Ah, complex ideas... well, I developed Misty's character a lot. If I ever get around to finishing that one-shot I'm working on (I'm back on it as of now; just gotta get through GCYL, then it's all downhill from there), you'll see what I mean, but... well, I saw her as having trouble with unrequited love, and then learning to accept it. I saw her as being very strong because she was able to accept loving someone who might never love her back. Well, that's just an example, but you get the idea.
I've also learned a lot of stuff about love and life through shipping. Well, maybe it's just a tool I use to think things out... but like with this thing about it not being real, I had kind of a strange thought. You know how in real life, we're never able to see things from another person's perspective, and we can only feel our own emotions? With shipping, both characters' feelings and thoughts are experienced through me, so it's like they're the same, even though they're not. They're connected in a way that's impossible for real people. That helps sometimes.
But it's funny, because that made me start thinking that we're all part of a greater whole in real life, and we really are connected. We just can't tell right now because our physical bodies limit and separate us. That idea of wholeness used to scare me. I used to think that it was like you would lose your own consciousness and just get absorbed by a bigger one.
But this way, it seems really wonderful. If we were all completely separate, then we'd really be isolated. We could never really know anyone, because our perception of someone isn't really that person. Then there's projection and all that. But if we're connected, we really can have understanding of another person. I just didn't understand the idea until I looked at it with shipping. It's not exactly the same, I mean, we're not just figments of someone's imagination, but you know.
Well, there's more, and I get into things like collective unconsciousness and sympathy, but that's enough. It doesn't have much to do with anything, but it's an example of how I think through shipping. You get an idea of how complicated things are inside my head, heheh.