting them he would just lie and tell Caurt and Jarek that he was never planning on resigning in the first place, that he had just made the whole thing up as a stunt to get people to come to the Fic Party.

When Archaic told Caurt and Jarek that he never was going to resign, they were extremely mad thinking that he'd tell such a big lie over something as trivial as that party. And Archaic was still mad at them for doing things behind his back, even though Chaos explained to him that they had had good intentions and were trying to do what they thought was best for OPS. So, Caurt and Jarek were pretty big enemies with Archaic after that. Jarek never did get over it and soon ended up quitting both OPS and PI and leaving the Shipping community. Phyx was appointed vice president of OPS in Jarek's place. As for Caurt, he decided he felt bad about keeping things from Archaic and apologized to him.

Archaic accepted the apology at the time, but later told Caurt that the apology wasn't enough. Archaic eventually made a post where he revealed that he really had been planning on resigning until he found out about the triad. He said he wouldn't reveal who told him about the triad, but very few people actually knew about it so there weren't many suspects. Even though the only reason Hiker had known about it is because Chaos had told him, Chaos decided to say that he probably had found out on his own and that Hiker had probably told Archaic. Chaos told Hiker that since everyone already thought he was a jackass anyways it wouldn't matter, and Hiker agreed to take the blame.

Much later Chaos did admit to Para that it was she who had told Archaic, and Para did forgive her, but revealed that he had done it for her, to try to protect her.

Debating Era

Then the Shippers started posting a lot on BMG. There PI gained a new member called dragon_clan, or Misagi. A lot of debating went on, and two new Pokeshippers, Kaz and Edgeknight, showed up. Archaic got a job at BMG and was made mod of the Anime forum.

Around this time, someone started an interactive fanfic on UPN, and Abi ended up turning it into a fic making fun of Archaic and OPS. She wrote that OPS was a big scary cult, and that Archaic sacrificed Mistywannabe, a very annoying and immature OPS member, and then forced his members to chant Misty's Song and pray to a big stone idol of Ash and Misty. Meggie started writing on it too, and she made Archaic kidnap Chaos, Abi and herself. Archaic seemed to take it really hard and thought that it was giving OPS a bad name. Also around this time Maronz started flaming OPS on their meeting topics on BMG, and Matt made a club called the Anti-Archaic Army on BMG. Archaic complained to Chaos that it made him feel the way he felt when he got bullied in highschool and asked her to make them stop, so she asked her PI members to stop making fun of Archaic and apologize, and they did.

Then Archaic started flaming Palletshippers and encouraging others to flame them, and threatened Chaos that he would report her Palletshipping site to Nintendo in an attempt to get it shut down. At that time Archaic's account was hacked; his email account was deleted, and his BMG account was used to delete many topics, including most of the Shipping topics. When this happened Archaic went to Chaos for help and complained to her about it for an hour and then asked her to do a bunch of chores for him such as posting a topic for him on UPN and saving some files. After this Archaic would often ask Chaos to do chores like this for him.

It seemed that the deletion of the topics sort of killed Shipping at BMG for a while. However, Shipping had been unbanned at TPM, so Archaic made an OPS branch there. But Palletshipping was banned there because of a homophobic mod, so PI could not expand there, even though there were some Palletshippers who went to TPM, such as EggTogepi, firepokemon (a half-breed) and Misagi.

Chaos' best friend Koji was an admin at BMG, and she tried to convince him to make a Shipping forum there, but he didn't see the point in it since Shipping was fairly dead at the time. However she did convince him to make her Archaic's co-mod on the Anime forum. It was soon after this that Caurt first confessed to Chaos how he felt about her, by sending her a secret admirer card on Valentine's day and then admitting that he was the one who sent it.

Later on, Chaos began fighting with people on BMG. PI was not very active there at all, so she didn't have much backup, and she didn't get along well with Kaz or Edgeknight, the Pokeshippers who posted the most. Then she got into a fight with Archaic over him plagerizing her material on the OPS site and refusing to give credit. Chaos began to get tired of BMG, and eventually quit her mod job and left the forums.

