When Twitch screened EVERY episode of Doctor Who, I expected young viewers to hate the old eps.
Instead I got to watch as they applied modern fan stuff and started SHIPPING THE HELL out of Ian and Barbara in chat.
It was wonderful. A testament to how Russell's performance, aptly, transcended time.
Yes, and David Whitaker's very first Dalek novel basically treats Barbara as Ian's love interest.
(Not in a great way, as on screen half the appeal of shipping them is that she is awesome too!)
Yep. Babs is my, and his, queen!
I did an essay about Barbara and Ian in one of the Chicks Dig Timelords books from Mad Norwegian which was very much about their crucial role in establishing the show.
The practice goes back further than that with Spock/Kirk often being citing.
But the whole concept of fan fiction can be found in Don Quixote with the Don debating stories with friends and wanting to write more adventures for his favourite knights at the start.
I think Spock/Kirk is the origin for slash, but not ships. There was a debate at the time whether Mulder/Scully was slash or not, given it was het but had the same level of textual support as S/K. I'm sure @ladylark.bsky.social or one of her colleagues has more about ship's emergence from slash.
So S/K (and Bodie/Doyle and many others) slash existed first, and are also ships, but the term ship emerged from that mid-90s debate around whether a het relationship being read into two characters was slash or not.
Yeah shipping as a term aka the verb 'to ship' was coined in the 90s but people were doing it waay earlier (and calling stories about it slash when it wasn't het)