Soon after that, Archaic decided to resign from the OPS presidency for real. He made some statements about how he wasn't a good leader and didn't deserve it and was giving OPS a bad name since so many people hated him. He appointed DC as president in his place, his thinking being that everyone liked DC and he was uncorrupted by Shipper politics. While this was true, everyone knew that OPS would probably die without Archaic's leadership, since he was the only one who really had the ambition to do the work to keep OPS running. Many people told him this, but he stuck to his plan. DC was allowed to choose a vice president, so several members talked him into appointing Archaic, since they didn't want OPS to die. Archaic accepted, but Phyx was upset at suddenly losing his job, so DC felt bad for him and made him the joint vice president. DC and Phyx were in leadership for a long time, but neither one of them ever did anything whatsoever, it was still really Archaic running it just like he always had. DC actually ended up almost totally disappearing from the boards soon after this, only posting once in a great while. Phyx was still around for a long time but wasn't very active, and eventually he kind of just faded away and no one ever heard from him again.

Soon, Jaxel wasn't making enough money from UPN to pay for his server, and he got kicked off the server and was forced to shut down the UPN site and board. Even though the Shippers forum hadn't been very active lately, the Shippers still thought of it as "home" and were really upset to see it go. Archaic had a funeral for it over on BMG.

Since UPN was gone, Koji made an EZBoard called the Refuge, with UPN's same layout. He didn't have all the same forums as the original UPN, but he kept the Shippers forum and made Chaos the mod of it.

Right before UPN had gone down, they had been having a Shippers Prom on the Shippers forum. It was kind of like a second installment to the Shippers Dance Party. RED had posted it. Chaos went to the Shippers Prom with Caurt. After UPN went down, they continued the Prom on the Refuge Shippers forum. Around this time, David Hawthorne suddenly came back, and he started posting his trademark hentai-ish topics. To be funny, RED posted a bunch of topics about masturbation, but the mods closed them, and she was mad. Since Chaos moderated the Shippers forum, she let her post a topic about masturbation there, and a PI member named LV said that the last 5 minutes of every Pokemon episode should be dedicated to masturbation alone. However, the Shippers forum on the Refuge never did become terribly active.

Around this time, Palletshipping was unbanned on TPM, and the Shipper community pretty much migrated there. However, there was no Shipping forum at TPM, so Shippy stuff was posted in the Anime forum. The Shippers mainly stuck to one huge topic, called the AAML vs. AAGL debate.

It was around this time that Shipping began to focus almost totally on very serious and involved debating. They stopped doing games, and "fun" topics and joking around, and basically started just arguing all the time. This caused many of the major names in Shippers to become bored with the whole thing and drift away from the boards. Both RED and Meggie, while still believers in Palletshipping, ended up getting really sick of having the same pointless circular fight with the Pokeshippers and rarely posted anymore. Mcsweeney, who had never been much into debating, also drifted away from the boards. Maronz and Courtney had both lost interest in Pokemon a while ago, and were only interested in the Shippers community, not Shipping itself, so they didn't post much anymore. Wendy had become more open to Ships that conflicted with Poke, such as Gym and Ego, and wasn't interested in debating. Also, by this time many of the old time Shippers had faded out completely. Malasashi or Abi weren't around anymore. V003, Hilde and Mistywannabe also seemed to disappear.

So, the main participators in Shipping on TPM at this time ended up being Misagi and Maddy (EggTogepi), TPM's resident PI members; Archaic and Chaos; and a Pokeshipper called Catbert who hailed from TPM. Catbert modded the Anime forum and had a lot of influence with the admins. He became friends with Chaos and talked the admins into making her his co-mod on the Anime forum.

A new member called Oblivious_Trace (Rob) showed up around this time. He and Chaos became close friends and later dated. He invented 2000shipping, which was Ash and Lugia, and though he believed in Pokeshipping he refused to join OPS and instead supported only 2000shipping.

Eventually Koji gave up the Refuge and handed over control to Chaka, who made a new UPN Refuge on a vB. She made a Shipping forum and made Chaos the mod of it, but it was never terribly active. Chaka also began hosting Chaos' Palletshipping site on her webspace. Archaic had been made an admin at BMG and managed to get a Shippers forum created there. He asked Chaos to co-mod it with him, and she said yes, but the forum was also never terribly active.

PI and OPS decided to hold an interactive fanfic party for both clubs. During this time Chaos and Archaic were fighting because Archaic had written a fanfic about her being beaten, molested, and killed, and posted it on BMG, but they made up enough to host the fic party together. Around this time is when homosexual board member ships were made up to tease members, such as Arrogantshipping (Hiker and Archaic) and PIshipping (Meggie and Chaos). Rob also made up many new board member Ships, including NeoOrangeshipping which was Chaos and himself.

At TPM, Catbert had been fighting to get the admins to make a Shippers forum, and finally he succeeded. Chaos, Archaic and Catbert were the mods. The forum was fairly active and was mostly debating. Around this time OPS started getting many new members. The OPS had a website by now, and the website had a message board for members which was fairly active.

Then there was a bunch of drama with Misagi. One time he converted to Pokeshipping, then later claimed that his little brother, who bullied him, had forced him to do it, and that he was really still a Palletshipper. After this, he would often post inflammatory topics or do other inappropriate things, and would then blame it on his brother.

Another time he said that he was cutting himself and that he was going to kill himself. Chaos, Archaic and a few other people got into a chat with him and talked him out of it. However, in only a few weeks he was threatening to kill himself again, and soon his suicide threats became a pretty regular event. He would also frequently threaten to leave the internet.

Another strange thing was when a person supposedly called "David" started getting on Misagi's MSN name. At first Misagi claimed David was a friend of his, and then later he claimed that David was actually a spirit that lived inside him and possessed him and forced him to do things.

Another strange thing is that he was always talking about how his crazy father forced him to live by something called "the code," which made him act totally submissive toward anyone in authority. He said that it was because of "the code" that he had to call all club leaders by honorifics like sama and dono and do whatever they said.

Kaz began posting at the TPM Shippers forum. Misagi became friends with Kaz and developed a crush on her. Kaz and Misagi decided to make a club together called Kaleidoscope, which had something to do with believing in Shippers not fighting. They ran the club at both BMG and TPM; however, it never became very popular and many Shippers felt it was poorly concieved or a bad idea. Misagi began telling people that Chaos was saying bad things about K-scope on AIM and trying to get people not to join it, though Chaos hadn't actually taken enough notice of K-scope to bother doing this. Chaos confronted Misagi about this and they eventually made up.

BMG held a Halloween dance in the Misc forum. Chaos and Rob went to dance together. Misagi was supposed to be Kaz's date, but he ended up deciding that he didn't want to go. At the time he told Chaos it was because he liked Kaz and didn't think she liked him back, but it later turned out that his real reason was because he was gay. However, instead of explaining this to Kaz, he just dumped her as his date and said it was because he didn't want her to kiss him.

At the same time, a girl whom Misagi claimed was a real life friend of his had been getting on his MSN name, and she had supposedly developed a crush on one of Kaz's friends from OPS, Kbuster. Kbuster was supposed to go to the Halloween dance with this girl, but it was found out that the girl actually didn't exist and that it was just Misagi himself pretending to be her. Later when Misagi revealed that he was gay, he explained that it had been he who had a crush on Kbuster.

Kaz was extemely upset about all this, as well as about the fact that she found out that he'd lied to her about his age, and also about his constant suicide attempts. Misagi and Kaz eventually got into an argument about religion wherein, according to Misagi, she, a Catholic, insulted his religion of Wicca harshly. These events caused Kaz to start hating Misagi. Kaz and Kbuster ended up going to the Halloween dance with each other, and Kaz also fired Misagi from his position as vice president of K-scope, and appointed Kbuster instead. Kaz and Misagi started many flame wars between themselves on TPM.

A Palletshipper from TPM, Hippie in a Chevy (Ashley) then became Misagi's girlfriend. However, he broke up with her multiple times, his suicide threats continued, and he often made up lies to avoid her, such as telling her that he was unable to use the internet but really just blocking her. When Misagi finally admitted that he was gay, they broke up for good. After this Misagi calmed down somewhat and actually became very good friends with Chaos. Chaos was also good friends with Ashley.

Caurt hadn't been coming online much, and he eventually told Chaos that he felt that it was wrong for him to be spending so much time with people who were not Christian, and that he and Chaos could never be together romantically because she wasn't a Christian, and that it would be best if they never spoke again and he left the internet. He came back six months later, but at the time Chaos was extremely broken up about his leaving, as they had been in love.

This was the first in a chain of events that eventually resulted in Chaos leaving the Shippers forum permanently, which effectively disbanded PI and brought in a new era of Shipping where most Shippers were OPS members and the community was free of fighting and debating.

The debates at this time were constant, and Chaos was virtually alone on the Palletshippers side. She felt that the debates were becoming more infused with animosity, and that she was becoming frustrated and not giving a very good impression to the many new Pokeshippers who had joined the board, most of whom she didn't know at all.

Chaos felt that Hiker's attitude towards her had changed, and when she confronted him about it, he said all his friends hated her and were telling him that she was bad, and it was hard not to influenced by them. When pressed he admitted that by "all his friends" he really just meant Ash's Baby Lapras, or ABL, whom Chaos had never heard of before then. Hiker told Chaos that ABL had been saying that Chaos "hated her" and was "a bitch who talked behind her back." Hiker admitted that he knew this couldn't be true since Chaos didn't even know ABL, and said that he would stop having an attitude towards Chaos.

Chaos mistakenly thought that the reason people who didn't know her might dislike her was because of all the debating and fighting on the board, and so this inspired to announce that she would no longer debate, saying that it was because of the fact that people were talking behind her back and it had caused problems with Hiker and she felt it wasn't worth it. However she wasn't very good at sticking to her resolution of not debating and would often get pulled into debates anyways.

When the next Shippers Prom was started, Chaos went with Hiker, Rob went with Meggie, and then later Archaic went with ABL, at which point Chaos left the topic. After Chaos left the topic Hiker told her that ABL was in love with him and was extremely upset that he'd gone to prom with Chaos. Hiker also told Chaos that ABL had told him that she'd only agreed to go to the prom with Archaic to upset Chaos and to make Hiker jealous. Chaos had told ABL how she felt about Archaic the one time they ever spoke, in a chat that Hiker pulled them both into. Years later Chaos would find out that shortly after this time ABL told many people that Chaos went to the prom with Hiker just to upset her and was a terrible person. Later ABL admitted that actually Chaos hadn't even known at the time that she liked Hiker.

Hiker also told Chaos that he felt the same way about ABL, but that he had told her that he didn't like her, because she had been going out with Psymander and Hiker didn't want to steal his friend's girlfriend. ABL was open about her feelings for Hiker, which made Psymander mad, and at one point he said he hated Hiker, which caused ABL to break up with him. ABL also said that he was mean to her throughout their relationship. At this point Hiker still didn't want to admit how he felt about ABL, because he had promised Psymander that he didn't like her and didn't want to look like a liar, and also he was afraid it would ruin their friendship if they dated. Several months later he did admit his feelings for her and the two dated for quite a long time.

Shortly after Hiker informed Chaos of these things, Chaos elected to leave the Shipping community. She stayed in touch with some Shippers over messanger, but they did not discuss Shipping and she never did come back to the forums.

Post-PI

Shortly after Chaos left the TPM Shippers forum and quit her mod job, the forum pretty much blew up. This is because the prom became a huge spam topic where people posted saying they were posting just to raise their count. An admin posted on the topic and told people to stop spamming, but the remaining mods, not realizing the person was an admin, ignored her and allowed the spamming to continue. The admins became angry and fired the mods and deleted the forum.

Because BMG had recently gone down, the remaining Shippers moved to a new forum called Serebii. Around this time yet another UPN was made, this time by Kuno, and the UPN Misc posters moved there. It had a Shippers forum, but again it was not very active at all.

During this period there were many Shippers Prom and Shippers Truth or Dare topics. At some point Archaic became president of OPS again and Hiker became Vice President and all other offices were eliminated. It remained this way until OPS eventually became inactive and faded out.

Links

• Chaos' thread archive, includes several Shipping threads
• Chaos' Palletshipping site
• An attempted revival of the Do you think Ash like Misty thread, showing that on 3-1-2000 OPS didn't exist yet since Archaic didn't have it in his sig
• First appearance of the OPS slogan in Archaic's sig on 3-3-2000, also reference is made to the fact that the first elections are going on at that point
• Original OPS Meeting topic, includes transcript of first chat meeting
• OPS Meeting topic listing propositions and members list
• Mcsweeney points out what was wrong with OPS after his attempted takeover
• Fanfiction by Mcsweeney
• A Shippers Game
• First Shippers Prom
• Archaic's AAML: The Fact and the Fiction